Archaeology, Memory and Oral Tradition: An Introduction

This paper serves as an introduction to this special edition of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology on the theme of archaeology, memory and oral history. Recent approaches to oral history and memory destabilise existing grand narratives and confront some of the epistemological assumptions underpinning scientific archaeology. Here we discuss recent approaches to memory and explore their impact on historical archaeology, including the challenges that forms of oral and social memory present to a field traditionally defined by the relationship between material culture and text. We then review a number of themes addressed by the articles in this volume.     

An Essay on the Tradition of Tibetan Tea

One day, I was searching the Internet to find a gift for a distant friend. As I browsed lists of teas, immediately I foundsomething that has been regarded as a necessity of life since I was young and nowadays had been packaged as an attractive gift or collectables. It is the Tibetan tea.     

Jane Jacobs: her life and work

In April 2006, Jane Jacobs—analyst of cities—died. As written in the Financial Times obituary of 27 April 2006 “She spent much of her career fighting for one deceptively simple principle: leave cities alone and let them develop by themselves”. In spring 2004 Gert-Jan Hospers visited Jane Jacobs in her Toronto home and conducted lengthy interviews with her about her beliefs, life and work. A future article based on this now invaluable material has been commissioned by European Planning Studies. However on the sad occasion of her death, and with the work of transcribing interview material underway, it seemed appropriate to create an account of key observations made by Jane Jacobs in that interview to explain her philosophy and practice more clearly than occurs in her always readable and influential books. As an early, maybe the first, evolutionary urban economist and modern inventor of the concept of “social capital”, it is especially appropriate to include this obituary in the journal, which has always been a welcoming host to literature composed from such perspectives.     

The Authoritative Medium: George Eliot,Ruin, and the Rationalized Market

This essay analyses the competing dynamics that shaped the formation of market relations in mid-nineteenth-century Britain: abstraction and rationalization, on the one hand, and embeddedness and personalism, on the other. It takes as its central case the mid-century debates over bankruptcy reform, focusing in particular on two textual representations of ‘ruin’: the system of certificates classifying bankrupts according to their culpability of character, established in 1849 and abolished in 1861; and Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss, with its account of financial and sexual ruin. I argue that the debates surrounding the character certificates' intervention in market relations, and Eliot's explorations of abstract and embedded or sympathetic modes of knowledge were part of a larger concern to negotiate the tensions produced by the contemporary impulse toward market rationalization. Eliot's mode of omniscient narration – her construction of a simultaneously interested and disinterested, authoritative and sympathetic narrative voice – represented, I suggest, a novelistic instance of a broader cultural fantasy that an approach to character representation could be found that would mediate the changing marketplace. At the same time, her narration of the story of debt through familial and sexualized representations highlights the way that the personal continued to pose a challenge to the establishment of market rationality. However, despite the generic distinctions that can be traced, I argue that their shared interest in character provides grounds for the project of reading across genres, and suggest that the cultural history of the Victorian credit economy requires attention to what different genres have in common, as much as how they have diverged.     

China's Cities: Tradition and change

Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner, eds. The Chinese City Between Two Worlds. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974. xiii + 458 pp. Tables, maps, notes, character list, and index. $18.75.     

Hysteria behind the scenes: Jane Avril at the Salpetriere

Jane Avril (1868-1943), the famous dancer of the Moulin Rouge, immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec, left behind published Memoires (1933). Trustworthy and written with verve, they include an account of her admission to Charcot's service at the Salpetriere in December 1882. There she was kept until June 1884, not so much because of illness but to protect her from her mother's abuse. Jane Avril provides unvarnished testimony of the daily life of the women with hysteria among whom she lived. She wrongly accuses them of simulation. But she accurately portrays the rivalry of the 'crazy girls' who vied to become the center of attention, and she sheds light on the factors that came together to make hysteria contagious (she herself escaped), the loading of symptomatology and the cultivation of the ailment. Charcot has been criticized on this score, since he showed his recognition of the underlying process when he pronounced isolation to be necessary to treatment. If Charcot accommodated hysteria, the ailment amply rewarded him with a fame that continues to this day to overshadow his achievement in neuropathology that he brilliantly forged using the "anatomo-clinical method."     

大传统与小传统——白蛇故事的三期型变

民间故事流传主要是口耳相传,由于记忆的局限性,如果不求助于文字文献就很难发现其变化的历史线索。然而在传统社会文字却主要掌握在官方系统,搜集整理民间故事的专业人士被称为稗官,西汉班固《汉书·艺文志》,“小说家者流,盖出于稗官。街谈巷语,道听途说者之所造也”。余嘉锡的《小说家出于稗官说》里认为,稗官是士人,“士传民语”,下情上达,沟通之用。     

An Ongoing Tradition: The Use of Russian Metal Dishware in Ob Ugrian Rites

The article focuses on foreign elements in the traditional cultures of northwestern Siberia. The sources of this study are silver and copper saucers mostly bearing representations of hunting scenes, which were manufactured by Russian craftsmen in the 18th–19th centuries for the needs of alien ethnic groups. Ways in which the saucers were used in Ob Ugrian rituals are described along with the specific features and attributions of these objects. The use of Russian metal dishware is viewed in the context of the long cultural tradition of using metal vessels, made in other ethnic environments (Iran, western Central Asia, Volga Bulgaria, Kama region, etc.) as well as in the religious and ritual practices of the Khanty and Mansi.     

Ceramics and the Early Swahili: Deconstructing the Early Tana Tradition

Archaeological understandings of the Iron Age societies that developed on the East African coast and its hinterland have been transformed by exploration of locally produced ceramics. During the late first millennium, c. AD 600–900, sites across eastern Africa are characterized by ceramics known as early Tana Tradition or Triangular-Incised Ware, containing necked jars with incised decoration and a series of other jar and bowl forms in varying quantities. The recognition of this pan-regional tradition of pottery, known from an ever-growing number of sites, has been crucial in the reorientation of Swahili research to recognize the indigenous roots of the cosmopolitan coastal culture. This paper reports on the results of a ceramics project that has revisited excavated collections from a series of key ETT/TIW sites, analyzing sherds according to a single system and allowing true cross-site comparison for the first time. The results show regional diversity, in both form and decoration, particularly in the relative importance of the necked jar types that have come to stand for the early Tana Tradition more generally. While previous studies have hinted at regional diversity, such conclusions have been subsumed in discussion by the evident similarities between assemblages. Comparative results are here discussed against the background of previous research at the sites, and a series of conclusions about overlapping spheres of commonality are presented. Rather than critiquing previous work that has recognized this ceramic type, we seek to understand the remarkable distribution better by exploring its context and content.     

【幕后故事】基诺山的唐吉诃德们

春天,杰波花开了,"特慕克"(注)也到了.跟云南各地的时尚一样,基诺年成了政府的节日,只是百姓的节日仍在寨子里过,村干部代替了从前氏族长老卓巴的职责,杀猪杀牛领着全寨老少吃喝一顿,高兴一天.