Things and the Slow Neolithic: the Middle Eastern Transformation

This paper argues that the search for an overarching explanation for the adoption of farming and settled life in the Middle East can be enhanced by a consideration of the dependencies between humans and human-made things from the Late Glacial Maximum onwards. Often not considered in discussions of the origins of agriculture is the long process of human tooth size reduction that started in the Upper Palaeolithic and can reasonably be related to the increased use of grinding stones that created softer and more nutrient-rich plant foods. A consideration of the use of groundstone tools through the Epipalaeolithic and into the Neolithic shows that they were entangled with hearths, ovens, houses and settlements, exchange relations and notions of ownership. The practicalities of processing plants drew humans into pathways that led to intensification, population increase, sedentism and domestication. Much the same can be said for other human-made things such as sickles, storage bins, domestic animal dung and refuse. The dialectical tensions between human-thing dependence and dependency generated the movement towards Neolithicization. Human-thing dependence (involving human dependence on things, thing dependence on humans and thing dependence on other things) afforded opportunities towards which humans (always already in a given state of entanglement) were drawn in order to solve problems. But this dependence also involved dependency, limitation and constraint, leading for example to increases in labour. In order to provide that labour or in other ways to deal with the demands of things and their entanglements with other humans and things, humans made further use of the affordances of things. There was thus a generative spiral leading to sedentism and domestication.     

Wheels of Time: Some Aspects of Entanglement Theory and the Secondary Products Revolution

This paper responds to that aspect of Andrew Sherratt??s writings that argued for building specifically archaeological theory. In describing a theory of entanglement, I have focused on the archaeological sensitivity to the complexities and practical interlacings of material things. The theory argues that human?Cthing entanglement comes about as a result of the dialectic between dependence (the reliance of humans and things on each other) and dependency (a constraining and limiting need of humans for things). Andrew??s discussion of the role of the wheel in his Secondary Products Revolution is a good example of how humans and things have become entangled so that, over the long term, we have been channeled down particular evolutionary pathways.     

Between the South Sea and the mountainous ridges: biopolitical assemblages in the Spanish colonial Americas

SUMMARY: Although the historical archaeology of the Spanish colonial world is currently witnessing an explosion of research in the Americas, the accompanying political economic framework has tended to remain little interrogated. This paper argues that Spanish colonial contexts bring into particular relief the entanglements between ‘core’ capitalist processes like ‘antimarkets’, dispossession and the disciplining of labour with the specific biopolitical ecologies assembled through co-option, coercion and accumulation. This perspective is explored through two archaeological case studies from Peru and Guatemala, where competing concerns about altitude, climate, disease, violence and populations of differentiated labouring bodies (both human and non-human) came to the fore in unexpected ways. The resulting discussion challenges the reliance on abstract analytical totalities like ‘capitalism’ and ‘colonialism’, and shifts attention towards the diverse assemblages of actors that shaped and continue to shape the processes central to political economic analyses.     

Storied Lines: Network Perspectives on Land Use in Early Modern Iceland

It is a truism nowadays to say that an archaeological site is embedded in extensive networks of relations. Connectivity has played a role in archaeological thinking for a considerable amount of time, and the adoption by archaeologists of both theoretical and methodological frameworks centring connectivity has become widespread. One such example is network analysis, which has seen a significant surge in interest within the field over the past two decades. Archaeological network analysis is far from a mature science, however, and the character of the archaeological record tends to yield networks with richly contextualised nodes connected by ties that, in stark contrast, are often based on very limited evidence for connectivity. Furthermore, archaeological networks are often accompanied by limited discussion about the implications for a connection between two sites interpreted through a commonality in material culture. In particular, the use of historical records to contextualise the interactions between sites remains somewhat uncommon. This paper takes an archaeo-historical network perspective by characterising land-use practices in early modern Iceland by mapping property records describing relations of ownership, resource claims and social obligations alongside comprehensive field archaeological surveys as extensive networks of interdependence between the known farmstead sites occupied at the time. This approach shows that these vibrant networks, documented both spatially and historically, regularly show signs of emergent properties. As these intersite relations begin to exert their own agency, the networks are cut, and the network lines begin to bundle up in knots and entanglements. The study, therefore, does not aim to quantify the presented networks using formal network analysis, but to use the networks as a starting point to investigate the properties that emerge as people aim to enact and materialise networks of property rights, resource claims and exchange.     

Maya heritage: entangled and transformed

This article discusses two aspects of heritage – entanglement and transformation – that became clear during a recent cultural heritage project in Yucatan, Mexico. Regarding entanglement, heritage becomes relevant only when coupled with other concerns, ranging from politics to livelihood to personal biographies. An unpredictable array of entanglements came into being during the project and these entanglements elevated the impact and visibility of local heritage to an unanticipated degree. Transformation refers to the claim that heritage is not frozen in the past. Instead, it is in motion and subject to change. The transformations of heritage discussed in this paper are examined from the perspective of a mobilities paradigm and understood, in part, as resulting from the experience of performing heritage for outsiders for the first time. In so far as the heritage project precipitated changes in identity, this paper explores what is meant by Maya identity and argues that it is a fluid construct that can be both anchored in the past and negotiated in the present. This perspective makes sense of an event in which contemporary people anchored their identity in a spectacular 1000-year-old ruin, but falls short of explaining the uneven recognition of smaller ruins.     

2. PRESENCE ACHIEVED IN LANGUAGE (WITH SPECIAL ATTENTION GIVEN TO THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST)

The aim of this essay is to ask whether what it calls the “presence” of things, including things of the past, can be rendered in language, including the language of historians. In Part I the essay adumbrates what it means by presence (the spatio‐temporally located existence of physical objects and events). It also proposes two ideal types: meaning‐cultures (in which the interpretation of meaning is of paramount concern, so much so that the thinghood of things is often obscured), and presence‐cultures (in which capturing the tangibility of things is of utmost importance). In the modern period, linguistic utterance has typically come to be used for, and to be interpreted as, the way by which meaning rather than presence is expressed, thereby creating a gap between language and presence. Thus, in Part II the essay explores ways that this gap might be bridged, examining seven instances in which presence can be “amalgamated” with language. These range from instances in which the physical dimensions of language itself are made manifest, to those through which the physicality of the things to which language refers is supposed to be made evident. Of particular note for theorists of history are those instances in which things can be made present by employing the deictic, poetic, and incantatory potential of linguistic expression. The essay concludes in Part III with a reflection on Heidegger's idea that language is the “house of being,” now interpreted as the idea that language can be the medium through which the separation of humans and the (physical) things of their environment may be overcome. The hope of achieving presence in language is no less than a reconciliation of humans with their world, including—and of most interest to historians—the things and events of their past.     

States,Money and the Persistence of Colonial Financial Hierarchies in British West Africa

This article contributes to debates about the persistence of colonial hierarchies in global finance by examining the reproduction of key features of colonial monetary and financial systems through the end of formal colonialism in West Africa, with a focus on Ghana. The article draws together engagements with Marxian theories of money and of the colonial state, and an examination of a key period which has often not received sufficient direct attention in debates about colonialism and financial subordination: the breakdown and end of formal colonial rule, roughly between 1930 and 1960. The central puzzle addressed in this article is how, despite the explicit desire on the part of nationalist political leaders to overturn colonial financial systems, these wound up being reproduced through the negotiation of political independence. The article shows how the entanglements of colonial monetary and financial systems with processes of state formation posed severe limits on efforts to articulate a ‘developmental’ colonialism after World War II. Efforts to work around these limits ultimately reinforced the reliance of the colonial and postcolonial state on extractive and hierarchical structures of global finance. In short, the article shows how the contradictory position of the state in colonial capitalism is vital to understanding the persistence of colonial monetary and financial structures.     

Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices

How are archaeologists to anticipate for future concerns in what they do? This article begins the task of plotting a workable path between the requisites of standardization and the necessities of leaving room for the unexpected. In order to allow for the unforeseeable in practice, it argues for the enrolment of creative modes of engagement while at the same time avoiding the exclusive reliance on the redundancy of routine. It argues for the importance of pluralism with regard to things. By calling attention to issues of information design in our memory practices, this article sketches some preliminary avenues toward open pasts.     

Announcing Swine Flu and the Interpretation of Pandemic Anxiety

This paper discusses the ways in which 2009 novel swine‐origin influenza A (H1N1) was announced and resonated with current pandemic anxieties. In particular, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are used as a lens through which recent pandemic anxieties can be analysed and understood. This entails a closer look at the securitisation of public health and the challenges and struggles this may have caused within public health agencies. In that light, CDC' formal entanglement with global health security and its announcement of the H1N1 pandemic are interpreted, followed by an ethnographically informed focus on various people who were engaged in the H1N1 emergency response and their practices and practical struggles in the face of pandemic anxiety.     

Agricultural brokers

Pigs worked as brokers of agrarian life in the early medieval west in two ways. First, they converted organisms and spaces that humans did not directly exploit into a ‘commodity’ that humans did value. And the material work that pigs did made possible a second kind of brokerage, this one conceptual: the animals facilitated (or provoked) ways of seeing local phenomena in the context of wider ecological and social systems. Pigs’ ability to make use of a range of habitats, and humans’ interest in exploiting that work despite the trouble that pigs routinely caused, demonstrated that seemingly small things could influence and illuminate early medieval economies, social status, justice, and even metaphysics.     

TEXTS ON THE MOVE: TEXTUALITY AND HISTORICITY REVISITED

The last time texts were brought onto the general theoretical and methodological agenda of the human and social sciences, they were reintroduced into history in terms of an indefinite set of indefinitely complex contexts, which gave every text a specific date and location in a network of other texts and events. A couple of decades later, however, a more prominent feature of texts seems to be that they are permanently on the move: they circulate, have effects on other things, change and transform realities, and are at the same time themselves translated and modified. In the literature exploring the textuality of history, these dimensions have been under‐theorized and often ignored. To meet this challenge, we need to develop concepts and approaches that enable us to place the mobility of texts as well as their mobilizing force at the center of our current historical concerns. In this article we will explore what the consequences of this move could be, and what resources are already at hand in different scholarly traditions. Exploring the entanglements between actor‐network theory (ANT in the version of Bruno Latour), on the one hand, and literary criticism, linguistics, and book history, on the other, enables us to focus on how texts move and how they move others. We will proceed in this essay by identifying three decisive moments in twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century textual scholarship, often conceptualized as “turns,” which are linked to the works of three path‐breaking authors and which at the same time represent three different stages or forms of textuality: the linguistic turn (Saussure), the turn to writing (Derrida), and the turn to print (Eisenstein). Our discussions of these three moments and forms of textuality aim at uncovering how they also represent seminal moments in Bruno Latour's development of the theoretical and methodological complex now referred to as ANT.     

旅游产业集群网络结构及其空间相互作用研究——以杭州国际旅游综合体为例

旅游产业集群的网络构成分为核心网络与外围支持网络。旅游产业集群网络由主体、旅游资源以及旅游活动三部分组成。论文把旅游产业集群网络结构分为原子式、单核式、多核式、混合式等4种形态。论文把旅游产业集群网络结构空间相互作用分为三个层次:第一层次是核心旅游企业之间及相关旅游企业之间的竞争与合作;二是旅游企业和研究机构、地方政府、旅游中介机构及旅游投资机构之间的空间作用;三是旅游产业集群内部主体,主要是旅游企业与旅游产业集群外部成员之间的交流与互动,并以杭州国际旅游综合体为例对这三个层次的空间相互作用进行了分析。     

‘Poor heathens’, ‘Cone-headed natives’ and ‘Good water’: the production of knowledge of the interior of Australia through German texts from around the 1860s

This essay critically reviews the textual archive related to the two German mission stations in the South Australian Lake Eyre basin: the Lutheran Hermannsburg mission at Killalpaninna and the Moravian mission at Kopperamanna. The multiple entanglements of these stations far beyond their missionary activity become evident through examining distinctly religious material, such as mission journals, and secular texts, in German-language newspapers and scientific journals. These include entanglement in German domestic affairs as well as German diasporic politics; and in debates over scientific advancement and British colonial expansion.     

The world in a nutshell: a historical archaeology of early modern entanglement in Scandinavia and India studied through the life course of the Danish nobleman Ove Gjedde, 1594–1660

SUMMARY: In 1620, the Danish colony of Tranquebar, on the Coromandel Coast in India, was founded by an expedition jointly mounted by the Danish Crown and the Danish East India Company, under the command of the Danish nobleman Ove Gjedde. Gjedde soon went back to Denmark, but the experiences gained in the colony proved important for his future career as a military man, civil servant and industrialist. The purpose of the article is to study the form of entanglement between people, places and things, provided through early modern globalization. This is done through a biographical analysis of the life, things and actions of, and related to, Ove Gjedde. The article suggests that the actions of Gjedde should be understood and interpreted in a global context showing the role of Scandinavia in early modern globalization. This study focuses on material culture as well as people in order to capture change, development and power relations between people and between people and things. The subjects and objects — human and non-human — are seen in this study as equally important in promoting change and development.     

The Legacy of Nineteenth-century Replicas for Object Cultural Biographies: Lessons in Duplication from 1830s Fife

The St Andrews Sarcophagus and Norrie's Law hoard are two of the most important surviving Pictish relics from early medieval Scotland. The entanglement of their later biographies is also of international significance in its own right. Soon after discovery in nineteenth-century Fife, both sets of objects were subject, in 1839, to an exceptionally precocious, documented programme of replication through the enlightened auspices of an under-appreciated antiquarian, George Buist. This well-evidenced case study highlights how and why replicas, things that are widely prevalent in Europe and beyond, are a ‘thick’ and relatively unexplored seam of archaeological material culture that we ignore at our peril. These particular replications also offer new insights into the vision, intellectual and practical energies of early antiquarian societies, and their web of connections across Britain and Ireland.     

Reconstructing Archaeological Networks with Structural Holes

Model-based reconstruction is an approach to infer network structures where they cannot be observed. For archaeological networks, several models based on assumptions concerning distance among sites, site size, or costs and benefits have been proposed to infer missing ties. Since these assumptions are formulated at a dyadic level, they do not provide means to express dependencies among ties and therefore include less plausible network scenarios. In this paper we investigate the use of network models that explicitly incorporate tie dependence. In particular, we consider exponential random graph models, and show how they can be applied to reconstruct networks coherent with Burt's arguments on closure and structural holes (Burt 2001). The approach is illustrated on data from the Middle Bronze Age in the Aegean.     

Geographies of Responsibility

Abstract Issues of space, place and politics run deep. There is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of space and place with the framing of political positions. The injunction to think space relationally is a very general one and, as this collection indicates, can lead in many directions. The particular avenue to be explored in this paper concerns the relationship between identity and responsibility, and the potential geographies of both.     

Whitescapes: A posthumanist political ecology of Alpine migrant (im)mobility

This article explores the many more-than-human actors involved in crafting migrant (im)mobility across the Alps and the racialised (re)production of the borderscape as what I call a whitescape. Using cycling and hiking as embodied and mobile methodologies of encounter it examines the entanglement of landscapes, terrains, gradients, weather, water, and forests, alongside transport and tourist infrastructures: roads, railways, tunnels, bus routes, ski slopes, golf courses, hiking trails and cycling tracks in shaping how illegalised migrants encounter the Alpine Susa Valley/Hautes-Alpes border routes and how these ecologies are made political. Drawing on the work of Juanita Sundberg the article makes the case for posthumanism and political ecology in the study of borderscapes and illegalised migrant (im)mobility, while being sensitive to the racist dynamics of the nature/culture divide present in much posthumanist and political ecology scholarship. Therefore, while the article makes space for the role of more-than-human actors in borderscapes it also highlights the racialising work of these more-than-human entanglements in the following ways: through perpetuating dualist ontologies of nature/culture or nature/human from which illegalised migrants are linked to the natural, read pre-modern, world; and through producing illegalised migrants as ‘bodies-out-of-place’ in a political ecology that is concomitantly (re)produced as a whitescape.     

Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751)

The year 2001 marks the 250th anniversary of la Mettrie's death. This paper commemorates his stormy life and the contribution he made to the neurosciences. Trained as a physician, la Mattrie soon fell out with both the medical and ecclesiastical authorities and was exiled first to the Netherlands and then to Frederick the Great's circle of intellectuals at Sans Souci (Berlin). The two works which are of greatest interest to the readers of this journal are the 1745 Histoire Naturelle de l'ame (retitled Traité de l'ame in 1751) and the 1747 l'Homme Machine. Both are collected in the 1751 Oeuvres Philosophiques. This paper reviews these two ground-breaking tracts noting that, although they are both materialistic, and hence worthy of the odium theologicum into which they fell, they are not materialistic in the Cartesian sense. La Mettrie is dismissive of the Cartesian concept of inanimate matter and the related notion of the 'beast-machine'. Instead, he sees an unbroken continuity between humans and the rest of nature. His vision is in many ways far ahead of its time and prefigures some of the dilemmas and concerns which our evolutionary neuroscience presents today: how is consciousness related to the goings on in the cerebrum? How can we be held responsible for what we do if all is material? His biographer, Raymond Boissier, writes that we can recognise in him an obscure predecessor of Lamarck and a prophet of things to come.     

Religion and nationalism: four approaches*

ABSTRACT. Building on recent literature, this article discusses four ways of studying the relationship between religion and nationalism. The first is to treat religion and nationalism, along with ethnicity and race, as analogous phenomena. The second is to specify ways in which religion helps explain things about nationalism – its origin, its power or its distinctive character in particular cases. The third is to treat religion as part of nationalism, and to specify modes of interpenetration and intertwining. The fourth is to posit a distinctively religious form of nationalism. The article concludes by reconsidering the much‐criticised understanding of nationalism as a distinctively secular phenomenon.