Integrating Archaeology and History at the “Commonwealth Block”: “Little Lon” and Casselden Place

My purpose here is to outline the research design for the excavation and analysis of Casselden Place, make some preliminary remarks about the initial phases of analysis and integration of archaeological and historical datasets at the site, and to make some general comments about the archaeology of the modern city. Much of what I say rests on intensive artifact analysis that has been reported in the papers collected here, in the major site report, and on research being undertaken on assemblages derived from comparable sites in Sydney.     

‘To Support Active Empirical Research at the Grassroots’: The Family and Community Historical Research Society

For over 20 years, the Family and Community Historical Research Society, FACHRS, has challenged the notion that universities should have a near monopoly on the construction, ownership, validation and transmission of knowledge. Its central strategy, of publishing research derived from its aggregation of data from connected local research projects, has its immediate roots in an Open University module, Family & Community History: 19^th and 20^th centuries, DA301. This emphasised research construction co-operation within a social scientific framework. The roots of the FACHRS also lie in the development, since Victorian times, of sociable, collaborative and co-operative local history projects. The FACHRS’s progress was framed by its engagement with communications and database technology and digitisation during a period when demarcation lines and epistemic identities, both within universities and outside them, dissolved and reformed.     

The Camera “at the Trowel’s Edge”: Personal Video Recording in Archaeological Research

Video recording is increasingly becoming a favourable medium in archaeological research, particularly as an unconventional documentation tool that captures the elusive processes of ongoing interpretation in an audiovisual format. Our research forms part of the Personal Architectonics Through INteraction with Artefacts (PATINA) project, a project focused on the design of technologies for supporting research. Archaeological fieldwork is one of the research environments being studied by the project, and one of our primary concerns was to observe and record current research practices in the wild and to examine the influence of new technologies on those practices. This research brings together well-established and advanced observation techniques used in social sciences and computing fields such as human–computer interaction with archaeological research and presents the deployment of an off-the-shelf wearable camcorder as a recording interface in archaeological fieldwork. The article discusses the user evaluation methodology and the results, while addressing long-standing and timely theoretical discussions on the role of video recording in archaeological research.     

The Role of the Student Researcher: Notes from Hadrian’s Wall

Fieldwork carried out for a Masters dissertation examined, through interviews, how well a consultation on the future management of the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site had been carried out. Unexpected access was granted during a tense and uncertain period for those involved in managing the Site, at least partly because as a student, the author was not affiliated with any of the organisations concerned. This paper will examine the roles and relationships that the student may find him/herself in, in such a situation, and the possible benefits and dangers these bring. It will also look at the student’s privilege of a sustained period to focus on a single topic, often denied to academics. In the case of an MA, this produces relatively quick results and the possibility of contributing to urgent current issues, if students can be persuaded to publish.     

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Notes Towards the “Big Book” of His Generation: Man Descending in the Sociopolitical Context of the 1960s and 1970s

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s historical novels starting with The Englishman’s Boy (1996) have been widely discussed and celebrated in academic books and journals, but his first collection of stories, Man Descending (1982), has been largely neglected by the academic critics. An examination of sociopolitical references, with a special focus on gender and masculinity, in a coherent group of these stories (“The Watcher,” “Drummer,” Cages,” “Man Descending,” and “Sam, Soren and Ed”), reveals a writerly personality that, while acutely sensitive to contemporary social and political developments, and itself deeply implicated in these trends, nevertheless stands uncomfortably apart from and assumes a critical attitude toward the prevailing, generally progressive, sociopolitical trends of the 1960s and 1970s. In the last story of Man Descending, the protagonist-narrator Ed emerges as an aspiring thirty-year-old author who has attempted, but could not finish, two novels of his society and times, and these early stories constitute Vanderhaeghe’s own notes toward a never fully realized “Big Book” of his generation of Saskatchewan men, born in the early 1950s, coming to young adulthood in the socially and politically transformative 1960s and 1970s, and surviving into an embattled early manhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time, as it is depicted in these stories, in which the aspirations of 1960s progressivism were hardening into a conformist sociopolitical orthodoxy.     

Historical shifts in remembering China’s “Nanjing Massacre”

ABSTRACT

Immediately after the occurrence of the Nanjing Massacre, it was reported by both official and nonofficial media, and followed by witness accounts and victim recollections. All this formed the basic memory of the atrocity in Chinese society. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the National Government conducted preliminary investigations and organized memorial services. However, the investigation was interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War (1947–49). After the Communist victory in 1949, relationships between the Communists and Nationalists, China and United States and China and Japan all played a role in suppressing and even forgetting the memory of the Nanjing Massacre. It was not until the 1980s, after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations, that the memory finally entered a process of reconstruction.     

Conservation,extraction and social contracts at a violent frontier: Evidence from eastern DRC’s Itombwe Nature Reserve

Conservation efforts must develop strategies to perform at violent frontiers where environmental values, mineral extraction and conflict intersect. Using war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's Itombwe Nature Reserve as an illustrative example, this article explores how community conservation is implemented and received at a violent frontier. Taking inspiration from an emerging body of literature which portrays conservation as a form of ‘social contract’ in regions where the nation state is weak or absent, it explores some of the expectations and obligations that surround community conservation initiatives. It draws the conclusion that conservation social contracts are likely to produce unintended consequences when left unfulfilled or broken. Conservation actors perceived to be breaking the terms of (implicit) social contracts can inadvertently encourage local communities to embrace alternative contracts with other actors seeking to extract value from the resources located in frontiers, such as industrial mining companies.     

Inside Tallis: Reconstructing the Interiors of Tallis’s London Street Views

This paper will examine how the physical reality behind Tallis’s illustrations can be illuminated to explore the commercial, domestic and social dimensions of Tallis’s London. It will explore the range of material culture available, and how this can be used to analyse interior space, in particular through English Heritage’s Architectural Study Collection. Two preliminary case studies will investigate the future potential for looking behind the façades of early Victorian London.     

Were Women Present at the Demographic Transition? Questions from a Feminist Historian to Historical Demographers

This essay identifies some of the deficiencies in discussions about fertility decline that bridge the gap between feminist historians and historical demographers. The author suggests that women are portrayed in the historical demographic literature as lacking decision-making ability. The author emphasizes that women are viewed in the literature as reproductive resources in a national context or statistical entities in quantitative analysis rather than as active and informed participants in reproductive decision-making. The author points out that the concept of fertility decline itself identifies reproduction with a biological universe unrelated to issues of social change. Since the concept of demographic transition was introduced in the 1950s, it has been criticized for its false sense of universalism about a complex set of social relations. Princeton University's European Fertility Project is criticized by David Levine as describing "large-group behavior at the expense of familial experience." Levine uses the couple as the primary unit of analysis rather than region, but ignores, as pointed out by Jay Winter and Wally Seccombe, that the changing position of women and changing marital relations are key to fertility decline. Fertility discourses at the turn of the century focused on the decline in racial dominance, class differences in fertility, and women's selfishness in taking control of their bodies. Thereafter, there was a shift from eugenics and biologism to medical sciences, statistics, and social sciences and policy. The long period of historical invisibility of women is now being reworked by scholars such as McNicholl, who recognize the different interests of men and women in families. It is argued by Anthony Gibbons that lesbian couples may be pioneers in clearly separating their reproductive capacities from their sexuality, a direction that heterosexuals may be approaching.     

‘The Tent’s Big Enough for Everyone’: online slash fiction as a site for activism and change

This article draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research (n = 429) that examines how women who write and read male/male erotica feel their involvement with the genre has affected their views on gender and sexuality and their political engagement with gay rights issues. Previous work has looked at how online slashfic communities might provide a safe space for exploring gender performance and sexuality, while other researchers have observed a tension between those who identify as queer themselves and those who only ‘play at queerness’ exclusively within the online environment. However, much of this work has examined the theoretical positioning of such forums as transgressive and/or political. Far fewer pieces have attempted to engage with the women who frequent such sites to ask them about whether their involvement in these online spaces has affected their attitudes and behaviours. This study looks not only at the ways in which online m/m fandoms can act as a safe space for women to explore their sexualities and gender identities, but whether and how these insights connect to women’s real-world lives. Data presented here shows a strong consensus among participants that involvement with explicit slash communities has had a positive effect on their lives, as well as contributing to beneficial changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and practices with regards to LGBTQ+ issues. Overall, slash is seen as a medium which can create better allies, encourage cross-identification, and bring about positive personal changes. To this extent, I argue that explicit online slash sites can act as heterotopias.     

And a Historical Folklore Survey? A Reply to John Widdowson’s ‘New Beginnings’

This note is written in support of John Widdowson’s recent reflections on the direction of folklore studies in Britain. A general discussion is in everyone’s interest and with his words Widdowson has given a gentle whack to the beehive. This article offers more of the same, although from the perspective of historical folklore.     

State‐Community Relations in Yemen: Soqotra’s Historical Formation as a Sub‐National Polity

Soqotra Island, the remote border outpost of the Yemeni state in the Indian Ocean, is a community of mixed ethnic composition with a non‐Arabic mother tongue. It offers an ideal socio‐political context for the study of state–community relations in terms of polity formation as part of a political incorporation process. This focus provides a corrective to the still dominant segmentary society paradigm and its tribes‐driven state politics in the anthropological discourse on Yemen. Polity formation in Soqotra occurred through a series of acts of political incorporation by a succession of political regimes from the late nineteenth century to the present. The study of this process is pursued through a historical narrative of the state’s politics of administration. This narrative is aptly described as a mesography, as its analytical focus is on the meso‐level institutional web of four different political regimes with their distinctive modes of polity regimentation and their structuring effects on Soqotrans’ communal life.     

Tom Stoppard’s Big Picture: The Chaos that is Our World

Abstract

Issues arising from discussions regarding the ‘two cultures’ of science and art are many and varied. Tom Stoppard’s very active utilization of science in many of his plays has resulted in his work — especially the quantum mechanics-informed Hapgood and the chaotics-informed Arcadia — being held up as paradigmatic of one science/art position or another. Often, critical approaches to these plays involve a checklist of scientific facts, implying that the goal of such art is to serve as a delivery device for scientific breakthroughs. While plays, novels, and movies of various sorts may have such goals in mind, Stoppard’s plays do not comfortably fill that agenda, critical arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. Neither do Stoppard’s plays show particular interest in engaging any debate about the superiority of one ‘culture’ over the other. In his two ‘science plays’ in particular, what Stoppard offers is an enrichment of both science and art through metaphorical intertwinings that suggest experience is best served when both camps collaborate. The bigger picture that results argues an overlap in epistemology, namely revealing the uncanny similarity in which artist and scientist approach the material that is our universe.     

Trump’s populism: lessons from Latin America

This paper compares left-wing Latin American populism with Donald Trump. Despite their different social bases and economic policies, they use a similar logic to construct politics as an antagonistic struggle between two camps. Left-wing and right-wing populists aim to rupture existing political institutions to give power to the people, yet they differ in how they construct this category. Whereas Trump used ethnic criteria to differentiate the people from three out groups – Mexicans, Muslims, and African-American militant organisations – left-wing Latin American populists used political and socio-economic criteria. Despite their democratising promises, Latin American populists like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador undermined democracy from within. Even though stronger institutions might protect American democracy, Trump has disfigured democracy.