The Construction of Soviet Ethnography and “The Peoples of Siberia”

The multi-generation book project "The Peoples of Siberia" enabled a group of Leningrad-based scholars to reshape their museum into a Soviet ethnographic community. This article analyses the face-to-face performances, the legalistic stenographic documentation, the collective crafting of a single authoritative style, and a unique temporal frame as an important background to understand a hallmark volume in Siberian studies. The authors argue that the published volume indexes nearly thirty years of scholarly debates as much as it indexes the peoples it represents. The article concludes with a critical discussion of how this volume was translated and received by a Euro-American readership influencing the perception of Siberian peoples internationally. It also links the volume to contemporary post-Soviet publication projects which seem to retrace the same path. The article is based on extensive archival work and references collections recently discovered and which are presented for publication here for the first time.     

The Origin of “Chinese Philosophy”

Using the analysis of a single word to launch a conceptual review of (a problem in) cultural history, the Chinese term zhexue 哲學 (wisdom-learning, tetsugaku) is not simply a translation of the word “philosophy”; its inventor, Nishi Amane (1829–97), regarded it as the (Western) counterpart of Oriental learning (Tōyōgaku). The first explicit linkage of “philosophy” with “the East” was at The University of Tokyo, where it played an important role in the work of Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1913) and Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944). Inoue’s History of Oriental Philosophy, written under Katō’s inspiration, used Western philosophy to systematize ancient Chinese thought, and transformed “philosophy” (tetsugaku) from a learning of others, or Western learning, into an important component of the spiritual world of the East, and into a kind of universal knowledge. This was completely different from earlier lectures on “China philosophy” (shina tetsugaku) by Nakamura Masanao (1832–91) and Shimada Jūrei (1838–98) which still followed the Chinese underlying structure, and in the background, it had the intent of grasping the power to control East Asian discourse. In China, when young scholars like Wang Guowei (1877–1927) embraced philosophy, they already took its universality as a self-evident premise. This kind of alignment later evolved into a situation where it seemed entirely natural to use Western systems to interpret Chinese thought, and it also induced serious scholars to reflect. However, “Oriental philosophy” and “Chinese philosophy” provide East Asia and especially China with an opportunity to reevaluate its traditional culture. In this connection, “Chinese philosophy” includes: first, using philosophical concepts to re-provision ancient thought (the so-called history of Chinese philosophy); second, the occurrence of “philosophy” and “Chinese philosophy” and their evolution after their arrival in China; third, drawing on philosophy to enrich and develop China’s thinking. When seeking out “philosophy” in the veins and arteries of China’s history, the first and second aspects must be strictly distinguished. As to what the future may hold, the effect of the third aspect is most important.     

The Idiom of the Other: Three Francophone Writers of “The Fringe”

This paper is based on the linguistic and cultural experiences of three francophone writers: Ahmadou Kourouma (Abidjan, Ivory Coast), Suzanne Dracius (Martinique), and Barry Jean Ancelet (Louisiana, United States). Their testimonies are discussed in the opening section. A reading of Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, enables us to analyze the experiences of these three writers, “whose relation to the French language is as vexed and varied as Derrida's own Algerian inheritance” (in the words of an anonymous reviewer). It leads, in the next section, to a discussion of the impossibility of absolute monolingualism demanded by “linguistic imperialism,” the multiplicity inherent in any language, and the violence of a language which claims to be unique, while serving some ideology or power. In the last part, I address the double interdict to which Derrida believes education must respond, and the double entitlement for which it is responsible.     

The necessity of “corporatism”: The case of the Hawke labor government

“Consensual Corporatism” under the Hawke Labor Government is a process of policy decision‐making engendered both by a reaction to perceived past Labor policy‐making failures and the context of the collapse of the long post‐war economic boom.

This paper argues:

1. 1) that the perceptions of economic crisis in Australia in 1983 were accurate and that the Hawkeist consensus model was a correct (though not really corporatist) reaction to the policy requirements of the mid‐1980s;

2. 2) that, primarily because of the fragility of the institutional‐cum‐political base of the Hawke “consensual corporatist” policy process it will take an unusual combination of continuous good management and good luck for the model and its progenitor government to survive beyond the next election.

     

The Sacred Economy of Ancient “Israel”

Abstract

Taking up the challenge to develop a new study of the economic patterns in the ancient Near East, including what passes for ancient “Israel’ (the Persian province of Yehud), this article proposes a model of the “sacred economy.” A study in economic history, it seeks to map out the broad contours of this sacred economy in light of the neglected but crucial economically–informed scholarship from the Soviet Union on the ancient Near East. The article identifies the key nodes of the sacred economy as the village–commune, the temple–city complex, the formation of the despotic state, the tensions between labour and class, and mediations between empire and village commune. It traces the development of the State to the tensions between the village commune and the city–temple complex. It also argues that the key features of this sacred economy may be described as regimes of allocation and regimes of extraction. The unique combination of these regimes and the tensions between them make up the sacred economy. The underlying logic of the regimes of allocation was to provide a rationale for the allocation of productive units such as land and fertility by means of kinship, the war machine, patron–client relations and the judiciary. All of this was posed in the language of the sacred, for the deity is the ultimate arbiter of allocation. By contrast, the regimes of extraction undermine the allocatory economic logic by means of a pattern of exploitation in terms of tribute and trade. This article insists upon the necessary centrality of economic analysis in any historiography of the Ancient Near East.     

The Anthropology of Islam as “AppliedAnthropology”

Thomas R. Berger. Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: The Report of Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. Vols. 1 &; 2. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1977. xxvii +213 pp. and xxii+ 268 pp. Illustrations, maps, figures, bibliography, and appendices. Each volume is $5.00 (paper) in Canada and $6.00 outside of Canada.

Johanna Brand. The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash. Toronto: James Lorimer &; Co., 1978. 171 pp. Illustrations, map, bibliography, chronology. $6.95, paper.

James Burke. Paper Tomahawks: From Red Tape to Red Power. Winnipeg: Queenston House, 1976. 406 pp. $2.95, paper.

Harold Cardinal. The Rebirth of Canada's Indians. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1977. 222 pp. $9.95 (cloth) and $4.95, paper.

Robin Fisher. Contact and Conflict: Indian‐European Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1977. xvii+ 250 pp. Illustrations, map, bibliography, and index. $18.00, cloth.

Cornelius J. Jaenen. Friend and Foe: Aspects of French‐Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Toronto: McClelland &; Stewart, 1976. 207 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. $10.00, cloth.

Martin O'Malley. The Past and Future Land: An Account of the Berger Inquiry Into the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1976. xiv +280 pp. Map and Index. $15.00, cloth, and $4.95, paper.

Frederick W. Rowe. Extinction: The Beothuks of Newfoundland. Toronto: McGraw‐Hill Ryerson, 1977. 166 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $10.95, cloth.

Joan Ryan. Wall of Words. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1979. 190 pp. $4.95, paper.

John Snow. These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places: The Story of the Stoney Indians. Toronto: Samuel Stevens, 1977. xiv + 185 pp. Illustrations, maps, references, appendix, and index. $12.95, cloth.

David H. Stymeist. Ethics and Indians: Social Relations in a Northwest Ontario Town. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1975. viii+ 98 pp. Tables and references. $8.95, cloth and $3.95, paper.

Peter Such. Vanished Peoples: The Archaic, Dorset and Beothuk People of Newfoundland. Toronto: NC Press, 1978. 94 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, glossary, index. $12.95, cloth and 55.95, paper.

Marc‐Adelard Tremblay, ed. Les facettes de l'identité Amérindienne ! The Patterns of “Amerindian” Identity. Quebec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 1976. xiv ‐ 317 pp. Bibliographies, panelists and sponsors. $16.50, paper.

Mel Watkins, ed. Dene Nation: The Colony Within. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. xii+ 189 pp. Map and references. $4.95, paper.

George Woodcock. The Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1977. 223 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $17.95, cloth.     

“The artifice of eternity”: The Wanderings of Oisin and the Byzantium poems

Yeats’s poetry and drama centre on conflict, and crucially, on the clash between the mortal and the eternal. In this essay, I focus on the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin foreshadows and informs the treatment of eternity in Yeats’s later Byzantium poems. The Wanderings of Oisin explores the intensity of human longing for the eternal despite our time-bound nature, prefiguring his later impassioned though analytical Byzantium poems. Although the Byzantium poems seem initially to glorify eternity at the expense of human life, this essay traces the complexity of Yeats’s desire. Previous criticism has understated the extent to which Yeats’s poetry actively resists the siren song of eternity. The Byzantium poems problematise the eternity that they seem to desire, and this article reveals them as inflected by the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin questions the value of the eternal realm in the light of mortal heroic values. The “intensity, solitude, defeat” of the artist are inevitable, but there is a victory of sorts won from the poet’s deliberate inability to commit to any version of the eternal that preclude his own power and humanity. Yeats’s poetry runs the gamut between versions of desire that express an overweening desire for resolution even as they retain their resistance to any single pure state of being, if any such state is possible.