Europe’s other? The Turks and shifting borders of memory

Abstract

Since the fifteenth century, the ‘Turks’ have represented the paradigmatic other of Europe. Even in times without violent conflict, the ‘Turks’ delimited the mental border of Europe towards the ‘Orient’ and served for identity-building in East Central Europe. In that region, the commemoration of the Turkish menace substantiated claims of being part of Europe over the last 200 years. Societies in peripheral regions could thereby redraw Europe’s frontiers in their favour. A comparison across Eastern European countries demonstrates how attempts at an inner homogenization through instrumentalization of an imagined external enemy contradict the plurality of interpretations of the past.     

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.     

“Turkish Dames” and “English Mastiffs”: The “Turk” and the Female Body in Massinger’s The Renegado

Abstract

In early modern travel discourse, exploration of ‘distant’ or ‘other’ lands is typically configured as some aspect of the female body. Power relations between East and West were often described in terms of conquest or ravishment, the site of which is typically the female body, as might be seen in early modern English literary response to the Ottoman. Couched in terms of the menace the Ottoman poses to the Western Christian, Massinger’s The Renegado courts parallels between sexual license, female rebellion, and religion to address domestic threats at home–not from the Ottoman Empire, but rather from the rebellious English women, who represent a clear danger to the patriarchal hegemony.     

The “State Idea” in Theory and Practice

Recent anthropology of the state is influenced by sociology's cultural turn—taking up “the state idea” as situated meaning. The works reviewed here pursue the state's idea of itself—in two cases through state projects of extreme social and cultural engineering, in two as a comparative problem. Notwithstanding differences of purpose and approach, the authors evince tacit points of convergence around the state as a form of modernism, as a function of elite interests, and as a localized process of depoliticization, associating dissent with cultural authenticity. The essay relates these points to western state nationalism and current ethnographies of political subjectivity.     

The “Philosophical Bible” and the Secular State

Almost all scholars of the Enlightenment consider Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke as the founding theorists of the “secular modern state.” In contrast to the widely held view of the modern state, I argue that far from being “secular” it was the product of the sacralization of politics, which resulted from the way these philosophers interpreted the Scriptures as part of their philosophical inquiries. The analysis of the “linguistic turn” in their biblical interpretations reveals how they tried to undermine the power of the Church to claim greater freedoms for the state. Their philosophical inquiries initiated the secularization of the Christian religion and the sacralization of politics as two correlative developments, rather than the secularization of the state per se, as is usually supposed. The philosophical arguments proposed by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke helped to resolve the religious battles of Europe’s many confessions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but are still pertinent to our current very different historical context.     

The new refugees and the “old ethnicity”

Haines, David W., ed. Refugees in the United States: A Reference Handbook. Westport, Connecticut: Westport Press, 1985. viii + 243 pp. including chapter references, annotated literature guide, and index. $39.95 cloth.     

The Qing Dynasty Ministry of Justice Memorials and “The New History”

The Qing Dynasty Grand Secretariat Archives are considered to be among the four great ancient texts discovered in modern Chinese history, and the memorials from the Ministry of Justice have garnered particular attention due to their well-preserved socio-economic content(s). From the 20th century onwards the New History, with its emphasis on drawing upon the social sciences’ discussions of citizens, communities and society, came to replace the more traditional “Imperial Genealogy” style of historiography, affording us a grander view of history. Progressing forward with “the times,” the New History continued to innovate and diversify the field; in terms of Qing dynasty social historical research, it brought about constant exploration and change within the field, first having shifted from socio-economic history to social history, then moving on to life history, the investigation of the “seeds of capitalism,” class relations, lower-class society, marriage and family relations, law and justice, gender studies, daily life (“life, livelihood and environment”), and so on, continually pushing the boundaries of academic research. Yet, underlying all this change was a close relationship between the use of the Ministry of Justice Memorials and the field’s overall development. This article not only introduces several findings made by academicians in using the Ministry of Justice Memorials, but also sets out to further reveal the relationship between the New History and the memorials themselves, probing into the deeper question of broader changes in historiography and their relationship with generational shifts in intellectual thought.