Eric Voegelin's New Perspectives on History and Experience: A Paradigm Shift

ABSTRACT

The article outlines Eric Voegelin's paradigm shift in his theory of history and experience to show how it has developed in several stages and through a number of revisions, shedding light on the historical and ideological backdrops of his theoretical endeavors. This also provides an introduction to the basic ideas and the methodological principles of Voegelin's approach.     

Globally and Locally Positioned: New Zealand Perspectives on the Current Practice of Religious History1

Religious history in New Zealand is now vigorously pursued by academic, public, and local historians. While there has been past neglect of religion in New Zealand historical scholarship, religious themes are now much more common in both writing and pedagogy. This article suggests that it is timely to take stock and to consider how religious history might be practised in the future. It argues that concerns about the place of religious history in New Zealand are mirrored by similar sentiments in the international literature. Cultural, imperial, and world histories provide new avenues for the pursuit of religious history. They also clearly indicate that religious history will have more to say to the wider field of history when it is strategically located at the intersection of “local” and “global” historiographies and methodologies. Using the example of a southern New Zealand urban parish, this article finishes by indicating how such a religious history might look.     

Iranian Cinema in the Twentieth Century: A Sensory History

This essay addresses itself to the century long history of cinema in Iran, focusing on the history of the senses as they combine with and are extended by film technologies. It argues that Khomeini's aim was to produce a transformed and Shi'ite Iran by purifying the sensorial national body by means of film technologies.     

Beyond Consumption: Functionality, Artifact Biography, and Early Modernity in a European Periphery

This paper considers the functionality and biographies of artifacts in the context of historical archaeology. It is argued that in order to understand how human life in the recent past unfolded in relation with material culture, artifacts must be recognized to perform various unobvious functions and also be conceived as processes rather than bounded physical objects. The paper begins with a theoretical discussion and then focuses on the post-acquisition life of artifacts and human-artifact relations in the seventeenth-century town of Tornio, northern Finland.     

Culture,Information, and Inheritance: New Perspectives on Old Questions

Two books under review investigate the relationship between biological and cultural transmission of information. This perspective offers a promising basis for a definition of culture with broad applicability in contemporary anthropology. Lamb and Jablonka stress the complexity of biological transmission and the importance of behavioral and symbolic variation to evolutionary biology. Richerson and Boyd present a rigorous model-based approach to the analysis of cultural transmission. The approach reduces cultural phenomena to simple models for methodological purposes. Modeling cultural transmission has value for anthropology but cannot replace approaches drawn from social theory and from detailed contextual studies.     

现代性与傅斯年的史学思想

傅斯年以进化观看待中、西方社会文化的演进,认为中、西文化虽遵循类似的进化轨迹,但属于两种不同的文化体系。在中国文化起源问题上,傅斯年由进化观促成的民族视角,提出了多元起源论主张,突破了传统史学中的中国文化同源论。他以汉民族的变迁为标准所做的中国历史分期,突破了旧史家依朝代的分界而做的自然分期,冲击了以王朝为中心的传统史学观念。傅斯年在自然科学观念影响下形成的以"史学即史料学"为主要内容的科学主义历史知识观,强调史料在史学研究中的核心地位,对于引导史语所治学的科学取向以及推动中国史学沿着科学实证的方向发展起到了积极的作用。这些是傅斯年在现代性观念影响下形成的史学思想的主要表现及意义,其局限主要在于他因将历史学自然科学化的强烈意愿,忽略了历史学与自然科学之间的差异及历史认识的相对性。