Collectanea

In emphasizing equivalences with conceptions of evil eye, accounts of Ethiopian buda understate the capacity of these beings to transform into hyenas. The case study presented here highlights how this element of the buda belief reveals a social realm that extends beyond the strictly human.     

Agamben in the Ogaden: Violence and sovereignty in the Ethiopian–Somali frontier

This paper asks what makes the periphery or the frontier a prime locus of the “inclusionary exclusion” that is, according to Giorgio Agamben, so constitutive of the state of exception. By applying Agamben’s analytics to the Ogaden – a frontier province of the Ethiopian state – we propose an interpretation of the political history of the Ethiopian Ogaden as a recurrent government by exception that spans the Imperial rule (c. 1890–1974), the socialist dictatorship of the Derg (1974–1991), and the current revolutionary democratic regime led by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) (1991–today). Drawing attention to the historical continuities in the exercise of (Ethiopian) state sovereignty in its (Somali) frontier, we offer a genealogy of the violent incorporation of the Ogaden into the Ethiopian body politic. We identify recurring practices of sovereign power by successive Ethiopian regimes that are constitutive of the state of exception, namely a conflation between law and lawlessness, the politics of bare life and an encampment strategy. By doing so, this paper insists on the constitutive importance of land appropriation – Carl Schmitt’s Landnahme – in performances of sovereignty and territorialization at the margins of the postcolonial state.     

The Evil Eye and Cultural Beliefs among the Bedouin Tribes of the Negev,Middle East [1]

This paper examines Bedouin attitudes and practices relating to the evil eye as a cause of misfortune. The evil eye is perceived by the Bedouin as one of the most dangerous forces that can interfere in their lives, and they invest much energy in a variety of methods to counteract it. This paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon by describing the rituals of diagnosis, treatment and prevention among the Bedouin tribes of the Negev in the Middle East.

The evil eye can bring a man to his grave, and a camel to the cooking pot (Arab-Bedouin saying).

The evil eye is like a light. You can see it, feel it, be affected by it, or affect others by means of it. It can cause harm or even death in large numbers, but you never succeed in holding it in your hands. This is the will of Allah (Bedouin saying).     

Tilling the Field of Interest Group Research: An Overview of New Insights

Abstract

This article argues that The Lives of Others contains a particularly powerful portrait of what the Czech dissident–philosopher Václav Havel called “post-totalitarianism.” I will explore Havel's understanding of this concept and the film's evocation of its key features. In Havel's view, these regimes preserve themselves through the principle of “social auto-totality.” They make every person, every citizen, an accomplice in their own oppression. Even more troubling for Havel is that these regimes do not continue to exist because of the evil will and historical misunderstandings of their originators. He suggests these horrors “can happen and did happen only because there is obviously in modern humanity a certain tendency toward the creation, or at least the toleration, of such a system.” Donnersmarck's brilliant film explores how it is that people are capable of living within a lie. This leads to a consideration of an important but heretofore unexplored question: What is the meaning of the movement of a totalitarian regime to a post-totalitarian regime? Was what seemed for many in the West to be a sign of Communism's ability to moderate itself actually the emblem of its true evil?     

The Social Production of Latin@ Visibilities and Invisibilities: Geographies of Power in Small Town America

This paper explores the sociospatial dynamics unfolding in Perry, a rural Iowa town that has been facing rapid change since the 1990s due to growing Latin@ settlement. We focus on what we call the social production of Latin@ visibilities and invisibilities: spatialized practices by individuals, families, communities, and institutions that render different Latin@ groups visible or invisible, with repercussions for survival, community integration, and political praxis. We discuss the border within as an extension of border politics and borderlands rhetorics to the US “heartland”, and how the entrenchment of a regime of deportability creates racialized and gendered conditions for the in/visibility of Latin@ immigrants and Latin@s more broadly. We conclude by considering some of the theoretical and political implications of our analysis for such geographies of power and the social relations, locations, and discourses that constitute and are constituted by them.     

The map drawings of Aegidius Tschudi (1505–1572)

‘On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: “We don't show churches on our maps.” Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. “That is a museum,” he said, “not what we call a ‘living church.’ It is only ‘living churches’ we don't show.”

It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps.’

E. F. Schumacher, ‘On philosophical maps,’ A guide for the perplexed (New York, 1977).     

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Repudiation of Protestant German War Theology

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a revolutionary in two senses. Obviously, his role in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, when it was discovered, stamped him as a political revolutionary. Beyond that, however, Bonhoeffer was a theological revolutionary in that he repudiated and refuted the prevailing Lutheran‐Hegelian‐Rankean Geschichtsbild, i.e., image of German history, that had become paradigmatic for his class, the so‐called Bildungsbürgertum, the highly educated upper middle class. Central to this image was the idea of the Creator God as essentially a “warrior” God who realized the history of salvation via the power struggles of nation states. Bonhoeffer, in his confrontation with the Third Reich, came to the conclusion that its evil triumph had a great deal to do with the image of history that underpinned it. This article traces the evolution of the doctrine of the Power State rooted as it was in Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms or realms, and shows how Bonhoeffer via his reflections expressed in the fragments known as Ethics, overturned that doctrine and thereby wrought an intellectual‐historical achievement of immense significance not only for Germany, but also for the modern world.     

BUILDING URBANITY: SPATIAL ORGANISATION AS SOCIAL PRACTICE IN MEDIEVAL ODENSE

The article investigates the social practices of the inhabitants of the medieval town as it is expressed in the materiality of the urban landscape. It is argued that a practice‐based approach allows an understanding of how urbanity, defined as a specific set of social practices motivated by the shared space, developed in the medieval period. The town is seen as something more than a physical entity. The argument is developed through a diachronic and contextual analysis of the spatial organisation and layout of the medieval town of Odense in Denmark, as it is seen in the archaeological record of I. Vilhelm Werners Plads, representing the 9^th‐16^th centuries. The analysis demonstrates that from the mid‐12^th century, the organisation of the settlement plot and the interaction between town dwellers and townscape change. This change of practices is seen as related to a different mind‐set and perception of what it means to live in a town, that progressively has provided a sense of urbanity.     

Playful spaces? a social geography of children's play in Livingston,Scotland

It is often assumed that ‘play’ is an unproblematic category of children's activity, but consideration should be given to whether it is really an adult construction full of questionable assumptions about enjoyable activities free of stress for the children concerned. This paper offers some empirical materials to begin such a deconstruction of ‘play’ through an inquiry into the social geography of children's play in a Scottish new town. By retrieving what children think about their own play, what it entails and the spaces, places, social encounters and social variations central to it, it is possible to sketch out a social geography of children's play that, if not entirely unexpected, does suggest the ‘nature’ of play to be less certain than might commonly be supposed.     

Hayden White: Beyond Irony

A crisis of our age that is usually identified with the loss of the sacred was one of the causes of the fall into irony in the nineteenth century. In the case of historians, asHayden White has shown in Metahistory, this irony was caused by a“bitterness” stemming from the failure of reality to fulfill their expectations. Anironic apprehension of the world arose in an atmosphere of social breakdown or cultural decline.A current stage of irony manifests itself in a doubt as to the capacity of language to grasp reality. Thus we live in a “prison house of language.” An intellectual parlor-gameproduces “second-hand knowledge” that cannot satisfy the needs of post-postmodern men and women still looking for another metanarrative. Therefore, the main purpose of this essay is to answer the question: how can we go beyond irony? This text is a “post-postmodern post mortem topostmodernism.” I am grateful to postmodernism for many things, especially for giving me an alternative apprehension of the world in terms of difference and continuity rather than binary oppositions, but I am tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos. I need order. I miss metanarrative. In trying to break with some modern/postmodern “principles” andretain within my discourse the premodernist perspective, I follow the current trend in thehumanities. We observe at present the breakdown of methodology and the rise of a more poeticapproach in the human sciences. Evidence of this phenomenon is the more autobiographical formof writing in anthropology (James Clifford, Clifford Geertz) and a more literary style inhistorical writing (Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Simon Schama). This trendis associated with a revaluation of the subjective aspects of research. Perhaps, and I wouldwelcome it, it also could be identified with a reappearance of a Collingwoodian idea of history ashuman self-knowledge, knowledge about human nature, knowledge about “what it is to be a man . . . what it is to be the kind of man you are . . . and what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is.”     

‘The Materialls for the Building’: Reuniting Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum and New Atlantis

Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum and his New Atlantis both appeared soon after his death, edited by his chaplain, Rawley. The works are, on the face of it, dissimilar, and have been treated as unrelated, on the assumption that Rawley was merely attempting to rush out (in the wake of his employer’s death) two works that had occupied his last years. In order to establish just what their relation is, we need to establish, first, whether New Atlantis was simply a last‐minute addition to the Sylva volume; second, what Rawley says about their association and how he effects it; and third, whether the two works have other concerns in common that would have led Bacon himself to consider them as companion pieces. Such an examination shows that there were intrinsically connected pieces, and can be used to throw light on the aims of both works.     

Power of the Rank Adjacency Statistic to Detect Spatial Clustering in a Small Number of Regions

The rank adjacency statistic D is a statistical method for assessing spatial autocorrelation or clustering of geographical data. It was originally proposed for summarizing the geographical patterns of cancer data in Scotland (IARC 1985). In this paper, we investigate the power of the rank adjacency statistic to detect spatial clustering when a small number of regions is involved. The investigations were carried out using Monte Carlo simulations, which involved generating patterned/clustered values and computing the power with which the D statistic would detect it. To investigate the effects of region shapes, structure of the regions, and definition of weights, simulations were carried out using two different region shapes, binary and nonhinary weights, and three different lattice structures. The results indicate that in the typical example of considering Canadian total mortality at the electoral district level, the D statistic had adequate power to detect general spatial autocorrelation in twenty‐five or more regions. There was an inverse relationship between power and the level of connectedness of the regions, which depends on the weighting function, shape, and arrangement of the regions. The power of the D statistic was also found to compare favorably with that of Moran's I statistic.     

Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical nomos

In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political. I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpins his theory of sovereign power. Starting from Agamben's spatial conceptualizations, I explore his attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt described as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how the definitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had dominated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and the lack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the century which followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading some key episodes in the history of European geography; in particular, the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzel's grand geographical project and the Geopolitik experiment. What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geographies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vital that we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil the Arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around which turn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo‐biopolitical machine.     

‘The Pathos of Conservation’: Raphael Samuel and the politics of heritage

When Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture was published in 1994, it was critically received. Yet, the book has not had the impact of other key works such as Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) or Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987). A number of factors have contributed to this, such as Theatres essentially being an unfinished project, and ‘heritage’ in the book having multiple personas – the net result being that Samuel’s arguments can at times be hard to pin down. Yet with interest in his approach to heritage now growing, this article seeks to unravel Samuel’s core ideas and arguments pertaining to heritage, and to give an historical background to their evolution. With the central tenets of Samuel’s argument essentially being a case for the democratisation of heritage; the validity of what we might today call ‘unofficial’ narratives and discourses; and to challenge the dominant view that heritage was ultimately history’s poor cousin, I argue that Samuel’s ideas have much to offer contemporary research agendas in heritage.     

The Enlightenment,Pyropolitics, and the Problem of Evil

Abstract

In this article I argue that the ideal of rationality espoused by the European Enlightenment hinges on the separation of the light of reason from heat, with which it had been conjoined in the classical element of fire at least since the Greek antiquity. As a result, evil, from the standpoint of the Enlightenment is tantamount to heat without light, while evil, critically viewed outside this tradition, inheres in the absolute separation between the two aspects of the life-giving, albeit ineluctably dangerous, fire.     

The upper mills quarter of Bamberg: Innovative,adaptive reuse

The Bavarian town of Bamberg had a complex of old mills which had become an eyesore to its citizens. In the late 1970s, work was undertaken to rehabilitate the structures. The end result has been a successful case of adaptive reuse. This is not just another case of adaptive reuse to the extent that it has been innovative. This case is examined in the context of a theory of urban renewal which had been popular and prevalent during the period when Bamberg's most distinctive and distinguished section, Die Altstadt (Oldtown), had to face change.     

The ‘China model’ and the global crisis: from Friedrich List to a Chinese mode of governance?

The global financial crisis reinvigorated ongoing debates over whether China has its own distinct and separate ‘model’ of political economy and/or development. There is much that connects this Chinese model with previous systems of national political economies; partly in terms of specific policy preferences, but also in terms of shared basic conceptions of the distribution of power in the global order. Like these previous systems, China has come to stand as an example of an alternative to following dominant (neo‐)liberal models of development. In this respect, what the China model is not and what China does not stand for might be more important than what it actually is and what it does stand for. However, the idea of a coherent and unique Chinese model has considerable purchase, and is both informed by and also feeds into considerations of China's uniqueness and difference from the norms, ideas and philosophies that dominate the rest of the world.     

The imperial governors of Dyrrakhion in the reign of Alexios I Komnenos

Abstract

This article considers the conclusions that we can draw about the imperial governors of Dyrrakhion in the reign of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. It looks at why Dyrrakhion became increasingly important in the course of the 11th Century and, above all, after Alexios' usurpation of the throne in 1081. Careful attention is paid to establishing the identity of the various individuals whom we know to have held the position of doux of the town in the period between 1081–1118, and the chronology of and context for the appointments looked at in detail. The significance of Dyrrakhion is further highlighted by drawing attention to the fact that only the very closest intimates of the Emperor – and indeed only senior members of the imperial family itself – were made governors of the town in this period. This study represents a fresh examination of Dyrrakhioii, and establishes several new conclusions about the identities and careers of the imperial governors of the town in the reign of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos.     

Why Dennis v. United States is a Landmark Case

A landmark, Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary tells us, is “an event or development that marks a turning point or a stage.” In my life, the case of Dennis v. United States ¹ is a landmark, or perhaps more accurately, a series of landmarks. My 1973 doctoral dissertation was on Dennis. ² Four years later that thesis became my first book. ³ My second book, a collection of articles on American political trials that appeared in 1981, contained an essay by me on Dennis. ⁴ By then, I assumed, I had said about everything I had to say on the case. In 1993, though, Mel Urofsky brought me back to it, asking me to write a retrospective article on Dennis for the Journal of Supreme Court History, of which he had just become the editor. ⁵ Now, fifteen years later, here we are together again. I am beginning to think that the “grave and probable danger” test that Dennis introduced into constitutional law will be inscribed on my tombstone.     

The Idea of a Good and Bad Gemeinschaft in William Bloke Modisane’s Autobiography,Blame Me on History

William Bloke Modisane, the African writer and journalist, attracted wide notice with his autobiography, Blame Me on History, which was banned in South Africa in 1963, the year in which it received its first publication. The sociologist's interest in Modisane's autobiography can be located in several basic themes (among these can be counted the problem of his cultural dilemma as a member of the African middle class), but for present purposes, we need to note only one aspect of the book which I think has been constantly ignored, namely the sociological tradition that informs the meaning of his concept of the community— Sophiatown. The name “Sophiatown” carries a profoundly important meaning in Modisane's autobiography. I will argue that in the sociological sense in which the Drum writer uses the name, he articulates the central notions of what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies regards as a Gemeinschaft social order. There is a different, though related, point that needs to be made about Modisane's use of the term “community”: if we read his book carefully, we can see that it contains two different narratives about Sophiatown, a positive one which appears to have been slightly romanticised, and a negative one, which focuses on the community's darker side, showing it up to have been a Gemeinschaft in an unusual way. It is through this binary opposition that Modisane creates in his autobiography that he shows his ambiguity with regard to his Gemeinschaft community.