Indigenous claims and heritage conservation: an opportunity for critical dialogue

Abstract

Indigenous claims of ownership and access to material culture challenge the field of heritage conservation. This article illustrates how indigenous concerns conflict with basic constructs of Western conservation, and how conservators respond to these claims. Despite efforts of inclusion, relatively few conservation projects integrate indigenous knowledge with scientific research. Redistribution of conservation authority is rarely put into practice. The article concludes by pointing to conservation as a meeting ground where collaborative decisions can be made about material culture on display. Conflict negotiation in conservation presents a potential forum for cultural representation and contested meaning of objects on display.     

Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method

In contemporary gender history, the story about the making of the gender category is inseparable from the concept of ‘gender binary’. It at once signifies a research agenda and constitutes a persistent problem pervading feminist analysis itself. On the one hand, it points to the massive historical record of persistent inequality between the sexes. On the other hand, the concept of ‘gender binary’ undergirds gender history's analytics, which empowers historians to pursue, expose and deconstruct the binary organisation of gendered – woman/man – identities as well as social relations and discursive formations that produce them. In both capacities, the concept carries a rich repertoire of connotations, which informs and influences the gender category: those of radical distinction, opposition, mutually exclusive and exhaustive differentiation, hierarchy, domination, oppression – in all their myriad historical forms. As a result, it captures the entanglement of gender – in theory, an open‐ended category – in binary, that is, negatively and positively determined connotations of feminine and masculine and, consequently, in a particular, historical form of heterosexual subjectivity, the one structured like a binary system. The entanglement of gender history's foundational category – gender – in the binary systems of assigning difference has had many critics. What has been left unexamined however and what gives this article its focus is the poverty of gender as a binary device to analyse those gendered identities that constitute heterosexual relations but do not fit the binary matrix. The goal in this article is to enable the conditions for the continuous development – not abandonment – of the gender category and our theoretical framework. To do that, I explore how the gender category became a binary category, tightly identified with connotations of asymmetry and hierarchy, by undertaking a deconstructive rereading of a foundational work by one of the discipline's most influential poststructuralist theorists – Joan Scott. I conclude by arguing that in order to address the problem of gendered, heterosexual identities that do not fit the binary matrix we need to revisit the concept of dichotomy and differentiate it from binary connotations of difference found in heteronormative gender systems.     

The Bullion Controversy and the history of political thought: experience,innovation and theory

ABSTRACT

In 1797 the British government relieved the Bank of England of the obligation to pay specie for its notes upon demand; then, after bitter debate and sustained inflation, it restored this burden in 1821. The episode is studied as the “Bullion Controversy”, and it is commonly assigned high significance in the development of monetary theory. Yet the Bank stood as an old target for so-called “country” thought, which suspected commerce of corroding virtue and undermining the proper functions of Parliament. Both the Bank and the Whig regime that created it in 1694 had withstood such attacks, but in the nineteenth century these critical voices were joined by political economists who reworked the existing lines of attack, above all by presenting themselves not as defenders of an ancient virtue but as the champions of a modern, commercial society that was being endangered by the government's and the Bank's ignorance and self-interest. This paper thus examines the Bullion Controversy in relation to the history of political thought, and reveals how the return to convertibility represented an early victory for political economy's self-styled “theorists” in reforming the state's institutions in the nineteenth century.     

Juvenal,satire and the persona theory: Some critical remarks

This article briefly outlines the origin of the persona theory as applied to Roman verse satire, particularly Juvenal. Scholars adapting this theory regard the speaker in the satires as a fictitious literary character, a dramatic mask (persona). The central arguments in favour of this concept put forward by W.S. Anderson and some of his followers are examined and discussed, and the validity of the whole persona doctrine in its more exceeding form is challenged.     

西方经济理论中可持续发展思想的演进及启示

可持续发展思想源远流长,但其作为一种系统理论产生于20世纪80年代末90年代初。本文回顾了可持续发展思想在西方经济理论中的演变过程,认为只有从根本上认识和接受可持续发展的新理念,人类才能迎来充满希望的未来。     

Ester Boserup's theory of agrarian change: a critical review

As discussions of the positive effect of population growth upon agricutural change have been less common than focus on the negative effects, Ester Boserup's book, "The Conditions of Agricultural Growth," and her subsequent work in which it is argued that population growth is the prime cause of agricultural change is of great importance. The objective of this essay is to review earlier attempts to relate the intensification of agriculture to population growth, to outline Boserup's theory, and to examine the criticisms which have been made of the theory. Boserup maintains that population growth is the cause rather than the result of agricultural change and that the principal change is the intensification of land use. The theory of agricultural development posed by Boserup is more subtle and complex than that of any of her predecessors. She sees population pressure as a major cause of change in land use, agricultural technology, land tenure systems, and settlement form. Boserup argues that population growth is independent of food supply and that population increase is a cause of changes in agriculture. The principal means of increasing agricultural output is intensification. Boserup's work has had a varied response from readers; other economists have been less than enthusiastic. It might seem as if the critics of Boserup's theory have left it in tatters. Her central argument, that intensification reduces labor productivity, remains unproven. There are few who would agree that an increase in the frequency of cropping is the only possible response to population pressure; the extensive margin can be extended, higher yielding crops adopted, and methods that increase yields introduced independently of increases in the frequency of cropping. Emigration or the control of numbers may relieve population pressure. Intensification can also take place without population pressure, under the stimulus of urban growth or the development of trade. It is difficult to accept that population pressure is the only cause or agrarian change or that the increased frequency of cropping is the only response to population pressure, yet the thesis is a fruitful interpretation of agrarian change. Assuming population growth as a change mechanism can lead to important new conclusions regarding the nature of agrarian change in western European history.     

The origin of the four stages theory: A contribution to the history of social evolutionary thought

Ronald L. Meek. Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1976. v + 249 pp. Index. $17.50.     

Framing theory: towards a critical imagination in heritage studies

Heritage theory has developed piecemeal over the last 30?years, with little progress made in fully understanding the way the subject can or should be theorised. This paper identifies some of the main sources of theory in heritage, as well as the approaches and perspectives that have been formulated as a result. These are framed on the basis of their disciplinary origins and can be viewed as theories in, theories of and theories for heritage. As frames through which heritage can currently be examined they are still employed in relative isolation from each other and we suggest, therefore, a way by which they might be considered as complementary, rather than competing approaches in order to provide impetus for the development of a critical imagination in heritage studies.     

Urban size and KIBS vertical disintegration: the case of Milan

The literature shows that market size favours firms’ vertical disintegration because it reduces transaction and knowledge coordination costs. The existing evidence is based primarily on cross-sectional data and on the manufacturing sector, with little or no attention is given to longitudinal data and services. This paper estimates the effect of urban size on the purchase of service inputs by knowledge-intensive business service firms located in the metropolitan region of Milan. Relying on a rich panel dataset, and adopting different econometric techniques to overcome endogeneity, we find a positive and statistically significant effect of increased urban population on the degree of KIBS vertical disintegration only when urban size is measured at the province level. We also find that this effect holds particularly in the case of traditional professional- rather than technology-related activities.     

论段玉裁对"叶音说"的批判

叶音说是科学的古音学产生之前人们对上古音的一种认识,其中虽然也有一定的合理内容,但非科学的成分是其主要方面.以陈第、顾炎武为代表的对叶音说进行了大张旗鼓的批判,但真正使叶音说彻底失去藏身之所的是清代学者段玉裁.段玉裁的明确的古音史观、科学的合韵说和对上古声调的独到见解,对叶音说的批判起到了至关重要的作用.     

试论考古类型学的逻辑与原则

类型学作为认识工具,只涉及科学发现与检验的原理和逻辑,并不涉及具体事实。考古类型学由分型和分式两部分构成,分型即分类,分式即排序。本文借《元君庙仰韶文化墓地》和《试论殷墟文化分期》两篇论著,以集合论的原理和知识说明分类的逻辑,得出穷尽性、排他性、同一性三条原则;以函数的思想说明排序的逻辑,得到同一性原则。