Rethinking the Historical Genealogy of Orientalism

The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978 Said, E. 1978. Orientalism, New York: Random House.  [Google Scholar]) marked a paradigm shift in thinking about the relationship between the West and the non‐West. Said coupled his critique of European discourse on the Middle East to issues of representation generally, demonstrating that Western discourse on the Middle East was linked to power, trafficked in racist stereotypes and continually reproduced itself. Despite important achievements, the critique of colonial representations often appeared abstract and disengaged from its own history as well as the specific colonial histories it sought to explain. We contend that while colonial representations have been theorized, they have yet to be adequately historicized. To this end, we trace the genealogy of the critique of colonial forms of knowledge in Britain, France and the US from the mid‐1940s to 1978. We argue for the historicization of the critique of orientalism, and for a more philosophically adequate theorization of modernity in world history.     

Welfare Warriors: Towards a Genealogy of the Soldier Citizen in Canada

Over the past few decades, new forms of citizenship have emerged in the context of a globalizing and urbanizing world. The government of citizens and economies, it is argued, is increasingly trans‐, supra‐, or sub‐national in scale, and characterized by the eclipse of Keynesian welfarism and rights‐based citizenship. Scholars have documented the emergence of targeted, risk‐based, and workfarist governmentalities and political economies at various spatial scales, and have even described emergent forms of citizenship as "post‐national". And yet, in many countries we are concurrently confronted with massive symbolic and fiscal reinvestment in national militaries, particularly in the welfare of personnel. Given this, and the longstanding relationships between the nation‐state and military service, it is curious that the soldier has hardly figured in recent discussions about citizenship. This paper provides a genealogy of the soldier‐citizen in Canada, from iconic national worker‐citizen in the post‐World War II period to its recent anxious positioning at the intersection of "domestic", entrepreneurial, workfarist citizenship, and the widespread re‐emergence of militarism and national security. It demonstrates that the military citizen has at key times been a template for innovations in social forms of national government, and argues that the soldier has been a crucial figure in their re‐engineering in recent years. Situated amidst transformations in work and worker‐citizenship, and at the intersections of political struggles in both the domestic and international spheres, the soldier provides a unique lens on questions of the national and the social. Through an engagement with the labour of social citizenship, and the war work that initiated many of its governing techniques, the military citizen emerges as a critical figure in the contemporary neoliberal nation.     

两汉时期谱牒学概论

两汉时期的谱牒学在谱学发展史上没有引起学者们的足够重视,原因在于这些学者认为只有私家之家谱、族谱才算是谱学著作。本文认为论述家族姓氏起源及发展的论著和论述帝王世系的史表同样是谱学著作。因此,《史记》等史书中的各类史表,以及王符、应劭等人专门论述姓氏的诸多论著便一同构成了两汉时期谱牒学的重要内容,且相当丰富多彩。     

The Possibility of Shamanism: A Genealogy of Anthropological Appropriations

This piece adopts a genealogical approach to the emergence of “neo-Shamanism” as a “spiritual” practice. It argues that the work of Freud and Durkheim collapsed the dichotomy between “primitive” and “civilized” which characterized nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropology. Neither Freud nor Durkheim embraced the consequences of this collapse, and while Bataille attempted to do so, his application of “Shamanism” to modern self-governance was constrained by the terms of the Freudian/Durkheimian framework. Jung did embrace this collapse, positing a universal equivalence between religious forms and psychological processes, and this epistemic shift permitted his interlocutors, Levi-Strauss and Eliade, to inaugurate the discursive frameworks which made “neo-Shamanism” thinkable as an ethical practice for contemporary Westerners. Analyses which suggest that “neo-Shamanisms” are rediscoveries of a primal “spirituality” write from within this framework, neglecting the contingency of historical change, the creativity of anthropological appropriations and the politics of knowledge.     

The Codex Mexicanus Genealogy: Binding the Mexica Past and the Colonial Present

Created in late sixteenth-century Mexico City, the Codex Mexicanus is an extensive bound book of miscellaneous contents, including a rare pictorial genealogy of the Tenochca dynastic lineage that traces the family line from its ancient origins to its colonial descendants. The Codex Mexicanus, as a whole, represents an attempt by its patrons and contributors to reconcile the Mexica past and the Christian present, and the inclusion of a genealogy in the larger book suggests that the Mexica royal house was believed to play an important role in this process. By providing a reading of the genealogy and comparing it with others, both native and European, I show that it presents a unique view of the Tenochca royal house that emphasizes its integrity and antiquity and in so doing effectively excludes outsiders who, at the time the codex was being created, were increasingly making claims on Mexica privileges without the proper family connections.     

南朝的谱学与政治

南朝谱学是南朝史学的一个重要组成部分,它较为突出地反映了史学与政治的密切关系。门阀政治深刻地影响着南朝谱学的发展,反之,谱学也成为门阀士族维护其特权政治的工具。南朝谱学的政治功用是它一个突出的时代特点,表现出很强的姓氏与地望相结合的姓族特征。同时,南朝谱学与南朝的选官、婚姻有看密切的内在联系。     

《叶赫那拉宗族谱》述评

那世垣先生撰修的《叶赫那拉宗族谱》以《那氏族谱》为底本,对其它支系多有衔接与添补,并加入了有关叶赫家族史的考述．首开叶赫那拉族谱中谱史结合之例。谱书理清了始祖奇玛瑚其人其事,使《那氏族谱》的许多问题迎刃而解,是叶赫家族史研究中的一个重要发现,《叶赫那拉宗族谱》在继承前人优长的基础上多有创新,必将促进叶赫家族史以及整个东北民族发展史的研究。     

汪道昆的谱本宗与宗法收族理论

徽州为明清宗族制度发达地区,这也是徽州士大夫文人宗法制度庶民化努力的结果。宗法制度庶民化并不仅仅是宗法制度贯彻实践的问题,也包含士大夫文人对民间宗族建设活动的宗法理论解释。汪道昆的谱本宗主张及其修谱活动就是建立在民间宗族的祖先谱系文化基础之上,反映了世家大族的独立性追求与以村落宗族为中心的社会现实;其强调的亲亲收族是对谱本宗活动的宗法理论新解释,民间宗族建设实践推动了宗法制度的庶民化发展。     

Gender and Text Messaging in an Iranian Context

Focusing on four linguistic domains, purpose/manner of communication, preferring local dialects, politeness, and volume of use, this study aims to explore how gender is reflected in messages produced by Iranian female and male students. A corpus of 2,116 text messages was analyzed. Participants also filled out a questionnaire on how frequently they used text messaging. Results indicated females to be more prolific users of messaging. As far as function is concerned, while texts produced by females were for the most part relational, involving an emotional language, males frequently employed messages for informative-transactional functions which were less wordy and in more authoritative language. In addition, males were more likely than females to employ their local dialect and forms considered less polite.     

The Gendered Genealogy of Political Religions Theory

This article explores the origins of certain theories of fascism, notably political religions theory, in the gendered intellectual milieu of the late nineteenth century. It suggests that political religions theory owes much to Gustave Le Bon's collective psychology (or crowd theory), a discipline that depended on a distinction between the feminised, racialised mass and the active male elite, and which saw women as trapped in the traditional phase of history. The article shows the influence of collective psychology in Durkheimian sociology and Freudian social psychology, and details its transmission to political theory via Talcott Parsons's account of the origins and nature of Nazism. The unacknowledged influence of collective psychology means that advocates of political religions theory either ignore women, or depict them as passive creatures defined by their need for the domination of a male elite.     

The Erasure of the Middle Ages from Anthropology's Intellectual Genealogy

This essay explores the curious absence of Middle Ages from the history of anthropological thought. An investigation of disciplinary histories reveals while anthropology's intellectual origins are often traced to early modernity or classical antiquity, the existence of authentic anthropological inquiry in medieval Europe has been either disregarded or explicitly denied. This historical lacuna is the product of an unexamined temporal logic that presupposes an epistemological rupture between the medieval and modern worlds. This essay challenges several historical myths that have underwritten the erasure of the discipline's medieval legacies, and then outlines the necessity of reintegrating the Middle Ages in anthropology's intellectual genealogy not only for enriching our understanding of pre-professional anthropology, but also for constructing a more holistic and inclusive understanding of the anthropological project.     

Text as Policy: Measuring Policy Similarity through Bill Text Reuse

The identification of substantively similar policy proposals in legislation is important to scholars of public policy and legislative politics. Manual approaches are prohibitively costly in constructing datasets that accurately represent policymaking across policy domains, jurisdictions, or time. We propose the use of an algorithm that identifies similar sequences of text (i.e., text reuse), applied to legislative text, to measure the similarity of the policy proposals advanced by two bills. We study bills from U.S. state legislatures. We present three ground truth tests, applied to a corpus of 500,000 bills. First, we show that bills introduced by ideologically similar sponsors exhibit a high degree of text reuse, that bills classified by the National Conference of State Legislatures as covering the same policies exhibit a high degree of text reuse, and that rates of text reuse between states correlate with policy diffusion network ties between states. In an empirical application of our similarity measure, we find that Republican state legislators introduce legislation that is more similar to legislation introduced by Republicans in other states, than is legislation introduced by Democratic state legislators to legislation introduced by Democrats in other states.      

“影”、家谱及其关系探析——以陇东地区为中心

根据对陇东农村普遍存在的"影"、家谱及其中关系的调查,认为作为传统农村家族文化重要载体的"影"和家谱,在现代社会急剧转型期很大程度上依然影响着人们的思想观念和日常行为方式,应该正确看待"影"与家谱的关系及其在现代社会中发挥的社会功能。     

A Complete Edition of an Oral Tradition: Text Selection Practices in the History of Publishing Latvian Folk Songs

This article addresses the history of publishing folklore texts—particularly the attempts at creating all-inclusive publications that would represent an oral tradition in its entirety. Despite the quest for comprehensiveness, these attempts have always entailed the need to be selective in order to draw textual boundaries within the unbounded, diverse folk singing repertory. The focus of this study is on the text selection principles applied by two editors of Latvian folk songs: Kri?jānis Barons (1835–1923) and Pēteris ?mits (1869–1938).