Learning from popular culture: Interpretation,visitors and critique

Abstract

The publication of Frank McCourt's autobiographical novel, Angela's Ashes in 1996 has sharply focused attention upon a sense of place and heritage identity of the Irish town of Limerick. It has both bolstered a local civic self‐conscious identity and spawned ‘McCourt tourism’. On the other hand it has provoked local controversy by revealing the existence of a number of hitherto largely concealed heritage dissonances.

The historical vision of the interwar period that it vividly portrays is a working‐class experience of poverty, poor housing, and absence of facilities compounded by an indifference of the local contemporary political and clerical establishment. There is a geography of McCourt's Limerick, much of which is still extant, composed of row housing, docks, gas works, public houses, Victorian churches and the like that is a different Limerick to the medieval conserved monuments of English Town or the stately residences of the Georgian Newtown (as portrayed in the earlier novels of Kate O'Brien). Such an image contrasts not only with the tourism image projected externally but more significantly with much of the received interpretation of the post‐independence Irish State that was until recently an almost unchallenged dominant ideology.

The catalytic impact of a single novel upon a town's self‐identity raises more general issues about the role of the novel in the shaping, revision and essential instability of heritage messages through time, as well as the management of disagreeable or contradictory elements in a local past through a polysemic and essentially multilayered heritage.     

The art of disputation: dialogue,dialectic and debate around 800

It has often been noted that argumentation in the early Middle Ages was mainly based on written authority, while dialectical modes of reasoning were held in suspicion. Towards the end of the eighth century, however, dialectic was back in vogue at the court of Charlemagne. Logical reasoning played a significant role in theological discussions initiated by the court. This article explores the ‘rules of engagement’ for conducting a debate, and addresses the question of whether public disputation and dialectical enquiry could (again) have a part in the proceedings of councils around 800, after their alleged demise in late antiquity.     

The dialectic of farm and village in French Canada

Michel Verdon. Anthropologie de la colonisation au Québec. Montreal: Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1973. 283 pp. Tables, charts, and appendixes. $7.50.     

The planning dialectic of continuity and change: The evolution of metropolitan planning in Madrid 1

City planning deals with designing and managing institutions that affect the future quality of urban places. The research reported in this article is on the evolution of urban planning in Madrid from 1857 to 1995. In Madrid, important aspects of planning have changed over this period, while others have remained almost unaltered. The tension between forces supporting continuity or struggling for change provided an animating dialectic that explains the evolution of urban planning and its institutions in Spain's capital. This dialectic of continuity and change is inherent in the nature of planning institutions themselves, as we argue in the conclusion, and has important implications for planning theory.     

A biblical Midrash on David and Goliath

ABSTRACT

Melchizedek appears in Genesis as a non-Israeli priest recog-nized by Abraham. The Rabbis assumed he gave the priesthood to Abraham who in turn gave it to his great grandson Levi, the father of Aaron, the first Jewish high Priest. In the Dead Sea Scrolls Melchizedek appears as a celestial high priest and eschatological warrior. This is consistent with the later author of the Letter to the Hebrews. Both he and Jesus himself were undoubtedly aware of these legends.     

The moral acceptability of nuclear deterrence: A critique

Theorists within the just war tradition of ethics differ in their conclusions about nuclear warfare and nuclear deterrence. This paper examines three arguments for the conditional moral acceptability of nuclear deterrence—those of the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops in their pastoral letter, of J. Bryan Hehir, and of Michael Walzer—and argues that none of the three constitutes intellectually compelling and practically useful moral advice. The bishops fail to convince us that nuclear use can ever fulfil the requirements of proportionality, and therefore that the intention to use nuclear weapons can ever be justified. Hehir fails to convince us that nuclear deterrence policies in fact distinguish categorically between intention and use. Walzer's case that deterrence is bad but necessary is more convincing but it, like Hehir's, does not constitute coherent moral advice for the citizen, soldier or government official. I conclude that, given the inadequacy of attempts to justify nuclear deterrence, even conditionally, we have a strong moral obligation to pursue alternatives.

The level of citizen concern about the dangerous possibility of nuclear war has become greatly heightened in Europe and the United States in the 1980s. This is probably due to at least three factors: the significant technological developments in nuclear weaponry that have occurred during the last decade, the increased fear of Soviet military strength, and the concentration of recent U.S. administrations on developing and improving a nuclear war‐fighting capability. But even before the growth of the peace movement since 1980, a ‘new debate’ about the morality of nuclear weapons and deterrence policy had begun in academic and theological circles. In this paper, I will analyze three arguments of moral philosophers and theologians, all working within the ‘just war’ tradition, about whether nuclear deterrence, in any form, can be morally justified.     

The geographical lives of commodities: problems of analysis and critique

In two programmatic essays, Peter Jackson has reviewed new critical research on the geographical lives of commodities. This paper offers a constructive critique of his particular reading of this research. It is argued that three major issues require urgent attention if critical geographers and fellow‐travellers are to take their commodity research forward. First, there is too much imprecision in the use of the related terms ‘commodities’, ‘commodification’ and ‘commoditization’. This threatens to render all three terms meaningless or at the very least confusing. Secondly, this lack of conceptual clarity is linked to the problem of superficial engagements with normative issues. It is argued that the recent geographical research on commodities has thus far glossed over important questions of both academic and lay judgement. Finally, the paper suggests that the ‘modest’ role for critical academics envisaged by Jackson and other commodity researchers is only defensible if questions of voice, message and audience are addressed systematically. Overall, the paper presents a menu of explanatory and normative issues that require attention if critical commodity analysts like Jackson are to maximize the potential of their research agenda.     

The critique of ethnocentrism in retrospect

This article opens with a review of the origins of the term ‘ethnocentrism’ as the linchpin of modern anthropology despite the discipline's background in the colonial past. The author is stimulated by Step Stuurman's The invention of humanity: Equality and cultural difference in human history (2017) to ask to what extent the critique of ethnocentrism, which gradually gathered strength in the West, has had parallels in non-Western civilizations. His conclusion is that the astonishing sophistication of a Persian and a Chinese polymath in studying cultures alien to their own does not seem, according to records available, to have influenced their respective civilizations in the same way that modern ‘anthropological intelligence’ (to borrow Gillian Tett's term) was extensively foreshadowed in Europe. Counter-ethnocentrism as a principle has now become indispensable to all the social sciences that aspire to be cosmopolitan, though it still has to compete with the baleful legacy of scientific racism.