At the crossroads of nationalism: Huizinga,Pirenne and the Low Countries in Europe1

Johan Huizinga and Henri Pirenne belong to the most prominent historians of the twentieth century. The fame of the former is most of all based on Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919), a fascinating study of the Burgundian culture; the latter is widely considered as the innovator of the economic and urban history of the Middle Ages. But both historians were equally highly preoccupied by the question as to which position their countries – the Netherlands in the case of Huizinga, Belgium in the case of Pirenne – should take up in Europe and what were the responsibilities of these engagements in an international community. This preoccupation is the subject of this essay. It tells the story of diplomats from small countries, of disappointment through war and of national pride, a story also in which positions changed repeatedly.     

Latin America: trade and culture at a crossroads

ABSTRACT

Trade liberalization took the cultural community in Latin America by surprise, forcing a defensive reaction that took years to generate adequate public policy responses. However, cultural policy has changed unevenly in the region. Two issues became the center of culture and trade debates after the 1990s: cultural industry production and traditional indigenous knowledge. Mexico, by far the largest producer of audiovisual content on the continent, has been reluctant to adopt defensive approaches or red lines during trade negotiations. In fact, Chile is the only country that negotiated a ‘cultural reserve’ in its FTA with the United States. Regarding traditional knowledge, only states with large indigenous populations like Guatemala, Panama but especially Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador in the Andean Region dedicated significant efforts to fight for intellectual property protection for traditional knowledge, including benefit-sharing for the commercial use of genetic resources, derived through indigenous collective knowledge.     

The limits to optimism: Australia and the rise of China

The Australian government optimistically expects that China's rise can be easily managed. They predict US–China relations will be cooperative, and reject concerns that Australia may face hard choices between them. This optimism seems to be based on the view that as China grows it will become increasingly integrated into a US-led global system. That overestimates America's power, and underestimates China's ambitions. The best we can hope for instead is that China and the US will cooperate in a concert of power, but the US will be very reluctant to make the necessary concessions to China for that to happen. So there is a real risk of even worse outcomes: Chinese primacy, sustained US–China hostility, or war. Australia therefore needs to try to persuade America to work with China in building a new ‘Concert of Asia’.     

The burden of profession: Applied anthropology at the crossroads

Elizabeth M. Eddy and William L. Partridge, eds. Applied Anthropology in America. New York: Columbia University Press. 1978. 484 pp.

Walter Goldschmidt, ed. The Uses of Anthropology. Special Publication No. 11. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association. 1979. 280 pp.     

The Alaskan Eskimo at the crossroads

Klausner, Samuel Z., and Edward F. Foulks. Eskimo Capitalists: Oil, Politics and Alcohol. Totowa, New Jersey: Allanheld, Osmun Publishers, 1982. xii + 343 pp. including appendix, references, and index. $37.50 cloth.

Fienup‐Riordan, Ann. The Nelson Island Eskimo: Social Structure and Ritual Distribution. Anchorage: Alaska Pacific University Press, 1983. xxxvii + 419 pp. including illustrations, references, index. $9.95 paper.     

The Danish 17th-Century Man-of-War Stora Sofia: Documentation and in situ Preservation

In 2002 Bohusläns museum, Sweden, conducted archaeological recording of the Danish man-of-war Stora Sofia , which foundered in 1645 just outside Gothenburg on the Swedish west coast. This was followed by an in situ preservation project involving a protective covering and a monitoring protocol. After three years of intensive monitoring the results are satisfying. In particular, the wooden samples show obvious differences in deterioration between the exposed outside environment and the newly-protected site. As well as preserving the remains of Stora Sofia , the project also represents the beginning of a more active regional strategy in marine in situ preservation.
© 2009 The Author     

The rationalist tradition and the problem of induction: Karl Popper's rejection of epistemological optimism

This article evaluates Karl Popper's contribution to analytic philosophy, and outlines some of the contradictions in his work which make it difficult to locate in any particular tradition. In particular, the article investigates Popper's own claims to be a member of the rationalist tradition. Although Popper described himself as a member of this tradition, his definition of it diverged quite radically from that offered by other supporters of rationalism, like, for example, Mach, Carnap, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. The reason for this was that Popper believed the rationalist tradition, if it were to remain coherent and relevant, needed to overcome the dilemma posed by Hume's problem of induction. Popper believed that this problem rendered conventional understandings of rationalism, science, and inductive reasoning incoherent. This article suggests that Popper's principal contribution to modern philosophy was to reconfigure the rationalist tradition in such a way as to circumvent the problem of induction while preserving the rationalist commitment to reason, rational debate, and objective knowledge. Popper's reconfiguration of the epistemological bases of the rationalist tradition challenged dominant understandings of rationalist and analytic philosophy, and may be appropriately understood as part of a wider move among philosophers like Quine and Putnam to challenge conventional understandings of analytic philosophy, and of what philosophy itself could and could not achieve. It also informed a vision of social and political life (and of the social and political sciences) as rooted in principles of freedom, equality, and rational debate, but which cannot be fit within the traditional ideological landscape.     

The paradox of contemporary linguistic nationalism: the case of Luxembourg

Through a case study of the mobilisation around the Luxembourgish language in the 1970s and 1980s, this article investigates the paradox of contemporary linguistic nationalism, resulting from a hiatus between the continued influence of the classic nation‐state model and the new constraints linked to a changed socio‐historical context. Based on an analysis of actors' discourses, parliamentary debates and legislative documents, the investigation retraces the social, political and economic dynamics as well as the cognitive mechanisms leading to a change in the social perception of the Luxembourgish language. It shows how the contemporary context implies specific constraints and difficulties for mechanisms of the invention of tradition, but that at the same time the traditional nation‐state model, where one nation equates with one state and one language continues to function as a reference. Through the Luxembourgish case is raised the more general question of the relation between linguistic nationalism, modernity and change in a contemporary context.     

The preservationist paradox: modernism, environmentalism and the politics of spatial division

According to Bruno Latour, the imposition of crude classificatory schemes onto complex entities has two main effects: firstly, the classifications lead social actors to sift the world into the schemes' simple categories; secondly, underlying relations subvert the schemes' functioning, resulting in the production of transgressive 'hybrids'. Thus, classification and relation interact and this interaction shapes both the practice of classification and the world that is classified. In this paper, we examine the interaction between a scheme of spatial classification and the spaces that are enrolled within the scheme. We show that a division between urban and rural areas was put in place in post-war England in order to protect a 'vulnerable' rural nature from urban advance. However, as soon as it was imposed, this division was transgressed by complex socio-economic processes. We assess the response to this transgression by considering the activities of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), an environmental group that played some considerable part in constructing the urban–rural divide in the first place. We show that the CPRE has responded to the 'paradox of preservationism' by placing urban–rural divisions in the context of 'ecological' relationships. We illustrate this 'ecologization' of the modernist divide using the example of housing and we argue that the CPRE's ecological approach illustrates how a new alignment between 'urban' and 'rural' may herald a new and more sophisticated form of spatial classification.     

History and theory: the paradox in Francesco Patrizi

ABSTRACT

Patrizi's Ten Dialogues on History bring the Renaissance humanist discourse on the meaning of history to a new level. First, he emphasizes narrativity as the fundamental structure of history. Then he asks for the essence of history, which hinges on the creativity of the narrator, who organizes the facts to be told. With a focus on the Third Dialogue, we see that, for Patrizi, history is elapsing time preserved beyond time and human knowledge enacted in time or reenacted in events. A theory of history shows that history is the connection between contingency and truth.     

陶寺晚期龙山文化与夏文化

中国是世界六大文明古国之一,但有关中国文明的起源问题,迄今学术界尚无定论,或尚无较为一致的意见。对此,过去一些学者认为我国文明起源较晚,大约是在商代。例如日本贝冢茂树曾说,中国古代文明形成的时代,应...     

The urban paradox of a stranger

Rubén E. Reina. Paraná: Social Boundaries in an Argentine City. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1974. xxiv + 390 pp. Figures, tables, illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $10.00.     

陶寺晚期龙山文化与夏文化——论华夏文明的形成（下）

这里所谓前期夏化,按笔的划分,主要指的是二里头化的东下冯类型一、二期。这一类型的前期夏化,据调查和发掘,多分布于晋南和晋西南,其遗址就目前的初步统计约有六七十处,其中位于夏县偃掌镇东下冯村的一处,面积最大并首先发掘,故而将这一夏纪年期的二里头阶段化称为“东下冯类型”。据仇士华先生在其《有关所谓“夏