Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity

This article seeks to clarify the concept of “historicity” and how it might guide ethnographic research. The argument is developed with particular reference to the eight studies of historicity in diverse societies ranging from the Pacific to North America contained in this special issue. The authors contend that the standard Western concept of “history” is culturally particular and not necessarily the best tool for cross‐cultural investigations. Western history is generally predicated on the principle of historicism: the idea that the “past” is separated from the present. People around the world, including Western historians, recognize, however, that the past, present and future are mutually implicated. The notion of “historicity” is intended to open out the temporal focus to a “past‐present‐future”. Studies of historicity address the diverse modes through which people form their presents in world societies.     

THE FLATNESS OF HISTORICITY

This article pursues an explication of the meaning of “historicity.” This explication is in part theoretical and in part historical, passing by the German conceptual history of the term, a Romantic‐era fairy tale with bearings on the matter, and structuralist theories of history, especially Claude Lévi‐Strauss's and Louis Althusser's. The “flatness” of historicity, the article argues, emerges from the absence of layers of explanatory and semantic depth that would provide a foundation for the term. The closer the concept of historicity was tied to notions of human existence and phenomenal and aesthetic experience in the hermeneutic tradition, the more such layers appeared to emerge. The structuralist argument started out from the impulse to reject this tradition. Diverse variations of this argument rally around an understanding of the reality of the historical in both set‐theoretical and semiotic terms. They dismantle a variety of manners in which historicity can be tied to notions of the phenomenal subject and of intentionality and existence/Dasein. The article asserts that the structuralist argument, in spite of a tendency to develop its own layers of seeming profundity, has a considerable degree of rigor and establishes the plausibility of the flatness of historicity. I conclude by discussing some of the positive implications of this notion, which in particular affect the manner in which the historical and the political interlock.     

POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE TWO SITES OF HISTORICITY

This essay examines the two sites of historicity, namely history‐writing and historical agency, and their interrelationship. I borrow the idea of “sites of historicity” from historian Michel‐Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). For the purpose of analyzing how the relationship between the two sites changes with time and context, using Trouillot's theoretical lens, I examine the philosophies of history of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. By citing instances from these two philosophers, I claim that with the rise of nineteenth‐century colonialism, the two sites of historicity became discursively related in a specific way, whereby historical agency came to be predicated on history‐writing. Hence, in contrast to Kant's work, in Hegel's philosophy of history the relationship between the two sites of historicity acquired a decidedly colonialist form. As a result of this predication of historical agency on history‐writing, the alleged lack of historiography of certain cultures began to be considered as a token of their lack of political ability. The essay ends with the suggestion that the postcolonial thinkers and commentators who deal with historiography should challenge the foregoing predication, as it continues to inform contemporary thought concerning historiography.     

Valleys of Historicity and Ways of Power among the Fuyuge

ABSTRACT Attention to history is widely seen as a necessary corrective to the synchronic perspective of ethnography, especially as this has come to inform research in Melanesia. In fact, anthropologists turn to the study of history not only to understand ‘change’ and ‘the past’ but to delineate the ‘history’ of the people studied. However, history as a concept and discipline has a unique place in western knowledge conventions, an outcome of the distinctive ways of gauging and relating past, present and future. Historical analysis can augment ethnography but not necessarily portray the history of the people concerned, as they may have no history, as such. The article suggests that historicity is a more appropriate notion with which to register the significant ways in which the social past is entangled in what people are and do and in their future potentialities. This argument is made with reference to the Fuyuge people of highland Papua and their involvement in engineered trail and road building during the colonial and post‐colonial period and their simultaneous interest in the performance of their gab ritual. These events exemplify different kinds of power and associated historicity. Through scrutiny of each it is shown that the form of Fuyuge (Melanesian) historicity parallels that of their sociality and its distinct temporality. The events that actors perform produce not so much history, as the recurrent evocation of past actions and the foreshadowing of future ones.     

Emotions and the Relevance of the Past: Historicity and Ethnicity Among the Banabans of Fiji

This article treats the ability emotions have to point up the relevance of past events and so structure consciousness of history. It shows how knowledge of the past is embodied via the agency of emotions. The case study looks at how history is given emotional expression among the Banabans, a group stemming from Banaba Island in central Oceania and later resettled in Fiji. Under the hegemony of Western “regimes of historicity”, the Banabans created a new specific consciousness of history, transforming in the process themselves and their relationships with others. By analyzing several of the channels (oral, artistic, performative) via which Banabans vent their history, the article shows how they articulate knowledge of the past—underscored as relevant by emotions—with awareness of their ethnicity in the past and present. It is argued that emotions are involved in forming historicity, a process that is marked, not least, by reciprocity.     

LÖWITH,LÖWITH'S HEIDEGGER,AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY

This article is about the problem of the unity of history as seen through the writings of Karl Löwith. By “unity of history” I understand the notion that all history constitutes one and only one range of kinds of objects and/or one field of knowledge. The article argues that the problem of the unity of history—though often neglected as a matter of mere argumentative infrastructure—is central to a number of wider problems, most prominently the possibility of a plural understanding of historicity and the possibility of ultimately avoiding a unified historical teleology. The article revisits Löwith's writings and proposes a variety of novel interpretations with the aim of evincing the centrality, and of exploring diverse aspects, of the problematic of the unity of history. This problematic is shown to have informed Löwith's work on the secularization thesis as well as his debate with Hans Blumenberg. The foundations of Löwith's discussion of the problem are pursued across his ambivalent critique and appropriation of Heidegger's model of an ontology of historicity as marked by inevitable internal conflict and thus disunity. The paper reconstructs the manner in which, after the Second World War, Löwith's philosophy of history sought to salvage basic traits of the Heideggerian model when it tried to establish the possibility of plural historicity from a notion of the natural cosmos. It is demonstrated that the motives for this salvage operation ultimately extended beyond the problem of Löwith's reception of Heidegger and concerned the possibility of continuing any debate on the philosophy of history.     

Remembering Ancestors: Commemorative Rituals and the Foundation of Historicity

One of the most elaborated responses to the human perception of being‐in‐time (as the essence of historicity) has been the cult of the ancestors. Consequently, the ancestor cult may be considered foundational for historicity. This is the core idea of this article. It is illustrated with Romanian ethnographic data and elaborated with cross‐cultural examples. A few objects used in commemorative rituals—coliva (a special dish), trees and pots—are interpreted according to their symbolic force of enabling people to live temporality not only fragmentarily (past?+?present?+?future), but as a transcendental unity of the temporal continuum. Finally, the functions of history are specified—namely, identity defining, the critical function, and especially (as revealed by the ancestor cult) the function of memorialization.     

Ludovico Geymonat le Problème de L’épistémologie Historique

The study of the various inspirations of Ludovico Geymonat's epistemology (positivism and neopositivism, neorationalism, historicism and dialectical materialism) illustrates the way in which for the Italian philosopher the problem of objectivity of knowledge remains inseparable from the historicity of the sciences. Geymonat's epistemological approach associates scientific progress to its objectivity.     

The World Upside Down: Boas,History, Evolutionism,and Science

A new wave of neo‐Boasian anthropologists advocate retrieving Boas’s sense of historicity. In his theoretical writings, and especially his early exchange with Mason and Powell in 1887, Boas linked history to Alexander von Humboldt’s “cosmographical” method and to inductive science, accusing evolutionists of reasoning deductively on the basis of artibrary classifications. Boas, on the contrary, would not classify but would consider the “individual phenomenon”. Strangely enough, Boas’s presentation of his scientific procedure has more or less been taken at face value, and I question this Boas‐centric view of Boas. Examining Boas’s theoretical statements, his onslaught against evolutionism and his ethnographic practice, I find the accusation of deductive reasoning against evolutionists totally polemical. Furthermore, I discover neither induction nor history or cosmography in his practice, but a Linnaean‐type natural history. In brief, I uncover an inverse image of what Boas presented of himself, and no basis whatsoever for retrieving a historicity for contemporary anthropology.     

RECONCEIVING THE PRACTICE OF HISTORY: FROM REPRESENTATION TO TRANSLATION

Arguing that history is not the application of a rigorous method to sources bequeathed to us from the past but rather a practice of coding that constructs “the past” in particular ways, this article seeks to delineate the key elements of this coding. Modern history treats past objects and texts as the objectified remains of humans who endowed their world with meaning and purpose while constrained by the social circumstances characterizing their times. This time of theirs is dead, and it can only be represented, not resurrected; the past is only ever the human past, and it does not include ghosts, gods, spirits, or nature. If, as argued here, “the past” does not exist independently of the means by which it is known and represented, then the many different modes of historicity that human beings developed and deployed before the modern form of history became dominant cannot be measured against “the” past in an effort to compare their accuracy or adequacy in representing it. The concluding section of this article asks what we are doing when we write the history of those who did not share the presumptions of the modern discipline but who had their own mode(s) of historicity. What, it asks, is the character and status of the knowledge produced when we write histories of premodern and non-Western pasts?     

The rhetoric of science and the critique of imperialism in British social anthropology,c. 1870–1940

In this article I discuss issues of memory and historicity in a contemporary African prophetic movement, the Tokoist church. I do so by focusing on the multiple processes of “biographization” of the prophet’s (Simão Toko) life from the different allegiances within the movement. I suggest that, despite recent critiques on the biographical method, the ethnography of those (unstable and heterogeneous) processes can be very helpful to understand the place of memory and historical consciousness in contemporary Christianity.     

De Quelques présents latins

Plato and Xenophon ‐ contrary to Dover's interpretation of the Clouds ‐ provide the background to Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates: viewed against that background, Aristophanes’ jokes in the Clouds lose their obscurity, his comedy gains on poignancy and artistic unity; Plato's and Xenophon's Socrates regains historicity.     

DOCUMENT AND TIME

This article explores what it calls the “documentarist” hypothesis: the belief that the subject matter of history, the past, is structurally absent and thus can be reached only by way of documents, testamentary traces of various sorts (not only written texts, but artifacts, land arrangements, oral witnessing, and so on). The first part of the article works out the documentarist position through interpretations of creative works that embody it and of a variety of reflections on historiography—those of Michel de Certeau and Paul Ricoeur, as well as some “postmodern historiography.” It argues that documentarism ultimately faces an insoluble problem: it presupposes the pastness of the past, yet it cannot give itself the latter by way of the documents to which it believes itself confined. Documentarism assumes as already at hand a historical‐temporal horizon of past, present, and future, for which it itself cannot account. In the second part of the article, accordingly, I turn to the historiographical portion of Faulkner's The Bear to expose the operativity of this always already given temporality. Faulkner's tale gives us access to a more radical historicity than any upon which documentarists reckon; yet this historicity turns out to sit askew from the usual frameworks of history as we know them, especially those of periods and epochs. The tension in Faulkner's own work between periodizing and event‐laden explanations, I conclude, points to questions that fall beyond history as currently conceived.     

Foucault,deleuze, and the ontology of networks

The concept of the network has become embedded in social thought and imagery, articulating what at root is inarticulable. The network metaphor occupies an ontological space, but this space, insofar as it is posed as a philosophical question, seems to assume a network-like shape itself. It may be particularly rewarding to read the constellations studied by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze from this point of view, in light of the analysis of the preconditions of networks. This paper examines how the question of the ontology of networks is addressed by these thinkers, especially with regard to the historicity of ontology.     

The Descents of Military Violence against Civilians: a history of the present

Inspired by the works of Michel Foucault and Erling Sandmo, this article explores contemporary discourses of military violence against civilians from a genealogical perspective. The purpose is to shed light on the historicity of certain structures of knowledge, thoughts, politics and ethics that are fundamental for the ways in which military violence against civilians is put into words, interpreted and explained in various situations and contexts today. My main argument is that the descents of Swedish contemporary discourse on military violence against civilians can be traced back to epistemological and politico-legal conflicts in the 17th century.     

Women’s History in France: An Ill-Defined Subject

As a new approach and subject, women’s history in France is ill-defined as an academic category and remains on the margins of mainstream history. The concept of gender, a necessary analytical tool, cannot in itself suffice; the historicity of the tensions between men and women must be restored. At stake is the tension between a continuous linear history and the historical discontinuities which arise in its gaps and flaws, the tension between female individuals [individues] who, as objects of representation, are taken to be representative of their sex, and critical subjects who confront representation as a form of power.     

The good and the bad of the same: On the political value of historical repetition in Angola

ABSTRACT

In this article I discuss processes of investment in historicity as an ideological, political and moral problem. Focusing on the study of religious and political movements in Angola, I address the problem of historical repetition as a form of ‘acting upon time’ which, in similar terms to Walter Benjamin’s citation a l’ordre du jour, contests the idea of temporal irreversibility. I propose that this contestation is multiplex and can produce ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ historical repetitions.     

语用可迁移性研究概述

从语用可迁移性研究产生的背案、理论基础和Takahashi的实证研究三方面介绍了语用可迁移性研究的现状。语用迁移研究是中介语语用学的一个分支,其理论来源于Eckman的标记性理论,并经由Kellerman等认知心理语言学学者发展出心理语言标记性理论。语言可迁移性研究包括Kellerman的“breken”和“ogg”词汇可迁移性试验及金苏扬的“眼”词汇可迁移性研究。迄今唯一的在语用层面的可迁移性研究为Takahashi的日语间接请求策略可迁移性研究。介绍了其研究方法、步骤及发现。该研究证实学习者在迁移某语用策略时具有选择性,可迁移性同时受到语境,学习者语言水平等因素的影响。提出语用可迁移性研究存在的问题和研究方向。     

Archaeology and the Bible Revisited: A Review Article

David and Solomon, a new book by Israel Finkelstein and Niels Asher Silberman, through their discussion of Palestinian archaeology's current understanding, proposes to provide evidence to prove the accuracy of Frank Cross's more than 30 year old revision of Martin Noth's theory of a “Deuteronomistic History.” The authors attempt to confirm the history of the redaction of the biblical narratives about Saul, David and Solomon, involving seven distinct oral and four written strata of tradition. Their argument moreover claims the warrant to assert the historicity of each of these legendary kings of Israel. The present article argues to the contrary that the “archaeological evidence” proposed does not support such a redaction history nor establish the historicity of either the biblical figures or their stories, but that the harmony of biblical and archaeological issues is circular and illegitimate by the standards of historical research. It argues, moreover, that the claim of an oral tradition, reflecting original memories of an historical David or Saul is an entirely unnecessary and unlikely explanation for the origins of both the figures and their tales in the stories of 1-2 Samuel and 1 Kings. It moreover argues that the hypothesis of a redaction history in a succession of four cumulative revisions, beginning in the eighth century and completed in the sixth to fourth century, BCE—lacking as it does reference to a readable text—is neither critical nor falsifiable. Finally, Finkelstein and Silberman's book is judged as an unsuccessful attempt to return to the methods of “biblical archaeology” that were legitimately impeached in the mid-1970s.