‘Rock-art’, ‘Animism’ and Two-way Thinking: Towards a Complementary Epistemology in the Understanding of Material Culture and ‘Rock-art’ of Hunting and Gathering People

In recent years, the concept of ‘animism’ has gained considerable popularity among archaeologists in exploring non-Western expressions of material culture. This development has also influenced recent academic approaches towards the study of ‘rock-art’ of people living as hunter and gatherers or in a hunting and gathering tradition. We argue here that attempts in this direction so far are generally compromised, because they fail to take Indigenous philosophies and intellectual contributions seriously. Any concern with Indigenous material expressions, including so-called rock-art, has to involve a critical re-assessment of academic discourse itself and a challenge to the primacy of Western scientific and literary, academic methodologies. With reference to the ‘rock-art’ and the world-view of the Ngarinyin (Kimberley, Northwest Australia), we present some preliminary thoughts for the development of an alternative interpretative framework, while offering a (much needed) legitimacy to another more balanced epistemology.     

‘Now’, ‘now’, ‘even now’: temporal deixis and the crisis of the present in some Northern Irish poems of the Troubles

The problem of how to describe and account for the present can be identified as a particular preoccupation of poets of the so-called Northern Irish renaissance. This article examines how the temporal deictic ‘now’ functions in some well-known poems by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. All three poets explore how to combine the plausibility of lyric derived from an individual consciousness with the authority of narrative derived from social interactions. This article will do three related things. First, it will argue that discussing ‘now’ as a temporal deictic enables us to appreciate the full ambiguity and complexity of some poems written at the height of the Northern Irish Troubles. Second, the article will argue that these poems reveal that ‘now’ actually functions in poetry more complexly than some theorists of deixis have allowed. Finally, the article will suggest newly fruitful ways of combining literary stylistics with more conventional close reading.     

‘What is to be Done When the Motherland Has Died?’ The Moods and Attitudes of Poles After the Third Partition, 1795–1806

Abstract

Literary scholars who have examined the reactions of Polish writers to the third and final partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795 have concluded that the dominant emotion of the first twelve years was despair, producing a moral desert, ruled by violence and treason. Most historians, in contrast, have emphasized cases of Polish resistance to foreign rule during the first years of statelessness. This article draws on a wide range of sources to present a more nuanced picture of Polish moods and attitudes in this period, especially in the lands annexed by the Russian Empire. A range of motivations emerges from the oaths of loyalty taken by the nobility to their new rulers. Military service in the service of one of the partitioning powers was at the time widely considered to be one of the more acceptable paths taken by those Poles who did not continue the struggle for national independence in exile. The article concludes that, by the time Napoleonic victories had changed the political outlook in 1806, the initial crisis of national consciousness had already been overcome, and that the existence of a Polish state was no longer the conditio sine qua non of the nation’s survival.     

The development of the longbow in late medieval England and ‘technological determinism’

Traditional understandings of the development of the medieval English longbow and its role in the fourteenth-century ‘infantry revolution’ have recently been challenged by historians. This article responds to the revisionists, arguing based on archaeological, iconographic and textual evidence that the proper longbow was a weapon of extraordinary power, and was qualitatively different from – and more effective than – the shorter self-bows that were the norm in England (and western Europe generally) before the fourteenth century. It is further argued that acknowledging the importance of the weapon as a necessary element of any credible explanation of English military successes in the era of the Hundred Years War does not constitute ‘technological determinism’.     

‘In aid of civil power’: The colonial army in Northern India,c.1919–42

India's tribal northeast continues to be a footnote in national and international historiography. Influenced by James C. Scott's recent characterisation of the non-state hill peoples of Zomia and their deliberate evasion of subject status, this article reappraises the 1826 treaty between the British political agent and Khasi leader U Tirot Sing, and the subsequent Nongkhlaw massacre. It further explores a set of British expectations of the hills as a potential site for missionisation and white colonisation. In this way, it asserts the purchase of Scott's theories, but argues for the further potential of micro-history and the colonial archive to render indigenous histories more visible.     

‘‘The Acceptable Face of the Unintelligible’: Intermediality and the Science Play’

Abstract

The limitations of the ‘science-in-theatre’ genre is explored and the concept of the intermedial science play is introduced as an alternative to conventional science plays. How the science-in-theatre play dampens the mediality of the stage in order to establish a specific contract with its audience in order to realize what Carl Djerassi calls ‘didactic realism’ is considered. By virtue of the dramatic form and the didacticism it establishes, the science-in-theatre play limits the means by which audiences may encounter and enjoy responding to science. In particular, when staging concepts from the postclassical sciences, the intermedial science play offers artists and spectators new approaches to the sciences of infinities, complexity and emergence whilst also establishing a new, interactive contract with the audience based on forms of pedagogy associated with the thinking of Jacques Rancière. Using the media theory of Peter Boenisch and others, intermediality is identified as more than the mere presence of multimedia, but in terms of the effects it produce on the sensorium of the spectator.