The world archaeological congress from a critical and personal perspective

Este trabajo trata sobre el contexto epistemológico y político que regula la organización del congreso arqueológico mundial y su historia. WAC introdujó una serie de puntos políticos renovadores, como por ejemplo el código de ética, la participación de los representantes indígenas y regionales, llevando a la arqueología a un nuevo contexto mundial. Como un ex secretario WAC, el autor argumenta por una democracia más profunda en la organización.

---

Résumé Cet article aborde le contexte épistémologique et politique qui a mené à l'organisation du Congrès mondiale de l'archéologie et l'histoire de la discipline subséquente. Le CMA a introduit une série de positions politiques, comme un code d'étiques, une représentation régionale et autochtone, ainsi que l'aboutissement de l'archéologie dans une nouvelle étape mondiale. Comme ancien secrétaire du CMA, l'auteur plaide en faveur de l'approfondissement des aspects démocratiques de l'organisation.

     

Dreaming as a critical discourse of national belonging: China Dream,American Dream and world dream

This article explores the normative politics of national belonging through an analysis of the ‘China Dream’ and the ‘American Dream’. It traces how politicians and public intellectuals employ such slogans to highlight how national dreams emerge in times of crisis and involve a combination of aspirations and anxieties. It compares parallel rhetorical strategies – ‘patriotic worrying’ in China and the American Jeremiad in the US – to examine how belonging to these two nations involves a nostalgic longing for the past as a model for the future. Debates about the meaning of these national dreams highlight the tension between freedom and equality in the US, between the individual and the collective in China, and between longing for the true nation, and belonging in the actual nation for both countries. It concludes that while this quest for redemption through past models limits opportunities for critical discourse in China, the American Dream still contains much ‘promise’. The China Dream and the American Dream thus are, at the same time, 1) familiar expressions of nationalism and national belonging, and 2) ongoing self/Other coherence‐producing performances that help us to question received notions of nationalism and national belonging.     

Trump,Montenegrins and the third world war

Thanks to President Trump's controversial interview in which he described the Montenegrin people as very aggressive, suggesting that Montenegro could be the cause of a third world war, this small Balkan nation got more attention than it had ever had before. Effectively, Trump exaggerated a historical stereotype of Montenegrins and based his comment on Montenegro's political behaviour from several centuries ago when they developed a warlike ethos. How this awareness of Montenegro's aggressive nature as a warrior people made its way to Donald Trump and how exactly he thinks Montenegrin bellicosity could be the cause of a third world war, we can only speculate. Montenegro has fewer than 700,000 inhabitants. The Montenegrin army counts some 1,800 soldiers. Most of the soldiers in active service see the job as a secure source of income, not a chance to prove their combat skills. Montenegro is therefore most unlikely to be the source of aggression itself. Starting from President Trump's statement regarding Montenegro, in this article, the author problematizes the historical roots of Montenegrin traditional masculinity, the reasons why the question of NATO membership still provokes controversies over Montenegrin identity and the position of Montenegro in contemporary geopolitics.     

Beware, the Historian! Hiroshima, the Enola Gay, and theDangers of History

Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory.
Edward T. Linenthal and Tom engelhardt, eds., History wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Post.     

Old world,new world: the evolution and influence of foreign affairs think‐tanks

The rise of think‐tanks in the United States, in Europe and around the world has generated considerable scholarly attention in recent years. Much of this interest has been fuelled by the widespread belief that these institutions have come to play an increasingly influential role in shaping both public opinion and the domestic and foreign policy preferences and choices of high‐level decision‐makers. This perception was reinforced when several think‐tanks with close ties to the administrations of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair advocated a far more muscular posture towards Iraq in the months and years following the events of 9/1ya. As think‐tanks on both sides of the Atlantic continue their efforts to become more entrenched in the policy‐making process, scholars are beginning to pay closer attention to how these institutions, established ostensibly to engage in policy research, have become even more adept at political advocacy. Not surprisingly, as think‐tanks have devoted more resources to affecting policy change, speculation about how much or little influence they wield has become more intense. The purpose of this article is to explore the evolution and transformation of foreign affairs think‐tanks in North America and Europe since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to highlight, by relying on specific foreign and defence policy issues, the extent to which a handful of think‐tanks have been able to become important fixtures in the policy‐making community.     

Captain Canuck,audience response,and the project of Canadian nationalism

This paper addresses the role of comic books in interpellating national identities, locating the process of national identity formation in the interplay between popular culture producers and their audiences as described by Althusser (1977 Althusser, L. 1977. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books.  [Google Scholar]) and McGee (1975 McGee, M. 1975. In search of ‘the people’: a rhetorical alternative. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61: 235–249. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The empirical section of this paper focuses on Captain Canuck, a Canadian-produced comic book originating in the 1970s and sporadically published through the present day. The authors engaged in a qualitative content analysis of the Captain Canuck comic books, searching for themes and markers of Canadian-ness and looking for audience identifications with those themes and markers in the ‘letter to the editor’ columns published within the comic books themselves. The study finds that through the many incarnations of Captain Canuck various versions of Canadian identity have been projected, with varying degrees of support by the readership. The role of the USA in Canadian identity formation looms large, especially in the positioning of Canadian quality and multiculturalism against the tacitly American lack thereof. Another finding of this research is that there has been a fundamental change in the way Canadian identity is structured as a new, commercially driven Canadiana culture industry has arisen since the 1970s.     

Missing the point: globalization, deterritorialization and the space of the world

This article provides a critique of a dominant strand of the literature on globalization – that which suggests it can be understood as deterritorialization. It argues that suggestions that we have moved away from territorial understandings of politics fail to conceptually elaborate the notion of territory itself. Drawing parallels between mathematics and politics in the seventeenth century, the paper claims that the notion of territory is dependent on a particular way of grasping space as calculable. This way of understanding space makes bounded territories possible, but also underlies new global configurations. In other words globalization is a reconfiguration of existing understandings rather than the radical break some suggest. The article concludes by making some comments on this reconfiguration, and suggesting that further historical and conceptual work on territory is necessary before it can be thought to be superseded.