The End of the Old World Order

Raymond L. Garthoff. The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War . Washington: Brooking Institution, 1994. 834 pp.     

Joan Barfoot's Exit Lines and the Pastoral of Old Age

This article traces the way in which Canadian author Joan Barfoot's novel Exit Lines draws upon the pastoral tradition in its representation of old age. Pastoral literature has traditionally encoded ideologies of age, and it is the inclusion of pastoral tropes that structures Barfoot's participation in the discussion of population aging currently taking place across disciplines and in the popular media. Pastoral writing is characterized by an acceptance of vulnerability and loss, and this provides Barfoot with an effective counterpoint to a contemporary culture of “positive” aging founded on an ethic of bodily control that alternately stigmatizes and masks the existence of decline and dependency in late life. The novel questions the way in which the rhetoric of crisis that characterizes discussions of population aging threatens to generate resentment against the dependent elderly, whom the novel depicts as vulnerable to exploitation by those who stand to profit from this “crisis.”     

The Teach-ins: Anti-war protest in the Old Stoned Age

A largely personal as well as anthropological reflection on the 60s teach-in movement, delivered in a 2008 AAA Session of the Association of Radical Anthropologists, with a view toward reminding us of the differences to the current 'structure of the conjuncture' with regard to the Iraq war.     

中国旧石器考古学研究的动态与展望

中国旧石器时代考古学实践,在二十世纪取得了举世瞩目的成果,二十一世纪定能取得新的辉煌。     

略谈苏秉琦晚年的学术研究主线--苏秉琦与中国文明起源研究之一

苏秉琦晚年的学术研究主线,正式形成于20世纪80年代初,修订于80年代中期,调整于90年代初,而最终确定为国家起源(即文明起源)和民族文化传统.苏秉琦对中国文明起源的种种论述,都是为了实现他的学术研究目的而进行的种种探索.     

影响农村养老模式选择的因素分析——以logistic回归为分析工具

本文立足＂百村观察＂的数据平台,通过对全国20个省68个村1942户农户的调查,探讨了个人因素、家庭因素对于农村养老模式选择的影响。认为年龄、健康状况、家庭居住地、家中子女数都影响了农民对养老方式的选择,并由此看到,传统家庭子女养老的方式正在被社会养老所改变。     

自然法尔与晚年亲鸾的精神救赎——《自然法尔事》文本的重释

在罪恶感与空虚不断加剧的晚年,亲鸾将唯物自然融入宗学理论,构筑起“自然法尔”的这一哲学体系。然而,自然法尔并非反映了一种客观的自然规律,其以“他力”为核心的理论实质,实际体现了对佛力的至上信念和绝对依赖,充分展现了晚年亲鸾自我救赎的心境及高远的宗教理想。     

第二轮修志应重视老年人口内容的记述

文章结合目前老龄化的现状,指出志书对老年人口内容的记述一直比较匮乏,第二轮修志也没有对人口老龄化这个重大社会问题引起足够重视,记载过于浅薄。认为第二轮修志要坚持以人为本修志理念,全方位、多层次记述老年人口内容,要注重运用鲜活的采访资料、口述资料、抽样调查资料等,在首轮修志基础上加以扩充深入,弥补空白,丰富更新已载之事。     

Maritime Worlds Collide: Agents of Transference and the Metastasis of Seaborne Threats at the End of the Bronze Age

Primary sources from the end of the Bronze Age have long been read as suggesting a time of chaotic transition, particularly with regard to threats from the sea that the established powers had no means of combatting. While the scale and severity of seaborne attacks seems to have increased in the late 13th century, these were not in themselves new phenomena, as a state of maritime threat seems to have been a constant for coastal polities and mariners in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean. However, a combination of internal and external factors in the late 13th and early 12th centuries combined to make these attacks more effective than they had been in the past, and polities more vulnerable to them. These included the rapid spread of improvements in maritime technology, particularly from the Aegean and the Levant, via high–intensity ‘zones of transference’, as well as an increase in the scale of ship­–based combat operations, due in part to the displacement of people during the Late Bronze Age collapse. This paper addresses this in two parts, beginning with the ‘background’ evidence for a constant state of maritime threat in the centuries leading up to the end of the Bronze Age, and concluding with the ‘foreground’ evidence for zones of transference and the transmission of groundbreaking elements of naval technology in the years surrounding the Late Bronze–Early Iron Age transition.     

Activism for End Times: Millenarian Belief in an Age of Climate Emergency

ABSTRACT

To be labeled an “eco-millenarian” has invariably pejorative connotations, insinuating the use of catastrophic rhetoric of an ecological end-times to bypass rational decision-making and democratic processes. In this article I critically assess this association, and also consider whether new political concerns – the suggestion that we are in a “climate emergency” – lend a new credibility to the structure of millenarian belief for an era of climate change. Clearly, caution is required here: the legacy of Christian millenarianism to secular politics has at times inspired peaceful, egalitarian revolution, but it is probably better known for motivating violent conflict and new forms of authoritarianism. Thus, we need to specify carefully which theological legacies are being evoked when discussing the relevance of millenarian belief today. Political theology can offer guidance to a new generation of environmental activists seeking resources with which to renew politics in times of emergency.     

Wrinkles in Time: Old Age,Gender and Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article explores one of the classic questions in the history of old age: what happened to the status of the elderly in the nineteenth century? How do we explain the emergence of the modern notion of an old age defined by ‘declines’ of every sort (cognitive, physical, financial)? The article focuses on Germany, then and now a global leader on this issue, and it focuses on women, whose ageing was more widely discussed than that of men. It shows that the great nineteenth-century debate about the elderly was not about industrialisation, labour, health or social policy. It was a debate about time. The cultural understanding of the elderly changed because the culture of temporality did. The focus on futurity and the youth around 1900 is well known, as modern Germany became convulsed with imperial fantasies and electric urban life. This had, it turns out, negative repercussions for older Germans. No longer the accretions of a long past of wisdom and experience, they were identified instead with their short future of corporeal decline and death. The social attitude towards older people is therefore related to the broader social attitude towards time, history and change: a finding that might apply in other times and places, including our own.     

江西地区新石器时代末期文化与夏文化的南渐

在距今四千年前后,中原地区的原始氏族制已完全解体而进入阶级社会,自禹和其子启开始,建立中国历史上第一个奴隶制国家夏王朝。根据夏商周断代工程的研究报告①,夏朝自启开始至桀灭亡,共