明朝公祭文文本的政治文化内涵

祭文是祭祀仪式过程中使用的祝祷性文字。明代史籍中保存了大量国家公祭文,按内容可分为常规性祭文与临时性祭文两类。祭文在公祭仪式中被宣读、呈案、焚烧或掩埋,此为祭祀过程的重要环节之一。公祭文文本传递出重要的文化内涵：首先,它以言辞形式传达出祭祀主体之意图,沟通了人神关系;其次,对祭祀主体之身份和统治之正统合法性进行反复强化;再次,表达祈福弥灾,规约官民,震慑鬼类的意图。此外,祭祀文中的各种对象关系展现出时人复杂而微妙的天、神,君、臣、人、鬼观。在祭祀仪式上使用祭文使上述内涵得到彰显,进而增强了群体意识中的“神圣”体悟。     

Tropes of a Texan trauma: monumental Dallas after John F. Kennedy

Dealey Plaza in central Dallas serves both as a ‘cradle’ and a ‘grave’; at this historic site Dallas was born and an American president died. The assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 changed Dealey Plaza, the site where the first citizen of Dallas settled in 1841, from a symbol of civic pride into a place of guilt and shame. After the events of 1963, the Dallas community voiced a wish to forget and hence, the exact location where Kennedy was murdered was initially remembered by neither monument nor plaque. At the same time, America grieved and from all over the country US citizens started to visit the assassination site. Dealey Plaza became a place of pilgrimage, which caused a change in the monumental landscape and eventually transformed civic guilt into civic pride. This article offers an analysis of the responses to this Texan trauma in terms of commemorative heritage and describes Dallas’ shift from ‘amnesia’ to ‘identification’, two contrary responses to traumatic, or mourning, heritage.     

Corporations and commemoration: first world war remembrance,Lloyds TSB and the national memorial arboretum

This paper explores the role of corporations and financial organisations in maintaining a memory of employees who have served during the wars of the 20th century. Focusing initially on memorial schemes devised by finance houses in the commemorative era after the Great War, the paper examines the emergence of a broader approach to organisational memory and the social construction of collective memory. Taking the Lloyds TSB finance group as a case study, the origins of the company’s war memorial in central London are examined, and the recent attempts to re‐locate a number of memorial objects and icons accumulated during the expansion of the group. This case study indicates how the social memory of an organisation might be understood through an appraisal of the monumental furniture that lives, often invisibly, within an organisation. The paper concludes with a number of questions concerning the nature of organisational memory when confronted with a history of merger and acquisition, and the difficulties in finding a commemorative site able to represent and safeguard these histories.     

The Last September: Irish modernism,narrative deferral,historicist determinism

This article questions the idea that Irish literary modernism is defined by Irish postcoloniality. The continued influence of historicist approaches in literary studies have inspired an understanding of Irish modernism as determined by material base. An oversight of such approaches, however, is that much of the respective fiction which constitutes Irish modernism resists representing the cultural circumstances from which it emerges. Particular to this predicament is Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September given that it is the novel which is often read as representing Ireland’s transition from colonial to postcolonial status. Through an analysis of its fractured, and thus typically modernist, narrative strategy, this article argues that colonial history is an absent presence which lacks constitutive meaning in this fiction, and thus suggests that Irish literary modernism does not neatly correspond to or reflect the story of Irish monumental history.     

Knowledge of the past and the judgement of history in tenth‐century Trier: Regino of Prüm and the lost manuscript of Bishop Adventius of Metz

Regino of Prüm's chronicle is an invaluable source for ninth‐ and early tenth‐century Frankish history, but also for contemporary perceptions of that history. Though Regino's motivations for writing continue to be discussed, most historians now agree that his account can be read as one of Carolingian rise and fall. This article argues that this interpretative stance should be considered as in part a product of Regino's engagement with the surprisingly limited sources for the ninth century at his disposal. Taken together, these texts suggested a narrative for which Regino could find ample confirmation in the events of his own time.     

A terrible beauty is bought: 1916, commemoration and commodification

Abstract

Mindful of Benedict Anderson’s emphasis on Imagined Communities on the power of print culture – and print-capitalism – to shape and share national ideas and identities, this article offers a comparative analysis of the commemorations of 1798 and 1916 by looking at commemorative ephemera: kitschy memorabilia, themed merchandise, newspaper cuttings and advertisements, handbills and inventively branded commodities, as important cultural texts which purveyed ideological values and meanings at the time of their production. It suggests that the consumer sphere allows us to shed light on the commemorative discourses these ephemeral objects produce, retelling and retailing the risings in question. Texts often regarded as throwaway or lowbrow vied for their share in the ideological marketplace to form part of the heritage of 1798 and 1916, the centenary of the one feeding into the ferment of the other. The reception and representation of the pivotal figures of Wolfe Tone and James Connolly is discussed through the prism of Thomas Richards’ conception of commodity culture, and attention is paid to counter-commemorative strands as well as positive rhetorics of remembrance.     

Travel Writing,Ethnography, and the Colony-Centric Voyage of the Jesuit Relations from New France

This article argues that the Jesuit Relations, commonly read as the accounts of daring French travelers to the New World in the seventeenth century, must also be understood in light of the colony-centric circulation of the texts. In a step that has never before been considered part of the process through which the Relations collected and circulated information, some—and perhaps all—of the texts were sent back to Canada after being edited and published in Paris, giving Jesuits in the colony an opportunity to consult the published texts to see how they had been changed in France. This article focuses on two related areas of scholarship on the Relations that need re-evaluation in light of the colony-centric circulation of the texts: the status of the texts as travel writing, and as the premiere source of ethnographic data on the Amerindian groups that the missionaries encountered in Eastern Canada.     

Commemorative events at destination memorials – a dark (heritage) tourism context

In the past, sites and events related to war and atrocities were viewed in the wider context of heritage tourism. The term ‘dark’ was added with the aim of recognising heritage sites closely related to death and suffering. Given that commemorative events as part of dark heritage are not prevalent in heritage and tourism literature, there is a need to understand the behaviour of visitors involved in visiting these sites or attending this type of event, which presents a special challenge. Public commemorations, especially those that mark particularly disturbing occurrences, such as ‘The Great School Hour’ – an event which is presented in the artistic form of a ‘school class’ – are unique form of tourist activity that has not been thoroughly investigated previously. Thus, the aim of the study is to explore the influence of the main motivators on revisit intention and willingness to recommend for those who attended the commemorative event ‘The Great School Hour’ in Kragujevac, Serbia, with a particular focus on younger people. The results suggest that learning, emotional response and uniqueness have a significant positive effect on revisit intention, while emotional response and uniqueness have a significant positive effect on willingness to recommend.     

TEXTS ON THE MOVE: TEXTUALITY AND HISTORICITY REVISITED

The last time texts were brought onto the general theoretical and methodological agenda of the human and social sciences, they were reintroduced into history in terms of an indefinite set of indefinitely complex contexts, which gave every text a specific date and location in a network of other texts and events. A couple of decades later, however, a more prominent feature of texts seems to be that they are permanently on the move: they circulate, have effects on other things, change and transform realities, and are at the same time themselves translated and modified. In the literature exploring the textuality of history, these dimensions have been under‐theorized and often ignored. To meet this challenge, we need to develop concepts and approaches that enable us to place the mobility of texts as well as their mobilizing force at the center of our current historical concerns. In this article we will explore what the consequences of this move could be, and what resources are already at hand in different scholarly traditions. Exploring the entanglements between actor‐network theory (ANT in the version of Bruno Latour), on the one hand, and literary criticism, linguistics, and book history, on the other, enables us to focus on how texts move and how they move others. We will proceed in this essay by identifying three decisive moments in twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century textual scholarship, often conceptualized as “turns,” which are linked to the works of three path‐breaking authors and which at the same time represent three different stages or forms of textuality: the linguistic turn (Saussure), the turn to writing (Derrida), and the turn to print (Eisenstein). Our discussions of these three moments and forms of textuality aim at uncovering how they also represent seminal moments in Bruno Latour's development of the theoretical and methodological complex now referred to as ANT.     

Fieldwork,heritage and engaging landscape texts

This paper outlines and analyses efforts to critically engage with “heritage” through the development and responses to a series of undergraduate residential fieldwork trips held in the North Coast of Jamaica. The ways in which we read heritage through varied “texts” – specifically, material landscapes, guided heritage tours, visual imagery and creative writing – and how these readings are couched within changing emotional geographies are analysed in relation to specific field-based sites. The study highlights the dynamic nature of heritage landscapes and the creative ways in which they can be understood and represented through diverse forms of engagement and assessment.     

南京国民政府国庆纪念中的辛亥记忆

国庆纪念是传承辛亥革命记忆的重要形式。南京国民政府时期,国民党通过国庆纪念仪式,不断打造并唤起人们的辛亥记忆;并通过自己所掌握的话语权与纪念宣传,完成对辛亥革命史事及意义的再建构。借助于辛亥记忆,国民党不断把自己的建国理念贯穿于国庆纪念之中,为国民党统治的合法性确立基础。     

A RETRIEVAL OF HISTORICISM: FRANK ANKERSMIT'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

Frank Ankersmit is often perceived as a postmodern thinker, as a European Hayden White, or as an author whose work in political philosophy can safely be ignored by those interested only in his philosophy of history. Although none of these perceptions is entirely wrong, they are of little help in understanding the nature of Ankersmit's work and the sources on which it draws. Specifically, they do not elucidate the extent to which Ankersmit raises questions different from White's, finds himself inspired by continental European traditions, responds to specifically Dutch concerns, and is as active as a public intellectual as he has been prolific in philosophy of history. In order to propose a more comprehensive and balanced interpretation of Ankersmit's work, this article offers a contextual reading based largely on Dutch‐language sources, some of which are unknown even in the Netherlands. The thesis advanced is that Ankersmit draws consistently on nineteenth‐century German historicism as interpreted by Friedrich Meinecke and advocated by his Groningen teacher, Ernst Kossmann. Without forcing each and every element of Ankersmit's oeuvre into a historicist mold, the article demonstrates that some of its most salient aspects can profitably be read as attempts at translating and modifying historicist key notions into late twentieth‐century categories. Also, without creating a father myth of the sort that White helped create around his teacher William Bossenbrook, the article argues that Ankersmit at crucial moments in his intellectual trajectory draws on texts and authors central to Kossmann's research interests.     

Early Maya geometric planning conventions at El Palmar,Guatemala

Archeology of complex societies has long focused on the actors behind the planning and engineering of architecture in monumental centers. However, the motivations for and conventions used in ancient planning are often lost to modern scholars without the aid of texts of the builders. This is especially true with the early ancient Maya, where large centers with evidence of extensive planning existed as early the Late Preclassic period (ca. 300 BC–250 AD). The current Focus article addresses site planning of monumental Late Preclassic settlements with a case study at El Palmar, Guatemala. Results suggest that apart from cardinal alignments based on solar movement, conventions of planar geometry formed a large part of the planning toolkit. The discussion argues that the dimensions of repeating similar rectangles probably related to the ideal size of ancient Maya agricultural spaces.     

Introduction: Marginalised Histories of the Second World War1

This special issue, stemming out of the AHRC-funded Teaching and Learning War Research Network (2017–2020), is published at an important juncture in cultural memory: as the focus of public commemorative events in Britain and the Commonwealth shifts from the First to the Second World War, including the Holocaust. Not only does it showcase exciting and cutting-edge research, but it also aims to stimulate conversation and ‘forward-thinking’ about commemorative cycles over the next two-and-a-half decades (2025–2045). The three research articles and four provocations focus, in different ways, on the question of ‘hidden histories’ in the expectation of a need to ensure that diversity, multi-perspectivity, complexity, and contention remain at the heart of ‘national’ commemorative processes (whether in Britain or elsewhere).     

Science, text and space: thoughts on the geography of reading

The idea of a 'geography of reading' provides a potential point of conversation between the cultural and scientific wings of our profession. Here I explore some dimensions of the geography of reading scientific texts. Drawing on a number of theoretical pronouncements – Gadamer's 'fusion of horizons', Said's 'travelling theory', Secord's 'geographies of reading', Beer's 'miscegenation of texts', Fish's 'interpretive communities' and Rupke's 'geographies of reception'– I focus on the spaces where scientific theories are encountered. The argument is that where scientific texts are read has an important bearing on how they are read. This realization points to a fundamental instability in scientific meaning and to the crucial significance of what might be called located hermeneutics. As a case study in the development of a cartographics of scientific meaning, I explore the different ways in which Darwin's fundamentally biogeographical theory of evolution by natural selection was construed in a number of different settings. The sites I have chosen to illustrate this are the scientific communities which congregated around the Charleston Museum of Natural History in South Carolina, the Wellington Philosophical Society and New Zealand Institute, and the St Petersburg Society of Naturalists in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century. In each case the encounter with evolution theory, and the ways it was interpreted, are shown to have been shaped by local cultural politics, thereby disclosing the critical role that space plays in the production of scientific meaning.     

Exploring the season of mound building through oxygen isotope geochemistry at the Garden Patch site,Gulf Coast Florida,USA

ABSTRACT

The American Southeast saw the development of large ceremonial village centers, the coalescence of households, and monumental architecture integrated into village layout during the Middle Woodland period (ca. AD 1–600). These shifts toward more sedentary lifeways occurred independently of, and prior to, the domestication of plants across the Southeast. This paper examines the seasonality of monumental construction at the Garden Patch site located on the central Gulf Coast of Florida. This site contains evidence for rapid mound construction that followed a predetermined site plan. Here, we present oxygen isotope analyses of archaeological mollusk shells (Crassostrea virginica) to evaluate the seasonality and periodicity of monument construction. We conclude that mound construction occurred during the cooler months of the year. Ultimately, this contributes to an anthropological understanding of the development of these early ceremonial centers in the Southeast.     

Poetry and Prayer: Women and Politics of Spiritual Relationships in the Early Twelfth Century

Writers such as the author of the Histoire , Richard of Devizes, Jordan Fantosme, earlier writers such as Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury, or even the dubious Geoffrey of Monmouth, used gendered language to comment, criticise or alternatively applaud women's roles. Their views on women can be explained by the climate of clerical misogyny within which they wrote, their desire to please their patron and the convention of genre. There were many influences working on individual writers which can explain their views. William of Malmesbury was partisan to the Angevin cause; Orderic Vitalis wrote an ecclesiastical history which criticised the morals of secular society and castigated violently the enemies of the patrons of his monastery. The complex nature of the portrayals of both men and women therefore has to be studied in the light of such biases. Noblewomen participated in literary patronage, they inspired authors as models of virtue, were condemned for typically feminine vices, and as such exerted some influence over the shape of texts. They also commissioned texts, were connected with churchmen and such networks could be used for political purposes. Literary sources have been the subject of much theoretical discussion, yet they can be read alongside charters, the evidence of women's economic, administrative, religious patronage and individual initiative, which have in comparison been relatively neglected.     

The Choosers or the Dispossessed? Aspects of the Work of some French Eighteenth Century Pacific Explorers

This paper links the work of eighteenth century French explorers with that being done by contemporary anthropologists. Good ethnographic writers are not necessarily limited by the texts they read before going into the field and, since the time of Bougainville, have actively evaluated what they saw against what they had read. Bougainville himself has been much underrated as an ethnographer and this paper accounts for the trivializing of his work. Furthermore, the paper makes it clear that there was not one unified attitude concerning the Other in eighteenth century France. In noting that abridged or re-written forms of the explorers' journals were extremely popular, the paper posits the idea that at any one time there is a limit as to how much We want to know about Them. Finally, the paper considers the role of the exotic in obliging the French to re-define the knowledge systems they were building in their own culture. In this context, the ethnographic text is seen as a provocation in proportion to the amount of the exotic world of ‘other’ it conveys.     

Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualisation in Early Seventeenth‐Century Lima*

In early seventeenth‐century Lima, Peru, female visionaries composed texts of their bodies, and texts composed their bodies. This fact can be explained, in part, by the belief that an individual could gain access to and appropriate the language of God (His spiritus) in distinct ways. Mystical narratives, stigmata, as well as the spoken words of enraptured visionaries communicating with absent souls were considered readable texts because the object to be read could be a book, a painting, or the body itself. Thus the reading of, and listening to, texts was parallel to Lima's visionaries entering a state of spiritual ecstasy (arrobamiento), and “reading” their bodies as living books, which perforce became a readable space.