Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity

"Cultural imperialism" has been an influential concept in the representation of the modern Christian missionary movement. This essay calls its usefulness into question and draws on recent work on the cultural dynamics of globalization to propose alternative ways of looking at the role of missions in modern history. The first section of the essay surveys the ways in which the term "cultural imperialism" has been employed in different disciplines, and some of the criticisms made of the term within those disciplines. The second section discusses the application of the cultural imperialism framework to the missionary enterprise, and the related term "colonization of consciousness" used by Jean and John Comaroff in their influential work on British missionaries and the Tswana of southern Africa. The third section looks at the historiography of missions in modern China, showing how deeply the teleological narratives of nationalism and development have marked that historiography. The concluding section argues that the missionary movement must be seen as one element in a globalizing modernity that has altered Western societies as well as non–Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that a comparative global approach to the missionary movement can help to illuminate the process of modern cultural globalization.     

Beyond Consumption: Functionality, Artifact Biography, and Early Modernity in a European Periphery

This paper considers the functionality and biographies of artifacts in the context of historical archaeology. It is argued that in order to understand how human life in the recent past unfolded in relation with material culture, artifacts must be recognized to perform various unobvious functions and also be conceived as processes rather than bounded physical objects. The paper begins with a theoretical discussion and then focuses on the post-acquisition life of artifacts and human-artifact relations in the seventeenth-century town of Tornio, northern Finland.     

日本大阪杏雨书屋藏《史记集解》(残本)研究

日本大阪杏雨书屋所藏十四行本《史记集解》是稀世之珍 ,学者难得一见 ,故其刊刻年代始终没能确定。笔者在对此本逐篇核校的基础上 ,从文本形态、字体、避讳、刻工及其与现存宋本《史记》的关系等方面 ,对其刊刻年代作了综合考证 ,确认杏雨书屋藏本刊刻于北宋真宗景德年间 (公元 1 0 0 4- 1 0 0 7年 ) ,是现存最早的《史记》版本之一     

Manufacturing Modernity: Cleaning,Dirt, and Neoliberalism in Chile

Since the coming to power in 1973 of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, neoliberalism in Chile has been discursively tied to the goal of “modernizing” Chilean society. This discourse of modernization has relied for its articulation upon another important discourse, that of “cleanliness” as a marker of progress: clean spaces are seen as those of modernity whereas dirty spaces are taken to represent social and economic “backwardness”. In this paper, then, we explore how spaces which are considered emblematic of the modern economy—shopping malls, giant office complexes, university campuses—are maintained as clean spaces. However, in order for the discourse of cleanliness as modernity to work, it is crucial that the corridors of mobility—train routes, subways, city streets—which allow passage between these nodes of the modern economy also be maintained as sanitary spaces. The result is the construction discursively of an almost seamless nexus of hygienic spaces, one which stands in contrast to the dirty spaces of the “other” Chile. The paradox in all of this, however, is that the workers who are crucial to this project—janitors—have suffered greatly as a result of neoliberalism.     

Marx and Modernity: Rethinking Labour,Capital, and Capitalism

This article argues that China’s modern historical development and, more generally, modern global developments can be illuminated by a renewed encounter with Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism. This renewed encounter entails a fundamental critique of traditional Marxism’s understanding of capitalism and of socialism. It seeks to explain the historically dynamic character of capitalist society as a system of ongoing constraints. This central feature of the contemporary world cannot be grasped adequately by intellectual paradigms, such as theories of identity or of politics, which have been dominant in recent decades. The approach outlined here analyzes capitalist modernity as structured by a historically unique social function of labour, and is based on a fundamental reevaluation of the meaning of labour in Marx’s analysis as the object, rather than the standpoint of his critique. The focus on the historical specificity of Marx’s analytic categories also calls into question any conception of a transhistorically valid social science.     

Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure,Modernity and Anglo-American Expansionism

This essay focuses on two updated, Americanized versions of the Robinson Crusoe story published in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century: Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island and Douglas Frazar's Perseverance Island: or the Nineteenth-Century Robinson Crusoe. The first half of the essay considers how these Robinsonades reworked Defoe's novel as a fantasy of applied technology in an industrialized agrarian context. The second half of the essay engages with recent historical work on nineteenth-century British expansion in order to consider how Verne's and Frazar's adventures might be understood in relation to the flow of migrants and money from Britain to America around the period the novels were written. As a result, the essay proposes The Mysterious Island and Perseverance Island as literary vehicles that inspired visions of agro-industrialization at a time when Victorian subjects were increasingly drawn to the American West as a site in which to sink their labour and finance. Thus linking the circulation of the adventure form with overseas capitalist enterprise, the essay concludes by reflecting upon how such expansionism might be understood with regard to the discriminatory processes of primitive accumulation and uneven development that have characterized the growth of the modern capitalist world system.     

Maps,Mapping, Modernity: Art and Cartography in the Twentieth Century

While the history of cartography has freed itself from debilitating debates over the scientific and artistic status of maps, considerations of the relationship between art and cartography have continued to focus largely on pre‐modern maps, avoiding critical examination of twentieth‐century art and science in cartography and leaving intact the impression that these followed distinct paths in the modern period. In this paper, however, I have drawn on theoretical work in Science Studies and taken account of modern art's separation from aesthetics to suggest that an examination of art and cartography in the twentieth century should focus on mapping practices rather than on maps as such. A summary overview of modern‐art movements and selected works indicates a continued, if critical, engagement of avant‐garde artists with cartography, and the examination of more popular newspaper artwork produced in the context of the intensely modern visual culture of mid‐twentieth century Los Angeles indicates a similarly close connection between modernity, art and cartography.     

后现代、现代性重建与中国的现代性问题

后现代主义对现代性的批判为人们提供了一个理解现代的有益视角,它有利于揭示现代性充满矛盾和悖论的一面,促使人们加强对现代性的反思并发掘其尚未释放的理性潜能,从而实现现代性的重建。就中国的后现代主义者而言,他们对现代性的批判过多地集中于剖析其“西化”本质,忽视了现代性的某些普遍内涵,使中国的现代性问题局限于中西对立的二元视野。客观地评价中国的现代性,就应当突破上述理论框架,认识到现代性中所包含的普遍性与特殊性之间的张力,同时借鉴后现代主义的建设性作用,努力实现现代性的解放功能。