WHAT I BELIEVE ABOUT WHAT YOU BELIEVE: DISCUSSING SOCIAL THEORY IN SOUTHEASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY

Taken together, the papers published in this volume demonstrate that Southeastern archaeologists are theoretically eclectic, are borrowers and users of theory, are reflexive and collaborative, and are modest and unaggressive when discussing their theoretical inclinations. This paper clarifies the positive and negative outcomes of these characteristics and suggests ways to encourage the benefits while discouraging the drawbacks. I advocate being careful when combining theoretical paradigms, using technology to continue year-round informal communication, being more generous with stakeholder relationships and the methods used to build them, and giving ourselves more credit for the interesting theory building that we do.     

WHAT I BELIEVE: DOING ARCHAEOLOGY AS A FEMINIST

I propose that a feminist approach will enrich archaeology in the Southeast and Midsouth. Feminist archaeology starts by taking the lives of women seriously in thinking about past human societies. This standpoint has implications for all topics of interest for Southeastern archaeologists: subsistence patterns, craft production, exchange, development of political systems, warfare, ritual, and so forth. Feminist archaeologists are also self-reflexive about and alert to conditions of work in the profession of archaeology. They pay attention to the importance of the intersection of gender, age, status, and other aspects of personal identity and to the need to accept ambiguity in interpretation. I review how a feminist archaeology might be applied to the archaeology of the South and what risks a feminist archaeology might raise.     

WHAT I BELIEVE: STRUCTURE AND THE PROBLEM OF MACROSOCIALITY

The recent turn in archaeology and other social sciences to the microscale analysis of agency, personhood, and identity has led to a neglect of analysis at the macroscale. With older frameworks such as neoevolution discredited or rejected, there has been relatively little emphasis on patterns of social change at larger geographical and temporal scales. Proceeding from the work of sociologist William Sewell Jr., I suggest that a focus on structures, events, and processes offers Southeastern archaeology a useful and theoretically flexible perspective on such patterns of incremental and exponential social change.     

WHAT I BELIEVE ABOUT THE USEFUL DIVERSITY OF THEORY IN SOUTHEASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY

Theory is crucial but has become boring and unintelligible; it is often ignored by most professionals. Archaeology must include a foundation of culture history, processual science, and postprocessual imagination and counteraction of bias. Further, all archaeology should aim for public aspects and practical applications. Theoretical writing must be clear and avoid pretension. Gender bias in Southeastern archaeology is one of the worst distortions of the prehistoric record for what were probably matrilineal societies. Diverse humanistic approaches from many (including non-archaeological) viewpoints can provide worthwhile avenues for investigation with new scientific tools. Narrow interpretive frameworks should be avoided in favor of the delightful banquet of multiple simultaneous or blended approaches.     

WHAT I BELIEVE: TAKING UP THE SERPENTS OF SOCIAL THEORY AND SOUTHEASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY

Social theory in Southeastern archaeology is constantly transforming. This generally positive process is nonetheless often fraught with growing pains. A sack of snakes serves as a humorous guise to highlight some of the issues currently being faced with social theory in the Southeast. Each “snake” poses a reality check on contexts of social theory as created by Southeastern archaeologists.     

WHAT I BELIEVE: REFLECTIONS ON HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ECOLOGY AS RESEARCH FRAMEWORKS IN SOUTHEASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY

Research themes centering on human-environment interaction have a long history in the writings of Southeastern archaeologists. However, many of the past theoretical frameworks that center on the environment do not articulate well with concepts such as agency and history as mechanisms for understanding the past. Two exceptions to this are research agendas that incorporate concepts derived from both historical and political ecology. In this paper, I explore the overlap and complementarity of various concepts from both of these frameworks. I suggest that the melding of these concepts offers a more robust avenue to consider the environment in archaeological research, which also explicitly takes into consideration both agency and history. In closing, I consider why such a perspective might benefit archaeological research in the Southeast.     

向凤梨酥学什么

<正>去台湾之前我在网上做功课,搜索此行买什么回来最好,答案是:凤梨酥。等我在去购物店的大巴上,吃了导游送上的尝品后才豁然明白,大名鼎鼎的凤梨酥不就是那种叫做改良月饼的菠萝馅糕点嘛。实话说,我对这种黏糊糊的馅很抵触的,但仍然大老远的买回来不少送给亲友,当然这是后话。     

PAUL RABINOW (1944–2021): A MEMOIR

In this narrative, the author reminisces over her collaboration on AIDS-HIV initiatives with recently deceased Paul Rabinow.     

THE GRANITE COLUMN IN MODON: HOW TO MAKE A STONE SAY WHAT YOU WANT IT TO SAY!

Summary.   The 3 km long ramparts of the castle of Modon survive remarkably unscathed despite the attacks of Man and Nature over the centuries. The most interesting monument which remains, a column of red granite, crowned with a capital and a stone slab, has escaped the looters of antiquities who often passed by Modon. It has also escaped the scholars who have failed to give a reliable interpretation of the monument. This paper seeks to deal with this question and to set the monument in its proper historical context.     

美国见闻点滴

<正>老少皆宜的游玩乐园到了美国,谁都想看看曼哈顿的楼群,华盛顿的白宫和国会大厦等美国标志性的城市风光。其实,遍及美国的小镇也充满了迷人的魅力。给我留下深刻印象又十分难忘的     

国家宝藏

跟随马可·波罗的足迹,西方认识了东方;沿着哥伦布的航线,世界连在了一起。2010年上海世博会必然是一次载入史册的盛会,184天中,世界各国都会将自己目前最精华、最先进的政治、经济、文化、科技呈现给世人,每一个国家馆展示的主题都是本国最珍贵的宝藏。让我们随着世界播客一起探寻这个奇妙的世界。     

ALL THIS HAPPENED,MORE OR LESS: WHAT A NOVELIST MADE OF THE BOMBING OF DRESDEN1

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse‐Five (1969) was a popular and critical success when it first appeared, and has had a notable impact on popular perceptions of “the bombing of Dresden,” although it has been criticized by historians because of its inaccuracy. This article analyzes the novel's quirky, comic style and its generic mixture of science fiction and testimony, showing how Vonnegut consistently used ingenuous understatement as a way of imaginatively engaging his readers with the horrors of war. The article argues that the text's aesthetics are closer to those of graphic novels than of realist narratives and that, accordingly, we can understand its cultural impact only by approaching it as a highly artificial linguistic performance with present‐day appeal and contemporary relevance, and not merely by measuring the degree to which it gives a full and accurate mimesis of past events. The article uses the case of Vonnegut to advance a more general argument that builds on recent work in cultural memory studies: in order to understand the role that literature plays in shaping our understanding of history, it needs to be analyzed in its own terms and not as a mere derivative of historiography according to a “one model fits all” approach. Furthermore, we need to shift the emphasis from products to processes by considering both artistic and historiographical practices as agents in the ongoing circulation across different cultural domains of stories about the past. Theoretical reflection should account for the fact that historiography and the various arts play distinct roles in this cultural dynamics, and while they compete with one another, they also converge, bounce off one another, influence one another, and continuously beg to be different.