Remembrance as remaking: memories of the nation revisited

This article revisits Anthony Smith's landmark collection Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999) from the perspective of recent developments in cultural memory studies. It argues for a more clearly demarcated distinction between myths and memories which acknowledges cultural memory as a site of new experiential perspectives that often work against the authority of myths, seen as the unquestioned truths about the collective past. Drawing on studies of modern memory cultures, it presents a dynamic and generative model that construes memory in terms of cultural practices of remembrance. It shows that memory is not an unchanging legacy but rather a malleable resource for making shared stories about the past. Where Halbwachs (1925) presumed that social frameworks precede and shape memory, remembrance is presented here as a cultural force that helps to redefine social frameworks and to create links between hitherto unconnected imagined communities.     

New Models of Religious Diversity: Modern Judaism beyond the Scylla of “Political” and the Charybdis of “Religious”

ABSTRACT

This essay is a response to Julie Cooper’s piece in this volume. In her essay, Cooper insightfully analyzes ways in which the rise of the modern state has imposed “religious” forms of identification on Jews, and she engages a series of early twentieth-century Zionist thinkers who resisted and challenged that problematic imposition. I build on Cooper’s analysis, highlighting ways in which even these thinkers may still be caught up in the very paradigm that they sought to challenge. Yet despite their limitations, I suggest that it is precisely by engaging more deeply with such thinkers that theorists today can extend and continue the critique that they initiated. By gaining greater awareness of the ways in which useful critiques of “religionization” can still succumb to problematic “politicization,” and vice versa, theorists can better position themselves to draw on past texts and thought in order to challenge the hegemony of dominant “political” and “religious” options.     

Isotopes as palaeoeconomic indicators: new applications in archaeoentomology

Previous studies have demonstrated the potential of archaeologically-recovered insect remains to stand as evidence of past human activities such as trade and industry. The present investigation reports the recovery of stable-isotopes from modern and Neolithic insect fauna and explores their utility in addressing issues of palaeoeconomic significance. While in its infancy, the application of stable-isotope methods towards archaeological insects may provide insight into exchange patterns and land-usage in the past. In the present analysis, stable-isotopes from modern and archaeological insects showed potential as a means of assessing local versus non-local signatures. Further study is recommended.     

Predicaments in the Management of Religious Heritage Buildings and Sites in Nigeria

Perhaps the most challenging heritage management issue since the beginning of the modern conservation movement relates to religious buildings and sites. This paper investigates approaches to the management of religious heritage buildings and sites in Osogbo, a multireligious Nigerian city, through the perspectives of various stakeholders. These stakeholders include the State, and its role in formal legislation and enforcement, the religious authorities as heritage owners and decision-makers, local communities’ understanding of heritage, and expert opinions about the properties. Drawing on physical observations, ethnographic assessment methods and secondary literature, the paper demonstrates how decisions taken by political leaders to construct a secularised national heritage have shaped the community’s cultural heritage perceptions, alienated from religious connotations. This selective use of the past gave heritage owners a free hand in decision-making about conservation, without taking into consideration historic and architectural/artistic values. It has also rendered expert judgment marginal.     

Crisis as method: Critical events and moral breakdowns

This article calls for a deeper consideration of crisis as a method, as spearheaded by anthropologists trained in the Manchester School, including Max Gluckman, who followed extended case studies to track ‘crisis over time’. This approach examines how certain occurrences trigger reflection and deliberation beyond the event and activate critique of interlocutors and anthropologists, reinserting questions of ethics and morality. I argue that crisis as a method facilitates a move away from ‘crisis-chasing’ apparent in anthropology over the past decade, which labels situations as ‘urgent’ while omitting constitutive aspects of social structure. Crisis as a method entails paying attention to the structures that name or call crisis into being and a critical perspective on what constitutes a crisis or noteworthy ‘event’.     

Religion and the US Presidency: Politics,the Media,and Religious Identity

Abstract

The relationship between religion and the presidency impacts both the viability of candidates and the manner in which decisions are made in the voting booth. Today we are living in culture where religion is front and center in politics. This article examines the role of religion in political discourse with special attention to the 2012 presidential election. It focuses on the manner in which religion and politics have become inextricably interwoven in the past sixty years. It begins by establishing the role of religion in the broader political arena. The article then turns to the manner in which religious identity and participation influence voting patterns, and how religious affiliation shapes the office of the presidency. The conclusion offers some reflections on the future of religion in presidential politics, an issue that will continue to be a significant factor in how and why voters support and marginalize particular candidates.     

Globally and Locally Positioned: New Zealand Perspectives on the Current Practice of Religious History1

Religious history in New Zealand is now vigorously pursued by academic, public, and local historians. While there has been past neglect of religion in New Zealand historical scholarship, religious themes are now much more common in both writing and pedagogy. This article suggests that it is timely to take stock and to consider how religious history might be practised in the future. It argues that concerns about the place of religious history in New Zealand are mirrored by similar sentiments in the international literature. Cultural, imperial, and world histories provide new avenues for the pursuit of religious history. They also clearly indicate that religious history will have more to say to the wider field of history when it is strategically located at the intersection of “local” and “global” historiographies and methodologies. Using the example of a southern New Zealand urban parish, this article finishes by indicating how such a religious history might look.     

Religious Pluralism

Abstract

This essay aims to lay out standards, personal and communal, for openness about religious diversity, without declining into a patronizing or trivializing relativism and without succumbing to the kindred weakness of skepticism. It is not inconsistent, I argue, to hold fast to one's religious convictions and practices while respecting and learning from other religious (and non-religious) traditions. Critical appropriation is the key here. For states and communities as well, openness and indeed support are warranted. But here too critical scrutiny is called for. Social harmony does not require unanimity or consensus, nor does diversity entail incommensurability, let alone inevitable tragedy. Sharp divisions between faith and practice are often artificial and unnecessary for a wholesome pluralism. The bien pensant reduction of all religious commitments to an imagined common core is unhelpful and often rightfully unwelcome. But equally unhelpful is the romantic if admiring stereotyping of the exotic. What's recommended here, societally, is the even-handed fostering of religious traditions (based on voluntary affiliation and support), on the grounds that, like education and the arts, religious communities promote human flourishing. But the same reasoning cautions against support for those religious trends that thwart or stymie human well-being. Societies do not require the level of coherence that individuals may pursue. But neither can they afford, for their own sake and that of their members, to ignore dangerous and destructive claims upon the human spirit.     

The Journal of Religious History 1960–2010: The Changing Face of Religious History over Fifty Years

The fiftieth anniversary of this journal offers an opportunity to reflect on both its history and that of the larger field of religious history. At its foundation, the journal drew inspiration from the approach to the history of religion taken by Lucien Febvre and other French Annalistes, with their emphasis on including religion as an integral part of the analysis of the past. Though the journal continued to publish a good deal of ecclesiastical history as more traditionally understood, these founding ideals have continued to shape the character of the journal. The increasing interest in the history of mentalities (partly due to the decline of Marxist historiography) has heightened an interest in the history of religion in ways which have proved increasingly congruent with the journal's founding ideals.     

Battlefields as cultural resources

Abstract

The category of 'historic battlefield' is a relatively new one in archaeology. As a place of activity in the past, a battlefield is most often considered to be a 'historic place', rather than an 'archaeological site', although the attention of archaeologists over the past few decades has done much to indicate the archaeological potential and significance of such places. As a site of attention by heritage agencies in the present, battlefields are subject to a range of different treatments not only in different territories, but often also different manners of treatment under the same management regime. Neither of these sets of approaches has resulted in any kind of debate about the nature of the historic battlefield as an object — the discourse remains locked in a set of unexamined assumptions that are worthy of review. Accordingly, this paper reviews, from the perspective of archaeology, the current state of the category of 'historic battlefield' internationally. In particular, it considers the historical development of battlefield studies in archaeology and examines the ontology of the historic battlefield from three key perspectives: the definition of 'battle'; battlefields as places; and the manner in which they are given value as part of management regimes.     

Heritage as trope: conceptual etymologies and alternative trajectories

The theorization of heritage must necessarily examine the impact of its often concealed status as a metaphor, a figuration framing our use of the term as well as those things described as heritage. Describing elements of the past as heritage is a trope as the past does not leave a testament. This figuration singularizes past, present, and legacy (concealing differences within these terms), as well as ascribing intentionality to the past. These resonances often lend a conservative charge to heritage; however, they might also be viewed as offering a critique of the present. The theorization of heritage should also examine specific histories of how this trope arose. In Britain, John Ruskin’s influential articulation of cultural heritage, for example, drew on the way inheritance featured in political writings of John Locke and Edmund Burke. Theorization of heritage can also be broadened by considering how inheritance is employed in other disciplines, such as its use in phenomenology and poststructuralism, an arc encompassing work by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Bernard Stiegler. These investigations help expand the conceptual dimensions of heritage.     

The Second Time as Farce: Archaeological Reflections on the New New Deal

Many connections have been made between the Great Depression and the current crisis in neoliberal capitalism, and many solutions proposed by the Left hearken to FDR’s New Deal programs. While New Deal policies had real benefits, assuming that they were uniformly beneficial to all lower class individuals is shortsighted. This is clear from the vantage point of our research in the Finger Lakes National Forest. The New Deal’s Resettlement Administration purchased these farms when implementing land-planning policies to move farmers off “sub-marginal” land to save families “stranded on sub-marginal farms.” Our research demonstrates that governmental land-use programs saved some farms by sacrificing others. This case makes it clear that solving current crises need more than nostalgic yearning for a mythic past. Solutions must come from a thorough examination of the “real concrete” past, not simply the past as imagined.     

Religious Emotions and Emotions in Religion: The Case of Sermons

This article examines the challenges posed by combining the categories of religion and emotion in historical studies. It analyses two major ways of framing this: religious emotion and emotions in religion. By taking sermons as a case study, both as a religious practice and a genre of historical source, an approach that retains the useful elements of each approach is developed. At the same time, the article explores the potentials of sermons as a source for the history of emotions, noting important consequences in the history of religious communication for the history of emotions and vice versa. In particular, reception history approaches are explored as a way to enrich accounts of the emotional aspects of sermons. Further, the article serves as an introduction for the collection of articles: “Preaching and Passions: Sermons and the History of Emotions.”     

以田野考古为主探索夏文化已经取得硕果——纪念徐旭生先生赴豫西考古调查"夏墟"49周年

本文回顾了几十年来探索夏文化、早商文化的历程及突破,并对学术研究中存在的一些问题进行了讨论,指出学术研究要遵守实事求是的原则.     

Time as told: Telling the past in Kyrgyzstan

This paper addresses Kyrgyz ‘time-telling’, exploring how Kyrgyz herders and villagers ‘tell’ of their experience of time through genealogies, family stories and epic poetry. The author takes a phenomenological approach, drawing on different forms of narrative; interweaving history, myth and story; revealing the life within the past, as genres mesh (and not always seamlessly). She argues that the lived experience of ‘time-telling’ works through narrative, memory, sound, performance, and poetics, providing a matrix through which the past is continuously brought to life for performers and audience alike. The paper is in three parts. The first sets the scene, exploring three interwoven, kin-related Kyrgyz genres – family trees, genealogies, and epic poetry. The second looks at diverse manifestations of the Kyrgyz epic Manas, and its interpenetration with social life. The third reveals how different forms of performing and remembering the epic bring the past to life through the act of performance.     

Apartheid,Religious Pluralism,and the Evolution of the Right to Religious Freedom in South Africa

The apartheid history of South Africa contains racial and religious discrimination, both running parallel to and supporting each other. South Africa's exodus from a society of forced religious homogeneity to one of celebrating religious pluralism adds valuable and unique patterns of thought to the promotion of religious pluralism and religious freedom. A brief history is presented of religion within the context of racial discrimination and eventual democracy in South Africa. The current plural religious demography of South Africa is presented to create a sense of the extent of diversity in the country and the extent of religious pluralism that should be considered for today. This demographical position necessitates an investigation into the current legal position on dealing with such a religiously plural state as well as the challenges it presents. This is also necessary in order to present the evolution of religious pluralism in an oppressive state to the right to religious freedom in democratic South Africa. This evolution can also serve as an example internationally to countries struggling with the issue of religious pluralism. The article is also of importance to sensitise South Africa to existing and escalating challenges against religious pluralism within the country.     

AN ASSESSMENT OF THE CURRENT APPLICATIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS OF OBSIDIAN SOURCING STUDIES IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH*

This paper thematically characterizes a large body of recent obsidian sourcing discourse as a means of highlighting the current place of obsidian provenance studies in larger archaeological discourse. It is shown that the field of obsidian sourcing is flourishing, with a clear upward trend in the number of published studies in the past decade. This paper further argues that sourcing is a means to an end, a way to determine where artefacts originate, and thus a means of addressing broader archaeological problems. Through this contextual framework, obsidian sourcing studies—and indeed all provenance studies—are seen as relevant because they transcend the increasingly specialized world of archaeological discourse.     

Interpreting Ritual as Performance and Theory Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania 2010 Distinguished Lecture

ABSTRACT The paper looks at specific rituals and their relationships with dance in Hawaii, Tonga, Bulgaria, and India. These four short case studies explore the relationship between dance and ritual, in particular how dance is presented as representing the ritual past. I bring ‘structured movement,’ as one of ritual's distinguishing marks, to center stage to explore how ritual movement and dance are related.     

The prey as patch model: optimal handling of resources with diminishing returns

Foraging theory provides archaeology with a valuable set of tools for investigating the constraints that influenced procurement decisions of the past. The prey-choice model has been used extensively by archaeologists, but has significant limitations given the nature of archaeological data. This paper suggests that the seldom-used Marginal Value Theorem (MVT) is a valuable tool for examining the ecological constraints on foraging decisions and merits further archaeological application. Ethnoarchaeological and experimental cases are presented demonstrating how patch–gains curves can be generated from quantitative data on butchering return rates and handling times. Results indicate that such curves are diminishing return functions. This provides a basis for examining the linkage between processing intensity and resource fluctuation. This model allows archaeologists to address the relationship between attribute-states of faunal remains and predicted optimal post-acquisition decisions. The MVT is valuable to ethnoarchaeology because it identifies how mean foraging return rate influences the handling of acquired prey and makes quantified predictions of return rate based on processing intensity. The MVT can also be applied to archaeological studies of foraging behavior and processing intensity as it can be used to estimate the set of environmental constraints in which a given kill was made (e.g., “good” vs. “bad” times). This approach may also identify the degree to which certain currencies, such as fat, are optimized at the expense of others, such as total caloric intake.