Inventing Ancient Greece

Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. By Mary Lefkowitz.     

Inventing paganism in eighth-century Bavaria

This article examines the hagiographies of Saints Emmeram and Corbinian and the synod of Neuching from eighth-century Bavaria. It argues that the references to pagan survivals in these texts are misleading, in the absence of other evidence of paganism in the region. Rather, since these texts were composed in a narrow window of time from 769–774, this anxiety reflects concerns aroused by pagan uprisings in neighbouring Carantania, which were only suppressed in 772. Thus, the texts' authors 'invented' paganism in their own culture as their perceptions of the dividing lines between Christianity and paganism grew sharper.     

Complexity science and human geography

Complexity science has attracted considerable attention in a number of disciplines. However, this perspective on scientific understanding remains ill defined. In this paper, ideas and approaches from complexity science are reviewed. It appears that complexity science fundamentally is driven by ontological decisions on the part of the investigator. This is a result of the epistemological approach fundamental to complexity as it is currently studied, which is based on the construction of computer simulation models of reality. This methodology requires that researchers decide what exists and is important enough to represent in a simulation, and also what to leave out. Although this points to serious difficulties with complexity science, it is argued that the approach nevertheless has much to offer human geography. Drawing on complexity science, renewed engagements between physical and human geography, and between both and geographical information science seem possible, based on clearly shared concerns with the representation of geographical phenomena. In conclusion, it is suggested that seeing models as a source of geographical narratives may be a useful way to promote constructive engagement between different perspectives in the discipline.     

Inventing truth and building power in Russia

Next year marks a quarter century since the end of the Soviet Union. How has power evolved in the region? What might the future hold? What are the implications for the West? Three important works illuminate these questions from different angles. Henry Hale argues that (except for the Baltic states) post‐Soviet regimes are fundamentally similar to one another in being constituted by informal networks that dominate resources and institutions. They converge around, and compete for, influence with a powerful presidency that imposes selective rewards and punishments. Succession is the key weakness, and an unpopular lame duck leader invariably leads to upheaval. Karen Dawisha charts the rise of Vladimir Putin's network of friends and colleagues, and documents allegations of corruption and illegality. She shows how quickly this network, on gaining presidential power, revived state strength and undermined other networks. Peter Pomerantsev vividly portrays a society of simulations ruled by a deft and disorienting ‘post‐modern authoritarianism’. But as systemic popularity has declined this has given way to a harder, shriller anti‐western course, and ultimately to the annexation of Crimea. The future may see the international context play a greater role in regime evolution than before. The compelling anatomy of power laid bare in these three works points to growing tensions and flaws in patronal rule across the post‐Soviet space.     

Inventing Revivalist Millennialism: Edwards and the Scottish Connection

Revivalism and millennialism are important concepts that influence contemporary evangelicalism. However it was in the Great Awakening that Jonathan Edwards and select Scottish ministers first connected revivalism and millennialism together in a new evangelical print culture. Evangelical ministers used publications and personal correspondence to hypothesise that the current Atlantic revivals were signs pointing towards Christ’s millennial kingdom. The 1740s stands as a unique decade where evangelical ministers created an influential synthesis of revivalism, social progress, and millennialism. The revivalist and millennial synthesis was a harbinger of the evangelical future for religious movements in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

Inventing modern Japan: Hobsbawm,Foucault and Meiji history

Takashi Fujitani. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. US$40.00, hardcover.

James Edward Ketelaar. Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and its Persecution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. US$35.00, hardcover; US$17.95, paper.     

Inventing Australia: a Critique of Recent Cultural Policy Rhetoric

This paper provides a critical analysis of the cultural and arts policies released by the Keating Labor government of the early 1990s and the current Howard Coalition government. While official definitions of Australian national identity promoted multiculturalism, analysis of Creative Nation, Labor's 1994 cultural policy, and recent statements from the Coalition, exposes the partiality of recent constructions. Both Labor and the Coalition's constructions of identity were based on an economism that was linked to traditional, masculine myths of egalitarianism and ‘mateship’. Such constructions show that neither party has embraced multiculturalism to the degree suggested by policy rhetoric.     

Inventing the Victorian age: the Greville Diary and its Early Critics

The Journals of Charles Greville, clerk to the Privy Council from 1821 to 1859 are among the most well-known, well-respected and widely cited sources for the political and social history of their times. What is less well-known is the controversy they aroused among Greville's Victorian readers when first published (less than a decade after Greville's death) in 1874. The purpose of investigation here is to chart the course and extent of reader reaction as it unfolded during 1874–75, to explore ways of accounting for its intensity and, finally, to attempt evaluation of its impact as a cultural experience conducive to the emergence among readers of a conscious recognition of themselves as ‘Victorians’. When read in the context of the preoccupations of its first readers, Greville's Journals prove to be anything but a dead historical source. Instead, reader reaction is found to be driven by a series of contemporary concerns. They include the question of the degree of respect owing to hereditary authority; the definition of standards of honourable behaviour in protection of the private dealings of people of public reputation; and the very degree of reliability to be attributed to diary-based ‘memoirs’, given their contestable genre. Even so, participants in the controversies which broke out on all these fronts found themselves admitting common ground in acknowledging across their differences that the ‘Victorian’ age in which they lived was a decisive cultural and political break from the past world the Journals recorded.