Nazi memorabilia,dark heritage and treasure hunting as “alternative” tourism: Understanding the fascination with the material remains of World War II in Northern Finland

Sites connected to the Second World War (WWII) are increasingly recognized as worthy of archaeological investigation. Researchers are also becoming aware that that the collectors market in objects connected to WWII, particularly those connected to Germany, is encouraging the stripping of conflict landscapes in the search for “collectors items.” Finnish Lapland is sometimes regarded as peripheral compared to more centrally located regions of Europe. Archaeologists working here nonetheless find themselves in direct competition with enthusiastic treasure hunters. This is complicated even further by the myriad ontologies employed by different individuals in the construction of their relationship with the material culture connected to recent conflict periods, and on specific “other” or “exotic” landscapes, such as Lapland. This paper examines what might be learnt about the nature of treasure hunting for and trading in WWII material from Lapland, and its position within the emerging research on broader trends in “dark” approaches to and encounters with heritage.     

Complexity,Capacity, and Budget Punctuations

The budgeting literature has long focused on “institutional friction” as a cause of ubiquitous punctuated equilibrium (PE) findings. A recent wave of scholarship looks to identify specific institutional mechanisms that affect the number of punctuations in policy outputs. We contribute to this growing body of research by focusing on the complexity of the institutional environment surrounding a policy area as well as that of the government as a whole. These factors have opposite effects: the more complex a policy area, the greater the likelihood of extreme spending changes. But, higher institutional capacity in general leads to greater stability. To test these ideas, we develop a novel index of budgetary change that balances the conceptual importance of extreme changes while analyzing the entire distribution of budget changes, not only the tails. In addition, we also demonstrate that findings are robust to a number of important distinctions, such as between series associated with slowly moving demographic trends or quickly moving stochastic events. We, therefore, demonstrate the robustness of important findings from the established literature, add a new measure of the dependent variable, and push the literature forward with a new focus on issue complexity and institutional capacity.     

THE WORDS OF HISTORY

In From History to Theory, Kerwin Lee Klein writes a history of the central terms of the discipline of theory of history, such as “historiography,” “philosophy of history,” “theory of history,” and “memory.” Klein tells us when and how these terms were used, how the usage of some (“historiography” and “philosophy of history”) declined during the twentieth century, and how other terms (“theory” and “memory”) became increasingly popular. More important, Klein also shows that the use of these words is not innocent. Using words such as “theory” or “historiography” implies certain specific ideas about what the writing of history should be like, and how theoretical reflection on the nature of history and its writing relates to the practical issues of the discipline. In the second half of his book, Klein focuses more on the concept of memory and the memory boom since the later part of the 1980s. He observes that “memory” came to be seen as a kind of “counterhistory,” a postcolonial, fragmented, and personal alternative to the traditional mainstream discourse of history. Klein does not necessarily disagree with this view, but he does warn us about unwanted side effects. More specifically, he argues that the discourse of memory is surprisingly compatible with that of extremist right‐wing groups, and should be treated with suspicion. Although Klein certainly has a point, he presents it in a rather dogmatic fashion. However, a more nuanced version of Klein's criticism of memory can be developed by building on Klein's suggestion that there is an intimate connection between memory and identity.     

What Are Policy Punctuations? Large Changes in the Legislative Agenda of the UK Government, 1911–2008

In this article, we argue that policy punctuations differ from each other in ways that reflect distinct types of political change. We identify three main kinds. The first are procedural changes that have unique unrelated policies within the same issue area. Within the remaining large policy changes, high‐salience punctuations are associated with increased attention in the media, whereas low‐salience punctuations do not attract such scrutiny. The analysis applies the typology to data from the UK Policy Agendas Project, identifying punctuations from the content of Acts of the UK Parliament between 1911 and 2008. Using evidence from the historical record and the data series, the analysis places each observation within the typology. We claim that the typology has a more general application and could be replicated in other jurisdictions and time periods. We conclude that attention to the historical record and qualitative studies of punctuations can complement and inform the analysis of aggregate data series.     

U.S. Foreign Policy and the Arab Spring: Balancing Values and Interests

The rapid and unpredictable changes in the Middle East collectively known as the “Arab Spring” are posing tremendous challenges to U.S. policy formation and action. This article will explore and evaluate evolving U.S. policy in the Middle East and its potential implications. There has always been a tension in American foreign policy between pursuing American “values” (foreign policy idealism) and protecting American “interests” (foreign policy realism). For decades, the United States has sought to “make the world safe for democracy,” while at the same time often supporting repressive, nondemocratic regimes because of national security or economic self‐interest. The tension between these two fundamentally distinct policy orientations has become even more pronounced as the United States tries to respond to the Arab Spring uprisings. Why did the United States actively support the rebels in Libya but not the protestors in Syria or Bahrain? Is there an emerging, coherent “Obama Doctrine” on intervention in Arab countries, or was Libya just a “one‐off” event? These are some of the questions that this article will attempt to answer.     

Dissenting Heads and Hearts: Joseph Priestley,Anna Barbauld,and Conflicting Attitudes towards Devotion within Rational Dissent

Anna Barbauld's and Joseph Priestley's disagreement on the subject of devotion was famously characterised by James Martineau as “passion for the sublime and the beautiful” confronting “passion for the truth.” Such a characterisation, however, is potentially misleading because it suggests that Barbauld lacked “passion for the truth.” At least partly, the disagreement between Barbauld and Priestley stems from a fundamentally different assessment of the limits of human knowledge (an assessment that in both cases is closely connected to a commitment to the search for truth and the associated principle of “free inquiry”). Inadvertently, Martineau not only distorts Barbauld's position within Rational Dissenting thought but also obscures a crucial split among Rational Dissenters in their approach to the search for truth.     

Unearthing the Truth: The Politics of Exhumations in Cyprus and Spain

Contrary to the experience of other countries with memories of clandestine violence and “missing persons”, where the mobilisation of the (civil) society towards “truth recovery” was immediate and pivotal, the societies of Cyprus and Spain remained silent for a remarkably long period of time. This article aspires to explain the reasons why both Cypriot communities and the Spanish society did not manage, until recently, to comprehensively address—not to mention resolve—the problem of “missing persons”. The recent emergence of the “politics of exhumations” in these two countries, which highlight issues related to truth recovery and collective memory, renders the attempt to respond to the question of why these processes are taking place only today even more stimulating.     

The two starting points of World War II: a reexamination from a global perspective

Although the factual chronology of World War II is not in dispute, how to best make sense of these facts and how to objectively evaluate that history have always been limited by political circumstances and personal biases. Viewing WWII seven decades later, we need to move away from Eurocentrism and to stop seeing the war from the prism of a European war or Pacific war. The entire history of WWII, from beginning to end, including its several phases characterized by fermentation, outbreak, climax, and conclusion, is extremely complex. This paper argues that the war has two origins or starting points because it resulted from disparate prewar conditions in Europe and Asia. Viewed from this perspective, the strategic importance of the China Theater in WWII and the enormous sacrifices and contributions the Chinese people made to the victory over Fascism and for world peace ought to be given due credit.     

Toward a Received History of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind—my “vicarious past.”     

Plot by Plot: Plotting Urbanism as an Ordinary Process of Urbanisation

With this paper, we analyse an ordinary urban process, which has received little attention so far, and propose a new concept to take account of it: plotting urbanism. It is usually subsumed under terms like “urban informality” or “incremental urbanism” and not studied as a distinct process. In comparing Lagos, Istanbul and Shenzhen we captured four defining features of plotting urbanism: first, it unfolds in a piecemeal fashion with limited comprehensive planning. Second, it emerges from specific territorial compromises often resulting from conflicts between overlapping modes of territorial regulation, land tenure and property rights. Third, plotting is based on commodification of housing and land, which might accentuate socio-economic differentiations between property-owners, who often live in the same area, and their tenants. The term “plotting” highlights the key role of the plot in the process. It also alludes to strategic acts of collaboration for individual and collective benefit.     

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Economic Analysis or Tract for the Times?

I argue that the French economist Thomas Piketty's 2014 (American) bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century is not the treatise of economic analysis that its author purports it to be, but is rather a work of political partisanship making claims about the supposedly inevitable increase in the share of national income deriving from capital as opposed to labor—to the point where Chinese bankers or Middle Eastern oil sheiks might own “everything,” even people's bicycles, barring either world catastrophe or broad government intervention—that lack any empirical support or logical plausibility. As a professed heir to (what he understands to be) the spirit of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, as distinguished from the American Declaration of Independence, Piketty displays none of the respect for the rights of the individual—including the right not to have lawfully acquired property arbitrarily confiscated by government—that the original American political tradition entails. Nor, indeed, despite his profession of staking everything on “democracy,” does Piketty display any regard for the principle of self-government. Rather, his ultimate, admittedly “utopian” goal, outlined in Part IV of his book, is of a European “budgetary parliament,” selected in vague fashion by the existing parliaments of Eurozone members (not by the people themselves), that would hold sweeping powers to confiscate any privately owned wealth that its members regarded as “excessive” and redistribute it to others they deem more needy or deserving. This body would exacerbate all the difficulties resulting from the European Union's widely publicized “democracy deficit.” Yet Piketty implies it should ultimately be a model for world governance. Ultimately, his cause is the opposite of democracy: the unfettered continental or even worldwide rule of unaccountable bureaucrats, advised by “intellectuals” like Piketty himself, convinced that they know far better than their fellows how the latter should live their lives, and claiming the authority to regulate it accordingly.     

A Loving Attack on Caputo’s ‘Caputolism’ and his Refusal of Communism

Abstract

For various reasons, John D. Caputo is one of my favorite philosophers. However, one may identify two basic weaknesses or contradictions when it comes to his thoughts on political economy: (1) Caputo insists on capitalism—even if it be a significantly transformed capitalism (what I will be calling here “Caputolism”)—but he does not question whether capitalism can accommodate the required reforms; and (2) Caputo’s refusal to entertain the possibility of communism as a good/better alternative to capitalism, even though he has referred to an earthly “Kingdom of God” composed of a “radical community of equals”—which (strongly) resembles communism, thus rendering his refusal of communism all the more perplexing.     

A History of Chinese Immigration in the United States and Canada

The 2005 Québec novel by Nicolas Dickner (English publication, 2008) presents intertextual effects that become a reflection on writing. The novel is a voyage of self-discovery while offering connections to Melville, Joseph Conrad, the German “bildungsroman,” nineteenth century classic novels, twentieth century French existentialist essays, Anglo-Saxon seafaring sagas, Central and South American imaginative tales, “cric-crac” stories of Québécois “raconteurs,” subversive Canadian novels, adventure stories, detective narratives, comic books and computer-generated discourse. This complex mise en abyme of writing through interlacing genres stands as a metaphor for diversity and rootlessness in North American society.     

历史记忆、历史-记忆或历史与记忆?——记忆史研究中的概念使用问题北大核心CSSCI

“历史记忆”“历史-记忆”“历史与记忆”以及“记忆史”等概念或议题看似相近,实则有着不同的意涵。“历史记忆”最初是莫里斯•阿布瓦赫在《集体记忆》中提到的概念,意在强调历史带有记忆的性质。随着后人对此术语的发展,“历史记忆”的含义被拓宽为“人们对过去的记忆与表述”。“历史-记忆”是皮埃尔•诺拉提出的术语,用于指称现代之前“历史与记忆”的联合体。“历史与记忆”是西方历史学家辩证地看待历史与记忆之间关系时所讨论的核心议题。面对记忆研究的挑战,西方历史学家之所以讨论历史与记忆的关系,其目的是为历史学正名。“记忆史”则是将记忆作为历史研究对象的领域,研究记忆随着社会历史发展的历时性变化。因此,在涉及这些概念的时候应认真加以区分,避免误用。特别是在翻译、引用西方学者的观点时应力求准确,以免造成误解。     

WHO SUFFERED FROM THE CRISIS OF HISTORICISM? A DUTCH EXAMPLE

Was the crisis of historicism an exclusively German affair? Or was it a “narrowly academic crisis,” as is sometimes assumed? Answering both questions in the negative, this paper argues that crises of historicism affected not merely intellectual elites, but even working‐class people, not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. With an elaborated case study, the article shows that Dutch “neo‐Calvinist” Protestants from the 1930s onward experienced their own crisis of historicism. For a variety of reasons, this religious subgroup came to experience a collapse of its “historicist” worldview. Following recent German scholarship, the paper argues that this historicism was not a matter of Rankean historical methods, but of “historical identifications,” or modes of identity formation in which historical narratives played crucial roles. Based on this Dutch case study, then, the article develops two arguments. In a quantitative mode, it argues that more and different people suffered from the crisis of historicism than is usually assumed. In addition, it offers a qualitative argument: that the crisis was located especially among groups that derived their identity from “historical identifications.” Those who suffered most from the crisis of historicism were those who understood themselves as embedded in narratives that connected past, present, and future in such a way as to offer identity in historical terms.     

From the logic of ideas to active-matter materialism: Priestley’s Lockean problem and early neurophilosophy

ABSTRACT

Empiricism is a claim about the contents of the mind: its classic slogan is nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, “there is nothing in the mind (intellect, understanding) which is not first in the senses.” As such, it is not a claim about the fundamental nature of the world as material. I focus here on in an instance of what one might term the materialist appropriation of empiricism. One major component in the transition from a purely epistemological claim about the mind and its contents to an ontological claim about the nature of the world is the new focus on brain–mind relations in the eighteenth century. Here I examine a Lockean trajectory as exemplified in Joseph Priestley’s 1777 Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. However, Locke explicitly ruled out that his inquiry into the logic of ideas amounted to a “physical consideration of the mind.” What does it mean, then, for Priestley to present himself as continuing a Lockean tradition, while presenting mental processes as tightly identified with “an organical structure such as that of the brain” (although he was not making a strict identity claim as we might understand it, post-Smart and Armstrong)? One issue here is that of Priestley’s source of “empirical data” regarding the correlation and indeed identification of mental and cerebral processes. David Hartley’s theory in his 1749 Observations on Man was, as is well known, republished in abridged form by Priestley, but he discards Hartley’s “vibratory neurophysiology” while retaining the associationist framework, although not because he disagreed with the former. Yet Hartley was, at the very least, strongly agnostic about metaphysical issues (and it is difficult to study these authors while bracketing off religious considerations). One could see Locke and Hartley as articulating programs for the study of the mind which were more or less naturalistic (more strongly so in Hartley’s case) while avoiding “materialism” per se; in contrast, Priestley bit the (materialist) bullet. In this paper I examine Priestley’s appropriation and reconstruction of this “micro-tradition,” while emphasizing its problems.     

FRUSTRATED SEXUALITY IN ROBERT KROETSCH'S THE STUDHORSE MAN

Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man is not simply the “passionate and comic celebration of fertility–in man and beast” that the paperback cover promises. In fact, generative impulses are regularly misdirected or thwarted, and the course of true sex never does run smooth. From the beginning of the book (saved and seduced by Polly Cockburn) to the end (saved and seduced by Marie Eshpeter), Hazard Lepage, the studhorse man, is a man more laid against than laying, a man whose entanglements are more often an ordeal than an adventure. And even though the thirteen year engagement to the voluptuous Martha Proudfoot comes, finally, to its long-fantasied conclusion, that climax begins with Hazard “on ice”–ostensibly dead–and ends with Demeter, the “professionally” insane narrator of the novel, prompted to action, an action that entails Hazard's actual death. Furthermore, the studhorse man mismanages the affairs of his studhorse almost as pervasively as he mismanages his own. The only local practitioner of his trade, he still cannot find “one farm with a mare that wanted covering.” The very survival of the Lepage horse is at stake. Yet Hazard's attempts to achieve his chief objective are comically inept. For example, at one point, dickering for a necessary mare, Hazard mistakenly trades away his stallion. Yet Demeter, eighteen, inept, and certifiably insane, easily supplies Poseidon with suitable mares, and the oafish Eugene Utter sees how many more can be provided. But even here Hazard is thwarted. Poseidon becomes the “busiest creature in Alberta” not to produce more Lepage horses but to turn every available mare into a PMU (Pregnant Mare's Urine) producing machine.     

A Turke turn’d Quaker: conversion from Islam to radical dissent in early modern England

The study of the relationship between the anglophone and Islamic worlds in the seventeenth century has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years, and much attention has been given to the cultural anxiety surrounding “Turning Turke”, conversion from Christianity to Islam, especially by English captives on the Barbary coast. Conversion in the other direction has attracted far less scrutiny, not least because it appears to have been far less common. Conversion from Islam to any form of radical dissent has attracted no scholarship whatsoever, probably because it has been assumed to be non-existent. However, the case of Bartholomew Cole provides evidence that such conversions did take place, and examining the life of this “Turke turn’d Quaker” provides an insight into the dynamics of cross-cultural conversion of an exceptional kind.     

Hope,Cynicism, and Complicity: Worldly Resistance in Reinhold Niebuhr's Criticism of Karl Barth

This paper seeks to investigate the relationship between hope, cynicism, and despair in the stakes of a well-known dispute between Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr accuses Barth, and those who adopt Barth's central doctrinal and political positions, of quietism: in the name of religious perfectionism, such Barthians are not disposed toward incremental but necessary social reforms. For Niebuhr, this is a sure sign of “Barthian pessimism,” the despair that results from a conscience oversensitive to the absolute demands of God's righteousness. This paper seeks to show that a certain form of Barthian political theology is defensible as an ethical disposition since it need not fall victim to the helpless despair that Niebuhr fears, and simultaneously that a defensible account of what I call “total complicity” reflects the self-awareness and self-criticism that often become deformed into cynical despair and reshapes them toward repentant engagement with the world.