HISTORY IN THE SIKH PAST1

This article offers a reading of an early eighteenth‐century Punjabi text—Gur Sobha or “The Splendor of the Guru”—as a form of historical representation, suggesting reasons for the importance of the representation of the past as history within Sikh discursive contexts. The text in question provides an account of the life, death, and teachings of the last of the ten living Sikh Gurus or teachers, Guru Gobind Singh. The article argues that the construction of history in this text is linked to the transition of the Sikh community at the death of the last living Guru whereby authority was invested in the canonical text (granth) and community (panth). As such a particular rationale for history was produced within Sikh religious thought and intellectual production around the discursive construction of the community in relation to the past and as a continuing presence. As such, the text provides an alternative to modern European forms of historical representation, while sharing some features of the “historical” as defined in that context. The essay relates this phenomenon to a broader exploration of history in South Asian contexts, to notions of historicality that are plural, and to issues particular to the intersection of history and religion. Later texts, through the middle of the nineteenth century, are briefly considered, to provide a sense of the significance of Gur Sobha within a broader, historically and religiously constituted Sikh imagination of the past.     

THE LIVING PAST

It is argued that although this book will be of interest to any scholar interested in Croce, Gentile, or de Ruggiero, it will be of particular interest to those interested in R. G. Collingwood, for the ultimate focus of the book is upon Collingwood's philosophy and how it developed in relation to the work of the Italian idealists. This is a subject that has not previously been investigated in any depth. Peters argues that the basic idea that unites all four philosophers is that “the past is not dead, but living”; but what distinguishes Collingwood's philosophy from the Italians' is the idea, and its justification, that “the past can live on even if we are not aware of it.” Collingwood explored and developed this idea in reaction to the “presentism” of the Italians, a position that is most obvious in the philosophy of Gentile but that is also to be found, albeit less obviously, in the philosophies of Croce and de Ruggiero. Without casting doubt upon the influence of the Italian idealists on Collingwood, it is suggested in this review that, as well as explaining that influence, Peters's book also throws Collingwood's similarities with Oakeshott into relief; by contrast with Collingwood, there is no evidence that Oakeshott ever read the Italian idealists.     

OBJECTS OF HISTORY: THE PAST MATERIALIZED1

What is the role of material culture in understanding the past? This review essay explores two principal approaches—the history of museums and antiquities and environmental history—to reflect on their shared investment in historical materialism. It reviews Timothy LeCain's The Matter of History and Peter Miller's History and Its Objects, discussing their perspectives on objects and the writing of history. One important part of this history concerns the relationship of academic historians to the idea of a history museum, curatorial practices, and public history. What kinds of history can we do in a museum, with things, that might not occur without the presence of objects? Why were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to encourage a close relationship between historical research and the history museum largely abandoned in favor of a document-driven approach? The second dimension of current interest in historical materialism concerns new approaches to environmental history. It draws inspiration from Deep History as well as recent work in archaeology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) to argue for a more integrated history of humans and nature that demonstrates how things have made us. The history of successive efforts to remake the environment in different parts of the world and their consequences offers crucial object lessons in how humans have responded to nature's own creativity. Both approaches to historical materialism highlight the virtues of a more interdisciplinary approach to historical scholarship, in the museum or in the field, but most important, in our own sensibilities about what it means to think historically with artifacts and to treat them as compelling evidence of a shared history of humanity and nature.     

REVISITING THE DEAD AT HELENA CROSSING,ARKANSAS

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a bioarchaeological reanalysis of the skeletal remains interred in the Middle Woodland burial mounds at the Helena Crossing site (3PH11). Based on current bioarchaeological methods, our reanalysis offers summaries of the sex and age estimates, pathologies, and trauma of the burials from Helena Crossing that are useful for their subsequent interpretation. We also document previously unrecognized evidence of postmortem processing in specific burials as evidenced by cut and chop marks that are associated with defleshing, disarticulating, and possibly mutilating particular corpses. We note the special attention paid to detaching and processing the mandibles and/or maxillas of several burials that indicates, along with evidence from other sites, that the mouth was an important symbolically charged orifice during the Middle Woodland period in the Eastern Woodlands.     

THE RED INK OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

The red ink on four fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls was analysed by X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction. The red pigment was identified as mercury sulfide (HgS), cinnabar. The significant archaeological and historical aspects of this finding are discussed.     

THE PAST IS EVIL/EVIL IS PAST: ON RETROSPECTIVE POLITICS,PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY,AND TEMPORAL MANICHAEISM

One of the most remarkable phenomena in current international politics is the increasing attention paid to “historical injustice.” Opinions on this phenomenon strongly differ. For some it stands for a new and noble type of politics based on raised moral standards and helping the cause of peace and democracy. Others are more critical and claim that retrospective politics comes at the cost of present‐ or future‐oriented politics and tends to be anti‐utopian. The warnings about the perils of a retrospective politics outweighing politics directed at contemporary injustices, or strivings for a more just future, should be taken seriously. Yet the alternative of a politics disregarding all historical injustice is not desirable either. We should refuse to choose between restitution for historical injustices and struggle for justice in the present or the future. Rather, we should look for types of retrospective politics that do not oppose but complement or reinforce the emancipatory and utopian elements in present‐ and future‐directed politics. I argue that retrospective politics can indeed have negative effects. Most notably it can lead to a “temporal Manichaeism” that not only posits that the past is evil, but also tends to treat evil as anachronistic or as belonging to the past. Yet I claim that ethical Manichaeism and anti‐utopianism and are not inherent features of all retrospective politics but rather result from an underlying philosophy of history that treats the relation between past, present, and future in antinomic terms and prevents us from understanding “transtemporal” injustices and responsibilities. In order to pinpoint the problem of certain types of retrospective politics and point toward some alternatives, I start out from a criticism formulated by the German philosopher Odo Marquard and originally directed primarily at progressivist philosophies of history.     

4. THE MATERIAL PRESENCE OF THE PAST

This article deals with the material presence of the past and the recent call in the human sciences for a “return to things.” This renewed interest in things signals a rejection of constructivism and textualism and the longing for what is “real,” where “regaining” the object is conceived as a means for re‐establishing contact with reality. In the context of this turn, we might wish to reconsider the (ontological) status of relics of the past and their function in mediating relations between the organic and the inorganic, between people and things, and among various kinds of things themselves for reconceptualizing the study of the past. I argue that the future will depend on whether and how various scholars interested in the past manage to modify their understanding of the material remnants of the past, that is, things as well as human, animal, and plant remains. In discussing this problem I will refer to Martin heidegger's distinction between an object and a thing, to bruno latour's idea of the agency of things and object‐oriented democracy, and to Don Ihde's material hermeneutics. To illustrate my argument I will focus on some examples of the ambivalent status of the disappeared person (dead or alive) in argentina, which resists the oppositional structure of present versus absent. In this context, the disappeared body is a paradigm of the past itself, which is both continuous with the present and discontinuous from it, which simultaneously is and is not. Since there are no adequate terms to analyze the “contradictory” or anomalous status of the present‐absent dichotomy, I look for them outside the binary oppositions conventionally used to conceptualize the present‐absent relationship in our thinking about the past. for this purpose I employ Algirdas Julien Greimas's semiotic square.     

THE LAST RIGHTS: MORE ON ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE DEAD

Summary. In a recent paper, one of us (Bahn 1984) made a preliminary sketch of the main issues involved in the question of whether archaeologists have the right to disturb the dead. Since then, a number of important new case studies have featured prominently in the media, and more literature on the subject has started to appear—most notably a collection of papers (Green 1984) which, though focused on the particular problems of North America, contains much food for thought for archaeologists elsewhere. In this article we propose to look at the new data and consider what light moral philosophy can throw on the problem as a whole.     

《鸟网》展翅腾飞——从《鸟网》年会看《鸟网》变化

<正>2010年《鸟网》年会已结束半月有余,但,每当看到鸟友们在年会《在线播报》专栏中跟发的精彩花絮,情景历历在目,记忆一次次加深。高端论坛会上,聆听文科总版主的精彩讲话和几位特邀嘉宾的主旨演讲,以及鸟友们谈论的话题,心有所感,忆起点点滴滴,真切地感受到了《鸟网》5年来发生的深刻变化。     

往事之旅,去民俗大院里发现新奇

<正>那些关于过去的鲜活记忆似乎根本就不曾消失过,当一本本页面已经发黄了的小人书,一张张破旧的粮票、肉票出现在人们眼前,很多人都会情不自禁地对同伴、跟孩子讲起那些久远的往事……     

HEROIC TIME: MONUMENTS AND THE PAST IN MESSENIA, SOUTHWEST GREECE

The archaeological structure of a landscape in terms of the history of settlement and burial in a particular locale through time, together with the construction, development and importance of the monuments placed within it, has become a feature of recent landscape archaeology in the study of Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain. The present paper introduces some of these themes into the study of the Messenia, southwest Greece, approaching two main problems. First, how the location chosen for the Late Bronze Age Palace of Nestor related to earlier patterns of habitation of the Middle Helladic period (an issue hitherto ignored by previous 'period-specific'studies) and, secondly, the later relevance of the Bronze Age landscape in the Iron Age when issues such as the 'Past'and 'History'came to be of great significance in Messenia.     

MATHEMATICS,STATISTICS AND ARCHAEOMETRY: THE PAST 50 YEARS OR SO*

This review of developments in the use of mathematics and statistics in archaeometry over the past 50 years is partial, personal and ‘broad‐brush’. The view is expressed that it is in the past 30 years or so that the major developments have taken place. The view is also expressed that, with the exception of methods for analysing radiocarbon dates and increased computational power, mathematical and statistical methods that are currently used, and found to be useful in widespread areas of application such as provenance studies, don't differ fundamentally from what was being done 30 years ago.