Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History

This article aims to consider the robust field of environmental history as a whole, as it stands and as it has developed over the past twenty‐five years around the world. It necessarily adopts a selective approach but still offers more breadth than depth. It treats the links between environmental history and other fields within history, and with other related disciplines such as geography. It considers the precursors of environmental history, its emergence since the 1970s, its condition in several settings and historiographies. Finally it touches on environmental history's relationship to social theory and to the natural sciences as they have evolved in recent decades. It concludes that while there remains plenty of interesting work yet to do, environmental history has successfully established itself as a legitimate field within the historical profession, and has a bright future, if perhaps for discouraging reasons.     

The Cage of Nature: Modernity's History in Japan

"The Cage of Nature" focuses on the concept of nature as a way to rethink Japanese and European versions of modernity and the historical tropes that distance "East" from "West." This essay begins by comparing Japanese political philosopher Maruyama Masao and his contemporaries, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Both sets of authors define modernity as the moment when humanity overcomes nature, but Maruyama longs for this triumph while Horkheimer and Adorno deplore its consequences. Maruyama insists that Japan has failed to attain the freedom promised by modernity because it remains in the thrall of nature defined in three ways: as Japan's deformed past, as the mark of Japan's tragic difference from "the West,"and as Japan's accursed sensuality, shackling it to uncritical bodily pleasures. In short, Maruyama sees Japan as trapped in the cage of nature.
My argument is that Maruyama's frustration arises from the trap set by modern historiography, which simultaneously traces the trajectory of modernity from servile Nature to freedom of Spirit and at the same time bases the identity of the non-Western world on its closeness to nature. In other words, nature represents both the past and the East, an impossible dilemma for an Asian nationalist desirous of liberty. By revising our historical narratives to take into account the ways in which Western modernity continued to engage versions of nature, it becomes possible to reposition Japan and "the East" within modernity's history rather than treating them as the Other.     

The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist Challenge to Environmental History

This article discusses the program of environmental history within the larger discipline of history and contrasts it with more recent contributions from post‐constructivist science. It explores the ways in which post‐constructivism has the potential to productively address many of the shortcomings of environmental history's theories and models that environmental historians themselves have begun to view with a critical eye. The post‐constructivist authors discussed in this article, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, both represent challenges to the ways in which nature and the natural sciences tend to be conceptualized as non‐problematized entities within environmental history. They also challenge the ways in which dichotomies of nature and culture tend to be reproduced within the program of environmental history. It is argued that these post‐constructivist contributions represent a radical and arguably more truly historical way of introducing non‐human actors into the historical narrative, and thus represent a potential reinvigoration of environmental history that would embrace a more radical historicity, greater diversity, and openness to difference.     

Snapshots of History and the Nature of the Archaeological Image

By its very definition, archaeology is situated at the intersection of the material and the temporal worlds. Photography is similarly positioned, and yet it can be manipulated to produce constructed contexts according a photographer’s agenda. In order to explore how the abilities and limitations of archaeology and photography are entwined I examine the representational power of the photograph and the phenomenon of Japanese tourist photography. I then discuss the construction of archaeological photographs, both in practice and in the prescribed theory contained archaeological methods textbooks, as well as how photographs are used to represent the embodied, physical performance of archaeology.     

环境史及其对自然的重新书写

长期以来,由于根深蒂固的静止世界观及地理环境决定论的消极影响,再加上人类对自然的生态价值缺乏认识,自然长期被历史学家所忽视。自19世纪后半期,一些美国学者尝试将自然纳入历史的写作范畴。经过长时间摸索,这一努力日臻成熟,集中表现在20世纪六七十年代出现的环境史。环境史扩大了历史研究的范畴,提供了观察历史的新思路和新视角,它还可以对一些重大历史事件和理论问题重新做出解释。     

On the Problem of Laws in Nature and History: A Comparison

In the philosophy of science there has traditionally been a tendency to regard physics as the incarnation of science per se . Consequently, the status of other disciplines has been evaluated according to their ability to produce laws resembling those of physics. This view has yielded a considerable bias in the discussion of historical laws. Philosophers as well as historians have tended to discuss such laws mostly with reference to the situation in physics; this often led to either one of two conclusions, namely that (1) history is epistemologically completely separated from natural science because it does not have universal laws, or that (2) the ultimate goal of the study of history must be the formulation of such universal laws. I maintain that neither conclusion is necessary. To substantiate this position, I discuss several aspects of natural laws. One aspect that is often neglected is that there are many kinds of statistical laws in nature; there is no close link between laws and determinism. Moreover, natural systems exist that have a history, that is, systems that are, like human history, shaped by irreversible, singular events. One important case is biological evolution; accordingly I discuss the relation between evolutionary theory and historiography. However, since we are part of the living world, and in addition to considering the methodological similarities between the two fields, one could also ask whether the laws of evolution are of direct relevance for understanding our history. This issue of history as evolution is investigated in detail in the final section of the paper.     

评日本政治“存异”和文化“求同”的殖民统治方针

迄今为止,国内外史学界对日本在台湾、朝鲜、“满洲国”进行殖民统治的研究,已取得丰硕成果。但不能不指出的是,对日本殖民统治方针形成和演变的研究,仍存在不足。这种不足至少表现在两个方面：一、日本殖民统治方针的形成和演变,均是以如何对殖民地进行政治和化统治为重心的,     

20世纪中国史学界对历史学性质的理论思考

历史学是否是科学的问题,在西方已讨论了200多年,在中国也争论了将近一个世纪。近代,由于自然科学的迅速发展,西方史学家提出,如果采用适当的方法去研究历史,就有希望得到科学的结果。20世纪初,中国新史学兴起。史学家们大量引进西方的史学理论,关于历史学与自然科学的关系、历史学能否成为科学的问题也引起史学界的极大兴趣。有人认为历史学是一门科学,或可以成为一门科学。有人认为历史学不是科学,而是艺术或其他学问。还有人认为历史学既是科学,也是艺术。     

Hannah Arendt's Mythology: The Political Nature of History and Its Tales of Antiheroes

Current scholarship has focused on analyzing how Arendt's storytelling corresponds to her political arguments. In following up this discussion, I offer a closer examination of the unusual myth Arendt uses to explain the condition of the modern age, a myth she refers to as the “political nature of history.” I employ literary terms along with the standard vocabulary of political theory in shaping this reading of Arendt. Following Robert C. Pirro, I also consider Arendt's story as a tragedy, but in the broadest sense, that of a collision of two goods, freedom and security. By describing Arendt's thought in this manner, I hope to reveal another way in which Arendt represents the call to action that she believes so crucial to humanity, as a summons to we flawed antiheroes through the device of a heroic myth.     

The Primacy of Science in Modernity,of Technology in Postmodernity,and of Ideology in the History of Technology

The abrupt reversal of culturally ascribed primacy in the science–technology relationship—namely, from the primacy of science relative to technology prior to circa 1980, to the primacy of technology relative to science since about that date—is proposed as a demarcator of postmodernity from modernity: modernity is when ‘science’ could, and often did, denote technology too; postmodernity is when science is subsumed under technology. In support of that demarcation criterion, I evidence the breadth and strength of modernity’s presupposition of the primacy of science to and for technology by showing its preposterous hold upon social theorists—Marx, Veblen, Dewey—whose principles logically required the reverse, viz. the primacy of practice; upon 19th and 20th century engineers and industrialists, social actors whose practical interests likewise required the reverse; and upon the principal theorizers in the 1970s of the role of science in late 20th century technology and society. The reversal in primacy between science and technology ca 1980 came too unexpectedly, too quickly, and, above all, too unreflectively to have resulted from the weight of evidence or the force of logic. Rather, it was a concomitant of the onset of postmodernity. Oddly, historians of technology have remained almost wholly unacknowledging of postmodernity’s epochal elevation of the cultural standing of the subject of their studies, and, specifically, have ignored technology’s elevation relative to science. This I attribute to the ideological character of that discipline, and, specifically, to its strategy of ignoration of science.