The Fate of Jewish Historiography after the Bible: A New Interpretation

What caused the eventual decline in later Jewish history of the vibrant historiographical tradition of the biblical period? In contrast to the plethora of historical writings composed during the biblical period, the rabbis of the early common era apparently were not interested in writing history, and when they did relate to historical events they often introduced mythical and unrealistic elements into their writings. Scholars have offered various explanations for this phenomenon; a central goal of this article is to locate these explanations within both the immediate historical setting of Roman Palestine and the overarching cultural atmosphere of the Greco‐Roman Near East. In particular, I suggest that the largely ahistorical approach of the rabbis functioned as a local Jewish counterpart to the widespread classicizing tendencies of a contemporary Greek intellectual movement, the Second Sophistic. In both cases, eastern communities, whose political aspirations were stifled under Roman rule, sought to express their cognitive and spiritual identities by focusing on a glorious and idealized past rather than on contemporary history. Interestingly, the apparent lack of rabbinic interest in historiography is not limited to the early rabbinic period. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, Jews essentially did not write their political, diplomatic, or military history. Instead, Jews composed “traditional historiography” which included various types of literary genres among which the rabbinic “chain of transmission” was the most important. The chain of transmission reconstructs (or fabricates) the links that connect later rabbinic sages with their predecessors. Robert Bonfil has noted the similarity between this rabbinic project and contemporary church histories. Adding a diachronic dimension to Bonfil's comparison, I suggest that rabbinic chains of transmission and church histories are not similar though entirely independent phenomena, but rather their shared project actually derives from a common origin, the Hellenistic succession list. The succession list literary genre, which sketches the history of an intellectual discipline, apparently thrived during the Second Sophistic and diffused then into both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. Thus, even though historiography was not terribly important to the early rabbis or to most Second Sophistic intellectuals, the succession list schematic, or the history of an intellectual discipline, was evaluated differently. Rabbis and early Christians absorbed the succession list from Second Sophistic culture and then continued to employ this historiographical genre for many centuries to come.     

Don't be a Drag,Just be a Priest: The Clothing and Identity of the Galli of Cybele in the Roman Republic and Empire

This paper explores the clothing and representation of the galli priests of Cybele in late Republican and early Imperial Rome. The galli were male-bodied, but practiced self-castration and wore traditionally feminine clothing and makeup, which the article argues placed them outside any expected gender binary and allowed them to inhabit a non-binary identity. The article applies contemporary drag theory and the relationship between clothing and identity, particularly in respect of (assumed) incongruity, to explore the ways in which the galli's identity is visible in the Roman world. In the final section, a case study is made of the way the galli are represented in Lucian of Samosata's On the Syrian Goddess.     

Performance and the politics of gender: transgender performance in contemporary Chinese films

This article focuses on two different genres of gender transitivity or impersonation. First, male actors who impersonate female characters. The two examples used to examine these impersonations are Chinese films Farewell My Concubine (Ba Wang Bie Ji 1993) and Forever Enthralled (Mei Lanfang 2009). Both films are based on the historical practice of dan in Peking Opera. Second, women who cross-dress as men for the sake of transgressing into the public sphere that had traditionally been forbidden for women. The main example of this is Hua Mulan (2009), a live action movie based on a Chinese legend of a female warrior called Hua Mulan, who disguises herself as a man to replace her father in the military service. Based on my close reading of the transgender performance in these Chinese films, the article will engage discussions of Western gender theories by Garber, Butler and Halberstam to examine the discourse and politics of gender and sexuality in contemporary China. To be more specific, a critical analysis will be carried out in the following three aspects: first, gender performativity is not necessarily subversive, but only suggests that heterosexual norms are arbitrary and unnatural. Second, rather than challenging heterosexism and gender binarism in contemporary China, the three films seem to support and consolidate the gender hierarchy. Thirdly, the category of transgender is intersected with art, identity and ideology in the specific social and historical settings. The contextualized analysis not only sheds new light on the implications of transgender in contemporary Chinese culture and politics but also questions the universalism of Western gender theories in cross-cultural contexts.     

The Gospel of Freedom,or Another Gospel? Augustinian Reflections on Empire and American Foreign Policy

Abstract

American foreign policy is often extolled in terms of exporting "freedom" to the rest of the world— extending God's gift to humanity (according to President Bush's Second Inaugural). But just what notion of "freedom" undergirds this project? According to the National Security Strategy, the freedom being globalized is a negative, non-teleological notion of freedom that primarily underwrites the expansion of free markets. But such a liberal, non-teleological notion of freedom is just the notion of freedom that is rejected by the orthodox (Augustinian) theological tradition. So the theological invocations that cloak this foreign policy can only be, technically, heretical. This paper takes Augustine's theology as a mode of cultural criticism, offering a contemporary rendition of Augustine's critique of empire in The City of God by interrogating the discourse of freedom associated with the Bush Doctrine as well as a critique of Hardt and Negri's alternative as it is laid out in Empire and Multitude.     

Putting the Roman periphery on the map: the geography of Romanness,orthodoxy, and legitimacy in Victricius of Rouen's De Laude sanctorum

Victricius of Rouen's De laude sanctorum (c.396) contains an original discussion of the cult of relics, introduced by a brief excursus on his recent trip to Britain. In this article, I argue that the author used both sections to define two symbolic territories, Britain and the centre of the empire, which invited his audience to think geographically about the concepts of Romanness, orthodoxy, and legitimacy. Exploiting a long‐standing tradition of stereotypes and geographical imaginations, Victricius used his argument of the unity of relics to justify his position in the Felician controversy, a contemporary episcopal and political conflict.     

Memory,history and the classical tradition

‘Memory’ is often confused and mistaken for myth; this is in turn connected with the widespread use of mistaking collective mythology and common myth for the idea of a ‘collective memory’. This essay discusses memory and history terminology in the context of the generic concept ‘classical tradition’. The case study explored here – the nineteenth-century Walhalla ‘temple’ near Regensburg in Southern Germany – is an attempt to discuss the classical tradition, focusing on archaeology and architecture rather than philology), within the parameters of the memory and history debate in contemporary historiography. The essay aims to develop the position of the iconic and symbolic importance of antiquity and the classical tradition in the memory and history debate as well as in historical writing. The concluding remarks emphasise the necessity of historicising tradition and its genealogies, conceptualised here as a tradition of legacies.     

From Karl von Frisch to Neuroethology: A Methodological Perspective on the Frischean Tradition's Expansion into Neuroethology**

This paper examines a tradition of eusocial insect research stemming from the Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch. As I show in this paper, one of the most enduring features of the Frischean tradition has been an experimental methodology developed by Frisch in the early 1910s. By tracing this methodology's use through Frisch's student, Martin Lindauer, and two of Lindauer's students, Rüdiger Wehner and Randolf Menzel, this paper illuminates a surprising aspect of ethology's development during the last half of the 20^th century. Namely, it sheds light on how the Frischean tradition, a tradition that had a complicated relationship with ethology since the discipline's formation in the 1930s, produced scientists who became leading figures in neuroethology, the most prominent contemporary field of behavioral research to retain the label of “ethology.” Some of the features that distinguished Frisch's training method from the program of classical ethology and the work of his contemporaries later helped his academic descendants adapt the method to the neuroethological program.     

A Sympathetic Appraisal of Cold War Modernization Theory

The apparent failure of recent US nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan has re-awakened interest in earlier American efforts at nation-building and the scholarly literature that provided the intellectual framework and justification for those efforts. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a generation of scholars, shaped by their wartime experience, contributed to that literature under the general label of modernization theory. Modernization theory was promulgated under the auspices of three major institutions: Harvard's Department of Social Relations, the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics and MIT's Center for International Studies. All three institutions provided homes for scholars conducting multidisciplinary research on conditions in the ‘new states’ – that is the former colonial countries. Drawing on the work of key scholars that contributed to modernization theory, this article offers a more sympathetic analysis than is typical of many contemporary assessments of the theory. In order to provide that sympathetic appraisal, the widest perspective on the various approaches to modernization theory is required so that the scholars whose work are highlighted include: Gabriel Almond, Lucian Pye, Karl W. Deutsch, Daniel Lerner, Alex Inkeles and Walt Rostow.     

Bede,Irish computistica and Annus Mundi

Bede's decision to diverge from the mainstream chronological tradition, based on the Septuagint, in favour of the Vulgate for chronology has generally been explained by his concerns about contemporary apocalypticism. This essay will argue that Bede's choice of Annus Mundi was also greatly influenced by Irish computistica. These texts incorporate a chronological framework – influenced by Victorius of Aquitaine's Easter Table – that was implicitly and explicitly apocalyptic and provided a date for the Passion that Bede objected to. Bede was greatly indebted to Irish computistica but adopting the Vulgate Annus Mundi allowed him to assert his own views on chronology.     

Cunning Histories: Privileging Narratives in the Present

Examining contemporary British witchcraft necessitates representing its historical context, currently a highly contested arena. Both magical practitioners and scholars have heavily critiqued the “orthodox” histories of unbroken lines of tradition reaching back to the distant past that were prevalent in the early to mid‐twentieth century. However, continuities of knowledge and skills based on the practices of rural cunning folk and folk magic continue to be mobilized by some practitioners as a way of connecting to ideas about the past, a narrative that is also critiqued by others. What is at stake is not only the conflicting foundational histories for contemporary witchcraft, but the ways in which the same textual and material evidence is deployed to substantiate competing accounts: they hinge on the ways evidence is contextualized. Interrogating “context” is not limited to the histories we aim to represent, but is embedded within anthropological writing and knowledge.     

A legal theory for the nation state. Pasquale Stanislao Mancini,Hegelianism and Piedmontese liberalism after 1848

ABSTRACT

This article aims to shed light on the Italian liberals’ contribution to the post-1848 European debate on nationality, representative government and the theory of the state, through focus on the political thought of Pasquale Stanislao Mancini. Building on Vico and Hegel’s philosophies of law and history, Mancini developed a sui generis tradition of national liberalism that founded representative government on a theory of the state that identified freedom and nationality. Far from being the passive and provincial adaptation of Anglo-French currents of liberalism, Mancini’s political thought, while engaging with the contemporary European debates on freedom and constitutional government, nurtured an original constitutional theory that connected conflicting ideas of cosmopolitan freedom and national patriotism.     

Strauss on Maimonides’ Secretive Political Science

Abstract

In this article, the authors review Joseph Cropsey's last collection of essays, Humanity's Intensive Introspection. They argue that Cropsey's essays draw on resources in the Western tradition, both from within liberal thought and from ancient sources, to elevate human life and to fortify modern society, especially against contemporary critiques of liberalism. Philosophy's discovery of the inscrutability of the whole opens it to revelation and also provides a basis for philosophy's active contribution to an open or liberal society.     

Settling Accounts: Retribution,Emotion and Memory during the Fall of Mussolini

Abstract

The fall of Mussolini on 25 July 1943, and the concomitant collapse of the Fascist regime, have long been recognized as a pivotal moment in the Second World War and, indeed, contemporary Italian history. To date, however, these events have been viewed almost exclusively ‘from above’, in terms of elite politics, international diplomacy, and military strategy. Drawing on the analytical frameworks of Alltagsgeschichte (‘everyday history’), the present contribution examines the experiences, reactions and behaviors of ordinary Italians during the fall of Fascism. In particular, it explores incidents of retributive and symbolic violence, political denunciation, and popular demonstration, in order to understand how individuals and communities expressed emotions and memories, negotiated relationships, and sought to redress grievances and antipathies developed over more than twenty years of ‘totalitarian’ dictatorship.     

Restaging Time: Photography,Performance and Anachronism in Shadi Ghadirian's Qajar Series

This paper looks at a group of photographs entitled Qajar Series (1998) by artist Shadi Ghadirian. Ghadirian recreates sets to look like those used in photographic portraits taken during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of the Qajar dynasty period and dresses her female sitters in costumes reminiscent of clothes from the era. The artist also integrates contemporary objects that do not fit within the historical setting created for the camera. This essay examines how the artist uses performance to stage this anachronism and think critically about temporal discourses and their links to the categories of modernity and tradition.     

The Weight of the Moment: J. G. A. Pocock's Politics of History

One of the great intellectual productions of the postwar period, J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment was also an intervention in the American polity of the 1970s. The book's content, its rhetorical style, its methodology, and even its physical printed form were all designed to effectuate a political gesture. The crises of 1968 to 1973 invalidated the optimistic liberalism of Pocock's academic circle. The history of political language offered a refuge and a programmatic foundation for Pocock's pragmatic conservatism. The Machiavellian Moment was designed to reinforce the weight of tradition in contemporary political debate.     

Paouté and Aiaouez: A New Perspective on Late Seventeenth-Century Chiwere-Siouan Identity

A fine-grained spatial and temporal analysis of relevant seventeenth-century French documents reveals that from circa 1650 to 1685 the two terms principally associated with the Ioway, Aiaouez and Paouté, were consistently applied to geographically distinct branches of that tribe. The conflation of these two terms after circa 1700 is the product of both changes in the contact-period cultural landscape and the manner in which it was defined. This conclusion has importance for the use of these accounts as analogues for reconstructing Oneota tradition social organization and highlights the value in applying contemporary theoretical perspectives and analytical techniques to ethnohistoric data.     

Tradition and the African Children’s Storyteller: The Example of Amos Tutuola and Ama Ata Aidoo

Africa’s oral storytelling tradition holds riches that are still largely untapped. A comparative reading of Amos Tutuola’s ‘The Complete Gentleman’, in his The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and Ama Ata Aidoo’s play Anowa offers clues on how to explore this heritage for the contemporary world. Both writers have adapted the tale of the headstrong/disobedient girl, who refuses all suitors from her own people, only to marry a monstrous stranger. The two authors’ adaptations of this widespread tale from sub-Saharan Africa offer clues both to the immense possibilities of the African folktale heritage and transcendence of once normative biases such as the fear of the stranger and gender inequality.     

Van Gulik's The Lore of the Chinese Lute Revisited*

In this article I propose a critical examination of van Gulik's The Lore of the Chinese Lute (LCL) in respect to its bibliographical sources and consequent aesthetic contentions. Despite being arguably the first academic monograph on the ideology of qin and historically a major non-Chinese source for the study of qin in general, the LCL does not represent van Gulik's mature thinking on qin. The LCL is limited by objective circumstances surrounding its writing and flaws in van Gulik's bibliographical engagement. His study of the musicology of Yueji on the basis of inaccurate translation and a neglect of the Neo-Confucian reading of Yueji, his hypothesis of Daoist dominance and Buddhist or Indian influence in the practice of qin with mistaken evidence, his skepticism of the truth of the literati tradition with fundamental bibliographical flaws, all require reconsideration. The current lacuna in the critical investigation of the LCL not only urges contemporary researchers to continue where van Gulik left off, but also calls for new research projects on qin and Chinese literati music in general.     

Beyond the stereotypes: Mary Lavin's Irish women

This paper discusses Mary Lavin's place within the Irish literary tradition by means of an analysis of her representations of female characters. It argues, first, that Lavin's short stories depart from the short story tradition in general and the Irish short story tradition in particular by failing to subscribe to the cultivation of the romantic outsider and focusing instead on family relations and social responsibilities. Second, Mary Lavin's marginal position in a feminist or female literary tradition is explained through her unwillingness to portray women as victims and through the absence of a clear critique of patriarchy in her work. The paper then tries to characterise the relationship between individual and society in Lavin's short fiction in a more positive way, by focusing on the notions of individual fate and personal responsibility, which turn out to be crucial to Mary Lavin's philosophy. This philosophy is first discussed explicitly in a reading of the story ‘Happiness’ and ‘The Widow's Son’ and subsequently shown to lie behind the oppositions and dilemmas in several other stories. Finally, the article demonstrates how Lavin manages to realise her Nietzschean belief in an Amor Fati in some of her most positive female characters through a clever use of imagery and point of view, without thereby succumbing to sentimentality or cliché.