Changing Inuit Historicities in West Greenland and Nunavut

Beyond a few stereotypes framed as oppositions between written and oral, history and myth, and so on, one actually knows little about Inuit historicities. This article argues that recent changes in Inuit senses of history do not represent a progress from limited interest in historical questions to some enlightened historical consciousness. Rather, these changes should be seen as paralleling the recent rapid transitions of their societies, world views and identities. Differences between West Greenlandic and Nunavut historicities may be attributed to the fact that today’s visions of the past are the outcome of divergent historical developments within a (post‐)colonial framework.     

Parliamentary History: An Oblique Glance*

Because parliamentary history has entered the DNA of English and anglophone historiography, one readily forgets how unusual are its parameters and influence in wider historical writing in the West. This essay supplies a reminder that we can look sideways at that historiographical form and think about the place of parliamentary history in societies so different as those of the United States and Europe. Doing so reveals oddities in the place of parliamentary history in divergent cultures and brings into question the viability of the subject in the light of current persuasions that have become hegemonic – the cultural, the gendered, the global. The enquiry concludes that the future of parliamentary history will rest on its ability to come to terms with some of those persuasions and relocate itself within their imperatives.     

“Hungry for Knowledge”: Towards a Meso‐History of the Environmental Sciences

In recent years, cultural studies and cultural theory have experienced a new wave of ecological thought. Despite the engagement with the Anthropocene the history of ecology and the environmental sciences has remained somewhat of a puzzle. This goes especially for the 20^th century, a period when the sciences of the environment came to matter on a broader scale. Why do we actually know so little about the environmental sciences in the 20^th century? And what could a history of the environmental sciences in that period look like? This article answers these questions with two interrelated arguments. First, by reflecting on different approaches to write the history of ecology since the 1970s, it uncovers crucial entanglements between the history of science and ecological thought that created blind spots regarding the environmental sciences in the 20^th century. Second, it argues for a shift in scales of analysis—towards meso‐scales. With a more regional approach historians can engage with the often‐neglected aspects of the political and economic history of the environmental sciences in the 20th century and thereby also reveal their fundamental infrastructural dimension. Because at its core, the article claims, the environmental sciences were and are essentially infrastructural sciences.     

Making History, Talking about History

Making history—in the sense of writing it—is often set against talking about it, with most historians considering writing history to be better than talking about it. My aim in this article is to analyze the topic of making history versus talking about history in order to understand most historians' evident decision to ignore talking about history. Ultimately my goal is to determine whether it is possible to talk about history with any sense.
To this end, I will establish a typology of the different forms of talking practiced by historians, using a chronological approach, from the Greek andRoman emphasis on the visual witness to present-day narrativism and textual analysis. Having recognized the peculiar textual character of the historiographical work, I will then discuss whether one can speak of a method for analyzing historiographical works. After considering two possible approaches—the philosophy of science and literary criticism—I offer my own proposal. This involves breaking the dichotomy between making and talking about history, adopting a fuzzy method that overcomes the isolation of self-named scientific communities, and that destroys the barriers among disciplines that work with the same texts but often from mutually excluding perspectives. Talking about history is only possible if one knows about history and about its sources and methods, but also about the foundations of the other social sciences and about the continuing importance of traditional philosophical problems of Western thought in the fields of history and the human sciences.     

The agrarian working class put somewhat centre stage: an often neglected group of workers in the historiography of labour in state-socialist Hungary

This study discusses a body of scholarship which is little-known internationally, written in Hungary in the period between 1949 and 1989: the historiography on agrarian labour from the eighteenth century to the Second World War. This historiography was conceptually inclusive in that it explored the history of many groups of agrarian workers, the varied types of labour in which they were involved, including long-term contracts, day and servant labour, seasonal migration and non-agricultural forms of labour, the role of agrarian labour in socio-economic development, and the political movement of ‘agrarian socialism’. This historiography for a large part remained embedded in three adjacent research clusters: peasant studies, local and regional history, and the history of the labour movement. This study argues that scholarly approaches and interests, and institutional framings specific to each of these clusters, were of key importance in generating the extensive scholarship that is reviewed. The fact that Hungary had been a dominantly agrarian country before 1945, the Leninist vision of the ‘alliance of the workers and the peasants’ that was to bring about socialism in Eastern Europe and the state-condoned interest in the history of the labour movement and labour more generally were other important factors conducive to, and to various degrees putting their stamp on, this research. Given its findings within a Marxian or classical social-history framing, and its focus on an often neglected group of workers, the historiography on agrarian labour written in state-socialist Hungary deserves to be integrated into the historiographical canon. This study discusses this scholarship against the backdrop of present-day global labour history. In pointing to some of its area-, time- and context-specific characteristics, the study aims to contribute to a global dialogue in labour history that is sensitive to and critically appreciative of different historiographical trajectories and traditions across world regions.     

国外工业遗产再利用对福州马尾区工业旅游开发的启示

本文在理解工业旅游和工业遗产旅游的起源和概念基础上,从西方国家对工业遗产保存和再利用的模式中受到启发,分析了福州马尾区工业旅游开发的条件,突出马尾造船厂这个具有代表性的历史遗迹及其船政文化的内涵,强调马尾区工业旅游开发特色在于对"工业遗产"的保存和利用、对近代船政文化的发扬光大,而不仅仅限于现代造船工业的观光。在借鉴国内外工业旅游开发经验基础上,提出了适合福州马尾区的传统和现代工业相结合的工业旅游开发设想。     

NEW HISTORIES OF EMOTION

At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, there was a growing sense that historians had neglected the emotions and failed to think seriously about them. Since then, there has been explosive interest in the history of emotions. What precipitated this development? What has this focus on emotion added to our historical understanding, and what does a historical perspective contribute to research on emotion? Two recent books help us think about these questions. In The History of Emotions, Jan Plamper offers the first book‐length introduction to this field available in English; in Emotional Lexicons, Ute Frevert and a group of fellow historians trace continuities and change in the vocabulary of feeling from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the millennium. At stake, in both books, is the idea that emotions are historically contingent—that history has the ability to shape and transform even the most basic features of human experience. This review essay engages with the central arguments of these books, and offers a somewhat different interpretation of the history of emotions. What is called for, the essay suggests, is not first and foremost a separate history of emotions nor the adding of emotion to existing histories, but new histories that systematically incorporate emotions into their analyses. Historians should seek to demonstrate how emotions are an integral part of history and historiography in a more general sense. Systematic attention to emotions not only adds nuance to a historical narrative, the essay concludes, but also fundamentally affects our ideas about how history actually happens.     

天演、进化、进步的内涵及其关系研究述评

<天演论>是中国近代史上一部划时代的著作,一百多年来,人们对它的研究长盛不衰,涉及问题殊多,现就严复译述<天演论>的概念问题进行梳理,包括研究状况、不同观点以及笔者的简评.关于天演、进化、进步之间的关系存在着两种对立的观点:一是对等说,二是非对等说.文中从天演与进化、进化与进步、天演内涵、严复态度四个方面进行了梳理,认为对等说较普遍认同,而非对等说更接近真理,从科学的观点讲,应该严格加以区分,并对具体问题进行具体分析,做到实事求是.     

A Weberian approach to the history of ethics: Aquinas and Kant

A distinction between hard-to-shake but rational convictions, on the one hand, and the rationality that calculates causal and logical consequences, on the other hand, can generate questions for the history of ethics. Most moral thinkers draw some such distinction but the contours of the line differ greatly, and, in drawing the line, past moral thinkers tend to be influenced by their own deeply held principles, which in turn tend to reflect their social world. Questions about where the line between values and instrumental calculation are drawn and about the effect on this of the moral thinkers own social world are applied by way of illustration to Thomas Aquinas and Kant. The paper attempts to use Weberian social theory to elucidate a theme in the history of ethics, making every effort to keep the two kinds of theory distinct.     

HISTORY AND POLITICS AS IF WE STILL LIVED IN THE HOLOCENE

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a monumental, boldly revisionist study of the human past from the last ice age to the present. It is geared explicitly toward the present in political terms and seeks to explain how primordial forms of human freedom were lost in ways that resulted in our current structures of violence and domination. The authors explore a vast range of prehistoric, ancient, and non-Western peoples to undermine (neo)evolutionist, stadial theories of long-term human development, particularly any that imply determinism, inevitability, or teleology. If so many peoples in the past were so much freer than we are today, how is it that we got stuck? And are we really as stuck as we think? Graeber and Wengrow successfully undermine the social scientific template of stage-based human development from hunter-gatherers to modern capitalist nation-states, but their book suffers from two major omissions. First, they ignore almost entirely the Anthropocene epoch and show no grasp of its implications for their analysis of the present or prospects for the future. Second, their “new history of humanity” ignores the history that is most relevant to answering their own questions about how we have arrived globally in our current structures of violence and domination: the early modern and modern history of expansionist, colonialist, capitalist, belligerent, imperialist Western European nations and their extensions since the fifteenth century. These two omissions are connected: it is disproportionately the history of the (early) modern West before and after the Industrial Revolution that explains how the planet arrived in the Anthropocene with the “Great Acceleration” around the mid-twentieth century. But heeding this history and its consequences would have undermined the authors’ upbeat political vision about our prospects for the future—essentially, a recycled Enlightenment vision about human self-determination and individual freedom that depends on environmental exploitation as if we still lived in the Holocene. For all its undoubted achievement, The Dawn of Everything neglects the history that is most salient to answering the main questions its own authors pose. What matters most about that history is not that it was inevitable but that it was actual—and that its cumulative consequences remain with us.     

History in Two Dimensions or Three? Working Class Responses to History

Research carried out by the author in North Carolina (2007) aimed to assess how museums might help rebuild identity in communities devastated by economic decline. Interviews, compared with examples from ‘Time and Tide’, Yarmouth, UK, suggested that working class people feel a strong need for history, intense emotional ties to the industrial landscape, and believe that museums can radically change their lives. The evidence suggested that the importance of history to people’s sense of self has been underestimated, particularly in the case of the industrial poor. This paper considers reasons for this underestimation, and suggests that these groups may also have higher and more wide‐ranging expectations of history than intellectuals do. It suggests these ‘emotional’ uses of history, rather than being inferior to academic history, may be richer, and that this ‘three‐dimensional’ experience of history exhibited by the urban poor can enrich the two‐dimensional historical experience of the researcher or museums professional.     

九姓渔民来源探析

九姓渔民是世代浮居于江河船上的一种社会人群,关于其来源,始终是一个不解之谜。本文首先介绍九姓渔民来源的主要传说记载,指出其不可靠性,然后利用文献史料及先行研究,澄清九姓渔民的一些基本问题,并结合民族学的方法,在对九姓渔民与疍民进行比较、分析的基础上,提出九姓渔民源于历史上的疍民这一观点。     

Writing Gender into History and History in Gender: Creating A Nation and Australian Historiography

This paper reflects on the impact of gender in the writing of history by considering the reception of Creating A Nation, the first gendered history of Australia. It argues that while there has emerged an impressive volume of feminist history and with it has come an important acceptance of women's historical experience, the reception of ‘gender’ within the historical profession has paradoxically been ambivalent and ambiguous. This is the case because of an unease about feminist theory and its relevance to history. There also remains a prevailing belief that a gendered neutral historical place exists, to which historians can retreat.     

Cosmopolitan nationalism: ordinary people making sense of diversity†

ABSTRACT. This article challenges the theoretical opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism with empirical research on the ways in which a group of ordinary Australians talked about multiculturalism in the 1980s and again in the 2000s. It shifts attention from identity work to the understanding of day‐to‐day social relations: it finds that they are strongly nationalist and yet also display a cosmopolitan embrace of the benefits of cultural diversity. They draw on the inclusionary resources of Australian nationalism and its history to strengthen their cosmopolitanism and calm their anxieties about living with diversity. Their commonsense conceptualising of Australia's contemporary multicultural society in terms of a mix of individuals rather than an ensemble of groups is crucial to understanding why cultural diversity has been embraced within the framework of the nation.     

‘No more road to walk’: cultures of heritage and leprosariums in Singapore and Malaysia

This paper examines how the state, social activists and former sufferers of leprosy participate in an international heritage discourse and how they construct the history of leprosy in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia. This paper finds both dissonances but also convergences between these different interests. The emergence of such entangled narratives is taking place at a time when the leprosariums are threatened by redevelopment and while social activists are calling for their conservation as heritage sites. The paper finds that both the state and social activists, in different ways, have selectively appropriated the history of leprosy to fit an international heritage discourse. Meanwhile aspects of that history, which are deemed incompatible, are discarded to fall in between the cracks of the discourse. By contrast, the oral history accounts of the leprosariums’ residents, as a possible source for intangible and radical heritage, are ambivalent about the sites’ heritage values. They reveal that while many residents reject the heritage discourse that seeks to save their homes from demolition, others have created a unique culture of heritage that appropriates the international discourse, but also expresses their own needs and perspectives. Cultures of heritage are, however, themselves fluid and liable to change like the memories on which they are based.     

DOES HISTORY MATTER? CHARLES TAYLOR ON THE TRANSCENDENTAL VALIDITY OF SOCIAL IMAGINARIES

Since its appearance in 2007, Charles Taylor's monumental book A Secular Age has received much attention. One of the central issues in the discussions around Taylor's book is the role of history in philosophical argumentation, in particular with regard to normative positions on ultimate affairs. Many critics observe a methodological flaw in using history in philosophical argumentation in that there is an alleged discrepancy between Taylor's historical approach, on the one hand, and his defense of fullness in terms of openness to transcendence, on the other. Since his “faith‐based history” is unwittingly apologetic, it is not only “hard to judge in strictly historical terms,” but it also proves that “when it comes to the most ultimate affairs history may not matter at all.” This paper challenges this verdict by exposing the misunderstanding underlying this interpretation of the role of history in Taylor's narrative. In order to disambiguate the relation between history and philosophy in Taylor's approach, I will raise three questions. First, what is the precise relation between history and ontology, taking into account the ontological validity of what Taylor calls social imaginaries? Second, why does “fullness” get a universal status in his historical narrative? Third, is Taylor's position tenable that the contemporary experience of living within “an immanent frame” allows for an openness to transcendence? In order to answer these questions, I will first compare Peter Gordon's interpretation of the status of social imaginaries with Taylor's position and, on the basis of that comparison, distinguish two definitions of ontology (sections I and II). Subsequently, I try to make it clear that precisely Taylor's emphasis on the historical character of social imaginaries and on their “relaxed” ontological anchorage allows for his claim that “fullness” might have a trans‐historical character (section III). Finally, I would like to show that Taylor's defense of the possibility of an “openness to transcendence”—as a specific mode of fullness—is not couched in “onto‐theological” terms, as suggested by his critics, but that it is the very outcome of taking into account the current historical situation (section IV).     

BEYOND COMPARISON: HISTOIRE CROISÉE AND THE CHALLENGE OF REFLEXIVITY1

This article presents, in a programmatic way, the histoire croisée approach, its methodological implications and its empirical developments. Histoire croisée draws on the debates about comparative history, transfer studies, and connected or shared history that have been carried out in the social sciences in recent years. It invites us to reconsider the interactions between different societies or cultures, erudite disciplines or traditions (more generally, between social and cultural productions). Histoire croisée focuses on empirical intercrossings consubstantial with the object of study, as well as on the operations by which researchers themselves cross scales, categories, and viewpoints. The article first shows how this approach differs from purely comparative or transfer studies. It then develops the principles of pragmatic and reflexive induction as a major methodological principle of histoire croisée. While underlining the need and the methods of a historicization of both the objects and categories of analysis, it calls for a reconsideration of the way history can combine empirical and reflexive concerns into a dynamic and flexible approach.     

Medieval socio-economic historiography in Western Europe: towards an integrated approach

The revival of interest in the economic history of the Middle Ages after World War II has benefitted first to the study of the fourteenth and fifteenth century through the introduction to historical practice of the theories and methods of modern economic science. Secondly the discussion on the early medieval economy launched by Pirenne's posthumous book on Mohammed and Charlemange (1937) resulted in a more dynamic and economic interpretation of the Carolingian renaissance and in a vivid discussion about its end around the year one thousand. On the contrary the centuries between these two periods, i.e. the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although they witnessed the biggest demographic expansion since Neolithic times, the movement of the great clearances and the growth of big cities, have been neglected. The author argues for a renewed interest in the economic history of these centuries through a more integrated approach now that the quantitative approach has passed its zenith and interest in individual people is reviving, especially the common people and their behaviour and habits. Archeology, demography and anthropology can be used for this purpose in the context of a more integrated social history of the period, no longer dominated by historians of law and institutions.     

RACE AND ANIMAL‐BREEDING: A HYBRIDIZED HISTORIOGRAPHY

Because it associates animals with one of the most vital topics in human history, the historiography of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding is at once controversial and inspiring. This article wishes to position this historiography in a more systematic framework than has been done thus far by examining both its merits and failings along with the more and less appropriate ways to write on the subject. The article identifies two main narratives in race–animal‐breeding historiography: the influence narrative and the projection narrative. The first reveals how perceptions of animal breeds and livestock‐breeding practices influenced the rise of racialist and eugenic worldviews. By contrast, the second shows how conceptualizations of human racial segregation contributed to the construction of ideas about the subdivision of domestic animal species into different breeds. The article argues that despite the projection narrative's inherent anthropomorphism, this perspective renders it possible to draft a nonanthropocentric history of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding with a focus on human–animal relations rather than on human society.