Forty Years of Ming and Qing Research Following China’s Opening Up and Economic Reform

Increasingly, Chinese history is becoming a more significant component of academic international history. This is particularly true in light of the Chinese economic reform, whereby historical narrative has been able to go beyond more traditional standards of periodization, allowing, for example, Ming and Qing-era historical research to grow and develop qualitatively as well as quantitatively. In this sense, the field has greatly benefitted from the “ideological liberation” which followed in wake of the reform. However in a broader sense, this development is also closely related with academic exchange. Communications among domestic and international scholars of Ming and Qing history, as well as of international history, has normalized in the years following the reforms. This has not only led to a considerable influx of “overseas” historical research to China’s mainland, but has also allowed for a larger-scale access to and citation of Chinese historical research by these overseas scholars. Domestic and international scholars have, from this, established much closer academic relations with one another. This tremendous progress made within the field Ming and Qing-era historical research during the past forty years was established upon the foundation of Chinese scholars’ assiduous efforts as well as their increasingly frequent exchanges with international scholars and academics.     

Construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history and the turning of modern history

The construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history has combined the indigenization of Western historiography and the modernization of traditional Chinese historiography, which reflects the characteristic of a change towards modern historiography. The academic sources of Yan’s view on social history include some Western thoughts such as Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinist theory, Edward Jenks’ patriarchal clan system theory, John Seeley’s political historiography, etc.; and also many indigenous sources such as Yang Zhu’s self benefit, Mozi’s selfless love, Buddhist views on mood, etc.     

‘Hidden from view’?: an analysis of the integration of women’s history and women’s voices into Australia’s social history exhibitions

ABSTRACT

‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big picture history to intimate and deeply personal stories that recast our understanding of the past in ways that are inclusive of gendered experiences. We investigate the use of the curatorial voice as reflected in Willis’ work, aligning it with the notion of curatorial activism, before exploring the changing curatorial practices that expanded the potential for an interpretive approach that incorporated the voice of the subjects themselves as a central component in the telling of history. We then analyse the impact of these strategies on traditional understandings of the past through three exhibitions developed by Melbourne Museum over 30 years: The Story of Victoria, a successor exhibition The Melbourne Story, and their Great War centenary exhibition, WWI: Love & Sorrow.     

On the Side of Light: Performing Morality at Rwanda’s Genocide Memorials

Abstract

In Rwanda, numerous memorials have arisen to remember the 1994 genocide and its victims. This paper considers the effect of the national genocide memorials on Western tourist visitors, in the context of research on ‘dark tourism’ and Western attitudes toward death and the dead. It draws on the idea that, in a Western context, viewing the remains of violent death can be a kind of ‘soft murder’, and on the concept that the act of witnessing violence creates a community of witnesses implicated in that violence. Western visitors to Rwandan genocide memorials therefore form a community, and their responses are guided by a set of community rules regarding behaviour and experiences during and after the visit. These rules, this paper argues, are rooted in pressures to assert oneself as a properly moral individual through performing morality in a morally ambiguous setting.     

Eric Bogle’s No Man’s Land and the grave of Willie McBride at the Somme

ABSTRACT

Eric Bogle wrote No Man’s Land in 1975. When it was released as The Green Fields of France by Davey Arthur and the Fureys in 1979 the song topped the Irish charts, while as far away as Australia it was declared one ‘of the most striking musical essays yet written on the futility of war.’ Yet No Man’s Land has been associated with controversy too: branded a rebel song in Ulster during The Troubles, singled out by Tony Blair as a ‘peace anthem’ and prelude to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and controversially chosen by the Royal British Legion for the Poppy Day appeal in 2014. In addition to exploring the ‘complex relations between cultural and political history’ in Ireland, this article also looks at the making of the documentary film ‘Eric Bogle: Return to No Man’s Land’ (by Dan Frodsham) in which Bogle returned to the grave of Willie McBride on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme to recite his poem to the now famous Inniskilling. To Bogle’s surprise the grave had become a pilgrimage site for this, an entirely fictional, Irish martyr created then immortalized in his own composition written four decades earlier.     

Sichuan’s promotion of education and activitiesof felling temple trees in the late Qing Dynasty

During Sichuan’s promotion of education in the late Qing Dynasty, trees in the domain of Buddhist or Daoist temples, which were part of temples’ property, had been felled across the province. The profits gained were used to repair or build schools as well as to fund their management. In different regions, the characteristics and intentions of the felling activities differed. Meanwhile, such fever gave rise to corrupt practices of deceitfully seeking profits which in turn caused numerous disputes and lawsuits, reflecting the confrontation provoked between the state and the people as well as different communities over tradition, ritual, and belief. The investigations of felling temple trees could enrich the understanding of provincial promotion for education in the late Qing period, and that of the social and cultural changes taking place in rural communities in modern times.     

Revising history: Elvira Giallanella’s Umanità and the editing of gender

A mix of fantasy, history, spirituality, and political engagement, Elvira Giallanella’s film, Umanità (1920), is a sort of Carrollian ‘through the looking glass’ in which reality resembles itself but upside-down. In the immediate aftermath of WWI, Giallanella’s film – a revision of Vittorio Emanuele Bravetta’s 1916 children’s story from 1916. children’s story – both reflects and critiques gender roles that had been temporarily fissured by the war itself. A feminist position transpires in the juxtaposition of the pre-war male-authored text with the postwar female-directed film, further revised by men. An invaluable historical source, Umanità not only offers insight into a woman’s and a feminist’s perspective on the Great War and its aftermath but also sheds light on the moral, political, and philosophical atmosphere of destabilization at the time. Coming full circle, Umanità suffered from the very same revisions by the re-established postwar patriarchy, and by the end of the 1920s, cinema itself had been reclaimed as male territory, leaving the film lost amongst the debris. Umanità’s resurfacing in 2007 allows us to reflect on the process of history-making in itself: what is omitted, what is included, and more importantly whose voices will be validated enough to be heard along the way. This instance – one amongst several – can serve as an example of how history is indeed a continuous process made up of (re)visions, and never a singular, univocal one.     

Counter-lineages within the history of anthropology: On disciplinary ancestors’ activism

Anthropologists frequently conceive of their disciplinary history in terms of intellectual lineages linked to ‘schools’ of anthropological theory. This article considers the importance of what might be called ‘counter-lineages’ – intellectual lineages which have tended to be eclipsed from our intellectual history due to interference by the secret state. One such significant counter-lineage is found in the lives and works of American anti-fascist anthropologists during the mid-20th century. During World War II, anthropologists’ findings had tended to support racial equality and anti-fascism. This motivated many to contribute to the war effort. During the post-war period, however, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and loyalty committees actively targeted anthropologists speaking out against racism in America. The history of how these counter-lineages of public anthropologists eventually ended up marginalized within the discipline is easily forgotten. However, their study can help to inform anthropologists as we face our current crises.     

‘Germany’s salvation’: Carl Schmitt’s teleological history of the Second Reich

Although Schmitt’s enthusiastic conversion to National Socialism is well known, his short history of the German Kaiserreich, published in 1934, remains neglected in Anglophone scholarship. This article contextualizes Schmitt’s narrative through the National Socialist conception of history and its accompanying teleology leading to the formation of the Third Reich. By placing Schmitt’s historical text in conversation with his earlier Staat, Bewegung, Volk, this article argues that Schmitt appropriated the history of the Kaiserreich to construct liberalism as a social pathology which could only be cured through the ‘concrete state theory’ he outlined in Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Furthermore, this article argues that Schmitt’s history relied heavily on propagandistic clichés of the Third Reich and thereby functioned as a rhetorical legitimation of Hitler’s rise to power.     

On the Centrality of Dionysus in Nietzsche’s Philosophy

Despite the widespread influence of Nietzsche’s iconoclastic works on twentieth-century intellectual and literary culture, there has been a surprising lack of academic focus on the parallels between his philosophical trajectory and the anthropological literature on the mysterious god Dionysus. The striking correlations between ancient Dionysian worship with Nietzsche’s oeuvre revalorise the celebration of ecstasy. In Twilight of the Idols, he states that the Dionysian is “beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming.” By elucidating some of the mysteries surrounding this enigmatic god, this article aims to re-establish the central importance of Dionysus in Nietzsche’s work, and to suggest that if we are to understand Nietzsche at all, we must first undertake an anthropological reading of Dionysus.     

The challenge of the spaceship: Arthur C. Clarke and the history of the future, 1930–1970

Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 essay on ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship’ was one of the founding manifestoes of the Space Age, and helped to establish him as the West’s leading techno-prophet. Restating his ideas in subsequent factual and fictional works, Clarke successfully propagated the belief that man’s destiny lay in space and that the process was already underway. On the surface Clarke’s oeuvre offers a classic astrofuturist model of progress as technology-driven, but on closer examination it also incorporates a more pessimistic, historically based strand of philosophy, British rather than American. This essay traces the genesis of Clarke’s early work and the influence upon him of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and the moral philosophers Olaf Stapledon and C.S. Lewis. Toynbee was essentially a Christian pessimist who believed that western civilization was on the way out; his long historical perspectives were an important source of inspiration for Clarke, leading him to a cyclical rather than a simply progressive model of history which contemplated both the beginning and the end of civilizations. The concerns of Stapledon and Lewis with grand narratives of decline and redemption were also influences on Clarke. All this needs to be understood in relation to both the European experience of World War I and to the coming of the atomic bomb, the latter a profound influence on Clarke’s generation. Such perspectives gave European astroculture a more modulated vision of the human future in space than the technologically based astrofuturism which dominated in the USA.