Laughter and Truth in Fiji: What We May Learn from a Joke

This paper examines a series of events which took place in a Fijian village in the late 1980s and which, for the ethnographer, brought into question joking, lying and telling the truth. The analysis suggests that our ideas of what language is good for necessarily inform our understanding of the truth conditions of what is said, from which it follows that truth may be regarded not as an absolute, but as a function of the moral force of language — itself an historical phenomenon that is embedded in, and constituted through, the everyday social relations that we may analyse in terms of gender, kinship, chiefship, and ideas of the person. Laughter emerges as central both to the events described and their analysis. Subtle though they may be, people's ideas of the moral force of language are amenable to investigation and analysis; but for all we may learn from laughter, it ultimately eludes any analysis — an observation that provides the key to its revelatory force.     

铜器与陶范讲了什么

<正>二里头遗址出土了大量铜器,种类包括兵器、工具、容器以及无法确知用途的铜器、铜块、铜片等,还发现了目前中国最早的铸铜作坊、一批与冶铸有关的遗迹,获得大量冶铸遗物,包括陶范、石范、熔炉碎片、铜渣、铜矿石、木炭、小件铜器。经过学者们多年的努力,对二里头铜器的制作技术和生产的研究已经取得许多重要成果,但是,仍旧存在许多难题,比如矿料来源、冶炼技     

Bringing Daesh to Justice: What the International Community Can Do

This paper explores the response of the international community to the atrocities perpetrated by Daesh in Syria and Iraq. The paper focuses on the crime of genocide and the recognition of the crime by several international institutions and states. Within this discourse, we argue that the Christian minorities should be included as victims of the Daesh genocide. The paper finds that the international community failed to respond to the Daesh atrocities adequately and explores the legal options to ensure that the Daesh fighters are brought to justice. The paper considers the legacy of previous responses to mass atrocities and explores their plausibility. The paper further scrutinizes the progress made to date to bring Daesh to justice and considers other options how the criminal justice can be achieved.     

徐甫陈生平考述——兼论"E考据"在家族史研究中的运用

徐甫陈(1865—1917),又名辅臣,字襄甫、襄辅,安徽怀宁人,是中国当代著名历史学家章开沅先生的外祖父.他一生先后在周馥、锡良、赵尔巽、赵尔丰、倪嗣冲等属下任职,历经河工、机器制造、钱粮转运、统兵、铸币、厘金等多项职务.1911年保路运动中,他率领所属的江安巡防营在泸州起义,与刘铭传之孙刘朝望建立川南军政府.通过家族口述与"E考据"、馆藏文献等多重手段结合考证,可以较为完整地还原徐甫陈的一生.家族记忆能够为文献考证提供人物生平、履历、官职等重要线索,而历史文献则可弥补家族记忆之不足,纠正家族记忆中的偏差.中国人重视家族观念,家族史也是大历史的折射."E考据"则为史学参与现实社会生活,提供了更为便捷的路径.     

Sharing What Can Be Sold: Women Haus Maket Vendors in Port Moresby's Settlements

Dominant narratives of the economy, as well as policy discourses in Papua New Guinea (PNG), tend to separate the ‘formal’ from the ‘informal’ economy. Concurrently, there is a development policy emphasis on women's economic empowerment. In urban areas this has meant a policy focus on larger market places as sites where women need support for economic engagement. Within these policy discourses, one activity in urban areas usually relegated to the ‘informal’ economy is small home‐based market stalls, referred to in this paper as haus maket. Located at homes or on nearby roads, haus maket are prolific and available to the public, and as such provide a similar function to public market places as spaces to make money. This paper considers these public yet intimate spaces as sites where vendors, usually women, embody and lead contestations between money and moral value spheres. At a time when the policy emphasis is on the formal economy and larger market places in PNG, why do such small market places persist? The first aim of this paper is to establish the role of haus maket as a site where spheres of value intersect. Rather than being ‘informal’ and peripheral, I seek to foreground its centrality to the economy but also as a site where economic and social moral values conflate. The second aim of the paper is to examine the role of sharing as a form of transaction in its own right distinct from exchange as a transaction between two actors. Haus maket stalls are sites of sharing and of moral action and value where forms of value in the settlement are shaped and negotiated.     

Sex and Sensibility: Margaret Mead's Descriptive and Rhetorical Ethnography

Anthropologists and historians encounter similar problems of analysis when attempting to decipher situations of first contact between Europeans and Oceanians and the resulting long-term historical processes these contacts triggered. Considering intercultural contact situations in Oceania, I stress the need to integrate anthropology and history to analyze such situations effectively.     

No Angst and All Play: Postmodernism and the Humanities

Abstract

There is widespread disagreement about Tocqueville's conception of human nature, some going so far as to say that Tocqueville possessed no unified conception of human nature at all. In this paper, I aim to provide the essential principles of Tocqueville's conception of human nature through an examination of the way in which he describes the power of human circumstances, such as physical environment, social state, and religion, to shape human character by extracting the principles underlying these transformations. There is no “natural man” or man “in the state of nature” but instead a set of psychic operations that reveal a picture of human nature in which human freedom, or the ability to initiate action in pursuit of important objects, lies at the heart of human life.     

Speaking of Books: Bonfire of the Humanities

Book reviewed in this article:
Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton, Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age     

Speaking of Books: Bonfire of the Humanities

Book reviewed in this article:
Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton, Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age     

旅游是什么——基于社会大众视角的反思

关于“旅游是什么”的讨论由来已久,但以往对此问题的研究多采用演绎逻辑或历时分析.通过访谈收集62位社会大众对此问题的回答,并使用内容挖掘分析法提取高频词后,本文发现,旅游的核心构成是时间、空间与体验;旅游的本质动机包括放松、体验、猎奇、享乐、社交与审美.本文又采用扎根理论编码对访谈内容进行分析,发现,不同的消费者建构不同的旅游类型,具体包括享乐型旅游、体验型旅游、生活型旅游和消费型旅游.对文本进一步批判性分析又发现,社会大众建构的旅游是被体制化的,旅游所追求的自由是有限度的自由,体现在旅游时间和空间的限定以及对旅游行为特征的刻板印象.     

Involved Knowing: On the Poetic Epistemology of the Humanities

The humanities represent a type of knowledge distinct from, and yet encompassing, scientific knowledge. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics in the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, as well as on the Latin rhetorical tradition and on Greek paideia, this essay presents humanities knowledge as “involved knowing.” Science, in principle, abstracts from the subjective, psychological conditions of knowing, including its emotional and willful determinants, as introducing personal biases, and it attempts also to neutralize historical and cultural contingencies. Humanities knowledge, in contrast, focuses attention on precisely these subjective and historical factors as intrinsic to any knowledge in its full human purport. In particular, poetry, which historically is the matrix of knowledge in all fields, including science, deliberately explores and amply expresses these specifically human registers of significance. The poetic underpinnings of knowledge actually remain crucial to human knowing and key to interpreting its significance in all domains, including the whole range of scientific fields, throughout the course of its development and not least in the modern age so dominated by science and technology.     

Philosophy,Theology, and the Humanities

Summary

This paper addresses the relation between the natural sciences and the humanities with reference to the work of Ian Hunter. It discusses the history of, role of philosophy in, and value of the humanities; the question of historicism; the issue of critique; and the role of theology in the humanities, all matters raised by Hunter's work. The paper suggests that a reinvented humanities might pay more attention to philosophy and the sciences, including theology. It asks how far such a perspective is compatible with Ian Hunter's pioneering work on the humanities and intellectual history. The paper concludes that a middle position, one between Hunter's historicising and an emphasis on naturalistic constraints, may be possible.