Concrete and non-concrete: exploring the contemporary authenticity of historic replicas through an ethnographic study of the St John’s Cross replica,Iona

ABSTRACT

What do we actually know about how replicas of historical objects and monuments ‘work’ in heritage contexts, in particular their authenticity, cultural significance and intangible qualities? In this article we examine this question drawing on ethnographic research surrounding the 1970 concrete replica of the eighth-century St John’s Cross on Iona, Scotland. Challenging traditional precepts that seek authenticity in qualities intrinsic to original historic objects, we show how replicas can acquire authenticity and ‘pastness’, linked to materiality, craft practices, creativity, and place. We argue that their authenticity is founded on the networks of relationships between people, places and things that they come to embody, as well as their dynamic material qualities. The cultural biographies of replicas, and the ‘felt relationships’ associated with them, play a key role in the generation and negotiation of authenticity, while at the same time informing the authenticity and value of their historic counterparts through the ‘composite biographies’ produced. As things in their own right, replicas can ‘work’ for us if we let them, particularly if clues are available about their makers’ passion, creativity and craft.     

Collective Biography and Europe’s Cultural Legacy

From the 1990s onwards there has been growing interest in the study of biography. As opposed to those who are skeptical of the biographical method, we defend the historiographical importance of collective biographies by contrasting them with biographical collections. By discussing the historical background of biography as a branch of history, and by focusing on the aims, methodology and outcomes of collective biographies, we attempt to show how they both extend and deepen our concept of historical research.     

Retrieving the Cultural Biography of a Gun

Abstract

The meanings of objects change as the people with whom they are associated change. Over the course of an artefact’s existence, the sum of these meanings constitutes a cultural biography, a life-story of the item. This is the case with objects associated with conflict, just as with those from other contexts; in this case, cultural biographies can have sharply contrasting phases. However, identifying the object in each of its changing relationships with people can be problematic. In the case of a World War I German 150 mm gun, that is one of the few of its type remaining in the world, this has been achieved by comparison of detailed characteristics, markings, and battle damage with historical photographs and surviving documentation. By these means, its role in the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, and after its capture by the Australian Corps, can be pieced together. The biography of such a gun can include manufacturing technology, a means of destruction, a valued war trophy, a public exhibit, a neglected relic, a source of scrap metal, a museum showpiece, and even a children’s plaything, but the gun investigated here was more fortunate. It is preserved in a museum, although its relationship to people could continue to change.     

论焦竑《献征录》的史料价值

《献征录》是明代焦竑编纂的一部记载本朝人物的传记史书,所收人物跨度之大,数量之多,史无前例。该书不仅是《明史》、《国榷》等文献的重要史源之一,而且在纠谬、补阙、辑佚其他明史文献方面也具有可贵的史料价值。但作为一部假一人之力而完成的宏大史著,该书也存在体例不一、内容讹误、传记重复、引文出处不明等不足。     

文本话语与行为规范:西藏宗教人物传记的史学史意义

本文主要从历史人类学的角度分析西藏历史上曾经大量著述的历史文本,即宗教人物传记。在这类传记中,西藏传统上有其特殊的分类体系和传统写作样本。传记的形式、流传的方式也与世界上任何一个地方的传记都有所不同。在西藏,传记在藏传佛教中被看作属于一种文本"传规"(lung-rgyun),具有特别的含义。传记传流方式对于藏族史学影响也很大,以至于传记成为藏族史学著作中数量最多的文本。对于西藏宗教传记的文化特点、历史演变及其影响加以全方位的研究,有助于我们对藏族文化的更深层次的认识。     

Antipodeans Abroad: Trends and Issues in the Writing of New Zealand Mission History

There has been a paucity of reflective and contextual analysis of New Zealand's historical involvement in the international missionary movement. This article suggests that existing literature falls into four categories: denominational/organizational histories; biographies and personal narratives; unpublished university theses; and a small body of more reflective and contextual works. Historical analysis since 1990 reflects wider historical discourses, rather than being the specific product of mission history. Valuable analysis has focused on women's involvement, culture contact, and the relationship between New Zealand missions, European colonialism and indigenous nationalist movements. Yet the theological nature of missionary involvement has been less extensively understood, obscuring the nuanced nature of things like missionary motivation and the relationship with colonialism. A lacuna still exists with respect to: a comprehensive and comparative analysis of post‐1945 missionary involvement; micro and macro‐historical analysis of missionary support; the gendered nature of missionary support; and the role of children and young people in missionary structures and discourse.     

Wheels of Time: Some Aspects of Entanglement Theory and the Secondary Products Revolution

This paper responds to that aspect of Andrew Sherratt??s writings that argued for building specifically archaeological theory. In describing a theory of entanglement, I have focused on the archaeological sensitivity to the complexities and practical interlacings of material things. The theory argues that human?Cthing entanglement comes about as a result of the dialectic between dependence (the reliance of humans and things on each other) and dependency (a constraining and limiting need of humans for things). Andrew??s discussion of the role of the wheel in his Secondary Products Revolution is a good example of how humans and things have become entangled so that, over the long term, we have been channeled down particular evolutionary pathways.     

Aerostatic spacing: on things becoming lighter than air

The development of practical aerostatic or lighter than air balloon flight in 1783 marked the emergence of a new way of being and becoming mobile, one that also involved an important technical and experiential transformation in earth–atmosphere relations. This paper narrates an account of the distinctive kinds of spaces of which aerostatic flight is generative. At the centre of this account is the claim that the affective materiality of aerostatic flight is simultaneously processual and possessing of what political theorist Jane Bennett calls 'thing-power'. In developing this claim, the paper draws from a range of historical and contemporary accounts of aerostatic flight in order to elaborate upon three aspects of the spaces of things becoming aerostatic: the distinctive kinds of sensing of which aerostatic flight is generative; the differential qualities of affectivity in which the movement and materiality of aerostatic things participates; and the kinds of vertiginous events in which the felt movement – actual or anticipated – of aerostatic things is implicated. The paper concludes by speculating upon how attending to the distinctive and sometimes disquieting materiality of aerostatic things might contribute to geographical engagements with the spaces of air and atmosphere.     

The Neoconservatives and the Pope: Misreading John Paul II in George Weigel's Biographies

With the recent release of his autobiographical narrative of the composition of the papal biography, Witness to Hope, prominent Catholic neoconservative George Weigel has invited a reexamination of the presentation of John Paul II to the world by Catholic neoconservatives. In his biographies, George Weigel crafts an often misleading portrait of Pope John Paul II as the pope of American liberalism and neoconservativism. Ironically, at the same time, the story of Weigel's biographies contains the story of the rise and fall of the Catholic neoconservative movement in America.     

Nakomaha: a Counter‐Colonial Life and its Contexts. Anthropological Approaches to Biography

ABSTRACT In the anthropology of Melanesia, local life‐histories or biographies have all too often been presented in a non‐problematic, acritical manner. Instead of repeating this hide‐bound style in an unthinking manner, I attempt to be more ethnographically sensitive to local realities and to open up the genre by presenting information about a ni‐Vanuatu leader in a deliberately achronic style. By providing relevant data in terms of their sources, I put up front the biases and blindspots of each source, to enable easier assessment of their worth and to forestall premature closure. In the process I examine the conflictive dialogue between locals and expatriate officials in Vanuatu between the 1940s and 1960s. The final aim is that the open‐ended approach adopted here makes the resulting text more accessible to indigenous readers, who might wish to produce their own version of the subject's life‐history. Writing this kind of biography can thus be viewed as a further attempt towards decolonizing the anthropology of former colonial states.     

Fire and Memory: Transforming Place using Fire at Henge Monuments

Henges — Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age earthwork monuments — often have long life-histories of reuse and rebuilding over generations. At some sites, fire-lighting and the deposition of fire-altered materials played a significant role in certain phases of the use of the henge. This article reviews the evidence for fire in the life-histories of four henges in Scotland, and interprets the various ways in which fire was employed at different times and at different sites. It argues that fire had a transformational effect, not only upon monuments and materials, but it also characterized and transformed people’s experiences and memories of particular sites, thus creating links between monumental sites and quotidian experience during the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Scotland.     

‘Circulating commodities’: reflections on the movement and meaning of shells and stories in North Australia and Eastern Indonesia1

As Victor Turner (1974) so eloquently argues, symbols have the capacity to move people, in both emotional and physical terms. In this article, I explore the power of certain kinds of symbols, namely shells (trochus shell, Tectus niloticus) and stories, to do just this. Stories, I argue, construct pathways for the movement of people and objects. Shells too also evoke (e)motion through their ability to signify specific spheres of exchange and the relationships, identities and values which circulate within these domains. Importantly, stories and shells not only suggest movement but are themselves entities which are moved between differently valued social and political contexts. As things which are defined in terms of their high exchangeability quotient, shells and stories, at certain times in their biographies, correspond to Appadurai's (1986) notion of a commodity. Through an exploration of the commodity status and circulation of both shells and stories within the broad ethnographic context of Maluku Tenggara, Indonesia, I aim to challenge some of the commonly held beliefs and stories which are transmitted via the Australian media and along other lines of communication about the so-called ‘problem’ of illegal Indonesian fishermen in north Australian waters.     

People,plants and performance: On actor network theory and the material pleasures of the private garden

Actor network theory has received considerable attention within geography. In this paper I suggest that geographers have looked at these ideas in a particular way and that this can be productively complemented by an excursion into the contemporary private garden. Through exploring the ways in which people and plants live together there, some geographical criticisms of a defined actor network theory no longer seem to necessarily apply to a more diffuse set of actor network ideas. Furthermore, these ideas can also provide a productive means of engaging practically with the material presence of things, insofar as this materiality is important in the constitution of human cultural experience.     

两晋史官制度与杂传的兴盛

较之魏晋六朝的其它时期,两晋杂传的创作十分兴盛。著作郎为“清官”的性质,使其受到贵族与寒族士人的共同青睐。特别是两晋“著作郎始到职,必撰名臣传一人”的史官制度,为寒微士人凭借文史著述之才进入仕途打开了一个门径,激发了寒士们对人物别传的创作热情,由此导致了两晋杂传的大量涌现。     

Imagining Palestinian Archaeologies: A Sampler

As three of the articles in this collection demonstrate, one central axis of the Zionist archaeological project is the absolute necessity of diminishing, and ultimately erasing, the importance and existence of aspects of “the archaeological record” that pertain to non-Jewish presences in Palestine, particularly and especially Islamic civilizations and the long-term presence of an indigenous non-Jewish Palestinian population. In this introduction, I focus, however, upon Zionist archaeology’s rearticulation of Jewish identity in nationalist form, an operation that has entailed the elaboration of a consistently simplified, unidimensional, or narrowly channeled interpretive version of Jewish history and Jewish identity in Palestine over time. Through several pointed queries, I suggest alternative interpretations of one element of the Zionist archaeological narrative that in turn could lead to other ways of thinking about the long-term presence of Jewish people in Palestine.     

Anthropology in the UK: Never Mind the Biographies,Here's the Reflexive Symbols

Focusing on the concept of the intellectual biography, I explore the relational and symbolic importance of life histories for the reflexive history of anthropology. Legacies of questioning disciplinary self-awareness exist for fieldwork, data analysis, writing up, and academic social networks. The intellectual biography, as a newly developing self-conscious genre, is becoming central to the way in which the discipline writes its own history. This article situates five recent biographies of “British” anthropologists into a theoretical, methodological, and intellectual landscape that encompasses the international development of a century of social anthropology in the United Kingdom.     

Building Identities: The Architecture of the Persona

We often approach architecture to deal with people’s social identities, as these structures are often the products of communal efforts or institutionalized orders. Nonetheless, we sometimes observe a discrepancy in the architectural homogeneity and the diversity of personalized practices brought forth by architecture. Hence, the built environment possesses often unexplored possibilities to prospect personal identities and biographies. In this paper I intend to scrutinize the role of built structures in the architecture of the persona. From the vantage point of Singularized Archaeology I aim at disentangling a quintessential Icelandic passageway house from the seventeenth century. Doing so, I turn the focus away from the standard debate on form and function of architectural design towards the variety of interpretive possibilities incorporated in the archaeological structures themselves, the building materials, the building processes as well as the relationality of the material assemblages that compose the architecture.     

Building Bundles,Building Memories: Processes of Remembering in Adena-Hopewell Societies of Eastern North America

Over the past 20 years, archaeologists have grown increasingly interested in exploring the relationships between humans and things. In part, this focus on materiality has been fueled by the integration of modern philosophical perspectives and considerations of non-Western ontologies and the New Materialisms. In North America, much emphasis has been placed on exploring the relational aspects of American Indian ontologies in the past and present. In this article, I build upon these perspectives by integrating memory as an important infrastructure through which these relationships are cast and maintained. I refer to these memory-based practices as processes of remembering. I argue that identifying these discursive memory processes provides an opportunity to refine how we understand objects like bundles and the social process of bundling—one way archaeologists have framed complex human/thing relationships. I use an Adena-Hopewell burial mound from the Middle Woodland period in Eastern North America (ca. 200 BCE–CE 500) as a case study to illustrate how societies during this era were, at least in part, organized and sustained through the rituals involved in revising bundles of ancestors, objects, and memories of human action. I argue that bundling assemblages of the past managed social dissonance by stabilizing or transforming perceptions of kinship in social coalitions.     

Suger's advice

There exist two biographies of Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis from 1081 to 1151: one by O. Cartellieri (1898) and the other by Marcel Aubert (1950). Since their starting point seems to be outdated, a new biography of Suger is a desideratum. The purpose of this article is to contribute to such a new biography by providing a reinterpretation of Suger's Life of King Louis VI, the Vita Ludovici Grossi.