Sacred Narratives in Secular Contexts

Although sacred narratives are thought to have lost their numinous aura for secular receivers (readers/listeners), their presence is evident whenever mythology, usually taken to reflect a mode of thinking typical of primeval cultures, and its associated themes are used in fictional works. This study aims at elucidating sacred narratives for people who do not subscribe to their sacredness. It attempts to show (1) that myths reflect a fictional mode of thinking; (2) that meaningful myths map the unconscious drives of secular readers/listeners, enabling them to confront them in terms of their own culture; and (3) that fictional thinking thus operates as a psychical laboratory. I illustrate these claims through myths that feature animosity between parents and children, such as the stories of Oedipus, Isaac, and Jesus.     

‘God was with me everywhere’: women’s embodied practices and everyday experiences of sacred space in Czechia

In this paper, we approach religion and spirituality through the analytic lens of the everyday and examine how ordinary women make sacred space through their embodied, emotional, and spatially varying practices. Our research is grounded in Czechia where about 80% of inhabitants do not declare any religious affiliation and ‘new’ religions are on the rise. We deploy auto-photography as a method that invites participants’ own visual representations and interpretative narrations of their quotidian experiences. Thirty-eight Christian, Buddhist, and non-religious women participated in this study in 2016. Our analysis of photographs and interviews shows that our participants turn places that are not primarily associated with religion or spirituality (such as a kitchen sink or a bus stop) into sacred or spiritual places while at the same time integrate officially sacred spaces (such as churches and meditation centers) into their daily lives through social activities. Thus, we argue that a mutually transformative process is taking place in contemporary Czechia. In this process, religiously affiliated and non-affiliated women alike transform everyday spaces into sacred sites through their embodied and emotional practices that seek calmness, peace, and transcendence. At the same time, women who participate in organized religions remake the sacrality of officially sacred sites through their emphasis on social connections and feelings of communal belonging and shared identity. Our findings underscore that sacred space is not fixed in any one location and its production involves the continual emotional and material investment by ordinary women.     

Medical practices in the french west indies: Master and slave in the 17th and 18th centuries

In these pages, the example of Guadeloupe is used to evaluate the power of coercion exercised by French slavery on the body of the slave afflicted by illness. The prohibition of African healers and their practices aimed to prevent the expression of the slave's body through its own medicine. Conversely, by wishing to forcibly promote their own order, the white masters were able to impose — as far as this was possible — their own vision of the body and of its relationship to nature and to society.     

Marxism and Anticlericalism: The Parti Ouvrier Français and the War against Religion, 1882–1905

This article analyses the relationship between French anticlericalism — one of the strongest forces within that nation's political culture — and the Parti Ouvrier Français — the embodiment of nascent Marxism in France. It reveals the ambiguities of the POF's engagement with religion, which ranged from a violent hostility towards the anticlericals, seen as diverting workers from their struggle against capital, to the development of a ferocious socialist critique of the church, seen as an instrument of capitalist oppression. The Marxists' critique of anticlericalism is awarded particular attention, given the usual association between the French Left and hostility towards a supposedly reactionary church, and it is suggested that the POF developed an "agnostic" strategy that might well have guided its politics safely through the storms of French religious politics. Instead, the Parti Ouvrier all too frequently echoed the standard leftist rhetoric of priest-baiting, and even developed its own socialist variant of anticlericalism. The analysis concludes that the resultant aporias in the Parti Ouvrier's political discourse determined the relative failure of French Marxism's intervention in the long war between clericals and anti-clericals.     

Contentious Realities: Politics of Creating an Image Archive with the Negev Bedouin in Southern Israel

This paper discusses the politics of creating an image archive amidst local Bedouin historicity in Southern Israel. To do so, it summarizes an archival initiative conducted during my fieldwork in Rāha?, Israel between 2011 and 2013, which broadly examined the presence and values of images in their society. I suggest that members compete over historical resources in attempts to augment limited cultural capital in the Negev, making efforts to collect and exhibit ‘shared’ histories contentious. This is particularly the case when local societies consider archival images rare artefacts and thus objects to be owned and protected. This paper concludes that control over archives and image objects, and the past, present, and future ideals to which they are used, is far from uniform amongst peripheral peoples in the Middle East. Visual evidence and the histories and presents it serves are indelibly localized within the prevailing status negotiations and current spatial divisions between Bedouin members in the Negev.     

Rigour,gate keeping and security: A debate with Bellamy and McDonald

I am pleased that Bellamy and McDonald have explained why they used an altered version of solidarism. Had they cited the post-1977 sources, rather than Hedley Bull's 1966 paper, in their article, my reaction would have been different. However, they have responded with further charges. Given space constraints, I respond to some, but not all, of their charges. This rejoinder is divided into five parts. The first defines the English School (ES), while the second discusses security in the ES. The third addresses the claim that I portrayed human security as a threat to the ES and the fourth examines the argument that I regard ES texts as sacred. The final part speculates about what we might learn from this debate.     

French businessmen in the nineteenth-century Mezzogiorno: technical innovation,sociability, networks and negotiation of identities

Abstract

This research examines a group of French entrepreneurs who settled in Naples during the sixty years before the Unification of Italy. It compares the marriage strategies, the professional behaviour, and the relations with the public authorities (the Bourbon government, their own consulate, the local courts, etc.) of these French businessmen with the experience and the life-style of other ethnic-national élites also present in the same period in the Mezzogiorno (Swiss, English, etc.). It highlights the considerable capacity for adaptation shown by the French, their integration in the host society, their collaboration with the indigenous population on a professional level, and their particular capacity to negotiate with the locals even their own status as foreigners. These are the elements that not only make the French case unique in the panorama of entrepreneurial minorities active in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, but also enabled many French entrepreneurs to make an important contribution to the business world in pre-Unification Southern Italy.     

REJOINDER TO FRACCHIA AND LEWONTIN

In their response to my article, Fracchia and Lewontin have not refuted any of my three principal objections to theirs; they have ignored altogether my suggestion that evolutionary game theory illustrates particularly clearly the benefits that neo‐Darwinian concepts and methods can bring to the human behavioral sciences; and they have attributed to me a version of “methodological individualism” to which I do not subscribe. It is, as is usual at this stage of a Kuhnian paradigm shift, too soon to say how much selectionist theory can contribute to the human behavioral sciences in general and comparative sociology in particular. But selectionism's critics achieve nothing by alleging that its proponents are committed to propositions to which they do not in fact assent and deny propositions with which they in fact agree.     

Putting the drum in conundrum: Guadeloupean gwoka,intangible cultural heritage and postnationalism

Since 2004, Felix Cotellon, the president of the centre for traditional music and dance on the island of Guadeloupe, has spearheaded a grass roots campaign to see gwoka inscribed on the UNESCO’s list of Representative Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanities. The move has been surprising, even controversial. Gwoka, a drum-based music and dance, has been used as a symbol of Guadeloupean cultural identity and resistance against French colonialism since the late 1960s. Moreover, Cotellon has had a long association with separatist activism. However, because Guadeloupe remains a French overseas department without a seat at the UN, the petition to add gwoka to the ICH list had to be sponsored by the French state. Following a successful bid, gwoka is now listed as representative of the culture of a French region. In this article, I draw from my ethnographic work as well as my own involvement in the committee that drafted Guadeloupe’s application to trace the complex network of individuals, who are shaping gwoka’s transformation from weapon of national resistance to symbol of humanity’s cultural diversity. I argue that these individuals shape and operate within a ‘zone of awkward engagement’ that allows for the emergence and expression of a postnationalist political subjectivity.     

An Ethnography of Teaching Archaeology

The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it refers to the ethics and logos of my courses in archaeology of the Near East and Israel attended by both Jewish and Arab students whose spatialisation of history and memory is different. The courses cover two periods: a—from prehistory to about 1,000 B.C; b—Christian and Muslim eras. Although these courses put much emphasis on Israel, the major sites of the Near East are well represented. Second, this article delineates some problems in the epistemology of Israeli archaeology, especially the slender consideration given to recent postmodern attitudes. Third, this article maps out an alternative way of teaching archaeology in contested regions such as Israel where different communities have their own mappings of the past. This alternative way provides the students with tools to evaluate the creation of knowledge about the past, and to reflect on their own social and relative positions in Israeli society. Dedicated to my teacher and friend, the late Prof. Moshe Kochavi     

论遗产的价值

肇始于法国的遗产保护运动已有两百余年的历史,而遗产价值却一直是个近乎扑朔迷离的话题。与一般商品相比,遗产有何特殊的价值与使用价值,遗产价值如何衡量及其对对现代社会的意义都有待于思考。从某种意义上看,过去之于现在,是古为今用的过程,亦是遗产价值从神圣走向世俗的关键缘由。无论是遗产保护热、遗产研究热,还是遗产旅游热,都在判断、建构、计算与赋予这四个面相上论证着遗产的价值,进而揭示遗产价值表象下人类集团的精神实践活动。     

Generation as a social variable

ABSTRACT

In this short paper, I start with a case study – about how elementary school children in the early twentieth century in England understood their responsibilities vis-à-vis family (and school). This example provides a window into a past which deeply contrasts with present-day children’s and adults’ understandings and lives. I go on to consider (very briefly, for the field is vast) how ideas about childhood changed in the interwar years and how, since then, children have become locked into educational establishments – as well as into families. It seems to me that in these circumstances we are not used to thinking of children as thoughtful and active members of society. So it is no surprise to me that adults do not look to inter-relations with children as key variables towards understanding the social order. I note that my emphasis is on the UK, since I know most about that!     

2. IN DEFENSE OF PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE: A RESPONSE TO CAROLA DIETZE

This response to Carola Dietze's critique of Provincializing Europe takes up for examination three key expressions or ideas on which the original argument of the book was founded: hyperreal Europe, historicism, and political modernity. I appreciate the spirit of Dietze's engagement with the book, but I show that her critique is based on a degree of misapprehension of these three central ideas. While clarifying the details and the degree of my disagreement with Dietze, I provide my own critique of Dietze's proposal of “equal histories” by arguing that Dietze has not named or explained the unit with respect to which different histories could be considered equal. I also argue that Dietze's proposals about judging societies only by their “own” standards, and basing human dignity on the idea of a “human nature” that could be seen as a “constant,” do not solve the problems she sees with my book and are themselves open to some serious historical and logical criticism.     

Resisting mothers,making gender: teenage girls in the United States and the articulation of femininity

Much of the feminist literature on teenage girls in the west has tended to polarize around the issues of girls' gendered agency and victimization. In contrast, this article explores the ambiguous relationship between gender resistance and compliance. I argue that while girls clearly articulate their own agency, they do so through a reliance on gendered and heterosexual norms, identities, and categories. The article draws on examples from my research with girls in South Carolina, USA, in particular girls' narratives about their mothers. I suggest that girls situate their gendered practices and evaluate femininity in part via evaluations of their mothers' gender, sexual and nurturing practices. Mothers often stand in as representatives of normative and traditional femininity for the girls; yet girls do not realize that they reproduce, rather than resist, aspects of femininity, even as they criticize generational differences and their mothers' versions of feminine and gendered behaviors.     

周文王之法新释

周文王在完成准备灭商事业过程中,曾经推行过一条法令--."有亡荒阅".史学界一直都把这条法令诠释为:"对逃亡的奴隶进行大搜捕",并引用这段史料来说明早期周族的社会性质.本文根据资料分析,"有亡荒阅"搜捕的不仅仅是奴隶,而是各阶层逃亡的人各归其主;而且这条法令在周灭商过程中,起了重大作用,它协调了西伯与各诸候国的关系,最终形成了推翻商朝的合力.     

Seeds: Contracting the Audience in a Play about Science

Abstract

In pursuing the question ‘what can scientists learn from theatre?’ Particularly, ‘what can scientists, as scientists, learn from theatre?’ this paper argues that science lacks a normative framework that theatre is capable of providing. Despite science’s well-earned epistemic reputation, there is adequate reason to question its ethical reputation, particularly at the point where cutting edge scientific technology impacts society. I consider science as operating in four categories: the scientific method; the scientific hypothesis; the scientific experiment; and the scientist’s personal character. The realms of the scientist’s hypothesis and personal character are those where social pressures are reciprocally exerted, where imaginative play mentality and epistemic values are most in evidence. Theatre can examine these realms effectively because it is able to use narratives that appeal not only to logical and social moral judgements but to emotional and visceral responses, so as to situate science in the social context in which the pressures of law, funding, experimentation, society, and personal ambition converge in ‘the game of life’.

This can be seen in the theatrical process known as ‘contracting with the audience’. I point out a spectrum of traditional narrative tropes by which science makes “contracts with” audiences. The paper draws on theories of entrainment and theatrical game-play from Peter Stromberg and Philippe Gaulier, as well as my own practice and research into the process of contracting with the audience, to propose how to reach beyond tradition and to shift normalising contracts “outside the box”. To illustrate my proposition, I examine the play Seeds by Annabel Soutar as directed by Chris Abraham for Crow’s Theatre and Theatre Porte Parole. Seeds follows the controversial court battles of Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser against agricultural-biotech corporation Monsanto, which sued him for patent infringement of its Genetically Modified Organism Roundup Ready Canola. Seeds helps its audience define a public arena for discourse even as it brings to our attention the factors that make this difficult to do, while making an excellent contribution to the genre of ‘Documentary Theatre’. It is a successful contract with the audience that creates a public forum for discussion about contemporary ethical debates in science, thereby merging artistic ambiguity and scientific theory.     

How should we analyse the patriotism of the populist Left: A response to Josep Lobera and Juan Roch

In a recent article in this journal, Josep Lobera and Juan Roch formulate a thoughtful critique of scholarly works on the nationalist dimension of left-wing populist discourses, and, in their analysis on Podemos, they engage especially with my works on the subject. They argue that not only do Podemos supporters express lower levels of national identification than the rest of the Spanish population, but also that, coherently with its electorate, Podemos avoids talking about issues related to Spanish identity and exhibits a non-nationalist or even anti nationalist narrative. Contrarily, in my studies I found that Podemos has made extensive use of nationalist rhetoric. In this article I briefly respond to their critique, further clarifying the findings of my works and explaining why they do not match with the findings of Lobera and Roch. More broadly, I see this response as a chance to contribute to the further development of the recent and vibrant scholarly debate on the Left and its relation to nationalism.     

Religion and Realpolitik

Abstract

Enduring groups that seek to preserve themselves, as sacred communities do, face a structural contradiction between the interests of individual group members and the survival interests of the group. In addressing existential threats, sacred communities rely on a spectrum of coercive and violent actions that resolve this contradiction in favor of solidarity. Despite different histories, this article argues, nationalism and religiosity are most powerfully organized as sacred communities in which sacred violence is extracted as sacrifice from community members. The exception is enduring groups that are able to rely on the protection of other violence practicing groups. The argument rejects functionalist claims that sacrifice guarantees solidarity or survival, since sacrificing groups regularly fail. In a rereading of Durkheim's totem taboo, it is argued that sacred communities cannot survive a permanent loss of sacrificial assent on the part of members. Producing this assent is the work of ritual socialization. The deployment of sacrificial violence on behalf of group survival, though deeply sobering, is best constrained by recognizing how violence holds sacred communities in thrall rather than by denying the links between them.     

A brief and improper geography of queerspaces and sexpublics in Austin,Texas

This article offers ethnographic and autoethnographic vignettes from my research on cultures of public sex in Austin, Texas. It also tracks some of the ways my own racialization as a black queer man shaped the research project. My approach, which includes an experimental – ‘reparative’ – textual style, offers several interlocking registers of analysis. I bring together my informants' nostalgic remembrances of public sex in Austin; the legal and media circulation of queer sex in general, and public sex in particular, as specifically ‘public’ problems requiring surveillance, administration, and management; the impacts of HIV/AIDS; and the rise of the Internet as a means to connect. In this way, I not only aim to archive sites of desire and their transformation, but to also archive the everyday and intimate affects that animate, make sense of, and give meaning to queerspaces and sexpublics in Austin as elsewhere. In its eclectic mixes of voices and styles, as well as reality and fiction, my ethnography does not simply describe material geographies (men have sex in parks and hook up online) or linear timelines (first there was public sex and then there was AIDS), rather, gesturing as it does toward a psychic geography of intensities, remembrances, and longings, it tries to conjure an expansive affective archive into brief life.     

Secularization,sacralization and the reproduction of sacred space: exploring the industrial use of ancestral temples in rural Wenzhou,China

This paper offers a nuanced understanding of different social groups’ roles in the reproduction of sacred spaces. Drawing on the analysis of the transformation of sacred ancestral temples into private factories in rural Wenzhou, China, it problematizes the underlying division of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ actors and their opposite roles. It shows how lineage groups and factory owners, in spite of their distinctive social identities, work together and facilitate the secularization and sacralization of temple landscapes. On the one hand, both groups of people deploy discursive strategies and re-interpret the significance of ancestral temples and economic production, thereby rationalizing and prompting the conversion of temple spaces. On the other hand, traditional sacred temples are constantly reproduced through lineages’ ritual performances and factory owners’ worship and daily protection. As such, the roles of lineage communities and factory owners are diverse and change in specific contexts. This paper foregrounds the multiple and flexible agency of different social actors in relation to the production of the complex sacred–secular entanglement, and reflects on the changing traditional cultural landscape in rural China.