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 MODERN TEMPORALITIES: TOWARD A CRITICAL HISTORY OF BREAKS IN TIME

This is an exceptionally sophisticated and wide‐ranging book on historical time, the construction of the past, present, and future, and the problem of periodization. Its major thesis is that temporal divisions of history are produced by social actors, including historians, who break up time from their distinct temporal positions. The book inquires about the theoretical underpinning and historical constitution of temporal breaks: the premises sustaining notions of pastness, presentness, and futurity; the relations constructed by these notions between historiography and other fields of knowledge; the specific articulation of shifting and mutually competing temporalities both within and beyond European history; and the political implications of temporal divisions. Throughout the book the breaking up of time is studied as a fundamental political operation. To engage with temporal breaks, the authors contend, is to engage with the historian's contemporary, to negotiate borders that act upon the present, including the border that safeguards the presumed autonomy of the time of history‐writing. Focusing especially on the temporality of European modernity, the book invites reflection on the politics of time as articulated through categories of historical totalization imposed on modernity's others. But it also suggests that this imposition gave rise to acts of resistance indicating how historical time defies the analytical categories through which social actors seek to organize and control it. This dialectic of imposition and defiance is made evident through the comparative study of temporal concepts that replace one another, compete with one another in certain historical settings without any of them constituting a final historical representation. It is also traced in the continuing significance of suppressed or “failed” temporalities, which are nonetheless still capable of challenging and qualifying our insights into historical time. The book's key contribution lies precisely in the attempt to intensify this challenge by translating the contradictory constitution of modern temporality into a language of self‐critique.     

TOWARD A UNIFICATION OF CONCEPTS AND TERMS USED IN INTEGRAL LANDSCAPE INVESTIGATIONS

A discussion of the concepts and terms of landscape research developed and applied for more than a decade at the field stations of the Institute of Geography of Siberia and the Far East (Irkutsk). The key concepts are geosystems, which represent the sphere of interaction between animate and inanimate nature; ecosystems, which focus on the biotic aspect of geosystems. Geosystems are said to fall within the sphere of interest of the landscape geographer, while ecosystems are viewed as the study objects of ecology, a biological discipline. Although the two approaches are said to be distinctive, the interests of geographers and ecologists overlap, and a common terminology for both disciplines is proposed.     

TOWARD A NEW VIEW OF HISTORY AND PROCESS AT CRYSTAL RIVER (8CI1)

Abstract

The Crystal River site (8CI1), located on Florida’s westcentral Gulf Coast, has long been counted among the most impressive yet inscrutable archaeological sites in the eastern United States. Excavations by C. B. Moore in the early twentieth century produced a number of artifacts with apparent Hopewellian affiliations, thus indicating an occupation during the Middle Woodland period. However, other features of the site—particularly the presence of flat-topped mounds and negative-painted pottery—suggested a later (Mississippian) date. This apparent conflict cast a cloud of confusion over the site, exacerbated by the later discovery of three purported limestone stelae. We present new insights into Crystal River based partly on new field work, including detailed topographic mapping, geophysical survey, and limited small-diameter coring. These field investigations, when combined with radiocarbon dates and the data gleaned from previous investigations, allow us to make new inferences regarding the chronology of settlement and mound construction at Crystal River. Specifically, we posit, based on these data, a greater degree of planning, structure, and complexity to the site from its founding, possibly as early as cal. 300 B.C. Further, these early practices impact the overarching historical trajectory of the site, guiding subsequent practices over a long time span, likely as late as cal A.D. 600.     

ON A BIOLOGICAL-GEOGRAPHIC CONCEPTION OF ETHNIC HISTORY

A critique of L. N. Gumilev's model of ethnic development, treating mankind largely as a biological species and attributing the origins and disappearance of ethnic communities to biological factors, including a psychic innate drive that is presented as the key element in the generation of new ethnic entities. The author insists that ethnic communities are social, rather than biological categories, and that, in accordance with historical materialism, social, rather than biological, aspects are decisive in all forms of social life. Gumilev's view that interethnic mixing tends to undermine the viability of ethnic communities is also disputed. The author asserts that interethnic marriage is a positive trend, noting that interethnic families in the Soviet Union rose from 10 percent in 1959 to 13.5 in 1970.     

A NOT SO PERFECT PEACE: A HISTORY OF CONFLICT ON IFALUK

Many accounts of the Caroline Islands have called the people in them non-violent. This paper uses early ethnographies, more recent ethnohistories, and new recollections on the part of the people of Ifaluk to reconstruct the extent of conflict on Caroline Islands and between them. Culture on Ifaluk in precontact times, and even in recent times, was violent in many respects. The evidence presented here contradicts several earlier arguments, among them: that the balance in the tribute relationship with Yap favoured outer islanders; that the balance in the tribute relationship between Ifaluk chiefs and commoners favoured commoners; and that sorcery and aggression were rare or absent on Ifaluk. Legends of wars between Ifaluk and other islands are also retold.     

HISTORY AND THE MANIFEST IMAGE: HAYDEN WHITE AS A PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY1

To claim that Hayden White has yet to be read seriously as a philosopher of history might seem false on the face of it. But do tropes and the rest provide any epistemic rationale for differing representations of historical events found in histories? As an explanation of White's influence on philosophy of history, such a proffered emphasis only generates a puzzle with regard to taking White seriously, and not an answer to the question of why his efforts should be worthy of any philosophical attention at all. For what makes his emphasis on narrative structure and its associated tropes of philosophical relevance? What, it may well be asked, did (or could) any theory that draws its categories from a stock provided by literary criticism contribute to explicating problems with regard to the warranting of claims about knowledge, explanation, or causation that represent those concerns that philosophy typically brings to this field? Robert Doran's anthologizing of previously uncollected pieces, ranging as they do over a literal half‐century of White's published work, offers an opportunity to identify explicitly those philosophical themes and arguments that regularly and prominently feature there. Moreover, White's essays in this volume demonstrate a credible knowledge of and interest in mainstream analytic philosophers of his era and also reveal White as deeply influenced by or well acquainted with other important philosophers of history. White thus invites a reading of his work as philosophy, and this volume presents the opportunity for accepting it as such.     

地理学思想史指要——杰弗里·马丁《所有可能的世界:地理学思想史》评介

地理学思想史研究对地理学学科发展具有重要意义.当前国内对地理学思想史的研究比较缺乏.地理学思想史的任务并不仅仅是讲述地理思想和知识的产生、形成和演变过程,而且要通过这一过程达到对地理学性质的把握和准确认识.通过地理学思想史研究可以把握地理学的要旨:地球表面的差异性是地理学的关键,而对此进行描述和解释是地理研究的主要内容.地理学思想史有两个大的发展阶段:古典时期和近现代时期.在面临坚持传统与积极创新的抉择时,地理学家应该多从思想史中吸收和借鉴,并避免掉入二元论的语义陷阱.     

OBJECTS OF HISTORY: THE PAST MATERIALIZED1

What is the role of material culture in understanding the past? This review essay explores two principal approaches—the history of museums and antiquities and environmental history—to reflect on their shared investment in historical materialism. It reviews Timothy LeCain's The Matter of History and Peter Miller's History and Its Objects, discussing their perspectives on objects and the writing of history. One important part of this history concerns the relationship of academic historians to the idea of a history museum, curatorial practices, and public history. What kinds of history can we do in a museum, with things, that might not occur without the presence of objects? Why were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to encourage a close relationship between historical research and the history museum largely abandoned in favor of a document-driven approach? The second dimension of current interest in historical materialism concerns new approaches to environmental history. It draws inspiration from Deep History as well as recent work in archaeology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) to argue for a more integrated history of humans and nature that demonstrates how things have made us. The history of successive efforts to remake the environment in different parts of the world and their consequences offers crucial object lessons in how humans have responded to nature's own creativity. Both approaches to historical materialism highlight the virtues of a more interdisciplinary approach to historical scholarship, in the museum or in the field, but most important, in our own sensibilities about what it means to think historically with artifacts and to treat them as compelling evidence of a shared history of humanity and nature.     

THE TEETH OF TIME: PIERRE HADOT ON MEANING AND MISUNDERSTANDING IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS1

The French philosopher and intellectual historian Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) is known primarily for his conception of philosophy as spiritual exercise, which was an essential reference for the later Foucault. An aspect of his work that has received less attention is a set of methodological reflections on intellectual history and on the relationship between philosophy and history. Hadot was trained initially as a philosopher and was interested in existentialism as well as in the convergence between philosophy and poetry. Yet he chose to become a historian of philosophy and produced extensive philological work on neo‐Platonism and ancient philosophy in general. He found a philosophical rationale for this shift in his encounter with Wittgenstein's philosophy in the mid‐1950s (Hadot was one of Wittgenstein's earliest French readers and interpreters). For Hadot, ancient philosophy must be understood as a series of language games, and each language game must be situated within the concrete conditions in which it happened. The reference to Wittgenstein therefore supports a strongly contextualist and historicist stance. It also supports its exact opposite: presentist appropriations of ancient texts are entirely legitimate, and they are the only way ancient philosophy can be existentially meaningful to us. Hadot addresses the contradiction by embracing it fully and claiming that his own practice aims at a coincidence of opposites (a concept borrowed from the Heraclitean tradition). For Hadot the fullest and truest way of doing philosophy is to be a philosopher and a historian at the same time.     

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF POPULAR CULTURE

The most common definitions of popular culture suffer from a presentist bias and cannot be applied to pre‐industrial and pre‐capitalist societies. A survey reveals serious conceptual difficulties as well. We may, however, gain insight in two ways. 1) By moving from a Marxist model (economic/class/production) to a more Weberian approach (societal/status/consumption). 2) By looking to Bourdieu's “cultural capital” and Danto's and Dickie's “Institutional Theory of Art,” and defining popular culture as “unauthorized culture.”     

中国特色考古学解读:百年中国考古学史之思考

目 次 一 考古学与文献史学的结合 二 形成于民族存亡关头的中国考古学 三 以马克思主义为指导的中国考古学 四 佐证中华文明国家认同与家国同构文化基因 习近平总书记2020年9月28日在十九届中央政治局第二十三次集体学习时的讲话提出"建设中国特色、中国风格、中国气派的考古学,更好认识源远流长、博大精深的中华文明",这是习近平总书记给中国考古工作者提出的时代使命、科学使命.作为考古工作者,我认为,必须深刻、全面地学习领会习近平总书记向中国考古工作者发出的时代强音,这样才能通过我们的考古学研究,更好地向世界宣传源远流长、博大精深的中华文明,增强中国特色考古学在国际考古学界、历史学界乃至整个国际学术界的影响力、话语权.中国考古学建设中的"中国特色"是"中国风格"、"中国气派"的核心,只有全面、深刻、准确了解、把握中国特色考古学,才能完成"中国气派"、"中国风格"考古学的建设.     

3. NATURE,RELIGION, AND IMAGINATION: COMMENTS ON IMAGES OF HISTORY

After sharing some reflections, I raise three questions. The first asks about the role of nature and reason according to Kant's teleological history, and the extent to which Kant's essays written before the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) are “dogmatic,” as his phrase “aim of nature” might suggest. The second asks about Kant's “impure” ethics and the role of religion. What would Kantian religion look like today? The last question concerns the relation between images and ideas—a thornier issue than Kant's initial definitions of imagination and reason would seem to suggest.     

DWELLING WITHIN: THE INHABITED RUINS OF HISTORY1

Addressing the recent call to rethink history as a form of presence, the essay works toward a recovery of a space in which such presence of history is encoded. I argue that history as a form of active perception is akin to virtual witnessing of the past in the moment of our encounter with historical artifacts, be they texts, photographs, or buildings. To this end, I engage with the conceptual and material aspects of historical perception, deriving a model of history as “inhabited ruins,” the way it emerges together with historical consciousness and finds an especially dynamic expression in Georg Simmel's philosophy of culture. Throughout, I work with the notion of distance and trans‐dimensional presence as the forces that shape and reshape historical awareness. Ruins, intimately connected to the modern historical imagination, are approached not as sites of commemoration or nostalgia, but as spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance. As such, they are taken to be the models for the transitive character of history itself, blurring the division between perception and thought. In other words, ruins are taken as structures that evoke and summon the past to an encounter with contemporary reality—a type of co‐appearance that opens the possibility of virtually witnessing the past. I conclude that the logic of “inhabited ruins” constitutes the event‐horizon of modern identity, always placing history right at the threshold of fragmentation.     

FUTURE BY HISTORY: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Philosophy of history has a threefold dimension: material, formal, and functional, which have largely been conceptualized as mutually exclusive. It is high time to mediate them into a coherent relationship, and Rohbeck's book is a decisive step toward such a new philosophy of history. The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the relationship between history and the future, the second analyzes the relationship between history and ethics, and the third synthesizes these two aspects into a pragmatics of history. With regard to the first part, historical thinking is based on a perception of temporal otherness related to the past. Rohbeck prolongs the time perspective by bridging this time gap into the future. As to the second, Rohbeck replaces teleology by ethics. Teleology includes ethics but limits its scope to a one‐sided development. Ethics allows many more options. Finally, who is the agent for historical ethics? Rohbeck proposes the “generation” as the basic actor in historical change and the addressee of ethical commitment. At the end of his work, Rohbeck draws consequences for the idea of philosophy of history from his idea of historical ethics. He shows that history has a new perspective if it is viewed through the lens of ethical elements in the fundamental relationship between past, present, and future. Of course, many questions follow this fascinating new version of the old philosophy of history. I raise only three of them: (1) What synthesizes the three dimensions of time into one and the same history? (2) Did we not learn from historicism that values in ethics have an inbuilt temporality? This argument does not run against the idea of an ethics of history, but should sharpen its genuine historical character. (3) Who is the agent of this change: who brings it about and at the same is subjected to it? An anonymous sum of generations in space and time is not a convincing answer. We need an integrative idea that covers the vast field of experience of the human world in space and time and that covers the strong commitment to universal values. In this respect it would be worthwhile to pick up the idea of humankind as it was conceptualized as the red thread of history in traditional, modern philosophy of history.