Cowboys,Indians, and being human

Niels Winther Braroe. Indian and White: Self‐image and Interaction in a Canadian Plains Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975. x + 205 pp. Dlustrations, bibliography and index. $8.50.     

Flights into the past: full-waveform airborne laser scanning data for archaeological investigation

Airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is a quite recent (mid-1990s) remote sensing technique used to measure terrain elevation. Recent studies have examined the possibility of using LiDAR in archaeological investigations to map and characterize earthworks, to capture features that may be indistinguishable on the ground and to aid the planning of archaeological excavation campaigns.     

Telling Times: History, Emplotment, And Truth

In Time, Narrative, and History , David Carr argues against the narrativist claim that our lived experience does not possess the formal attributes of a story; this conclusion can be reinforced from a semiotic perspective. Our experience is mediated through temporal signs that are used again in the construction of stories. Since signs are social entities from the start, this approach avoids a problem of individualism specific to phenomenology, one which Carr takes care to resolve. A semiotic framework is also explicit about a theme Carr handles implicitly: the status of representation. Representation is internal to signification, mediating our experience not just retrospectively but prospectively in the planning and execution of action.
A model is presented in which the temporal organization of experience and action is formally coordinated with the temporal organization of narrative. The model is then applied to a historical event: John Batman's attempt in 1835 to purchase land from some Aboriginal tribes around what is now Melbourne. The meaning of this event is not located only in historical writing about it but in the semiotic constitution of the event itself. Changes of meaning emerge from relations between events as new events–in this case the Australian High Court's Mabo decision–align with old ones. Finally, a number of contrasts are indicated between this model and proposals made by Arthur C. Danto, Hayden White, F. R. Ankersmit, Fernand Braudel, and Paul Ricoeur.     

真理、信念与历史研究——兼说人类历史发展规律

1．什么是真理真理这个概念在《大英百科全书》中没有相应的条目。《微软大百科辞海》中有四种定义：相符即真理,有用即真理,普遍一致即真理和削减的真理论。这里的任何一种定义都不能令人信服,它们仅仅给出了一些似是而非的答案,导致许多人从根本上否认真理的存在。我国的《辞海》和《中国大百科全书·哲学卷》都对真理的概念作出了明确的解释。《辞海》称：真理是对客观事物及其规律的正确反映,同“谬误”相对。《中国大百科全书·哲学卷》称：真理是与谬误对立的认识论范畴,指认识主体对存在于意识之外、并且不以意识为转移的客观实在的规律性的正确反映。这两种定义的突出特点是,把真理确定为认识主体对客观事物的规律和规律性的正确反映,指明了真理在认识领域中所处的地位。     

Truth,plausibility, and the virtues of narrative at the millennium

While it is widely understood that medieval historiographers employed the techniques of rhetorical invention in their work, less attention has been paid to the way in which the standard of plausibility, upon which rhetorical invention was premised, could be reconciled with the historian's traditional obligation to tell the truth. This paper examines the ways in which the rhetorical doctrine of narratio probabilis was understood and put into practice by three authors active around the turn of the millennium: Richer of Saint-Rémi, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, and Adalbero of Laon. All three had been trained in the schools of northern Francia in the late tenth century and all reveal a sophisticated understanding of the doctrines of Ciceronian rhetoric, according to which plausible inventions were not seen to be incompatible with historical truth.     

The discourse of the past: phenomenology,structuralism and historical geography

Historical geography has to be predicated on a critical examination of past and present discourses, and this necessarily involves a rejection of positivist epistemology. This was, in more general terms, the basis of Husserl's critique, but two alternatives to this are the constitutive phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and the linguistic structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both present major difficulties. Schutz fails to recognize the necessity of a hermeneutic understanding of past societies and cannot account for the genesis and temporality of meaning, while Lévi-Strauss provides for a formalism which is directed towards the structure of the human mind rather than the historically specific structures of particular discourses. The connections and contrasts between these two positions suggest several ways in which the examination of discourse might be constituted in order to contribute to a structural history.     

Political Phenomenology: Radical Democracy and Truth

Abstract

In light of the "theological turn" in recent phenomenology, a question arises for contemporary thought of how the relationships among philosophy, religion, and democratic politics might be recontextualized and understood from a specifically phenomenological perspective. Essential in addressing this question is a critical examination of the method of reduction, or epoche instituted by Edmund Husserl as the original, core practice of phenomenology. Reinterpreting the epoche in terms of its social, historical, and political dimensions, later phenomenologists Enzo Paci and Jan Patocka demonstrate how phenomenology's conception of truth is necessarily coordinated with a commitment to collective democratic praxis. In Paci, the practice of epoche initiates critical resistance to ideological and idolatrous social and political forms through contrast with the infinite openness of truth's real universality. In Patocka, phenomenological method as applied to historically-embedded religious and philosophical traditions helps to clarify what in particular distinguishes democratic from autocratic forms of life. By drawing the insights of Paci and Patocka into conjunction, a new conception emerges of the unique religio— the collective, existential commitment— of phenomenology as such: to express the experience(s) of truth through democratic praxis in collaboration with other analogous philosophical, religious and scientific traditions.     

The Enduring Toltecs: History and Truth During the Aztec-to-Colonial Transition at Tula,Hidalgo

Tula, Hidalgo, was an important early Postclassic city that dominated much of central Mexico as well as adjacent regions to its north and west. For many decades, Tula was thought to be the city that early colonial documents referred to as “Tollan,” or “place of the reeds.” It is clear that the Aztec Empire, a later civilization that dominated a much larger area, revered Tollan and connected themselves to the city and its people, the Toltecs, in various ways. Recent research has questioned whether Tula was indeed the Tollan that the Aztecs revered; instead, Tollan may have been a concept that referred to all of the great civilizations that preceded the Aztecs. These two perspectives, which I frame as the “single Tollan/many Tollans” debate, have important consequences for our understanding of the early Postclassic period as well as colonial configurations of power. I argue that to understand the Aztecs’ relationships with their past, and the colonial consequences of those relationships, it is important to shift away from questions of truth. Instead, I concentrate on historical narratives and the social, material, and biological effects that they produced, including the early and late Aztec interventions at Tula. I argue that Jorge Acosta’s data provide evidence for an Early Aztec period termination ritual and a Late Aztec period New Fire ceremony that ushered in a new population boom at Tula. In turn, these connections allowed for the unprecedented rise of the Moctezuma family during the colonial period. This evidence forms part of a broader argument that the two sides of the Tula debate are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they both form part of attempts to control, claim, and revere the past in the inherently unstable fields of power that characterized the late Postclassic and early colonial periods in central Mexico.