Homogenisation,nationalism and war: should we still read Ernest Gellner?*

ABSTRACT. Is homogenising nationalism a consequence of industrialisation? This view has been most forcefully and systematically advanced by Ernest Gellner. The article contests this approach by focusing instead on militarism and militarisation. It therefore identifies the key role of the mass army as presaging the era of mass nationalism and cultural homogenisation. Drawing on a range of authors from history, sociology and political science, the relationship is found to be reciprocal and symbiotic. A preliminary exploration on the possibility of early modern (or pre‐modern) forms of cultural homogenisation is preceded by a critical assessment of Gellner's interchangeable use of the terms culture, language and ethnicity.     

THE POETICS OF ANCIENT GREEK MEMORY AND THE HISTORICAL IMPERATIVE

This book examines Greek engagements with the past as articulations of memory formulated against the contingency of chance associated with temporality. Based on a phenomenological understanding of temporality, it identifies four memorializing strategies: continuity (tradition), regularity (exemplarity), development, and acceptance of chance. This framework serves in pursuing a twofold aim: to reconstruct the literary field of memory in fifth‐century bce Greece; and to interpret Greek historiography as a memorializing mode. The key contention advanced by this approach is that acts of memory entailed an “idea of history” that was articulated not only in historiography, but also in epinician poetry, elegy, tragedy, and oratory. The book offers a rich account of poetic conventions and contexts through which each of these genres counterbalanced contingency through the use of exemplary and traditional modes of memory. This fine analysis highlights the grip of the present on the past as a significant feature of both historiographical and nonhistoriographical genres. The essay argues that this work fills a disciplinary gap by extending the reflection on memory to a new period, Greek antiquity. The retrospective positioning of this period at the outset of Western historical thought brings Grethlein's investigation to the center of debates about memory, temporality, and the meaning history. In engaging with the book's argument, the essay suggests that historiographical memory emerged in Greece not as a first‐order encounter with time, but as a second‐order encounter with forgetting. This confrontation marked a certain separation of historiography from other memorializing genres. Whereas poetic and rhetorical memories were posited against contingency, historiography sought to retrieve those aspects of the past that may otherwise have been irretrievably lost and forgotten. In doing so, it formulated the historiographical imperative as a negation of forgetting that problematized the truth‐value of memory and the very act of remembering the past.     

Re-Inventing Mississippian Tradition at Etowah,Georgia

Frequent population movement and political re-organization spurred a pattern of repeated abandonment at the Mississippian mound center of Etowah in the southeastern United States. These processes also characterized the larger surrounding region in north Georgia and southeast Tennessee. The Etowah abandonments provided inflection points where interest groups were able to distance themselves from previous conventions of structure and reformulate new forms of sociopolitical organization. Re-invented traditions were embedded in changing definitions of genealogical and mythical time, and mediated through the built environment and iconography.     

Youth as a metaphor: an interview with Carmen Leccardi

Abstract

What are the specificities of youth in Italy as a group? How are they received in civil society and beyond? What kind of approaches have characterized the study of youth in Italy throughout the last decades? In this interview, the editors of this Special Issue open a conversation with Carmen Leccardi, a leading scholar in the field whose work has impacted the study of Italian youth not only in Italy but also internationally. Leccardi investigates these issues diachronically, following and commenting some salient aspects of Italian history that have had an impact on how the lives of young people have unfolded, among them social movements, policies and labour market fluctuations. Revisiting and updating the notion of uncertainty in young people’s lives, the interview concludes that youth can be considered as a metaphor particularly able to capture contemporary social changes.     

Border collapse and boundary maintenance: militarisation and the micro-geographies of violence in Israel–Palestine

Drawing upon subaltern geopolitics and feminist geography, this article explores how militarisation shapes micro-geographies of violence and occupation in Israel–Palestine. While accounts of spectacular and large-scale political violence dominate popular imaginaries and academic analyses in/of the region, a shift to the micro-scale foregrounds the relationship between power, politics and space at the level of everyday life. In the context of Israel–Palestine, micro-geographies have revealed dynamic strategies for ‘getting by’ or ‘dealing with’ the occupation, as practiced by Palestinian populations in the face of spatialised violence. However, this article considers how Jewish Israelis actively shape the spatial micro-politics of power within and along the borders of the Israeli state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem during 2010–2011, an analysis of everyday narratives illustrates how relations of violence, occupation and domination rely upon gendered dynamics of border collapse and boundary maintenance. Here, the borders between home front and battlefield break down at the same time as communal boundaries are reproduced, generating conditions of ‘total militarism’ wherein military interests and agendas are both actively and passively diffused. Through gendering the militarised micro-geographies of violence among Jewish Israelis, this article reveals how individuals construct, navigate and regulate the everyday spaces of occupation, detailing more precisely how macro political power endures.     

1. TIMES OF THE EVENT: AN INTRODUCTION

This introduction sets the stage for the following contributions by outlining the current state of research on the two fundamental categories that this forum brings together: the event and time. In a brief survey, we discuss the ways in which the temporality of events has been theorized across disciplines. We also present our core argument for understanding the event as a temporal focal point. In dialogue with existing approaches, we seek to develop a theoretically enriched and empirically fruitful conceptualization of the event, thus offering new perspectives to the academic historiography of events as well as to historical culture at large.     

THE “THEORETICAL REVOLUTION” IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY: FROM THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS TO THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL LANGUAGES

This article intends to clarify what distinguishes the so‐called new “politico‐intellectual history” from the old “history of political ideas.” What differentiates the two has not been fully perceived even by some of the authors who initiated this transformation. One fundamental reason for this is that the transformation has not been a consistent process deriving from one single source, but is rather the result of converging developments emanating from three different sources (the Cambridge School, the German school of conceptual history or Begriffsgeschichte, and French politico‐conceptual history). This article proposes that the development of a new theoretical horizon that effectively leads us beyond the frameworks of the old history of political ideas demands that we overcome the insularity of these traditions and combine their respective contributions. The result of this combination is an approach to politico‐intellectual history that is not completely coincident with any of the three schools. What I will call a history of political languages entails a specific perspective on the temporality of discourses; this involves a view of why the meaning of concepts changes over time, and is the source of the contingency that stains political languages.     

中国抗日战争在世界反法西斯战争中的历史地位

抗日战争时期,在中国共产党的倡导和推动下,建立了全民族的抗日民族统一战线,中国人民的抗日战争抵制和消耗了日本军队大量的兵力,阻止了日本进攻苏联的计划,配合和援助了世界反法西斯战争。因此,中国人民抗日战争在世界反法西斯战争中具有重要的历史地位。     

Some Napoleonic-style army camps from the period of the Dutch-Belgian separation (1830–1839) in the Southern Netherlands

This paper focuses on the period of the political separation of the Netherlands and Belgium (1830–1839). Both countries were in a state of war for almost a decade, which resulted in massive troop deployments along their borders and the militarisation of the landscape. The principal objects of study are the Dutch army camps at Rijen and Oirschot near the Belgian border, which to date have barely received any scholarly attention. Both camps were almost 2 km across and offered accommodation to up to 12,000 infantry soldiers. They will be studied from an archaeological-historical perspective, focusing on the spatial and social dimensions of the camps and their place in the wider landscape. The camps are representative of the final stage of pre-industrial warfare in Europe, which is characterised by a continuation of many eighteenth century and Napoleonic traditions.     

2. ON ISLAMIC TIME: RETHINKING CHRONOLOGY IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MUSLIM SOCIETIES

This article argues that the academic representation of Islamic history as a single timeline, which was established in the nineteenth century and continues to predominate to the present, is a primary issue restricting fruitful readings of Islamic historical materials. Utilizing insights in thinking about history that favor multiple temporalities, I suggest that scholars in Islamic studies can expand the possibilities of their work by paying attention to the diversity of ways in which time is conceptualized within original materials. As illustrations for the rethinking I advocate, I provide readings of the structures and literary affects of three Persian works in different genres, produced circa 1490–1540 ce . I suggest that a foundational reorientation in the field of Islamic historiography has the potential to help us break out of binds identified in the critique of orientalism provided by Edward Said and others and would lead to better ways to approach developments in Muslim societies.