The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation – as in the context of colonial era evictions – there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of ‘sites of memory’, which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern ‘memory’, suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and ‘being first’. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory.     

Existentialist manifesto or conservative political science? Problems in interpreting Raymond Aron's Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire

Raymond Aron's Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire is often held to be a paradigmatic book because of either its rejection of positivism in the social sciences, or its anticipation of existentialism in philosophy. The common denominator in these paradigmatic interpretations of the work is its use of various German philosophical influences that, though relatively obscure in France at the time of its first publication in 1938, became prominent features of the postwar Parisian intellectual landscape. During the Cold War, however, Aron was not only a peripheral figure within the Parisian intelligentsia, but also one of its harshest critics. The apparent mismatch between the paradigmatic status claimed for the Introduction as the first French existentialist book and Aron's subsequent critical position towards the leading figures of existentialism in France forms the starting point for a critical re-examination of the book and its paradigmatic interpretations. After seeking an explanation for these interpretations of the Introduction in deeper trends of generational thought, this article suggests that the history of the idea of intellectual engagement offers a more useful angle from which to approach this challenging book.     

The Idea of a Good and Bad Gemeinschaft in William Bloke Modisane’s Autobiography,Blame Me on History

William Bloke Modisane, the African writer and journalist, attracted wide notice with his autobiography, Blame Me on History, which was banned in South Africa in 1963, the year in which it received its first publication. The sociologist's interest in Modisane's autobiography can be located in several basic themes (among these can be counted the problem of his cultural dilemma as a member of the African middle class), but for present purposes, we need to note only one aspect of the book which I think has been constantly ignored, namely the sociological tradition that informs the meaning of his concept of the community— Sophiatown. The name “Sophiatown” carries a profoundly important meaning in Modisane's autobiography. I will argue that in the sociological sense in which the Drum writer uses the name, he articulates the central notions of what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies regards as a Gemeinschaft social order. There is a different, though related, point that needs to be made about Modisane's use of the term “community”: if we read his book carefully, we can see that it contains two different narratives about Sophiatown, a positive one which appears to have been slightly romanticised, and a negative one, which focuses on the community's darker side, showing it up to have been a Gemeinschaft in an unusual way. It is through this binary opposition that Modisane creates in his autobiography that he shows his ambiguity with regard to his Gemeinschaft community.     

Freedom Isn't Free: Free Will in La vida es sueño Revisited

This article analyzes the structural composition of the chicana/o novel …y no se lo tragó la tierra, by Tomás Rivera, a book that has become a collective point of reference for chicana/o culture and community. Its structure will be explained, including the importance of personal and collective memory as elements that evolve every chapter as a fragmentary part of a whole. The classical concept of "art of memory" joined to the rhetoric of discourse opens a new perspective to analyze this fragmentation and helps the reader to understand the connection of its elements. Finally, the idea of "theater of memory" may be applied to the novel's chicana/o universe as a dramatic device for structuring the narrator's personal memories, achieving a final literary composition similar to a memorable, collective altarpiece full of impressive images from this community's daily struggle in the 1960s.     

ASHKELON

Abstract

The Bible refers frequently to sacrifices offered on high places (bamot) and altars 'on every high hill and under every leafy tree'. Archeological finds in the Land of Israel, however, include only a few altars for animal sacrifices. The altar described here is unique, an unprecedented find in the Land of Israel. It is hewn in the rock about 1.5 km west of Shiloh, in an area quite rich in ancient ruins and near a spring. There are no building remains, nor pottery relevant to the period, in its immediate vicinity. At the side is flat, blackened stone, apparently broken off the altar top because of the heat of its fire. The altar has four 'horns' and a levelled top, and its dimensions resemble those of the altar in the book of Exodus (27. 1–2). It stands not on a summit but in mid-slope. It may thus be conjectured that the altar was Israelite and used for monotheistic worship. The orientation of the altar is interesting: its corners, rather than its sides, are aligned with the four cardinal directions (north and south, east and west). In this respect the altar is similar to that discovered on Mount Ebal. The altar shares some features with 'Manoah's altar' below ancient Zor'ah; however, there are some basic differences, and the Shiloh altar is much more impressive.     

The Relevance of Cassirer and the Rewriting of Intellectual History

Summary

This essay aims to discuss the historiographical implications and premises of Peter Gordon's masterly book Continental Divide, in which he re-evaluates the Davos meeting between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. This impressive reminder of the prospects of intellectual history deserves to be paid serious attention, particularly in European philosophy departments. Gordon's book exemplifies how problems of systematic philosophy can be clarified by a detour through history.

I want to highlight three aspects of Gordon's book that fundamentally transform and deepen our understanding of intellectual history in general and the Davos meeting in particular. First, I highlight one of the main merits of Gordon's study: his emphasis on the plurality behind the term ‘continental philosophy’. This opens up a whole new perspective on a seemingly well-known event within the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Second, I address Gordon's methodological premises, which challenge and fundamentally transform our understanding of intellectual history. Third, I attempt to summarise, from an intellectual history perspective, Gordon's argument about Cassirer's relevance. Here we are faced with the task of realigning and legitimising philosophy in a radically historicised world. To adumbrate the core of my comment I should say that I am thrilled by Gordon's book. I agree with nearly everything he says apart from his conclusions. In a closing remark I will try to explain the reasons for this surprising divergence.     

Robert Weston,Medical consulting by letter in France, 1665-1789

This review investigates Robert Weston’'s Medical Consulting by Letter in France, 1665–1789. Weston uses correspondence between physicians and patients to explore perceptions of health and methods of treatments in early modern France. He also approaches the theme of how authority was expressed and perceived in epistolary communication. This book is important in its exploration of an underutilized source and its contribution to an understanding of how medical relationships were constructed in the past. With a rigorous structure and a high volume of information, Weston’'s work is an invaluable contribution to historical literature on early modern France.     

The ‘Ungallant Silence of the Historian’: Elizabeth Stone,Esther Owen and the Art of Needlework

This essay explores the challenges of authorship for two women authors of important needlework books during the 1840s. Elizabeth Stone authored the first British history of needlework, the Art of Needlework (1840), and Esther Owen wrote an influential pattern book, the Illuminated Ladies' Book of Useful and Ornamental Needlework (1844), but both women were powerless over their work when authorial mis-attribution and financial mismanagement hindered their efforts to engage in professional careers. Countless anonymous writers of needlework articles and guidebooks provided scholars with a treasure of textual artifacts that contain valuable cultural and historical information about women's lives, whether the women were readers, editors or writers. Yet the lack of specific bibliographical and biographical details about needlework books and their authors often frustrate adequate scholarly reappraisal. The tradition of anonymity and a general lack of respect for domestic women's art from publishers and contemporaries outside the woman's sphere created a dearth of archival material, and careless reviewers spurred mistakes and omissions that sometimes began as early as the first printing and continue from that moment until now. The careers of Stone and Owen serve as case studies of complications for women working in the writer's trade, and of problems encountered by scholars writing nineteenth-century women's history.     

WONDER: FROM POETICS TO POLITICS

Marnie Hughes-Warrington's book, History as Wonder: Beginning with Historiography, invites readers to reconsider the power of wonder as a critical concept whose theoretical implications go far beyond its evident ability to inspire historical research. Wonder is supposedly a neutral weapon for historians, one that is limited to promoting incessant curiosity about the past. Attempting to move from a poetic and aesthetic vision of wonder to a consideration of the concept's ethical and political uses, Hughes-Warrington claims that “historians since Herodotus have engaged with or responded to the efforts of thinkers who attempt to make general sense of the world, metaphysicians” (xii). In what follows, I challenge Hughes-Warrington's approach by emphasizing and exploring the epistemological questions History as Wonder raises about who holds the power to establish a conventional sense of the world and to what extent historical research may offer general explanations of the world without succumbing to precritical assumptions or metahistorical reductionisms.     

Standing buildings and built heritage

SUMMARY: This essay examines the available archive of articles on standing buildings published in Post-Medieval Archaeology. After setting out some general trends evident in a brief analysis of the number of buildings archaeology articles published over the last 50 years, their subjects and authors, this essay places these articles in three key wider contexts: the relationship of buildings archaeology to architectural history; buildings archaeology in Post-Medieval Archaeology in an international context; and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology’s relative lack of engagement with modern buildings and contemporary built heritage.     

Children's nomination of friendly places in an urban neighbourhood in Shiraz,Iran

This study investigates how children conceive of and value the outdoor environment as a child-friendly one with particular reference to an urban neighbourhood in Shiraz, Iran. It utilizes Chatterjee's (2005. “Children's Friendship with Place: A Conceptual Inquiry.” Children, Youth and Environments 15 (1): 1–26) place friendship construct to find out friendly places and their attributes from children's points of view. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 106 middle childhood children. Findings suggest that a child-friendly neighbourhood is made up of diverse places that children use to meet their different needs. However, formal and informal open spaces, private precincts, and streets in the neighbourhood afforded highest contributions to place friendship.     

Do the Banaro Really Exist? Going Back After Richard Thurnwald

Between 1913 and 1915, the Austro‐German anthropologist Richard Thurnwald explored the Sepik area with the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde expedition. In the last months of his stay, he worked with two Banaro informants and later on published his famous study on that society. Eighty five years after, the only anthropological reference on the Banaro is still his own articles. Bernard Juillerat spent four months among the Banaro in 1989, discussing with the people Thurnwald's analyses on the social structure and the mundu partnership. A book was published in French in 1993. This article is a short abstract of the book, where the author discusses Thurnwald's interpretations and gives ethnographic material on men's house ritual and initiation. Some more anthropological information is given on the transformations of Banaro society in the meantime.     

Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciouness: The Sorrows of Satan,Popular Fiction,and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon

Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) presents a paradoxical test case for the practice of academic literary criticism. The best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, the book was demeaned by Victorian critics and has been long ignored by criticism since. In spite of Corelli's recent mini-revival, the formally self-conscious properties of this work deserve further examination: the text insistently foregrounds the act of literary criticism and demands that the reader's attention is focussed on not only the content of the narrative but also the nature of the procedure of reading. Such a strategy allows Corelli's romance to participate safely in the kinds of literary transgressions enacted in the work of her since-canonized contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. The narrative mode warns against the production of the wrong kinds of readings of the narrative, inoculating its consumer against the corruption suffered by many of Sorrows's characters – and by the readers of the kinds of contemporary fiction Corelli seeks to warn against. As a consequence, The Sorrows of Satan, while exiled from the canon, shows itself to be surprisingly representative of the image of fin-de-siècle literary culture constructed by its afterlife. Like so many 1890s fictions, it is a work of art about the work of art, and dramatizes such by now familiar late-Victorian tropes as: decadence, moral relativism, debates over literary taste, realism, post-Ibsen drama, the sexual double standard, the marriage market, the New Woman, motherhood, hysteria and female pathologies, degeneration anxiety, mesmerism. The Sorrows of Satan's status as forgotten best-seller, a ‘great bad book’, asks difficult questions about the relationship between literary criticism and literary pleasure.     

The Inglorious

Abstract

The essay argues that Sheldon Wolin's case for decoupling democracy and liberalism, which he makes in both editions of Politics and Vision (1960 and 2004), significantly depends on the historical argument Henri Cardinal de Lubac made in his book Corpus Mysticum: L'Eucharistie et l'Eglise au moyen âge (1944 and 1949). Such a claim for the importance of this dependence deepens our understanding of the significance of both Wolin and Lubac for contemporary debates about religion and democracy. To this end, the essay has two proximate goals: (1) by displaying Wolin's use of Lubac's arguments concerning the shifting use of the term corpus mysticum, we will have a better theological understanding of Wolin's complex criticisms of liberal democracy; and (2) in the midst of claims to uncertainty about the political implications of Cardinal de Lubac's thought, we will see some of the conclusions that one political theorist came to after considering a theological argument. Finally, this particular instance of a mutually critical dialogue of faith and political reason raises crucial questions for thinking about the ends of democracy.     

King Pym and his ‘Happy,Scrappy Jester’

The Reign of King Pym took mid 17th‐century studies in a new direction when it was published in 1941. Anglo‐American collaboration in the field in the 1920s and 1930s had been rooted in making available in print to a scholarly readership one of the private diaries of the Long Parliament. J.H. Hexter's book, produced at a time when Anglo‐American collaboration was temporarily on hold under pressure of global war, changed the direction of academic discourse by its format (monograph), content (a detailed study of a brief period in a unique parliament) and tone (brash and unrestrained by the idiom of the academy). The book scoped out the power of John Pym, but also its limitations, and introduced to scholarly debate a categorisation of political groupings in 1642–3 that held sway for 40 years. The first direct attacks on Hexter's work, beginning in the 1980s, were weakened by overstatement. In the forthcoming History of Parliament volumes, Pym's signal importance is reasserted, but Hexter's concept of the ‘middle group’ is found to be untenable.     

AFTER POLITICAL ECOLOGY

This book review article probes present anthropological engagement with the environment through the prism of political ecology, placing political ecology in conversation with newer work in environmnetal anthropology. In situating this conversation, the reviewer draws on four recent anthropological monographs that, in one way or another, deal with aspects of ‘nature’. The four monographs are Tania Murray Li's (2014) Land's end: Capitalist relations on an indigenous frontier; Marianne Elisabeth Lien's (2015) Becoming salmon: Aquaculture and the domestication of fish; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruin; and, lastly, Marisol de la Cadena's (2015) Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. As I suggest, political ecology requires a radical remake, perhaps a political ecology 2.0, which brings in nature in a new way and makes the category of the political more inclusive.     

HISTORIOGRAPHY: A FIELD IN SEARCH OF A HISTORIAN?

Richard Kirkendall's collection of essays, The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History, examines the history of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from its founding to the present, using that history to illuminate how the writing of American history has changed over the last hundred years. The book provides coverage of all the major dimensions of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association's (MVHA) and the OAH's activities, ranging from the work of its scholarly publications, the Mississippi Historical Valley Review and the Journal of American History, to its role in promoting the teaching of American history. Overall, the essays in the volume tell a story of the organization's progress toward greater inclusion and democracy, falling prey to a Whig interpretation of historiography. In doing so, the book is part of a larger tendency in the way that historians have approached historiography, which in turn reflects their ambivalence about their relationship to the historical process. Thus, even as the very enterprise of historiography is premised on the recognition of how historians are themselves the products of the historical process, historians have revealed the limits to that recognition in their approach to the subject. This essay shows how deeply rooted this duality has been in the study of American historiography and illuminates some of its sources by placing Kirkendall's book in the context of how the MVHA and the OAH have treated historiography over the course of the organization's history.     

Equal Rights and Individual Freedom: Enlightenment Intellectuals and the Lascasian Apology for Black African Slavery

Juan Antonio Llorente's edition of Bartolomé de Las Casas's writings, Colección de las obras del venerable Obispo de Chiapa, Don Bartolome de las Casas, defensor de la libertad de los Americanos, illustrates how Las Casas was perceived and condemned in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In this article, I seek to explain why and in what ways Bartolomé de Las Casas's early propositions on African slavery played a fundamental role in Juan Antonio Llorente's edition of Colección, an ambitious editorial work that involved much more than selection, editing, and publication. By approaching the Colección's production and reception from the perspective of book history, I explore how Llorente's Colección reflects the role that colonial affairs and race had in the challenges faced by European rule and white hegemony.     

On Dittmer's Popular Culture,Geopolitics, and Identity as a classroom resource

In this intervention, four geographers, all of whom have used Jason Dittmer's book, Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity, in their classes, assess its status as a teaching resource. All have had considerable success using Dittmer's book, alongside other resources, to cultivate critical thinking and critical knowledge production in a wide range of classes.