4. THE GADAMERIAN APPROACH TO THE RELATION BETWEEN EXPERIENCE AND LANGUAGE

Narrativism as a theory of historical depiction intuitively opens the question: what is left of reality when it is poured through the filter of language structures? And, extended a little bit further, questions arise: What is responsible for the final shape of a historical depiction? Is it experience or language? What is affecting what? Narrativism typically accuses language units of transforming experience in a specific way. However, even in asking these questions, the problem of the separation of experience from language and language from experience remains. In this article, I address this issue using Gadamer's hermeneutical frame. Wherever philosophical tradition insists on the separation of certain positions, Gadamer tries to show their ontological connections. For Gadamer, understanding is a basic ontological structure, within which both sides of a dialogue affect and constitute each other. In Gadamerian hermeneutical ontology, there is no “starting point” or first responsible position. In the understanding, dialogue has the permanently moving character of a play, where separate positions are erased. This Gadamerian view can also be applied to the question of language and experience and their mutual connection in depicting any experience via language. In Gadamer's example of the work of art, the original subject matter (Urbild) is articulated through its depiction. The subject matter dictates possible ways of depicting, which in turn dictate the final shape of depiction. In this article, I discuss Gadamer's term “articulation of the world,” by which he means a function of language. Articulation is simply a transformation of shapeless matter into a shape, and in our case it is a transformation of an experience into a language depiction. I show that the Gadamerian approach to language and experience can offer an interesting perspective on the issues discussed in reaction to narrativist philosophy of history.     

Review Article: Brigands,Emperors, and Anarchy

PHILIP DE SOUZA. Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. x, 276. $59.95 (US); KURT RAAFLAUB and NATHAN ROSENSTEIN, eds. War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica. Washington: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, 1999; dist. Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press. Pp. viii, 484. $50.00 (US); B. D. HOYOS. Unplanned Wars: The Origins of the First and Second Punic Wars. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998. Pp. xviii, 326. $80.00 (US). Reviewed by Arthur M. Eckstein     

Directions in Australian Linguistics: A Review Article

Handbook of Australian Languages by R. M. W. Dixon and B. J. Blake (Eds) Canberra, The Australian National University Press, 1979. Pp. i-xviii and 1–390.     

Review Article

Book reviewed in this article: Review Article Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China. James R. Ross. Review Article Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore 1870-1940. James Francis Warren. Africa and the Middle East Egypt in Late Antiquity. Roger S. Bagnall. The Women's Awakening in Egypt. Beth Baron. Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's‘Economic Decline. Thomas M. Callaghy and John Ravenhill. The First Son of South Africa to Be Premier: Thomas Charles Scanlon. Basil T. Hone. The Making of Saudi Arabia 1916-1936: From Chieftaincy to Monarchical State. Joseph Kostiner. The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire. Alan Palmer. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. Leslie P. Peirce. Revolution until Victory? The Politics and History of the PLO. Barry Rubin. Zimbabwe and the New Elite. Ruth Weiss. The Americas From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America. John A. Andrew IE. Apartheid's Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War. Thomas Borstelmann. God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America. Walter H. Conser, Jr. Samtiento: Author of a Nation. Tulio Halperin Donghi, Ivan Jaksic, Gwen Kirkpatrick, and Francine Masiello. Passionate Sage: The Character and legacy of John Adams. Joseph J. Ellis. American Political Cultures. Richard J. Ellis. Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier. Arrell Morgan Gibson. The Texture of Industry: An Archaeobgkal View of the Industrialization of North America. Robert B. Gordon and Patrick M. Malone. Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History. Carole Haber and Brian Gratton. Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877. Bruce Hampton. The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution. Tom Hatley. 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York. Clifton Hood. James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age. James G. Herehberg. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Eric Lott. A Bloc of One: The Political Career of Hiram W. Johnson. Richard Coke Lower. Prize Possession: The United States and the Panama Canal, 1903-1979. John Major. Losing Our Souls: The American Experience in the Cold War. Edward Pessert. Lincoln in American Memory. Merrill D. Peterson. Ronald Reagan: The Great Communicator. Kurt Ritter and David Henry. Chester Bowles: New Dealer in the Cold War. Howard B. Schaffer. Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980. Steven Seidman. Benjamin and William Franklin: Father and Son, Patriot and Loyalist. Sheila L. Skemp. Sam Houston: The Life and Times of the Liberator of Texas, an Authentic American Hero. John Hoyt Williams. Ultra in the Pacific: How Breaking Japanese Codes and Cyphers Affected Naval Operations against Japan, 1941-45. John Winton. Asia and the Pacific Colonialism in an Indian Hinterland: The Central Provinces, 1820-1920. D. E. U. Baker. Central Authority and local Autonomy in the Formation of Early Modern Japan: The Case of Kaga Domain. Philip C. Brown. Broken Promises: Popular Protest, Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar, 1935-1946. Vinita Damodaran. The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942-1945. Peter Ward Fay. Law and Order in Song China. Brian E. McKnight. An‘Agreed’Frontier: Ladakh and India's Northernmost Borders, 1846-1947. Parshotsam Mehra. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume 2, Expansion and Crisis. Anthony J. S. Reid. Europe The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple. Malcolm Barber. Collaboration in Belgium: Leon Degrelle and the Racist Movement 1940-1944. Martin Conway. The Halt in the Mud: French Strategic Planning from Waterloo to Sedan. Gary P. Cox. Anglicizing the Government of Ireland: The Irish Privy Council and the Expansion of Tudor Rule, 1556-1578. Jon G. Crawford. A History of Wales. John Davies. Franco. Sheelagh Ellwood. The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924. Gerald D. Feldman. From Weimar to Hitler: Germany, 1918-1933. E. J. Feuchtwanger. After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848-74. Margot C Finn. Life in the Middle Ages from the Seventh to the Thirteenth Century. Hans-Werner Goetz, Albert Wimmer and Steven Rowan. The Origins of the Crimean War. David M. Goldfrank Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Geoffrey Hartman. Living and Dying in England 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience. Barbara Harvey. Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post Communist Eastern Europe. Paul Hockenos. Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire 1918-1964. Stephen Howe. The Rush to German Unity. Konrad Jarausch. The Labour Party since 1945. Kevin Jefferys. Park Güell. Conrad Kent and Dennis Prindle. Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant. Amy Knight. Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West. Stephen Koch. Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present. John A. Lynn. Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany. Kristie Macrakis. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. J. M. Neeson. Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen and Legend. D. D. R. Owen. The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain. Jonathan Parry. Julius II. The Warrior Pope. Christine Shaw.d German History 1770-1866. James J. Sheehan. The Spanish Civil War. Hugh Thomas. The Shape of Athenian Law. Stephen C. Todd. Planning for War against Russia and Serbia: Austro-Hungarian and German Military Strategies, 1871-1914. Graydon A. Tunstall, Jr. The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula. David J. Wasserstein. The Merovingian Kingdoms 450-751. Ian Wood. General , Comparative , Historiographical A History of Civilizations. Femand Braudel. Richard Mayne.     

Review Article: Ancient Warfare

Richard A. Gabriel and Karen S. Metz. From Sumer to Rome: The Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. Pp. xxi, 182. $45.00 (us)

Victor Davis Hanson, ed. Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience. London and New York: Roudledge, 1991. Pp. xvi, 286. $39.95 (us)

W. Kendrick Pritchett. The Greek State at War. Part V. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Pp. x, 578. $60.00 (us)

Lionel Casson. The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in Ancient Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Pp. xviii, 246. $39.50 (us), cloth; $12.95 (us), paper.     

Hindmarsh Revisited: Review Article

A review of two books: Diane Bell's Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: a world that is, was, and will be. North Melbourne: Spinifex 1998. Dulcie Wilson's The cost of crossing bridges. Mitcham: Small Poppies Publishing 1998     

Review Article: Napoleon Bonaparte

J. M. THOMPSON. Napoleon Bonaparte. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Pp. xiv, 418. £20.00. Reviewed by Paul W. Schroeder     

Review Article: Franco Cunctator

PAUL PRESTON. Franco: A Biography. London: HarperCollins, 1993. Pp. xxi, 1,002. £25.00;

PAUL PRESTON. The Politics of Revenge: Fascism and the Military in Twentieth- Century Spain. London and New York: Routledge, 1990 and 1995 (reprint). Pp. xix, 215. £11.99;

MICHAEL ALPERT. A New International History of the Spanish Civil War. New York: St Martin's Press, 1994. Pp. ix, 209. $45.00 (US);

ENRIQUE MORADIELLOS. La Perfidia de Albión: El Gobierno británico y la guerra civil española. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, 1996. Pp. xviii, 408. 3,000 ptas.     

Review Article: Professional,Political, and Mercenary Soldiers

Since the late 1970s, most scholarship on the origins of the Zionist–Palestinian conflict has emphasised the actions and agency of the Palestinian Arabs and Zionists, with a focus on the period before 1914. It is argued in this article, however, that the expectation of and commitment to political independence on both sides, a defining feature of the conflict, did not emerge until 1918, and that the actions of the British government in Palestine during the final year of the First World War drove this fundamental shift. Following Britain's occupation of southern Palestine in December 1917, the British administration undertook an extensive propaganda operation in the country to advertise their backing for Arab nationalism and Zionism. This campaign was part of the British government's wider endeavour to mobilise support for the Allied war effort and British imperial expansion in the Middle East in the new age of nationality. It led, the article contends, to a war for national sovereignty over Palestine between two statist nationalist movements. Rather than emphasise British colonial agency at the expense of that of the Palestinian Arabs and Zionists, the article argues that this development derived from a complex interaction between the three parties within the context of radical changes in international politics.     

Archaeology and the Bible Revisited: A Review Article

David and Solomon, a new book by Israel Finkelstein and Niels Asher Silberman, through their discussion of Palestinian archaeology's current understanding, proposes to provide evidence to prove the accuracy of Frank Cross's more than 30 year old revision of Martin Noth's theory of a “Deuteronomistic History.” The authors attempt to confirm the history of the redaction of the biblical narratives about Saul, David and Solomon, involving seven distinct oral and four written strata of tradition. Their argument moreover claims the warrant to assert the historicity of each of these legendary kings of Israel. The present article argues to the contrary that the “archaeological evidence” proposed does not support such a redaction history nor establish the historicity of either the biblical figures or their stories, but that the harmony of biblical and archaeological issues is circular and illegitimate by the standards of historical research. It argues, moreover, that the claim of an oral tradition, reflecting original memories of an historical David or Saul is an entirely unnecessary and unlikely explanation for the origins of both the figures and their tales in the stories of 1-2 Samuel and 1 Kings. It moreover argues that the hypothesis of a redaction history in a succession of four cumulative revisions, beginning in the eighth century and completed in the sixth to fourth century, BCE—lacking as it does reference to a readable text—is neither critical nor falsifiable. Finally, Finkelstein and Silberman's book is judged as an unsuccessful attempt to return to the methods of “biblical archaeology” that were legitimately impeached in the mid-1970s.