"We Are Who We Are": Humanity and Divinity in Russian Literature and History

Book reviewed in this article:
Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler, (eds.) Self and Story in Russian History     

"感谢"就是感谢——"毛泽东说要感谢日本侵略"评议

<毛泽东关于日本侵略一个表述之真意>①一文(以下简称"<真意>")拜读已久.该文以解读"毛泽东说要感谢日本侵略"的说法(作者称之为"关于日本侵略一个表述")并铨释其含义来为人们解"惑",立意甚高;但读后却使人增添了"困惑".<抗日战争研究>将该文列入"问题讨论"栏目,表明有关问题可以讨论,需要讨论.我想说一点个人看法和想法,就算参加讨论吧.     

"The Experts Taught Us All We Know": Professionalisation and Knowledge in Nepalese Community Forestry

Environmentalist concerns over the state of Nepal's "fragile forests" resulted in the establishment of Community Forestry projects. These community‐based projects are partnerships between the state and community user groups that invest user groups with a great deal of control over their forests. Project implementation, however, begins with the assumption that users have little prior knowledge of forest management and need to be taught modern silviculture. I examine the extent to which different community members embrace notions of professional forestry materially and symbolically. The development of written management plans, the need for careful accounting records and the promotion of silviculturally based management strategies by District Forest Officers serve to (re)inscribe differences between users based on education and literacy. Which users embrace these discourses and practices and for what purposes lends insight into the workings of neoliberalism and how it is implicated in the reconfiguring of social and power relations within localities and, in this case, the consequences of this for ecological change. It is argued that the promotion of expert knowledge and professional practices in Community Forestry is often used as a somewhat contradictory vehicle for educated elites to retain control over forest management, thus undermining some of the key objectives of the program.     

"We have a little bit more finesse, as a nation": Constructing the Polish Worker in London's Building Sites

Abstract:  This paper examines how male Polish builders in London construct themselves relationally to English builders as they negotiate their place within the labour hierarchies of the building site and in the London labour market. This is based on semi-structured interviews and participant photographs taken by Polish migrants arriving in the aftermath of the European Union expansion in May 2004, and now working in building sites across London. These buildings sites are mundane elements of a global city which employ transnational labour, and where differences between Polish and English builders become significant discursive tools of survival in a competitive labour market. The paper illustrates how Polish workers mark themselves as "superior" to English builders through the versatility of their embodied skills, work ethic, artistic qualities, and finesse in their social interactions on the building site. This paper thus provides new ways of understanding the meanings of work and the complexity of identity politics within the spaces of low-paid manual work in a global city.     

The Gift We Bring

Abstract

Miroslav Volf’s A Public Faith invites religious traditions, especially Christianity, to bring their best elements into the public square in a spirit of hospitality and engagement for the common good. With regard to Christianity, he claims that one of the best elements we can offer the public square is a complexly relational vision of the human person made to love self, others, God. In this essay Dávila proposes that the preferential option for the poor is a particular expression of this anthropological vision of Christianity that is well poised for public engagement based on humility and care for the most vulnerable members of society. Following Volf’s proposal, the option for the poor functions as a paradigm for imaginative and creative engagement in the public square that might help people of faith navigate seemingly intractable political and cultural disagreements in the public square.     

In Cloth We Trust

In this essay, I contextualize recent studies of cloth and culture in Africa, South America, and Oceania within changing anthropological concerns. Examining cloth as an important aspect of art, technology, and economy, I question how specific properties of objects are connected with cultural and social significance. Over the last two decades in particular, cloth—whether woven or nonwoven—has often been construed as an especially potent polyvalent symbol. Examining how scholars have explored this potential, I address the conceptual relocation of cloth in different, often contradictory regimes of value that join discrete physical locations, from isolated community to cosmopolitan museum.     

为什么我们需要环境史

现代环境危机要求一种新的史学和历史意识。我们要以全新的眼光审视历史 ,将其视为人与自然之间长期交互作用、彼此挑战、彼此改变的历史。环境史己经在世界上许多国家出现 ,它对于那些试图应对危机的科学家和政策制定者实际上有很大的帮助。环境史可以对资源保护以及环境保护主义———现代社会中两种强大的政治力量———的兴起提供更深刻的理解。环境史有助于生态学以及其他环境科学提出更富有创见、更加成熟的解决问题的方法。环境史有助于我们更深刻、更富批判性地了解我们的经济文化和制度 ,特别是占有统治地位的资本主义的经济文化及其对地球所造成的后果。环境史可以让我们对我们所栖居的每一个特定的地方———我们必须在那里发现更好的生活方式———有更深邃的了解。     

Foreign Scholars and We Are Eyewitnesses

Many times,we have been to Lulang Town in Nyingchi Prefecture,which is known as “Geneva on the plateau”.But this time,we invited a German Scholar named Daniel Winkler,who has been carrying out work for a long time related to the protection and development of fungus resource in the Tibetaninhabited areas in China,