Where Have All the Realists Gone?

Book reviewed in this article:
Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the "American Century."     

Where Have All the Children Gone?: The Archaeology of Childhood

Current images portray childhood as primarily a time of play and learning, de-emphasizing children's economic contributions and relegating them, like women, to the less-visible realm of the home. Ethnographic and historic literature amply demonstrates that age categories are constructs and, thus, exhibit considerable temporal and cross-cultural variability. Nevertheless, archaeologists have tended to ignore prehistoric children, perhaps viewing them as only peripheral to central research concerns, or to treat them stereotypically. The archaeological record provides opportunities for the exploration of numerous aspects of childhood and archaeologists are encouraged to respond to the challenge.     

Men’s History,Gender History,or Cultural History?

Books reviewed in this article: Shawn Johansen, Family Men: Middle–Class Fatherhood in Industrializing America Martin A. Berger, Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood Matthew Basso, Laura McCall and Dee Garceau (eds), Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West     

Where Have All the People Gone? A Puzzle from Middle and Late Iron Age Essex

A survey of 211 Iron Age roundhouses from twenty-five settlements across Essex shows a steep Late Iron Age fall in numbers from a Middle Iron Age peak. It cannot be explained by the replacement of the roundhouse with an architectural form that left little trace in the ground because the roundhouse remained a living architectural tradition until the late Roman period in the county. Nine of these twenty-five settlements were abandoned in or before the Late Iron Age, but have next to nothing in the way of pre-conquest artefacts that could have come from houses of that date which had not survived. The fall in roundhouse numbers is interpreted as a population contraction of at least 50 % over the period c. 125–25 BC. Political upheaval may have been partly responsible. No environmental changes could be identified as contributory factors. Population retreat in the county explains the dearth of Late Iron Age settlements and the absence of large cemeteries.     

Spatial organisation and local unemployment rates in Metropolitan Adelaide: significant issue or spatial fetish?

This paper examines variations in local unemployment rates within metropolitan Adelaide and relates them to patterns of residential segregation, selection and allocation processes in rental housing and variations in accessibility to job opportunities. Adult male unemployment rates are highest in the inner and older suburbs characterised by areas of cheap privately-rented accommodation. Adult female and junior unemployment rates are generally highest in outer suburbs with high percentages of dwellings rented from the South Australian Housing Trust, and remote from job opportunities. Implications for housing, metropolitan planning and transport policies are considered. Although in the absence of an overall increase in the demand for labour such policies may be regarded as merely ameliorative, they are still worth pursuing if the opportunities to do so arise.     

History in Two Dimensions or Three? Working Class Responses to History

Research carried out by the author in North Carolina (2007) aimed to assess how museums might help rebuild identity in communities devastated by economic decline. Interviews, compared with examples from ‘Time and Tide’, Yarmouth, UK, suggested that working class people feel a strong need for history, intense emotional ties to the industrial landscape, and believe that museums can radically change their lives. The evidence suggested that the importance of history to people’s sense of self has been underestimated, particularly in the case of the industrial poor. This paper considers reasons for this underestimation, and suggests that these groups may also have higher and more wide‐ranging expectations of history than intellectuals do. It suggests these ‘emotional’ uses of history, rather than being inferior to academic history, may be richer, and that this ‘three‐dimensional’ experience of history exhibited by the urban poor can enrich the two‐dimensional historical experience of the researcher or museums professional.     

Belief and ritual: Has anthropology lost its magic?

Brown, Michael F. Tsewa's Gift: Magic and Meaning in an Amazonian Society. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985. No front matter, 220 pp. including appendices, chapter notes, bibliography, and index. $19.95 cloth.

Elworthy, Frederick Thomas. The Evil Eye: An Account of This Ancient and Widespread Superstition. New York: The Julian Press, 1986. xi + 471 pp. including illustrations and index. $7.95 paper.

Hurley, J. Finley. Sorcery. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. vi + 232 pp. including key to principle sources, principle sources, and index. $25.00 cloth.

La Fontaine, J. S., Initiation: Ritual Drama and Secret Knowledge Across the World. New York: Penguin, 1986. No front matter, 208 pp. including notes to chapters and index. $5.95 paper.     

What If? Modality and History

Philosophers and historians have long been suspicious of modal and counterfactual claims. I argue, however, that historians often legitimately use modal and counterfactual claims for a variety of purposes. They help identify causes, and hence help explain events in history. They are used to defend judgments about people, and to highlight the importance of particular events. I defend these uses of modal claims against two arguments often used to criticize modal reasoning, using the philosophy of science to ground the truth of modal claims. This analysis puts several important points into perspective, including how certain we can be about our claims about what might have been, and the role that determinism plays in those claims. The proper analysis of modality shows, I argue, that counterfactual claims are legitimate and important, if often uncertain, and that issues of determinism are irrelevant to the modal claims used in historical analysis.     

On the Spacing of Time: On “The Tide of History”

The author discusses aspects of how time appears and is used by the individual and by society. In focus is what the author calls the ideological time scale as it appears in Western society. The concept of the ideological time scale implies systems of strong, ideological signals transferred through time in the human mind from one generation to another. One such signal is the age-old concept of the hero and the symbolism projected around this concept. The paper ends with an admonition to scholars to be aware of and study the kinds of messages transferred through time by this signal system. These messages carry important information about the ways in which society directs itself in the time continuum.