From the Ground Up: Agency,Practice, and Community in the Southwestern British Bronze Age

Embodied, sensual, engagements between people, earthly elements, and celestial bodies during focused, periodic acts of ritual construction and artifact deposition in the southwestern British Bronze Age resulted in the remaking of identities, local communities, symbolic/mythical knowledge, and the landscape itself. To appreciate how material culture, time, and space were employed to define the criteria by which people understood themselves and their world necessitates an archaeological focus upon shared practices in particular settings that served to define rules of engagement with the environment based upon shared human perceptions. Agency appears in this encounter as central in the construction and perpetuation of symbolic perception, shared social memory, and community identity.     

St-Germain des-Prés, St Vincent and the martyrs of Cordoba

The Translatio Georgii, Aurelii et Nathaliae , in which Aimoin recounts the journey of Usuard of St-Germain to Cordoba in search of relics, and the use which Usuard made of Spanish material in his Martyrology , reveal many inconsistencies. These are explained, by comparing these texts with Aimoins's Translatio Beati Vincentii and other evidence for St-Germain, as the result of attempts to bolster the monastery's standing with Charles the Bald at a time of political difficulty.     

Bridging Positivist and Interpretivist Approaches to Qualitative Methods

The usual juxtaposition of qualitative research against quantitative research makes it easy to miss the fact that qualitative research itself encompasses at least two traditions: positivist and interpretivist. Positivist work seeks to identify qualitative data with propositions that can then be tested or identified in other cases, while interpretive work seeks to combine those data into systems of belief whose manifestations are specific to a case. In this paper, I argue that discovering causal relationships is the province of positivist research, while discovering causal mechanisms is the province of interpretivists. I explain why absolutist claims for one or the other approach are mistaken, and argue that the combination of both makes more sense. Finally, I offer suggestions for combinations of positivist and interpretive work, both at the level of thought experiment and in actual data collection and analysis. Throughout, I draw my examples from recent studies of poverty, a field in which a small but distinguished tradition of qualitative studies of the poor has been joined by a growing body of both positivist and interpretive work.     

Reviews

A Persian Requiem , Simin Daneshvar, trans. Roxane Zand, New York: George Brazillier, Inc., 1992, 279 pp., $12.50.

Epic and Sedition: The Case of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh , Dick Davis, Fayetteville, the University of Arkansas Press, 1992, 222 pp., $30.00.

Modern Capitalism and Islamic Ideology in Iran , Cyrus Bina and Hamid Zangeneh, eds., New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992, 301 pp., incl. bibliography, index, $45.00 (cloth).

Waqf in Central Asia: Four Hundred Years in the History of a Muslim Shrine, 1480–1889 , R. D. McChesney, Princeton University Press, 1991, 319 pp. + Glossary, Bibliography, and Index, $49.50.

Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center , Carl W. Ernst, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992, xxxi + 381 pp.

The Warriors of Islam: Iran's Revolutionary Guard , Kenneth Katz‐man, Boulder, San Francisco and London: Westview Press, 1993, 180 pp., Bibliography to page 185, Index to page 192, $42.50.

The Legacy of Medieval Persian Sufism , Leonard Lewisohn, ed., London, New York: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, 1992, 434 pp.

Les otages américains à Téhéran , Nouchine Yavari‐d'Hellencourt, Paris: La Documentation Francaise, 1992, 128 pp., FF 95.

Entre l'Iran et l'occident: adaptation et assimilation des idées et techniques occidentales en Iran , Yann Richard, ed., Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1989, 242 pp.

Zerfall der Staatsmacht Persiens unter Nasir ad‐Din Schah Qa?ar (1848–1896): Einblicke in die Machtsverhältnisse am Teheraner Hof nach den Tagebüchern I'timad as‐Saltanas , Mostafa Edjtehadi, Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1992, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen Bd. 161, 184 pp.

Irangeles: Iranians in Los Angeles , Ron Kelley, Jonathan Friedlander and Anita Colby, eds., with photography by Ron Kelley, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993, 381 pp., incl. index, $35.00 (paper).

Sociology in Iran , Ali Akbar Mahdi and Abdolali Lahsaeizadeh, Bethesda, Md.: Jahan Book Company, Middle Eastern Series N 27, 1992, 141 pp., $8.00.

Education and the Making of Modern Iran , David Menashri, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992, xvii + 328 pp., bibliography (p. 342), index (p. 352).

The Theology of .al‐'Allama al‐Hilli (d. 726/1325) , Sabine Schmidtke, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, Band 152 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1991), 260 pp. + bibliography, indices.

Ay kūtah astinan , ’Ali Akbar Sa'idi Sirjani, Costa Mesa, Calif. and Bethesda, Md.: Mazda Publishers (in association with Iranbooks, Inc.), 1991, 263 pp., no price listed.

From Palace to Prison: Inside the Iranian Revolution , Ehsan Naraghi, trans. from the French by Nilou Mobasser, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994, ix + 283 pp.

Whirling Dervishes , Shems Friedlander, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991, 160 pp., hard cover $30.50 paperback $12.95.

The History of al‐Tabari (Ta'rikh al‐rusul wa'l‐muluk), vol. XV: The Crisis of the Early Caliphate: The Reign of ‘Uthman, A.D. 644–656/A.H. 24–35, Muhammad b. Jarir al‐Tabari, trans. and annot. R. Stephen Humphreys, Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990.cover $39.50, paperback $12.95.

An Ocean Without Shore: Ibn Arabi, the Book, and the Law , Michel Chodkiewicz, Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1993, 184 pp.     

Nothing to Be Ashamed of: Francis Slade's Apology for Contemplation

Premodern philosophy is an essential constituent of the common good precisely because its contemplative character raises it above politics and thus sets limits on politics. Modern philosophy is ashamed of the ineffectiveness of contemplation, which it sees as the naïve appropriation of mind determined by its naturally given end. By appropriating mind as its own act, modern philosophy becomes effective: reason becomes rule and crushes all natural claims to rule through the obliteration of the naturally “higher things,” exemplified by Machiavelli's elimination of the “gentlemen.” The clarity of Slade's contrast between premodern and modern philosophy helps us to understand the meaning of the new order of things in which there are no natural limits and everything is possible.     

French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law

Summary

This article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions.