路易斯·宾福德访谈

伦福儒问:让我们从过去谈起,先谈谈你早年的生活吧。宾福德答:我在弗吉尼亚州诺福克(Norfolk)上的高中,大部分学校时光都是在海边度过的。我对学校不是很有兴趣,倒是更愿意逮麝鼠,在海边泥滩上闲逛。     

Mundane Myths: Heritage and the Politics of the Photographic Cliché

This paper considers the impact of photographic clichés on the management, conceptualization, and experience of heritage. Working along the grain of pejorative readings of ‘snapshot’ photography, this account views the repetitiveness and redundancy of the cliché as a critical point of departure, rather than a cause for reproach. Taking the World Heritage Site of Angkor as a core case study, three intersecting axes of political concern are sketched out to elucidate the broad social, material, and affective implications of clichéd photography for heritage. First, processes of dehistoricization and depoliticization are interrogated in relation to the role certain images play in constructing a mythic sense of the past in the present. This leads directly in to the second strand of analysis, which examines the various ways in which individuals negotiate these myths through the production of their own highly personalized photographic clichés. Here I develop the concept of an embodied politics of heritage photography to grasp the multivalent resonances of tourist clichés in particular. Finally, the implicit and explicit forms of spatial control that permeate sites such as Angkor are examined in relation to the photographic clichés they respond to and help shape.     

Obituaries

Abstract

A rich variety of processes have modified the glacial landscape of the Scottish Highlands since the last glaciers disappeared 11,500 years ago. Many of these processes can be described as paraglacial (glacially-conditioned): retreat of glacier ice has resulted in exposure of metastable sediment sources (rock slopes, drift-mantled slopes and valley-floor glacigenic deposits) that have been reworked over a range of timescales. Much of the reworked sediment has been deposited in paraglacial sediment stores (talus accumulations, debris cones, alluvial fans, valley fills, river terraces and deltas). The trajectory of paraglacial sediment transfer can be approximated by an exhaustion model. A corollary of this model is that all sediment stores eventually undergo a change from net accumulation to net erosion, reflecting the non-renewable nature of sediment sources. This concept helps to explain why most talus accumulations, debris cones and alluvial fans in the Highlands are now relict, and why many floodplains appear to have experienced an initial period of aggradation followed by later river incision and terrace development. Since deglaciation, rock slopes have experienced paraglacial stress release due to differential deglacial unloading. Many rock slopes have remained stable or experienced gradual adjustment through intermittent rockfall. At over 600 sites, however, large-scale rock-slope failure has occurred, either in the form of catastrophic failure with complete or arrested debris runout, or as major slope deformations. Modification of drift-mantled slopes has been dominated by rainstorm-generated debris flows activity, which have stripped sediment from slopes and redeposited it in debris cones. Radiocarbon dating of buried organic horizons shows that debris flows have occurred intermittently throughout the Holocene. Snow avalanches have played only a localized role in paraglacial sediment transfer. The Holocene alluvial history of the Highlands is poorly understood. Some alluvial fans formed during a few exceptional flood events, and there is evidence that postglacial floodplain aggradation peaked in the late Holocene and was succeeded by floodplain incision and terrace development, possibly reflecting upstream reduction in paraglacial sediment supply. Other processes have operated independently of glacial conditioning. The effects of wind action are dominant in the coastal zone, forming dunefields through aeolian reworking of beach sand, and on plateaux in the form of deflation surfaces and sand sheets. Extensive erosion of plateau-top sands and aeolisols occurred in the period AD 1550–1700, a period of exceptional storminess. Small-scale periglacial processes have also been active on high ground throughout the Holocene, including granular weathering of exposed rock surfaces, the development of small-scale frost-sorted patterned ground on unvegetated terrain, and slow downslope movement of solifluction sheets, solifluction lobes and ploughing boulders.     

The Archaeology of the Peasant Land Market in Pre-Plague England c ad 1290–1350: A Way Forward

WHILE ARCHAEOLOGISTS are well informed about plague and climate change, many are less familiar with the emergence in pre-plague England of a vigorous market in peasant land in which both freemen and villeins were represented. Yet the tenant’s growing freedom to buy and sell land arguably played a larger part in transforming the social structure of late-medieval England than either the Black Death (ad 1348–9) or Great Famine (ad 1315–17). Accustomed to seeing the five decades before the pestilence as a final interlude of prosperity before the onset of recession, archaeologists have looked chiefly to the post-plague years for evidence of change. However, the toxic combination of a hyperactive peasant land market, combined with the worst subsistence crisis that England has ever known, had encouraged the growth earlier in the century of a rich and increasingly acquisitive and dominant peasant or ‘kulak’ class with properties it needed to protect. The large and more permanent village house, it is argued here, originated at this time. It is also suggested that it was successful peasant engrossers, rather than status-hungry, would-be gentry, who were probably the diggers of the overwhelming majority of non-manorial moats which survive in such numbers across England. Although more work is needed to date these moats archaeologically, it is already widely assumed that they belong primarily to the first half of the 14th century. If this is correct, the smaller domestic or ‘homestead’ moat, occurring in multiples of up to 13 in some parishes, can now be seen as persuasive material evidence of a catastrophic crisis in law and order which historians know only from the documentary sources.     

Between Large-N and Small-N Analyses: Historical Comparison of Thirty Insurgency Case Studies

Abstract

The authors study the 30 insurgencies occurring between 1978 and 2008 using four methods crossing the qualitative/quantitative divide. The four approaches are narrative, bivariate comparison, comparative qualitative analysis, and K-medoids clustering. The quantification of qualitative data allows the authors to compare more cases than they could “hold in their heads” under a traditional small-n qualitative approach, improving the quality of the overall narrative and helping to ensure that the quantitative analyses respected the nuance of the detailed case histories. Structured data-mining reduces the dimensionality of possible explanatory factors relative to the available observations to expose patterns in the data in ways more common in large-n studies. The four analytic approaches produced similar and mutually supporting findings, leading to robust conclusions.     

The man within the breast,the supreme impartial spectator,and other impartial spectators in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith infused the expression ‘impartial spectator’ with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator, he can be deemed impartial only presumptively. Such presumptive impartiality as regards the incident does not of itself carry extensive implications about his intelligence, nor about his being aligned with benevolence towards any larger whole. We may posit, however, a being who is impartial and who holds higher levels of intelligence and of benevolence, and then converse over what her sentiments would be about the matter under discussion. It is natural to conceive of a being who is unsurpassable in such qualities, who is morally supreme, and who naturally takes the definite article the without having been definitized by the writer (because unnecessary, just as we speak of ‘the world’). Signal passages, new to edition 6, suggest that Smith formulates the man within the breast as a representative of the always present and everywhere morally supreme impartial spectator. When Smith speaks of the man within the breast as ‘the supposed impartial spectator’ (all new to edition 6), we interpret ‘supposed’ as sup-pos-ed (purported), not sup-pos’d (posited).