Advocacy and the struggle for a better science of anthropology

Spaulding, Philip, ed. Anthropology in Praxis. Calgary, Canada: Department of Anthropology, Occasional Papers in Anthropology and Primatology, 1986. iii + 253 pp. N. P.

Paine, Robert, ed. Advocacy and Anthropology, First Encounters. St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1985. xiii 4‐ 278 pp. including references. $15.00 paper.

Agar, Michael H. Independents Declared: The Dilemmas of Independent Trucking. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986. 191 pp. including appendices, literature cited, and index. $24.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.     

Rural sociology and social change

Charles P. Loomis and J. Allan Beegle., A Strategy for Rural Change. New York: Halsted Press, 1975. xv + 525 pp. Tables, figures, references, author and subject indices. $19.50.     

Development vs. Reform: Attempts at Modernisation During the Twilight of British Influence in Iraq, 1946–58

This study analyses British and local Iraqi elites’ efforts to avoid social revolution through promotion of economic development during the last years of the Iraqi monarchy. Discussing the complex set-up of domestic Iraqi elites and their ambiguous relations with British officials in Iraq, it argues that the structural composition of the Iraqi state itself is an important explanatory factor for the swift overthrow of the old regime in 1958. Using British archival records, this article analyses the politics of avoiding reform and promoting economic development to which Iraqi elites and the British were privy. It shows how economistic ideas of ‘modernisation’ and economic growth were believed to be the solution to Iraq's endemic problems of social unrest and politicisation of large parts of the population. Arguing that increased wealth through oil-fuelled development programmes would ultimately trickle down to all strata of the population and thus stave off the danger of revolution, the British failed to realise that Iraq's structural setup with its unscrupulous politicians and wealthy landowners at the apex of power, along with an all-permeating patronage system, effectively hampered any dispersal of what little new wealth was generated through these projects.     

And a Historical Folklore Survey? A Reply to John Widdowson’s ‘New Beginnings’

This note is written in support of John Widdowson’s recent reflections on the direction of folklore studies in Britain. A general discussion is in everyone’s interest and with his words Widdowson has given a gentle whack to the beehive. This article offers more of the same, although from the perspective of historical folklore.     

Patent portfolio analysis of cities: statistics and maps of technological inventiveness

ABSTRACT

Cities can be considered as engines of the knowledge-based economy, because they are the primary sites of knowledge production activities that subsequently shape the rate and direction of technological change and economic growth. Patents provide rich information to analyse the knowledge specialization of specific places, such as technological details and information on inventors and entities involved. The technology codes attributed at the level of individual patent documents can be used to indicate the diversity and scope of the knowledge claims underlying a specific invention. In this study we introduce tools for portfolio analysis in terms of patents that provide insights into the technological specialization of cities. The mapping and analysis of patent portfolios of cities exploits data derived from the Unites States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and dedicated tools (at https://leydesdorff.net/software/patents/). The results allow policy makers and other stakeholders to identify promising areas of further knowledge development, including smart specialization strategies.     

Toward a Received History of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind—my “vicarious past.”