WHAT I BELIEVE: A MEMOIR OF PROCESSUALISM TO NEOHISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

In North America, historical anthropology is closely linked with political-economic studies. The materialist and comparative emphases of the political economy approach have had a strong impact on archaeological research in the Southeast and elsewhere. The increasing popularity of idealist positions in some quarters of archaeological theory has led to a waning of traditional political-economic research. However, recent trends in postcolonial theory suggest that a neohistorical anthropology can accommodate both materialist and idealist viewpoints. Current research on warfare in the Southeast exemplifies the advantages of multivariate vantage points for investigating the past.     

A Grocer's Tale: Gender,Family and Class in Early Nineteenth‐Century Manchester

This article examines the diary of George Heywood, a journeyman grocer turned small shopkeeper, who moved to Manchester from Huddersfield in 1809. Heywood's modest lifetime ambitions were to own a grocery shop and find a companionable wife. As a lower‐middle‐class man of humble means and limited ambitions, Heywood does not fit the heroic mould of those working‐class diarists and autobiographers of the nineteenth century that have more readily captured historians’ attention. Yet it is precisely this ‘ordinariness’ that makes Heywood's journal important. His smaller‐than‐life adventures are the very stuff of lower‐middle‐class life, and reveal something of a petit‐bourgeois world from which historians and social commentators have traditionally shied away. His diary allows us to glimpse one form of masculine identity that both fits with and complicates our notions of ‘bourgeois’ masculinity in this period.     

Fragments of an early Islamic Arabic papyrus from Khirbet Hamrā Ifdān

Excavations in 2013 at the site of Khirbet Hamrā Ifdān in the Faynān revealed several pieces of an Arabic papyrus, the first ever found in Jordan. Although the papyrus is poorly preserved, a detailed analysis of the fragments based on parallels have suggested that it dates to the late seventh/early–mid‐eighth century AD. This article discusses the papyrus fragments and places them within their papyrological and archaeological contexts.     

Seeking a New Materialism in Australian History

Labour and economics are traditional strengths of Australian history, though in recent decades cultural history has instead dominated historical practice. This article discusses the relationship between the economic and cultural in Australian history, utilising our own research as case studies that explore reasons to combine the structural and discursive. Inspired by settler colonial studies and other developments internationally, we propose a new historical materialism for Australian history. In particular, we argue for an increased attention to economic questions and data in combination with cultural history sources and analysis; for the greater historicisation of capitalism as itself a specific and contingent phenomenon; and for the application of Marxist tools, without discarding the lessons of the cultural turn and their specific value to Australian history.     

Calculable territory and the West German census boycott movements of the 1980s

This paper argues that recent signs of a hesitant convergence between discourses on sovereignty and territory and discourses on power/knowledge point to ways in which both discourse of power are linked to calculable territory. Both sovereignty and power/knowledge are based upon intervention, and intervention in turn presupposes these two general forms of power. But intervention is also inherently territorial. The historical context for these claims is set through a brief account of the general sciences of order emerging in the early modern period. The theoretical argument is then given a platform by means of a heuristic model of calculable territory, which, while incomplete and partly counter-factual, provides an overarching framework for understanding a range of recent studies of spatial power relations as contributions to a collective genealogy of calculable territory. An important recent change in the genealogy of calculable territory was brought on by the widespread adoption of electronic information and communications technologies in state institutions and other large organizations over the past quarter century. Both the continued relevance of calculable territory and recent changes in its composition and significance for power relations are illustrated by chronicling one important early set of controversies in the emergence of the ‘information age’: the mass boycott movements in West Germany in 1983 and 1987 aimed at blocking the federal census in that country. These boycotts clearly show the links between sovereignty, power/knowledge, intervention and calculable territory.