THE REVEREND BAYES VS. JESUS CHRIST

The Bayesian perspective on historiography is commonsensical: If historiography is not certain like a priori knowledge or sense data, and it is not fiction, historiography is probable. Richard Carrier's book argues for a Bayesian, probabilistic interpretation of historiography in general and of the debate about the historicity of Jesus in particular. Jesus can be interpreted as a historically transmitted reference of “Jesus,” as a bundle of properties, or literally. Carrier devotes too much energy to debating literalism that confuses evidence with hypotheses. But evidence preserves information to different degrees; it is true or not. Carrier proposes to apply objective, frequentist Bayesianism in historiography despite the difficulties in assigning values. He argues that ranges of values can determine historiographical hypotheses. Carrier does not analyze in Bayesian terms the main method for Bayesian determination of posterior probabilities in historiography: inference from multiple independent sources. When the prior probability of a hypothesis is low, but at least two independent evidential sources, such as testimonies, support it, however unreliable each of the testimonies is, the posterior probability leaps. The problem with the Synoptic Gospels as evidence for a historical Jesus from a Bayesian perspective is that the evidence that coheres does not seem to be independent, whereas the evidence that is independent does not seem to cohere. Carrier's explanation of some the evidence in the Gospels is fascinating as the first Bayesian reconstruction of structuralism and mimesis. Historians attempted to use theories about the transmission and preservation of information to find more reliable parts of the Gospels, parts that are more likely to have preserved older information. Carrier is too dismissive of such methods because he is focused on hypotheses about the historical Jesus rather than on the best explanations of the evidence. I leave open questions about the degree of scholarly consensus and the possible reasons for it.     

UNIQUE ISOLATION VERSUS NETWORKS OF OPPORTUNITY: THE COMPETING DISCOURSES OF TASMANIA

In order to understand why people move, we must first try to comprehend how they understand their migration decisions and recognize that such understandings are intricately tied to their understandings of places. Place construction – the way people understand and discuss the nature and meaning of places – occurs at all levels from individual constructions to constructions by economic and political interest groups. These place constructions necessarily influence each other, and hence they are in constant flux and reflect power relations evident in society. This article examines these issues in the context of the negative net migration of young adults in the Australian state of Tasmania through an examination of the experiences of thirty young return migrants who participated in in‐depth interviews and group discussions about their experiences of migration. It finds that bounded constructions of Tasmania – which stress the physical isolation and social and political insularity of the state as well as the uniqueness of the state's environment and society – appear to be dominant for these young returned migrants. However, the article argues that these bounded constructions necessarily exist in relation to networked constructions, which focus on the opportunities for people, ideas, goods and money to benefit through connections with other places as well as the loss of the uniqueness of the Tasmanian environment and society. This article concludes with a discussion of the political, economic and social consequences of these different forms of place construction.     

Persistent pasts,present struggles,imagined futures: Gender geographies in South Africa after apartheid

Abstract

Any analysis of South African gendered performances, identities and inequalities confront past and present experiences of and struggles with race, colonialism, post-colonial development and sexuality. These tensions shape gendered geographical work, highlighting the importance of histories of race, class, and sexuality, as well as the ways in which gender itself can be approached as an analytical category and epistemic framing in South Africa. In this paper we focus on two avenues that have engaged scholars since the end of apartheid, namely: gender and development; and gender and geographies of sexualities. The former articulates the particular ways that the historical spatially exclusionary trajectory of the country has impacted especially on women and their ability to engage with state and national building projects post-apartheid. The latter explores how South African geographies (despite the country’s progressive post-apartheid constitution with regard to LGBT rights) continue to reflect and (at times) enable spatial segregation and inequalities related to gender. A key strength of research in South African gender scholarship is that it complicates and challenges how we might approach gender and gender-based inequalities, and the diverse ways in which gender categories and framings can be imagined, deployed and troubled in post-colonial states and cities.