Fighting for the Afterlife: Spiritists, Catholics, and Popular Religion in Nineteenth-Century France

This article examines the position of nineteenth-century French spiritism in relation to the Catholic Church. Spiritism offered an alternative "religion" to French Catholics dissatisfied with the church's traditionalism in a modernizing world. I begin by describing the spiritists' position on Catholic dogma and the movement's place as an urban popular religion. Spiritist critiques of heaven and hell incorporated liberal and republican values, thus making it appealing to these groups who were often hostile to the church. I move next to conflicts between the adversaries. Spiritists, unfettered by dogma or even logic in some cases, freely incorporated the supernatural into the nineteenth-century acceptance of Enlightenment values such as reason and science. The church, unable to deny the reality of supernatural phenomena claimed by the spiritists, limited itself to asserting the devil's hand in these phenomena. It thus could not fully address the challenge of spiritism. Spiritism as a popular religion complicates the assumption by many folklorists regarding the disappearance of popular beliefs in the face of the modern. The article concludes with a call to modify these theories in order to understand an evolving, often urban, popular culture which integrated "tradition" and "modernity" and continually created new forms of the marvellous.     

Historicising Agency

Why has ‘agency’ been such a tenacious concept in historical scholarship on women and gender, and what have been the consequences on this tenacity? This essay tackles these questions and proposes, through a brief examination of the history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, how agency might be pushed in more surprising, more analytically productive directions. Too often agency slips from being a conceptual tool or starting point to a concluding argument. For example, in my subfield of African women's and gender history, statements like ‘African women had agency’ can stand as the impoverished punch lines of empirically rich studies. Consideration of Walter Johnson's 2003 essay ‘On Agency’ highlights the intellectual and political imperatives of 1970s Marxist and feminist social history that placed agency at centre stage. This essay examines why, more than a decade after Johnson's critique, agency endures as a ‘safety’ argument for reasons related to representational politics, research methodologies and the circumscribed imagination of intellectual gatekeepers. It argues that we should move beyond agency as argument by attending to the multiple concerns and desires – some intentional, others not – that animate human actions, including contentious gendered practices, and by examining how different historical actors have themselves understood agency. Agency has a history. By acknowledging and tracing that history, we will be better able to discern the usefulness and limits of agency for our own analyses.     

New insights about the construction and use of shell mounds from the geochemical analysis of mollusks: an example from the greater San Francisco Bay

A new method developed by Schweikhardt et al. (2011) for the geochemical analysis of bay mussels is applicable (when combined with radiocarbon assessments) for examining the seasonal construction patterns and growth cycles of coastal mound sites over time. Ideally suited for the analysis of mollusk fragments in museum collections, this method allows archaeologists to evaluate divergent models about the functions of mound sites, as well as the mobility practices and social organizations of the mound builders. In this case study, the method is employed to examine two adjacent mounds (Ellis Landing, Brooks Island) in the San Francisco Bay Area, California to assess whether their occupants may have participated in a broader multi-site community dating to the Late Period (1100–250 BP).     

WHO TALKS TO WHOM: ÉLITENESS AMONG THE WORLD'S NATIONS

International standing is always relative. To T.A. Mits in Toronto, New York, or Moscow it's the clan in Parliament, the White House, or the Kremlin who are the aristocracy. And it is the study of who talks to whom among the world's nations that provides insights into which countries constitute the nobility of the international power structure. Those nations making critical decisions in the political arena and directing the course of history are those who are 'more equal than others' at the United Nations or Geneva peace talks.