Reading Livy against Livy: The dream and nightmare of (American) empire1

Recent debates over the rise of an American Empire have relied on analogies to past empires, from ancient Athens to modern Britain. Such historical analogies, while inexact and debatable, are a basic mode of understanding our relation to the past. This article explores the analogy of the United States to the Roman Empire. The figure of Rome is a contested legacy, as can be seen in the long-ago writings of Livy and Tacitus, in the developing ideal of Rome during the Middle Ages, and in the works of modern scholars and poets living under Soviet domination in Poland. Tacitus tells us that the most profound symptoms of empire may be seen in the homeland. The debate over analogies for the American Empire is thus a debate over the “state of America's soul.”     

The Paradox of the Political: Carl Schmitt's Autonomous Account of Politics

Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political advances an understanding of the political in which the political is assessed in terms of the autonomy of the friend-and-enemy distinction. This article questions the autonomous foundations of Schmitt's concept of the political. Ultimately, Schmitt's desire to establish the autonomous nature of the political, allowing the specifically political antithesis to achieve mastery over all other forms of discourse, is replete with paradox. Whilst Schmitt endeavours to establish the autonomy of the political—where the political is free from interference from other domains—it is argued that his account of the political is highly dependent on the state. More critically, Schmitt's depiction of the political as autonomous is a strategic manoeuvre to establish the autonomy of the domain of the political vis-à-vis other conceptual domains.     

The background to the proposition that plankton be used as food in the United Kingdom during the Second World War

Food shortages, particularly of proteins, in Britain during the Second World War led to the suggestion re-surfacing that marine plankton might be harvested on an industrial scale first as human food, then turning to its potential use as a supplement to stock and poultry feed. The notion emanated in the United Kingdom from Sir John Graham Kerr, at Glasgow University. He encouraged Alister Hardy, at Hull, to develop the idea and the natural testing ground was the Clyde Sea Area (given the extensive history of plankton research at Millport). Unpublished documents from the archives of the Scottish Association for Marine Science shed new light on the interactions behind the scenes of this project between Kerr, Hardy and the Millport Marine Station's then director, Richard Elmhirst. Elmhirst, who was sceptical about the feasibility of the plan from the outset, went along with it; not least as a way of attracting welcome research funding during lean times but also, doubtless, regarding it as his patriotic duty in case the proposal proved worthwhile.     

Discipline or profession: Anthropology and its guilds

Chambers, Erve. Applied Anthropology: A Practical Guide. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1986. ix + 258 pp., including references and index.

Driben, Paul. Aroland Is Our Home: An Incomplete Victory in Applied Anthropology. New York: AMS Press, 1986. xiv + 185 pp., including chapter notes and index. $32.50 cloth.

Eddy, Elizabeth M. and William L. Partridge, eds. Applied Anthropology in America, Second Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. xiii + 571 pp., including bibliography.

Van Willigen, John. Applied Anthropology: An Introduction. South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1986. xviii + 259 pp., including bibliography and index. $36.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.     

Ballistically anomalous stone projectile points in Australia

The emergence of stone-tipped projectile weaponry was an important event in hominin evolution. A common archaeological approach to identifying projectile weapons is to extrapolate from optimal values of ballistically-relevant attributes as determined from ethnographic North American weapons and modern experiments. Among the most significant of these attributes is “tip cross-sectional area” (TCSA) because it determines a point's efficiency in penetrating an animal. The warranting argument for projecting these data onto prehistoric artefacts is that past “research and development” necessarily led to stone projectiles with optimal TCSA values for a given delivery system. However, our test of this warranting argument, involving analysis of 132 hafted ethnographic Australian stone projectile points and 102 hafted knives, demonstrates that Aborigines did not optimize TCSA values, thus offering a challenge to TCSA-based narratives about the first appearance of projectile weaponry. This illustrates the difficulty of inferring ancient stoneworkers' design intentions from narrowly-defined optimal values. Instead, tool designs should be considered in the context of the reduction sequences that produced them and the dynamics of transmission of those reduction sequences across generations.