Ireland’s eternal Easter: Sorley MacLean and 1916

Abstract

This essay examines the treatment of the 1916 Easter Rising by Scottish Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean. From his early work onwards, the Rising assumes a mythical significance in MacLean’s poetry. Throughout, this aetheistic, socialist poet uses rhetoric borrowed from the Gaelic Christian tradition to present the rebels of 1916 as exemplary secular martyrs. James Connolly plays a crucial role as the Scottish son of Irish immigrants. MacLean’s later praise poem for Connolly, “Àrd-Mhusaeum na h-Èireann”, deploys biblical rhetoric to present the Rising as an act of ritual sacrifice, recalling Patrick Pearse’s “Fornocht do Chonaic Thu”. MacLean’s valorisation of violence takes place against the backdrop of the modern Troubles, and prompts a reassessment of the political legacy of his poetry.     

Understanding Population Decline Trajectories in Spain using Sequence Analysis

Population decline is a key contemporary demographic challenge. Previous work has measured the national extent of population decline, and we know that it is more acute in Japan and Eastern Europe and is set to accelerate across many industrialized countries. Yet, little is known about the population trajectories leading to current trends of depopulation and their underpinning demographic and contextual factors. To address this gap, we aim to identify and characterize the different trajectories of depopulation in Spain from 2000 to 2020 at the small area level using sequence analysis, spatial autocorrelation analysis, decomposition techniques, and multinomial logistic modeling. We show that while Spain recorded an overall 17.2% national population growth between 2000 and 2020, 63% of municipalities experienced depopulation. We identify six trajectories of population decline, with a well-defined northwest-south divide. These trajectories include mostly rural municipalities, but also certain small- and medium-sized cities. Natural decline comprises the main demographic component underpinning differences in the extent of depopulation across trajectories, and international migration plays an important role in explaining transitions to decline since the financial crisis of 2008. Small and old populations, and, to a lesser extent, remoteness from cities are key features characterizing areas of high decline.     

“The Island of the Clouds”<Emphasis Type="Bold">:</Emphasis> The Archaeology of Life on the Margins in a Small-Scale Caribbean Island Landscape,Bequia (St. Vincent Grenadines) ca. 1700–1900 CE

The study of marginal Caribbean islands and economies remains understated within the wider context of the discipline of Caribbean historical archaeology. Research has tended to focus mainly upon the study of the dominant site form of the colonial period in the region: the industrial sugar plantation, and mainly upon the larger islands. This contribution moves the scale of analysis to the smaller Caribbean island landscape as a whole entity, and attempts to frame an archaeological biography of Bequia in the St. Vincent Grenadines over the last three hundred or so years. Further, we consider how more peripheral economic strategies that developed there over this period impacted upon this island landscape, how they are recognized archaeologically and what they can tell us about wider social and economic processes. Using landscape archaeology survey allied to GIS and historical cartographic analysis, the study presented here charts the emergence and development of a distinctive insular Caribbean socioeconomic identity very much on the margins.     

Ferdinand Tönnies and Enlightenment: A Friend or Foe of Reason?

Ferdinand Tönnies, the founder of sociology, has been characterised as contributing to the “destruction of reason,” although he viewed himself as a champion of Enlightenment with a social vocation. Here, we shall consider Tönnies’s discussion of the epistemological bases of what he called “rationalism”: his theory of the state, based on the rationalism of Hobbes, and of society, based on the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith and Hume; his implicit development of rationalist ethics and the positions he took on Spinoza and Kant; and the relationship between his philosophy of history and that of his philosophical forebear, Adam Ferguson, who wrote in the age of bourgeois emancipation that marked the high Enlightenment. We shall conclude with reflections on the grounds on which Tönnies has been read as an opponent to rationalism and even as a foe of Enlightenment.     

Barbadian Gothic: The Moving Coffins of the Chase Vault in Socio-Cultural Context

Abstract

The Chase family vault (Oistins, Barbados) is widely known as the setting of a macabre nineteenth-century story of moving coffins. On several occasions between 1812 and 1821, on opening the sealed vault to add a new burial, the neatly stacked coffins were found scattered. This legend has never been examined within its contemporary setting, including the Gothic literary and cultural movement. This article seeks to show that the episode reveals much about the negotiation of power in an island society on the edge of slave rebellion, where the planter class were fearful of the enslaved peoples’ continued practice of the banned spiritual and healing rituals known as Obeah. The article further examines how the story reflects notions of otherness, death, materiality, and memory in early nineteenth-century Barbados, where the ordered Protestant world of the planters clashed with what they perceived as the elemental worldview of the enslaved African and Afro-Barbadian population.     

Ferdinand Tönnies and Friedrich Paulsen: Conciliatory Iconoclasts

Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, a work of global import and condensate of the history of ideas, was much influenced by the philosopher Friedrich Paulsen. The study of their friendship shows how these intellectuals chose to adopt and adapt paradigms of the European legacy—rationalism and empiricism on the one hand, rationalism and romantic historicism on the other—in achieving creative idiosyncratic syntheses of idealistic monism. Beyond the shared scientific agenda of monism, they were convinced of the vocation of intellectuals in social legislation, which Paulsen pursued through pedagogy, while Tönnies became a social activist. Their interest in forms of socialism, romanticism and pessimism had varying consequences due to the differences in temperament between the political realist Paulsen, whose choices were more expedient for career advancement, and the political idealist Tönnies. Their relationship is an instance of the specific rapport that Tönnies characterises as intellectual friendship.