Oral Histories and Scientific Knowledge in Understanding Environmental Change: a case study in the Tumut Region,NSW

What can professional land managers gain by consulting with local communities? Scientific knowledge provides valuable insights into the causes of environmental change and the processes by which it occurs but often lacks a historical dimension. Recollections of local people can supplement both historical records and scientific understandings of cause and process to achieve a more comprehensive picture of change over time. However, the process of memory is tied to life experience and is highly selective. Any attempt to use oral accounts in constructing a picture of environmental change over time must also include an analysis of the process of memory itself. Drawing on oral histories with long term residents of the Tumut region of NSW, this paper explores the nature of local environmental knowledge and evaluates oral history as a source of information for understanding environmental history and the impact of changing patterns of land use.     

Britishness or Englishness? The Historical Problem of National Identity in Britain

Abstract. The dominant ‘modernisation’ perspective on the nature of nations and national identities characterises these phenomena as purely modern artefacts which function as sociological cement for complex industrial societies. In opposition, Anthony D. Smith has elaborated an ‘ethno-symbolist’ framework which posits the possibility of pre-modern antecedents to modern national identities. According to Smith, modern states which have been able to establish their official cultures on the ethnicity of a demographically dominant and cohesive ethnic core are likely to be more stable than states that are divided by the rival histories and traditions of competing ethno-national communities. This paper evaluates Smith's ethno-symbolist thesis by applying his work on the relationship between states and ethnic cores to the historical example of Britain. What is Britishness? Is it just a transnational state patriotism, or is it a secondary form of national identity constructed largely in English terms?     

Les jésuites et l’utopie du «comédien honnête» aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles

The author focuses her approach on the quite unknown actor’s figure, central in the theatrical activity of the jesuit colleges, at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century. The author attempts to decipher the portrait of the christian actor, an antiactor invested by all the strenght of truth whose image is feigned by the comedian. But, more generally, the paper places the actor of Jesuit religious dramas, which were often written by the professors of the colleges, in the framework of those colleges, which constitutes the ultimate guarantee, since the actor is a student, and in no way a future actor, of the specificity of this theatre.