TIN AND PREHISTORIC MINING IN THE ERZGEBIRGE (ORE MOUNTAINS): SOME NEW EVIDENCE

Summary. A number of settlements and other traces of occupation have been identified in the mountainous areas near to tin and copper deposits in the Erzgebirge, and some of them excavated. The newly collected evidence seems to suggest that many small sources of metals, both tin and copper, were exploited, the former metal by washing from the river and creek beds. Though these sources were more modest than the British and Spanish tin supply, they seem to have served the Bohemian and Saxon Bronze Age cultures well.     

3. THE EXPRESSION OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

The theory and philosophy of history (just like philosophy in general) has established a dogmatic dilemma regarding the issue of language and experience: either you have an immediate experience separated from language, or you have language without any experiential basis. In other words, either you have an immediate experience that is and must remain mute and ineffable, or you have language and linguistic conceptualization that precedes experience, provides the condition of possibility of it, and thus, in a certain sense, produces it. Either you join forces with the few and opt for such mute experiences, or you go with the flow of narrative philosophy of history and the impossibility of immediacy. Either way, you end up postulating a mutual hostility between the nonlinguistic and language, and, more important, you remain unable to account for new insights and change. Contrary to this and in relation to history, I am going to talk about something nonlinguistic—historical experience—and about how such historical experience could productively interact with language in giving birth to novel historical representations. I am going to suggest that, under a theory of expression, a more friendly relationship can be established between experience and language: a relationship in which they are not hostile to but rather desperately need each other. To explain the occurrence of new insights and historiographical change, I will talk about a process of expression as sense‐formation and meaning‐constitution in history, and condense the theory into a struck‐through “of ,” as the expression of historical experience.     

Postmaterialism and the Vote for the Senate in Australia

There is a disagreement in the political science literature regarding the impact of postmaterialism upon Australian politics. Elim Papadakis, and Ian McAllister and Clive Bean argued that postmaterialist values were expressed through support for the minor parties in the 1990 federal election. But David Gow, analysing the same data, found no evidence supporting postmaterialist theory. In this research note, I re-analyse the data and present fresh evidence which suggests that there is a postmaterialist effect associated with voting for the minor parties in the Senate. My analysis also addresses the question of modelling the vote for the Senate to adequately account for the representation of new politics values by the minor parties.     

TWO CULTURES OF THE POSTHUMAN FUTURE

The posthuman has been looming large on the human horizon lately. Yet there is no shared understanding of what a posthuman future could possibly mean, and the tension between a technological‐scientific prospect of posthumanity and the critical posthumanist scholarship of the humanities is growing palpable. Whereas the former harbors a novel sense of historicity signaled by the expectation of an evental change to bring about the technological posthuman as a previously nonexistent and other‐than‐human central subject, the latter theorizes a postanthropocentric subjectivity of beings still human. In doing so, it extends the already familiar emancipatory concerns of the human world over the nonhuman, with special attention paid to the ecological other. Despite the occasional claims of critical posthumanism to bring humanities and technological‐scientific approaches to a shared platform, the prospect of technological beings of unparalleled power and the ecotopia of species equality do not fit together very well. In this article I argue that, in their present shape, technological posthumanity and critical posthumanism represent hardly reconcilable social imaginaries and two cultures of the posthuman future. My intervention is a plea for developing a more profound and mutual understanding of both. Instead of advocating particular agendas that nevertheless claim validity for the entirety of planetary life and the entire scholarly enterprise of knowledge‐production, we could invest more in efforts to come to grips with both social imaginaries and venture jointly into the creation of the conceptual tools of a new knowledge economy of understanding the rapidly changing world and our own (post)human prospects.     

‘Burning Back with the Snow’: Traditional Approaches to Grassland Management in Tasmania

High altitude grasslands in northwestern Tasmania respond positively to periodic disturbance through grazing and burning. The major issue in considering the value of these activities as management tools, how-ever, is understanding their dynamics. Too much or too little disturbance may create adverse impacts. Yet, many of the most diverse grasslands have long traditions of active management by Tasmanians for hunting and grazing. Interviews with a number of these graziers and hunters reveal the existence of a coherent system of grassland management which has been applied for generations. These traditional management techniques may well derive from traditional Aboriginal methods and have considerable value for modern grassland management.     

HISTORICAL FUTURES

This article outlines the agenda of a collective research project that aims to explore modalities of historical futures that constitute our current historical condition. To present the collective work adequately, we have teamed up with History and Theory and initiated a long‐term serial publishing experiment. In the coming years, each issue of the journal will feature contributions to this research endeavor. In our project‐opening piece, we briefly introduce the experiment and the premises of the collective research agenda. We begin by recounting the many ways in which increasingly towering novel future prospects have begun to capture the scholarly world's attention across disciplinary boundaries. We then introduce the notion of historical futures. Crediting theoretical inspirations and paying intellectual debts to conceptual relatives, we define “historical futures” as the plurality of transitional relations between apprehensions of the past and anticipated futures. At the core of the article, we formulate our call for a collective investigation of modalities of historical futures and sketch three basic sets of concerns that the explorative works in this experiment may address: kinds of transitions from past to futures, kinds of anticipatory practices, and kinds of registers as interpretive tools that position such practices on a variety of spectrums between two poles (for instance, a value register with the poles of catastrophic and redemptive futures). Finally, we close with a brief note about the necessity of collective endeavors.     

HEGEL AND PATHOLOGIZED MODERNITY,OR THE END OF SPIRIT IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

This article has two broad concerns, both of which are pursued primarily with reference to Hegel's philosophy of history. First, it examines whether Hegel can help explain the difficulty we have in modernity in responding to climate change and ecological crisis. It argues that Hegel provides a useful analysis of this problem, since the model of self‐determination that he appeals to is comprehensively embedded in embodied forms of culture. This helps explain why even a self‐correcting worldview like modernity is obdurate in the face of this crisis. Second, Hegel claims that the defining attribute of spirit is its capacity for self‐production. Modernity is characterized by the emerging and widespread knowledge that spirit is self‐producing. Modernity develops institutions that facilitate and provide an objective reality for spirit's self‐production and its freedom. This aspect of the article examines whether the distinctive capacity of spirit for self‐determination, which is realized in modernity, is subject to the same atrophying conditions by which Hegel says all other historical shapes of spirit are characterized. It asks if the present ecological crisis, something that is directly attributable to spirit itself, represents the limits of self‐producing spirit. The article concludes by examining the difficult position of those countries that cannot be considered to be responsible for the emergence of the Anthropocene but whose actions in the present will amplify its impact.     

SPACE,SCALE AND LOCALITY*

The importance of spatial variations for social behaviour has recently been re-established in social theory. But, paradoxically, space does not exist in the sense of being an object that can have properties and effects. How, then, are these two axioms to be reconciled? Recent attempts to solve this question have been centred around the concept of ‘locality’. In this paper we subject this concept to critical evaluation. First, we consider in abstract terms the way in which spatial variation affects social phenomena. Subsequently, we discuss the implications of this, focusing around the use of ‘locale’ and ‘local labour market’ as operationalisations of ‘locality’. Next, we review and comment on the debate on locality in the light of this discussion. The upshot is that locality is shown to provide an inadequate conceptual scheme for dealing with spatial patterning.     

A Powerful Place of Pictland: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Power Centre of the 4th to 6th Centuries ad

OUR UNDERSTANDING of the nature of late and post-Roman central places of northern Britain has been hindered by the lack of historical sources and the limited scale of archaeological investigation. New work at Rhynie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland (NJ 49749 26345), has begun to redress this through extensive excavation and landscape survey. This has revealed a Pictish central place of the 4th to 6th centuries ad that has European connections through material culture, iconography and site character. In addition to reviewing the place-name and historical context, this article outlines preliminary reflections on five seasons of excavation and survey in the Rhynie landscape. The article also provides a detailed consideration of chronology, including radiocarbon dating and Bayesian statistical analysis. The results reveal the multi-faceted nature of a major, non-hillfort elite complex of Pictland that comprised a high-status residence with cult dimensions, a major centre for production and exchange, and a contemporary cemetery. A series of sculptured stones stood in association with the settlement and cemetery and the iconography of the stones, along with the wider archaeological evidence, provides a rich dataset for a renewed consideration of the central places of early medieval northern Britain with broader implications for the nature of power and rulership in late and post-Roman Europe.