Carion's chronicle in sixteenth‐century Danish historiography

The brief world history called Carion's Chronicle, telling the history of the world from the Creation up to the sixteenth century, was widely read in the Protestant world. The first edition (1532 in German) was written, it seems, by Johann Carion in collaboration with Philipp Melanchthon. In 1558–60 Me‐lanchthon published a revised Latin version of the first part (up to AD 800). After a presentation of the contents, the article traces the influence of Carion's Chronicle in two works of Danish history from around 1570, one by Hans Svaning, the other by A.S. Vedel. It is argued that both authors project the universal perspective of the Chronicle onto national dimensions.     

Tacitus and Tacitism in Johannes Meursius’ historia danica (1630–38).∗

The article examines the role of Tacitus in the Latin history of Denmark (1630–38) by Johannes Meursius. It is argued that “Ta‐citism”; ‐ a contemporary movement influenced by Tacitus both as a stylist and as a political writer ‐ is reflected in Meursius’ work in various ways. The first part deals with Meursius’ introduction and his use of Tacitus’ famous avowal of writing sine ira et studio. Next, Meursius’ Latin prose style, with its brevity, antitheses, and paradoxes, is seen in the context of the contemporary “Attic”; movement, which advocated primarily Seneca and Tacitus as prose models. Thirdly, Meursius’ portrait of the Danish king Nicolaus is shown to be inspired by the Tacitean archtyrant Tiberius. Fourthly, it is argued that Meursius also drew extensively on one of the seminal works of Tacitism in Northern Europe, Justus Lipsius’ Política (1589). Finally, the apparently incongruous union of Tacitean cynicism and Meursius’ generally Christian and moralistic outlook is taken up.     

Marxist Critiques of the Developmental State and the Fetishism of National Development

The developmental state has been heavily discussed in various disciplines and across diverse political spectrums. However, the statist notion formulated by institutionalists that the developmental state is autonomous from society and therefore effective in achieving “national development” has more often been taken for granted than problematised. The statist notion of the developmental state has also been accepted and reproduced or challenged merely inadequately by Marxist critics. By analysing how and why currently available Marxist assessments of the developmental state fail to challenge statism, this article offers an alternative theory of the developmental state by drawing on both social form critique and world system analysis. It then locates the origins of statism itself in the dynamics of global capitalism, in which the totality of capitalist social relations (understood as global from its inception) are hierarchically and unevenly constituted. From this it extends Marx's critique of commodity fetishism to the question of the international (the relationship between the nation state and world market) and criticises the statist notion of the developmental state from the perspective of a critique of the fetishism of national development.     

Meeting the demand for meat?

Renewed fears expressed by the United Nations about worldwide population growth have coincided with international concerns about the increased consumption of meat. This article, which draws upon long‐term fieldwork in the Guatemalan highlands and ongoing scientific research in the Netherlands, examines the ways in which global organizations are framing and responding to these concerns. Economists generally address the problem of increased meat consumption through the language of ‘demand’, while nutritionists adopt the rhetoric of nutritional ‘needs’. Not only do these approaches tend to present meat – which in practice takes many forms – as a single substance, but they also flatten the nuanced relationships that exist between the eater and the eaten, while overlooking the diverse contexts in which ‘meat’ eating takes place. This article addresses the question how anthropologists might approach the topic of increased meat consumption, suggesting that an analysis of the ways in which global actors approach this topic can help the discipline of anthropology to re‐engage with historic debates about the role of ‘the material’ and ‘the symbolic’ in relation to eating practices and to move these debates in new and productive directions.     

THE EAST MEDITERRANEAN LATE BRONZE AGE GLASS TRADE WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE PANAZTEPE FINDS

The Late Bronze Age is a period during which intensive transactions occurred in the Mediterranean and Near East. The glass trade became a real industry, exhibiting the innovations of the period from around the region. The glass finds of the Late Bronze Age consisted of valuable gifts exchanged between the elite classes of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Aegean. The objective of this study is to reconstruct Late Bronze Age glass trade systems in the light of archaeological data recovered from Panaztepe, located in the Izmir region of west Anatolia. The glass finds at Panaztepe are represented by examples such as necklace spacers, relief beads, and spherical and circular beads recovered from the two burial grounds. While the interior chronologies of the tombs have not been completely distinguished, it is thought that most of these finds were used during the Late Helladic III A–B periods.