From the “Good Tradition” to Religion on Some Basic Aspects of Religious Conversion in Early Medieval Tibet and the Comparative Central Eurasian Context

What Western academic literature described as ethnic or cultural Tibet in fact implies something composite and processually constructed: Tibet then often appears as a typical example for explanations of collective identity (and ethnicity). Such approaches increasingly are applied in present-day anthropology and historical studies, highlighting the historical conditions and the politically, socially and ideationally constructed features of identity. In Tibet, identity-building was strongly related to the spread of Buddhism. The new religion was introduced in the time of the Tibetan Empire (seventh to ninth century), but it was only its later spread (from the eleventh century) that led to the effective, all-embracing establishment of Buddhism in the Highlands. It was interlinked with regionally different forms of political manifestations—the founding of Buddhist kingdoms at the periphery and the emergence of monastic hegemonies in the central regions. These developments correlated with processes of conversion, which in its narrative model is described as an act of conquest, taming and civilizing the physical universe and which in theory actually never ends. Apart from considering current anthropological discussions of the phenomenon of religious conversion, this paper will include a comparative view of the history of Christianization in early medieval Europe (especially in Western Europe—the Frankish kingdom and the barbarian zones North of the Rhine and the Danube, fifth to tenth century). Inter alia this also raises questions about the initial social forces and interests promoting the new religion's adoption, and to what extent formal similarities with the Tibetan case are ascertainable in Europe.     

7. TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF THE RESEARCHER AS SUBJECT IN POST/DECOLONIAL PACIFIC HISTORIES

Recent discussion has drawn out some important differences between postcolonial and decolonial theories. The former are associated primarily with the work of South Asian scholars working in cultural, literary, or historical studies; decolonial scholarship, by contrast, is located in Latin America and has emerged from sociological critiques of dependency theory. Shifting the locus of debate to the Pacific centers another subject in globalizing critiques of colonialism: the historian in indigenous communities. In this article, I examine how the role of the researcher is conceptualized in Linda Tuhiwai Smith's landmark work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). Revealing tensions between objectivity and intersubjectivity, on the one hand, and between essentialist identity and hybridity, on the other, I ask why Smith's book hinges on dichotomizing nonindigenous and indigenous researchers, who are by turn enabled or constrained in a colonial present. I situate this late twentieth-century subject in a genealogy of indigenous engagement with history and anthropology in New Zealand and contemporary problems of historical justice.     

OBJECTS OF HISTORY: THE PAST MATERIALIZED1

What is the role of material culture in understanding the past? This review essay explores two principal approaches—the history of museums and antiquities and environmental history—to reflect on their shared investment in historical materialism. It reviews Timothy LeCain's The Matter of History and Peter Miller's History and Its Objects, discussing their perspectives on objects and the writing of history. One important part of this history concerns the relationship of academic historians to the idea of a history museum, curatorial practices, and public history. What kinds of history can we do in a museum, with things, that might not occur without the presence of objects? Why were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to encourage a close relationship between historical research and the history museum largely abandoned in favor of a document-driven approach? The second dimension of current interest in historical materialism concerns new approaches to environmental history. It draws inspiration from Deep History as well as recent work in archaeology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) to argue for a more integrated history of humans and nature that demonstrates how things have made us. The history of successive efforts to remake the environment in different parts of the world and their consequences offers crucial object lessons in how humans have responded to nature's own creativity. Both approaches to historical materialism highlight the virtues of a more interdisciplinary approach to historical scholarship, in the museum or in the field, but most important, in our own sensibilities about what it means to think historically with artifacts and to treat them as compelling evidence of a shared history of humanity and nature.     

山地聚落历史人口的重建:以近三百年云南峨山沿河村为例

重建山地聚落人口变化的时空过程对认识历史时期人口发展有重要意义。本文以西南山地聚落沿河村为例,以田野调查资料为主,辅以历史文献和档案,利用估算户数和户均口数的方法重建了沿河村近三百年的人口变化过程。户数以某一时点占主导的世代可婚男子数作为代用指标进行折算;户均口数使用家庭结构模型,以流域内多个聚落人口的婚姻、生育和死亡数据推算出时段上的平均值,再通过1953年流域人口的年龄构成和多个聚落的户均子女和老人数得到平均值作为经验值,代入1920年之前户均口数的重建中,得到长时序的户均口数。重建结果通过对比检验,表明该方法能较好地重建历史时期山地聚落代际分辨率的人口序列。分析发现,该山地聚落人口变化具有大起大落和阶段性发展的特征,且大落的速度比大起的速度快。     

Geographies of Swimming Pool Provision: Lessons from Glasgow 1804–2014

Swimming is a popular form of recreation and exercise in the UK and US. Swimming can take place outdoors but, particularly in the UK, largely takes place in designated indoor pools. Existing research tends to focus on ‘public’ or ‘municipal’ pools leaving broader spatial geographies of swimming pool provision under explored. In response to concern about swimming pool closures, this paper draws from extensive archival research into all swimming pools in the City of Glasgow, Scotland, since the first opened in 1804. Formal and informal programmes of pool building and closure were revealed. Rather than decreasing, public provision has remained constant for the last 100?years but become progressively more spread out in relation to the city’s changing size. Broadening exploration beyond the ‘public’ category exposed a vast drop in school pool numbers around the year 2000 due to a Private Finance Initiative project that consolidated the secondary school estate and outsourced school building management. The lessons: researching all types of swimming pool through time greatly enriches understandings of the changing meaning and extent of public service provision.     

Organized Materiality

In the late medieval period the religious guilds along with trade guilds grew in importance, as did the role of material culture related to the guilds. This history has seen little examination from a Fenno-Scandinavian and particularly a Swedish vantage point. In order to analyse the role of material culture in the formation of this way of organizing people, the article investigates the existence of late medieval guildhalls, especially rural ones, and discusses remains of other material culture that can be connected to the guilds. The halls, drinking vessels and other material things were activated in the growth of a new more substantial way of organizing society outside the boundaries of feudal society and family control. It is argued that material culture had a significant role in the recurrent activities of the guilds of the Middle Ages and in the shaping of new ways of organizing people.     

Truth as historical recapitulation: the dead of Cape Town’s District One

In this essay, I reflect on the massive and dramatic re-emergence of the dead of Cape Town’s District One in 2003, and its aftermath. I discuss how the resurfacing of these ancestors helps us understand how heritage discourses operate in Cape Town, and how their agency forces us to consider what it means to live in the city during post-apartheid urban renewal. I argue that the agency of the District One dead hinges on their exposure of the internal workings of discourse and the associated disciplinary practices through which we experience Cape Town and its heritage. This story ends ambiguously. I discuss how, following the storage of the District One dead in the Prestwich Ossuary, the gaze on Cape Town was redirected away from the city’s past and towards its future; I explore how their reinterment foreclosed a series of discussions regarding the reconciliation of past events with the present realities of Cape Town. I argue, finally, that truth at District One can be understood as a form of historical recapitulation.     

Nostalgia or das Heimweh: Homesickness and the Press-ganged Soldier in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863)

This article argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) uses nostalgia as a literary aesthetic and historical context to articulate a narrative of disorientating epochal change. Gaskell’s novel draws on nostalgia’s roots as a psychosomatic disease afflicting soldiers displaced by international conflicts to reassert the traumatic roots of a familiar feeling often understood as superficial and insignificant. Nostalgia began as a disease brought on by migration and only later came to be thought of as a type of sentimental memory; first home was far away and then it was long ago. Gaskell’s novel incorporates both, mingling longing for a place with longing for a past. This double distancing articulates an experience of transition within her historical novel. She draws on an eighteenth-century trope used by figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth, repurposed for the demands of prose fiction. The homesick soldier who was the first sufferer with pathological nostalgia is cast as the central protagonist of historical transformation and an emblem of uneasy transitions. Sylvia’s Lovers has received scant critical notice to date and, perhaps for this reason, its explicit allusions to nostalgia, and the role they play in Gaskell’s historical imagination, have been left entirely unremarked.     

Blurred images: Indro Montanelli’s anti-politics

Through a close reading of Indro Montanelli’s 1944/1945 novel Here They Do Not Rest, this article argues that the famous and popular Italian journalist Montanelli contributed significantly to a particular Italian form of ‘anti-politics’ after the fall of fascism. It argues that anti-politics in Italy provides the foundation for the county’s right-wing populism and that it makes a significant contribution to political and historiographical revisionism of the fascist past. Indro Montanelli is read as an important architect of this revisionism and as such read against his popular image.     

Fabric fragments from Pine Island,Alabama: indicator of an evolving male costume item

European and indigenous artifacts from a grave near a mound on Pine Island in the Tennessee River near Guntersville, Alabama, donated to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in 1915, included a group of fabric fragments. The fragments, which incorporate interlaced bison-hair yarns, most likely represent portions of a sash, an accessory with a long history in Mississippian iconography but with few extant archaeological examples. This paper addresses fabric attributes, comparable archaeological and historical fabrics, and the social significance of this costume item.