由"言今"到"证古"--从徐松看道光朝西北史地研究的一个侧面

渊源于新疆方志修撰的清代西北史地研究,在嘉庆末年至道光初年即表现出面向现实的特点。其中,龚自珍、魏源等人关注清政府西北统治政策的得当与否,而徐松等人则重在讲求西北山川形势的真实客观。道光中期以后,随着徐松等人在这一研究中的持续努力,西北史地研究转向对蒙元史及传统史志的研究,表现出由“言今”向“证古”的转变。     

孟子“性善”思想的现代诠释

孟子认为人区别于禽兽的只是“人性善”,它源于人类共有的同情之心。因为人特有理性精神——反思能力,人人可以发现自己的“本心”,人人也可以成为“尧舜”。“人性善”是孟子“仁政”学说的基石。然而把“人性善”作为“平天下”功业的起点,也使其诞生之日起就有了巨大的消极意义。可是,现代人视人性为物质生活,社会生活等等所决定,也使人类为了从精神家园逃离,失去了生存的终极意义。把“人性善”作为终极的价值理性或许可以拯救这一现代病。     

Telling small stories: spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography

This article examines how the practice of learning geography, and the arenas in which knowledge-making takes place, can be usefully positioned within changing histories of the discipline. It contends that networks of action – understood through the intersection of social sites, subjects and sources – present a conceptual framework and narrative focus for the re-consideration of specific episodes from geography's past. The interventions made here are informed and illustrated by a 'small story' about the doing of geography. Based on different personal accounts, the story revives a series of events, encounters, dialogues and images dating back to the winter of 1951 at Glenmore Lodge, Scotland. This educational institution in the Cairngorm mountains offered children from urban areas the opportunity to learn field studies and the skills of 'outdoor citizenship'. Initially, the focus falls on Margaret Jack, a 14-year-old field-course participant. Her learning experiences are traced through personal letters, a diary and a field journal dating from that time, and her recent recollections of this event. Margaret's account dovetails with the story of her field studies instructor, Robin Murray. Robin's role is traced through his learning experiences as a geography undergraduate at Aberdeen University, and the recent recollections of Catriona Murray, his wife.     

Between realism and the 'New Right': geopolitics in Germany in the 1990s

This essay explores the connections between geopolitics and political conservatism. The introductory argument is that geopolitics historically has been appealing and useful for two very different expressions of conservatism: one which aims to preserve the political geography of the existing international status quo and one which seeks to transcend it and establish a new international order. Through an examination of the 'renaissance' of a conservative geopolitics in Germany, the essay considers how this particular pattern is reproduced in the present day. Although this conservative geopolitics operates for the most part at the fringes of political discourses in Germany, it does have a more specific significance for nationalist-conservative perspectives and those of the 'New Right', both in Germany and elsewhere.     

Regional survey and the economic geographies of Britain 1930–1939

This paper re-considers the history of economic geography in the interwar period in Britain. The activities of the discipline are considered in the context of the commercial geographies of this time, and the intensive round of industrial and social surveys undertaken at a regional level in Britain in the period. Taken together, these economic geographies constructed a range of representational and material spaces and helped construct industrial regions characterized by particular types of places, peoples and performances. These surveys, and the production of the economic geographies that they facilitated, became a key intellectual arena where conflicting ideas about the political and economic management of the industrial region and the national economic were acted out. Following the intention of recent work into the histories of geographical knowledge, the essay will seek out the lateral associations of economic geography, paying particular attention to politically situated nature of the economic geographies produced by academics, regional organizations and the Labour Party.     

Consumption,Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.     

From the Little Tree,Half a Block Toward the Lake: Popular Geography and Symbolic Discontent in Post‐Sandinista Managua

Abstract: The inhabitants of Managua, Nicaragua have a sophisticated, often bitingly ironic, popular geography that they use to navigate the city. The Nicaraguan capital has been destroyed twice by earthquakes, ravaged by war, left to decay for lack of funds, transformed by the creative destruction of speculative capitalism and subjected to a series of ideological impositions. Few people know the official names of streets, and recent governments have not had the ability to put up signs. So a supple system of popular geography dominates, resisting and ridiculing attempts to impose an official order, and adapting to change while preserving a bottom‐up sense of memory, history and place. Drawing on Allan Pred's classic account of popular geography in late nineteenth century Stockholm, I use Managua's language of spatial orientation as a window into peripheral modernity and the politics of everyday life.     

Pollen analysis of core DS7-1SC (Dead Sea) showing intertwined effects of climatic change and human activities in the Late Holocene

The Dead Sea sediment holds the archives of a complex relationship between ever-changing nature and ancient civilisations. Here the detailed pollen analyses of core DS7-1SC (off-Ein-Gedi) are presented for the first time. The record covers the last 2500 years. The facies changes from halite (when no freshwater flows in the Dead Sea) to laminites (when rainfall provides sufficient inflow for the Jordan and subsidiary rivers) a couple of times through the record. The pollen diagram (supported by the facies change) shows a wetter Roman-Byzantine period, which allowed intensive arboriculture and a wetter period at the end of the XIXth and beginning of the XXth centuries, the latter in good relation with historical and instrumental data. Based on radiocarbon chronologies on several pollen diagrams along the western Dead Sea shore, the transition to drier climates and the transition to pastoralism are suggested to take place between a few decades before the Islamic period and close to this transition.     

Direct radiocarbon (AMS) dating of split-based points from the (Proto)Aurignacian of Trou de la Mère Clochette,Northeastern France. Implications for the characterization of the Aurignacian and the timing of technical innovations in Europe

Radiocarbon (AMS) dates on two split-based point wings and a hominin molar from the site of Trou de la Mère Clochette in the French Jura are presented in this paper. Dating split-based points has very rarely been undertaken. This is unfortunate given that these artefacts are critical to our definition and characterization of Early Upper Palaeolithic technocomplexes, as they are considered to be the type fossil of the Classic Aurignacian.     

Border crossings: new approaches to the Irish border

This paper explores and extends recent work on the Irish border that has sought to redress the relative lack of attention to the social, economic and cultural dimensions of the border in contrast to its intense political symbolism. In particular it addresses the theme of border crossing as a way to consider the border in terms of its everyday dimensions and in terms of questions of conventional and reconfigured categories of identity shaped by borderland life. The first section of the paper outlines recent approaches to the Irish border and their relationships to the field of border studies. The second section uses new research material to explore the ways in which the border was experienced on the ground in the lives of those most directly subject to its changing nature over the course of the twentieth century. The final part of the paper addresses recent suggestions that those experiences may form the basis of new cross-border and cross-community ‘border identities’. The term ‘border crossing’ in the paper's title thus stands both for the issue of physically crossing the border whose difficulties and effects have been central to the lives of those who have lived near the border, and for recent arguments that shared experiences of the impact of the border may be the basis for new senses of identity and commonality that imaginatively cross the borders of old categories of religion, culture and political affiliation. Recent efforts to reconceptualise border identities are emerging within a context still dominated by more polarised perspectives on identity and history, but they represent one significant strand of engagement with the Irish border. They suggest possibilities for forms of border identities that co-exist with, run counter to or cross cut old categories of division and difference.