Multiple Histories: Three Journeys through Academic Records,Medieval Yemen,and Current Anthropology's Encounters with the Past

This chapter sets out to reconsider the interrelation and non-identity between tribal and kinship relations in South-Western Arabia's history through three cumulative methodological steps that are in part inspired by renewed debates on kinship in anthropology, but also by the École des Annales and other historians such as David Sabaean. A first step identifies different legacies of interactions between history and anthropology in the Euro-American academic record after 1945, and specifies their relevance for today. In a next step, prevailing relations between tribal structures and kinship relations will be assessed through a long-distance comparison between the medieval constellations in the Zaydi highlands of Yemen and elsewhere in Asia for an eleventh century time horizon. Thirdly, the outcome of this comparative analysis should then provide some indicators for a fresh assessment of existing source materials through anthropological perspectives, with special emphasis on gender, kinship and hierarchies. The argument concludes with a discussion of “multiple histories”, and how to approach and write them.     

A reexamination of the reasons for the closure of the Dunhuang Library Cave

Abstract

Cave 17 or the cave library is located on the northern wall in the hallway of Cave 16 in Mogao Caves, Dunhuang. The murals on the cover layer of Cave 16 are closely connected with the reason why the cave library was sealed. The transformation tableaux of the thousand Buddhas on the cover layer of Cave 16 seems to reflect the thought of the Final Dharma, which could be dated in the late Guiyijun period when Dunhuang was ruled by the Cao family. In 1052, the trend of the Final-Dharma thought flourished in the Liao Dynasty. With the frequent communications between the Guiyijun regime and the Liao, this trend came to Dunhuang and merged with the original thought of the Final Dharma in this region, which tremendously impacted the Buddhist community in Dunhuang. So the local Buddhist community made the transformation tableaux on the mural of Cave 16 and also transformed Cave 17 for storing Buddhist texts as a response to the coming Final Dharma. These activities seem to have led to the eventual sealing of Cave 17.     

TOWARD A MULTIDIRECTIONAL FUTURE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY: GLOBALITY,INTERDISCIPLINARITY, AND POSTHUMANITY

Compared with the survey offered in the New Perspectives on Historical Writing nearly three decades earlier, historical practices around the world today have witnessed a remarkable change on several fronts. First, marked expansions occurred in such fields as gender history, history of memory, history of knowledge, and visual history, resulting in their noticeable transformation (for example, “gender history” to “history of sexuality” and “visual history” to “history of things”). Second, by exploring and presenting the “other(s)” in modern historiography, new areas are opened up in postcolonial history, global history, emotions history, and so on, which have prompted historians to reconceptualize their notions of time and space. Third, menacing global climate change and notable breakthroughs in various areas of modern technology have exerted an unprecedented impact on historical writing, exemplified by the new developments in environmental history, neurohistory, digital history, and animal history. Science and technology help historians to rejuvenate their research methodology and teaching pedagogy, but they have also demanded that historians acquire a better understanding of the interaction and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans in history, or to take the nonanthropocentric and nonanthropomorphic approach. In sum, what lies ahead for historians and history students today is a multidirectional future, which is at once an opportunity and a challenge.     

2. SOME KEYWORDS TOWARD DECOLONIAL METHODS: STUDYING SETTLER COLONIAL HISTORIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE FROM TKARONTO

This article provides keywords and reflections for decolonial methods, drawing on insights from the Indigenous-led Land and the Refinery project, which concerns the history of Canada's Chemical Valley. This project is crucially organized as Indigenous people co-researching the Imperial Oil Refinery, not as academics studying Aamjiwnaang, and asks how Indigenous and decolonial methods might reorient the use of archives toward other futures. Together, the keywords begin to outline a particular place-based theory of change within decolonial historical practice.     

MIGRATION AND NARRATION: HOW EUROPEAN HISTORIANS IN THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES TOLD THE HISTORY OF HUMAN MASS MIGRATIONS OR VÖLKERWANDERUNGEN

Historians’ interest in the history of human migrations is not limited to recent years. Migrations had already figured as explanatory factors in connection with cultural and historical change in the work of classical and ancient studies scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the writings of these scholars, migrations acted as historical landmarks or epochal thresholds and played a key role in the construction of geo-historical areas. This model has been called “migrationism” and cannot be explained simply on the basis of the history of individual disciplines, but must be seen in its complex interaction with scientific and historical contexts. However, “migrationism” does not relate to fixed political and scientific positions or movements. For this reason, it cannot be explained adequately by using a historically or ideologically based approach. Relying on narratological approaches, this article examines migration narratives that historians of this period used to explain the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. Referring to contemporary historiographical representations of the ancient Near East, it distinguishes three main narratives that are still common today: narratives of foundation, narratives of destruction, and narratives of mixtures. In this sense, analyzing older migration narratives helps us to sharpen the critical view on the genealogy of our own views on the history—and present—of human migrations.     

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY CONFRONTS THE LONGUE DURÉE

This review of John Potts's Ideas in Time: The Longue Durée in Intellectual History discusses the advantages and disadvantages of writing intellectual histories that embrace the longue durée. It applauds Potts's concise account of historiographical discussions of continuity and discontinuity in the history of ideas in the last seventy-five years but laments his failure to discuss the contributions of historians of science and scholarship to the practices of knowledge-making and to the transmission of ideas. It suggests that the study of discontinuities can also be rich and revealing, and it proposes one approach to understanding the ways in which ideas go out of fashion. It concludes by noting, first, that the models that contemporary historians of ideas adopt also have to do with book-market opportunities and pressures and, second, that we have work to do to engage our contemporaries and students in whatever form of intellectual history we choose to write.     

The Unflinching Mr. Smith and the Nuclear Age**

This article focuses on the U.S. diplomat and nuclear arms control negotiator Gerald (Gerry) Coat Smith in order to cast new light on the importance of diplomats in the context of the set of international activities currently labelled as “science diplomacy.” Smith, a lawyer by training, was a key negotiator in many international agreements on post-WW2 atomic energy projects, from those on uranium prospecting and mining, to reactors technologies to later ones on non-proliferation and disarmament. His career in science (nuclear) diplomacy also epitomized the shortcomings of efforts to align other countries’ posture on nuclear affairs to U.S. wishes. In particular, the unswerving diplomat increasingly understood that strong-arm tactics to dissuade other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons would not limit proliferation. Not only did this inform later U.S. diplomacy approaches, but it lent itself to the ascendancy of the new notion of “soft power” as critical to the re-definition of international affairs.     

Geopolicing Race,Gender, and Class: How the Police Immobilise Urban Allochthones

City landscapes are ever-changing stages for the protagonists that pass through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses to positively and negatively code subjects. As such, geography matters to the body. Rather than taking geographic locations, crime statistics, predictive maps and human bodies as objective truths, I focus on the work of police officers, not in terms of an instrumental-rational “meeting of policy targets” or attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make raced, gendered and classed geographical differentiations. This process culminates in geopolicing: the spatial imaginations and practices of police officers as to who, what and where to police and, of course, why. Geopolicing includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of urban “matter out of place”. Police officers perceive exclusionary territories in which landscapes racialised as white and identified as affluent are threatened by urban allochthones identified by class, race, gender, age and residential status. The findings are based on my ethnography among police officers in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, between 2007 and 2011.     

Of “madness,” against Babylon: A story of resistance, (mis)representation,and paradox in the Caribbean

This article provides a postcolonial feminist account of the complex politics of the Earth People, an anti-systemic movement in Trinidad and Tobago who organised against the post-independence status quo during the 1970–1980s. The purpose of the piece is twofold. Firstly, on a scholarly level, it endeavours to (re)tell a theoretically-driven empirically-based story of the nuances that surfaced during the Earth People's resistance to “Babylon” (i.e. racial capitalism, Western institutions, rise of a post-colonial nationalist bourgeoisie). Secondly, on a political-epistemological level, we are countering conventional ways Caribbean people, histories, social movements, and the region at large are documented, studied, and ultimately written about within mainstream academia. To do so, we outline the fraught politics of (mis)representation that arise in established ethnography, with specific care afforded to the perspectives and political agency of participants from the movement. Our analysis emerges out of fieldwork guided by critical race theories, decolonial critique, feminist ethics, and community collaboration. Our methods included archival research, focus groups, oral histories, go-along interviews, and narrative inquiry with former members of the group. In general, the piece historicises the Earth People's efforts to evade and defy colonial norms, capitalist logics, and Westminster state power by “returning to nature.” Further, we offer a synopsis of movement's worldviews, social relations, and ideological standpoints, which despite being episodically paradoxical and not adopted widely throughout the Caribbean, merit further respective attention and critical scrutiny apropos regional posterity and orthodox academic knowledge production.     

中国俄国史研究百年检视与思考

中俄交往始于蒙古西征和金帐汗国时代(1238-1480年),中国学人撰写俄国史自1878年刊印的鹭江奇迹人的《俄国志略》,到今天已经有整整140年的历史。中国的俄国史学科伴随民族命运、国家危机以及世界形势的变化而生,自诞生之日起即负有学人情怀、民族重任和学术职责三重使命。因此,俄国史学科在中国一直发挥着“知夷”和“盗火”的两大作用。中华人民共和国成立后,俄国史(包括苏联时期和俄罗斯联邦时期)研究获得了70年的巨大发展,主要成就有:1985年中国苏联东欧史研究会成立(1992年英文更名为中国俄罗斯东欧中亚史研究会),高等院校、社会科学院、党校、国家有关部委及党政机构纷纷设立俄国史或俄罗斯问题研究机构,建立了从历史学学士、俄国史硕士到俄国史博士的三级专业人才培养体系,俄国史和俄罗斯问题研究的专业期刊创立并连续出版,大量的俄国通史、中俄(中苏)关系史、专题著作、各类教科书、翻译著作(来自俄文、英法、法文、德文、波兰文等)出版,中国俄国史学者积极参与国际学术会议和国际合作研究,具有中国特色的中国“俄罗斯学”新学科正在建立过程中。