A MOST MODERN SUBJECT: THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY AND THE FASHIONING OF NATIONALIST AND OTHER MODERN SUBJECTIVITIES

This book takes an ethnographic approach to its topic by endeavoring to observe how social and disciplinary subjects shaped by modernity go on to constitute modern worlds. Specifically, it attempts to “explore modernity as a contradictory and checkered historical-cultural entity and category as well as a contingent and contended process and condition” (1). Most of the subjects considered are intellectuals and academic disciplines (specifically history and anthropology), although the argument occasionally focuses on artists as well. The book particularly recognizes and analyzes the ambiguities, ambivalences, and contradictions generated within modernity not as mistakes or gaps like so many potholes to be fixed over time, but as constitutive of the modern landscape itself. This accepting acknowledgment, in turn, stands central to the book's endeavor to resist the teleological paradigms inherent in many modern metaphors regarding roads that must be traveled to move from what is backward to what is forward, from a superseded past to a promising future. Central to the volume—and its most original contribution—are various deliberations on the productions of time and space by various subjects. To be clear, by “time” the book means history and temporality whereas “space” suggests tradition and culture. It resists the naturalization of modern constructs such as secularized time and cultural traditions, and forces them under an analytic lens. Critical to these investigations is Saurabh Dube's appropriately insistent claim that these temporal and spatial regimes can exist in tandem and coevally, even when they are seemingly in contradiction. Among other outcomes, the volume prompts further reflection on the manner in which historiography plays a role in the formation of nationalist and modern subjectivities among nonhistorians. This essay seeks to think through the history of history as a discipline emerging during the coalescence of a hegemonic European episteme and the emergence of a popularly embraced scientism. Despite its roots in Europe long preceding modernity and its parallels in South Asia preceding British rule, history underwent a transformation when inflected through European modernity, especially the influence of empirical science paradigms. Although its emergence as a discipline promoted and employed by both the empire and the nation-state created professional historians, an expanding public sphere has meant that research into its role in fashioning modern subjectivities (including nationalist ones) must consider its reshaping and redeployment by those resisting European-originated modernity and promoting alternative modernities.     

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.     

The Science of Empire: Darwinism,Human Diversity,and Russian Physical Anthropology

Summary : The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the “natural history of humanity” in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in the a priori accepted developmental evolutionary model. The other constructed a new language that undermined the idea of species/subspecies/races/nations/ as stable, externally bounded, and internally homogeneous units and attempted to rationalize imperial hybridity. The article's main focus is on the latter classificatory narrative, its relational methodology, and the protostructuralist units of comparison that it produced.     

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.     

The legacy of Cesare Lombroso and criminal anthropology in the post-war Italian police: a study of the culture,narrative and memory of a post-fascist institution

This article examines the employment in post-war Italy of positivist scientific policing originally inspired by the work of the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso at the end of the nineteenth century and subsequently developed at the scientific policing institute (Scuola Superiore di Polizia) in Rome. It analyses how the post-war police addressed the fascist regime’s employment of scientific policing for oppressive purposes and how far post-war scientific policing reflected the legacy of fascism. The article argues that post-war police narratives stressed the international importance of Lombroso and Italian criminal anthropology in order to ‘normalize’ the activities of the Scuola Superiore di Polizia during the fascist period and legitimize its work after the Second World War. Positivist criminological theories continued to influence police repression and criminal investigations in post-war Italy. However, the extent to which police officers and officials working outside the Scuola Superiore were convinced by such theories is questionable.     

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.