Introduction: recent approaches to pottery and society in the Southeast

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the themes of this special edition of Southeastern Archaeology on modern pottery studies and summarizes the articles included in this edition. Southeastern archaeologists increasingly are applying new theoretical constructs and techniques to ceramic studies. These new techniques, in conjunction with traditional typological analysis, allow archaeologists to approach the study of past peoples from a broader perspective.     

Critical development studies in the Anthropocene

In this short commentary, the ramifications of the Anthropocene for a broadly defined critical development studies are considered. The likely anthropogenic roots of increasing cyclonic intensity and associated impacts in the Pacific are drawn upon to propose four research agendas. The first focuses on how places are becoming connected through human‐induced changes to planetary systems. While direct causal relationships are difficult to draw, research efforts can highlight the disproportionate contributions particular development models, actors, and lifestyles are having on more distant socioecological systems. A second more conventional theme focuses on the uneven impacts of the Anthropocene on people and places, as well as on how development is practised and prioritised. A third theme explores how the Anthropocene can be used to retheorise development in creative and more‐than‐human ways, recognising non‐human agencies and the co‐production of development processes. A final agenda involves asking how critical development researchers can strategically use and repurpose the Anthropocene to pursue socially and environmentally progressive ends.     

POSTMODERNISM,SOCIAL SCIENCE,AND HISTORY: RETURNING TO AN UNFINISHED AGENDA

Recognizing that the vogue of postmodernism has passed, Simon Susen seeks to assess whatever enduring impact it may have had on the social sciences, including historiography. Indeed, the postmodern turn, as he sees it, seems to have had particular implications for our understanding of the human relationship with history. After five exegetical chapters, in which he seems mostly sympathetic to postmodernism, Susen turns to often biting criticism in a subsequent chapter. He charges, most basically, that postmodernists miss the self‐critical side of modernity and tend to overreact against aspects of modernism. That overreaction is evident especially in the postmodern preoccupation with textuality and discourse, which transforms sociology into cultural studies and historiography into a form of literature. But as Susen sees it, a comparable overreaction has been at work in the postmodern emphasis on new, “little” politics, concerned with identity and difference, at the expense of more traditional large‐scale politics and attendant forms of radicalism. His assessment reflects the “emancipatory” political agenda he assigns to the social sciences. Partly because that agenda inevitably affects what he finds to embrace and what to criticize, aspects of his discussion prove one‐sided. And he does not follow through on his suggestions that postmodernist insights entail a sort of inflation of history or historicity. Partly as a result, his treatment of “reason,” universal rights, and reality (including historiographical realism) betrays an inadequate grasp of the postmodern challenge—and opportunity. In the last analysis, Susen's understanding of the historical sources of postmodernism is simply too limited, but he usefully makes it clear that we have not put the postmodernist challenge behind us.     

Introduction: Critical Agrarian Studies in Theory and Practice

In this introductory article we argue for renewed attention to life and labor on and of the land—or what we call the field of Critical Agrarian Studies. Empirically rich and theoretically rigorous studies of humanity's relationship to “soil” remain essential not just for historical analysis but for understanding urgent contemporary crises, including widespread food insecurity, climate change, the proliferation of environmental refugees, growing corporate power and threats to biodiversity. The article introduces an innovative and varied collection of works in Critical Agrarian Studies and also examines the intellectual and political history of this broader field.     

ENTANGLED MEMORY: TOWARD A THIRD WAVE IN MEMORY STUDIES

This essay takes up the call for a “third phase” in memory studies and makes theoretical and methodological suggestions for its further development. Starting from an understanding of memory that centers on memory's temporality, its relation to language, and its quality as a social action, the essay puts forward the concept of “entangled memory.” On a theoretical level, it brings to the fore the entangledness of acts of remembering. In a synchronic perspective, memory's entangledness is presented as twofold. Every act of remembering inscribes an individual in multiple social frames. This polyphony entails the simultaneous existence of concurrent interpretations of the past. In a diachronic perspective, memory is entangled in the dynamic relation between single acts of remembering and changing mnemonic patterns. Memory scholars therefore uncover boundless cross‐referential configurations. Wishing to enhance the dialogue between the theoretical and the empirical parts of memory studies, we propose four devices that serve as a heuristic in the study of memory's entanglement: chronology against time, conflict, generations, and self‐reflexivity. Current debates on European memory permit us to explore the possible benefits that the concept of entangled memory carries for memory studies.     

“The play is set in the theatre”: Conor McPherson and the late-modern humanism of the theatrical event

The plays of Conor McPherson emphasise a sociality of story, language, and theatre. His theatre demands both that a storyteller be heard and that storytellers acknowledge the reality of their words existing in a social space. Meaning-making in McPherson's monologues must thus be social, shared either between the monologists and the theatrical audience, or between a storyteller and the in-play audience. This essay argues that the dynamic of storytelling in McPherson's theatre epitomises a late-modern humanist pursuit. We encounter his characters on loosely defined linguistic journeys of ontological becoming, and are called upon as audience to become interlocutors, supporting and advancing this humanist process. Ultimately, McPherson's work suggests that dramatic characters and theatrical audience exist in a reciprocal relationship of soliciting and supporting a becoming from one another.     

Mother Knows Best? Intergenerational Notions of Fashion and Identity

This paper presents research into intergenerational notions of fashion and identity. It uses examples drawn from the case study interviews with mother–daughter family groups and the participatory method of draw and write with the daughters to illustrate the influences on young girls' fashion choices in the key spaces of childhood: the home, school and community. The findings reveal that young girls both identify and disidentify with fashions and identities available to them. Their mothers play a key role in allowing and restricting certain outfits in certain spaces, with particular distinction being drawn between public and private space. This paper contributes to children's geographies by focusing on intergenerational relationships between mothers and their daughters in relation to theories of identity formation. In doing so this paper highlights how both intergenerational relationships and the girls' identities are mediated through fashion, consumption, peers and the home, school and community spaces.     

Forum: Cultural Geography and Cultural Studies

This forum discusses linkages between cultural geography and allied ‘cultural’ disciplines. A symposium on this topic – held at the 2005 conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers in Armidale – was triggered by the targeted inclusion of geography in a cross‐disciplinary network funded by the Australian Research Council. Although non‐geographers in the network have articulated strong interest in and an enthusiasm for geography, their knowledge of, and everyday participation in its disciplinary travails have been limited. Given this, the papers in the forum review geography's long and dynamic consideration of the relations between place and culture, and raise a set of key issues for geographers to consider: how we might interact with other disciplinary debates about the ‘cultural’, retain distinctiveness as the home of intellectual inquiry around issues of space and place, and leverage opportunities to forge more permanent connections to geographers working not in our traditional institutional settings, but in a range of research centres, schools and disciplinary homes.     

华侨华人学的学科定位与研究对象

本文力图从国际学术界传统学科体系的分解与整合这一角度来分析建立华侨华人学的现实性 ,并从局限性、可行性、研究对象的定位及辨识标准、研究范围、挑战与机遇等五个方面进行了分析。由于其特定的研究对象和无法进行科学抽象的特征 ,从传统的学术分类来看 ,华侨华人研究不可能成为独立的学科。然而 ,学术史的演变表明 ,一些多学科或跨学科的研究领域日益独立出来 ,这为华侨华人学的建立提供了条件。作者对“华侨华人学”下了定义 ,并提出了建立作为学科分支的华侨华人学的两种可能途径。     

关于当代中国边疆研究中的几个问题

关于边疆的界定问题 ,在 2 0世纪 90年代以前 ,我们往往只提陆疆 ,在这以后有所改变 ,增加了海疆的概念。我们在观察边疆地区的时候一定要历史地看 ,中国疆域的历史发展呈现出延续性和波动性相结合的特点。边疆的重要战略地位不仅体现在边疆地区是国防的前线、改革开放的前沿 ,还体现在边疆地区的稳定与发展是我国可持续发展的重要保证