Crisis,challenge and choice: recent theoretical trends of anti-modernism and Western studies in Chinese history

During the last three decades, so-called “postism” (a Chinese non-professional, invented referent to postcolonialism, postmodernism and poststructuralism) has powerfully criticized and challenged the hegemonic ideology of the long-standing Euro–American centralism and the authoritative discourse of modernism in Western intellectual and academic circles, albeit it with various different resonances in Chinese and other non-Western societies. By tracing the trajectory of Western conceptual ideas from classical “rational” interpretations of history, this article tries to construct the inner connections and evolution between these conceptions and ways of thinking, and to summarize their impacts on and reactions from the field of Chinese historical studies. This article suggests that these new trends have definitely cast light on macro ideological and perspective concerns but have been less fruitful in concrete historical studies.     

Command Celebrities: The Rise and Fall of Hanzelka and Zikmund

In the 1950s and 1960s, the travellers, explorers, authors, and filmmakers Ji?í Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund became celebrities both in Czechoslovakia and abroad. The Communist cultural authorities actively supported the transformation of the two men into cultural icons, which could be exploited as a model for the suppression of ‘old’, ‘decadent’, and indeed ‘popular’ culture, and as a tool for recruiting members of the intellectual, cultural, and social elites into its service. Hanzelka and Zikmund’s multimedia travelogues, as well as their dashing public personae, blended in a unique way the ‘high’ and ‘low’, the accessible and unreachable, the familiar and the exotic, in the officially promoted culture of the time. But in the later 1960s, as Hanzelka and Zikmund’s political loyalties towards some form of reform socialism became more blatant, the two men fell into disfavour, and they found themselves banished from the public sphere following the events of 1968 until the regime fell in 1989. This article investigates how the curious ‘command celebrity’ of ‘H&Z’ straddled socialist ideology and capitalist consumerism, political affirmation and cultural critique.     

盛世隐忧：从乾嘉文治看清朝由盛而衰

以盛世光环载入史册的乾隆朝在文治领域潜伏着重重隐忧。当时朝廷重视经学,而思想上却不认同民间汉学;虽然承袭庙堂理学,却对其内圣外王鲜有心得,并且压制朝野理学的发展。同时,统治者的信仰世界混乱、迷茫。嘉庆朝的经学政策略有调整,重新重视理学,又强调以勤简为政,但总体上缺少新意,无济于事,清中期遂成武功彰显而文治偏失的格局。这也是清朝由盛而衰的重要根源。     

在“同种”与他邦之间:杨成志对越南民俗的考察及其方法论启示

20世纪20年代末,杨成志赴滇开展民族调查,往返途中在越南停留月余,收集了不少关于越南的文字、实物与影像材料。此后他根据相关材料撰文对越南社会、历史与文化进行了总体性介绍,成为首位研究越南的中国人类学家。这不仅是中国人类学、民俗学的一笔学术积累,亦彰显出杨成志的家国情怀与其越南研究的方法论意义,迄今仍对中国人类学的海外研究深具借鉴价值。     

Archaeological Observation on the Layout of the Three Courts and Five Gates of the Daming Palace of the Tang Dynasty

The system of Three Courts and Five Gates is an essential content of the designs of the capitals and palaces of ancient China. The Three Courts and Five Gates planning of the Daming Palace is the adoption of this rule and the application to the spatial designing of the palace city. The archaeological fieldwork revealed that within the Daming Palace, the Three Courts pattern with three walls as the borders, and Hanyuan Hall, Xuanzheng Hall, and Zichen Hall as the centers formed the outer court, middle court, and inner court plan, which was the embodiment of the new interpretation of the Tang Dynasty to the traditional Three Courts and Five Gates ritual system. Through the trimming of the archaeological data fetched in the past 60 years about the southern part, which is the official affair zone, of the Daming Palace, this paper discusses the spatial structure of the Three Courts and Five Gates pattern of the Daming Palace, and analyzes the substantial relationship between this pattern and the political demands of the ruling class.     

Hidden in plain sight: mixed methods and the marble orchards of the Vlach Rom (Gypsies) in Toledo,Ohio

While American Romanies live a remarkably secretive cultural existence, their grave locations and memorial stones offer accessible evidence about their history and active, on-going communities. This article elaborates a less-intrusive ethnographic method that uses Romani cemetery data to explore and map the distributions and social networks of American Romani communities. This case study identifies Vlach Rom memorial sites located in Toledo, Ohio's Calvary Catholic Cemetery. Data were gathered on the memorials and spatially cataloged using a global positioning system (GPS). Additionally, genealogical data on the families were collected whenever available in order to construct and map family networks. Conjectures explaining the spatial distribution were tested by empirically investigating geographic information system (GIS) maps of different gravesite attributes. Land availability was the most likely factor determining the distribution. Evidence of Toledo Rom history and cultural practices were also gathered and reviewed from a qualitative analysis of the memorial stones. These discoveries have the potential to advance Romany studies—by applying modern analytic tools, GPS and GIS hardware and software to reveal otherwise “hidden” knowledge.     

Mobile Media as New Forms of Spatialization

Abstract

The physical space has historically served as an important support for human expression. However, the production of location-based information has been consciously used as means of social control by the hegemonic power, which decides what can be publicly displayed, and what should be hidden. With the development of mobile media, space has gained new dimensions, resulting in a sort of hybrid space where digital information overlays the physical space revealing what was previous unknown about a place. As mobile devices become increasingly present in our society, they should be understood as a social interface to our experience of space, serving not only as means to consume information, but also tools for communication. This paper discuss the current mobile media practices, such as mapping, urban electronic annotations, location-based mobile games, and smart mobs, which creates opportunities for new forms of human expression, reappropriations of space, and contestation of hegemonic power.     

Between orthodoxy and heterodoxy: the troubled relationships between heritage studies and heritage law

This article discusses the relationships between heritage law (HL) and heritage studies (HS) from the perspective of international law. More specifically, it focuses on the ways in which HL scholars have integrated (or failed to integrate) HS considerations into their work, and vice versa. The paper shows that the relationship between HL and HS is better resolved with respect to orthodox approaches to both law and heritage. More specifically, orthodox HS and HL take each other into account only lightly, a strategy that, while unsatisfactory on many grounds, is balanced on both sides. However, when it comes to heterodox (critical) analyses in these fields, the relationship is far more fragile and unbalanced, from the point of view of heterodox HS, the law tends to be neglected or even sometimes rejected; whereas from the point of view of HL, there is a more conscious effort to fully engage with HS, which is made difficult by heterodox HS’s push against the law. This dissonance can lead to severe difficulties in understanding heritage work and even the field itself.     

Scaling heritage. The construction of scales in the submission process of alpinism to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list

ABSTRACT

For the last two decades, the polysemous notion of ‘scale’ has drawn an increasing amount of attention among scholars studying heritage policies and practices, often with regard to UNESCO conventions. Significantly, in many of these works, terms such as ‘global’, ‘national’ and ‘local’ are connected to categories of ‘scale’ or ‘level’ that are taken for granted by the scholars who use them to guide their analysis. This paper, in contrast, promotes a different, constructivist understanding of the notion of scale. From our perspective, there is an added value to be found in focusing—without using any preconceived or external conception of scale—on the ways in which stakeholders conceive of and use scale throughout the processes of heritage making. Using the case of alpinism and the creation of its file for submission to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list, we show that the interest of this approach lies in its comprehensive ability to highlight how people define, elaborate and use scale in order to qualify their practices or to achieve specific goals.     

The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria , 27 January 2001

The article examines the first official, national Holocaust memorial day in Italy, the so-called Giorno della memoria (Day of memory), marked on the 56th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 2001. It looks at the ways in which the day acted as a filter for issues of national collective memory and identity, in particular state and public negotiation of the legacy of Fascism, as well as addressing broader issues of Holocaust remembrance. The article looks first at the origins of the Giorno della memoria in political and in legislative terms. Then it sketches in the events of the day itself, at national and local levels, in political, educational and cultural terms. This is followed by an analysis of media coverage and contemporary commentary, showing how various lines of interpretation addressed general issues related to the Holocaust and specifically Italian historical, ideological and contemporary questions.