Indigenous myths and nation building in Latin America

In Latin America, ethnicity is equated with indigenity. It is an objective of this article to review the legacy of Anthony Smith regarding the vitality of the ethnic past and the myth of origin, as the core of his theory of nationalism based on the weight of ethnocentrism. To this end, we address two routes, the use of the ethnic past and ethnicity by nationalists and founders of the state and, how indigenous intellectuals, on the other, have found a reinvention of their identities through various myths of Amerindian origin. Ethnic myths and the use of the ethnic past have been accepted, denied or rejected by nationalists, while indigenous peoples adhere to their own myths or seek to reinvent them. Mythical information is a component of identity but also requires institutions to disseminate such information among the group.     

History manifested: making sense of unprecedented change

An essential element usually passes unnoticed in recent discussion about how history as an academic discipline is supposed to be relevant for the shaping of our public life. It is the concept of history itself (history as both the course of events and historical writing) that underlies the whole discussion, which also configures the two currently most influential and fashionable efforts to reinstate the public relevance of history: The History Manifesto, co-authored by Jo Guldi and David Armitage, and Hayden White's The Practical Past. In advising to turn to the past in order to shape the present and the future, both books rely on the familiar developmental view that characterised nineteenth-century thinking in general, and on which the discipline of history became institutionalised in particular. The author's main contention in this essay is that turning to this notion of history is not the solution for the problem of the supposed public irrelevance of professional historical studies, but the problem itself. The developmental view, based on a presumption of a deeper continuity provided by the subject of the historical process that retains its self-identity amid all changes, certainly suited the discipline of history when it was engaged in the project of nation-building. However, it hardly fits our present concerns. These concerns, like the Anthropocene, take the shape of unprecedented change, and what they challenge is precisely the deeper continuity of the developmental view. The discipline of history can regain public relevance only insofar as it proves to be able to exhibit a thinking of its own specificity which can nevertheless explain such unprecedented changes. What such historical thinking could provide is what the developmental view can no longer: the possibility to act upon a story that we can believe.     

A toolkit to implement graduate attributes in geography curricula

This article uses findings from a project on engagement with graduate outcomes across higher education institutions in New Zealand to produce a toolkit for implementing graduate attributes in geography curricula. Key facets include strong leadership; academic developers to facilitate conversations about graduate attributes and teaching towards them; ownership of the process by the teachers; the development of a contextualized set of graduate attributes for the geography degree; curriculum mapping to promote alignment between graduate attributes, learning outcomes and assessment tasks; incorporating high-impact educational experiences and signature pedagogies to foster graduate attributes; the use of evaluative data to inform continual enhancements; and allowing at least five years for curriculum renewal to occur.     

从"资治"到"救国"--关于19世纪史学经世致用思想变化之研究

自19世纪40年代伊始,中国社会所发生的空前的沧桑巨变,直接推动了史学由古代史学向近代史学的转变。这种转变的重要标志之一,就是史学经世致用思想的变化,即史学经世致用思想从“资治”到“救国”,从着眼于王朝治乱兴衰到关注国家和民族前途命运之经世致用的宗旨和参照系的变化。同时,这种变化又对整个19世纪中国史学的发展及其走向产生了重大而深远的影响。     

从历史轨迹看“以史为鉴”的得失

“以史为鉴”是历史学被高度政治化的1体现。结合中国古代史的发展轨迹做考察,就必须承认,“以史为鉴”可以导致两种不同的社会效用。正面效用,用作前车之鉴,直接导致了周、西汉、唐盛世的出现;负面效用,以防弊致弱的方式,影响到东汉、西晋、北宋等朝代的立制不良。对造成这两种不同效用的原因,应该正视和探讨。     

Indigenous Archaeologies of Crete, 1878–1913

This article makes a contribution to the emerging study of alternative, indigenous and subaltern archaeologies, using the Mediterranean island of Crete as a case study. My focus is on the crucial political developments that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the establishment of the Cretan State. These developments coincided with and facilitated the consolidation of archaeology as a scientific discipline and a state policy on the island. The Cretan population of the countryside ‘contested’ the new attitudes towards the material past by persevering with embedded practices that questioned the validity of scientific approaches. What kind of indigenous imagination underscored such practices? And how did the peasants interact with the new dogma regarding antiquities? Contrary to other groups involved, such as local and Western archaeologists, the rural Cretans remain among the ‘great unknowns’: accounts of relevant events by their own pen are scarce, highlighting the importance of oral historical sources. I therefore present these people through the voices of the others. Archival material such as administrative documents, correspondence, memoirs and newspaper articles, critically assessed, are used for this purpose. This research is also influenced by autobiographical archaeology, as glimpses of my personal work experience and family background overlap with the archival data discussed here.     

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.     

范文澜:倡导优良学风,捍卫历史学的科学性

建国后十七年,史学界实际存在着两种学风,一种是教条主义学风,在1958年以后一度盛行;另一种是倡导实事求是、独立思考、刻苦钻研的学风。范文澜恰恰是后者的代表人物,他作为正直的史学家,十几年如一日潜心治学,精心修订和重写《中国通史简编》这部巨著;作为近代史所的创建者,他卓有成效地提倡和培育了全所坚持不懈、勇于创新的优良学风,他在领导中国史学会的工作中,更是贯穿了高度重视扎实的史料基础和提倡严谨学风的指导思想,当教条化的错误潮流袭来时,他挺身而出进行抵制,表现出捍卫历史学的科学性和尊严的高风亮节。     

Acts of heritage,acts of value: memorialising at the Chattri Indian Memorial,UK

Abstract

The Chattri Indian Memorial is a public site that hosts and embodies heritage in complex ways. Standing on the edge of Brighton, UK in a once-remote part of the Sussex Downs, the Memorial was built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought on the Western Front during the First World War. As both a sacred place and a space of socio-cultural heritagization processes, the monument is an enduring testament of past values of war heroism, but also more ephemeral practices of ritual. The article documents the heritage-making at work within memorialisation at the Chattri as a case study, examining how differing ‘valuations’ of a memorial site can be enacted through time, between material form and immaterial practices, and across cultures. The article theorises participants’ current affective practices as conscious ‘past presencing’ , and analyses how their conscious acts of heritage-making affectively enacted values of morality, community and belonging.