Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Algerian Coins“

The coins minted by the Carthaginians in silver, gold, electrum, billon and bronze comprise one of the largest coinages that circulated in the W Mediterranean before the Roman conquest. They provide essential information on both the history and economy of Carthage and on Carthaginian interactions with their neighbors, allies and adversaries. Carthaginian bronze coins, in particular, are frequently found throughout the Punic world, in each of its core regions (N Africa from Tripolitania to Algeria, Sicily, Sardinia, Ibiza and the southernmost Iberian peninsula), as well as in Italy. Yet few accounts of Carthage and the Punic Wars take Carthaginian coinage into consideration, and an emphasis on Greek and Latin literary sources continues to drive the narrative. Of course, in evaluating the political and economic implications of numismatic evidence one needs to distinguish from the start between the issues of the Carthage mint and those of other mints that struck coins under Carthaginian authority. Carthaginian coinage did not follow a linear path of development. As the Carthaginians began to produce coins in Sicily earlier than in N Africa, the start of minting at Carthage deserves careful scrutiny. This essay, based upon an ongoing study of Carthaginian bronze and billon coins, will review the history of modern scholarship and current research on Carthaginian coinage, focussing upon the formative period of the Carthage mint between c.350 and 300 B.C. in order to define the main aspects of its output, its relevance for the monetization of the Carthaginian homeland, and the sequence of the earliest issues.

Shainool Jiwa’s The Rise of a Muslim Empire is a two-volume historical work on the legacy of the Fatimid Empire. The first volume surveys the religious and sociopolitical underpinnings of Fatimid rule from its North African establishment in 909 to its transition to Egypt in 969. Jiwa’s second vol- ume focuses on the pinnacle of Fatimid society up until its decline from 969-1171. This review pertains to the first of the two volumes. Working within this phase, Jiwa details the reigns of the first four Imams: ‘Abd Allāh al-Mahdī, Abū’l-Qāsim Muḥammad, Ismāʿīl al-Manṣūr, and al-Muʿizz li- Dīn Allāh. The second book, which is titled The Fatimid Rule from Egypt, discusses the latter ten Imams (4). The first chapter covers the origins of the Fatimids in respect to both religious and geographical contexts. Jiwa starts by providing the historical background of Ismaili Shiism. Here, everything from the succession crisis of 632 CE to the emergence of the different strands of Shiism are discussed. Jiwa describes the Ismaili sect as having held Ismāʿīl, the eldest son of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, to have been the chosen successor of his father, therefore mak- ing him Imam. Ismāʿīl’s ephemeral mortality caused for the Imamate to then pass over to his young son, Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl, eponym of the sect (10). The Twelvers are described as having believed in the Imamate of Jaʿfar’s youngest son, Mūsā, whose lineage gives root to the Imams of Twelver Shiism. Jiwa characterizes Ismaili beliefs as having rested on dawr al-satr (period of concealment) and daʿwa (religio-political mission) (11). The dawr al-satr refers to the Imams going into hiding with only their most trusted followers knowing their true identities. Subsequently, these follow- ers promoted the recognition of these hidden Imams, which in large part refers to daʿwa (the act of inviting). Jiwa explains that during dawr al-satr (765–909 CE) Ismaili doctrine had spread as far as from Yemen to Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia and eastern Algeria) (12), with its most prominent adherents being the Kutama Berbers of North Africa. Under the teachings of Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Shīʿī, a pronounced Ismaili dāʿī (inviter), the Kutama had aspired to establish the dawlat al-ḥaqq (the righteous state) (16). This aspiration materialized under the allegiance of ‘Abd Allāh al-Mahdī who had been pronounced as Imam by his predecessor and later recognized as the mahdī (messianic figure) (20). This belief, nonetheless, was not accepted by all Ismailis, particularly those following Ḥamdān Qarmaṭ, who later came to be known as the Qaramiṭa (21). Sa- lamiyya (a town located in Syria), the town where ‘Abd Allāh al-Mahdī had resided, became unsafe due to Abbasid persecution, causing the Imam to migrate to various locations and eventually Sijilmasa (22). Meanwhile, the Kutama had grown to such a force that they had been able to seize control over Qayrawān of North Africa under the leadership of al-Shīʿī (22). When al-Mahdī was later arrested in Sijilmasa and the news spread to the Kuta- ma, a campaign of soldiers marched to secure his release and bring him to Qayrawān. Having accomplished this, the Fatimid State came into fruition (22). Jiwa provides sources detailing the events which led up to the Fatim- id establishment, including eyewitness accounts from Jaʿfar al-Ḥājib’s Sīrat Jaʿfar al-Ḥājib, secondary sources such as Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm al-Naysābūrī’s Istitār al-Imām (‘The Concealment of the Imam’), and other historical works such as the influential Iftitāh al-daʿwa wa-ibtidāʿ al-dawla (‘Com- mencement of the Mission and the Beginnings of the State’) authored by Abū Ḥanīfa al-Nuʿmān (29-30). These references help readers pinpoint who was instrumental in recording Fatimid history. In chapter two, Jiwa discusses the establishment of the Fatimid state, giving details of its institutions, processes, and hallmark locations. Al-Mah- dī is seen to have incorporated officials who had previously served the Aghlabids (the previous rulers of Qayrawān). In addition, institutions such as maẓālim (oppressive acts) courts are discussed as having been estab- lished to provide redress for ordinary civilians against abuses of power (35). During this time of development, dissension amongst the Kutama is seen to have imploded on the basis of marginalized sentiments. Once having been one of the most loyal dāʿīs to al-Mahdī, al-Shīʿī had led a rebellion against his former Imam on charges of being a false mahdī. Ultimately this campaign was pacified, resulting in the execution of al Shīʿī. This chapter also reveals new characters who later became prominent figures in Fatimid history. The heir apparent or Prince Abū’l-Qāsim Muḥammad, the eldest son of al-Mahdī, already took up much of his father’s duties while his own son, Ismāʿīl or al-Manṣūr bi’llāh (‘the One Who is Victorious by God’) was entrusted by the sitting Imam, al-Mahdī (his grandfather), as his most faithful confidant (39). The port city of al-Mahdiyya which had been con- structed by the Fatimids in 916 is described as having been unique in its architectural design and strategic in its location. Al-Mahdiyya served as the new Mediterranean capital and had secured the Fatimids a booming com mercial fabric. Similarly, the city of Palermo in Sicily had been occupied by the Fatimids and had also brought a great deal of cultural exchange and goods. Jiwa brings out images of palaces and charts out maps of the port city to provide visual comprehension of the architecture. Chapter three surveys the reign of al-Manṣūr, discussing his ascension to power under fraught circumstances and his construction of a new city. This chapter focuses attention on the reconstruction of Palermo in vivid archaeological detail. Readers are informed of the Khariji rebellion from Ifrīqiya spearheaded by Abū Yazīd al-Nukkarī. The Kharijis are described to have been insurmountable by the Fatimids, pushing their Empire as far back as to the Mediterranean coast of al-Mahdiyya (60). It was not until al-Ḥasan b. ‘Alī al-Kalbī, the governor of Tunis, and his army pushed back against the Kharijis that the North African coastland would be recaptured (61). Despite this, the Kharijis were too difficult to overcome and remained at conflict with the Fatimids up until the death of Abū’l-Qāsim. Fearful that news of Abū’l-Qāsim’s death would puncture the morale of the Fatimid war effort, al-Manṣūr had managed to keep the news of his father’s passing silent. After an eventful encounter, al-Manṣūr would eventually go on to defeat Abū Yazīd’s army and restore Fatimid rule. Following this victory, al-Manṣūr began taking restorative measures to recover the now war-torn society. Socially considerate policies such as charity stipends, the appoint- ment of a Sunni-based Maliki judge, and omission of taxes were all strides in this effort. But the most significant of his developments was the con- struction of a new capital called Manṣūriyya. Much of this city’s structural inspiration came from the North African ancient ruins al-Manṣūr had been enchanted by (68). Jiwa’s training as a historian is evident in how she cites primary sources every chance she gets, from sermons to testimonies. Clos- ing this chapter, Jiwa provides an anecdote recorded by al-Nuʿmān which romantically relays the moment al-Manṣūr knew that his son, al-Muʿizz li-Dīn Allāh, was ready to ascend to power (77). Jiwa’s anecdotes connect the reader to the ethos of Fatimid personalities. Chapter four delves into the reign of al-Manṣūr’s heir, al-Muʿizz (953- 75), who came into conflict with both the Umayyads and the Byzantines during his reign and would later live out his final days in his new capital, al-Qāhira al-Muʿizziya (‘the Victorious City of al-Muʿizz’)—modern-day Cairo (78). Beyond the royal family, Jiwa presents key stalwarts that the Em- pire was indebted to. Once servant to al-Mahdī, Jawhar, who was of Slavic origin, had risen through the ranks (serving both as scribe and commander in battle), eventually being entrusted with many honorable state positions. This chapter is the longest one of the book and attempts to accomplish many things. Along with discussing the battles which ensued during this juncture, Jiwa also fleshes out the theology of Ismaili beliefs. Al-Nuʿmān is said to have written extensively on the topic—including his text written between 958 and 960, Daʿā’im al-Islām (‘Pillars of Islam’), which delineates such fundamental concepts to Ismaili theology as walāya (allegiance and obedience), īmān (faith), ẓāhir (exoteric), and bāṭin (esoteric) (88-89). The early Fatimid age is described as having been a milieu of knowledge seek- ing, with debates and lectures taking place on a frequent basis. Through the majālis (teaching sessions) program, the Ismaili doctrine would proliferate to the broader society. Jiwa’s text is filled with firsthand accounts which describe Fatimid institutions, ceremonies, and events, providing vivid pic- tures of what is being described (e.g., al-Nuʿmān’s description of the grand circumcision ceremony hosted in 962 and Ibn Haytham’s description of the diversity of attendees and tailoring of lessons in the majālis by teach- ers such as Aflaḥ b. Hārūn al-Mālūsī, 95). The tension between the Uma- yyads in Spain and the Fatimids is also presented in this chapter, depicted as stemming from their varying loyalties in the rivalry between ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib and Muʿāwiya. The coastal regions of the Mediterranean and North Africa would see many conflicts between the Fatimids and Umayyads; the Umayyads and the Byzantines worked together to suppress their Fatimid adversary, with the Byzantines launching campaigns on the parts of the Empire closest to Sicily while the Umayyads attacked the most western part. After briefly losing parts of their North African territories, the Fatimids eventually reasserted their control over the Maghrib, leaving the Umayyads no choice but to resort to a peace treaty (103). The Ismaili daʿwā reached far and wide, with its message gaining adherents from the Gulf of Yemen to as far as Sind. Jiwa also describes the Kalbid dynasty of Fatimid Sicily, which had come under the governorship of al-Ḥasan al-Kalbī. During this period (960-65), Sicily had been the site of intense warfare between the Fatimids and the Byzantines, with two distinct battles resulting in the most pivotal outcomes for the region, namely the Pit and the Straits (119). Like the Umayyads, the Byzantines would also later come to negotiate terms of peace with the Fatimids in 958 (116). Chapter five speaks to the venture the Fatimids made into Egypt in 966. Here, readers are presented with the terms acknowledged by local nobles such as Sharīf Abū Jaʿfar Muslim al-Ḥusaynī and the Fatimids, the founding of the new capital (al-Qāhira), and the relocation of al-Muʿizz along with a significant portion of the Manṣūriyyan population in 972. The chapter serves as both a close to the book and a cliffhanger for the second volume of the series (which turns to Fatimid rule in Egypt under the son of al-Muʿizz, Niẓār b. al-Muʿizz). Capturing the cohesive religious fabric of Fatimid rule, Jiwa notes that al-Muʿizz pledged to maintain Sunni religious life while ruling over Egypt (126); she describes pillars of Sunni Islam that can serve as points of contrast to the Ismaili tradition (127). Individuals who can justly be seen as archetypes of the Fatimid intel- ligentsia are referenced both biographically and through their works. Jiwa introduces her readers to eminent characters including missionaries like Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī of Khurāsān (d. after 971); writers and thinkers who composed the Fatimid ideology such as Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān; poets who gave inspiration such as Muḥammad b. Hānī; and generals who rendered their lives for the Fatimid Empire such as al-Ḥasan b. ‘Ali al-Kalbī. Although some readers may be frustrated by the detail of jumping back and forth across names, dates, and events, those who are able to follow the work the- matically will certainly find this work to be nothing short of informative. Jiwa impressively condenses a rich and fluid history into few pages while including the most essential elements, people, and institutions making up this period. Readers are provided with visual aids (maps, family tree charts, and city maps) to help identify and locations and structures which would otherwise come off as abstract and jargon-heavy. In addition, she includes colorful images of important monuments such as mosques, coins, and ar- tifacts. Ameen OmarMA, Islamic Studies & HistoryThe George Washington University

Shainool Jiwa’s The Rise of a Muslim Empire is a two-volume historical work on the legacy of the Fatimid Empire. The first volume surveys the religious and sociopolitical underpinnings of Fatimid rule from its North African establishment in 909 to its transition to Egypt in 969. Jiwa’s second vol- ume focuses on the pinnacle of Fatimid society up until its decline from 969-1171. This review pertains to the first of the two volumes. Working within this phase, Jiwa details the reigns of the first four Imams: ‘Abd Allāh al-Mahdī, Abū’l-Qāsim Muḥammad, Ismāʿīl al-Manṣūr, and al-Muʿizz li- Dīn Allāh. The second book, which is titled The Fatimid Rule from Egypt, discusses the latter ten Imams (4). The first chapter covers the origins of the Fatimids in respect to both religious and geographical contexts. Jiwa starts by providing the historical background of Ismaili Shiism. Here, everything from the succession crisis of 632 CE to the emergence of the different strands of Shiism are discussed. Jiwa describes the Ismaili sect as having held Ismāʿīl, the eldest son of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, to have been the chosen successor of his father, therefore mak- ing him Imam. Ismāʿīl’s ephemeral mortality caused for the Imamate to then pass over to his young son, Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl, eponym of the sect (10). The Twelvers are described as having believed in the Imamate of Jaʿfar’s youngest son, Mūsā, whose lineage gives root to the Imams of Twelver Shiism. Jiwa characterizes Ismaili beliefs as having rested on dawr al-satr (period of concealment) and daʿwa (religio-political mission) (11). The dawr al-satr refers to the Imams going into hiding with only their most trusted followers knowing their true identities. Subsequently, these follow- ers promoted the recognition of these hidden Imams, which in large part refers to daʿwa (the act of inviting). Jiwa explains that during dawr al-satr (765–909 CE) Ismaili doctrine had spread as far as from Yemen to Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia and eastern Algeria) (12), with its most prominent adherents being the Kutama Berbers of North Africa. Under the teachings of Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Shīʿī, a pronounced Ismaili dāʿī (inviter), the Kutama had aspired to establish the dawlat al-ḥaqq (the righteous state) (16). This aspiration materialized under the allegiance of ‘Abd Allāh al-Mahdī who had been pronounced as Imam by his predecessor and later recognized as the mahdī (messianic figure) (20). This belief, nonetheless, was not accepted by all Ismailis, particularly those following Ḥamdān Qarmaṭ, who later came to be known as the Qaramiṭa (21). Sa- lamiyya (a town located in Syria), the town where ‘Abd Allāh al-Mahdī had resided, became unsafe due to Abbasid persecution, causing the Imam to migrate to various locations and eventually Sijilmasa (22). Meanwhile, the Kutama had grown to such a force that they had been able to seize control over Qayrawān of North Africa under the leadership of al-Shīʿī (22). When al-Mahdī was later arrested in Sijilmasa and the news spread to the Kuta- ma, a campaign of soldiers marched to secure his release and bring him to Qayrawān. Having accomplished this, the Fatimid State came into fruition (22). Jiwa provides sources detailing the events which led up to the Fatim- id establishment, including eyewitness accounts from Jaʿfar al-Ḥājib’s Sīrat Jaʿfar al-Ḥājib, secondary sources such as Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm al-Naysābūrī’s Istitār al-Imām (‘The Concealment of the Imam’), and other historical works such as the influential Iftitāh al-daʿwa wa-ibtidāʿ al-dawla (‘Com- mencement of the Mission and the Beginnings of the State’) authored by Abū Ḥanīfa al-Nuʿmān (29-30). These references help readers pinpoint who was instrumental in recording Fatimid history. In chapter two, Jiwa discusses the establishment of the Fatimid state, giving details of its institutions, processes, and hallmark locations. Al-Mah- dī is seen to have incorporated officials who had previously served the Aghlabids (the previous rulers of Qayrawān). In addition, institutions such as maẓālim (oppressive acts) courts are discussed as having been estab- lished to provide redress for ordinary civilians against abuses of power (35). During this time of development, dissension amongst the Kutama is seen to have imploded on the basis of marginalized sentiments. Once having been one of the most loyal dāʿīs to al-Mahdī, al-Shīʿī had led a rebellion against his former Imam on charges of being a false mahdī. Ultimately this campaign was pacified, resulting in the execution of al Shīʿī. This chapter also reveals new characters who later became prominent figures in Fatimid history. The heir apparent or Prince Abū’l-Qāsim Muḥammad, the eldest son of al-Mahdī, already took up much of his father’s duties while his own son, Ismāʿīl or al-Manṣūr bi’llāh (‘the One Who is Victorious by God’) was entrusted by the sitting Imam, al-Mahdī (his grandfather), as his most faithful confidant (39). The port city of al-Mahdiyya which had been con- structed by the Fatimids in 916 is described as having been unique in its architectural design and strategic in its location. Al-Mahdiyya served as the new Mediterranean capital and had secured the Fatimids a booming com mercial fabric. Similarly, the city of Palermo in Sicily had been occupied by the Fatimids and had also brought a great deal of cultural exchange and goods. Jiwa brings out images of palaces and charts out maps of the port city to provide visual comprehension of the architecture. Chapter three surveys the reign of al-Manṣūr, discussing his ascension to power under fraught circumstances and his construction of a new city. This chapter focuses attention on the reconstruction of Palermo in vivid archaeological detail. Readers are informed of the Khariji rebellion from Ifrīqiya spearheaded by Abū Yazīd al-Nukkarī. The Kharijis are described to have been insurmountable by the Fatimids, pushing their Empire as far back as to the Mediterranean coast of al-Mahdiyya (60). It was not until al-Ḥasan b. ‘Alī al-Kalbī, the governor of Tunis, and his army pushed back against the Kharijis that the North African coastland would be recaptured (61). Despite this, the Kharijis were too difficult to overcome and remained at conflict with the Fatimids up until the death of Abū’l-Qāsim. Fearful that news of Abū’l-Qāsim’s death would puncture the morale of the Fatimid war effort, al-Manṣūr had managed to keep the news of his father’s passing silent. After an eventful encounter, al-Manṣūr would eventually go on to defeat Abū Yazīd’s army and restore Fatimid rule. Following this victory, al-Manṣūr began taking restorative measures to recover the now war-torn society. Socially considerate policies such as charity stipends, the appoint- ment of a Sunni-based Maliki judge, and omission of taxes were all strides in this effort. But the most significant of his developments was the con- struction of a new capital called Manṣūriyya. Much of this city’s structural inspiration came from the North African ancient ruins al-Manṣūr had been enchanted by (68). Jiwa’s training as a historian is evident in how she cites primary sources every chance she gets, from sermons to testimonies. Clos- ing this chapter, Jiwa provides an anecdote recorded by al-Nuʿmān which romantically relays the moment al-Manṣūr knew that his son, al-Muʿizz li-Dīn Allāh, was ready to ascend to power (77). Jiwa’s anecdotes connect the reader to the ethos of Fatimid personalities. Chapter four delves into the reign of al-Manṣūr’s heir, al-Muʿizz (953- 75), who came into conflict with both the Umayyads and the Byzantines during his reign and would later live out his final days in his new capital, al-Qāhira al-Muʿizziya (‘the Victorious City of al-Muʿizz’)—modern-day Cairo (78). Beyond the royal family, Jiwa presents key stalwarts that the Em- pire was indebted to. Once servant to al-Mahdī, Jawhar, who was of Slavic origin, had risen through the ranks (serving both as scribe and commander in battle), eventually being entrusted with many honorable state positions. This chapter is the longest one of the book and attempts to accomplish many things. Along with discussing the battles which ensued during this juncture, Jiwa also fleshes out the theology of Ismaili beliefs. Al-Nuʿmān is said to have written extensively on the topic—including his text written between 958 and 960, Daʿā’im al-Islām (‘Pillars of Islam’), which delineates such fundamental concepts to Ismaili theology as walāya (allegiance and obedience), īmān (faith), ẓāhir (exoteric), and bāṭin (esoteric) (88-89). The early Fatimid age is described as having been a milieu of knowledge seek- ing, with debates and lectures taking place on a frequent basis. Through the majālis (teaching sessions) program, the Ismaili doctrine would proliferate to the broader society. Jiwa’s text is filled with firsthand accounts which describe Fatimid institutions, ceremonies, and events, providing vivid pic- tures of what is being described (e.g., al-Nuʿmān’s description of the grand circumcision ceremony hosted in 962 and Ibn Haytham’s description of the diversity of attendees and tailoring of lessons in the majālis by teach- ers such as Aflaḥ b. Hārūn al-Mālūsī, 95). The tension between the Uma- yyads in Spain and the Fatimids is also presented in this chapter, depicted as stemming from their varying loyalties in the rivalry between ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib and Muʿāwiya. The coastal regions of the Mediterranean and North Africa would see many conflicts between the Fatimids and Umayyads; the Umayyads and the Byzantines worked together to suppress their Fatimid adversary, with the Byzantines launching campaigns on the parts of the Empire closest to Sicily while the Umayyads attacked the most western part. After briefly losing parts of their North African territories, the Fatimids eventually reasserted their control over the Maghrib, leaving the Umayyads no choice but to resort to a peace treaty (103). The Ismaili daʿwā reached far and wide, with its message gaining adherents from the Gulf of Yemen to as far as Sind. Jiwa also describes the Kalbid dynasty of Fatimid Sicily, which had come under the governorship of al-Ḥasan al-Kalbī. During this period (960-65), Sicily had been the site of intense warfare between the Fatimids and the Byzantines, with two distinct battles resulting in the most pivotal outcomes for the region, namely the Pit and the Straits (119). Like the Umayyads, the Byzantines would also later come to negotiate terms of peace with the Fatimids in 958 (116). Chapter five speaks to the venture the Fatimids made into Egypt in 966. Here, readers are presented with the terms acknowledged by local nobles such as Sharīf Abū Jaʿfar Muslim al-Ḥusaynī and the Fatimids, the founding of the new capital (al-Qāhira), and the relocation of al-Muʿizz along with a significant portion of the Manṣūriyyan population in 972. The chapter serves as both a close to the book and a cliffhanger for the second volume of the series (which turns to Fatimid rule in Egypt under the son of al-Muʿizz, Niẓār b. al-Muʿizz). Capturing the cohesive religious fabric of Fatimid rule, Jiwa notes that al-Muʿizz pledged to maintain Sunni religious life while ruling over Egypt (126); she describes pillars of Sunni Islam that can serve as points of contrast to the Ismaili tradition (127). Individuals who can justly be seen as archetypes of the Fatimid intel- ligentsia are referenced both biographically and through their works. Jiwa introduces her readers to eminent characters including missionaries like Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī of Khurāsān (d. after 971); writers and thinkers who composed the Fatimid ideology such as Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān; poets who gave inspiration such as Muḥammad b. Hānī; and generals who rendered their lives for the Fatimid Empire such as al-Ḥasan b. ‘Ali al-Kalbī. Although some readers may be frustrated by the detail of jumping back and forth across names, dates, and events, those who are able to follow the work the- matically will certainly find this work to be nothing short of informative. Jiwa impressively condenses a rich and fluid history into few pages while including the most essential elements, people, and institutions making up this period. Readers are provided with visual aids (maps, family tree charts, and city maps) to help identify and locations and structures which would otherwise come off as abstract and jargon-heavy. In addition, she includes colorful images of important monuments such as mosques, coins, and ar- tifacts. Ameen OmarMA, Islamic Studies & HistoryThe George Washington University

Background: To determine the prevalence of indigestible foreign bodies in rumen-reticulum of cattle. Identify the types and the common diseases associated with their occurrence. 289 cattle were examined at Batna (Algeria) municipal abattoir. Methods: About 289 cattle were examined immediately after slaughtering to determine the presence or absence of the foreign bodies in their rumen-reticulum and different lesions were recorded. Result: From total of 289 cattle examined 151 (52.24%) were found positive for various types of foreign bodies in their rumen and/or reticulum. From each 56 (19.37%) and 95 (52.24%) were positive for vulnerable bodies and non-vulnerable foreign bodies respectively. The types of foreign bodies detected were: wire segments, needles, nails, hair clips, coins, corks, ropes, cloth, pebbles, sand, glass pieces, trichobezoar, plastic bags. The plastics were the most common found in 61 (23.92%) males and 34 (79.06%) females. The most common lesions in rumen of cattle with Foreign bodies were traumatic reticuloperitonitis, perirecticular abscess, esophageal obstruction, non penetrating reticulum and/or ruminal foreign bodies were respectively 3.79%, 12.65%, 1.26% and 82.27%. The study revealed that the plastics in rumen my play an important role in the pathologenesis of cattle.

1. Make a list of things to do2. Copy list of things left undone from previous list3. Add items to list of new things needing to be done4. Add some of the things already done from previous list and immediately cross off so as to put off the feeling of an interminable list of never accomplishable tasks5. Finish writing list and sit back feeling an overwhelming sense of listlessnessIt started so well. Get up: make list: get on. But lists can breed listlessness. It can’t always be helped. The word “list” referring to a sequence of items comes from the Italian and French words for “strip”—as in a strip of material. The word “list” that you find in the compound “listlessness” comes from the old English word for pleasing (to list is to please and to desire). To be listless is to be without desire, without the desire to please. The etymologies of list and listless don’t correspond but they might seem to conspire in other ways. Oh, and by the way, ships can list when their balance is off.I list, like a ship, itemising my obligations to job, to work, to colleagues, to parenting, to family: write a reference for such and such; buy birthday present for eighty-year-old dad; finish article about lists – and so on. I forget to add to the list my necessary requirements for achieving any of this: keep breathing; eat and drink regularly; visit toilet when required. Lists make visible. Lists hide. I forget to add to my list all my worries that underscore my sense that these lists (or any list) might require an optimism that is always something of a leap of faith: I hope that electricity continues to exist; I hope my computer will still work; I hope that my sore toe isn’t the first sign of bodily paralysis; I hope that this heart will still keep beating.I was brought up on lists: the hit parade (the top one hundred “hit” singles); football leagues (not that I ever really got the hang of them); lists of kings and queens; lists of dates; lists of states; lists of elements (the periodic table). There are lists and there are lists. Some lists are really rankings. These are clearly the important lists. Where do you stand on the list? How near the bottom are you? Where is your university in the list of top universities? Have you gone down or up? To list, then, for some at least is to rank, to prioritise, to value. Is it this that produces listlessness? The sense that while you might want to rank your ten favourite films in a list, listing is something that is constantly happening to you, happening around you; you are always in amongst lists, never on top of them. To hang around the middle of lists might be all that you can hope for: no possibility of sudden lurching from the top spot; no urgent worries that you might be heading for demotion too quickly.But ranking is only one aspect of listing. Sometimes listing has a more flattening effect. I once worked as a cash-in-hand auditor (in this case a posh name for someone who counts things). A group of us (many of whom were seriously stoned) were bussed to factories and warehouses where we had to count the stock. We had to make lists of items and simply count what there was: for large items this was relatively easy, but for the myriad of miniscule parts this seemed a task for Sisyphus. In a power-tool factory in some unprepossessing town on the outskirts of London (was it Slough or Croydon or somewhere else?) we had to count bolts, nuts, washers, flex, rivets, and so on. Of course after a while we just made it up—guesstimates—as they say. A box of thousands of 6mm metal washers is a homogenous set in a list of heterogeneous parts that itself starts looking homogenous as it takes its part in the list. Listing dedifferentiates in the act of differentiating.The task of making lists, of filling-in lists, of having a list of tasks to complete encourages listlessness because to list lists towards exhaustiveness and exhaustion. Archives are lists and lists are often archives and archived. Those that work on lists and on archives constantly battle the fatigue of too many lists, of too much exhaustiveness. But could exhaustion be embraced as a necessary mood with which to deal with lists and archives? Might listlessness be something of a methodological orientation that has its own productivity in the face of so many lists?At my university there resides an archive that can appear to be a list of lists. It is the Mass-Observation archive, begun at the end of 1936 and, with a sizeable hiatus in the 1960s and 1970s, is still going today. (For a full account of Mass-Observation, see Highmore, Everyday Life chapter 6, and Hubble; for examples of Mass-Observation material, see Calder and Sheridan, and Highmore, Ordinary chapter 4; for analysis of Mass-Observation from the point of view of the observer, see Sheridan, Street, and Bloome. The flavour of the project as it emerges in the late 1930s is best conveyed by consulting Mass-Observation, Mass-Observation, First Year’s Work, and Britain.) It was begun by three men: the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, the poet and sociologist Charles Madge, and the ornithologist and anthropologist-of-the-near Tom Harrisson. Both Jennings and Madge were heavily involved in promoting a form of social surrealism that might see buried forces in the coincidences of daily life as well as in the machinations and contingency of large political and social events (the abdication crisis, the burning of the Crystal Palace—both in late 1936). Harrisson brought a form of amateur anthropology with him that would scour football crowds, pub clientele, and cinema queues for ritualistic and symbolic forms. Mass-Observation quickly recruited a large group of voluntary observers (about a thousand) who would be “the meteorological stations from whose reports a weather-map of popular feeling can be compiled” (Mass-Observation, Mass-Observation 30). Mass-Observation combined the social survey with a relentless interest in the irrational and in what the world felt like to those who lived in it. As a consequence the file reports often seem banal and bizarre in equal measure (accounts of nightmares, housework routines, betting activities). When Mass-Observation restarted in the 1980s the surrealistic impetus became less pronounced, but it was still there, implicit in the methodology. Today, both as an on-going project and as an archive of previous observational reports, Mass-Observation lives in archival boxes. You can find a list of what topics are addressed in each box; you can also find lists of the contributors, the voluntary Mass-Observers whose observations are recorded in the boxes. What better way to give you a flavour of these boxes than to offer you a sample of their listing activities. Here are observers, observing in 1983 the objects that reside on their mantelpieces. Here’s one:champagne cork, rubber band, drawing pin, two hearing aid batteries, appointment card for chiropodist, piece of dog biscuit.Does this conjure up a world? Do we have a set of clues, of material evidence, a small cosmology of relics, a reduced Wunderkammer, out of which we can construct not the exotic but something else, something more ordinary? Do you smell camphor and imagine antimacassars? Do you hear conversations with lots of mishearing? Are the hearing aid batteries shared? Is this a single person living with a dog, or do we imagine an assembly of chiropodist-goers, dog-owners, hearing aid-users, rubber band-pingers, champagne-drinkers?But don’t get caught imagining a life out of these fragments. Don’t get stuck on this list: there are hundreds to get through. After all, what sort of an archive would it be if it included a single list? We need more lists.Here’s another mantelpiece: three penknives, a tube of cement [which I assume is the sort of rubber cement that you get in bicycle puncture repair kits], a pocket microscope, a clinical thermometer.Who is this? A hypochondriacal explorer? Or a grown-up boy-scout, botanising on the asphalt? Why so many penknives? But on, on... And another:1 letter awaiting postage stamp1 diet book1 pair of spare spectacles1 recipe for daughter’s home economics1 notepad1 pen1 bottle of indigestion tablets1 envelope containing 13 pence which is owed a friend1 pair of stick-on heels for home shoe repairing session3 letters in day’s post1 envelope containing money for week’s milk bill1 recipe cut from magazine2 out of date letters from schoolWhat is the connection between the daughter’s home economics recipe and the indigestion tablets? Is the homework gastronomy not quite going to plan? Or is the diet book causing side-effects? And what sort of financial stickler remembers that they owe 13p; even in 1983 this was hardly much money? Or is it the friend who is the stickler? Perhaps this is just prying...?But you need more. Here’s yet another:an ashtray, a pipe, pipe tamper and tobacco pouch, one decorated stone and one plain stone, a painted clay model of an alien, an enamelled metal egg from Hong Kong, a copper bracelet, a polished shell, a snowstorm of Father Christmas in his sleigh...Ah, a pipe smoker, this much is clear. But apart from this the display sounds ritualistic – one stone decorated the other not. What sort of religion is this? What sort of magic? An alien and Santa. An egg, a shell, a bracelet. A riddle.And another:Two 12 gauge shotgun cartridges live 0 spread Rubber plantBrass carriage clockInternational press clock1950s cigarette dispenser Model of Panzer MKIV tankWWI shell fuseWWI shell case ash tray containing an acorn, twelve .22 rounds of ammunition, a .455 Eley round and a drawing pinPhoto of Eric Liddell (Chariots of Fire)Souvenir of Algerian ash tray containing marbles and beach stonesThree 1930s plastic duck clothes brushesLetter holder containing postcards and invitations. Holder in shape of a cow1970s Whizzwheels toy carWooden box of jeweller’s rottenstone (Victorian)Incense holderWorld war one German fuse (used)Jim Beam bottle with candle thereinSol beer bottle with candle therein I’m getting worried now. Who are these people who write for Mass-Observation? Why so much military paraphernalia? Why such detail as to the calibrations? Should I concern myself that small militias are holding out behind the net curtains and aspidistra plants of suburban England?And another:1930s AA BadgeAvocado PlantWooden cat from MexicoKahlua bottle with candle there in1950s matchbook with “merry widow” cocktail printed thereonTwo Britain’s model cannonOne brass “Carronade” from the Carron Iron Works factory shopPhotography pass from Parkhead 12/11/88Grouse foot kilt pinBrass incense holderPheasant featherNovitake cupBlack ash tray with beach pebbles there inFull packet of Mary Long cigarettes from HollandPewter cocktail shaker made in ShanghaiI’m feeling distance. Who says “there in” and “there on?” What is a Novitake cup? Perhaps I wrote it down incorrectly? An avocado plant stirs memories of trying to grow one from an avocado stone skewered in a cup with one “point” dunked in a bit of water. Did it ever grow, or just rot? I’m getting distracted now, drifting off, feeling sleepy...Some more then – let’s feed the listlessness of the list:Wood sculpture (Tenerife)A Rubber bandBirdJunior aspirinToy dinosaur Small photo of daughterSmall paint brushAh yes the banal bizarreness of ordinary life: dinosaurs and aspirins, paint brushes and rubber bands.But then a list comes along and pierces you:Six inch piece of grey eyeliner1 pair of nail clippers1 large box of matches1 Rubber band2 large hair gripsHalf a piece of cough candy1 screwed up tissue1 small bottle with tranquillizers in1 dead (but still in good condition) butterfly (which I intended to draw but placed it now to rest in the garden) it was already dead when I found it.The dead butterfly, the tranquillizers, the insistence that the mantelpiece user didn’t actually kill the butterfly, the half piece of cough candy, the screwed up tissue. In amongst the rubber bands and matches, signs of something desperate. Or maybe not: a holding on (the truly desperate haven’t found their way to the giant tranquillizer cupboard), a keeping a lid on it, a desire (to draw, to place a dead butterfly at rest in the garden)...And here is the methodology emerging: the lists works on the reader, listing them, and making them listless. After a while the lists (and there are hundreds of these lists of mantle-shelf items) begin to merge. One giant mantle shelf filled with small stacks of foreign coins, rubber bands and dead insects. They invite you to be both magical ethnographer and deadpan sociologist at one and the same time (for example, see Hurdley). The “Martian” ethnographer imagines the mantelpiece as a shrine where this culture worships the lone rubber band and itinerant button. Clearly a place of reliquary—on this planet the residents set up altars where they place their sacred objects: clocks and clippers; ammunition and amulets; coins and pills; candles and cosmetics. Or else something more sober, more sombre: late twentieth century petite-bourgeois taste required the mantelpiece to hold the signs of aspirant propriety in the form of emblems of tradition (forget the coins and the dead insects and weaponry: focus on the carriage clocks). And yet, either way, it is the final shelf that gets me every time. But it only got me, I think, because the archive had worked its magic: ransacked my will, my need to please, my desire. It had, for a while at least, made me listless, and listless enough to be touched by something that was really a minor catalogue of remainders. This sense of listlessness is the way that the archive productively defeats the “desire for the archive.” It is hard to visit an archive without an expectation, without an “image repertoire,” already in mind. This could be thought of as the apperception-schema of archival searching: the desire to see patterns already imagined; the desire to find the evidence for the thought whose shape has already formed. Such apperception is hard to avoid (probably impossible), but the boredom of the archive, its ceaselessness, has a way of undoing it, of emptying it. It corresponds to two aesthetic positions and propositions. One is well-known: it is Barthes’s distinction between “studium” and “punctum.” For Barthes, studium refers to a sort of social interest that is always, to some degree, satisfied by a document (his concern, of course, is with photographs). The punctum, on the other hand, spills out from the photograph as a sort of metonymical excess, quite distinct from social interest (but for all that, not asocial). While Barthes is clearly offering a phenomenology of viewing photographs, he isn’t overly interested (here at any rate) with the sort of perceptional-state the viewer might need to be in to be pierced by the puntum of an image. My sense, though, is that boredom, listlessness, tiredness, a sort of aching indifference, a mood of inattentiveness, a sense of satiated interest (but not the sort of disinterest of Kantian aesthetics), could all be beneficial to a punctum-like experience. The second aesthetic position is not so well-known. The Austrian dye-technician, lawyer and art-educationalist Anton Ehrenzweig wrote, during the 1950s and 1960s, about a form of inattentive-attention, and a form of afocal-rendering (eye-repelling rather than eye-catching), that encouraged eye-wandering, scanning, and the “‘full’ emptiness of attention” (Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order 39). His was an aesthetics attuned to the kind of art produced by Paul Klee, but it was also an aesthetic propensity useful for making wallpaper and for productively connecting to unconscious processes. Like Barthes, Ehrenzweig doesn’t pursue the sort of affective state of being that might enhance such inattentive-attention, but it is not hard to imagine that the sort of library-tiredness of the archive would be a fitting preparation for “full emptiness.” Ehrenzweig and Barthes can be useful for exploring this archival mood, this orientation and attunement, which is also a disorientation and mis-attunement. Trawling through lists encourages scanning: your sensibilities are prepared; your attention is being trained. After a while, though, the lists blur, concentration starts to loosen its grip. The lists are not innocent recipients here. Shrapnel shards pull at you. You start to notice the patterns but also the spaces in-between that don’t seem to fit sociological categorisations. The strangeness of the patterns hypnotises you and while the effect can generate a sense of sociological-anthropological homogeneity-with-difference, sometimes the singularity of an item leaps out catching you unawares. An archive is an orchestration of order and disorder: however contained and constrained it appears it is always spilling out beyond its organisational structures (amongst the many accounts of archives in terms of their orderings, see Sekula, and Stoler, Race and Along). Like “Probate Inventories,” the mantelpiece archive presents material objects that connect us (however indirectly) to embodied practices and living spaces (Evans). The Mass-Observation archive, especially in its mantelpiece collection, is an accretion of temporalities and spaces. More crucially, it is an accumulation of temporalities materialised in a mass of spaces. A thousand mantelpieces in a thousand rooms scattered across the United Kingdom. Each shelf is syncopated to the rhythms of diverse durations, while being synchronised to the perpetual now of the shelf: a carriage clock, for instance, inherited from a deceased parent, its brass detailing relating to a different age, its mechanism perpetually telling you that the time of this space is now. The archive carries you away to a thousand living rooms filled with the momentary (dead insects) and the eternal (pebbles) and everything in-between. Its centrifugal force propels you out to a vast accrual of things: ashtrays, rubber bands, military paraphernalia, toy dinosaurs; a thousand living museums of the incidental and the memorial. This vertiginous archive threatens to undo you; each shelf a montage of times held materially together in space. It is too much. It pushes me towards the mantelshelves I know, the ones I’ve had a hand in. Each one an archive in itself: my grandfather’s green glass paperweight holding a fragile silver foil flower in its eternal grasp; the potions and lotions that feed my hypochondria; used train tickets. Each item pushes outwards to other times, other spaces, other people, other things. It is hard to focus, hard to cling onto anything. Was it the dead butterfly, or the tranquillizers, or both, that finally nailed me? Or was it the half a cough-candy? I know what she means by leaving the remnants of this sweet. You remember the taste, you think you loved them as a child, they have such a distinctive candy twist and colour, but actually their taste is harsh, challenging, bitter. There is nothing as ephemeral and as “useless” as a sweet; and yet few things are similarly evocative of times past, of times lost. Yes, I think I’d leave half a cough-candy on a shelf, gathering dust.[All these lists of mantelpiece items are taken from the Mass-Observation archive at the University of Sussex. Mass-Observation is a registered charity. For more information about Mass-Observation go to http://www.massobs.org.uk/]ReferencesBarthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Fontana, 1984.Calder, Angus, and Dorothy Sheridan, eds. Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology 1937–1949. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing: An Introduction to a Theory of Unconscious Perception. Third edition. London: Sheldon Press, 1965. [Originally published in 1953.]---. The Hidden Order of Art. London: Paladin, 1970.Evans, Adrian. “Enlivening the Archive: Glimpsing Embodied Consumption Practices in Probate Inventories of Household Possessions.” Historical Geography 36 (2008): 40-72.Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 2002.---. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.Hubble, Nick. Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2006.Hurdley, Rachel. “Dismantling Mantelpieces: Narrating Identities and Materializing Culture in the Home.” Sociology 40, 4 (2006): 717-733Mass-Observation. Mass-Observation. London: Fredrick Muller, 1937.---. First Year’s Work 1937-38. London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938.---. Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939.Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (1986): 3-64.Sheridan, Dorothy, Brian Street, and David Bloome. Writing Ourselves: Mass-Observation and Literary Practices. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2000.Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009.

Since the late 1990s, W. G. Sebald’s innovative contribution to the genre of prose fiction has been the source of much academic scrutiny. His books Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants and Austerlitz have provoked interest from diverse fields of inquiry: visual communication (Kilbourn; Patt; Zadokerski), trauma studies (Denham and McCulloh; Schmitz), and travel writing (Blackler; Zisselsberger). His work is also claimed to be a bastion for both modernist and postmodernist approaches to literature and history writing (Bere; Fuchs and Long; Long). This is in addition to numerous “guide to” type books, such as Mark McCulloh’s Understanding Sebald, Long and Whitehead’s W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion, and the comprehensive Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook. Here I have only mentioned works available in English. I should point out that Sebald wrote in German, the country of his birth, and as one would expect much scholarship dealing with his work is confined to this language. In this article I focus on what is perhaps Sebald’s prototypical work, The Rings of Saturn. Of all Sebald’s prose fictional works The Rings of Saturn seems the example that best exhibits his innovative literary forms, including the use of lists. This book is the work of an author who is purposefully and imaginatively concerned with the nature of his vocation: what is it to be a writer? Crucially, he addresses this question not only from the perspective of a subject facing an existential crisis, but from the perspective of the documents created by writers. His works demonstrate a concern with the enabling role documents play in the thinking and writing process; how, for example, pen and paper are looped in with our capacity to reason in certain ways. Despite taking the form of fictional narratives, his books are as much motivated by a historical interest in how ideas and forms of organisation are transmitted, and how they evolve as part of an ecology; how humans become articulate within their surrounds, according to the contingencies of specific epochs and places. The Sebald critic J. J. Long accounts for this in some part in his description “archival consciousness,” which recommends that conscious experience is not simply located in the mind of a knowing, human subject, but is rather distributed between the subject and different technologies (among which writing and archives are exemplary).The most notable peculiarity of Sebald’s books lies in their abundant use of “non-syntactical” kinds of writing or inscription. My use of the term “non-syntactical” has its origins in the anthropological work of Jack Goody, who emphasises the importance of list making and tabulation in pre-literate or barely literate cultures. In Sebald’s texts, kinds of non-syntactical writing include lists, photographic images, tables, signatures, diagrams, maps, stamps, dockets and sketches. As I stress throughout this article, Sebald’s shifts between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing allows him to build up highly complex schemes of internal reference. Massimo Leone identifies something similar, when he notes that Sebald “orchestrates a multiplicity of voices and text-types in order to produce his own coherent discourse” (91). The play between multiplicity and coherence is at once a thematic and poetic concern for Sebald. This is to say, his texts are formal experiments with these contrasting tendencies, in addition to discussing specific historical situations in which they feature. The list is perhaps Sebald’s most widely used and variable form of non-syntactical writing, a key part of his formal and stylistic peculiarity. His lengthy sentences frequently spill over into catalogues and inventories, and the entire structure of his narratives is list-like. Discrete episodes accumulate alongside each other, rather than following a narrative arc where episodes of suspenseful gravity overshadow the significance of minor events. The Rings of Saturn details the travels of Sebald’s trademark, nameless, first person narrator, who recounts his trek along the Suffolk coastline, from Lowestoft to Ditchingham, about two years after the event. From the beginning, the narrative is framed as an effort to organise a period of time that lacks a coherent and durable form, a period of time that is in pieces, fading from the narrator’s memory. However, the movement from the chaos of forgetting to the comparatively distinct and stable details of the remembered present does not follow a continuum. Rather, the past and present are both constituted by the force of memory, which is continually crystallising and dissolving. Each event operates according to its own specific arrangement of emphasis and forgetting. Our experience of memory in the present, or recollective memory, is only one kind of memory. Sebald is concerned with a more pervasive kind of remembering, which includes the vectorial existence of non-conscious, non-human perceptual events; memory as expressed by crystals, tree roots, glaciers, and the nested relationship of fuel, fire, smoke, and ash. The Rings of Saturn is composed of ten chapters, each of which is outlined in table form at the book’s beginning. The first chapter appears as: “In hospital—Obituary—Odyssey of Thomas Browne’s skull—Anatomy lecture—Levitation—Quincunx—Fabled creatures—Urn burial.” The Rings of Saturn is of course hardly exceptional in its use of this device. Rather, it is exemplary concerning the repeated emphasis on the tension between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing, among which this chapter breakdown is included. Sebald continually uses the conventions of bookmaking in subtle though innovative ways. Each of these horizontally linked and divided indices might put the reader in mind of Thomas Browne’s urns, time capsules from the past, the unearthing of which is discussed in the book’s first chapter (25). The chapter outlines (and the urns) are containers that preserve a fragmentary and suggestive history. Each is a perspective on the narrator’s travels that abstracts, arranges, and uniquely refers to the narrative elaborations to come.As I have already stressed, Sebald is a writer concerned with forms of organisation. His works account for a diverse range of organisational forms, some of which instance an overt, chronological, geometric, or metrical manipulation of space and time, such as grids, star shapes, and Greenwich Mean Time. This contrasts with comparatively suggestive, insubstantial, mutable forms, including various meteorological phenomena such as cloudbanks and fog, dust and sand, and as exemplified in narrative form by the haphazard, distracted assemblage of events featured in dreams or dream logic. The relationship between these supposedly opposing tendencies is, however, more complex and paradoxical than might at first glance appear. As Sebald warily reminds us in his essay “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio,” despite our wishes to inhabit periods of complete freedom, where we follow our distractions to the fullest possible extent, we nonetheless “must all have some more or less significant design in view” (Sebald, Campo 4). It is not so much that we must choose, absolutely, between form and formlessness. Rather, the point is to understand that some seemingly inevitable forms are in fact subject to contingencies, which certain uses deliberately or ignorantly mask, and that simplicity and intricacy are often co-dependent. Richard T. Gray is a Sebald critic who has picked up on the element in Sebald’s work that suggests a tension between different forms of organisation. In his article “Writing at the Roche Limit,” Gray notes that Sebald’s tendency to emphasise the decadent aspects of human and natural history “is continually counterbalanced by an insistence on order and by often extremely subtle forms of organization” (40). Rather than advancing the thesis that Sebald is exclusively against the idea of systematisation or order, Gray argues that The Rings of Saturn models in its own textual make-up an alternative approach to the cognitive order(ing) of things, one that seeks to counter the natural tendency toward entropic decline and a fall into chaos by introducing constructive forces that inject a modicum of balance and equilibrium into the system as a whole. (Gray 41)Sebald’s concern with the contrasting energies exemplified by different forms extends to his play with syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing. He uses lists to add contrast to his flowing, syntactically intricate sentences. The achievement of his work is not the exclusive privileging of either the list form or the well-composed sentence, but in providing contexts whereby the reader can appreciate subtle modulations between the two, thus experiencing a more dynamic and complex kind of narrative time. His works exhibit an astute awareness of the fact that different textual devices command different experiences of temporality, and our experience of temporality in good part determines our metaphysics. Here I consider two lists featured in The Rings of Saturn, one from the first chapter, and one from the last. Each shows contrasting tendencies concerning systems of organisation. Both are attributable to the work of Thomas Browne, “who practiced as a doctor in Norwich in the seventeenth century and had left a number of writings that defy all comparison” (Sebald, Rings 9). The Rings of Saturn is in part a dialogue across epochs with the sentiments expressed in Browne’s works, which, according to Bianca Theisen, preserve a kind of reasoning that is lost in “the rationalist and scientific embrace of a devalued world of facts” (Theisen 563).The first list names the varied “animate and inanimate matter” in which Browne identifies the quincuncial structure, a lattice like arrangement of five points and intersecting lines. The following phenomena are enumerated in the text:certain crystalline forms, in starfish and sea urchins, in the vertebrae of mammals and the backbones of birds and fish, in the skins of various species of snake, in the crosswise prints left by quadrupeds, in the physical shapes of caterpillars, butterflies, silkworms and moths, in the root of the water fern, in the seed husks of the sunflower and the Caledonian pine, within young oak shoots or the stem of the horse tail; and in the creations of mankind, in the pyramids of Egypt and the mausoleum of Augustus as in the garden of King Solomon, which was planted with mathematical precision with pomegranate trees and white lilies. (Sebald, Rings 20-21)Ostensibly quoting from Browne, Sebald begins the next sentence, “Examples might be multiplied without end” (21). The compulsion to list, or the compulsiveness expressed by listing, is expressed here in a relationship of dual utility with another, dominant or overt, kind of organisational form: the quincunx. It is not the utility or expressiveness of the list itself that is at issue—at least in the version of Browne’s work preserved here by Sebald. In W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, Long notes the historical correspondences and divergences between Sebald and Michel Foucault (2007). Long interprets Browne’s quincunx as exemplifying a “hermeneutics of resemblance,” whereby similarities among diverse phenomena are seen as providing proof of “the universal oneness of all things” (33). This contrasts with the idea of a “pathological nature, autonomous from God,” which, according to Long, informs Sebald’s transformation of Browne into “an avatar of distinctly modern epistemology” (38). Long follows Foucault in noting the distinction between Renaissance and modern epistemology, a distinction in good part due to the experimental, inductive method, the availability of statistical data, and probabilistic reasoning championed in the latter epoch (Whitehead; Hacking). In the book’s final chapter, Sebald includes a list from Browne’s imaginary library, the “Musæum Clausium.” In contrast to the above list, here Sebald seems to deliberately problematise any efforts to suggest an abstract uniting principle. There is no evident reason for the togetherness of the discrete things, beyond the mere fact that they happen to be gathered, hypothetically, in the text (Sebald, Rings 271-273). Among the library’s supposed contents are:an account by the ancient traveller Pytheas of Marseilles, referred to in Strabo, according to which all the air beyond thule is thick, condensed and gellied, looking just like sea lungs […] a dream image showing a prairie or sea meadow at the bottom of the Mediterranean, off the coat of Provence […] and a glass of spirits made of æthereal salt, hermetically sealed up, of so volatile a nature that it will not endure by daylight, and therefore shown only in winter or by the light of a carbuncle or Bononian stone. (Sebald, Rings 272-73)Unlike the previous example attributed to Browne, here the list coheres according to the tensions of its own coincidences. Sebald uses the list to create spontaneous organisations in which history is exhibited as a complex mix of fact and fantasy. More important than the distinction between the imaginary and the real is the effort to account for the way things uniquely incorporate aspects of the world in order to be what they are. Human knowledge is a perspective that is implicated in, rather than excluded from, this process.Lists move us to puzzle over the criteria that their togetherness implies. They might be used inthe service of a specific paradigm, or they might suggest an imaginable but as yet unknown kind of systematisation; a specific kind of relationship, or simply the possibility of a relationship. Take, for example, the list-like accumulation of architectural details in the following description of the decadent Sommerleyton Hall, featured in chapter II: There were drawing rooms and winter gardens, spacious halls and verandas. A corridor might end in a ferny grotto where fountains ceaselessly plashed, and bowered passages criss-crossed beneath the dome of a fantastic mosque. Windows could be lowered to open the interior onto the outside, and inside the landscape was replicated on the mirror walls. Palm houses and orangeries, the lawn like green velvet, the baize on the billiard tables, the bouquets of flowers in the morning and retiring rooms and in the majolica vases on the terrace, the birds of paradise and the golden peasants on the silken tapestries, the goldfinches in the aviaries and the nightingales in the garden, the arabesques in the carpets and the box-edged flower beds—all of it interacted in such a way that one had the illusion of complete harmony between the natural and the manufactured. (Sebald, Rings 33-34)This list shifts emphasis away from preconceived distinctions between the natural and the manufactured through the creation of its own unlikely harmony. It tells us something important about the way perception and knowledge is ordered in Sebald’s prose. Each encounter, or historically specific situation, is considered as though it were its own microworld, its own discrete, synecdochic realisation of history. Rather than starting from the universal or the meta-level and scaling down to the local, Sebald arranges historically peculiar examples that suggest a variable, contrasting and dynamic metaphysics, a motley arrangement of ordering systems that each aspire to but do not command universal applicability. In a comparable sense, Browne’s sepulchral urns of his 1658 work Urn Burial, which feature in chapter I, are time capsules that seem to create their own internally specific kind of organisation:The cremated remains in the urns are examined closely: the ash, the loose teeth, some long roots of quitch, or dog’s grass wreathed about the bones, and the coin intended for the Elysian ferryman. Browne records other objects known to have been placed with the dead, whether as ornament or utensil. His catalogue includes a variety of curiosities: the circumcision knives of Joshua, the ring which belonged to the mistress of Propertius, an ape of agate, a grasshopper, three-hundred golden bees, a blue opal, silver belt buckles and clasps, combs, iron pins, brass plates and brazen nippers to pull away hair, and a brass Jews harp that last sounded on the crossing over black water. (Sebald, Rings 25-26)Regardless of our beliefs concerning the afterlife, these items, preserved across epochs, solicit a sense of wonder as we consider what we might choose for company on our “last journey” (25). In death, the human body is reduced to a condition of an object or thing, while the objects that accompany the corpse seem to acquire a degree of potency as remnants that transcend living time. Life is no longer the paradigm through which to understand purpose. In their very difference from living things these objects command our fascination. Eric Santner coins the term “undeadness” to name the significance of this non-living agency in Sebald’s prose (Santner xx). Santner’s study places Sebald in a linage of German-Jewish writers, including Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan, whose understanding of “the human” depends crucially on the concept of “the creature” or “creatureliness” (Santner 38-41). Like the list of items contained within Sommerleyton Hall, the above list accounts for a context in which ornament and utensil, nature and culture, are read according to their differentiated togetherness, rather than opposition. Death, it seems, is a universal leveller, or at least a different dimension in which symbol and function appear to coincide. Perhaps it is the unassuming and convenient nature of lists that make them enduring objects of historical interest. Lists are a form of writing to which we appeal for immediate mnemonic assistance. They lack the artifice of a sentence. While perhaps not as interesting in the present that is contemporary with their usefulness (a trip to the supermarket), with time lists acquire credibility due to the intimacy they share with mundane, diurnal concerns—due to the fact that they were, once upon a time, so useful. The significance of lists arrives anachronistically, when we look back and wonder what people were really up to, or what our own concerns were, relatively free from fanciful, stylistic adornment. Sebald’s democratic approach to different forms of writing means that lists sit alongside the esteemed poetic and literary efforts of Joseph Conrad, Algernon Swinburne, Edward Fitzgerald, and François René de Chateaubriand, all of whom feature in The Rings of Saturn. His books make the exclusive differences between literary and non-literary kinds of writing less important than the sense of dynamism that is elicited through a play of contrasting kinds of syntactical and non-syntactical writing. The book’s closing chapter includes a revealing example that expresses these sentiments. After tracing over a natural history of silk, with a particular focus on human greed and naivety, the narrative arrives at a “pattern book” that features strips of colourful silk kept in “the small museum of Strangers Hall” (Sebald, Rings 283). The narrator notes that the silks arranged in this book “were of a truly fabulous variety, and of an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty as if they had been produced by Nature itself, like the plumage of birds” (283). This effervescent declamation continues after a double page photograph of the pattern book, which is described as a “catalogue of samples” and “leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival” (286). Here we witness Sebald’s inclusive and variable understanding as to the kinds of thing a book, and writing, can be. The fraying strips of silk featured in the photograph are arranged one below the other, in the form of a list. They are surrounded by ornate handwriting that, like the strips of silk, seems to fray at the edges, suggesting the specific gestural event that occasioned the moment of their inscription—something which tends to be excluded in printed prose. Sebald’s remarks here are not without a characteristic irony (“the only true book”). However, in the greatercontext of the narrative, this comment suggests an important inclination. Namely, that there is much scope yet for innovative literary forms that capture the nuances and complexity of collective and individual histories. And that writing always includes, though to varying degrees obscures, contrasting tensions shared among syntactical and non-syntactical elements, including material and gestural contingencies. Sebald’s works remind us of what potentials might lay ahead for books if the question of what writing can be is asked continually as part of a writer’s enterprise.ReferencesBere, Carol. “The Book of Memory: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz.” Literary Review, 46.1 (2002): 184-92.Blackler, Deane. Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2007. Catling Jo, and Richard Hibbitt, eds. Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook. Oxford: Legenda, 2011.Denham, Scott and Mark McCulloh, eds. W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Fuchs, Anne and J. J. Long, eds. W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Gray, Richard T. “Writing at the Roche Limit: Order and Entropy in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” The German Quarterly 83.1 (2010): 38-57. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. London: Cambridge UP, 1977.Kilbourn, Russell J. A. “Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.Leone, Massimo. “Textual Wanderings: A Vertiginous Reading of W. G. Sebald.” W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Ed. J. J. Long and A. Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.Long, J. J., and Anne Whitehead, eds. W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2004. McCulloh, Mark. Understanding W. G. Sebald. Columbia, S. C.: U of South Carolina P, 2003.Patt, Lise, ed. Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Critical Inquiry and ICI Press, 2007. Sadokierski, Zoe. “Visual Writing: A Critique of Graphic Devices in Hybrid Novels from a Visual Communication Design Perspective.” Diss. University of Technology Sydney, 2010. Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Schmitz, Helmut. “Catastrophic History, Trauma and Mourning in W. G. Sebald and Jörg Friedrich.” The German Monitor 72 (2010): 27-50.Sebald, W. G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1998.---. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1999.---. Campo Santo. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Print. Theisen, Bianca. “A Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” MLN, 121. The John Hopkins U P (2006): 563-81.Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and The Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1932.Zisselsberger, Markus. The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010.

Idag är det flera teoretiker inom counterinsurgency (COIN) arenan som har uppfattningen att entusiasmen för klassisk COIN teori är missriktad. Flera menar att dagens insurgent grupper skiljer sig markant från de som har verkat tidigare då dagens konflikter är mera komplexa. En av dessa är den australiske counterinsurgency officeren David Kilcullen. Han har utvecklat en teori eller ramverk som bygger på tre pelare nämligen säkerhet, politik och ekonomi. Dessa tre pelare måste utvecklas parallellt och är lika viktiga för att nå framgång i en COIN operation. Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka om Frankrikes misslyckande i Algeriet kriget 1954-62 kan förklaras utifrån Kilcullens moderna teori med tre pelare modellen för upprorsbekämpning. Efter erfarenheter från kriget i Indokina hade fransmännen utvecklat en COIN doktrin som de kallade "counterrevolutionary warfare". Denna doktrin innebar att counterinsurgency styrkorna inte bara skulle fokusera på militära medel utan dessa skulle kombineras med politiska och ekonomiska åtgärder för att slå ner ett uppror. Resultatet av undersökningen visar att fransmännen utnyttjade en tre delad strategi bestående av militära, ekonomiska och politiska medel för att försöka vinna över den lokala muslimska befolkningen från upprorsmakarnas sida. Undersökningen visar vidare att på den taktiska och operativa nivån hade doktrinen framgång, men på den strategiska nivån när FLN lyckades göra konflikten internationell genom att visa på franska säkerhetsstyrkors övervåld, nyttjande av tortyr och omflyttning av befolkningen minskade Frankrikes legitimitet att fortsätta konflikten och till slut lämnade fransmännen Algeriet. Studien har visat att det går att förklara Frankrikes misslyckade insats i Algeriet utifrån Kilcullens COIN teori och att en modern COIN teori kan appliceras på ett gammalt krig.

On 1 November, 1954 an armed insurgency against French rule commenced with a large scale terrorist attack throughout various parts of Algeria. France responded by sending troops from the continent to Algeria and was soon involved in a full out counterinsurgency against the Front Liberé National (FLN), a revolutionary movement organised in a classical communist insurgent pattern. Many of the experiences the French gained conducting counterinsurgency in Algeria have been examined by writers of COIN literature. The conclusions have been incorporated into counterinsurgency doctrines of many countries, and the works of Galula, who experienced the war, is considered basic literature for many counterinsurgency courses. This has been inherited by modern COIN literature. The US FM 3.24 draws from the French experiences and theorists in its main body. This essay examines whether modern counterinsurgency literature derived from French experiences and theories gained, fighting FLN fails to address the question on how the insurgent organisation is structured. It provides a few arguments why we should know this, such as knowing your enemy’s structure will help you understand his vulnerabilities. To archive this and lay a foundation for the argumentation it first compares the Algerian FLN to modern day Taliban to establish if their organisational structures are different or similar.

This groundbreaking investigation uncovers serious mismatches between David Galula’s counterinsurgency practice in Algeria and his counterinsurgency theory-the foundation of current U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the centrality of David Galula’s theory to U.S. Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is striking that there has been no independent evaluation of Galula’s recollection of his COIN operations in Algeria. Galula in Algeria: Counterinsurgency Practice versus Theory delivers just such an analysis, exploring the colonial French counter-insurrectionary theoretical milieu of which Galula’s COIN theory was a part, the influence of Galula’s theory on U.S. COIN doctrine, and the current views of Galula’s theory in France and other NATO countries. French defense researcher Grégor Mathias compares each of the eight steps of Galula’s theory set out in Counterinsurgency Warfare against his practice of them as described in his writings and now, for the first time, against the SAS archives and those of Galula’s infantry company and battalion. The study shows that Galula systematically inflated his operational successes to match his theoretical scheme and that he left problems unresolved, causing his work to unravel quickly after he left his command. Mathias concludes that, however heuristically fruitful Galula’s theory might prove for U.S. COIN doctrine, it must be interpreted and implemented under the caveat that it was not successfully field-tested by its author.

How do the things which connect us divide us at the same time? This book tells a different history of globalization by tracing how news circulated in a divided society: Algeria under French rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The years between 1881 and 1940 were those of maximum colonial power in North Africa, a period of intense technological revolution, global high imperialism, and the expansion of settler colonialism. Algerians became connected to international networks of news, and local people followed distant events with great interest. But once news reached Algeria, accounts of recent events often provoked conflict as they moved between different social groups. In a society split between its native majority and a substantial settler minority, distant wars led to riots. Circulation and polarization were two sides of the same coin. Looking at a range of sources in multiple languages across colonial society, this book offers a new understanding of what news is. News was a whole ecosystem in which new technologies such as the printing press, the telegraph, the cinema and the radio interacted with older media like songs, rumours, letters, and manuscripts. The French government watched anxiously over these developments, monitoring Algerians’ reactions to news through an extensive network of surveillance that often ended up spreading news rather than controlling its flow. By tracking what different people thought was new, this history of news helps us reconsider the relationship between time, media, and historical change.

Abstract In the classic Maoist doctrine of revolutionary warfare, often shared by COIN specialists, guerrilla forces found a logistic support base among isolated mountain populations. A case study of the Algerian War (1954–1962) shows how ‘vanguard’ militants arriving from the cities, far from imposing revolutionary organizations on ‘primitive’ peasants, had to adapt to pre-existing rural forms of social and political organization. During a vital early phase, when guerrilla organization was at its most fragile, insurgents turned to ‘traditional’ forms of peasant networks for vital supplies like weapons, food, and taxes. In the construction of a counter-state, the insurgents adapted rather than destroyed colonial local government structures, as well as those of the village assemblies.

A central feature of long-term colonial rule in Algeria was a deep and unresolved tension, between indirect rule by local, conservative élites based on patrimonial forms of government, and plans for economic and political modernization that depended on breaking the hold of the caids and the old system of commune mixte administration. Opération Pilote revealed such contradictions. Servier supported plans of socio-economic development and modernization, the creation of a ‘New Algeria’, but in practice he supported the neo-tribalism of the bachaga Boualam, and other traditional élites, that continued to depend on patron-client relations, maraboutism, and charismatic authority. The special forces officer Hentic was unable to transform Boualam’s harkis from an incompetent ‘private’ army into a regular, trained force. Likewise the secret service supported and armed the third force movement led by the ex-MNA leader Djilali Belhadj or ‘Kobus’. Kobus, revealing wider political ambitions, acted like a predatory warlord and had catastrophic impacts in damaging COIN operations in the Ouarsenis, before his assassination by the FLN.

In January 1957 the military and colonial government accepted a master plan drawn up by the anthropologist Jean Servier to undertake Opération Pilote in the Chelif region, the biggest counterinsurgency (COIN) experiment of the Algerian War. The arrival of Salan and Indochina specialists in command accelerated the adoption of the doctrine of revolutionary warfare, that victory over the FLN could not be achieved by conventional ‘big’ force operations, but only through winning over the indigenous population. The catastrophic failure of counterinsurgency in Kabylia in late 1956 diverted attention to the Chelif where a dispersed population was seen as advantageous to COIN operations. Servier’s plan was linked to the revival of Lucien Paye’s communal reform of 1945 to 1948, seen as the key reform to retain Algérie française. By late 1956 the colonial government and military had rapidly lost control of the Dahra and Ouarsenis mountains, a collapse signalled by the evacuation of isolated colons, and the aim was to ‘reconquer’ the interior through driving the ALN and its OPA structures from each douar, and replacing it by ‘djemâa amie’ that could form the core of future rural municipalities in which peasants could take on board their own local government and auto-defense. Unable to guarantee open elections Opération Pilote aimed to secretly train future douar leaders in the psychological warfare centre at Arzew.

Abstract Following the outbreak of armed conflict in Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Angola, Portuguese Guinea, and Mozambique in the 1950s and 1960s, health services and disease control programmes were confronted with significant challenges. These were acutely felt by vulnerable populations in rural areas which became the targets of ethnic and nationalist insurgency as well as counter-insurgency operations. The shift in focus of colonial policies to the contested terrain of community welfare and the militarization of colonial space turned villages into laboratories for the implementation of new forms of collective (health) security. ‘Mass medicine’, which was developed from the early 1900s with planned, top-down operations, mapping, large scale screening, curative and preventive interventions, and surveillance techniques to control and eradicate diseases, showed marked similarities with securitarian COIN-related interventions in conflict zones. This chapter analyses the entanglements of mass medicine, collective health security, and COIN strategies, as the developmentalist colonial state undertook the securitization and scientization of bio-social population management during late colonialism. In the process, it explores cognitive and behavioural aspects of coercive and persuasive strategies and interventions, showing how they evolved during protracted armed conflict in former Portuguese colonies—Angola and Portuguese Guinea—until the end of empire.

The chapter examines the success of the forms of psychological warfare deployed during Opération Pilote. A key element of Servier’s plan was to recruit peasants to undertake a crash training programme in the COIN centre at Arzew, so that they could be secretly reinserted in the douars to act as future political leaders. The first cohort proved to be of mediocre ability, and their placement in the douars, known to the FLN, proved to be perilous. The army turned to other techniques of mass brainwashing of the rural population, who were either subjected to propaganda teams or, at Warnier in the Chelif, placed in ‘re-education’ camps. Anthropology, promoted by Servier, was marginalized since army officers could not be rapidly trained in the necessary language and ethnology skills, and instead the army relied on behaviourist theories of conditioned reflexes and mechanical forms of mass indoctrination by repetition of slogans. The prefect, and some officers, were deeply scathing of the impacts of such brainwashing techniques. By August 1957 Opération Pilote was wound down but, despite its major failure, was promoted by top commanders as a great success, and was rapidly expanded across Algeria. The claims made for the experiment were supported by dubious forms of psychological mapping that claimed to plot the success of ‘pacification’.