Academic literature on the topic '1892-1982 Political and social views'

There is not much studies dedicated to the participation of Priyutino brotherhood and Alexander Kornilov in the struggle with famine. However, it played an important role in the construction of the political views of the brotherhood. The famine of 1891–1892 showed the Russian intellectuals the terrifying life of people. The fight against the famine was the first big experience of concrete private enterprises aiming at helping Russian peasantry. Since the famine, the agrarian question erased and became one the main questions in all politico-social programs, from liberal to Marxist.

In 1982 a panel of the Western Political Science Association meeting in San Diego took stock of postwar developments in the study of public law among American political scientists. The Western Political Quarterly has published the papers as a symposium intended to “revive a dialogue” among political scientists about the future of public law. The participants in this symposium generally take for granted the decline among political scientists, academic lawyers, and legal philosophers of the belief that judicial decision can be or even ought to be free of “political” considerations. All seem to agree about the justified triumph of something called “political jurisprudence.” Yet no consensus unites the symposium participants regarding all that political jurisprudence is or ought to be. The participants agree that political jurisprudence should be more than simply teaching and research that confines itself to the legal categories and research methods that dominate lawyers' legal briefs and judicial opinions. They also agree on the need for inquiry into the social-psychological factors of judicial choice, impact studies, alternative methods of conflict resolution, and the like. But the symposium reveals conflicting views regarding the philosophic questions of moral value that enter into legal judgments. Two views in particular stand out.

SynopsisThis article discusses the trial of a woman accused of murder in 1890 whose defence rested on the claim that she acted unconsciously under the hypnotic influence of her older lover. This relatively banal case brought together two rival schools of French psychiatry – that of J.-M. Charcot in Paris and that of Hippolyte Bernheim in Nancy – and provided a wide-ranging examination of views on the nature of unconscious mental activity as well as the social, political and professional implications that their theories on hypnotism and hysteria contained. Discussions on women's sexuality, family relations, crowd behaviour and political radicalism all played a part in the debate and are examined through the case study that the trial of Gabrielle Bompard permits. Moreover, the trial shed incidental light on the campaign by physicians against amateur healers and hypnotists whom they blamed for unleashing a wave of mass hysteria through their theatrical representations. The episode was one important element in the struggle for the passage of the law of 30 November 1892, which outlawed amateur practitioners and established the medical monopoly over healing in France.

This study aims to analyze the differences between media and medialogy to reach the matrices that are writing a new epistemology of communication. The study of medialogy contemplates investigative views based on the characteristics of Western civilizations developed amid communicative practices of administrative utilitarian use until taking on another investigative aspect within the contemporary and under the influence of digital media. This media is rooted in the observation of political dimensions of communication that reach greater complexity and demand in their investigative paths, presenting another epistemological aspect, which, through dialogue, overcomes the linearity of communication as a scientific area that is more persuasive than social.

This paper examines the role of women chiefs in post war reconstruction in Sierra Leone, particularly the connection between women chiefs with the movement for women’s equality and economic empowerment. Contrary to scholarship which views culturally based traditional structures, including chieftaincy, as counterproductive to progressive change, I argue that traditional women chiefs have contributed to the movement for gender justice and gender equity and could be key to shaping and promoting both an agenda and an ideology for women’s social and political advancement on a local level. The study is based on fieldwork conducted in Sierra Leone from 1982 to 2012 and includes semi-structured interviews with women chiefs and other key players before, during, and after the war, as well as sources such as newspaper articles, journal and book publications and archival materials.

The degree to which researcher generated visual records (for example video texts) may be used to collect valid information about the social world is subject to considerable academic debate (cf. Feld and Williams, 1975; Gottdiener, 1979 and Grimshaw, 1982). On the one hand the method is assumed, by implication, to have limited impact on the data, the taped image being treated as a replica of the unrecorded event (Vihman and Greenlee, 1987; Vuchinich, 1986). On the other, it is suggested that the video camera has a uniquely distorting effect on the researched phenomenon (Gottdiener, 1979: p. 61; Heider, 1976: p. 49). Research participants, it is argued, demonstrate a reactive effect to the video process such that data is meaningful only if special precautions are taken to validate it. Strategies suggested include a covert approach to the data collection itself (cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Haass, 1974; Gottdiener, 1979; Albrecht, 1985) or the application of triangulative techniques such as respondent validation (Gottdiener, 1979; Albrecht, 1985 and Arborelius and Timpka, 1990). In this paper we suggest that both these views are problematic. The insistence of one on marginalising the role of the research process and the other on attempting to separate the process from the research data is at the expense of exploring the degree to which the process helps socially and interactionally produce the data. As we demonstrate, the activity of data collection is constitutive of the very interaction which is then subsequently available for investigation. A reflexive analysis of this relationship is therefore essential. Video generated data is an ideal resource in as far as it can provide a faithful record of the process as an aspect of the naturally occurring interaction which comprises the research topic.

Opening ParagraphOne of the more interesting historiographical debates that emerged in the course of the great burst of research into Akan (actually primarily Asante) history during the 1950s and 1960s concerned the ‘structure’ of the Asante empire, or ‘Greater Asante’ as one of the contributors to the debate, Kwame Arhin, has termed it (Arhin, 1967). The debates have largely been informed by a synchronic, ‘centrist’ approach; that is, by an approach that views the imperial structure at a given point in time, and primarily from the perspective of the political centre, the capital town of Kumase. The 1970s have seen a proliferation of regional studies of the Akan and their neighbours, and so it is perhaps time to reopen the debate on the nature of the Asante imperial order from a broader perspective, one that is both more sensitive to change over time and includes the emerging views from the periphery (see, for example, Berberich, 1974; Case, 1979; Ferguson, 1972; Greene, 1981; Haight, 1981; Handloff, 1982; Sanders, 1980; Weaver, 1975; Yarak, 1976). The present paper first briefly sketches the social and political setting in nineteenth-century Elmina (εdena), then critically reviews the historiographical debate over the structure of Greater Asante, and lastly offers an alternative approach to the study of Greater Asante based on a case study of the history of Asante relations with Elmina.

Conflict is an integral part of human relationships. As defined by The University English Dictionary conflict denotes a struggle, a clashing of views or statements, a meeting in opposition or antagonism. The position taken in the present study is that a conflict consists of an opposition between two individuals “when one person does something to which a second person objects” (Hay, 1984, p.2). This particular outlook is consistent with that adopted by Kagan, Knight & Martinez-Romero (1982) in their study of children's conflict resolution styles.Paradoxically, while conflict may be an important aspect of human relations, conflict as evidenced in children's relations has received scant attention. Research has identified possible sex differences in children's conflict with boys engaging in more direct conflict than girls (Miller, Danaher & Forbes, 1986; Shantz, 1986). Boys do appear to use different conflict resolution strategies (namely more threats and physical force as opposed to negotiation) than girls (Miller et al, 1981). Some evidence also exists that there are developmental changes in children's conflict resolution strategies such that from 5 to 9 years there is an increasing use of a reconciliation conflict resolution style (Aboud, 1981).

AbstractHaving examined 151 years of enacted legislation in the Canadian youth criminal justice system (1857–2007), the author analyzes how the Parliament of Canada has regulated the publication of information that identifies young people as being or having been dealt with by the justice system. Piñero identifies four different time periods in the legislation: 1857–1891; 1892–1907; 1908–1981; and 1982–2007. The regulation enacted during 1857–1891 was not concerned with the publication of information that may identify young offenders. This position started to change during the period 1892–1907, reaching its highest point during the period 1908–1981. The 1908–1981 period was highly concerned with the protection of young offenders' private information, since such a measure was perceived as an important factor for granting young offenders rehabilitation. However, since 1982 this direction started to change: the enacted regulation during the period 1982–2007 drew a distinction between two groups of young offenders according to the seriousness of the committed offences, thereby protecting the private information of one of the groups but not the private information of the other. Piñero argues that the theoretical implications underlying the regulation of young offenders' privacy rights in the period 1908–1981 constituted an evolution (innovation) with regard to the periods 1857–1891 and 1892–1907, while the theoretical implications underlying the period 1982–2007 constituted (and constitute) a regression as to the third period.

The recent influx to the United States of a new large wave of immigrants from Hispanic America and Asia has reinvigorated immigration and ethnic studies, including those devoted to the analysis of the origins and process of international migrations. The accumulation of research in this field in the last fifteen years has brought about a shift in the theoretical paradigm designed to interpret these movements. The classical approach explains the mass flow into North America of immigrants (from Southern and Eastern Europe, in the period 1880 to 1914), as an international migration interpreted in terms of push and pull forces. Demographic and economic conditions prompted individuals to move from places with a surplus of population, little capital, and underemployment, to areas where labor was scarce and wages were higher (Jerome, 1926; Thomas, 1973; Piore, 1979; Gould, 1979). This interpretation views individual decisions and actions as the outcome of a rational economic calculation of the costs and benefits of migration. Recent studies of international population movements have reconceptualized this problem, recasting the unit(s) of analysis from separate nation-states, linked by one-way transfer of migrants between two unequally developed economies, to a comprehensive economic system composed of a dominant core and a dependent periphery— a world system that forms a complex network of supranational exchanges of technology, capital, and labor (Castells, 1975; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Kritz, 1983; Sassen-Koob, 1980; Portes, 1978; Portes and Walton, 1981; Wood, 1982). In this conceptualization, the development of the core and the underdevelopment of the peripheral societies are seen not as two distinct phenomena, but as two aspects of the same process—the expanding capitalist world system, explained in terms of each other. Generated by the economic imbalances and social dislocations resulting from the incorporation of the peripheries into the orbit of the core, international labor migrations between the developing and industrialized regions are viewed as part of a global circulation of resources within a single system of world economy. This interpretation shifts the central emphasis from the individual (and his/her decisions) to the broad structural determinants of human migrations within a global economic system.

In this dissertation it is contended that central to Reinhold Niebuhr's theology and ethics is his understanding of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as a revelation of the suffering of God. Keeping in mind the theologia crucis of Martin Luther, Part I examines the significance of the Christian symbol of the cross during Niebuhr's formative years and as he later sought to relate the moral and ethical insights of the Christian faith to the more tragic social and political events of his age.
Part II begins with a systematic appraisal of Niebuhr's theology of the cross in reference to his understanding of Christian anthropology, theology proper, the atonement, history and eschatology. The theological similarities of Niebuhr's thought to the theologia crucis of Luther are made explicit. A delineation is then made of Niebuhr's social ethic of the cross. It is an ethic which seeks to underscore the true but limited relevance of the norm of sacrificial love to issues of relative justice. This ethic is then contrasted to the ethica crucis of Luther.
The dissertation concludes with an examination of the current debate regarding Niebuhr's ultimate political position. It is suggested that an understanding of Niebuhr's theology and ethic of the cross is essential to any thorough appreciation of the major shifts which occurred within his political thought.

Democracy and mysticism are two prominent themes of Walt Whitman's writings, yet few critics have explored the connections that may exist between these areas. Some critics have noted that Whitman holds an ideal of "spiritual democracy," in which all people are equal due to their identity with a transcendent self such as that found in "Song of Myself," but they have not identified the best philosophical model for such a political viewpoint. I believe that the parallel between Whitman's thought and Vedantic mysticism, already developed by V. K. Chart and others, may be expanded to account for Whitman's political thought. Past studies of Whitman and Vedanta have focused only on the advaitic aspects of his writing, but in his later years he came to adopt a visistadvaitic stance similar to that of Ramanuja. In the political sphere, his concept of a Brahmanic self shared by all people led him to not only believe that all people are equal, but that they also possess the capacity to become contributors to a democratic society. Whitman felt that the poet was the primary means by which the masses could attain mystical consciousness and the concomitant social harmony. The ideal poet described in Democratic Vistas and the Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass serves as a mediator between the people as they are and Whitman's ideal of a completely unified democratic society and thereby parallels the Vedantic guru's function of bridging the relative and absolute levels of reality.
Department of English

The purpose of this thesis is to organize and examine Walt Whitman's poetic representations and discussions of laborers and labor issues in order to argue that form a distinct "poetics" of labor in Leaves of Grass. This poetics of labor reveals that Whitman was attempting to enlarge the audience for American poetry by representing American society at work in poetry. Whitman also used labor as a poetic subject in order to justify the work of the poet in that society. In this sense, Whitman's poetics of labor is comprised of numerous demonstrations of his argument for the labor of poetry because the representation of America at work is contained within the work of the poet. The organization of this thesis rests upon a distinction between the work of the hands and the work of the mind. This distinction resonates in nineteenth century American literature, and it is especially important to debates about the status of the writer in a working democratic society. This question figures prominently in the works of Emerson and Thoreau, and a central issue for both of them is whether or not the writer should participate in the work of the hands. Whitman engages in this debate as well, and argues that the poet can participate in all kinds of work through poetic representation. He participates by representing workers in poetry, and in Whitman's argument the poet then becomes a representative of those workers. A central premise of this thesis is that Whitman's poetry of labor demonstrates an attempt to ensure that America works according to Whitman's interpretation of democracy. This is most apparent in poems where he directly addresses his working audience, and those addresses reveal a specific ideology behind Whitman's poetics of labor. That is, Whitman attempts to level the implicit hierarchical organization of different kinds of work. For instance, in such poems as "Song for Occupations" and "Song of the Broad-Axe," Whitman engages in a conversation with manual laborers in an effort to acknowledge their value and significance to the democratic process. As he celebrates their contribution, he also associates his own work with them, and argues for the · usefulness of such poetry to that process as well. In such poems as "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer'' and "To A Historian," Whitman addresses those who labor with the mind in order to include them in the dialogue, and also to argue that the majority of that work needs to be revised because its claim for authority perpetuates hierarchical distinctions. Whitman offers poetry as a solution, and argues that it is central to democracy because it "completes" all labor by fusing the work of the community with the work of shaping individual identity that comes from reading and writing poetry. This thesis draws upon New Historicist methodologies and approaches to Whitman in order to reconstruct the significance of labor in Whitman's poetics. The poetry which directly addresses laborers and labor issues in Leaves of Grass forms the basis of the argument, but Whitman's relevant prose is considered in detail as well. In particular, Democratic Vistas is examined for its claims that the "work" of poetry is itself incomplete. "Work" is used here to refer both to the aesthetic object and the effort involved in reading it. In other words, Whitman argues that the work of poetry, like the work of democracy, is a continuous, recursive process.

'The Politics of Place in the Work of Hugh MacDiarmid' argues that there is no fundamental contradiction in MacDiarmid's politics, his Scottish nationalism and international communism issuing in a radical Scottish Republicanism that synchronizes the local and universal, seeking to unify the cultural and political divisions of Scotland. This thesis suggests that MacDiarmid challenges the metropolitan location of culture through a provincialist poetry and politics energized and exasperated by intimate relationship with home. It analyses the connections between MacDiarmid's ideological valorization of difference and the Scottish places from which his politics evolve. Chapter One suggests that modem Scottish cultural politics is still thirled to the imperialistic dualities of the metropolitan Scottish Enlightenment. MacDiarmid's strategic essentialism reasserts an autonomous cultural and political practice that aims to make Scotland whole. The chapter traces MacDiarmid's communism to his defiance of the churchy parochialism of Langholm. Using uncollected newspaper material, Chapters Two and Three illustrate the internationalism of MacDiarmid's localism in Montrose and Whalsay. From examining how engagement with specific places shapes MacDiarmid's politics. Chapter Four returns to analysis of the ideological construction of Scotland. The chapter explores how education has formed ideas of Scotland crucial to its political position and bound up with the specialized Scottish educational system's suppression of a Scottish Republican tradition, whose energies MacDiarmid uncovers and endeavours to release through an autodidactic generalism. Prioritizing this particularity of local culture. Chapter Five argues that the apparent contradictions in the modernist MacDiarmid's politics are best understood in terms of global capitalism's construction of mass culture, a division of labour he opposes through an internationalist poetry of generalist knowledge. This thesis finds theoretical alliance with the internationalism of Marxism and postcolonialism, synthesizing these with an autochthonous critical apparatus, declaring Hugh MacDiarmid a major modem component of a tradition of radical Scottish Republicanism.

Furthermore, the present research is going to indicate that many historians and theologians have failed to take serious the diasporic context when articulating their concepts of traditional Chinese culture and of the Chinese identity. In fact, Xie Fuya, as a diasporic Chinese after 1949, did not define his Chinese identity and the Chinese culture in territorial or political terms. Instead, he shared the viewpoints of those overseas Chinese who were struggling to survive in diasporic contexts. And his diasporic experience and horizon generated a critical understanding of Chinese culture and indigenous theology as well as their relationship. Even now, some scholars in Mainland China continue to emphasize that indigenous theology should be understood, discussed and applied within the social, political and cultural contexts of Mainland China only. However, their understandings of Chinese culture and Chinese identity, as well as the related methodology of indigenous theology they have employed, need to be examined critically.
In addition, the thesis will argue that this diasporic identity constitutes a significant ingredient of Xie Fuya's indigenous theology and contributes to Xie's new understanding of his own indigenous theology of Christianity in a post-1949 diasporic environment. Xie's indigenous theology, especially his theological method, aroused furious discussion among Chinese Christian intellectuals in and after the 1960s. Such discourse was identified as a significant break of historical continuity between the past generation and the next of Chinese Christian intellectuals in Hong Kong.
The present research aims at pointing out that the relevant historical materials do not support the above conclusions-that Xie Fuya did not concern the social and political situation of his homeland and indwelling place(s). In fact, historical evidences show that Xie as an indigenous theologian, not only spent time on bridging the relation between Christian message and Chinese culture, but also paid much effort in social construction and political participation. All these were done both before and after 1949.
The present thesis aims at investigating how the Chinese Christian intellectual Xie Fuya, responded to a diasporic movement resulting from the drastic political change of China in and after 1949. He tried to construct a unique and new identity that he had never had before-an identity that helped him to face the diasporic environment and generated a new horizon of his understanding of his faith. Showing the contents of this identity; the thesis illustrates how unique Xie's diasporic identity was expressed in the community of Chinese intellectuals and Chinese Christians during the 1950s and 1960s. That identity could not have been created, experienced and articulated by any Chinese and Christians inside Mainland China at that time.
The significance of this research does not only rest in its showing that a significant and important figure like Xie Fuya has been neglected in the historical and theological studies of Chinese Christianity in the past; it is significant also because it discloses how the thought behind the identities of a diasporic Chinese and Chinese Christian bears significance in a historical context and contributes to a new understanding of the Chinese identity, the Chinese culture and indigenous theology from a different perspective---which is different from the past and is closely related to cultural, anthropological and theological studies of our times.
The thesis will argue that it is Xie Fuya's experience of being forced to leave his homeland and the reflection of his Christian thought and experience that helped formulate his diasporic identity. Furthermore, both the fate of Chinese overseas in different areas because of the change of international politics, and the understanding of his own ethnicity and culture through the discourse among the Chinese intellectuals in Hong Kong, helped reinforce the articulation of that dislocating identity.
Xie Fuya (1892-1991), one of the most prolific Chinese theologians of the 20th century, has so far been largely ignored in the historical or theological studies of Chinese Christianity. Even worse, Xie Fuya has been seriously misunderstood by some historians of Chinese Christianity. Some of them labeled him as a representative of the indigenous theologians who focused exclusively on the relation between Christianity and Chinese culture without any concern for the relevance of the Christian message to the contemporary social change. Some stereotyped him as one of the Chinese Christians who made a far-fetched comparison between Chinese culture and Christianity. However, these prevailing paradigmatic "conclusions" on Xie Fuya are not properly based on in-depth historical investigation and the derived theological criticisms were merely built on some a-historical assumptions.
何慶昌.
論文(哲學博士)--香港中文大學, 2006.
參考文獻(p. 282-307).
Adviser: Pan-Chiu Lai.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0607.
Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Abstracts in Chinese and English.
School code: 1307.
Lun wen (zhe xue bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2006.
Can kao wen xian (p. 282-307).
He Qingchang.

My study is a theoretical intervention of the South African contemporary visual art of Mary Sibande. It focuses on the figure of Sophie representing the maid in three series; namely, Sophie-Elsie, Sophie-Merica, and Sophie-Velucia. The study applies Frantz Fanon’s thought to the understanding of the figure of Sophie while emphasising the themes of naming, the human subject, and presence-absence. The theoretical framework of this thesis is a decolonial epistemic theory, which is used as a lens to understand Fanon’s political thoughts. I argue that the themes of naming, human subject, and presenceabsence are inherent in Fanon’s thought. These thematic areas give a better understanding of the existential questions of the figure of Sophie in the antiblack Manichean world. It is important to unpack the figure of Sophie as a Manichean figure who represents the crossing of two different worlds – the white world and the black world, Africa and Europe. The study highlights the importance and relevance of reviving Fanon’s thought concerning decolonial contemporary African art and establishing other tools of interpretation necessary to understand decolonial aestheSis. The thrust of this thesis is to deploy decolonial epistemic theory as a theoretical framework to the Fanonian understanding of the figure of the three Sophies that embody the modern/colonial predicament of the figure of the maid and blackness.
Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology
Ph. D (Art)

Like Julian Pitt-Rivers, Godfrey Lienhardt (1921–93) was a student of E. E. Evans-Pritchard at Oxford. His great ethnography Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka, published in 1961, is regarded as one of the great social anthropological studies of religion. In his research (1947–50) on this southern Sudanese nomad population (neighbors of the Nuer, the people researched by Evans-Pritchard), Lienhardt approaches religious symbolism, imagery, and leadership as informed intimately by the Dinka’s own everyday experience of the world. He altered dominant social anthropological perspectives on religion of the time by drawing attention to the discrepancy and contradictions that existed between people’s everyday experience of “religion” and their conscious, reflexive articulations about those practices. The attention to skepticism and ambiguity is evident in this essay (first published in 1982, and reproduced here almost in its entirety) that reflects on the interaction between the Dinka and Italian Catholic missionaries, who had been in the Sudan since the mid-nineteenth century. Lienhardt begins by asking, “What kind of translation, as it were, of experience is required for a Dinka to become a nominal or believing Christian?” He responds to this question with circumspection, stressing the challenges in any missionary encounter, which he aptly characterizes as not one of simple straightforward instruction and conversion (or rupture), but one fraught with gaps in understanding and divergent intentions on both sides. Many of these gaps inhere in language, both idiomatic and semantic terms, with many ideas being “caught in translation,” leading Catholicism to “stick” unevenly and in unpredictable ways across the Dinka world. Thus the Dinka accepted the Church mostly, Lienhardt suggests, through ideas of progress and mostly material development that were quite foreign to Dinka experience and, somewhat ironically, also to the ideas and principles taught by the missionaries. Catholic doctrine and eschatology were thus absorbed into the Dinka life-world through a kind of “linguistic parallax” (a displacement or change in the perception of objects in space from different points of observation). Lienhardt erroneously characterizes the church as “the bearer of a theoretically unified body of theological and social doctrine”—a portrayal similar to widespread views even today. But the acuity of his attention to the intricacies and uncertainties of the exchange of meanings that is part of missionization—and to the political economic realities shaping the encounter—distinguishes this work as a pioneering study in the anthropology of missions, especially in colonial Africa. In this respect Lienhardt’s essay might be seen as a precursor to a great tradition of poststructuralist works on African religious missionaries, postcolonialism, and social transformation.¹ His focus on Catholicism, however, provides us a glimpse of the dynamics of “syncretism” in situ as a process that cannot be understood outside its social, historical, and political context.

In 2002, the extraordinarily wealthy inhumation burial of a single adult male was discovered less than 5 kilometres from Stonehenge in Wiltshire. The Amesbury Archer, as he soon came to be known, was buried sometime between 2380 and 2290 BC (Fitzpatrick 2011), and he was accompanied by an array of grave goods including three copper knives, a pair of gold ornaments, five Beaker pots, seventeen barbed and tanged arrowheads, two stone bracers, a shale belt ring, and a possible cushion stone for the working of metal objects. The appearance of single burials with grave goods at the beginning of the Chalcolithic has long been interpreted as indicating the emergence of an ideology of the individual (e.g. Renfrew 1974; Shennan 1982). The objects buried with the Archer have been viewed as a direct reflection of his wealth and status, and the discovery seems to support established views of Bronze Age society as increasingly hierarchical—dominated by individuals who drew political power from success in long-distance exchange, control over specialist technologies such as metalworking, and prowess in hunting and warfare (Needham 2000a; Needham et al. 2010; Sheridan 2012). It has frequently been recognized, however, that such evolutionist narratives in fact present a reductionist reading of the evidence (e.g. Petersen 1972; Petersen et al. 1975, 49; Brück 2004a; Gibson, A. 2004), and detailed evaluation of human remains from both mortuary contexts and elsewhere indicates considerable variability in the treatment and perception of the human body (Sofaer Derevenski 2002; Gibson, A. 2004; Brück 2006a; Fitzpatrick 2011, 201–2; Appleby 2013; Fowler 2013, ch. 4). We will return to consider the significance of grave goods in Chapter 3; here we will focus on the treatment of the body both in Bronze Age mortuary rites and in other forms of social and ritual practice. As we shall see, the bodies of the dead were manipulated in complex ways that indicate the existence of concepts of the self that differ profoundly from those familiar from our own cultural context.

There has been a tendency in archaeology and in related social sciences and humanities to view human cultures as simply ‘adapted’ to or ‘in tune’ with ‘nature’ (Binford 1962; Butzer 1982; Steward 1955a; White 1959). Nature in this view is difficult to define and is principally considered in opposition to culture; it is not culture, it is external to humans, and it has an active causality of its own. This is often true even when researchers have been considering phenomena with a distinctly ‘human’ flavour such as population growth or technological development; both have often been seen as ‘natural’ aspects of human behaviour, as things which ‘just happen’. In such thinking, when human societies are impacted by nature (conceived of as a phenomenon emanating from outside of the human realm) their responsive action or behaviour is often considered to be ‘forced’, in the sense that there is only one way in which society can respond and therefore that the nature of the change is inevitable. The idea that alternative actions might be as appropriate and effective, and equally likely, is given little credence—the specific nature of the response is taken as requisite and the form of the response goes unquestioned: human agency (choice) is given little opportunity to make its mark. Cause and effect are favoured over choice, opportunism, innovation, and dynamic decision making, while the environment is seen as external to culture and shaped by natural rather than cultural forces. Moreover, this logic is self-fulfilling; things occur as they do because the result was inevitable and only one course of action was possible; ergo the problem is solved! Of course I am here describing an extreme position and most researchers today would see a much more dynamic interaction between humans and the natural world. However, unicausal thinking does remain pervasive in popular accounts (Diamond 2005, 1997; Fagan 2007: 16–17; Scarre 2005: 35) and in much influential academic work where technology, environment, and ecology remain prime mover explanations, at least partially at the expense of variable responses, individual agency, politics, and ideology (Algaze 2008: 151–4; Demarest 2004: 27–30; Pollock 1999: 22–5; Webster 2002: 327–43).

As settlements became more clearly bounded and fixed in the landscape, so too did territories based on landed production, which became increasingly intensive and politically controlled (as we shall see in Chapter 5). These territories became formalized when leaders were able to exercise authority within them by protecting clients through juridical and/or military means, and by extracting surplus from, and controlling access to, landed resources. The identification of communities and individuals with a particular territory or region, whether this was defined by shared markets, dialect, military allegiances, or other commonalities, must also have grown in importance in this period, as ties of ethnicity and kinship began to give ground to bonds of clientship and rank. The formalization of territories was of course key to the formation of early kingdoms. What can archaeology tell us about the effects of territorialization and estate formation on rural communities? Certain regular features govern territorial formation in pre-industrial societies. In particular, universal ‘push–pull’ factors underlie the territorial structure and settlement pattern of agrarian communities. Briefly stated, every community needs to establish a territory in order to keep neighbouring communities at a distance and preserve its resources (‘push’ factors), but the necessity of maintaining certain social ties between communities, such as marriage, trade, and shared defence (‘pull’ factors), will act to minimize the distance between them (Heidinga 1987, 157). For example, the distribution of settlement in the Veluwe district of the central Netherlands shows that the northeast and the southwest regions were largely empty in the seventh century, even though their soils were suitable for farming and they were occupied both before and after this period. They lay outside the core area of the seventh-century resettlement of the Veluwe, however, and it appears that communities chose not to spread out thinly across the entire territory, but rather to remain relatively close to one another (Heidinga 1987, 162). In the Netherlands, Germany, and England, early territories could, under certain circumstances, be remarkably stable and survive to be detected in much later boundaries (e.g. Waterbolk 1982 and 1991a; Cunliffe 1973; Janssen 1976). In view of this stability and the behavioural ‘rules’ which appear to govern territorial formation, some archaeologists have attempted to reconstruct proto-historic territories. Several presuppositions underlie such reconstruction. The first is that the ‘push–pull’ factors already mentioned invariably operate between neighbouring communities.

The American Library Association’s 1982 statement on Diversity in Collection Development reminds librarians of our professional responsibility “to select and support the access to materials on all subjects that meet, as closely as possible, the needs, interests, and abilities of all persons in the community the library serves. This includes materials that reflect political, economic, religious, social, minority, and sexual issues.” The William H. Hannon (WHH) Library’s vision statementaffirms that the library views itself as Bridge, Gateway, Agora, and Enterprise. To ensure that our materials collection aligns with our institutional vision and meets the research needs of our diverse campus population, the project team proposed an assessment of our electronic collection through the lens of diversity. The assessment was to determine if the library’s online databases (most often the first point of research consultation for our students and faculty) are adequately “bridging disciplines” (Bridge) and “representing diverse topics and perspectives” (Gateway). What the team learns will inform the library collection strategy, to ensure that it builds collections that deliberately and positively contribute to an inclusive campus climate. [1] http://library.lmu.edu/aboutthelibrary/libraryvisionmission/