Abstract: "Time and Free Will" - the idea of duration "Matter and Memory" "Mind-Energy" "Creative Evolution" "Duration and Simultaneity" - the nature of time "The Creative Mind" Bergson and Kant - beyond the noumenal "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion" "Melanges".

Abstract: Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric Edited by Eugene R Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001 viii + 408 pp $5900 cloth Although the title-page of this essay collection does not indicate its status as a festschrift, one of its main purposes is evidently "to honor the teaching and scholarly career of John R Roberts" (viii) The focus chosen for the collection is indeed most apt, since extending the informed critical discussion of early modern English religious lyrics has been the achievement of Jack Roberts's career His pioneering annotated bibliographies of critical writing on Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, as well as his own articles and essay collections, and his unfailing support of younger scholars, have combined to enable the increased attention given to the seventeenth-century religious lyric over the past three decades As Claude Summers writes in the closing contribution to this volume, Roberts's "calculated strategy of restraint" in the bibliographies has made them available to critics of every tradition (336) His evenhandedness in presenting critical approaches with which he might not personally agree "bespeaks," in Summers's elegant formulation, Roberts's "understanding of the winding ways of scholarship and the mysteriousness of the creative process" (337) An annotated bibliography, in the hands of a sensitive and objective scholar such as Jack Roberts, can function as literary history in itself, charting the shifting currents of critical taste Criticism, after all, is an expression of an age as well as of the individuals who contribute to it The volume under discussion is no exception, being very much an essay collection of our time in its expressed aim to extend the canon of the poems generally implied by the phrase "seventeenth-century English religious lyric" The essays devote attention to a number of hitherto neglected groups, including women writers and English Catholics, as well as to poets who might be termed "minor" but whose work nevertheless adds to our understanding of the religious lyric and of the era As Kari Boyd McBride vividly puts it, the canon can have the same effect as urban light pollution, erasing the "dimmer stars" and leaving us with a "manageable set of constellations and bright suns" This volume takes us away from the familiar perspective, into the "desert, where darkness reveals the innumerable lights of the night sky and masks the relationships we thought we understood" (40) The rediscovered heavenly "lights" in this volume span the period from Robert Southwell and Elizabeth Middleton in the late sixteenth century to Joseph Beaumont and Thomas Traherne towards the end of the seventeenth Holding true to the editors' conviction that there are many more stars in the sky than the sparkling Donne and Herbert, the fifteen essays explore exciting new constellations The Scottish poet William Drummond keeps company with the anonymous author of Eliza's Babes, and the failed monk Patrick Cary finds himself in an adjacent essay to the maternal Mary Carey, author of the verse lament "Upon ye Sight of my abortive birth" In reviewing an essay collection it is impossible to give detailed attention to every contribution, though there are many here deserving of serious reading Among the most valuable, in my view, are those which implicitly or explicitly redefine the religious lyric through the individual case studies they have chosen: Patrick Cook's perceptive reading of Aemilia Lanyer's "Description of Cookeham" as a devotional lyric, for example, and Donna J Long's plausible claim that women's elegies form a gendered subgenre, the "recuperative religious lyric" Several essays situate devotional poets more firmly in their appropriate denominational group or doctrinal context, such as Ann Hurley's discussion of the "vivifying force" of Protestantism in the work of An Collins (234), and Kate Narveson's invented term "Anglianism" for the conformity to the established church evinced in the poems of William Austin (163) …

Abstract: Analyzing docudrama as a mode of argument, this book explores the ethical, historical, and ideological functions of docudrama to discover why these films based on true stories offer such appealing storylines It posits that such appeal is rooted in docudrama's representation of actual people and events by means of melodramatic narrative structures that play on the emotions of the viewer The dual nature of docudramas - blending narrative and documentary style - argues for a moral view of reality-based subject matter The ethics, the ideology, the very presence of docudrama on television and the range of topics and problems that appear in contemporary feature film docudrams indicate how this form of presentation appeals to the audience Docudrama offers a warranted, rational view of what the story material might suggest initially to be an irrational world Through its moral agenda, docudrama ultimately allows the possibilities of understanding, optimism, and hope to emerge from "real stories" The book traces the development of docudramas into contemporary movies of the week and feature films, including "Schindler's List", "Amistad", "JFK", "The Killing Fields", "Quiz show", "A League of Their Own", "In The Name of the Father", "Call Northside 777", "13 Rue Madeleine", "Cheerleader Mom", "Shine", "Rosewood", "A Civil Action", and "October Sky" Steven N Lipkin provides further insight into the genre by identifying and describing the commonalities connecting ostensibly different docudramas through their shared themes and narrative techniques In doing so, he exposes the persuasive rhetorical strategies at the heart of docudramas and reveals the constructed emotional appeal inherent in films "based on a true story"

Abstract: Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict, by Samir Khalaf. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. xxiv + 328 pages. Notes to p. 334. Bibl. to p. 351. Index to p. 368. $32.50. According to the dust jacket notes, this is "a long-awaited work." It is nowhere suggested by whom, but if they were expecting something new and revelatory a disappointment could well be in store. Dr. Khalaf is a well-known professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut (AUB), but his lengthy narrative offers not much beyond very personal views on the causes and effects of the Lebanese War (most of which he viewed from 6,000 miles away in Princeton, New Jersey, not returning to AUB until four years after the fighting ended). Some of these observations are genuinely insightful while others are inevitably derivative and contentious, but they add little of substance to what has been written at length on this topic since 1975. The book contains ten chapters, the first three devoted to sociological analysis, the next six to an historical over-view from 1820 to the present, and a final chapter on "Prospects for Civility" which, among other panaceas, calls for "visionary and enlightened leadership" and a restructuring of group loyalties (p. 328). As to where the former is to be found or how the latter is to be achieved, the reader is left utterly clueless. The title is itself a catchy bit of nonsense, since the term "uncivil" is not the opposite of "civil" in this case, and when used with "violence," "uncivil" becomes a tautology since all violence is by its very nature uncivil. The author never seems able to define these two terms satisfactorily, and in the first paragraph of chapter 3 where he attempts to do so, the text descends into linguistic chaos. Awkward and frequently imprecise English usage mars the work throughout. An example is found in the very first sentence of the preface, which informs the reader that "Lebanon's national image has been, for much of its checkered political history, associated with three seemingly intractable aberrations" (p. ix). These turn out to be political conditions which are neither aberrations nor intractable. Hobbes's famous description of life in the state of nature is not a "ringing metaphor" (p. 38); it is not a metaphor at all. Verbosity assaults the reader at every turn. On page 45, for example, a tedious banality tries desperately to escape the fol- lowing example of Khalafian verbal miasma: "The incivility and futility of strife became more visible precisely because such atavistic forms of self-administered retributive justice were bereft of any redemptive or restorative value." Say what? On the same page, Israel "shot down" two Syrian MiGs; two lines later, the Israeli Ambassador to Britain was "shot down" in (not over) London. Cliches and truisms lower the overall tone (e.g., "peasants rarely acted alone," repeated twice on pp. xv and 101). Misprints ("the Holly Land," p. 185), and neologisms such as "hybridity" (p. 5), "clientalistic" (p. 159), "beneficent" (where "beneficial" is called for on p. 191), "expectable" (p. 237), and "familism" (p. 263) abound. There are inconsistencies in spelling, e.g., Ba'labakk rendered three different ways ("Ba'lbak" on p. 134, "Baalback" on p. 195, and "Baalbeck" on p. 219), while the author's home region of Al-Shuf (or El-- Chouf in the French transliteration) appears inexplicably as "Chuf' (p. 129 and throughout), as if the Beirut-Damascus train were still running. There are historical, geographical, and demographic errors. Holland and Belgium never fought a civil war, as is suggested on p. …

Abstract: This reference includes 1500 English-language proverbs that are widely recognized. Arranged alphabetically, entries give the meaning of each proverb, the date it was first recorded, variant forms of the proverb, other proverbs that are similar and opposite to it in meaning, and examples of the proverb's use. Proverbs covered include - "Absense makes the heart grow fonder", "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush", "Every man is his own worst enemy", "It takes a village to raise a child", "Pride goes before a fall", "The leopard can't change its spots", and "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown".

Abstract: The events of September 11, 2001 have led to a public display of unity unseen for nearly four decades in fractious, pluralistic America. The response could be dismissed as simple reactive patriotism at a moment of crisis, and given the nebulous and attenuated nature of any likely "war on terrorism," one might guess that the fervor will be difficult to sustain at the level apparent at this moment. But American patriotism has always been a more complex matter than the stereotype of unthinking, jingoistic flag-waving might suggest. According to the political historian Richard Reeves, writing in the New York Times on October 1, 2001, "We are a self-created nation driven to defend our own masterwork. Being an American is not a matter of geography or bloodlines. America is a matter of ideas, the rejection of an Old World standards we thought corrupt." He cites De Tocqueville, who wrote that Americans "have been repeatedly and constantly told that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people," and as a result, they "have an immensely high opinion of themselves." This attitude has been contextualized by a variety of social scientists within the concept of an enduring American "civil religion." It might be argued that American civil religion became something of a joke in the era of political cynicism associated with Vietnam and Watergate (although it was revived very briefly during the Bicentennial). (See Jorstad 1990 for a more complete analysis of the transformation of the traditional American pieties into what he calls the "awakening to peace and justice" issues in the 1970s.) It certainly has not been a conspicuous element in the national consciousness during the subsequent decades of increasingly bitter interest-group politics. Social scientists, heir to the positivist traditions of Comte and Marx, accepted as a given the trend of modern societies toward "secularization," and hence have grown increasingly impatient with the notion that religion-even a "civil" one-has any place in a modern polity (Wilson 1998). Nevertheless, troubled people in a secular society may seek meaning and solace in a civil religion in response to the same motives, emotions, and associations that lead people in traditional societies to the standard sacred religions. The historian Joanne Freeman (2001: B6) has noted that "in a way no one ever wanted or imagined, the events of this month [September 2001] have taken us back to the mindset of an earlier time, when the American nation was newly formed." It was a time when "only a deep and abiding loyalty to the nation's founding principles of governance prevented the early Republic from dissolving into civil war." Another historian, Richard Slotkin, reminds us that a society experiencing trauma may come to believe that a certain shocking event upsets its fundamental ideas about what can and should happen. Such a challenge to the authority of its basic values leads people to "look to their myths for precedents, employing past experience--embodied in their myths-as a way of getting a handle on crisis" (2001: B11). This process, regardless of the form it might take in secularized societies, is a fundamental process of any religious system in any culture. Culture is, after all, more than simple behavior (e.g., patriotic flag-waving). Behavior always flows from a complex of attitudes, beliefs, and values that derive from a common historical tradition. The concept of a civil religion allows us to interpret current behavior-which may appear superficially to be transitory and shallow-in light of historical tradition and values that have historically held meaning in American culture. At the same time, the concept allows for the analysis of particular values and behaviors in the larger context of cross-culturally salient categories of ideology, ritual, and myth-making. For anthropologists trying to get a grip on a huge and somewhat amorphous entity like "American culture," the concept of civil religion may be a reasonable point of entree, particularly at a moment in history when the residual commonalities of the culture loom larger than its otherwise more prominent divisions. …

Abstract: The term "post-colonial" is a relative newcomer to the jargon of Western social science. Although discussions about the effects of colonial and imperialist domination are by no means new, the various meanings attached to the prefix "post-" and different understandings of what characterizes the post-colonial continue to make this term a controversial one. Among the criticisms leveled against it, reviewed comprehensively by Hall (1996), are the dangers of careless homogenizing of experiences as disparate as those of white settler colonies, such as Australia and Canada; of the Latin American continent, whose independence battles were fought in the 19th century; and countries such as India, Nigeria, or Algeria that emerged from very different colonial encounters in the post-World War II era. He suggests, nevertheless, that "What the concept may help us to do is to describe or characterise the shift in global relations which marks the (necessarily uneven) transition from the age of Empires to the post-independence and post-decolonisation moment" (Hall 1996, 246). Rattansi (1997) proposes a distinction between "post-coloniality" to designate a set of historical epochs and "postcolonialism" or "post-colonialist studies" to refer to a particular form of intellectual inquiry that has as its central defining theme the mutually constitutive role played by colonizer and colonized in shaping the identities of both the dominant power and those at the receiving end of imperial and colonial projects. Within the field of postcolonial studies itself, Moore-Gilbert (1997) points to the divide between "post-colonial criticism," which has much earlier antecedents in the writings of those involved in anti-colonial struggles, and "post-colonial theory," which distinguishes itself from the former by the incoporation of methodological paradigms derived from contemporary European cultural theories into discussions of colonial systems of representation and cultural production. Whatever the various interpretations of the term or the various temporalities associated with it might be, Hall claims that the post-colonial "marks a critical interruption into that grand whole historiographical narrative which, in liberal historiography and Weberian historical sociology, as much as in the dominant traditions of Western Marxism, gave this global dimension a subordinate presence in

Abstract: Introduction: Postcoloniality, Exoticism, and the Politics of Value [V]alue is always `transitive'--that is to say, value for somebody in a particular situation--and ... always culturally and historically specific. (Terry Eagleton, "The Question of Value")(1) Sociologists of literature, among other materialist-oriented critics, have stressed the artificiality of the distinction between the "inside" and "outside" of literary texts.(2) Literature emerges, not as a locus of immanent value but as a site of contestation between different discursive regimes. The word "regime," as John Frow has suggested, connotes a politics of value whereby the literary text, far from functioning as an independent aesthetic object, circulates within a complex network of social relations and significations (p. 145).(3) Literary texts, like other cultural forms, have no intrinsic meaning or value: meaning and value are contingent, rather, on changing sets of historical circumstance (p. 145). The value of a literary text is a site of institutional struggle-a struggle, over such issues as authorship, authenticity, and legitimacy, which involves several different but interconnected levels of mediation. This emphasis on struggle seems especially pertinent to so-called postcolonial" literatures, which often tend to display and/or interrogate the conflicted material circumstances governing their own production. Postcoloniality, as Gayatri Spivak sees it, describes a state of constant vigilance to the neo-colonial "regimes of value" (Appadurai) through which literary texts (among other cultural forms) are produced, distributed, and consumed. One such regime of value pertains to the Western (Euro-American) education system, which is increasingly invested in the promotion and certification of "marginal" products (Spivak). Another is the metropolitan publishing industry, which has placed its stake in the postcolonial as a convenient device for the merchandising of exotic--culturally "othered"--goods. Both of these agencies arguably participate in what we might call an alterity industry": one which involves the trafficking not only of culturally othered" artifacts but of the institutional values that are brought to bear in their support.(4) As I have argued elsewhere, postcoloniality implies a condition of contradiction between anti-colonial ideologies and neo-colonial market schemes.(5) This is not to accuse postcolonial writers and scholars reductively of complicity, or to discredit the interrogatory and/or oppositional work that many of them do. It is rather to see that work as being bound up in a late-capitalist mode of production, where such value-laden terms as "marginality," "authenticity," and "resistance" circulate as commodities available for commercial exploitation, and as signs within a larger serniotic system--the "postcolonial exotic" (Huggan).(6) One of the most obvious ways in which this serniotic system functions is through the legitimizing machinery of the literary award or prize. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued,(7) the prize exists within a wider framework of symbolic sanction or "consecration." Literary prizes, in other words, do more than reward the significant achievement of a writer; they stake a claim in the right to judge--to legitimize--that writer's work: [T]he fundamental stake in literary struggles is the monopoly of literary legitimacy ... the monopoly of the power to say with authority who are authorized to call themselves writers; or, to put it another way, . . . the monopoly of the power to consecrate producers or products (we are dealing with a world of belief and the consecrated writer is the one who has the power to consecrate and to win assent when he or she consecrates an author or work-with a preface, a favorable review, a prize, etc.). (P. 42) Bourdieu's emphasis is on the various ways in which writers accumulate cultural capital: the means by which they acquire and, in turn, confer recognition and prestige. …

Abstract: "Objective" research is ill-equipped to deal with emotion-laden topics such as terminal illness, dying, and death. I am confronted daily with these issues during my current fieldwork in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU). Physicians are biased toward methods claiming to be "scientific," and many medical sociologists conspire to satisfy this predilection. When unable to conduct hypothesis-driven research, they strive to be value-neutral and "objective" in the field, thus avoiding the Hawthorne effect. But why bother, when the Heisenberg Effect still holds? A phallic metaphor valorizes "hard" science as masculine, while denigrating "soft" science as feminine. This paper examines and critiques the notion of value-neutral social research, where "objectivity" is equated with scientific legitimacy. A fieldworker can learn more from perturbing the system than from pretending to be an invisible fly on the wall.

Abstract: In Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (1996). Monika Fludemik reconstitutes narativity on the basis of experientiality, i.e., humanity's embodiedness in the world, and claims that incomprehensible texts can be made more readable if one attempts to narrativize them. Since Samuel Beckett's short prose work "Lessness" is one of the most enigmatic texts of the twentieth century, it serves as an ideal test case for this new narratological paradigm. "Lessness" does indeed lose its initial strangeness if one reads this piece as narrative. Moreover, although a "natural" narratological analysis paves the way for a new interpretation of "Lessness," the new paradigm provides only a partially satisfying analysis of it. To make the text fit into the new consciousness-oriented paradigm, Fludernik's quasiuniversal naturalizing mode has to ignore certain aspects such as the mechanical structure of "Lessness." Beckett's later prose work challenges narrativization and the "natural" narratological project. A reading of "Lessness" should be liberated from the confines of experientiality and instead concentrate on the role of chance and chaos. Beckett's text must be located in a counterworld, a limbo between signifier and signified. One should allow this limbo world to seep into the "real world" and not attempt to explain this different counterworld by means of "real-world" knowledge. 1. Introduction According to J. E. Dearlove, the fragmentary short prose works that Samuel Beckett produced in the period following the publication of Comment C'est(1961), i.e., "All Strange Away" (1963-64), "Imagination Dead Imagine" (1965), "Enough" (1965), "Ping" (1966), "Lessness" (1969), and "The Lost Ones" (1966, 1970), might strike readers as "utterly alien and incomprehensible," and by thrusting the burden of creating order and meaning on readers, "demand a new critical response" ("Last Images" 104, 116). Similarly, Mary Bryden points out that some readers have reacted adversely to Beckett's later prose, seeing it as "perversely uncommunicative" and "teasingly mysterious" (137). The short prose work "Lessness" is definitely one of the most enigmatic texts of the period after How It Is. Because of the initial shock that this strange and incomprehensible prose work might produce in readers, it may be used as a case to test the new narratological approach Monika Fludernik puts forward in Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (1996). Fludernik attempts to counteract some of the shortcomings of classical narratology and other traditional approaches to narrative theory. Her aim is the radical "reconceptualization of narratology" and "the creation of a new narrative paradigm"(xi), a paradigm, however, that despite its interdisciplinary make-up, will still be identifiable as narratological. As Gibson notes, Fludernik sets out to redefine narrativity in terms not of plot but of cognitive or what she calls "natural" parameters. These parameters are based on our experience, on our sense of embodiedness in the world ("Review" 234). Whereas structuralist narratology employs formal categories defined in terms of binary oppositions, Fludernik wishes to institute organic frames of reading. She reconstitutes narrativity on the basis of experientiality, a feature derived from research on oral narrative established by Labov (Language). At the same time experientiality relates to Kate Hamburger's thesis that narrative is the only form of discourse that c an portray consciousness, particularly the consciousness of someone else (83). Since, for Fludernik, the prototypical case of narrative is given in its oral version (textual make-up is considered to be a variable), the "natural" narratological paradigm, as Ronen suggests, identifies narrativity with conversational parameters in a storytelling situation (647). Furthermore, Fludernik wishes to institute a reconceptualization of the term "natural" within a more specifically cognitive perspective. She argues that "natural" narratives, i. …

Abstract: Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997) seeks to re-imagine agency as a function of coalition processes that are communal and caring in impulse. In so doing, Paradise addresses issues of coalition in ways that complicate and finally gesture away from dominant conceptualizations of coalition in the United States in the wake of the Civil Rights and New Left Movements. Although both of these movements championed coalition politics, commonly understood as the combining of "human and material resources to effect a specific change" that cannot be brought about "independently" (Brown 3), as a means of achieving equality, they operated on models of coalition that in the end retained hierarchy, retained the notion of a centered, stable subject that was male and gained dominance through processes of othering. (1) That the prevailing conception of coalition politics has been masculinized is evident not only in its various enactments within the abovementioned activist movements but also in the ways in which coalition itself has been theorized in the West. Since the early 1960s, the disciplines of history, economics, political science, and psychology in the West have tended to discuss and theorize coalition in terms that privilege mathematical and market models and that unquestioningly assume maximizing power and winning as the goals of coalition building. For example, William H. Piker's groundbreaking The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962), which is cited in almost all texts that succeed it, privileges "abstract reasoning" as the mechanism by which "political science" can "rise above the level of wisdom literature" and "join economics and psychology in the creation of genuine sciences of human behavior" (viii), and he constructs a model of coalition-building that assumes that "rational man wants... to win," "to maxim ize power" (21-22). Consequently, the dominant versions of coalition processes privilege an individualistic and agonistic model, complete with hierarchy and exploitation, and both devalue and efface other modes of coalition. R. Radhakrishnan is one of the few scholars who has argued that there exists a need "for the creation of non-aggressive, non-coercive, and generous space where different and multiple constituencies may meet collectively" (323). Although the work of W. Edward Vinacke, in the area of psychology, describes the differing behaviors of men ("exploitative") and women ("accommodative") when placed in controlled experimental situations that necessitate coalition-building, he does not analyze the consequences of his findings for existing models of coalition that have tended to privilege those behaviors associated with men ("Accommodative" 511). (2) While Jerome Chertkoff notes Vinacke's findings, he argues that "these sex differences are not terribly damaging to the existing theories" (314), thus d emonstrating the widespread tendency to foreclose on any exploration of coalition that revises established, dominant, male-centered notions of coalition. In contrast, Morrison's Paradise explores coalition processes that are more accommodative, caring, and loving, rather than exploitative, and that are aimed principally at survival and at moving toward a new, alternative form of non-hierarchical justice, rather than at maximizing power and winning. Such a reformulation of coalition necessarily entails a particular conception of justice, as articulated within recent discussions of justice that have emphasized how "justice is inseparable from social practices" and thus "cannot be examined a historically, for it changes in relation to changes in power" (Garth 1, 11); how "it is artificial and inappropriate to separate the concept of justice from that of power or ideology" (Fineman 81); and how "conceptions of justice are historical constructions" and thus "power is implicated in the construction of justice" (Eurick 37). All of these conceptualizations of justice share an understanding that justice is both fluid and socially constructed and that any claims to univ ersality must be understood as "perspectival universality," in the sense that "society provides the perspective from which justice is done" and from which "'principles of justice' are formulated" (Fisk 227-28). …

Abstract: History has been fodder for cinema from the silent era to the blockbuster present, a fact that has seldom pleased historians themselves. As pundits increasingly ponder ""how Hollywood fails history"", Robert Toplin counters with a provocative alternative approach to this enduring debate over the portrayal of history in film. Toplin focuses on movies released since 1985 - during which 12 historical films won the Oscar for Best Picture - and argues that critics often fail to recognize the unique ways in which fictional films communicate important ideas about the past. His work establishes commonsense ground rules for improving critical analysis in this area. Citing films like ""Gladiator"" and ""Braveheart"", ""Gandhi"" and ""Nixon"", he underscores the pressures placed on filmmakers to simplify and alter historical fact to conform to the demands of an extraordinarily expensive mass medium. Toplin demonstrates how a historical epic like ""Glory"" may contain ""creative adjustments"" that worry historians but shows how its distortions communicate broader and deeper truths about the Civil War experiences of African Americans - just as ""Saving Private Ryan"" presented little factual detail about World War II and yet effectively conveyed the experience of combat. He also shows how other films - such as ""Mississippi Burning"", ""Amistad"" and ""The Hurricane"" - contain so many elements of fictional excess and oversimplification that they deserve the criticism they receive. Toplin draws upon his own experiences in film production and takes direct aim at writing about film dominated by jargonistic theory and empty rhetoric. He urges film studies scholars to move beyond their preoccupation with formal aesthetics and recognize that, in historical films, content does matter.

Abstract: Nations are bound together by remembering and forgetting, and past is often purposefully altered by means of invention or amnesia. Circumstances, culture and society constrain the ways we employ our memory and recall history. Since the 1980s, anthropology and other social sciences have increasingly focused on the constructed nature of collective memory and its political implications. According to Lowenthal (1996), such shift in the social scientific focus was partly due to the fact that many nations became "possessed by the past." This was certainly true about Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The decade was marked by an outburst of nationalism, search for ethnic identity and what one might call "memory-work," an attempt to establish links between the past and the present to "legitimise" political changes. Today's Eastern Europe is more preoccupied with its future, as membership in the European Union is imminent for many countries. Nation (re)building almost complete and pragmatism triumphing over patriotism, it is a "safe" moment to study collective memory and its politics in a broader and less emotional framework. In this paper I will use an "anthropological lens" to look at collective memory and scrutinise certain aspects of the construction of Estonian nationhood in the nineteenth century from the perspective of anthropological understanding of collective identity formation and maintenance. I am particularly interested in the creation and functioning of what I call "reservoirs of memory"--institutions, cultural practices, or physical places, which carry in themselves meaningful history and thus serve as a trigger for memories and identities. I will focus on three of them--song festivals, oral history, and the attachment to land--to exemplify the ways that anthropological perspective can help us understand the politics of collective memory. On anthropological aspects of collective memory "History resembles a crowded cemetery, where room must constantly be made for new tombstones," says a French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1980:52). It is everywhere a battleground for rival attachments, a "field" where, by discovering, correcting, elaborating, inventing, and celebrating their histories, competing groups struggle to validate present goals by appealing to continuity with or inheritance from ancestral and other precursors (Gathercole and Lowenthal 1990: 302). The past is thus subject to multiple interpretations and recallings. It is constantly altered by means of invention and forgetting, which, from the perspective of "memory work" or the "censorship of memory" in the psychoanalytic terminology (Le Goff 1992:94), are two sides of the same coin. Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983), caused a major paradigm shift in the anthropological study of memory. If politics of collective memory did not constitute a particular focus of study earlier, Invention of Tradition set a power example, demonstrating the historically recent and inventive content of many national traditions, cultural elements and symbols, commonly regarded as old and autochthonous. Invention of the new automatically means forgetting about the old. Barnes (1947:52) has called such collective forgetting "structural amnesia," which is another inevitable aspect of "memory editing." (1) The collectiveness of memory, carried by what Irwin-Zarecka (1994:47) has called a "community of memory," makes the past especially powerful as the basis for collective identity. As Lowenthal (1985:xv) puts it, "each particular trace of the past ultimately perishes, but collectively they are immortal. Whether it is celebrated or rejected, attended to or ignored, the past is omnipresent." The unity of the "community of memory," based on a vague notion of the shared past, is, however, imagined, as there is no face-to-face interaction between past and present generations. In bigger societies, unity has to be imagined also with one's contemporaries. …

Abstract: Paul Dresch, Wendy James and David Parkin (eds.), Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000, xiv + 310 pages.Reviewer: Ian CoshYork UniversityAs the editors of this volume remind us, times are tough for British anthropology, for reasons that will resonate with Canadians: neo-conservative budget priorities are making it hard to carry on the tradition of extended, open-ended fieldwork. From a certain "managerial" standpoint, anthropology's brand of research compares poorly with the "rapid field assessment" practices of other disciplines and corporations. In this context, it seems a token bit of money was granted to the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University for a workshop on methods (held in 1997). To their credit, the Oxford faculty used the occasion to defend anthropological fieldwork as a "patient engagement" with the "wider world." Since then, they have discussed, revised, and collected their papers into this volume, the seventh in a series on "Methodology and History in Anthropology" edited by David Parkin, Director of the Institute. The series abstract promises to offer timely reflections on the state of the discipline: Just as anthropology has had a significant influence on many other disciplines in recent years, so too has [sic] its methods been challenged by new intellectual and technological developments. This series is designed to offer a forum for debate... The intention is for critical essays to complement the intensive ethnolgraphic [sic] studies on which anthropology fundamentally depends.The critical intent of the present volume is declared in the introduction by Paul Dresch and Wendy James. They argue that recent trends in anthropology have neglected "method" due to an excessive concern with the "personal experience" of the fieldworker. "Feminist arguments have been effective and powerful here," they observe (p. 3); but after this perfunctory bow (cf. Caplan, 1992:85) the volume speaks no more of feminism (until a parting nod on page 268), focusing instead on what the editors call a "complementary" mission: to "redress the balance" in favour of the realities of "an intransigent historical world." Searching for a method for apprehending that world, Dresch and James survey a time-honoured trail through the imperatives of listening for the "unsaid" and looking for patterns behind events, arriving finally at the sine qua non of long-term fieldwork. Many--perhaps most--anthropologists are charting new routes through this territory. The editors, however, seem determined to go it alone. For example, they discover, without the aid of a single citation of their many fellow travellers, the challenge of connecting local field experience to global processes. Undeterred, they offer this methodological conclusion: "One cannot see the whole, however. One can only be on guard against self-centredness, and a certain cross-cutting of experience with history deserves noting" (p. 18).One certainly cannot argue with that. More on history and self-centredness comes in a separate essay by Wendy James. Her reflection on a long fieldwork career in North East Africa is quite interesting in its own right. The narrative supports her strong conviction that fieldwork, far from being a singular encounter, is embedded in a dynamic historical process. Most readers will surely be convinced, if they were not already. Having established this point, James turns her critical attention to Clifford and Marcus' Writing Culture (1986), observing that the book promotes an unhistorical approach to ethnography and a "simplistic notion of 'culture' " (p. 88). The source of both errors, she says, is an overemphasis on personal experience. She concludes by contrasting the "whimsies" of "postmodernism" (and this passage is helpfully indexed: "postmodernism: whimsies of, 89") to the "humble," "hard work" invested in "those analytical accounts of human life and experience which might outlast in their significance the emotional ups and downs of the author in producing them" (pp. …

Abstract: Andrew Strathern, Pamela J. Stewart, Laurence M. Carucci, Lin Poyer, Richard Feinberg and Cluny Macpherson, Oceania: An Introduction to the Cultures and Identities of Pacific Islanders, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2002, 249 pages.The material is presented in three independent parts: "The South-West Pacific" by Strathern and Stewart (67 pp. of text), "The Eastern Pacific" by Feinberg and Macpherson (53 pp.), and "The West Central Pacific" by Carucci and Poyer (52 pp.).In their very brief Introduction to the volume, Strathern and Stewart reject the common anthropological areal terms-Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia-in favour of compass directions, except where they use the older terms in quotations marks, to signify their dissatisfaction with them. Feinberg and Macpherson are of a different opinion, as indicated by the quotation marks they place on the phrase the "Eastern Pacific" in the title of part 2. Strathern and Stewart say that the sections ("parts") into which the book is divided "... correspond to geographical, historical, and cultural differences within the region as a whole, but we do not stress these broad divisions as such." Yet, having named the parts of the book for those divisions does indeed give stress or emphasis to them.Stewart and Strathern provide the volume's aim: "... to provide an overview of ethnography, history, and contemporary changes in a broad range of societies across the Pacific region" (p. 3). They say that their intended audience is undergraduate college students; however, knowing that the average college/university student already finds Mela/Micro/Polynesia sufficiently hard to keep straight, I would rather that Strathern and Stewart had either used the traditional terms, or had taken the more sophisticated approach of avoiding this classificatory problem altogether. They state that "contemporary processes," "common ethnographic themes" and "dynamic differences" in Oceania as a whole are their primary interest (p. 4). Actually organizing the book around these concepts, rather than according to geographic areas (whatever one might call them), would have provided a unique treatment of Oceanic ethnography.Additionally, in their Introduction, Stewart and Strathern note that they "...have written this book in the conviction that this Pacific world...is a world worth knowing, as much today as it was perceived to be by its earlier explorers, whether captains of ships or writers of books" (p. 3). While I agree with this, I also wonder why they feel they need to make this statement. The underlying issue is not how "worth knowing" Pacific cultures are, but the noxious habit of Westerners' judging other cultures as more or less interesting and therefore worth knowing in direct correlation with how "exotic" they appear to be. I wonder which audience Stewart and Strathern are trying to convince of the value of knowing contemporary Pacific cultures: students, their own colleagues, or the general public?Part 1 of the book focusses on the South-West Pacific. The first section is overly detailed. For an undergraduate textbook, providing accurate content is essential, of course, but so is building a sense of place and context, visual clues and cues to aid students' memory and understanding, and that sense of "being there." What few pictures there are-nine-only appear at the end of the text of this section, preceding the References, very much like footnotes. None is in colour. Five are from Mt. Hagen, and not one is from outside Papua New Guinea.The pictures seem like archival footage, frequently focussing on ritual moments-the National Geographic type of native (Lutz and Collins, Ch.5), strangely dressed, frightening or scowling, and more often than not, nameless: "a female mourner," "a male dancer," "a newly married bride," "a younger man."Part 1 also contains 16 "Case Studies": two on Fiji; one each on New Caledonia andVanuatu; three on the Solomons; and nine focussed on Papua New Guinea. …

Abstract: It Ain't Necessarily So: How the Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality. David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and S. Robert Lichter. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. 248 pp. $24.95 hbk. The authors of this well-written, carefully researched book target misapprehensions about reality and intend to "demystify" the news process. They provide case studies of a wide range of dubious reporting on various scientific topics, including breast cancer, AIDS, radiation risk, and global warming. It is an ambitious book in that the authors state that they hope to make readers "more discerning consumers of the news." The authors claim "news consumers" generally as their audience. The writing is clear, the case studies well selected and interesting-ones most of us can recall from recent years. They also have the stated goal of "providing a new and deeper understanding of the 'reality industry.'" And they do so, in the limited spectrum of scientific issues. The book should be of interest to social scientists, too, because the authors deal at length with the problems behind polls and the problems in reporting on polls. The book is divided into three sections: "The Ambiguity of News," "The Ambiguity of Measurement," and "The Ambiguity of Explanation." It is a useful division, which not only organizes the material for the informed reader, but also increases the accessibility and facilitates its potential for classroom use. The first part covers the process surrounding news decisions, what does and does not make it into print (the medium with which they are concerned is largely print). Part two is a primer on interpreting statistics, providing case studies of problems associated with certain phenomena, such as minorities' rejection rates for mortgages, or the difference between "reported" and "committed" crime. In part three, the authors delve into some difficult issues. They call into question the motives of researchers and activists, and do so in a way that would benefit good reporting. They conclude with a discussion of the problems that arise at the intersection of reporting, science, and policy making. Science, they note, proceeds incrementally. In contrast, policy moves by negotiation and debate, along the lines of litigation. Reporters, of course, have a greater appreciation and understanding of the policy process vs. the scientific process. And therein lies a source of problems in science reporting. The authors are to be commended for addressing the ideological issues associated with science reporting. They pointedly observe, correctly, I believe, that reporting on certain topics takes on a greater "symbolic expression of one's position in a larger moral and political landscape." Some scientific claims are burdened with attachment to political agendas. They cite AIDS research and global warming: "Accepting or rejecting a particular scientific conclusion can be read as a signal concerning what kind of person you are." Silicone implants, they note, have meanings for debate that probably will be absent in a debate about silicone chips. …

Abstract: Rae Bridgman, Sally Cole and Heather Howard-Bobiwash (eds.), Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1999, 314 pages.Reviewer: Jasmin HabibFeminist Fields: Ethnographic Insights edited by Canadian anthropologists Rae Bridgman, Sally Cole and Heather Howard-Bobiwash and published by the independent Broadview Press presents essays about feminism, women in anthropology and feminist practices in the field. In the introduction, the editors write that they set out to attract young and old practitioners and to make the text "friendly to lay and undergraduate readers" by "encourag[ing] authors to enliven their texts with stories and first person narratives to bring tangled theoretical concepts to life" (p. 2).Though in many ways this is an uneven text, in most cases the writers accomplished their editors goals. The best essays offer exceptional insights and are accessible, reflexive, and most importantly for someone reading this text for its methodological contributions, ("ethnographic insights" being the subtitle of the book), they challenge feminists to rethink the study of gender in anthropological terms. The book covers a range of topics in 17 essays, including the role of women and feminism in academia; the problematic representation of women's practices; the changing social and political economies and their effects on women; the frontiers of women's organizing and political practices; and reflexive feminism in the "field." This review will focus on the best of these essays, reflecting my interest in feminist research methodologies.Most impressive was "Home has Always been Hard for Me" by Susan Frolick who chooses to situate her own privileged mobility in order to gain insight into what can be the disorienting and demanding experience of homelessness and single-motherhood. Of one woman's struggles, she writes how: She politicized home as an impossible space wherein she has had an ongoing struggle to find and make a place for herself and her son against barriers of poverty, abuse, homophobic and sexist discrimination, and her own inability to overcome the politics and weightiness of "home" work. (p. 91)Through her vulnerability as a lesbian, as well as through her poverty, Raine mediates her understanding of home--as a secure place of belonging--as a reality she has never been able to "afford," symbolically or materially, nor likely will in the future (p 92).In her chapter on homelessnes, Rae Bridgman adds to her analysis a reflection on the vulnerabilities of the subjects of any ethnographic project, something feminist sociologists who were at the forefront of the development of feminist research methodologies wrote about in the early 1980s but it seems anthropologists still need to be reminded of.On the politics and problematics of representing--in anthropological and feminist terms--women's practices, Parin A. Dossa's chapter entitled "Narrating Embodied Lives: Muslim Women on the Coast of Kenya" begins with this provocative statement: My purpose is to suggest a frame that goes beyond the listening-telling paradigm of life narratives (Ong, 1995), that seek to address the "crisis of representation" in feminist/subalternist anthropology, but ultimately, remain confined to capturing "words" (p. 157)....[D]espite my painstaking efforts to listen to women's stories, I was missing out on a critical element: images of women's bodies at work, engaged in aesthetic and creative endeavours, on the move and in positions of repose. The telling and listening paradigm became inadequate.... (p. 158)Dossa "returns" to do field work in the village of Lamu in her "home" region, though as she writes, not as a "native": "[a] 'native' stance would be pretentious as my advanced education in the West and my profession as an academic have created cultural and class differences that need to be taken into account" (p. 160). In the paper, she "show[s] that there is no simple equation between veiling/seclusion and women's oppression and lack of opportunities. …

Abstract: Genocidal violence leaves but a broken historical trace. Not surprisingly, therefore, the surviving records of the subcontinent's (1) Partition are marked by their fragmentariness. They move, in fits and starts, through jerks and breaks and silences--incoherent, stuttering, even incomprehensible--between the poles of testimony and rumor. Testimony, Langer notes, is "a form of remembering." Rumor, by contrast, is a form of doing--of making happen--by telling. (2) The record of Partition clearly bears the mark of both. The importance of first-person testimony (for the judge, as for the historian) requires no underlining. "I was there"; "I saw"; "I can name"; "I recognize"; and (more than occasionally for the journalist, as well as for the historian, though less commonly, we are told, for the judge) "I learned from the most reliable witnesses." Testimony's method is that of particularizing and individualizing, specifying sites and bodies that carry the marks of particular events, making "real" in everyday, physical, nameable terms. Its difficulty in the "limit case" is that it needs to articulate an unparalleled, "unthinkable" history struggling to find voice. How does the witness share "the particularity, the unshareability, and the incommunicability of pain in torture"? (3) How can we speak for the dead, who are no longer present? How can we t estify on behalf of the dead, if we are not dead? How can anyone who is not a Muselmann know what it is to be a Muselmann, as historians of the Holocaust have repeatedly said? (4) The importance of rumor in the record of violence is also established, though perhaps more in the matter of its making than in that of its evaluation or reconstruction. Rumor moves in a direction almost contrary to that of testimony: generalizing, exalting to extraordinary (even miraculous) status, and employing the sweeping terms of deluge and just desserts (actual or impending). In rumor, language is transformed from a mode of (possible) communication to a particular kind of imperative condition, communicable, infectious, possible (and almost necessary) to pass on. The impact of this anonymous, mercurial, fleeting figure is well attested in accounts of the history of violent uprisings--from Lefebvre's and Rude's writings on the French Revolution to Guha's analysis of peasant insurrections in colonial India and Veena Das's account of the 1984 massacre of the Sikhs. (5) That rumor is no stranger also to the written records and oral accounts of 1947 is hardly surprising. How seriously has all this affected our assessment of that moment? It is the purpose of this article to examine the extent to which historical discourse on Partition, from 1947 to today, takes the form of testimony or that of rumor--or hovers between the two. For this purpose, I focus on the twin questions of violence against women and the number of casualties, both of which loom large in the annals of the event. "The figure of the abducted woman became symbolic of crossing borders, of violating social, cultural and political boundaries," Menon and Bhasin write. By the time that the rape, looting, and migrations were finished, "about eight to ten million people had crossed over from Punjab and Bengal ... and about 500,000-1,000,000 had perished." (6) "Estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted," writes Butalia. She goes on to note the statistical evidence of "widespread sexual savagery": "about 75,000 women are thought to have been ab ducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion)." (7) Observers described the violence that erupted so fiercely between Hindus/Sikhs and Muslims in 1946 and 1947 as "a war on each other's women" and as a war waged "especially" on women and children. …

Abstract: Debate concerning virtual reality is often drawn in terms of sharply defined dichotomies--for example, between "real" (or "actual") and "virtual," "authentic" and "inauthentic," and "natural" and "artificial." In this paper we offer an alternative approach by suggesting a conception of a virtual world that highlights a continuity and commonality with our sense of everyday reality. We accomplish this in part by an examination of the English picturesque garden as if it were a virtual world partially constructed out of ideas and objects collected during travels to foreign lands on the Grand Tour. Such foreign travel transformed not only the English person's sense of self, but also altered the English landscape. We conclude that in one sense the "real" England is also a "virtual" reality.

Abstract: In the final chapter of Beloved, the narrator repeats, "It was not a story to pass on." Nonetheless, like the ghost in the novel that haunts 124 Bluestone Road, that draws the life out of Sethe, the story is beloved. The "dearly beloved," those buried, burned, thrown overboard, who cannot or should not be forgotten, create this story that must be known and told. In the telling, Morrison not only "rememories" the experience of slavery, but she also ties her work to the production of critical theory as she deconstructs the Enlightenment notion of subjectivity to make room for what bell hooks calls a "radical black subjectivity." Morrison's narrative work poses a strong theoretical challenge to the Modernist tradition of knowledge, reason, language, history, and identity. Then, in the open space remaining, she reconstructs knowledges, histories, and identities, all of which allow for the inclusion of the African American subject and the African American experience. However, this is no easy task. The Western intellectual tradition works against the establishment of alternatively legitimate modes of knowledge. It is not only a white intellectual tradition that has required the black experience of slavery to be viewed through a white lens. African American intellectuals have similarly tried to gain social advancement through mastery of white language and knowledge. Influenced by his Enlightenment world view, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in the "Talented Tenth" that "knowledge of life and its wider meaning has been the point of the Negro's deepest ignorance" (Writings 852), thus "underestimating the capacity of everyday people to 'know' about life," argues Comel West (58), (1) and embracing instead the Modernist tradition of power/knowledge. Enlightenment thought constructed a white, heterosexual, patriarchal hegemony that marginalized those outside the "fixed" center. Similarly, Du Bois's social philosophy for the betterment of his race depended implicitly upon the Modernist vie w of subjectivity and language, which necessitated the presence of a rational, coherent subject. It was upon the shoulders of this "enlightened," "exceptional" man that Du Bois placed the burden to save the race, for he was far more likely to act on behalf of the common good than were the uneducated masses. However, within the bounds of Enlightenment thought, neither Du Bois nor any other member of a socially marginalized group (2) could cast himself as a thinking subject because he was necessarily constituted as Other. Enlightenment tradition alienated African Americans from knowledge and all its rewards--history, identity, language. This exclusion from American culture has formed an "unrelenting attack on black humanity," producing the "fundamental condition of black culture--that of black invisibility and namelessness" (West 80). For many marginalized groups in America, the "historical status of subjectivity is precisely that of never having existed," because members have lacked the power imperative to conceive of oneself as a centered, whole entity (Harper 11). Because Du Bois's agenda for social improvement proved incompatible with the philosophy under which it was conceived, African American intellectuals have been compelled to find theoretical alternatives which would allow for the creation of presence and voice through which to articulate their experience and history. The subversion of the monarchical rule of Enlightenment thought which discredits alternatives, multiplicitous representations, or varying knowledges appears essential for African American intellectuals who would empower themselves to create a "radical black subjectivity" and identity outside of hegemonic prescriptions. Henry Louis Gates defines this opposition to the hegemony as "the most fundamental right that any tradition possesses.. . to define itself... [and] its very own presuppositions." If African Americanists fail to accomplish this task, "we shall remain indentured servants to white masters. …

Abstract: HOPKINS' POETRY EMPLOYS TO A MARKED DEGREE TROPES OF ENERGY IN THE form of heat, fire, and light. His discourse reveals an attraction to the emerging science of thermodynamics, especially an anxiety with the second law. His energy tropes admit a dialogue between the domains of science and literature, a conversation transcending the very tropes themselves; "shifting a metaphor from its initial field," as Gillian Beer observes, may bring to light homologies (or dissonances) that will propel new work." (1) Whereas tropes establish connections between things, discourse models" the metalogical operations by which consciousness, in general cultural praxis," comes to terms with its milieu. (2) At ontological levels, the universe "allows for cross-umwelt comparisons." Tropes raise "the possibility of isomorphism across evolutionary levels so distant that it would appear that chunking would have erased any similarities based on contiguity." (3) Unveiling these tropes, according to Richard Boyd, is "an essential part o f the task of scientific inquiry" (p. 362); for the "primary encounter with any text, be it metaphysics, poetry or biology, is linguistic, for texts are made of language." (4) While there might well be areas across which science and literature struggle to communicate, an impasse Douglas Hofstadter has called chunking," there are clearly areas of seepage, especially where the laws of thermodynamics are concerned, laws involving global systems that extend "far beyond science proper." (5) Thus it makes sense to talk about the ramifications of entropy on biological and social systems, the way James Gleick does, recognizing chaos in "the behavior of the weather, the behavior of an airplane in flight, the behavior of cars clustering on an expressway, the behavior of oil flowing in underground pipes.... Chaos breaks across the lines that separate scientific disciplines," bringing together thinkers from cross-disciplinary studies asserting "strong claims about the universal behavior of complexity," among them "determinism and free will," "evolution," and "the nature of conscious intelligence." (6) I intend to explore the extent to which Hopkins' poetry deviates from and distills concepts of energy, especially notions of waste and recovery, and to show the disparate ways he employs tropes structuring the protean character of nineteenth-century energetics. Implicit in my argument is the assumption that the so-called divide between science and literature, C. P. Snow's bifurcated cultures, cannot readily be applied to Hopkins. His is an apologetic characterized by border crossings, excursions into the fluid territory of cross-disciplinary umwelts, which makes Hopkins an especially helpful segue into postmodernisr considerations. (7) Hopkins' conversion to Roman Catholicism (1866) and Jesuit affiliation (1868) granted him membership in a religious community open to scientific inquiry on the grounds that science reveals the mystery of the universe and is ultimately compatible with Church dogma. (8) Issues raised by the biological and geological sciences unsettled Victorians as well as Roman Catholic Victorians, like St. George Mivart, who imagined that there were in fact solutions within emerging scientific theories not incompatible to faith. A close friend and admirer of Darwin, the Catholic biologist Mivart reassured believers that evolution "need alarm no one, for it is, without any doubt, perfectly consistent with strictest and most orthodox Christian theology." (9) Less distressing, however, was the new energetics, with its first law ensuring divine superintendence of the universe and its second corroborating apocalyptic claims. Hopkins welcomed the freedom to explore new scientific frontiers (optics, for one), with all sorts of ambi tious plans to advance science, many of them, like so much of Hopkins' career, aborted or never undertaken. Speaking of Hopkins' interest in "the modern depiction of nature as an inhuman and aimless flux," Daniel Brown believes that the poem "I must hunt down the prize" "states a bold resolve to reclaim such territory for a more coherent view of nature than that which it ostensibly presents. …

Abstract: LORI ANNE FERRELL AND PETER MCCULLOUGH, EDS. The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600-1750. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2000. Pp. x + 270, introduction, essays, indices. $74.95. Bemoaning how the English sermon has suffered "indulgent, even condescending neglect", (p. 3), editors Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough call for a "franker assessment of the sermon...as a literary artifact" (p. 3). To this end, their collection of essays "offers...new ways to approach the sermon as a more viable-indeed, vibrant-part of both literary and historical study" (p. 2). In The English Sermon Revised, they offer an engaging series often essays which leaves little doubt that the sermon constitutes an important element in both English literary and English historical development. Although the three essays constituting the first section each deal with "The Rhetoric of Preaching," they are quite different in both subject and approach. Andrew Fitzmaurice, in "Every Man, that Prints, Adventures," argues how the Virginia Company sermons were a major instrument of propaganda. These sermons draw on classical political theory in stressing the godly mission of responsible cilizenship as the reason for establishing and maintaining the Virginia colonies. In "Elect Nations and Prophetic Preaching," Mary Morrissey considers how in Paul's Cross sermons the words "church" and "nation" are variously interpreted in relation to the commonplace comparison of Israel and England as God's favored nation. In particular, she stresses that Israel is not intended as a traditional "type," but as an example allowing for more variable interpretation and application. Bryan Crockett in his essay on Playfere's "Poetic of Preaching" provides an insightful and engaging reading of Playfere's sermons, his intention, in part, being to demonstrate how more than "breadth of learning" (p. 52) is necessary to ensure popularity. Despite Crockett's efforts, however, it is still difficult to view Playfere as anything other than an idiosyncratic exception, given to "verbal pyrotechnics" and "sacred trickery" (p. 59). and one who hardly qualifies as a major force in the development of the English sermon. Arnold Hunt's observation that "preaching, in early modern England, was a profoundly political activity" (p. 80) hardly needs repeating. What is interesting is how the connection between politics and religion is expressed. The four essays in the second grouping, "Sermons on Emergent Political Occasions," do just this, although one might have wished for only one essay on Donne, who has already taken up so much of the critical literature devoted to the sermon. Hunt's essay, "Tuning the Pulpits: The Religious Context of the Essex Revolt," uses the sermon literature surrounding the Essex revolt to indicate, how, on the one hand, Essex used the sermon to gain political support, and how, on the other, the authorities went about "policing" preaching in Elizabethan England. The two essays on Donne focus on different dimensions of his religious beliefs as revealed in his sermons, with Debora Shuger discussing Donne's "Absolutist Theology" and Jeanne Shami considering Donne 's antiCatholicism. Shuger contends that Donne represents one extreme in the comparison of God as king, stressing the immediate power of God as both "terrifying and destructive" (p. …

Abstract: This article explores the differences between the anthropological and the sociological approaches to religion as they have developed in the last decades of the twentieth century. Both disciplines are divided between generalizing and particularizing schools—"ethnology" vs "ethnography" to use the anthropologists' preferred terms. Where once the disciplinary affiliation of particularizers/ethnographers determined the content of their studies—anthropologists studying "culture" and sociologists studying "structure"—this division no longer holds. It has been replaced by a division that is simultaneously ethical and epistemological: anthropological ethnography has become post-colonial, while sociological ethnography remains in a largely colonial mode. The article distinguishes these modes and traces their implicit epistemologies to different sets of regulative ideals. Recent anthropology's twin regulative ideals, "truth" and "equality", have led it away from the myth of the anonymous observer to a focus on intercultural dialogue.

Abstract: I Introduction THE TERM "POLITICAL ECONOMY" seems to have entered modern discourse for the first time in 1611 in a treatise on government by L. de Mayerne-Turquet (Groenewegen 1987, pp. 904-906). Four years later a fellow "Consultant Administrator," Antoyne de Montchretien, Sieur de Watteville (c.1575-1621), published his Traicte de I'oeconomie politique ([1615] 1889), which though "a mediocre performance and completely lacking in originality" (Schumpeter 1954, p. 168), marks the beginning of an intellectual enterprise that has continued--with some large ups and downs--to this day. The object of that enterprise is to generalize Aristotle's [omicron][iota][kappa][omicron][nu][omicron][mu][iota][kappa][eta] ("economics") to the level of the [pi][omicron][lambda][iota][tau][epsilon][iota][alpha] ("commonwealth" or "state"). For in Aristotle's Politics (1967, pp. 31-32) "economics" is to be construed as "the art of household management" where "household" means a more or less self-sufficient, manorial estate. Hence at the outset "political economy" was an attempt to extend the art of estate management to the needs and resources of a modern nation state, of which France was in the 1600s the foremost example. It was in this way that Sir James Steuart employed the term in his Inquiry into the Principles of Political (Economy ([1767] 1966). Although Adam Smith rejected the enterprise as futile and harmful, he accepted the usage, but introduced an important analytical distinction between two senses of "political economy." In the normative sense understood by Smith's predecessors and contemporaries (i.e., prescriptions for running France like a manorial fief) the term signifies some "system" of public policy designed to "increase the riches and power" of a country ([1776] 1976, paras. I.xi.n.1; II.5.31; IV.1.3). But in the positive sense that is now orthodox though often contested, "what is properly called Political OEconomy" is "a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator": namely "an inquiry," which is in principle disinterested and open-ended, into "the nature and causes of the wealth of nations" (IV.intro; IV.ix.38; emphasis added). In this article I shall be concerned with the positive sense of "political economy": that is, as a body of theory that purports to explain economic phenomena. For whatever else has changed, one element of continuity that runs from the political economy of Montchretien and before to that of Joseph Stiglitz and beyond is its inescapable dependence upon theory of some kind. Another element of continuity is the two-way street that runs between economic theory and political thought and action. In one direction, the "private interests and prejudices of particular orders of men"--not to mention the social and economic circumstances of their time and place--have given occasion to very different theories of political oeconomy," In the other, "[t]hese theories have had a considerable influence, not only upon the opinions of men of learning, but upon the public conduct of princes and sovereign states" (Smith [1776] 1976, p. 11). A complete intellectual history of the relation between economic and political ideas would look carefully in both directions: to the "context" of the conversation, as well as to the "text" of its recorded exchanges (Skinner 1969). However, I have argued elsewhere that a merely "internalist" attention to "text" can be justified for some purposes (Waterman 1998a, pp. 303-304, 312-313). In this article, therefore, I shall look in one direction only. I shall adopt a rigorously internalist approach, averting my eyes from wars, slumps, classes and cultures, and keeping them fixed on the logic of the ongoing economic-theory conversation. My purpose in so doing is to propose the following strong thesis for debate: The " 'new'political economies" of the present day differ sharply in their ideological implications from those of 50 years ago. …

Abstract: An adventurous novel "intermingling [literary] traditions such as historical romance, realism, allegory, fantasy, science fiction, and mystery" (Horvitz 246), and also the first African American novel featuring "both an African setting and African characters" (Gruesser 77), Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood attempts to counter turn-of-the century racism by looking toward Africa and its past with pride. Directed at an African American reading audience--the novel was serialized in the Colored American Magazine from November 1902 to November 1903--and pointing to the splendors of ancient African civilizations, the novel is designed to "provide African-Americans with a usable, livable past" (Gruesser 75), a past meant to support the development of a healthy self-image, support the struggle for equal rights, and lead to recognition in an environment hostile to or oblivious of and uninterested in the accomplishments of Africans and their descendants. By delineating an impressive ancient Meroe, the historical center of an ancient Kushite (or Nubian) civilization, Of One Blood reverses mainstream racist visions of Africa as representing, to quote Hegel and also to cite nineteenth-century European historians' widespread assessment, "the unhistorical and underdeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature" (qtd. in Magubane 24). But in doing so, Of One Blood runs into a number of problems, the most ideologically dangerous of which is what could be named the "Darwinist trap": Making the "worth" of a people dependent on technological and cultural accomplishments means following the same quasi-Darwinian logic that served nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialists to "justify" their ventures. The "Darwinist trap," or the temptation to make material, technological accomplishments the standard by which any people should be measured, allows technology and pseudo-scientific racism to come together as a world view: In the middle of the nineteenth century, steamers started carrying European cannons deep into the interior of Asia and Africa. With that a new epoch in the history of imperialism was introduced. This became a new epoch in the history of racism. Too many Europeans interpreted military superiority as intellectual and even biological superiority. (Lindqvist 47) Wealth and technological progress served both as means and rationalization of the imperialism Europeans and their descendants aggressively pursued in Africa and Asia, as well as within their own territories. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin reasons that "without the accumulation of capital the arts [meaning chiefly the mechanical arts--i.e., technology] could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take the place of the lower races" (135). But as this quote exemplifies, technology, or "civilization," which in nineteenth-century usage virtually always means "Western civilization," did, in Darwin's view, not merely entitle imperialists to territories, but even justified, implicitly, the extermination of those unable militarily to resist it. As Darwin claims, "The grade of their civilisation seems to be a most important element in the success of competing nations .... It is a ... curious fact ... that savages did not formerly waste away before the classical nations, as they do now before modern civilised nations" (183). In "Exterminate All the Brutes", an impressive essay on the pervasiveness of such justifications for genocide, Sven Lindqvist traces such sentiments, or at least their expression in the natural sciences, back to Robert Knox, who, in his 1850 work The Races of Man, announced that he felt "disposed to think that there must be a physical and[,] consequently, a psychological inferiority in the darker races generally" (qtd. in Lindqvist 125). Knox did not remain a lone voice for long. …

Abstract: Comparative and developmental psychology are engaged in a search for the evolutionary and developmental origins of the perceptions of "intentions" and "desires," and of epistemic states such as "ignorance" and "false belief." Shanker & King (S&K) remind us that these are merely words to describe public events: All organisms that can discriminate states of "knowledge" in others have learned to do this through observation of publicly available information.

Abstract: The starting point for this dissertation can be characterised with the question: why don't dreams come true? In 1900, Ellen Key proclaimed the coming hundred years as the children's century. One of the great questions of the time concerned the relation between the individual and the community. Through the years, school curricula became influenced by visions of "reform-pedagogics" (Reformpedagogik). The main aim of this study was to investigate the encounter between the visions of "reform-pedagogics" and the Swedish state school system from a perspective of "reform-pedagogics". A second aim was to discuss the importance of social-philosophical views. The investigation was accomplished using the philosophical perspectives of Husserl's phenomenology, together with the Gadamer hermeneutic tradition. The discussion was made by reference to the social-philosophy of Habermas and his Theory of Communicative Action. In the dissertation, three educational concepts were focused on: the "school of the future" by Ellen Key, "activity-pedagogics" by Elsa Kohler and the "culture-humanistic school" (Waldorf methods) by Rudolf Steiner. In the encounter between visions of "reform-pedagogics" and the Swedish state school system, the realisation of ideas of "reform-pedagogics" seemed to be hindered. Lifeworld-conflicts were developed by the increasing systemintegration of the field of schools. The antagonistic tension between transforming educational goals into practice ("exchanging") and the "acquiring of culture" was found to be a dominating characteristic of the encounter. Power, money and control seemed to have a depressing influence on the field of schooling and seemed to lead towards unconscious sclerotic system-buildings. The rigidity of the system prevented "communicative actions" and led to a lifeworld colonisation. In the future teachers, parents and pupils in schools or "centres for culture " will need space to carry out creative, individual, social and epistemological action based on individual conceptions and reflection-in-action. It was suggested that in the future, democracy will require a new constitutional law to protect the freedom of education.

Abstract: I have been invited to speak to you about Wissenschaft as personal experience. (1) This is a subject I would scarcely have chosen myself, and I even hesitated to accept an invitation that involved speaking about my own personal experience. For the end result of intellectual endeavor is actually all that should be made public, not the inner process leading to it; what can be of more than private interest about the latter? I think that what is expected of me in surveying my past is to glean from my own experiences something like paradigmatic features that lie beyond the personal sphere and thus reveal something about contemporary thought in general. Approached for this purpose in the evening of a long life devoted to the study of philosophy, I shouldn't disappoint this expectation--taking into account the danger that what Nietzsche called "cursed ipsissimosity" might play its tricks upon one. I therefore accepted this disquieting task. My hesitation is heightened by the fact that Max Weber, who in 1919 gave a celebrated address entitled "Wissenschaft als Beruf" ("Scholarship as a Vocation"), is looking over my shoulder, so to speak. The echo of his title was probably intentional on the part of my hosts, but I hope it does not leave me open to comparison with Weber's incomparable example. In contrast to the more objective nature of the word "vocation" in Weber's address, the reference to "personal experience" in my title forces me to enter the subjective, autobiographical sphere with all its unique and accidental qualities. I shall attempt here to use personal memories as guideposts leading to reflections of a more general nature. Unlike the narrower Anglo-American sense of the word "science," the German "Wissenschaft" in my title also embraces the humanities and the social sciences; and it must primarily be these, including philosophy, that my assignment encompasses. The "wissenschaftlich" character of these disciplines is different from that of the exact sciences dealing with nature; nowhere else has so much thought been given to this difference as in Germany. In Heidelberg an audience scarcely needs to be reminded that at the turn of the century Heinrich Rickert made a distinction between a field of inquiry whose goal is "explanation" and one whose goal is "understanding." In addition, I must mention Wilhelm Dilthey, whose lifework focused on the concept of experience. And then there is the philosophical theory of hermeneutics, which was not developed until my time and whose Nestor, Hans-Georg Gadamer, is still among us. These are the names of philosophers, and they point to the quite different character of philosophy as a discipline. Going beyond the specialized individual sciences, philosophy reflects--as the preceding examples indicate--upon their differing approaches to knowledge and their conception of truth, and in the process philosophy becomes itself a highly developed specialty. This self-mirroring of knowledge on a new level of truth can in principle be repeated at will in the form of ever new reflections on reflections. As concerns "understanding," the cognitive approach of the humanities, it is clear that "personal experience," understood as empathy with the object--itself the concrete embodiment of experience--is an indissoluble part of the intellectual process from start to finish, pervading the entire interpretation. How else can one study history, for example--the history of art, literature, religion, politics, of all the past thoughts, feelings, and actions of humankind? We must use our imagination; what has been experienced must be re-experienced. For here one subject encounters another subject, which no matter how alien and far removed in historical time, still remains human and thus approachable by us, albeit open to endless interpretations. But why should this encounter take place, why should the past be re-experienced? Goethe answered this question with the following words: Those unable to give themselves an account of the past three thousand years Must remain in the dark, naive, And live from day to day. …

Abstract: The question of Balzac's scientific vision is not a new one. It is an issue which has been studied in its own right, and also in relation to more purely literary concerns. In a sense, it is not in fact possible to separate Balzac's "scientific vision" from his literary style, since the latter is in part determined by the former. For example, the question of whether Balzac should be considered a "Romantic" or a "Realist" author--one of the most fundamental stylistic questions faced by Balzac scholars--arises largely as a result of the explicitly scientific aspirations of La Comedie humaine. Balzac's formative years were the 1820s and 1830s, at the height of the "bataille romantique," and well before the "bataille realiste" of the 1850s. (1) But the peculiarity of his position is not just a question of timing; it resides more particularly in the fact that the ideas underlying his novelistic creation have much in common with a certain strand of "Romantic thought"--it is close to German Naturphilosophie--but his authorial voice is typically one of detached objectivity; which is to say that it is close to the style which would come to be called "Realist," and quite distinct from the voice of impassioned insight associated with the "Romantic" movement. He seems to combine a "Romantic" vision with a "Realist" style. The strangeness of this mixture is somewhat diminished by the tendency of its different elements to come to the fore in different parts of the cycle of novels. The first part of La Comedie humaine, the Etudes de moeurs, is meant to be an empirical survey of all of the different varieties of Social Being represented in nineteenth-century France, and it is here that Balzac's "Realist" style is most in evidence. In the second two parts, on the other hand--in the Etudes philosophiques and the Atudes analytiques--Balzac expressly presents his "Romantic" notions on the ultimate nature of mankind; and in these sections he does in fact tend to use the voice of impassioned insight rather than the voice of objective R ealism. This divide is not absolute, however, and aspects of Balzac's Romantic philosophy of the human being are very much present in the etudes de moeurs, even though they are expressed here only in implicit terms. Balzac conceived the outline of his novel-cycle at a time of fundamental epistemological re-organization. "Science was undergoing a divorce from "Philosophy" the better to establish itself as an independent type of knowledge. It would no longer be subservient to the former umbrella discipline, but would stand next to it as a different way of knowing about the world. The distinctive mark of the "scientific" approach to knowledge was its objective empirical method; and conversely, the distinguishing mark of the "philosophical" approach was its association with the subjective consciousness. Of course these two approaches did not absolutely have to be antagonistic, or even separate: it was perfectly possible to study a phenomenon initially in an empirical way, before passing on to a more intuitive synthesis of the objective facts, and thus arriving at a speculative explanation of the deep causes of the phenomenon. This is precisely what Balzac aimed to do with his chosen phenomenon: the Social Being. These are the methodological considerations that gave La Comedie humaine its form. What about its theory-content? As a "scientific" investigation into the organisation of the Social Being, it would have to start by taking a position on the fundamental nature of man himself; and this position would have to be derived from a secure position within the established sciences. The concept of "unity" emerging from the "transcendental" approach to the study of animal anatomy in the 1830s was well suited to the novelist's purposes. "Il n'y a qu'un Animal," Balzac famously proclaimed in the "avant-propos" of 1842: all actual animal species are simply variant forms of a single original type. …