The Century’s Firstborn: Intimate History in the Aftermath of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Revolutions in Central Mali

Just as scientific knowledge is constructed using distinct modes of inquiry (e.g. experimental or historical), arguments constructed during science instruction may vary depending on the mode of inquiry underlying the topic. The purpose of this study was to examine whether and how secondary science teachers construct scientific arguments during instruction differently for topics that rely on experimental or historical modes of inquiry. Four experienced high-school science teachers were observed daily during instructional units for both experimental and historical science topics. The main data sources include classroom observations and teacher interviews. The arguments were analyzed using Toulmin's argumentation pattern revealing specific patterns of arguments in teaching topics relying on these 2 modes of scientific inquiry. The teachers presented arguments to their students that were rather simple in structure but relatively authentic to the 2 different modes. The teachers used far more evidence in teaching topics based on historical inquiry than topics based on experimental inquiry. However, the differences were implicit in their teaching. Furthermore, their arguments did not portray the dynamic nature of science. Very few rebuttals or qualifiers were provided as the teachers were presenting their claims as if the data led straightforward to the claim. Implications for classroom practice and research are discussed.

Taking its departure in the correspondence of eighteenth-century entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood, focusing on his development and use of two field-based metaphors or heuristics, this article explores two modes of enquiry employed in business history and argues for the maintenance and strengthening of ties to humanistic modes of historical enquiry. In doing so, the essay identifies a loose genre of agenda-setting books and articles within business history, to which it seeks to add a modest proposal.

For the past 40 years, scholars of the US South and West Africa have been engaged in a robust debate about the agency of enslaved laborers in the origins and evolution of the commercial rice industry in the colonial South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. Though the debate has been contentious at times, scholars studying Atlantic rice farmers have come to agree on a few points: enslaved Africans’ provision grounds were probably important in Carolina colonists’ experimentation with rice as a staple crop; enslaved Africans continued to practice “heel–toe” sowing techniques until the nineteenth century; African water control and processing techniques served as prototypes for mechanized irrigation and processing machinery. This article suggests the time has come to explore additional questions, particularly in what different ways did subsistence and commercial production shape the lives of African peasants and enslaved Africans? An analysis of the evolution of mangrove rice production in West Africa's Upper Guinea Coast and the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry reveals overlap between these two artificial categories. However, the different impacts of intensive mangrove and tidal rice production on the health of African peasants in early modern Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved Africans in the antebellum South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry are stark indeed.

Drawing together 10 years of surveillance data on and material gathered through ethnographic engagements with a small group of 20 young people and families, the article interrogates tensions and complementarities in the ways in which divergent research modalities come to represent kinship, family life, and changing forms of child vulnerability over time. The article begins by drawing out some of the tensions between demographic and ethnographic modes of inquiry, exploring the divergent objects and values of each. The focus then shifts from these broader epistemological debates to explore the life of a selected “case” as it unfolds within both a demographic database and through ethnographic research in one locality in South Africa. To resolve the tensions between these perspectives, the article concludes that we must move beyond a focus on empirical divergences between forms of research representation. Rather, we must develop more rigorous methodologies for critical, comparative, “multi-sited” analyses of forms of experience and local-life worlds. Understanding the divergent insights that can be gained through different modes of inquiry, and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by everyday experiences in locality, is essential to coming to terms with contemporary forms of governance and everyday life.

Drunk? Adventures in sixteenth Century Brewing is a research-based film produced within the ERC-funded FoodCult project (2019–2025). Developed in collaboration with historians, archaeologists, craftspeople, scientists, and filmmakers, the film follows the reconstruction of a sixteenth-century beer through experimental archaeology. The film was conceived, from the outset of the project, as a mode of inquiry, with filmmaking shaping how the reconstruction was interpreted and communicated. This article examines the film as creative practice research, focusing on three dimensions: radical interdisciplinarity, where cinematic and editorial decisions brought different forms of expertise into dialogue; materiality, where framing and sound design highlighted tools, ingredients, and environments as co-actors in the reconstruction; and embodiment, where the camera conveyed tacit skills, sensory awareness, and affective responses. Audience reception, gathered through questionnaires, Q&A discussions, and teaching contexts (cited as pers. comm.), is considered alongside close analysis of the filmmaking to evaluate the project’s dialogical and pedagogical value. We show that filmmaking can operate as a research method in its own right, generating historical insights, facilitating interdisciplinary exchange, and extending the reach of historical inquiry to wider publics.

> You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath. > > — Haruki Murakami , 1Q84 What is the future of architectural history? The very question embodies an inherent contradiction, since historians are particularly skilled at studying the past; our aptitudes for predicting the future are far less honed. Nevertheless, important anniversaries invite introspection, reflection on our past, and speculation about our future. What pressures are coming to bear on our field that are most likely to cause significant change? Who will be our audiences in the decades to come? How will they find our work, and what will be the forms of our scholarship? In what follows, I examine three aspects of the architectural historian’s practice, casting stones into the pond of our field to see, as Murakami writes, what might come out of it after that. Until very recently, architectural historians generally conducted research in mostly the same manner as their colleagues across the humanities, which is to say, they did so largely working alone in libraries, museums, archives, and special collections. The single factor differentiating our work from that of scholars studying largely text-based or pictorially based subjects was our need for on-site investigation. Examining architectural, urban, and landscape spaces themselves has always been—and will no doubt continue to be—a crucial distinguishing aspect of our research culture, and there is little doubt that we will continue to perform solitary investigations with a range of primary and secondary sources. However much our methods of inquiry may remain constant, the archive, the library, and even the museum have changed. What does “the archive” now mean? In our current era of increasingly massive amounts of digitized …

For many intellectual historians, presentism is viewed as a cardinal sin—linked to unreflective anachronism and the inappropriate projection of present-day values onto a very different past context. However, by embracing the ways in which the present inevitably shapes our modes of inquiry, our historical interests, and even the moral underpinnings of our analysis, we can find in the present tools that can make our history better, and help make sense of historical debates and controversies. This essay gives an account of Japanese historiography organized around four versions of presentism. The first is political presentism, an analytic lens that emerged in the “objectivity debate” over what constituted politicized scholarship and reflected the political antagonisms of the Cold War in Asia. Consciously or unconsciously, political convictions shape our scholarship. The second version is the presentism of social context. Each decade that followed the Asia–Pacific War possessed its particular zeitgeist, and histories written during those moments were products of their time. The third form of presentism is the connection between past and present via analogy or likeness: using a past event or person to understand the present and vice versa. To analogize past and present means finding a correspondence that makes the past feel familiar and less “other.” The fourth version of presentism is the project of contemporary history: the past in the present, the past leading to the present, the present as the starting point for historical inquiry.

Tax as a social and institutional practice

Previous articleNext article FreeAntiquarianism as a Vital Historiography for the Twenty-First CenturyCrystal B. LakeCrystal B. LakeWright State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn his famous essay from 1950, Arnold Momigliano countered the stereotype of eighteenth-century antiquaries and their modern successors as the “muddle-headed” collectors of old things and odd facts (297). Antiquarianism was not, Momigliano argued, the pastime of eccentric fetishists who hoarded old stuff just because it was old; rather, antiquarianism established the foundation of so-called “modern” history by making the study of primary source material, including physical remains, the bedrocks on which historians’ claims about the past should be based. As Momigliano explained, “religious and political disputations” in the seventeenth century swirled around the work of traditional historians (295). Wary that polemical biases had corrupted the writings of traditional historians, antiquaries bypassed secondary accounts of the past and went straight to examining primary, often nonliterary, sources instead. In so doing, they established archival documents and archaeological artifacts as the most reliable evidence for historical study—and future historians found themselves tasked with discovering and describing such evidence before they could proceed to interpreting it.Since 1950, scholars have followed Momigliano’s lead and examined how antiquaries disciplined historical inquiry.1 Antiquarianism, however, has come under fire again in the twenty-first century in two documents, both of which were collaboratively authored polemics published online that criticized the fields of history and Victorian literary studies. The V21 Collective’s “Manifesto” (2015) and The Wild on Collective’s “Theses on Theory and History” (2018) advocate for reforming the ways that academics study the past by censuring—in one case explicitly and in the other case implicitly—the antiquarianism that now operates under the guise of modern historiography. These twenty-first century dismissals of antiquarianism share the assumptions of Momigliano’s midcentury readers: that antiquaries collect the detritus of the past for its own sake. They also, however, accept the argument that Momigliano made: that antiquarianism constitutes a rigorous method of study that prioritizes the discovery of history’s bare facts over theories.Yet the work of two influential antiquaries, John Aubrey (1626–97) and John Britton (1771–1857), suggests that neither antiquarianism’s detractors nor its devotees have quite told the whole story about what antiquarianism as a methodology can entail. Antiquaries were not “muddle-headed” fetishists for objects or for facts who abjured from varieties of speculation. For antiquaries like Aubrey and Britton, old objects had the power to reveal facts about the past. Although this power meant that those old objects constrained interpretive possibilities, it just as often meant that those old objects enticed antiquaries into speculating about matters that exceeded the physical as well as the temporal boundedness of the objects themselves. In this way, antiquarianism was not the deadening methodology that twenty-first century academics who are eager to escape the tyranny of positivism should dismiss. Rather, antiquarianism is a method they might consider returning to for the ways it once offered scholars opportunities to translate their careful, close scrutiny of lively historical artifacts into theories that transcended the boundaries between the past and the present as well as between the personal and the political.In the process of leveling critiques of the “positivism” that they take to characterize contemporary historical research, both the V21 and the Wild on Collectives isolate antiquarianism as a methodology their readers should disavow. On the one hand, both collectives use antiquarianism to denote a fetish for primary sources and the facts they preserve; on the other hand, they use antiquarianism to signify an interpretive mode that turns the facts one finds in primary sources into constrained interpretations of sociocultural phenomena that render them as the mere effects of the specific historical contexts—particular slices of time in particular places—in which they occurred.The V21 and the Wild on Collectives claim that giving up what old antiquarian sensibilities persist in historical scholarship will lead scholars to welcome the opportunities their subjective points of view present for developing theories about their old objects of study that are relevant for today’s readers and their political concerns. The V21 Manifesto explicitly uses the phrase “bland antiquarianism” to denigrate what they describe as the “positivist historicism” that typifies the methods of nineteenth-century literary studies: “a mode of inquiry that aims to do little more than exhaustively describe, preserve, and display the past” (1).2 The most noxious “symptoms” of positivist historicism include “a fetishization of the archival” and “an endless accumulation of mere information” (1). “At its worst,” the V21 Collective maintains, “positivist historicism devolves into … bland antiquarianism,” the “primary affective mode” of which “is the amused chuckle” (1).In contrast to the limpid scholarship produced by bland antiquarianism, the V21 Collective implores their readers to practice “post-historicist interpretation” (7). Post-historicist interpretation entails embracing “presentism” and emphasizing “form” over facts (7–8). Presentist, formalist critics acknowledge that their research is “motivated by features of [their] own moment” and examine how “forms persist across artificially designated historical periods” (8, emphasis added). Consequently, the V21 Collective suggests that rejecting bland antiquarianism will produce more politicized as well as more germane studies of nineteenth-century literature for twenty-first century readers.The Wild on Collective does not explicitly single out antiquarianism for a bemused chuckle, but similarly attempts to convince contemporary historians to abandon what antiquarian sensibilities remain in the discipline of history. Specifically, the Wild on Collective calls for historians to relinquish their presumption that “past events are objectively available for discovering, description, and interpretation” (I.4) through “immediately observable, preferably archival, evidence” (I.2). The Wild on Collective, therefore, conflates “positivism” with the historiography that became popularized during the Enlightenment—the period when historians incorporated antiquarianism into their studies of the past, as Momigliano and others have shown (I.1). The first thesis tendered by the Wild on Collective declares, for example, that “[a]cademic history has never managed to transcend its eighteenth century origins as an empiricist enterprise” (I.1). The Wild on Collective spares a generous thought for David Hume’s skepticism but moves quickly to denounce all those other eighteenth-century historians who privileged a “scientistic [sic] method” for “gathering facts” about the past in the archives they fetish (I.1).Like the V21 Collective, the Wild on Collective proposes that abandoning the search for facts in archival sources will free contemporary historians to practice “critical” or “theorized history:” a method for studying the past in which historians can translate their subjective experiences of the present into politically relevant studies of the past as “structure” (III.2 and “Coda”). “Structure,” in the Wild on Collective’s manifesto, appears to be similar to “form” in the V21 Collective’s manifesto. For both collectives, forms or structures exist in dynamic relationships with their perceivers in the present. The study of archival materials, therefore, fails both to divulge and to produce a comprehensive understanding of forms or structures that must, to a degree, always be theorized.The emphasis on “theory” marks the telos in both the V21 and Wild on Collective’s manifestos: the final transformation of their rejection of antiquarianism’s imperative that knowledge about the past should be factual and derived from primary sources into a refutation of scholarship that aims to document historical “context.” In this regard, the two collectives enter as the chorus affirming Bruno Latour’s declaration that “context stinks.” Yet without perhaps realizing it, both collectives also thereby reintroduce antiquarian sensibilities about what historical objects of study are, and what they do, back into their reformist methodologies.Latour first declared that “context stinks” in his 2005 Reassembling the Social. In an imagined dialogue between Latour and a student struggling to practice his actor-network-theory (ANT), Latour attributes the quip to the architect Rem Koolhaas. Koolhaas actually said “fuck context” in 1995 as a way of ventriloquizing what really big buildings might have to say for themselves.3 Latour uses the more delicate phrasing to admonish the student who is about to turn to something conceptually “bigger” than the individual case studies that she has gathered for her dissertation in order to conclude what her research has illustrated. The student’s other advisors want her descriptive “case studies to ‘lead to some useful generalization,’” and so the student seeks to find “a frame” or a “typology” they can use to “compare, explain, [and] generalize” (149). For Latour, then, context names that which researchers presume to be prior to, bigger than, outside of their individual case studies.Latour’s dismissal of context reflects the core philosophical tenet from which the method of his ANT arises. That is, Latour argues that researchers should treat all of their objects of study—even, literally, the objects that they study—as actors, or, “things that do things”: entities vested with varieties of autonomous agency to influence “states of affairs” (We Have Never Been Modern 104). ANT is therefore a method whereby the task of the researcher is simply to “follow the actors” and describe what it is that they do. Applied to studies of the past, in other words, context stinks when a scholar presumes that old ideas, events, or institutions determine the existence and significance of her objects of study.Latour, therefore, doesn’t think that historical contexts stink. If an object of study refers to or wanders through an old idea, event, or institution, then it has led an ANT researcher to follow it into those historical contexts. Consequently, had Latour’s dialogue in Reassembling the Social occurred between him and V21 and Wild on Collectives, Latour would likely have insisted that their objects of study did not need to be theorized; they theorize themselves. Likewise, Latour would likely have pointed out that the critic as well as the historian have always been “presentist” (“Manifesto” 8) or “psychically, epistemologically, ethically, and politically implicated in their objects of study” (“Theses” III.6). Such realizations are borne, in fact, out of practicing Latour’s actor-network-theory. If an actor doesn’t act, Latour might say, then an ANT researcher has nothing to describe or theorize. This means that the critics’ or historians’ objects of study act by existing as objects of study in the present—and as such, they remain capable of not only revealing facts and inviting researchers to exploring historical contexts but also of leading researchers to theorize about forms as well as structures.Noah Heringman and I have suggested elsewhere that Romantic antiquarianism was akin to Latour’s ANT.4 Beginning in the seventeenth century, antiquaries like John Aubrey granted antiquities the power “to speak” or “give evidence for themselves” (Monumenta 1.32). In so doing, antiquarianism developed in ways that anticipated Latour’s rendering of objects as “actors” or things that do things. The antiquaries’ task was to find, follow, and describe old objects, which they understood to be vested with the agency to preserve and make manifest facts about the past. Once antiquities were understood to be things that could do things, however, they proved capable of doing a lot of things—including affecting the antiquaries who encountered them personally and inciting those antiquaries to engage in varieties of speculation.Aubrey’s antiquarian research offers one representative example of how antiquarianism could yield political, personal, and theoretical interpretations about the past while still keeping such interpretations tethered to the antiquaries’ objects of study and the facts they also yielded. In 1845, John Britton published the first comprehensive biography of Aubrey. Britton learned about Aubrey’s antiquarianism four decades earlier while writing the first volume of what would become Britton and Edward Wedlake Brayley’s (1773–1854) The Beauties of England and Wales (1800–1820): a county-by-county survey of the notable sites, including especially the antiquities, to be seen in England and Wales. The first volume Britton tackled was the volume on Wiltshire county, famous for its henges and the place that Britton himself called home. Britton read Aubrey’s seventeenth-century manuscript notes on Wiltshire in 1800 and discovered a kindred spirit. The two men had grown up nearly a century and half apart in the same region, and “[w]hat Aubrey wrote of himself … applie[d] in many respects to myself,” Britton affirmed. (Autobiography 1.40).Britton’s biography of Aubrey honored the kinship he felt for the early antiquary by attempting to rehabilitate Aubrey’s posthumous reputation. Britton lamented that few of his “general” readers in 1845 were likely to recognize the name John Aubrey—unless, that is, they knew about Aubrey’s Miscellanies (1696). The only work that Aubrey managed to see through to publication in his lifetime, the Miscellanies had unfortunately focused on documenting evidence of supernatural phenomena: “a subject long since trodden down by the ‘march of intellect’” (Britton, Memoir 1). Organized under twenty-one headings such as “Omens,” “Apparitions,” “Blows Invisible,” and “Converse with Angels and Spirits,” Aubrey’s Miscellanies struck many readers as superstitious hogwash. As Anthony Wood (1632–95)—Aubrey’s sometime collaborator and accused plagiarizer—put it, the Miscellanies showed that Aubrey had not pursued serious inquiries into serious matters of historical fact; rather, he had “addicted himself to the whimseys and conceits of astrologers, soothsayers, and such like ignorant and superstitious writers” (quoted in Britton, Memoir 6).In his Memoir of John Aubrey, Britton maintained that the superstitious whimseys of Aubrey’s Miscellanies were simply a by-product of the historical moment in which Aubrey had lived. Everyone in the seventeenth century believed in “ghosts, in haunted houses, in witchcraft, in necromancy, in fairies, and their manufactory of grass rings, in the supernatural influence of jack-o-lanterns, or will-o’-the-wisps, and many other visionary vagaries,” Britton upheld, especially if they were from Wiltshire (Memoir 8). Even Britton had believed such things himself as a young boy and still did, sometimes.In Britton’s estimation, then, the Miscellanies was a “failing incidental,” but it was still important as a historical record of seventeenth-century beliefs that persisted into the nineteenth-century present. Since the publication of Britton’s Memoir, however, it has been commonplace for scholars to set Aubrey’s Miscellanies aside as an anomaly and proceed to rescue Aubrey’s contributions to historical studies by focusing on his unpublished manuscript materials, which include the report on England’s stone henges and extensive notes he prepared for writing county histories of Wiltshire and Surrey that Britton also prized.5Although the Miscellanies has not featured prominently in accounts of Aubrey’s or his contemporaries’ antiquarianism since Britton published his Memoir, it should have. The Miscellanies preserves aspects of antiquarianism that have been lost in the disciplinary and disciplining histories that cast early antiquaries in the role of archaeologists in spirit, if not yet in name. Specifically, the Miscellanies illustrates how an antiquary’s careful examination of old objects could produce more than just dry-as-dust facts; it could also yield personal, political, and theoretical engagements with the past that were relevant for the present. These features of antiquarianism not only compelled Britton to appreciate Aubrey and his life’s work; they also speak to the reformist demands of the V21 and Wild on Collectives.As a collection of first- and secondhand accounts of strange phenomena, Aubrey’s Miscellanies does not initially appear to be an antiquarian publication. Yet on closer inspection, Aubrey’s interest in objects and the histories they alone have the power to convey are hard to miss. The evidence that Aubrey presents throughout the Miscellanies—which suggests to him that there is an “Invisible World” that exists and “knows what we do, or incline to”—derives from observing and describing things, and such evidence assembles into a curious political history of seventeenth-century England (Miscellanies vi). The Miscellanies describes, over and over again, things that break at untimely but auspicious moments in ceremonies of state, items that fall off the walls during conspiratorial tête-à-têtes, prophecies about treachery written on old parchments that turned out to be true. Aubrey’s catalogue of strange things, therefore, also documents the English civil wars, the Interregnum, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. readers of the Miscellanies of the and that at all the and of antiquarianism and antiquities that Aubrey in his other writings to how his method for studying the past through its objects could produce the of subjective and that the more readers of the Aubrey of antiquities as objects from the past that had the of but he of his own to were often those objects that had not only the of time but also the of (Miscellanies through the of the seventeenth century, Aubrey knew that often old things in order to work of and describing the objects that had managed their escape from the past was often a Aubrey and one that with that his own research had often been (Miscellanies Aubrey his search for antiquities with “a of and he appears to have understood that antiquarianism was more as a methodology because it was capable of As Aubrey in his manuscript notes on stone an antiquary simply meant the objects that to or “give evidence for antiquities could only speak and so (Monumenta 1.32). Although the antiquities that had and an antiquary’s from they still always some to (Miscellanies is what the Miscellanies for many of Aubrey’s Although Aubrey suggests that the he had gathered in the Miscellanies the existence of an “Invisible which what we do, or incline he never more than that (Miscellanies vi). Aubrey that the in the Miscellanies was and that he as well as his readers remain in the as to what the phenomena the objects proved (Miscellanies vi). Aubrey’s to on of the he in the Miscellanies marks an moment of in the context of the over of and in the that in the seventeenth can never quite be what all those objects that and on their own were really to say about the political events that they had and to the objects in Aubrey’s Miscellanies and antiquarian imperative to to the agency of things in the to interpretation was in and of a political As Momigliano antiquaries to the of things that could speak or evidence for themselves once it became that the historians who for the past often the of Aubrey’s lifetime, historical as in about the as well as the of As the case is now with the that have been by Latour’s so it was in the first of antiquarianism’s in the seventeenth a to an in the of the The power of objects, antiquaries like Aubrey might one not the power of political who declared for themselves the to determine what the facts really a to the political imperative to or historical antiquarianism offers the V21 and the Wild on Collectives a methodology that they might than a methodology that has for politically scholarship as well as for scholarship that finds its objects of study not only capable of affecting their present but also capable of opportunities for their to engage with forms or structures and theories in the of or Aubrey’s Miscellanies is just this of and it as a record Aubrey prepared for future a collection of things that might to speak and evidence for themselves. They are still about the political that Aubrey and the of time he knew he would not They to about the of personal and that can as Aubrey the Miscellanies would always its readers with to Consequently, the antiquarianism that Aubrey’s Miscellanies can the V21 and Wild on Collectives a methodology they might than it can also them more than a few of The posthumous of Aubrey how the antiquaries’ that things from the past could and should be to speak for that they would speak without to be antiquarianism’s Aubrey was to to it was that the objects he encountered had to say with the understanding that they could only say so however, before historian to that they had and the of old things, as Momigliano has historians turned out to the same or the that antiquities for to the that they Aubrey’s readers of his Miscellanies on the personal as well as the that it they its descriptive mode and political Although Aubrey’s readers at the on the the that antiquaries for the two often to around the of political that antiquarianism was to not only Aubrey’s Miscellanies but also on other antiquaries’ claim that their of primary sources the of that had of their critics could be the eighteenth century, antiquaries to their critics’ that their own research could be politically by evidence as for and that they had from the objects they In other words, as critics into the that interpreting the past and its objects antiquaries down on their first that old objects did speak for themselves by that those objects always told the As Wiltshire wrote in all at the and at the of his of Wiltshire for example, he and his antiquaries from facts not that the study of primary evidence really did in the of facts turned however, to be a in the The of the of antiquarianism into the study of history was one in which historian could that they were ventriloquizing the facts that historical objects and because those same objects always for interpretations could always be as mere The of of Wiltshire for the to declaration by out that his of in was theoretical Britton the Beauties in he antiquarian histories for the first time and that the research antiquaries had produced in the century was and (Autobiography Britton would on to describe himself as a of an and he was the to describe Aubrey as an (Memoir Aubrey, to Britton, was the who his studies and to in its of (Memoir Aubrey’s antiquarianism as Britton to rehabilitate Aubrey’s reputation. also, however, to aspects of Aubrey’s antiquarianism that had been lost in the of hard facts in archival sources that had come to characterize the of historical study in the other words, Britton’s to describe Aubrey as an and himself as a not as his and Aubrey’s work in of nineteenth-century Britton also aspects of Aubrey’s antiquarianism, including the of its objects of study and the political, personal, and theoretical their could For example, in his Britton what it was like when he and first their in the antiquarian Once they their of county, in and up close the antiquities that they had read about and would on to describe in ways for the Britton was to of descriptive of objects of of of and of of as a of a a a to his of an and and on the produce of the like a was and of the and who not only their own and but their in and of a who the the the and to the and also the of of and he moves from observing antiquities to observing a a a and a Britton the work of earlier antiquaries who their research in the of the of and proved to and moves to antiquarianism’s for a of the the the the the V21 and Wild on Collectives, then, Britton to of there is in be which would never be or Britton believed (Autobiography The publication of Britton’s Memoir of John Aubrey was by the Wiltshire which Britton himself had to with a of young Britton from and of Antiquaries in in order to the study of antiquities in (Autobiography For Britton, the of the as well as the

Knutson’s essay examines contemporary accounts in Sanskrit verse of the conquered territories of King Laksmanasena of Bengal (c. late twelfth/early thirteenth century), situating their false claims in a larger history of petty kings’ competing false claims about themselves in the early medieval period. The essay thus uncovers a history of falsity and warring falsities and then correlates the tendencies of figuration that seemed to prove inseparable from the poetic conquest of political reality in Sanskrit. It traces tropes of sadism and sexual abuse and uncovers the threads, stretching back to Kalidasa (c. fourth/fifth century), of a longer history of correlation between such forms and political contents self-consciously presented in contradiction to a possible reality. Understanding this sadistic hypertrophy of expression, which culminated in the medieval period’s political poetry, in terms of the sadism inherent to the Freudian concept of the work of melancholia, the essay argues for a mode of literary and historical enquiry that grasps the most chimerical cultural forms, awash with falsity and fantasy—those that may attempt most forcefully to deny their historicity—as subtly situated in particular sociopolitical historical processes.

In this essay, I present Quine’s fragmented and often forgotten views on writing history. However, this needs to be done in conjunction with an examination of his notion of science as our “total world-picture.” Quine elegantly avoids the task of specifying a demarcation criterion of science. The result is to position science as a Wittgensteinian language game that gradually expanded from its purpose of predicting our experiences and became socio-historically institutionalized set of practices. Thus, this essay has two aims; (i) I analyze Quine’s idiosyncratic, post-positivist concept of science with a particular focus on his inclusion of sciences that are traditionally labeled as soft or social. Then, (ii) I eventually indicate how Quine deals with historical inquiry. When taken together, this essay can also be read as a case study analysis of Quine’s take on all non-experimental modes of scientific inquiry, and, more broadly, his special account of naturalism and pragmatism.

This volume explores the conceptual terrain defined by the Greek word eikos: the probable, likely, or reasonable. A term of art in Greek rhetoric, a defining feature of literary fiction, a seminal mode of historical, scientific, and philosophical inquiry, eikos was a way of thinking about the probable and improbable, the factual and counterfactual, the hypothetical and the real. These thirteen original and provocative essays examine the plausible arguments of courtroom speakers and the 'likely stories' of philosophers, verisimilitude in art and literature, the likelihood of resemblance in human reproduction, the limits of human knowledge and the possibilities of ethical and political agency. The first synthetic study of probabilistic thinking in ancient Greece, the volume illuminates a fascinating chapter in the history of Western thought.

This essay addresses the potential of oral history performance to explore human communication across cultures. The study describes a class project in collecting and performing oral history interviews. By engaging students as field researchers to gather oral texts, and through the use of performance as a mode of historical, cultural, and interpersonal inquiry, students meet their interview subjects in a dialogic encounter designed to enhance their understanding of another person's experience.

This chapter describes narrative inquiry methodology and modes of thinking and knowing. It delves into the author’s journey as a novice narrative inquirer and explores how her own transitional experience as an Arab immigrant high school student impacted her initial perceptions and expectations of participants’ views and experiences. While she greatly identified with the participants’ experiences in transition, she explains how her research opened her eyes to different life possibilities and circumstances. She describes how living the inquiry in the midst of her career, family life, and doctoral studies in tandem with her participantsʼ ongoing lives exposed her to new life-learning opportunities. The experience shifted her understanding of peoples’ lives and experiences and allowed her to better appreciate human differences and similarities alike.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. —Marshall McLuhan. What is visible and tangible in things represents our possible action upon them. —Henri Bergson. Introduction: Subjective Maps as ‘Contact Zones’ Maps feature heavily in a variety of media; they appear in textbooks, on television, in print, and on the screens of our handheld devices. The production of cartographic texts is a process that is imbued with power relations and bound up with the production and reproduction of social life (Pinder 405). Mapping involves choices as to what information is and is not included. In their organisation, categorisation, modeling, and representation maps show and they hide. Thus “the idea that a small number of maps or even a single (and singular) map might be sufficient can only apply in a spatialised area of study whose own self-affirmation depends on isolation from its context” (Lefebvre 85–86). These isolations determine the way we interpret the physical, biological, and social worlds. The map can be thought of as a schematic for political systems within a confined set of spatial relations, or as a container for political discourse. Mapping contributes equally to the construction of experiential realities as to the representation of physical space, which also contains the potential to incorporate representations of temporality and rhythm to spatial schemata. Thus maps construct realities as much as they represent them and coproduce space as much as the political identities of people who inhabit them. Maps are active texts and have the ability to promote social change (Pickles 146). It is no wonder, then, that artists, theorists and activists alike readily engage in the conflicted praxis of mapping. This critical engagement “becomes a method to track the past, embody memories, explain the unexplainable” and manifest the latent (Ibarra 66). In this paper I present a short case study of Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies a new media art project that aims to model a citizen driven effort to participate in a critical form of cartography, which challenges dominant representations of the city-space. I present a critical textual analysis of the maps produced in the workshops, the artist statements relating to these works used in the exhibition setting, and statements made by the participants on the project’s blog. This “praxis-logical” approach allows for a focus on the project as a space of aggregation and the communicative processes set in motion within them. In analysing such projects we could (and should) be asking questions about the functions served by the experimental concepts under study—who has put it forward? Who is utilising it and under what circumstances? Where and how has it come into being? How does discourse circulate within it? How do these spaces as sites of emergent forms of resistance within global capitalism challenge traditional social movements? How do they create self-reflexive systems?—as opposed to focusing on ontological and technical aspects of digital mapping (Renzi 73). In de-emphasising the technology of digital cartography and honing in on social relations embedded within the text(s), this study attempts to complement other studies on digital mapping (see Strom) by presenting a case from the field of politically oriented tactical media. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has been selected for analysis, in this exploration of media as “zone.” It goes some way to incorporating subjective narratives into spatial texts. This is a three-step process where participants tapped into spatial subjectivities by data collection or environmental sensing led by personal reflection or ethnographic enquiry, documenting and geo-tagging their findings in the map. Finally they engaged an imaginative or ludic process of synthesising their data in ways not inherent within the traditional conventions of cartography, such as the use of sound and distortion to explicate the intensity of invisible phenomena at various coordinates in the city-space. In what follows I address the “zone” theme by suggesting that if we apply McLuhan’s notion of media as environment together with Henri Bergson’s assertion that visibility and tangibility constitutes the potential for action to digital maps, projects such as Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies constitute a “contact zone.” A type of zone where groups come together at the local level and flows of discourse about art, information communication, media, technology, and environment intersect with local histories and cultures within the cartographic text. A “contact zone,” then, is a site where latent subjectivities are manifested and made potentially politically potent. “Contact zones,” however, need not be spaces for the aggrieved or excluded (Renzi 82), as they may well foster the ongoing cumulative politics of the mundane capable of developing into liminal spaces where dominant orders may be perforated. A “contact zone” is also not limitless and it must be made clear that the breaking of cartographic convention, as is the case with the project under study here, need not be viewed as resistances per se. It could equally represent thresholds for public versus private life, the city-as-text and the city-as-social space, or the zone where representations of space and representational spaces interface (Lefebvre 233), and culture flows between the mediated and ideated (Appadurai 33–36). I argue that a project like Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies demonstrates that maps as urban text form said “contact zones,” where not only are media forms such as image, text, sound, and video are juxtaposed in a singular spatial schematic, but narratives of individual and collective subjectivities (which challenge dominant orders of space and time, and city-rhythm) are contested. Such a “contact zone” in turn may not only act as a resource for citizens in the struggle of urban design reform and a democratisation of the facilities it produces, but may also serve as a heuristic device for researchers of new media spatiotemporalities and their social implications. Critical Cartography and Media Tactility Before presenting this brief illustrative study something needs to be said of the context from which Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has arisen. Although a number of Web 2.0 applications have come into existence since the introduction of Google Maps and map application program interfaces, which generate a great deal of geo-tagged user generated content aimed at reconceptualising the mapped city-space (see historypin for example), few have exhibited great significance for researchers of media and communications from the perspective of building critical theories relating to political potential in mediated spaces. The expression of power through mapping can be understood from two perspectives. The first—attributed largely to the Frankfurt School—seeks to uncover the potential of a society that is repressed by capitalist co-opting of the cultural realm. This perspective sees maps as a potential challenge to, and means of providing emancipation from, existing power structures. The second, less concerned with dispelling false ideologies, deals with the politics of epistemology (Crampton and Krygier 14). According to Foucault, power was not applied from the top down but manifested laterally in a highly diffused manner (Foucault 117; Crampton and Krygier 14). Foucault’s privileging of the spatial and epistemological aspects of power and resistance complements the Frankfurt School’s resistance to oppression in the local. Together the two perspectives orient power relative to spatial and temporal subjectivities, and thus fit congruently into cartographic conventions. In order to make sense of these practices the post-oppositional character of tactical media maps should be located within an economy of power relations where resistance is never outside of the field of forces but rather is its indispensable element (Renzi 72). Such exercises in critical cartography are strongly informed by the critical politico-aesthetic praxis of political/art collective The Situationist International, whose maps of Paris were inherently political. The Situationist International incorporated appropriated texts into, and manipulated, existing maps to explicate city-rhythms and intensities to construct imaginative and alternate representations of the city. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies adopts a similar approach. The artists’ statement reads: We build our subjective maps by combining different methods: photography, film, and sound recording; […] to explore the visible and invisible […] city; […] we adopt psycho-geographical approaches in exploring territory, defined as the study of the precise effects of the geographical environment, consciously developed or not, acting directly on the emotional behaviour of individuals. The project proposals put forth by workshop participants also draw heavily from the Situationists’s A New Theatre of Operations for Culture. A number of Situationist theories and practices feature in the rationale for the maps created in the Bangalore Subjective Cartographies workshop. For example, the Situationists took as their base a general notion of experimental behaviour and permanent play where rationality was approached on the basis of whether or not something interesting could be created out of it (Wark 12). The dérive is the rapid passage through various ambiences with a playful-constructive awareness of the psychographic contours of a specific section of space-time (Debord). The dérive can be thought of as an exploration of an environment without preconceptions about the contours of its geography, but rather a focus on the reality of inhabiting a place. Détournement involves the re-use of elements from recognised media to create a new work with meaning often opposed