The Cognitive Foundations of Decline Narratives in Human Societies.

Vaccine Development and Collaborations: Lessons from the History of the Meningococcal A Vaccine (1969-73).

Korean Beauty in a Global Cultural Context*

Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus

This special issue of Modern Theology gathers together full research essays that were first presented, in summary form, at the 2021 online conference Theological Genealogies of Modernity. For both the original event and now this collection, theological genealogies of modernity serves as a term of art referring to any complex, broad-sweep narrative account of the rise of a modern Western cultural order that highlights theology's role within that process. The conference organizers deliberately employed the term in a capacious sense out of a desire to find a rubric under which to include a range of narratives and disciplinary perspectives on them. Defined broadly, the terminology extends both to stories celebrating the Enlightenment for bringing about progress and also to narratives stressing the need constantly to recur to a pre-modern cultural synthesis from which people today should continue to receive instruction. Of course, this simplistic distinction deserves to be challenged, and several of the essays here contest this stark division of options. The overall aim of the inquiry into genealogies is to help theologians understand how these narratives work, regardless of which account is attractive to them, so that they may develop a well-informed position on how (and even whether) to employ them. Suppose that we define theologians inclusively as those who speak about God. Theologians assume different stances on genealogies. Marcus Borg invokes a common story about modern progress by claiming that during the previous two centuries historical scholars have learned that the picture of Jesus emerging from the ecumenical councils of the church does not actually match up well with the life and ministry of Jesus himself, but instead is the work of the early Christian movement in the years following his death.1 Advances in historical research supersede prior understandings, no matter how firmly ensconced ecclesial tradition has become. By contrast, John Milbank argues that Christians must take their cue from a medieval participatory ontology in order properly to conceive the identity of Jesus.2 Failing to see the relevance of this ontology entails starting with another set of fundamental commitments, ones that from the outset undermine offering a non-identical repetition of what the classical creeds say about who Jesus is. Borg and Milbank employ substantively different genealogies, but each one uses a single story that conforms, more or less, to a recognizable type—progress in the first case and declension in the second, at least in the eyes of its critics. Other theologians blend these options together. Georges Florovsky, for example, works with a complicated combination of narratives. On the one hand, he insists that all Christian theology should trace itself back to the fathers of the church, who articulated the deposit of faith. Contemporary constructive theological reflection requires strict fidelity to a synthesis of patristic thought; anything else counts as defection from this standard. On the other hand, Florovsky values modern historicism and other forms of thought that were not elements of the patristic synthesis. Only by a sleight of hand is he able to mingle together a declension narrative and his appreciation for the fruit of progress.3 It is also possible to find arguments for being wary of any whole genealogy and, instead, limiting oneself to gleaning insights from several of them. Joel Rasmussen reads Søren Kierkegaard as casting suspicion on any attempt to take the measure of ourselves, the whole of recent history, and our place within it, without ideology infecting these evaluations. The best strategy, in light of these problems, is to select insights from a plurality of approaches that perpetually vie with each other. Whether theologians employ a single genealogy, whether they use multiple stories, or whether they are suspicious of any story on such a grand scale, they can hardly avoid taking some stance on genealogies of modernity. Therefore, theologians should think through the issues these accounts raise and how to deal with them. This work is worth undertaking because theologians need to make recourse to one or more genealogies in the process of sustaining their substantive claims. Those who incline toward a progress narrative press it into service to explain how entrenched traditions block the future trajectory of research and must be resisted for this reason. Those working with a decline narrative, or something like it, need a way to explain why their theological claims are not immediately believable to many in the world today, although they had greater subscription in a previous period. Those who combine stories feel pulled in both directions at once and attempt a synthesis of genealogies. And, finally, those wary of being drawn into the orbit of any large story still end up taking a position on topics they address, such as religion's role in the modern world. In one form or another, genealogical discourse is entangled in the theological task. It therefore profits theologians to consider how best to navigate such stories. That was a working hypothesis behind the Theological Genealogies of Modernity conference and remains a premise of this special issue. There are several features of these accounts, however, that make them challenging to handle skillfully. Perhaps the most obvious difficulty is their massive scope. They are indeed grand narratives, spanning whole epochs and rendering interpretive judgments upon them. As Richard Cross fittingly comments in his blistering polemic against the way Radically Orthodox theologians read Duns Scotus, “A grand narrative of this nature is dependent upon some—probably all—of the smaller stories that compose it. That some, and probably all, of these stories are truthful is necessary for the truthfulness of the analysis as a whole—for the truthfulness of the grand narrative.”4 Is it even possible for those who employ such narratives to know enough about all that they contain for their knowledge to be genuinely secure? Cross argues that while Radical Orthodoxy takes Scotus to be proposing a metaphysic when he says that the concept of being is univocal to God and creatures, he intends merely to advance a semantic theory. It would be easy for a reader of Cross's critique to feel that if the leading lights of Radical Orthodoxy are off base about Duns Scotus, then perhaps not only have they rushed in where angels fear to tread, but it would be foolhardy for anyone to lean heavily on a genealogy. Maybe caution should be the rule instead. Being wary regarding grand narratives appears to constitute the only way to avoid exposing oneself to perpetual vulnerability. One of the constituent essays in this collection responds constructively to this challenge, as discussed below. But for now, the point is simply to note that this difficulty attends grand genealogical narratives. Large-scale narrative accounts are also challenging to handle insofar as they contain a variety of material. While many major on intellectual history and refer to a wide range of primary texts, others bring within their purview material culture and social factors as well. A final challenge to handling genealogies well is that they raise fundamental questions of epistemology. Do genealogies force the theologian to choose between either a problematizing approach to knowledge (Nietzsche) or a tradition-informed stance (Aristotle)? Or is it preferable to bring these two together somehow? In this collection, Joel Rasmussen explores these questions in dialogue with Kierkegaard's corpus. Theologians face these challenges, yet standard academic arrangements throw an obstacle in the way of addressing them effectively. Due to the breadth of genealogies, it would be ideal to discuss them in an interdisciplinary setting. Theologians would profit from conversing with historians, philosophers, and literary scholars. But because academic fields are typically isolated from one another in ways that inhibit communication and cooperation between specialized areas, the sort of discussions that theological genealogies inherently deserve seldom take place. It was for this reason that the conference included practitioners with an array of expertise. As readers of their respective essays can see, both Brad Gregory and Peter Harrison bring specialist skills as historians from which theologians can glean much. Several of our contributors have knowledge of philosophy. While Thomas Pfau did not contribute an essay to this collection, his skills as a literary scholar were on display at the conference itself when he engaged in a discussion of Kierkegaard with Joel Rasmussen.5 A welcome trend in recent work on genealogies is that the discussion is diversifying. Many standard points of reference continue to receive discussion at present, but they now stand alongside more efforts to speak about and from the perspective of previously marginalized communities. The conversation about such accounts is rightly expanding to include new voices, some of which are challenging well-ensconced genealogical practices in order to create opportunities to be heard. This is evident in the essay on “Genderealogy: Erasure and Repair” within this special issue. Its authors, Christine Helmer and Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, argue that raising the profile of women within genealogies requires a deep reconception of human agency itself. Likewise, Ragnar M. Bergem ends his essay with an appreciative assessment of two major texts on the role of race and religion in the formation of modern Western culture. It is to the benefit of the present discussion that it is less dominated by figures from a single demographic. Five of the essays brought together here interpret and assess genealogies of modernity as they currently exist. Their authors provide some guidance for how these narratives might develop in response to their interrogation, but they mainly focus on understanding and evaluating examples from the current discussion. The value of these pieces derives from how they challenge assumptions that give certain narratives greater influence than those stories perhaps deserve, how they undermine caricatures that may misconstrue some genealogies, how they highlight the achievement and limits of genealogies, and how they wrestle in explicit ways with methodological questions that are seldom satisfyingly answered in other discussions. In the modern West, the narrative enjoying the broadest cultural currency portrays history as bringing about progress, or an ever-increasing quality of life for human beings. Yet Brad Gregory points to what he sees as a significant problem with this story. The obstacle is the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch marking out the beginning of large-scale human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems. Such impact includes climate change, but it indicates broader and deeply problematic alterations to the planet's energy, water, and biochemical cycles. This difficulty pertains not only to problems that have already occurred, but even more to the trajectory that the planet is currently on. Based on observations that scientists can presently make, people's impact upon the world may well challenge the habitability of some or even all of the planet. For this reason, the onset of the Anthropocene, usually dated to around the middle of the twentieth century, poses a challenge to any narrative about human progress: if human beings cannot continue to live on the planet they currently inhabit, that decisively undermines the claim that their quality of life only improves with time. The usual, allegedly benign, attempts to include more people within a consumer capitalist culture only exacerbate the issues. They do not offer a solution to the basic problem. Western nations, in which Christianity has exerted a tremendous influence, have proven largely responsible for these difficulties—this despite Jesus’ stern and unambiguous condemnation of the greed and accumulation of wealth that ultimately drive many current threats. Nominally Christian nations have outrightly repudiated core teachings of Jesus, and this choice has brought looming planetary destruction as its consequence. Gregory holds up saintly individuals and ascetic communities as examples proving that it is indeed possible to follow Jesus’ teaching, at least on a small scale, despite the sorry display writ large that we otherwise see and with the consequences of which we must now live. Gregory's picture is admittedly gloomy. Those who seek to resist his conclusion about progress narratives would need to find a way to account for the considerable range of evidence he marshals without bursting the bounds of that common modern story. Could it be that the progress story might yet sustain itself if technological solutions were invented that could reverse the degrading effects that human beings are presently having on the planet? Only time will tell if anything like this comes to pass. While Gregory proffers the evidence of the current Anthropocene as sufficient to undermine the progress narrative, he stops short of embracing a macro-account of decline, insisting that declension accounts depend on rightly identifying a point from which decline began—a question with which he does not deal in this focused essay. In his larger work, The Unintended Reformation, Gregory disavows nostalgia for a past Golden Age, refusing to embrace a single historical period as the juncture from which subsequent history defected.6 Two other essays deal more fully with genealogies that are often understood in terms of decline. In “Neither Progress nor Regress: The Theological Substructure of T. F. Torrance's Genealogy of Modern Theology,” Darren Sarisky contends that the category of decline does not genuinely apply to the genealogy of the Scottish Reformed theologian. A brisk reading of Torrance's work might lead one to conclude that he views history as a declension from certain high points, such as the Nicene period or the Reformation. But such a conclusion overlooks his appreciation for many modern advances. And, more importantly, it fails to register what is most important for the structure of his genealogy, that is, Torrance's own deepest doctrinal commitments. Aspects of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, rather than the idealization of any time periods, lie at the heart of his genealogy, because they determine its structure. Among other effects, they reshape how Torrance understands time. Even though nearly two millennia separate today's church from the events of Jesus’ earthly ministry, that does not entail that an unbridgeable gap opens up between him and today's ecclesial community. Rather, time is warped in the sense that it is no longer exclusively linear. The one who was crucified and resurrected then is alive even now and becomes present to the church by the power of the Spirit. Because time is not simply linear, on his view, it is erroneous to understand his genealogy as portraying history as a decline from a particular point. What is more fundamental to the genealogy than chronologically bounded periods is epistemic reconciliation between the knowing subject and the God who is the object of theological inquiry. Because the practice of theology depends upon epistemic affinity, Torrance's genealogy critiques developments in history that frustrate achieving epistemic reconciliation and lauds those that facilitate it. This focus helps Torrance prioritize which historical moments need evaluation, and it explains the angle from which he assesses any given claim. Furthermore, because God can establish epistemic affinity between humans and himself in any set of historical conditions, thereby retaining his freedom, knowledge of God does not depend ultimately on the existence of certain earthly circumstances. Torrance's genealogy certainly offers some bold assessments and can at times display carelessness with details. But it manages to avoid indulging in the most sweeping historical generalizations that other genealogies include. Torrance's work thereby contributes to the current debate by being more measured in this sense. Readers concerned about the tendency toward cavalierly evaluative periodization can turn to Torrance to find something different. The notion of decline figures less centrally in John Milbank's essay, “Genealogies of Truth,” but his piece might well nevertheless be construed as offering two important comments on this notion. The first is that whatever relevance “decline” possesses, there is also a need within Christian theology for genealogy to operate in a fundamentally different mode. Genealogy ought to function positively in the first instance. Positive genealogy builds upon the past, not simplistically, by merely repeating what others have already said, but by reflectively building upon exemplars from within a tradition in which one stands. The warrant for history in genealogy comes from less than the where Jesus is understood as the life of the church by being as as possible with its Positive genealogy doctrinal by theologians to think with their because is in the of the it within a particular of thought and theology also genealogy, in order to challenge assumptions that may be well but that nevertheless to basic Christian commitments. genealogy common assumptions and them, their the role of genealogy is to by an of the of the which turn out to be other than was and rather than and This to the that Milbank is, in in his essay. While genealogy is to be substantively it less than the genealogy of Radical which is often by with terms such as decline and Milbank insists that what he is ultimately if it is a to an that had greater influence in the past, is to to have learned from while fully to it by of with theological The use of genealogy itself an of him in this and that he is working in by this point of on Milbank's essay a and discussions of and as some of the he has In his of Modernity and Its Ragnar Bergem a of points that to both progress narratives and decline is that many of the recent genealogies that have drawn from theologians have by and work, although theologians have also theology and Radical Orthodoxy have to modernity by its and up the of challenging it. these genealogies are most they have given readers a point on sense that it is not in its our perhaps even a that there could an for life that has not by the of a modern In this these theological discussions have the sense that Christians today have no choice but to into a and to that Yet insofar as these stories point back to a their anything as of his genealogies. only to the present and to up about new genealogy to a theological to which past Bergem does not on whether theologians in the of or Radical Orthodoxy would take his as a some of them have no of within the limits of he highlights the that theological genealogies have by where their do not with that have them. While these accounts have some theologians to from modern developments that would in the past have as is in some modernity still a force within them. For because many of the genealogies in question their discussion on intellectual to the of material they have only a to the that in place the they One of the most genealogies from recent years that some accounts separate out from their cultural and problems on intellectual referring to this problematic tendency as an Furthermore, Bergem theological genealogies to modernity by periodization that in modern that its and that may even out evidence that does not the narrative genealogy of race as a category is as some of these by heavily on rather than to the historical in that race a of By contrast, work on race attends to in a more obvious overall aim is not to for the of genealogical he mainly to assess current and, to offer for that might benefit current is at his most when he that genealogies that are options are and instead, one story may depend on elements of its Readers often understand theological genealogies to be an case by starting from that not all and to be in Peter and the of The of Modern argues that several genealogies actually work in a how accounts to that are in a even though such genealogical arguments do not with Genealogies can this by basic in the stance with modern and Because they within historical these accounts a different point of as the only In this these genealogies function as This is the of the function of genealogies. Harrison in a and several genealogies that problems in the of modern For argues that cannot people to the of a as it is of the of without some form of within But the offers itself as a one that is to religion as thereby depends on what it itself not to be fully This that should receive a assessment of some though does not need to himself to a evaluative perspective to make this The conclusion simply from a analysis of the of itself. Harrison explores several other examples as well. about other major historical works to that authors such as Brad Gregory are often to be their own or claims when they are in for only that the concept of human is not well it to theological Gregory need not himself to such to make that point. The once is to how genealogical work can be and substantive without being in ways that historians consider broader discussion of major recent works a range of subject is a more of from modern The essay what is often as an obvious that modern and practices genuinely are by that they depend on theological in some piece should historians and theologians to to the form of within genealogies. offers terms that can help readers understand the nature of the at work within accounts derives from in the form of rather than from any or arguments the to on essays within this special issue whether and how genealogies ought to be of these essays is to problems with the though they to the they The first essay a to certain of with a toward common with narratives that history having a The essay for a to the common of to the final essay that our human for requires about any particular grand narrative we might tell about human history and our place in it. that genealogies which develop stances toward because assumptions at some point in the to their from the history they The problems of the present to which this history has can to be if the reader of the genealogy more with the not than with the one that has Such genealogies do not an of but something like this is a that attends these What is the best way to avoid the constructive is that genealogies should be to their in the of Those genealogies should the of their own points and They ought to be about how the stories they forms of and to the of It is for any genealogy that is of modernity to this But it is for theologians to genealogies, for declension narratives the narrative within as from within human beings and as no one can for what is with the world. There methodological and theological to genealogies. In should compose historical narratives that they as Because genealogies are narrative accounts that offer readers in the face of an otherwise of historical their authors should that their accounts have the of an They are Genealogies provide and those who receive guidance from them should to a more perspective by undertaking more specialized of of at genealogical narratives in this way has two it the tendency to any that from it the of Richard Cross's that large-scale stories are to questions from specialist of a genealogy rightly own up to the need to even as they to the they have from the story that their like in historical practice as well as within Christian The theological perspective the of human who have a not a of In its point of reference is the for with God in the new should any appreciation that a has for a past period of

As the questions posed by this journal indicate, the idea of is easily conflated with a narrative of decline: What is left of theory? Has lost its relevancy and critical edge? Has it lost the self-identity that it once had? The account of what is feared lost delineates (by negation) a nostalgic image of theory's past: relevance, a critical edge, and self-identity. When those things are gone and that golden age is over we are left with ruins and remainders, as other recent titles on the state of theory, which the journal's questions selfconsciously echo, make all too clear: What's Left of Theory? (Butler, Guillory, and Thomas); In Near Ruins (Dirks); The University in Ruins (Readings). This essay too will relate the notion of theory trouble to conceptions of remnants and remainders, but it will do so without a narrative of decline. Consider, rather, how images of ruins and remains appear also in another theoretical text from the past couple of years: Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz (the original Italian title could be rendered more precisely as What remains of Auschwitz). Here the question of what is left has a rather different valence. Agamben does not concern himself with, say, a decline in the interest in or sense of relevance of Auschwitz, but with a task that he believes has barely started: thinking the ethical implications of the events of the Holocaust.

Although childless women comprise around 17% of women aged 65 and over in the US (Census Bureau, US, 2016) and up to 20% in other places in the world (Dykstra, 2009), the intersection of childlessness, female gender and old age has not been as widely explored as is necessary; older women have historically been and continue to be overlooked in feminist research compared to other groups of women (Browne, 1998; Ray, 1996; Twigg, 2004). Therefore, how childlessness affects identity and identity, childlessness in later life is not well understood. Our analysis considered: How do never-married, childless women identify themselves in terms of age? What are the key features of such an age identity? And, do these identities align with progress narratives or narratives of decline? For this chapter, interviews with 53 older women (22 African American, 31 White) aged 60 and over, who described themselves as never married and without biological children, were analysed. Questions were semi-structured and open-ended and covered background health information, a life story interview, questions about social networks, various forms of generativity and the sample’s views about the future. Overall, these women negotiated their age identity not necessarily in relation to others (e.g. child, spouse) but in relation to themselves as social actors with an orientation towards the future – what will tomorrow bring? These forward-thinking narratives point to a new and important way to consider progress narratives and to rethink trajectories of the experience of aging.

‘Progress’ means extravagant energy use, enabled by the burning of fossil fuels and colonial expansion. The peak in the extraction of oil and countless other key natural resources, the ‘peak everything’, is at hand or imminent. Renewable and nuclear energy depend on fossil fuel-based production and have a poor EROI (energy return on investment). At the same time, the industrial civilisation has triggered a series of irreversible chain reactions. For the last 10,000 years, a period known as the Holocene, the Earth has enjoyed an exceptionally stable climate, which is a prerequisite for agriculture and the functioning of civilisations. We are entering a hothouse Earth with an unstable climate. The author starts from a post-sustainable framework of deep adaptation, according to which the collapse of industrial societies due to climate chaos and limits to growth is likely, inevitable or already underway in our lifetime. The essential question of the post-sustainable world is how to live on a planet, on which humankind has never set foot in its entire evolution. In order to conceptualise this situation and to create an action plan, it is necessary to abandon the dogma of progressivism, the narrative that everything is going to get better, that all stories have a happy ending, and that there is no ‘going back to childhood’ (to a ‘Golden Age’, ‘traditional society’, etc.). The author takes a brief look at empirical and theoretical analyses that are in sharp contrast to the basic narratives of progress. The author also points out that no scientific-technical, Enlightenment-based culture or cultural situation in history can be shown to have been sustainable for even a single moment. At the same time, history is littered with examples of former state subjects, who have fled civilisation and gone native. Consequently, the achievement of an ecologically sustainable culture that breaks away from the doctrines of the Enlightenment and progress is an opportunity that is within reach at any moment. Since the mid-19th century (at the latest), Estonian culture has consisted of attempts to create European-style culture in Estonian. In order to reach an ecologically sustainable way of life that can be lived from generation to generation, it is necessary to search for and invent the “modes of creation” of Estonians as a countryside people (before the 19th century, Estonians called themselves “people of the land”), i.e., a local epistemology and ecological sensitivity of the local culture, rebuilding a photosynthesis-based food system. The author calls for the abandonment of modernist business as usual and for the actual care of the land, generation after generation, a regenerative economy. The task of the regenerative economy is to bind water, carbon, nutrients into the Estonian soil. Agriculture – to the extent that it is possible on a hothouse Earth – must move towards forest gardening and grazing, because carbon is better safeguarded in the soil than in vegetation in the event of wildfires and superstorms. Also, it will be harder for colonisers to seize crops. Regenerative economy can be summed up in three words: food, wood, fibre. Finally, the author proposes an extensive list of ideas for regenerative entrepreneurship. A regenerative entrepreneur is a practical environmental radical, whose everyday challenge is to find business models that are based on human or animal labour and photosynthesis as a source of energy and to create soil. Keywords: limits to growth, climate chaos, deep adaptation, going native, regenerative economics

Current concepts of therapeutic landscape combine landscape with principles of holistic health and the interaction of social, affective and material factors. As social tensions widen the gap between the places of emotional retreat and healing from those of everyday sociability, concepts of therapeutic landscape are evolving to reflect society’s current values. This chapter examines how cultural place-based values affect and maintain physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health and well-being in the context of a therapeutic landscape. Five case studies from Australasia, Africa, Middle East and Latin America are analysed to understand better the interrelationships between land, culture and health that make an environment therapeutic. The case studies were selected based on their engagement with the cultural traditions of landscape architecture and how the boundaries of these cultural traditions are negotiated within a modern context. The chapter contributes to the knowledge base of landscape architects and academics interested in the role of culture in producing and maintaining therapeutic landscapes by presenting a cross-cultural analysis to illustrate a range of strategies for incorporating cultural traditions and customs into modern landscape architectural contexts to promote health and well-being.

The second chapter examines the story of Detroit’s ruin as a narrative of progress and decline through an examination of the photography of Camilo José Vergara in the late 1980s and 1990s. These images were central in producing a narrative of ruin. In his Detroit images, and in his statements about the city, structural racism and unequal access to the spoils of capitalism are written out of the narrative of postindustrial urban space, replaced with a simpler narrative of progress and decline. Vergara’s images of the landscape in particular suggest that Detroit’s ruin and potential for rise is a natural process, contributing to the common discourse that affirms the rise and fall and rise again of the city.

In the Barataria episode of Don Quixote, Cervantes uses acorns as a source of humor, highlighting the contrast between aristocratic and peasant ways of life. Acorns, however, not only connote a rustic, lower class existence, but they also symbolize the myth of the “Golden Age,” a romanticized vision of humanity’s earliest days. Cervantes explicitly links acorns to the Golden Age earlier in the Quixote, when the nuts inspire don Quixote’s discourse on the theme. While critics often interpret Barataria as a type of utopia, albeit a failed one, the symbolic connections that the acorns provide suggest that we should also read the episode against the myth of the Golden Age in order to uncover its full significance. A utopian society achieves its ideal state through adherence to a set of rules and regulations that aim to promote accord among its citizens, whereas this social code is absent in the Golden Age, unnecessary in an as-yet-uncorrupted community. Through his strategic use of acorns, Cervantes calls attention to the differences between the two visions of a halcyon existence, ultimately suggesting that the very idea of utopia points to a decline in the human condition.

Reviewed by: Native Intoxicants of North America by Sean Rafferty Cameron B. Strang (bio) Keywords Intoxicants, Native Americans, Indigenous, Drugs Native Intoxicants of North America. By Sean Rafferty. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. 294. Cloth $60.00.) Anthropologist Sean Rafferty's Native Intoxicants of North America is an overview of the plants, fungi, and animals that Indigenous people consumed to achieve altered states of consciousness. The scope of Rafferty's study is continental, reaching from Florida to Alaska, but he situates this research in a global and panhuman context. Thus, instead of zeroing in on how particular groups understood or pursued intoxication, Rafferty sees efforts to reach altered states of consciousness as a "universal human trait" (1) and asserts that "Native North Americans were no different from any other human population in terms of innate desires for intoxication" (203). While this desire to reach altered states of consciousness may be partially biological, the book argues that social behaviors, especially rituals, determine the prevalence and use of various drugs. Humans are intensely social creatures, and those individuals and groups with the most friends, lovers, trading partners, and allies have a competitive—and perhaps evolutionary—advantage over loners. So, the theory goes, intoxicants that foster connections among people tend to be more widespread and socially acceptable than those that lead to antisocial behavior. Tobacco was the most widely used intoxicant throughout North America because its mild effect encouraged social bonding and, relatedly, because the rituals and material culture associated with tobacco—most famously calumet smoking—strengthened relationships within groups, among nations, and between human beings and non-human beings. More potent drugs, especially powerful and risky hallucinogens, were more limited to ritual specialists (whom Rafferty associates with a broad shamanic tradition that may have had roots in central Asia). Drawing global significance from North American evidence, Rafferty concludes that "intoxication was an ancient and widespread practice" (16) among humans and that "it is the social value of intoxicants that has been largely responsible for their widespread use by human societies" (214). Rafferty supports these broad claims with both archaeological and documentary evidence. Archaeologists have uncovered centuries-old botanical specimens of intoxicating species as well as artifacts such as pipe bowls and other ceramics that suggest the degree to which intoxicants mattered [End Page 454] to social and spiritual rituals. Rafferty interprets petroglyphs from the Great Basin and Southwest as possible evidence of drug-inspired artwork, and while he is rightly cautious in drawing conclusions from these elusive drawings, he suggests that they may reflect some of the patterns and images often visualized by users of particular hallucinogens. The book also leans heavily on the work of twentieth-century ethnographers and the writings of early European observers. Assembling this wide array of textual sources is a practical way to fulfill the book's continental ambitions, but the author's decision to introduce most of this ethnographic and historical evidence through a parade of long block quotes makes for clunky reading. Although some of these passages do capture Native peoples' own perspectives on intoxicants—especially peyote use within the Native American Church—the overall dearth of Indigenous voices is glaring when compared to the surplus of quotations from white observers. Native Intoxicants of North America is at its best when interrogating how and why drugs were used in a comparative, continental context. For example, the discussion of datura, which early Americanists may know as jimsonweed—from "Jamestown weed," the deliriant that incapacitated some of America's first English colonists—is both far-ranging and culturally specific. As a powerful and potentially deadly hallucinogen, datura use seems to have been regulated by social and ritual norms within the many nations that ingested or smoked it throughout the continent. Interestingly, Native groups in both Virginia and California incorporated datura into male initiation ceremonies because, Rasmussen suggests, of its antisocial effects: Datura created such a strong disassociation from oneself and one's people that the period of delirium helped mark a break between childhood and adulthood. Moreover, kiva drawings resembling datura from the Southwest, datura-shaped ceramics from Cahokia, and chemical residue from datura on a Mississippian pipe bowl found in Tennessee all support the...

Reality Bites

The subject of the research is the socio-economic development of the Russian Empire during the modernization era of Witte and Stolypin, with a focus on the first component. The object of the study is the establishment and development of the cosmetics industry in European and Polish provinces within the context of modernization—primarily examining changes not in production but in consumption—during the last third of the 19th to the early 20th century through the lens of three basic indicators: the number of factories, the total annual output, and the number of employed workers. The source corpus of the work is based on the directories of factories and plants of the Russian Empire and industrial censuses, supplemented by appendices to gubernatorial reports on the analyzed provinces and a number of other materials, primarily literary works from the late 19th to the first decade of the 20th century. The work employs historical-genetic, comparative, predominantly diachronic, systemic, and quantitative methods, including the use of computer technologies. The main conclusion of the conducted research is the overly predictable placement of production points. The demand for consumption was not limited to large industrial centers; it is also not always appropriate to speak of a determining link to the resource base, and it seems that cosmetics could serve as a good example of an industry whose rise is conditioned by the social changes of the modernization era and is recorded everywhere—but this does not happen. Not least, from our perspective, this is due to the entrepreneurs whose names are associated with the establishment of the "golden age" of Russian perfumery—Brokara, Ralle, and others—who effectively turned the market into an oligopoly, blocking opportunities for the establishment (although the emergence can still be traced) of new points, including regional ones. It can be suggested that the logistical component of modernization—the development of railroads and the final formation of a unified commodity market in the empire—has a rather negative effect on local productions in the cosmetics industry.

Generic fascism scholarship, which has turned strongly towards cultural political history in recent years, has focused heavily on themes of rebirth in fascist culture, but rebirth's counterpart of decline remains under-researched. After emphasizing the existence of several distinct and even mutually exclusive ideological strands in the NSB, this article shows how ideological difference was marked by narratives of decline. But they were equally used to generate a coherent political message about the contemporary state of the Netherlands. Central to their functionality as a unifying tool was party newspaper Volk en Vaderland, which served to promote a patriotic, news-focused, and peculiarly Dutch narrative of decline that overarched ideological difference. Yet more than just tying ends together, one narrative in particular served as a crucial ideological constant in the Movement, namely the Leider Anton Mussert's narrative of decline since the early modern Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, which tied traditional liberal patriotic themes into fascist discourse. Where other historians have emphasized Mussert's lack of moral and ideological leadership, the article impresses how narratives of decline functioned as moral support, and rallied NSB loyalists throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands, until Mussert's own death.

1. The American Jeremiad: Politics, Religion, Rhetoric, and History PART I. THREE AMERICAN JEREMIADS 2. Puritan New England and the Foundations of the American Jeremiad 3. Decline, Slavery, and War: The Jeremiad in Antebellum and Civil War America 4. Taking America Back: The Christian Right Narrative of Decline and Renewal PART II. THE JEREMIAD IN AMERICAN CULTURE: NARRATIVE, HISTORY, AND POLITICS 5. The Jeremiad as Narrative: Capacious and Constraining Stories of American Nationhood 6. Constructing a Usable Past: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Golden Age 7. Restorationism versus Pluralism: Traditionalist and Progressive Jeremiads in the American Culture Wars 8. Narratives and National Identity: Toward a More Capacious Jeremiad