Distant Lands Research Articles

Greek Commercial Endeavors in the Antiquity - A Brief Account of the Ancient Commerce of Cassiterite Between Greece and Northern Europe

). Thehistorical facts that have been gathered up to date present that the shipping fleets of the Minoans conducted most of this commerce, along with other merchants from the Aegean Sea.Moreover, the sea was not the only route of transport for the aforementioned metal, since also continental paths were in use. In this way, the Greek geographical area was interlockedwith the areas of extraction, production and exportation of cassiterite.There were two primary Kassiterean islands: Ireland and Britain. Almost all ancient writers referring to them placed these islands in the North-Western part of Europe: ‘North andacross of Artabron’ (modern day Galicia), as Strabo notes. Britain at that time was often mentioned as ‘Albion’, whilst Ireland as ‘Hibernia’ or ‘Hernia’. The latter seemed to have asignificant amount of minerals that were exported to the Aegean cities of that time (1). The main bulk of cassiterite was concentrated in Cornwall, which was during the 3rd MillenniumBC the undisputed production centre of the known world.There were cassiterite ores to be found in the Mediterranean basin and specifically in the areas of: Cadiz, Asia Minor and Cyprus. When the intense productions led to the overvaluationof this metal, risk-taking merchants directed their efforts towards the discovery of this ore in more distant lands (2).Quite a few researchers have argued that the first nation that started the North-South commerce of cassiterite should have been the Phoenicians, who enjoyed a remarkable commercialstatus in the Mediterranean world, as well as a long string of colonies from modern day Lebanon to the south of Spain. Nevertheless, this nation did not appear on the shores of theWestern Mediterranean Sea before the 13th Century BC (3). Therefore, they could not have been the “culprits” of any mercantile activity prior to that time. According to the archeologistand historian Stanley Casson, the Greeks had been exploring the British Isles from 2000 BC, and ignited a dynamic commercial activity concerning cassiterite as well as pottery.Having stated the aforementioned point, a question that arises is how the Aegean-Greek communities managed to travel so far from their bases and be able to maintain so dispersecommercial networks for such a prolonged period of time. Raymond Furon notes that, ‘Already from the Proto-Minoan period I (2800-2400 BC) commerce was very developed. Cretewas in the process of becoming then a major commercial power in the world. The industrial use of Bronze was a major factor for the development of the island, which in turn neededcassiterite as the main element for Bronze production. For that reason the Western Mediterranean was firstly explored and gradually came under the economic and political sphere ofinfluence of the Minoans’ (4).During that era a wide commercial network centered in the Aegean Sea spanned across the entire Mediterranean Sea, and when exploitation of the metal had reached its peak, theCretans were eager to obtain new unspoiled sources of production, so as to retain their dominant position. Thus the need to venture in the North was formed. Dr. Cyrus Gordon notes:‘A small Minoan sword was engraved in a Stonehenge Menir, reflecting in that way the direct or indirect relations between the population of the British Isles and those of the AegeanSea. Furthermore, Minoan scriptures—1500 BC—were to be found from the Anatolian area to the Hibernian Peninsula and the Metcalf Rock in the USA. The existence of an ancientformidable commercial network on which the Mediterranean Sea was the epicenter, is being revealed’ (5).In addition to cassiterite, electron (amber, C

The Effect of Employment Sub-centres on Population Density in Barcelona

The polycentric models of the new urban economics (NUE) predict that population density decreases while increasing the distance to employment centres. In contrast with this, some studies have calculated non-significant gradients or even positive ones, which appear to threaten seriously the usefulness of these theoretical models. Does this mean that this theoretical framework should be given up in order to understand the decision-making processes of the actors in a polycentric city and their cumulative effects on urban structure? Or, rather, is it a matter of overcoming problems with the appropriate estimating techniques? This study has tested the effect of decentralised and integrated sub-centres in the Barcelona metropolitan region on population density in 1991 and 2001. From the preliminary results, it is clear that population density increases with distance in a considerable number of the sub-centres that have sprung up as employment has decentralised. It has been detected that this result is due not so much to the higher value of more distant residential land compared with that nearer the employment sub-centres, but to deficiencies in the econometric model used. The problem is that the sub-centres belonging to this group are very close together. Once this is resolved, it is demonstrated that, although distance has less effect on decentralised sub-centres than integrated ones, in both cases the effect is negative; that is, when distance increases, population density is reduced. Therefore, the results obtained are not clearly contrary to the predictions of the theoretical models.

Assyrian Royal Hunts: Antlered and Horned Animals from Distant Lands

Assyrian royal texts disclose the rich variety of wildlife encountered in distant landscapes during military campaigns. The royal hunts of wild animals are illustrated in the visual arts of Assyria, which include species of Cervidae and Bovidae. Singled out are the deer (fallow deer, red deer), wild mountain goat (ibex, Kuban tur), and gazelle. These non-aggressive herbivores, represented in different contexts and media of ancient Near Eastern art and especially Assyria, are studied individually. Neo-Assyrian art provides evidence that species of deer, mountain goat, and gazelle were hunted in the wild; kept in herds for royal sporting events; and subjected to cultic practices. On occasion their images had political meaning as symbols of distant lands.

An Empire of Imagination, Sweat and Blood

This article uses photographs and first-hand reporting to illustrate the complications and challenges for a battalion of Army engineers in imagining and preparing for deployment. It follows the battalion during their preparation in a mock-Afghanistan in Washington State, while also detailing their previous deployment in southern Afghanistan. From the metropole, the outer reaches of Empire can be distant lands of the imagination--places once known through spices and poems, now through second-hand stories and news. Such stories and imagination, it seems, can only go so far when one is ultimately to serve in said far-flung frontier.

Music and the Formation of Sidi Identity in Western India

Long before the current age of postcolonial globalization, the Western Indian Ocean served as a maritime highway linking littoral settings in Western India with Arabia, Persia and East Africa. Among the many travellers who crossed the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people from Africa faced a particularly gruelling fate. In contrast to those who willingly journeyed by sea among them Arab and Indian merchants, Sufi masters, Islamic scholars from Yemen and Europeans Africans often endured a sea passage which was enforced by enslavement. Today, descendants of former African crossers of the Indian Ocean are dispersed over many islands and littoral societies such as Zanzibar, Oman and Western India. Along the Western coasts of South Asia, small but distinct communities of African descendants are settled in the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan, the Indian coastal states of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka and the former princely capital of Hyderabad, and further south in Sri Lanka. In Gujarat and elsewhere in South Asia, people of African origins are called 'Sidi'. From the times when sailing ships were the only means of transport, the appellation 'Sidi' was given indiscriminately to African slaves and sailors working on ships and in Indian Ocean ports.1 The sea journey from Africa to distant lands in South Asia thus transformed displaced people from the hinterland of the Swahili coast into 'Sidi'. This essay addresses the ways in which Sidi have created a place for themselves in Gujarat. It considers the sea journey that brought uprooted Africans Sidi slaves and seamen from Zanzibar to Gujarat and then examines the processes shaping the emergence of a collective Sidi identity in interaction with the host society. In both contexts at sea and on land African-derived forms of music referred to as goma played an important role. Through their music, Sidi in Gujarat reflect a significant strand in Indian history its maritime connections across the Indian Ocean. The century-old transoceanic migration of people, ideas, things and practices in dhows (the Arabic for sailing ship) resulted in the constitution of plural societies along the Indian coast characterized by 'dhow cultures'.2 This concept highlights the mobility of social and cultural practices in the Indian Ocean region. More specifically, the concept draws attention to social

Corrections and Amplifications

The article “Adventures in Abyssinia: The Relation of Charles Poncet, 1698 to 1700” by Ronald S. Love, published in Itinerario 28/3 (2004): 38–69, does not indicate the extent to which it was based on a publication by Theodore Natsoulas that covers the same topic. The article by Natsoulas, “Charles Poncet's Travels to Ethiopia, 1698 to 1703”, appeared in Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700, edited by Glenn J. Ames and Ronald S. Love, 71–96. Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies 45. Westport: Praeger, 2003.In the article by Stefan Halikowski Smith, “Perceptions of Nature in Early Modern Portuguese India”, Itinerario 31/2 (2007): 17–49, the following illustrations should have appeared on page 39. The editors regret the error.

Changes Are Needed to Attract and Retain Good Middle Grades Teachers

The arrival of two university magazines in the spring and summer of 2007 has made very personal to me the changing of the guard in American education. The spring 2007 issue of the DePauw Magazine bore the news that my undergraduate academic advisor, Prof. Clifton J. Phillips, passed away March 20 in Greencastle at age 87. In the summer, Education Times: University of Florida College of Education Magazine carried the news of the passing of Prof. Arthur J. Lewis, my doctoral advisor, September 10, 2006, in Jacksonville at age 89. These coincident events brought back to me fond memories of the relationships I had with each, as they guided me through the tangles of growing up and making decisions about my future. Both were not only inspiring teachers in the classroom, but patient, interested, and insightful mentors outside of it. Both brought a wealth of experiences—many of them in the distant lands of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—to our encounters, which greatly influenced my own journey in life.

From the editors

Interesting times and interesting research at Data Base this year. We'll be providing coverage of a new Chinese Information Systems conference, courtesy of Global Co-Editor Patrick Chau. We have an issue on software testing in process with Al Hevner, and this promises to provide some interesting new perspectives on an underutilized but critical research area in our field. We are expanding our global reach and service dramatically. You'll see important colleagues from distant lands on our masthead as board members, even editors. You'll notice increasing submissions from far parts of the global market. You'll find a new perspective on the practice of scholarship in Information Systems, worldwide, at ACM Data Base! This issue, welcome Guest Editor Ed Roche, who has brought a globe-spanning body of speculative and futuristic writing about emerging virtual worlds enabled by online technology. Authors from the four corners of the eWorld weigh in with discussions of where the Internet is taking us as an experiential and cultural milieu of modern life. The directions for research provided by this extraordinary overview of an emerging field of inquiry are innovative, visionary and dramatic. We hope you like it. We hope you'll send us work equally as innovative. We hope you'll tell your friends around the world about how easy it is to access ACM Data Base with our online portal and review system, as well, located at http://www.editorialmanager.com/sigmisdb.

Sustaining adventure in New Zealand outdoor education: Perspectives from renowned New Zealand outdoor adventurers on the contested cultural understanding of adventure

Introduction This article is an exploration of adventure understandings in New Zealand and how these contested understandings impact on the sustainability of adventure in outdoor education. The focus is on outdoor pursuits oriented adventure over the second half of the 20th century. The prominence of outdoor pursuits adventure in the image of New Zealand can be linked to May the 29th 1953 when New Zealander (Sir) Edmund Hillary and Nepali Tenzing Norgay successfully became the first people to climb Mount Everest. In doing so Sir Edmund provided for the world and for New Zealanders' cultural identity a benchmarked and typical representation of the adventurous New Zealander. Historically, New Zealand has been imaged as an adventurous location due to its distance from Europe, isolated island geography and wild natural scenery. In the image creation area of tourism the adventure theme has been linked to physical activity in natural outdoor settings (Tourism New Zealand, 2001; Bell & Lyall, 2002a, 2002b; Cloke & Perkins, 1998, 2002). In the first half of the 20th century international identities, royalty or films stars were used to promote New Zealand's potential for adventure holidays. In the second half of the 20th century as nationalism grew, there was a drive to define a distinct identity and the prominence of New Zealanders with global renown expanded (Belich, 2001; King, 2003; Sinclair, 1986, 2000). Sir Edmund Hillary and other successful outdoor identities contributed to this global adventure image and also to the discourse and understanding of adventure in New Zealand culture. Their text of outdoor experiences, memoirs, web pages and the externally authored articles in print media provided an expert definition of adventure. Given the historical mythology of adventure and New Zealand's own 'outdoor oriented imaging' it is understandable that in New Zealand culture the concept of adventure is intrinsically linked to outdoor pursuits. The image and branding of New Zealand as adventurous and outdoorsy had to make sense to New Zealanders for it to be successful and sustainable (Zink, 2004, p. 37). This sense making is grounded in New Zealand's relatively young culture which has been dominated by English pioneering colonisation, deriving success through physical outdoor labour. The indigenous population, the Maori, were also oriented to the land and sea for survival, with their cultural relationship having been described as a kinship (Patterson, 1992; Belich, 2001). With these cultural values the use of the outdoors in school education has had a long tradition, although it did not gain official status in the Education Curriculum till 1999. The orientation of outdoor education has also shifted over time with pre-1940s focused on recreational and notions of nature's link to health. Post this time and especially after the 1970s the orientation focused on instrumental outcomes such as leadership and teamwork (Lynch, 2006). The 1999 recognition of outdoor education as a key learning area in the health and physical education curriculum stated that "adventure activities foster student's personal and social development" (Ministry of Education, 1999, p. 46). Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with renowned New Zealand adventurers, this paper focuses on the understandings of adventure they present and seek to sustain. Guided by the ideas of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu the paper will sketch the adventure capital of these renowned adventurers and explore the contested understandings that participants feel are diluting the beneficial values to society they attribute to adventure. These challenging and contested understandings will also be correlated to the limited research that explores adventures place in outdoor education in New Zealand schools. It is to the historical understandings of adventure and then its place in the New Zealand outdoor education field that we now focus. Adventure and its narrative The historic narrative of adventure has been centred on the heroic individual over-coming adversity in a distant land and either establishing a utopian enclave or returning with riches and honour (Zweig, 1974; Green, 1980). …

:The World in Venice: Print, the City and Early Modern Identity

Positing a dynamic relationship between print culture and social experience, Bronwen Wilson's The World in Venice focuses on the printed image during a century of profound transformation. City views, costume illustrations, events, and portraits of locals and foreigners are brought together to show how printmakers responded to an expanding image of the world in Renaissance Venice, and how, in turn, prints influenced the ways in which individuals thought about themselves. Woodcuts and engravings of cities and inhabitants of Europe, and those of distant lands, initiated a sudden and pervasive experience with alterity that redefined the relations of Europeans to the world. By condensing the world into pictures, print enabled a radically novel and vicarious experience of others. Wilson explores the overlapping and evolving relations between space, vision, print, and identity, and engages with current scholarly debates concerning ethnicities, gender and geography, copies and originals, travel, nationhood, fashion, urban life, visuality, and the body. Venice was one of the largest cities in Renaissance Europe, a trading crossroads, and a centre of print. The World in Venice shows how Venetian identity came to be envisioned within the growing global context that print constructed for it.

The Return to the Origin: Heidegger's Journey to Greece

The literature of travel abounds in descriptions—ecstatic, enthusiastic, lukewarm, perplexed, disappointed, sometimes downright cantankerous—of voyagers' impressions of the places, monuments, and artworks of the Italian Renaissance and classical antiquity. From the splenetic Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett (1721–1771), whose disappointment at all things foreign (and generally unpleasant) began at Boulogne, to the awe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) evinced on seeing Rome in 1786 after long years of anticipation, travelers without number attest to the travails of the journey to distant lands and to the experience of the encounter once there.1

Effects of spatial extent on landscape structure and sediment metal concentration relationships in small estuarine systems of the United States’ Mid-Atlantic Coast

Prior studies exploring the quantitative relationship between landscape structure metrics and the ecological condition of receiving waters have used a variety of sampling units (e.g., a watershed, or a buffer around a sampling station) at a variety of spatial scales to generate landscape metrics resulting in little consensus on which scales best describe land-water relationships. Additionally, the majority of these studies have focused on freshwater systems and it is not clear whether results are transferable to estuarine and marine systems. We examined how sampling unit scale controls the relationship between landscape structure and sediment metal concentrations in small estuarine systems in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. We varied the spatial extent of the contributing watersheds used to calculate landscape structure and assessed linear relationships between estuarine sediment metal concentrations and the total area of developed and agricultural lands at each scale. Area of developed lands was consistently related to sediment metals while total agricultural land was not. Developed land had strongest associations with lead and copper; weakest with arsenic and chromium; and moderate associations with cadmium, mercury, and zinc. Local (i.e., less than 15−20 km from a sampling station) land uses have a greater impact than more distant land uses on the amount of toxic metals reaching estuarine sediments.

Introduction

The seventh issue of this journal is going online tomorrow, and contains a number of papers on methodological issues as well as reports from around the globe that tell us about the progress of evaluation in distant lands--in this issue, there are contributions from Ireland, China, the South Pacific, Australasia, and one with ten authors from the ‘newly independent states’ (ex-USSR).

The Ideal City: Heterotopia or Panopticon? On Joseph Brodsky’s Play Marbles and Its Fictional Spaces

In 1972, Joseph Brodsky, the renowned Russian poet expatriate, the Nobel Prize winner, the Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College, began his exilic ‘‘quest for significance,’’ since the democratic state, the place of his e´migre´ inhabitant (America), provided him with ‘‘the physical safety but render[ed] him socially insignificant. And the lack of significance is what no writer, exile or not, can take’’ (Brodsky, ‘‘Condition’’ 4). For Brodsky, this quest was a welcome one. He understood exile as a lesson in humility that teaches one existential essentials and puts one’s journey ‘‘into the longest possible perspective’’ (5). For Brodsky, exile became a pursuit in creativity, a spiritual and aesthetic expedition, and a condition that generated new energy and ideas. Brodsky’s expulsion became a creative paradigm rather than a state of constant suffering, disorientation, and displacement. It caused an expansion of his artistic interests when the Russian poet not only willingly embraced his forced bilingualism but also found it stimulating to think, to write, and to teach in English. Moreover, the exilic condition necessitated his investigation of the forms of writing that he had regarded as ‘‘foreign’’ when living at home. Thus his life in distant lands made Brodsky not only write in a new language but also explore the artistic challenges of composing prose and drama not poetry. These other venues became Brodsky’s new creative territories, the manifestation of his adaptability and hybridization, the creolization if not of his everyday then of his artistic tongue. Accordingly, this article discusses Joseph Brodsky’s play Marbles (1982) and argues that the play offers a representation of the Platonic city – a modern version of the ideal metropolis, based on the tendencies of geopathology and nostalgia, and the crossroads of exilic narratives registered within cityscapes from the period of the Enlightenment on. It becomes an exilic writer’s projection not only of his past experience with the state but also of his understanding of how his adopted country, a model democracy, is, in fact, treating its citizens.

Popular geographies and scholarly geographies in provincial France: the Société Normande de Géographie, 1879–1937

Geographical societies were established in many provincial cities of France during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Through lectures and publications, these organizations promoted popular geographies at a time when academic geography was in its infancy. The Geographical Society of Normandy was founded at Rouen in 1879 and survived for six decades. Unlike some of its counterparts, it did not provide commercial information after its early years nor did it receive funding from the local chamber of commerce. Its annual Bulletins presented aspects of popular geography at the time and elucidated views held by explorers, colonial administrators and other contributors. Tales of expeditions to distant lands were reported enthusiastically, but assessments of opportunities for European settlement were not always optimistic. European affairs rose to prominence in the life of the Society in the years surrounding World War I. Its popular geographies conveyed in public lectures continued to enjoy success but contacts with academic geographers were intermittent. Largely forgotten geographical societies, such as that in Normandy, played a significant role in raising knowledge of the world before geography became firmly established as a university discipline.

From India to England and Back: Early Indian Travel Narratives for Indian Readers

Asians as well as Europeans composed travel narratives about distant lands during the early modern period. In light of current debates about the nature of modernity, Michael H. Fisher explores in this article the first four travel accounts written by Indians about Britain intended for Indian readers, considering these authors' backgrounds, approaches, and selected content. All four authors emerged from the Persianate class of Muslim scholar-officials that struggled to maintain its socio-political position in the face of expanding British colonialism. While these authors recognized British technical, political, and military achievements, they also contested British assertions of cultural superiority, particularly concerning religion and gender relations.

Ethnography, borders and violence: reading between the lines in Satō Haruo's Demon Bird

Satō Haruo traveled to Taiwan in 1920 and published the short story ‘Demon Bird’ (Machō) in the October 1923 issue of Chūō Kōron. The narrator of ‘Demon Bird’ imitates the style of an ethnographic report to tell his civilized audience about a custom of scapegoating in an unnamed ‘barbaric’ society. He offers an interpretation of this custom and recounts a recent episode of persecution. By his literary indiscretions, he also discloses his own position within a colonial apparatus and underscores the connection between ‘barbarism’ at home and violence in the colonies. In the end, this narrative about a violent, ‘barbaric’ other is not what it appears to be. While the narrator of ‘Demon Bird’ sets the episode of persecution in a distant land, he also hints at an unspeakable atrocity fresh in the minds of his readers: the massacre of thousands of Korean residents of the Japanese capital during the Great Kanto Earthquake. This short story thus straddles the border of two genres (ethnography and fiction) and links two separate spaces (colony and metropolis) and times (narrative time and the time of writing). This hybrid text appeared at a time when criticism of Japan's colonial policies by liberal and reformist intellectuals was at its peak and epitomizes both the strength and the limitations of the liberalist critique of colonialism.

A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas (review)

Reviewed by: A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas Stephen Middleton A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas. By Billy D. Higgins. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Pp. 367. Cloth $34.95; paper $16.95.) This book is definitely filled with intrigue. It won a Ragsdale Award for nonfiction about Arkansas history in 2005. If it were possible to interview its subject, Peter Caulder and his family, they would be shocked that the ordinary life of an army deserter would become the subject of a book, let alone an award-winning study. That this book was a cowinner of the Ragsdale Award is a credit to Billy D. Higgins, a specialist on African American history and culture. Higgins has skillfully taken an obscure subject, and broadened it beyond any reasonable expectation, to tell the story about race and frontier life in antebellum America. Peter Caulder was born in Marion County, South Carolina, in 1795. His state was easily one of the most repressive racial communities in the country. But where it was a slave community for most Africans, it held out subtle possibilities for racially mixed people, whose white parents were willing to protect them. Such was the case of Peter Caulder, whose father, Moses, was mixed. The Caulders "lived comfortably in a mixed community that helped prepare" young Peter (1). When the War of 1812 began, Peter entered an integrated state militia and worked closely with whites without any apparent friction because of race. His service, however, was only partly voluntary. Peter entered the militia through the substitution system, serving in the place of Alexander Lane, a wealthy white neighbor. Lane furnished Caulder with a rifle and other supplies. His service would last for ninety days. Once his service in the militia ended, Caulder enrolled in the regular army, which provided for his sustenance and, upon an honorable discharge, a 160-acre land bounty. Caulder's odyssey in the Rifle Regiment carried him to distant lands, far away from Marion, South Carolina—forever. His sojourns carried him to Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas, his adopted home. He would also acquire skills that would serve him well on the western frontier, such as hewing timber and [End Page 71] manufacturing gunpowder. Frontier soldiers had to be self-reliant, and Caulder learned how to hunt for meat and grow crops for food. Every frontiersman needed these skills, and when Caulder left the army in 1824, he was prepared to exercise his independence for the first time since he was nineteen years old. If Caulder believed that life would be easy upon his discharge from the army, he was soon in for a rude awakening. The army gave him a land bounty as it had promised. However, the land was barren and unfit for cultivation. He soon abandoned his bounty and headed farther west to visit David Hall, a fellow rifleman. Hall had the good fortune of acquiring fertile land and had actually heaved out a good life with his wife, Sarah, and several children. As good as it was to visit Hall, Caulder decided to return to the army and the life he had once enjoyed. He took the oath on October 3, 1824, enlisting for five years. For unknown reasons, Caulder deserted the army in May 1827, fewer than three years since his reenlistment. Peter Caulder resurfaced in the Arkansas Territory, returning to the homestead of David Hall. Apparently, Peter had fallen in love with Eliza, Hall's fourteen-year-old daughter, whom he married in 1829. David was thirty-three. Caulder and his wife built a cabin on the White River in the Arkansas Territory, where federal law, in most cases, gave a squatter the first right of purchase when the land was surveyed for sale. Although initially isolated from the day-to-day racial animosity that civilian and enslaved blacks experienced and secluded from whites while he was living on the frontier, the fate of Peter Caulder changed in the 1830s. Arkansas could not escape the slave revolts in the South or the race riots in the North. William Woodruff, the editor of the Arkansas...

On Historiography of Human Rights Reflections on Paul Gordon Lauren's The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen

On Historiography of Human Rights Reflections on Paul Gordon Lauren's The Evolution of International Human Rights:Visions Seen Reza Afshari (bio) I. Historical Narrative The historiography of the contemporary human rights as a scholarly pursuit enhances our knowledge of the origins and development of the discourse and improves our understanding of how that history is constructed—with its paradoxes revealed and its myths examined—and as such it helps the international human rights advocates to contribute increasingly effectively to the future evolution of the concept of universal human rights. One of the main issues that the current historiography has to grapple with is the apparent disparity between the often-celebrated normative global achievements in codifying human rights values among the UN member states and the often-lamented failures to enforce them. This glaring absence of effective enforcement is mainly addressed by scholars and practitioners without offering a comprehensive picture linking it to the process by which those norms were articulated in the language of human rights in the first place. I argue that the link should not be seen as mechanical or procedural. Weaknesses so obviously apparent in the enforcement process signify the lack of vigor in the normative consensus; the vim and vigor by which the face was adorned by high-flying colors might in fact have masked a frail body. [End Page 1] Paul Gordon Lauren's book remains perhaps the most significant contribution to the historiography of human rights.1 I use the book as the focus of this manuscript because it is truly a valuable asset, particularly for those of us who teach human rights in history departments. Lauren writes as an artist paints, or a Persian carpet maker weaves densely knotted and intricate designs whose brilliant hues compete with each other for attention. He casts a searching light around the world and throughout history to locate those who, driven by compassion, altruism, and pity, have objected to injustice and exploitation. He refers to them all as human rights visionaries, a characterization that initially sparked my commentaries. Their visions seemingly transcended the bounds of the historically-contingent possibilities and struggled to improve human conditions. In a beautiful historical tapestry he offers "visions of prophets, philosophers, and activists" seen last century or centuries ago in the United States or in "distant lands," all "still capable of capturing our imagination, inspiring our thoughts, and influencing our behavior today." Indeed they do, particularly, I dare say, through Lauren's inspiring narrative which depicts their articulated wrath against perceived injustices and their hopes for an improved future. The book is full of retrospective and illuminative judgments. At certain critical conjunctures—such as the WWII era leading to the founding of the United Nations—many of the book's colorful threads converge to create complications that only an astute scholar-author could sift through without being lost in analytical mazes or leaving behind bewildered readers. Lauren follows the well-trodden path of the rights-of-men scholarship, tracing the historical origins of the concept back to ancient Greece and Rome, whose thinkers delved into a universal force they called the law of nature. To the pantheon of the ancients he adds the Mediterranean prophets and the Asian sages. The path leads him from the thirteenth century to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), passing through the renaissance and the decline of feudalism. At that stage, he explains, a major historical evolution occurred, whose narrative bears a formal resemblance to today's language of human rights. Lauren proclaims, "Thoughtful and insightful visionaries in many different times and places have seen in their mind's eye a world in which all people might enjoy certain basic and inherent rights simply by virtue of being human beings."2 This theme runs throughout the book, constructing a continuous, grand historical narrative to the present day. The book delineates the antecedences of human rights norms and explores the sources of "tributaries into the ever expanding and evolving river of thought about what would eventually be described as international human rights,"3 as well as the barriers constructed by the conservatives of each period to obstruct or at least impede the flow of such a mighty river...

Des « arts méconnus » aux « arts premiers » : inclusions et exclusions en anthropologie et en histoire de l’art

From “arts méconnus” to “arts premiers” : Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion in Anthropology and Art History In 1881, three years after the foundation of the musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, Emile Soldi published one of the first major books on non-Western art under the title Les Arts méconnus (unrecognized art forms). Today, with the opening of the pavillon des Sessions at the Louvre and the inauguration of the musée du quai Branly, the term “arts premiers” - roughly translatable as “primordial arts or early art” - is widely spread in France. Over the course of a century non-Western objects have been successively labeled in France “ethnographic objects”, “arts méconnus”, “arts lointains” (artifacts from distant lands), “primitive art” and, finally, “arts premiers”. This constant process of renaming and redefining non-Western objects informs us about changes in anthropological approaches since the second half of the nineteenth century as it does about the extension of the Western notion of art to non-Western objects. At the same time, non-Western objects are submitted to the same canonical criteria that art historians apply to Western art, and the notion of art has increasingly been equated with the material dimension.