Distant Pasts Research Articles

Finding Minority Voices in Early Modern European Archives

ABSTRACTSince the rise of postmodernism and the archival turn in the mid-nineteen nineties with the writings of Jacques Derrida and others, much scholarship has been dedicated to the question ‘who is not represented in the archives?’ Indeed, suggested changes and alterations to traditional archival practice include the incorporation of newer models like social provenance, oral history testimonies, shared-stewardship, and community archives. While this wealth of attention and consideration towards creating more inclusive archives today are sorely needed, what can be done for archives of more distant pasts? In this article, I evaluate a number of different scholarly works which address, or demonstrate, the issue of finding minority voices in early modern archives specifically. Whether through the study of works of art, literature, or legal, government documents, these authors either find ways to breathe life into past histories once assumed to be utterly lost, or their problematic analyses uncover potential for using such methods.

Institutional-cultural coherence and economic development: The case of the Spanish regions

We explore how cultural traits coherent with liberal institutions affect economic performance. The matching between cultural traits and institutions is what we refer to as cultural-institutional coherence. We study how cultural-institutional coherence influenced the paths followed by Spanish regions after Spain's liberal reforms in the 19th century. We argue that these liberal reforms brought important changes to Spain's institutions and contributed to inducing a major rearrangement in the distribution of economic development across the country's regions. This process favored regions with cultural traits that were more coherent with liberal institutions. We address endogeneity issues using the disparate political paths that the regions followed in their distant pasts. We characterize political paths in terms of Municipal autonomy in the Middle Ages, as well as Constraints on the executive in the early modern period which, we argue, are good instruments for these cultural traits.

Russian Disinformation – The Technological Force Multiplier

Part one of this article is a Literature Review assessing the state of the collected works of arguments surrounding the comparison and contrasting of older Soviet and contemporary Russian disinformation campaigns. There were two main overarching ideas that kept reemerging: either there is no practical difference or technological change is the only real difference, and even then, some believe it is just a natural evolution of these systems of disinformation. Other less frequent ideas surrounding this analysis are also highlighted as potentially important variables. After reviewing these previous works, the second part of this piece delves deeper into the topic by laying out examples of disinformation campaigns of the recent and distant pasts. The Literature Review and resulting analysis will ultimately show a correlation between the growth of technology and the speed of changes in the tactics used for Russian disinformation, as well as consistency between the goals of the Russian government today and the Soviet regime.

Depth and Death

AbstractThis article proposes a re-reading of what inclusion into the sphere of the historical actually means in modern European historical discourse. It argues that this re-reading permits challenging a powerful but problematic norm of ontological homogeneity as something to be achieved in and by historical discourse. At least some of the more conceptually profound challenges that accounts of “deep history”—of very distant pasts—pose to historical discourse have to do with pursuits of this norm. Historical theory has the potential of responding to some of these challenges and actually reverting them back to the practice of accounting for deep times in historical writing. The argument proceeds, in a first step, by analyzing the ties between modern European mortuary cultures and historical writing. In a second step, the history of humanitarian moralities is brought to bear on the analysis to make visible, thirdly, the fractured presences of deep time in modern-era and contemporary historical writing. The fractures in question emerge, the article argues, from the ontological heterogeneity of historical knowledge. Thus, in the end, a position beyond ontological homogeneity is adumbrated.

Where Secrets Lie by Eva V. Gibson

Reviewed by: Where Secrets Lie by Eva V. Gibson Alaine Martaus Gibson, Eva V. Where Secrets Lie. Simon, 2021 [384p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781534451223 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781534451247 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12 Since childhood, seventeen-year-old Amy Larsen has spent summers on her wealthy family’s estate just outside rundown River Run, Kentucky, hanging with golden-boy cousin Ben and working class soulmate Teddy. Last year, yearnings broke free, hearts broke, and fights ended friendships; this summer, the distances seem unbroachable, until tragedy strikes. New grief shoves aside old grievances, as the three set out to solve the heartbreaking mystery that, unbeknownst to all, links their three families. With its abundance of personal angst and intergenerational strife paired with a compelling mystery, this gripping drama-thriller reads like a cross between Dawson’s Creek and Riverdale. The twining narratives, one this year, one last, gradually ratchet up anticipation for both romance and revelation, bridging recent and distant pasts, teens and parents. Indeed, it is the writing and plotting that are the true stars here, pulling the audience in, sweeping them along, and keeping them caring about both the characters and their quest for the truth. Readers more observant than heroine Amy may see some of the big reveals coming, but that won’t undermine the tension of the final confrontation or the relief as final chapters set most things to rights again. [End Page 380] Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Introduction: The Making of Sámi Religion in Contemporary Society

This Special Issue of Religions approaches “Sámi religion” from a long-term perspective seeing both the past religious practices and contemporary religious expressions as aspects of the same phenomena. This does not refer, however, to a focus on continuity or to a static or uniform understanding of Sámi religion. Sámi religion is an ambiguous concept that has to be understood as a pluralistic phenomenon consisting of multiple applications and associations and widely differing interpretations, and that highlights the complexities of processes of religion-making. In a historical perspective and in many contemporary contexts (such as museum displays, media stories, as well as educational programs) the term Sámi religion is mostly used as a reference to Sámi pre-Christian religious practices, to Laestadianism, a Lutheran revival movement that spread among the Sámi during the 19th Century, and last but not least to shamanism. In this issue, we particularly aim to look into contemporary contexts where Sámi religion is expressed, consumed, and promoted. We ask what role it plays in identity politics and heritagization processes, and how different actors connect with distant local religious pasts—in other words, in which contexts is Sámi religion activated, by whom, and for what?

The Ties That Bind: A Coronavirus Disease Journey.

The Ties That Bind: A Coronavirus Disease Journey.

Историческата тема в творчеството на скулптора Борис Гондов

In the works of sculptor Boris Gondov the historical theme occupies an important place. He transforms vivid events and personalities of the story deeply and masterfully into a plastic direction. Our near and distant pasts excite the author and he creates memorable images such as those of Patriarch Evtimii, King Boris I, King Samuel, Kolyo Ficheto, Dimitar Blagoev and many others. Through them he discovers his attitude to a certain historical period and the personalities of history. Boris Gondov always looks for the original compositional and plastic solution and transforms his images in the light of their role and appreciation of their work in history.

Object

Drawing on autoethnography as a genre, this letter of disapplication to the discipline of organizational communication is organized around short poems. Speaking from my positionality as a brown foreign woman of Ivorian and French heritage, I walk the reader through my experience of the walkout at the 2019 National Communication Association Organizational Communication Division's Top Paper Panel. Weaving in recent and distant pasts, I claim that this particular encounter is interconnected to other daily embodied experiences of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism that constitute the normal for many people of color in communication studies.

Rune Stones as Material Relations in Late Pagan and Early Christian Scandinavia

In this article, the material qualities and the use of space on rune stone and its links to the landscape during the Viking Age and in the Early Medieval Period in South Scandinavia are explored and related to acts of commemoration and changing spatial perceptions. The 11th century rune stones from Denmark and Scania without iconography have previously received less scholarly attention by the archaeologists, but here they form the main focus. Whereas the commemorative aspects of the rune stones have been noticed by a number of scholars, less emphasis has been on their material qualities and the spatial aspects of the inscription on the stones; the spatial references in the rune stones to the surrounding landscape; and the bodily effect they had for the readers of the runes. The rune stones are studied as expressions of social relations between living, deceased and places in late pagan and early Christian Scandinavia. Three phenomena are explored: the rune stones at bridges and the role of the bridge in paganism and Christianity; the use of the surface and shape of the stones to separate diverging beings; and the shape of the inscription and its relation to the new concepts of afterworld in terms of heaven above, while simultaneously creating links to near and distant pasts. Further, the process of creating relations to distant pasts in the Early Christian period is explored.

Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts by Juan G. Ramos

Reviewed by: Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts by Juan G. Ramos Katie Anania Ramos, Juan G. Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts. U of Florida P, 2018. Pp. 266. ISBN 978-1-68340-024-0. Poetry, film, and music all summon revolutionary energy in particular historical moments in distinct ways. In his book Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America, Juan G. Ramos preserves the heterogeneity of these arts while simultaneously undermining the disciplinary boundaries that separate them. In this ambitious and stimulating volume, Ramos puts forward Jacques Rancière’s theory of aisthesis, or the idea that all sensory perception should be trusted as knowledge, as a way of re-centering the arts within the cultural production of leftism. Ramos’s main argument is that we cannot grasp the networked, interdisciplinary political artworks of the 1960s using traditional epistemes handed down from colonially-driven academic disciplines. Instead, he uses the sensescape as a framework—something that, according to the Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo and the aforementioned French political theorist Rancière, bypasses the rigid structures of knowledge that are the West’s colonial legacy. Such structures, including Kantian aesthetics, exclude (and discount) the movement-galvanizing, world-changing power of popular entertainment forms like antipoetry, nueva canción, and the New Latin American Cinema. Ramos shows how these art forms created new sensory environments for thinking about what futures were possible. In four sections, Ramos reveals the poetic, filmic, and musical techniques across Latin America that appealed to the senses in order to locate “a certain indigenous spirit” in Latin America that was “the key to a future poetics of liberation” (65). The most commendable aspect of the book is its willingness to combine seeing, hearing, and spoken dialogue into the central axis of a decolonial aesthetic program. Ramos reminds us, rightly, that the sounds, sights, smells, tastes and touches of decolonial movements across Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s were drawn from “other” places and times, such as vernacular cultural forms from these countries’ distant pasts. By focusing on how they were heard and received in the long 1960s, Ramos fashions a method for considering these entertainment forms—many of them meant for popular audiences—without “fall[ing] prey to nostalgia,” as many analyses of the global 1960s tend to do (19). In this sense, several groups stand to benefit [End Page 288] from this book. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students might mine it for methods and bibliography for their own material on postcolonial cultural production, in an effort to expand the canon of Latin American literary and cultural history. Scholars of comparative literature, philosophy, art history, or film studies will find a methodologically adventurous account of popular arts production across Latin America. Broadly, the book also appeals to anyone interested in the history of leftism within Latin American lived experience in the long 1960s. The text is not without problems. The first and most pressing is that, despite the book’s title, Ramos’s prose style frequently neglects the senses. Descriptions of how these poems, songs, or films might have unfolded in the moment are frequently sidelined in favor of quotations of other scholars’ work. While Ramos has done rigorous research to craft an energizing constellation of discourses—a challenge for a text with this kind of interdisciplinary scope—the book often tells rather than shows. Illustrations could also have done significant work in Chapter 3 to demonstrate how nueva canción performances might have been “sensed otherwise” (21), or in Chapter 4, to show how each of his chosen New Latin American films “engage . . . [the] other modes of sensing” that constitute a decolonial aesthetic experience (147). Additionally, Ramos introduces gender alongside other identities and positionalities that were historically de-emphasized and subjugated under colonialism but does not directly set it aside as a framework for many of his analyses. This is surprising given that this book charts important new terrain in analyzing mixed-gender artistic networks of poets, performers, and filmmakers. An example is his discussion of both the musician and artist Violeta Parra and poet Nicanor Parra, who are brother and sister. Violeta Parra’s work in both music and the visual arts...

Translating the Distant into the Present: How actors address distant past and future events through situated activity

Situated views demonstrate how ongoing activity is both framed by temporal structures and serves to reproduce those same structures. Yet, recent research on temporality shows that addressing distant events enables actors to reflect on and eventually transform the temporal structures that frame their ongoing activity. We develop a theoretical framework of how actors address distant events through situated activity in organizations in three steps. First, we discuss the notion of situated temporality to describe how actors go beyond, and potentially transform, the temporal structures within which they operate as they address distant events through situated activity. Second, we introduce the concepts of singular and exemplary events to show how distant pasts and futures comprise different combinations of events. Third, we discuss how certain areas of organization studies that advocate a situated view, notably practices, routines and materiality, may benefit from a situated temporal view. At the paper’s conclusion we suggest the concept of ‘temporal translation’ to describe the process of how actors may combine different temporalities through situated activity.

The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin

Reviewed by: The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin Mark A. Goldberg The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. By Greg Grandin. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019. Pp. 370. Sources, notes, index.) In this sweeping book, historian Greg Grandin demonstrates the power, influence, and transformation of the frontier myth in the history of the United States. Writing for a popular audience, Grandin argues that President Trump's border wall signifies the true closing of the frontier, or the "promise of boundlessness" (7), more than one hundred years after Frederick Jackson Turner first declared the frontier closed. Instead of a reckoning with America's imagined limitlessness and its harmful impact on democracy, equity, the environment, and countless human bodies, Trump's acknowledgment of limits embraces domination, targeting those same victims of this once powerful myth. The End of the Myth covers three centuries of American history, beginning in colonial America with the Royal Proclamation Line of 1763. For colonists, the boundary separating Native and British territories hindered their ability to achieve individual independence through agriculture and land ownership. This was not the first time Euro-American settlers invaded Native lands; however, such acquisition solidified the notion that expansion would solve America's problems. In the post-independence era, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison advocated a westward-looking empire of liberty and extensions of the sphere, respectively, as ways to achieve "true" American democracy and freedom. As the United States industrialized in the nineteenth century, Americans saw the West as the [End Page 374] solution for all obstacles to progress, at least progress for ordinary white men, built on the backs of women, Native peoples, African Americans, and ethnic Mexicans. Slave owners removed Indians and instituted a growing cotton industry while paying little attention to a growing sectional crisis, and militias and military men achieved their masculinist dreams through violent expansion. Then came Turner and the so-called closing of the frontier, which introduced a new reading of limitlessness. In his 1893 speech, Turner solidified Anglo westward expansion as the essence of American democracy. The way to achieve progress and build America would now expand beyond its geopolitical borders. In 1898, three decades after the Civil War, northern and southern soldiers worked together to "save" the Caribbean and Philippines from Spanish tyranny. Yet white soldiers, reveling in the havoc they wreaked on people of color on the islands, employed violence against fellow African American military men. Frontiers also produced fear, which has continued to the present day. Early twentieth-century white nativists mapped their anxieties about a closed frontier onto U.S. borders and influenced the creation of the Border Patrol and immigration quotas. Americans viewed World War II, the New Deal, and the Cold War through a frontier lens, and the brutality of Vietnam built on the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and Spanish-American War as "another frontier war" (201). While Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists used the frontier myth to push alternative visions of America predicated on civil rights and antiwar critique, the Right advocated "the right to limitlessness," most markedly characterized by Ronald Reagan (214). Boundless U.S. interventions abroad and global trade in the late twentieth century helped restructure North American economies to benefit the few, leaving the many without living wages and, in many cases, a place to call home. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent collapse of the economy once again transformed discussions of the frontier, and Americans responded with fear to what they perceived as chaos. By the election of President Obama, the frontier myth's safety valve had disappeared, giving rise to Trump and his wall, a symbol that "no longer pretends, in a world of limits, that everyone can be free—and enforces that reality through cruelty, domination, and racism" (275). The End of the Myth is an excellent intellectual history of the enduring frontier myth. It accessibly reframes the significance of U.S. expansion and adeptly ties the distant and recent pasts to the present day. Students of history as well as audiences interested...

Citing Wang Wei: Mi Youren and the Temporal Dimensions of Landscape

Mi Youren (1074-1151), one of the few painters active during the transition from the Northern Song (960-1127) to the Southern Song (1127-1279) whose works survive, provides a rare window on the trauma of the Jurchen invasions of 1127-30 that almost brought down the dynasty, and their effect on painting. Comments by Mi reveal that the evocation of the name of the esteemed poet, painter, and statesman Wang Wei (699-759) continued to be a part of the literati painter's practice at the end of the Northern Song, but what did Wang's name mean precisely? Wang, in fact, presented multiple images as a painter-portrayer of figures, landscapes, even bamboo. More importantly, as the connoisseur Mi Fu (1052-1107) pointed out, what constituted a genuine Wang Wei painting was little understood, as attributions of all kinds had proliferated. The practice of citation in painting will be reviewed against this backdrop, with attention paid to how familial and social contingencies shaped artistic decisions. Mi Youren, witness to the near collapse of a dynasty, presents particular urgency in his use of citation, layering evocations of both the near and distant pasts to affirm continuity in a period of great uncertainty. Specific emphasis is placed on Mi Youren's Cloudy Mountains of 1130 (Cleveland Museum of Art). The landscape's references to the painting conventions of the Tang dynasty (618-907), juxtaposed with the background image of a problematic Wang Wei, reveal Mi's efforts to establish an exclusive family vision, which he curiously labeled Xiao-Xiang after the poetic landscape of south China. Mi's repurposing of this well-known landscape term obliquely reflects upon an important transformation in how the past was cited by the second generation of literati painters.

Aitire, 人質, тали, όμηρος, رهن , obses: Hostages, Political Instability, and the Writing of History c. 900-c. 1050 CE

The medieval hostage stood as a surety given by one party into the custody of another, with the understanding that hostages bound their donors to a particular obligation or set of terms outlined by the hostages’ recipient. The practice is attested on a global scale, and much can be said about the narrative function of hostages as a foil for writers to construct stories of victory, defeat, piety, mercy and cruelty. This article adopts a broad geographical focus, from Ireland to eastern China. By looking at periods both of political turbulence and stability in the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, it examines how writers depicted hostage-giving in times of political fragmentation and change, and in what way was this reflected in narrative and documentary texts. By including authors writing about recent and more distant pasts, it explores how this practice operated both within and without the boundaries of legal custom, and considers how attitudes towards those who granted and received hostages might be shaped by politico-social transitions.

History meets palaeoscience: Consilience and collaboration in studying past societal responses to environmental change

History and archaeology have a well-established engagement with issues of premodern societal development and the interaction between physical and cultural environments; together, they offer a holistic view that can generate insights into the nature of cultural resilience and adaptation, as well as responses to catastrophe. Grasping the challenges that climate change presents and evolving appropriate policies that promote and support mitigation and adaptation requires not only an understanding of the science and the contemporary politics, but also an understanding of the history of the societies affected and in particular of their cultural logic. But whereas archaeologists have developed productive links with the paleosciences, historians have, on the whole, remained muted voices in the debate until recently. Here, we suggest several ways in which a consilience between the historical sciences and the natural sciences, including attention to even distant historical pasts, can deepen contemporary understanding of environmental change and its effects on human societies.

Gifts from Our Elders: African Artsand Visionary Art History

Gifts from Our Elders: African Arts<i>and Visionary Art History</i>

Deep sea writing: recent conversations with Lindsey Collen, writer and activist from Mauritius

ABSTRACTOceans have occupied our imagination since time immemorial, both in symbolic and in practical ways. The Indian Ocean is a region characterized both by complex economic, historical, cultural, and social entanglements. Memories of recent and distant pasts plumb oceanic depths, needing to be carefully recollected and sieved to make sense of the present, and imagine possibilities for the future. The ocean is thus read as a site of contested struggles, a space where historical identities and stories interconnect. Storytelling is one device through which personal and collective memories can resurface and be questioned, as can be observed in the work of South African-born Mauritian writer and activist Lindsey Collen. This essay discusses Collen’s outlook on the Indian Ocean region, and on Mauritian literature and socio-political landscape. Building on previous work and research on Collen as a major activist and literary figure in Mauritius, this paper is based on a series of interviews and conversations with Collen and the two authors.

Organizational Time

Whereas the evolution of organizations through time has received ample attention in longitudinal studies, the on-going construction of their pasts and futures is a relatively recent preoccupation among scholars. Yet, such a view is important for better understanding how actors’ time construction affects – and is affected by – organizational practices and processes. Our review of current literature on time and organization suggests that it is moving from a dominantly objective, continuous, singular, periodic and structured conception of time towards subjective, event-based, on-going, multiple and enacted conceptions of time. A common denominator of the five dimensions is a move towards greater temporal agency. Building on these five dimensions we propose how they can be synthesized into a novel theoretical framework of organizational time that accounts for temporal agency. The framework embodies three mutually constitutive conceptual elements: Temporal trajectories, events and temporal work. A distinguishing feature of the framework is that it addresses the present- past-future dynamics, while explaining how their mutual dynamics unfold in relation to near and distant futures and pasts. The paper then suggests how these dynamics are enacted in relation to five different time orientations that may be found with organizations, including suggestions for future research.

Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East: Recent Contributions from Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Archaeology

Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East: Recent Contributions from Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Archaeology