Diverse Source Materials Research Articles

Modernizing Mansaf: The Consuming Contexts of Jordan's National Dish

Mansaf is the national feast dish of Jordan. As such, it is commonly associated with a traditional culture based on an agro-pastoral lifestyle in which meat and yogurt were readily available and hosts had ample time to attend to the needs of guests. This nostalgic ideal is not representative of contemporary Jordanian experience, yet mansaf remains—especially for those of Bedouin origin—the most appropriate measure of a host's respect for “his” guests. The relationship between mansaf as a domestic product and mansaf as a national icon are examined here in historical and contemporary contexts. Utilizing diverse source materials, I analyze the reactions of Jordanian Bedouin to general efforts to commodify, rationalize, and nationalize the meaning, making, and political utility of mansaf. This process sheds light on current analytical engagements with modernity, public culture, tourism, and the performance of national identity.

Het Srebrenica-rapport en de geschiedenis van het heden

The Srebrenica report and the history of present times, P. LagrouThe Srebrenica report, compiled by the Dutch Institute for War Documentation, is an unprecedented venture into genuinely contemporary history. The enquiry started one year after the massacre in July 1995 and the report was published less than six years later. The Dutch government granted the team of researchers exceptional access to public archives, but the investigation also benefited from the ongoing proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The report produced spectacular political results, culminating in the resignation of the Dutch government, but its implications for the debate on the chronological limits of the exercise of history as a scientific discipline will be longer lasting. Is the self-imposed limit, whereby historians only concern themselves with things past, that are at least a few decades old, merely circumstantial, due to the inaccessibility of the sources, and thus destined to disappear when the rules of access are changed or are they a fundamental condition of the historian's method? The report can be credited with impressive achievements in the reconstruction of the massacre through a thorough combination of very diverse source materials. It also raises fundamental questions in that it shows that a national approach is no longer sufficient to analyse the complex functioning of European politics at the close of the twentieth century. However, the most important objection one can level against the report's approach is that the fundamental problem of exclusive access granted to one specific research team, yet unavailable to contradictory investigations, was considerably aggravated by the redactional choice of a streamlined end-result that does not accommodate dissenting opinions or internal debate. This review is part of the discussion forum 'Srebrenica, een "veilig" gebied' (J. C. H. Blom, B. G J. de Graaff, D. C. L. Schoonoord).

African Americans and Jewish Americans: Searching for a new Song

Abstract Drawing on diverse source materials, the history of oppression of both peoples, dating to Biblical times, as well as more contemporary evils of slavery and the Holocaust are reviewed to show the commonalities in historical experience. Suffering tempered by religious beliefs has also been part of the history of both peoples. Current conflicts as well as shared values are discussed, as the case is made for the importance of understanding these two peoples by social workers. Suggestions for inclusion of materials in the social work curriculum are made.

The Social Context of Settlement in Norway in the First Millennium AD

A comparative approach towards understanding the character of the Scandinavian societies in the First Millennium AD is argued for in this article. A comparison with the other Germanic cultures north of the Alps, with their more diverse source material, allows for a thematically broader and more developed understanding of the specific and varying social formations in Scandinavia. The challenge of involving the archaeological record in this kind of analysis is more readily overcome if the Scandinavian written sources from the 11th century onwards are also included. A study along these lines, an analysis of the social context of settlement history in the region of Romerike, central eastern Norway, is presented. The settlement expansion in the First Millennium AD seems to have taken place in two main waves, one in the Late Roman Iron Age and one in the Viking Age, both of them brought about by the aristocracy whose control of the land was one component in their dominion. The aristocracy set their men, some of whom were slaves, to cultivate new farms on the land that was in their dominion. The rapid growth in the number of these unfree, half-free and free men made manpower abundant, while good arable land at that time was scarce. This situation reduced the need for forced labour, which is probably one of the main reasons why serfdom of the Continental type never developed in Norway.

Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (review)

Reviews 171 The short glossary, like the section on Theory and Practice, seems to have been compiled without any direct reference to the preceding text, and some inclusions and omissions are odd. W e are able to learn what circumvallation was, but not contravallation, and many of the entries have no specific military significance—why define 'Hussites' but not 'Saxons' or 'Swabians'? I would also take issue with the definition of 'gallo glach' (gallowglass) as 'heavilyarmored Irish footsoldiers'; as Cyril Falls notes in Elizabeth's Irish Wars, they were actually Scottish in origin, and were for a long time considered to be foreign troops by the Irish, the literal definition being gall (foreign) uglach (young fighting man). The reading list is very useful, including works published up to 1994, and the chronology chart will be of help to many readers. Charles Edelman Department of Language and Literature Edith Cowan University Hotchkiss, Valerie, R., Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Med Europe (The N e w Middle Ages 1), N e w York and London, Garland, 1997; board; pp. 201; R.R.P. US$30.00. This book provides a lively discussion of those strange creatures, women w manly spirits and the clothes to match, w h o drifted through the imaginations of medieval writers. As Hotchkiss points out in her introduction, disguised women aspired to and often achieved the male virtues of daring and strength while of necessity suppressing their female qualities. It is of course essential for the success of these narratives that the disguise be recognised, and although the male characteristics of the w o m e n m a y have usually w o n approval from their narrators, some aspect of essential femininity is at last revealed and the essential weakness of w o m e n is demonstrated. This broad outline of the function of the tales of female cross dressing is convincingly applied by Hotchkiss to an impressively wide variety of sources. After a brief contextual introduction, there are seven chapters each concentrating on one set of sources. Chapter T w o is a broad discussion of cross-dressing within hagiography. The main sources are the hagiographical texts of the early and predominantly eastern saints, w h o used male dress for a variety of purposes but were all discovered in the end. The conclusion drawn by Hotchkiss is that male disguise was usually viewed as sign of special sanctity, a view which served to underline the male dominance of all aspects of the medieval church. Chapter Three is an in-depth study of one historical woman, Hildegund von Schonau, w h o entered a monastery as the monk Joseph in 1187 and died a year later, after which her disguise was discovered. The texts analysed by Hotchkiss include the vitae written within a few years 172 Reviews of Hildegund's death, and portray profound ambivalence between admiration of the strength of Hildegund in her ability to maintain her disguise and anxiety about her femininity, particulalry her bodily functions. Chapters Four and Five continue the in-depth studies, with analyses of Joan of Arc and the legendary Pope Joan respectively. Hotchkiss concentrates on the place that cross dressing played in the rise and downfall of these two women. She is particularly interesting in discussing the ways that later medieval and early Renaissance writers used these two legends for their o w n political and religious purposes. Chapters Six and Seven return to discussions of a broad range of materials— the disguised wife in vernacular literature and a more general discussion of literary figures and cross dressing. These chapters emphasise the breadth of Hotchkiss' research and emphasise her conclusions that the male authors of tales of cross dressing display profound ambiguity about the virtues of masculinity and femininity. Generally, the chapters contain enough background information for the diverse source material to be understood by the non-specialist, though this is perhaps a little tedious to those readers w h o are very familiar with the material. One feature of this book is the inclusion of an appendix of the hagiographic sources which have been used. This is useful in offering the references to...

New Light On the Christian-Muslim Controyersy of the Nineteenth and Twentieth CENTUItY

Christian-Muslim relations in our day are marked by continuing mutual distortion, confrontation and rivalry as well as by genuine efforts to arrive at a more adequate understanding of one another by way of scholarship, dialogue and collaboration in the face of problems and goals perceived by at least some on each side as a genuine challenge to both. In this perspective the two works under review would seem to be of more than mere historical interest. Without a sound presentation and analysis of past disagreement, confrontation and polemics-which, as Schirrmacher demonstrates, continue vigourously in our day-a lasting improvement of Christian-Muslim relations will remain a vane hope. A.A. Powell's book is based on her doctoral thesis of 1983 at SOAS, London. A decade of teaching Asian and South Asian history and of further research on the subject have enabled her to transform the thesis into a mature and polished monograph. It impresses by the way a wide range of diverse primary and secondary source material has been critically digested and elegantly presented, as well as by its combining relentless and meticulous exploration of detail with sustained attention paid to the relevant socio-political settings and ideological issues. It is a major contribution to the body of writing on Indian and Indo-Muslim history as well as on the history of Christian-Muslim relations.

Professionalizing domesticity

The 19th century consolidation of the ideology of domesticity and the ideology of professionalism paralleled the evolution of nursing as a formal occupation for women. Efforts to combine these ideologies, which are based on markedly different foundational assumptions, have been central to the history of American nursing. A meaningful understanding of nursing's history necessitates a synthesis of the interpretations generated by individual historians who have studied similar events in nursing's past. Three feminist historians have studied the professionalizing process in nursing. Generated from diverse perspectives and source materials, the work of these historians illuminates the tensions resulting from nursing's efforts to blend the ideologies of domesticity and professionalism and provides insight into the lessons that can be learned from history.

Carbonate, silicate and fluid relationships in eclogites, Selje district and environs, SW Norway

ABSTRACTOrthopyroxene- and kyanite-lineage eclogites are distinguished on the basis of silicate and carbonate petrography and chemistry. Different textural and chemical types of magnesite, dolomite and calcite can be satisfactorily attributed to one of the three sequential metamorphic stages of eclogite history at anhydrous eclogite facies, hydrous eclogite facies and amphibolite facies. The chronological sequence of development of magnesite, dolomite and calcite matches the carbonate sequence found experimentally in synthetic peridotite-CO2-H2O systems during decompression. Magnesite and dolomite show reasonably regular Fe/Mg distribution relationships with silicates.A new geothermobarometer based upon is provisionally calibrated. It yields T estimates for given P very similar to those given by the geothermobarometer, e.g. 759–829°C at 20 kb and 803–894°C at 40 kb. P is tentatively estimated at 30±10, 23±6 and 10 ± 3 kb respectively for the three metamorphic stages.Fluid conditions after equilibration during each stage were either low or fluid-absent, but not low . A unique quartz-magnesite-dolomite vein represents an influx of CO2 in the P-T regime of instability of CO2 + pyroxene. Tectonic emplacement by deep-level obduction of diverse foreign source materials remains the petrogenetic model which best fits the data for these eclogites.

Rāmāyaṇa—An Instrument of Historical Contact and Cultural Transmission Between India and Asia

AbstractThis paper examines the role of the Hindu Epic Rāmāyaṇa in the historical and cultural contact between India and the rest of Asia. The Rama legend—rather legends—are prevalent in almost all countries of Asia, namely China, Tibet, East Turkestan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaya, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Burma. The contact was not only close but it was also general and widespread. By no means was it confined to the Brahmanical values which were upheld by Vālmīki in the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and shared by the upper strata of Hindu society. The Rama legends prevalent in Asia, except those in China, do not agree in content and emphasis with the Vālmīki version. A close examination of the Rama story in India itself reveals that in addition to the Vālmīki version, a number of Rama legends, differing from the Valmiki story, were prevalent in vernacular and Jain Literature all over the country. All diese versions provided the diverse and complex source material for the Ramayanic legends of Asia. Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical elements appeared in different mixtures and emphasis. While China accepted the more orthodox ethical values, the countries of Soudieast Asia adopted Rāmāyaṇa mostly for the epic qualities of romance, adventure, and valor.