Historical Contingency Research Articles

Reformed government. Puritanism, historical contingency, and ecclesiastical politics in late Elizabethan England. Edited by Polly Ha with Jonathan D. Moore and Edda Frankot. Pp. lxxii + 191. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. £95. 978 0 19 879810 1

Reformed government. Puritanism, historical contingency, and ecclesiastical politics in late Elizabethan England. Edited by Polly Ha with Jonathan D. Moore and Edda Frankot. Pp. lxxii + 191. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. £95. 978 0 19 879810 1

Adorno and Ecofeminist Ethics

ABSTRACT This article connects three elements of Theodor Adorno’s critical theory and contemporary ecological feminism: the critique of a strict dualism between nature and human activity, the role of care in moral thinking, and considerations of “the animal” in ethical frameworks. First, the author unpacks Adorno’s critical concept of “natural-history,” Naturgeschichte, which gives philosophy a two-pronged task: to denaturalize history and to historicize nature. After the article demonstrates that complicating the dualism between nature and history has consequences for ontology and our sense of “what things are,” the author further suggests that the concept of natural-history critically modifies ethics and the terms concerning “what we ought to do.” By examining the critiques of rationalist moral approaches in the work of Adorno, Carol Gilligan, and Deborah Slicer, the article argues for an ethics of care that resists both the false naturalization of contingent history and the denigration of the nonhuman.

Global Dynamics of an Oligopoly Game Model with Nonlinear Costs and Strategic Delegation

A dynamic oligopoly game model with nonlinear cost and strategic delegation is built on the basis of isoelastic demand in this paper. And the dynamic characteristics of this game model are investigated. The local stability of the boundary equilibrium points is analyzed by means of the stability theory and Jacobian matrix, and the stability region of the Nash equilibrium point is obtained by Jury criterion. It is concluded that the system may lose stability through Flip bifurcation and Neimark–Sacker bifurcation. And the effects of speed of adjustment, price elasticity, profit weight coefficient and marginal cost on the system stability are discussed through numerical simulation. After that, the coexistence of attractors is analyzed through the basin of attraction, where multiple stability always means path dependence, implying that the long-term behavior of enterprises is strongly affected by historical contingency. In other words, a small perturbation of the initial conditions will have a significant impact on the system. In addition, the global dynamical behavior of the system is analyzed by using the critical curves, the basin of attraction, absorbing areas and a noninvertible map, revealing that three global bifurcations, the first two of which are caused by the interconversion of simply-connected and multiply-connected regions in the basin of attraction, and the third global bifurcation, that is, the final bifurcation is caused by the contact between attractors and the boundary of the basin of attraction.

Historical Contingency: A Special Issue on Epistemic & Non-Epistemic Values in Historical Sciences

Historical Contingency: A Special Issue on Epistemic & Non-Epistemic Values in Historical Sciences

Narrative Explanation and Non-Epistemic Value

Abstract Explanations in the natural historical sciences often take the form of stories. This paper examines two accounts of the sources of narrative’s explanatory power: Beatty’s suggestion that narrative explanation is closely connected to historical contingency, and that narratives explain by contrasting what happened with what might have happened; and Ereshefsky and Turner’s view that narratives explain by organizing events around a central subject with a distinctive direction of historical development. In both accounts, it turns out that non-epistemic values typically play a role in the construction of narrative, and hence contribute to narrative’s explanatory force. Two case studies from historical science – the plate tectonic story of the Avalonian terrane, and the story of the evolution of trichromatic vision in (some) mammals – help to motivate and illustrate this argument.

Promises, Promises

Promises, Promises Sarah Haley (bio) To say that prison is place may be self-evident. And yet, Ruthie Gilmore does the awe-inducing work of transforming our understanding of prisons as placemaking, which is to say economy-making and state-making formations; she also delineates ways of being present together that make prisons less possible. Her theorization of abolition as presence is so dramatically sharp because of her own organizing work to create and dismantle. Those of us working on research toward abolition will have already read many of the essays in Abolition Geography. Indeed, Gilmore's essays are avidly and passionately read, recited, circulated, lines shared between us. You know the one: "The expansion of prison constitutes a geographical solution to socioeconomic problems, politically organized by the state which is itself in the process of radical restructuring."1 The grammars of Gilmore's essays have already saturated abolitionist research: planned concentrations, aggrandizement, surplus, individualization. Gilmore's work to demonstrate that places are made through the movement of people and commodities and "people as commodities," and her deft theorization of racism as a practice of abstraction, has transformed multiple fields. So the task to assess (read: celebrate) the merits of work already so influential and now collected is a somewhat peculiar one. And yet Abolition Geographies is urgent as an announcement of Gilmore's eminence and the necessity of circulating her ideas beyond those who have and will enter the portals of JSTOR collections or google scholar searches confronted with paywall and passcode requests. Also, the gathering of ideas into a form that ardent Gilmore readers can hold and carry and place on the portion of the shelf reserved for the books to which we must return over and over is consequential; in other words, the affective gift of the collection should not be underestimated. Promise or premise? Whenever I think of the famous Gilmore line (which is very often), both words come to mind, and I fumble for a second before remembering which it is: right, promise. "Anti-state state: a state that grows on the promise of shrinking" (276). Perhaps the moment of uncertainty is because the premise of the anti-state state that Gilmore offers is so powerful. [End Page 377] But promise is important because it highlights the active (or maybe activist) character of the state, its dynamism, and its historical contingency. Gilmore writes, in an essay coauthored with Craig Gilmore, a "state is a territorially bounded set of relatively specialized institutions that develop and change over time in the gaps and fissures of social conflict, compromise, and cooperation" (262). States interact and "attempt to maintain consent or coercion" largely by retaining "singular control over who may commit violence and to what end" (263). States are, they note, the "residue of struggle," or "the long bloody process of staking out control of the planet's surface" (263), and so "the institutions comprising them are the same substance: partly realized and partly failed attempts to make general certain modes of social being whose underlying contradictions never fully disappear" (266). If the state is seemingly composed of stable, calcified qualities, it instead must be understood as characterized by agency, and its residue; structures making up the state are, Gilmore teaches us, "animated by agential capacities while the modes in which ordinary people organize to relieve the pressures that kill them and their kin are, or become, structural" (425). While Gilmore's work has been central to debates within Black, cultural, and leftist organizing and scholarship about whether the state itself holds promise, it is critical to the abolitionist imperatives (read: brilliance) of Gilmore's work to highlight the state as agent and residue of historical agency and, as such, a formation that can promise. Promise to decrease, to solve, to resolve, to redress, to protect, to stabilize and equalize, and on and on. This is especially significant because the emphasis on state agency in Gilmore's work demands new ways to consider the insurgent organizing of the dispossessed, caged, formerly caged, future caged, and enclosed. Gilmore's argument that one must understand state agency and structural insurgency exemplifies her way with contradiction and her unfaltering ability to shift...

Extemporáneo y contemporáneo: El poeta en la obra narrativa de Roberto Bolaño

Abstract: This article studies the poet as a key figure in Roberto Bolaño's narrative. Throughout his fiction, the poet will be constantly displaced from their time and turned into a subject akin to Nietzsche's untimely and Agamben's contemporary. Cast aside from history, he will be able to recognize and understand the presence of an absolute evil, recurring ad eternum throughout history. If the newly reinstated democracies in Latin America blindly embraced neoliberalism, putting an end to any utopic discourses, and thus rendering those who once chose the path of militancy obsolete, Bolaño will at least redeem the poet, by placing him above all and any historical contingencies. He will not be able to modify the course of history, but he will serve as a witness, if not a moral compass.

Reformed Government: Puritanism, Historical Contingency, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Late-Elizabethan England. A Critical Edition, with Introduction and Notes. Edited by Polly Ha, with Jonathan D. Moore and Edda Frankot. Oxford University Press, 2022. lxx + 191 pp. £95.00 hardcover.

Reformed Government: Puritanism, Historical Contingency, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Late-Elizabethan England. A Critical Edition, with Introduction and Notes. Edited by Polly Ha, with Jonathan D. Moore and Edda Frankot. Oxford University Press, 2022. lxx + 191 pp. £95.00 hardcover.

Translating eco-evolutionary biology into therapy to tackle antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotic resistance is currently one of the most important public health problems. The golden age of antibiotic discovery ended decades ago, and new approaches are urgently needed. Therefore, preserving the efficacy of the antibiotics currently in use and developing compounds and strategies that specifically target antibiotic-resistant pathogens is critical. The identification of robust trends of antibiotic resistance evolution and of its associated trade-offs, such as collateral sensitivity or fitness costs, is invaluable for the design of rational evolution-based, ecology-based treatment approaches. In this Review, we discuss these evolutionary trade-offs and how such knowledge can aid in informing combination or alternating antibiotic therapies against bacterial infections. In addition, we discuss how targeting bacterial metabolism can enhance drug activity and impair antibiotic resistance evolution. Finally, we explore how an improved understanding of the original physiological function of antibiotic resistance determinants, which have evolved to reach clinical resistance after a process of historical contingency, may help to tackle antibiotic resistance.

Historical contingency in parasite community assembly: Community divergence results from early host exposure to symbionts and ecological drift.

Host individuals are commonly coinfected with multiple parasite species that may interact to shape within-host parasite community structure. In addition to within-host species interactions, parasite communities may also be structured by other processes like dispersal and ecological drift. The timing of dispersal (in particular, the temporal sequence in which parasite species infect a host individual) can alter within-host species interactions, setting the stage for historical contingency by priority effects, but how persistently such effects drive the trajectory of parasite community assembly is unclear, particularly under continued dispersal and ecological drift. We tested the role of species interactions under continued dispersal and ecological drift by simultaneously inoculating individual plants of tall fescue with a factorial combination of three symbionts (two foliar fungal parasites and a mutualistic endophyte), then deploying the plants in the field and tracking parasite communities as they assembled within host individuals. In the field, hosts were exposed to continued dispersal from a common pool of parasites, which should promote convergence in the structure of within-host parasite communities. Yet, analysis of parasite community trajectories found no signal of convergence. Instead, parasite community trajectories generally diverged from each other, and the magnitude of divergence depended on the initial composition of symbionts within each host, indicating historical contingency. Early in assembly, parasite communities also showed evidence of drift, revealing another source of among-host divergence in parasite community structure. Overall, these results show that both historical contingency and ecological drift contributed to divergence in parasite community assembly within hosts.

Dispersal changes soil bacterial interactions with fungal wood decomposition

Although microbes are the major agent of wood decomposition - a key component of the carbon cycle - the degree to which microbial community dynamics affect this process is unclear. One key knowledge gap is the extent to which stochastic variation in community assembly, e.g. due to historical contingency, can substantively affect decomposition rates. To close this knowledge gap, we manipulated the pool of microbes dispersing into laboratory microcosms using rainwater sampled across a transition zone between two vegetation types with distinct microbial communities. Because the laboratory microcosms were initially identical this allowed us to isolate the effect of changing microbial dispersal directly on community structure, biogeochemical cycles and wood decomposition. Dispersal significantly affected soil fungal and bacterial community composition and diversity, resulting in distinct patterns of soil nitrogen reduction and wood mass loss. Correlation analysis showed that the relationship among soil fungal and bacterial community, soil nitrogen reduction and wood mass loss were tightly connected. These results give empirical support to the notion that dispersal can structure the soil microbial community and through it ecosystem functions. Future biogeochemical models including the links between soil microbial community and wood decomposition may improve their precision in predicting wood decomposition.

Phenotypic and genotypic adaptation of Escherichia coli to thermal stress is contingent on genetic background.

Evolution can be contingent on history, but we do not yet have a clear understanding of the processes and dynamics that govern contingency. Here we performed the second phase of a two-phase evolution experiment to investigate features of contingency. The first phase of the experiment was based on Escherichia coli clones that had evolved at the stressful temperature of 42.2°C. The Phase 1 lines generally evolved through two adaptive pathways: mutations of rpoB, which encodes the beta subunit of RNA polymerase, or through rho, a transcriptional terminator. We hypothesized that epistatic interactions within the two pathways constrained their future adaptative potential, thus affecting patterns of historical contingency. Using 10 different E. coli Founders representing both adaptive pathways, we performed a second phase of evolution at 19.0°C to investigate how prior genetic divergence or adaptive pathway (rpoB vs. rho) affects evolutionary outcomes. We found that phenotype, as measured by relative fitness, was contingent on founder genotypes and pathways. This finding extended to genotypes, because E. coli from different Phase 1 histories evolved by adaptive mutations in distinct sets of genes. Our results suggest that evolution depends critically on genetic history, likely due to idiosyncratic epistatic interactions within and between evolutionary modules.

Racism and policing beyond North America

In this issue's “Directions” section, we initiate a discussion on racism and policing in places beyond North America. Part of our motivation for doing so stems from a common experience we share—as antiracist educators and as anthropologists of policing and the carceral state—in our classrooms and even among our peers. This is the misplaced notion that police racism is somehow a uniquely “American” problem that does not afflict other world regions, including our own countries of origin (the United Kingdom and Turkey). Though this viewpoint gains less and less academic traction today, conceptual frameworks for comprehending policing and racism and their various entanglements beyond North America are still in their infancy. This is especially true of places where nation-states that do not routinely statistically enumerate the ethnoracial make-up of their populations (e.g., in Germany and France), regions where ideologies of admixture that code everyone as “mixed” prevail (e.g., in Latin America, this issue), and places where racism is tethered to (and conceptually subsumed by) cognate forms of discrimination such as caste or xenophobia (e.g., China and Pakistan, this issue). Often intertwined with colonialism, the omission, amnesia, semantic recoding, or outright denial of racism go hand in hand with the erasure of both past and present forms of coloniality. While the robust and capacious scholarship on racism and policing in the United States has made enormous contributions in understanding how racism is sustained through policing, racism and policing come together in different ways historically and internationally. This historical contingency and variability call for regionally grounded framings that account for “multiple racisms” (Gilroy, 1987, 38) and, we would argue, plural policings. Sparked by the Black Lives Matter protests, governments and commissions around the world have focused their attention on assessing—and questioning—institutional racism within the police as a social reality and an organizing principle of state-sanctioned surveillance and violence. Yet importing and imposing US mainland-centric framings on other places, without accounting for history and culture, has sometimes served to foreclose rather than engender recognition of the problem. In the context of Europe, for instance, Sara Salem and Vanessa Thompson (2016, 2) demonstrate how the US-centric lens into the discourses of racism has helped “European societies to continue to construct a self-image that displaces racism onto other geographical contexts or isolates it as a purely historical phenomenon.” In a similar fashion, Dipesh Chakrabarty (1994, 145) argues that an analytical tendency to approach racism “as something the white people do” has undermined efforts to name and address systemic racism against various communities in India and elsewhere. Teasing apart and making sense of the different dimensions of “multiple racisms” and “multiple policings” is critical to understanding and addressing the problem. This means thinking through the variable ways that racial injustice and violence manifest and are maintained by and through policing. As Eddie Bruce-Jones (2015) shows in his work on racism and German policing, the avoidance of using the term race in Germany is part of a layered political landscape of invisibility. Like in France, the political injunction against gathering racial statistics makes it hard to prove that police violence differentially affects nonwhite Germans (2015, 36). If we are committed to understanding and addressing how policing differently targets and afflicts violence upon communities globally, we need to engage with multiple understandings of racism and policing. This means exploring the structures and logics that allow for the criminalization and collective punishment of racialized and disadvantaged communities around the world and excavating the local and particular histories and presents that differentially value human life along racial lines, rendering some communities worthy and deserving of protecting and others unworthy and targets of police violence. Accordingly, this section and its accompanying online “Emergent Conversations Series,” is devoted to exploring the intersections of racism and policing outside North America.

Conceptual Confusion in R.G. Collingwood’s Theory of the “Criterion of Historical Truth”

In the section of The Idea of History entitled “Epilegomena 2: The Historical Imagination,” R.G. Collingwood propounds his theory of the criterion of historical truth. All theory entails ontological commitment to those principles and concepts on which its truth relies. In Collingwood’s case, these include the historical or a priori imagination, the concept of necessity, the idea of the past as an innate idea, a coherence theory of truth in the project “to construct a picture of things as they really were and of events as they really happened,” and an elastic notion of evidence, according to which the present, as sequel to the past, serves as evidence for the past. Each of these commitments succumbs to challenges to its validity, plausibility, and applicability. As a result, the very notion of a criterion of historical truth, as Collingwood formulates it, collapses. The a priori imagination lacks any point of epistemological purchase and becomes a faculty with nothing to address since, in applying this concept, Collingwood confuses the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge as well as that between a priori and inferential reasoning, converts historical contingency into necessity, and misconstrues the notion of synthesis or the combination of disparate units into a systematic whole. Moreover, through his linking of evidence with temporal becoming, truth loses its stable meaning as perspective on evidence changes with each new moment, as does the evidence itself.

ON SOME ACTUAL PROBLEMS OF REFORMING RUSSIAN HIGHER EDUCATION AT THE PRESENT STAGE

The object of the research is the peculiarities of the latter-day reforms of Russian higher school that over the past two decades has gone through a serious transformation. The purpose of the paper is to analyze some issues of the performed changes, public experts’ proposals, and after reviewing theoretical and methodological studies of Russian and foreign scientists, some other countries’ experience of higher education reforming, the officially offered variant of modernization to substantiate the hypothesis that the maintenance of multi-level higher education in Russia will require to rethink profoundly the role of baccalaureate, specialty and magistracy in the higher educational process and to set up a unique modern based on the unified competence structure training system of both specialists with higher education and research staff. The paper examines the necessity of taking into account both the character of traditions and obvious advantages of Russian, including Soviet, education, and foreign positive operational experience. During the work the comparative method of historical analysis and system contingency approach were used. It was concluded that setting up an independent system of Russian higher education is primary at present.

Morphological and molecular characterization of twenty-five new Diploneis species (Bacillariophyta) from Lake Tanganyika and its surrounding areas

Lake Tanganyika, the second oldest lake in the world, is home to some of the largest and most phenotypically, genetically, and ecologically diverse freshwater assemblages. While the evolutionary processes responsible for generating its extraordinary richness are well understood across various animal groups, little is known about the diatom species richness, turnover patterns, and their drivers. Here, we explored species richness of the diatom genus Diploneis from Lake Tanganyika and surrounding regions by using morphological and molecular information. Both datasets suggested the presence of twenty-five new Diploneis species, each not related to any known Diploneis species so far. The multi-locus phylogeny indicates a monophyletic group of twenty-one Diploneis species from Lake Tanganyika, suggesting potential intralacustrine diversification possibly triggered by certain historical contingencies. This is supported by the small genetic distances and the presence of unique silica ornamentations on the valve face exterior, to date only known to occur on the Baikal endemic Diploneis implicatus. The discovery of such a high richness of Diploneis species in Lake Tanganyika and the presence of a unique morphological character points to a potential adaptive radiation - a mechanism yet to be confirmed.

Historicising the perpetrators of sexual violence: global perspectives from the modern world

ABSTRACT This special issue seeks to re-situate perpetrators at the heart of discussions of sexually coercive behaviour. Acts of sexual aggression are intrinsically connected to historically contingent gender dynamics, as well as by social structures which foster the circumstances for sexual assault. In a wide range of geopolitical contexts, the perpetrators of sexual violence have been protected by ineffective and intrusive police, prosecution and court systems which ultimately place the burden of proof on victims, and by patriarchal social structures in which aggressors are more likely to occupy positions of power which can be exploited with impunity. Our contributors come from varied disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, sociology, media studies and history to explore perceptions and characteristics of sexual perpetrators in a range of geographical and cultural contexts. Throughout their work, the term ‘perpetrator’ emerges as both the individual agent of crime as well as the institutions, social structures, and discourses which facilitate and accommodate sexual violence. By recognising the historical contingency of sexual perpetrators, we eschew essentialising worldviews which present sexual harm as natural and immutable.

In Charisma’s Wake: History, Divinity, and Change in Early Mādhva Vedānta

Abstract As religious reformers who, since their origins in late thirteenth-century Tulunadu, sought to correct what they believed were false interpretations of the Vedic canon, Mādhva Brahmins have thought actively about processes of social and intellectual change. This article examines several Sanskrit texts attributed to fourteenth-century Mādhva authors that recount the movement’s origins and contemplate how past forces had corrupted the canon and what kind of circumstances might rehabilitate it. Of course, one of those circumstances was the advent of the movement’s founder, Śrī Madhvācārya (1238–1317) whose self-proclaimed divinity legitimated his reformist message. But while these texts elaborate Madhva’s supernatural identity so as to promote the Mādhva movement’s regional importance within Tulunadu, they also consider more mundane aspects of religious and social innovation. In the process, these texts acknowledge their divinely guided movement’s historical contingency. This acknowledgment complicates certain longstanding scholarly perspectives on premodern Sanskrit intellectuals’ attitudes towards change.

Irreplicability in methodology: embracing the historical contingencies of educational technology research during the 2020–2021 United States school year

ABSTRACT The claim that research should prioritize qualities of replicability is foundational to scientific knowledge production. At the same time, replication is not an algorithm but instead based on a disciplinary community’s values and norms. With this understanding, we reflect on how varying degrees of replicability and irreplicability are always co-constituted in research projects through historically situated relationships between humans, methods, and technologies. We explore our own research collaborations and choices during the 2020–2021 US school year – defined by the COVID-19 pandemic and emergency remote teaching – to recast irreplicability not as a mark of pseudo-science but instead as an inherent part of studying teaching and learning during emergency conditions. We argue that explicit attention to irreplicability can not only be generative in research design but can help researchers think about themselves as historical actors who are accountable to the particularities and contingencies of the conditions in which they work.

Thinking about Islamic legal traditions in multicultural contexts

ABSTRACT Faced by the apparent difference between legal traditions, how should scholars and policy makers assess their compatibility or incompatibility? What criteria should be used to adjudge the commensurability, or even the elements of incongruity, between traditions that have developed in different cultural, social and economic circumstances? This article argues for a shift from the way that much of the scholarship on Islamic legal traditions in Western polities pursues these questions. First, scholars assess Islamic legal traditions by explicitly or implicitly assessing their compliance with a contingent Western rendition of the rule of law. Second, comparisons tend to focus on a Western legal theoretical priority of the ‘rule’ itself, whereby conceptualisations of law are parsed out using an analytical infrastructure particular to the contingent history of the nation state. Such approaches may usefully assess migrant traditions’ political compatibility with a benevolent or hegemonic Western legal regime. Indeed, they may be defended philosophically on the basis of ‘difference blind’ legal arrangements or some kind of minimal secular baseline of governance. However, these approaches are insufficient for addressing the prior question of commensurability. Based on ethnographic data from the Shia Muslim tradition of legal training, I offer a brief account of two ‘repertoires of justification’ standing askance from this anyhow contingent rendition of Western law. This account serves as a counterpoint to rule based approaches, demonstrating why commensurability should be assessed through an attentiveness to the alternative logics of other legal traditions.