Pre-modern Societies Research Articles

Orthodox Christianity and the State: the Relevance of Globalization

Abstract Orthodox Christianity remains relatively understudied and its scholarly analysis still suffers from widespread misconceptions. This article’s opening section is devoted to de-bunking of past biases, as these emerge in conventional or traditional modernist images of Orthodoxy in scholarship. Next, the article lays out a global perspective and argues that such a perspective can contribute greatly toward a different understanding of the relationship between Orthodox Church and politics. It proposes a series of distinct church-state patterns as observed in Orthodox pre-modern and modern societies. The variety of these arrangements strongly suggests the need to overturn past interpretations and to accept the basic premise that Orthodox Christianity has a multifaceted relationship to society and culture – as well as to accept the notion that, from within the lenses of historical globalization, Orthodoxy has experienced historical change and that its current version is in fact not the relic of an unchanged tradition but rather the product of social change and of adjustment to globalization.

Energy Decline and Authoritarianism

Could declining world energy supplies result in a turn toward authoritarianism by governments around the world? Mainstream forecasts of an increase in world energy production lasting until at least mid-century are coming under sustained criticism from researchers emphasizing the dynamics of resource depletion. Energy decline is a likely near-term challenge that polities around the world will face. Energy metabolism is a constraining factor for societal complexity and economic production, as established in the anthropological and biophysical economics literature and supported by a multitude of examples of both modern and pre-modern societies. It can be argued that political systems will necessarily face significant destabilization and the potential for a reversion to more autocratic forms as a result of energy depletion. We review relevant risk factors for this shift toward authoritarianism and discuss the contrasting aspects of democratic and authoritarian governance under conditions of energy decline. We conclude with a discussion of possible responses to counter the risks of democratic failure. Overall, we find that opacity of the links between energy, the economy, and politics may hamper such responses and that a more widespread understanding of the role of energy in society will be advantageous to the survival of democratic governance.

Social bonds with the dead: how funerals transformed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Evolutionary thanatology includes the study of necrophoresis—the removal of dead individuals by the living among social insects. In human societies, ‘necrophoresis' is performed via the funeral ceremony. In pre-modern societies, relatives and local community members helped to conduct funerals. In this way, holding a funeral was a form of mutual help, a social exchange of duty and responsibility essential to individuals. These societies developed systems to ensure the survival of humans as social animals based on mutual trust built over long periods of time within the same community. Contemporary societies are undermining these systems. Compared to funerals in pre-modern societies, holding a funeral in a modern society is a complicated process that requires professionals with specialized knowledge and skills. If people feel they can face mortality without support from relatives or the local community, and that they cannot necessarily expect a future return on the effort invested in community-based social relationships, they may begin to disengage from such relationships. In the context of modernization, the clearest changes in collective funerary behaviours include decreased funeral attendance and the above-mentioned outsourcing of funerary services. As such, it can be said that bonds with the dead changed completely under modernization, especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To establish a sociology of death with a clearer focus on how funeral ceremonies have been affected by modernization, there is a need for research concerned with human behavioural changes regarding the treatment of corpses—that is, a ‘funeralogy'. Accordingly, this study aimed to investigate how modernization has complexified the handling of deceased bodies as death-related services have become commoditized and outsourced while, at the same time, local communities are becoming disengaged from their traditional roles in funeral ceremonies. To this end, fieldwork was conducted in several countries. Moreover, data from surveys conducted by the Social Well-Being Research Consortium in Asia in five East and Southeast Asian countries were quantitatively analysed. The findings highlight the modernization of funerals with the outsourcing of funeral services from the perspective of socio-economic development.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary thanatology: impacts of the dead on the living in humans and other animals'.

Palaeodietary reconstruction as an alternative approach to poorly preserved early medieval human bone assemblages: the case of Boadilla (Toledo, Spain)

This article presents the results of research on the human population buried at the early medieval cemetery of Boadilla (Toledo, Spain). This was the burial ground of a rural community that was established at the nearby village of Alameda del Senorio. Both sites were occupied between the end of the fifth and the beginning of the eighth century. The cemetery was characterized by the ordered arrangement of its graves, the frequent re-use of graves and the deposition of grave goods in some burials. The human osteological assemblage was poorly preserved. The minimum number of individuals was estimated to comprise 226 individuals recovered in 181 burials. The population had a demographic profile typical of premodern agricultural societies. Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analyses were successfully carried out on 73 human and 20 faunal samples. The results indicate that the faunal diet was exclusively based on C3 resources and point to different management strategies for each taxon. The human diet was mainly based on C3 plants, but most individuals also consumed small but regular amounts of C4 resources. Protein intake was very variable and related to age, with subadults between 3 and 7 years old having the lowest intake. No relationship was found between the diet of the deceased and the deposition of grave goods in their graves. Finally, there was less variation between the individuals buried in the same grave than within the whole population, an aspect that may suggest the presence of family burials.

Intersex Bodies in Premodern Islamic Discourse

Abstract Sexuality scholarship demonstrates the historical production of the male/female sexual binary in scientific discourse. While some scholars have applied the insights of this scholarship to modern Islamic contexts, studies on intersex persons (khuntha) in premodern Islamic societies often underestimate the nonjudgmental character of legal and medical discourse. Based on analysis of medical, lexicographical, and juridical discourse from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries, this article argues that the dominant strand of this discourse tolerated ambiguity and flexibility regarding nonbinary sex embodiments. This discourse widely recognized three to five sexual categories, including khuntha mushkil, a “medial sex” with intersex physical characteristics difficult to categorize as predominantly male or female. Jurists and physicians treated such persons as indeterminate or complex, even when assigning them a “provisional” legal sex. Premodern Islamic experts largely understood intersex as ambiguous and mutable when addressing inheritance, prayer, burial, dress, travel, and marriage.

Rediscovering lessons of adaptation from the past

Abstract We argue that the deep time perspectives offered by historical disciplines, such as archaeology and history, provide important human-scale data about climate-adaptation over long timescales, and that these insights are currently lacking in global change research and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. Pre-modern societies are not comparable with contemporary societies, but the completed experiments they represent can offer evidence of the consequences of climate change, the challenges of uncertainty and socio-cultural limits to adaptation. The limited visibility of data on long-term human interactions with climate change in global change research could be overcome through a ‘new social contract’, a two-way movement between global change and historical disciplines to, 1) make use of, and apply, historical data to contemporary climate-related challenges, 2) design robust interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research, 3) publish synthesised research in high-impact climate-adaptation journals, and 4) communicate research to the public in cultural history museums.

Antitrust in History

The antitrust world before 1890 looks barren when compared with today’s global antitrust industry. The most common antitrust laws in pre-modern societies condemned practices that had the perceived tendency to raise prices: forestalling, hoarding and price fixing. Enforcement was focused on retail markets and trade in essential foodstuffs, like grain. Laws intended to ensure fair prices are common throughout history. Rules prohibiting unfair or excessive prices raise the more general question of price controls in pre-industrial societies. The historical evidence is ambiguous. Laws prohibiting monopolistic or abusive conduct are less clearly evident than anti-cartel laws in pre-industrial societies, although a few references exist. Before the 20th century, courts and authorities lacked the tools of modern economic analysis, like mathematics-based theories of harm. This absence of modern economics meant that there was no clear distinction among “economic,” “social,” “moral” and “political” policy objectives. Laws concerning product quality, consumer fraud and misrepresentations are commonly found in pre-modern societies. Although consumer protection rules were based on notions of fair dealing and justice, the rules were consistent with modern economic notions of transaction cost efficiencies, asymmetric market information and imperfect market information.

The Social Burden of Resilience: A Historical Perspective

We examine the social burden associated with resilience to environmental shocks in pre-modern societies. We argue that analyses of state-level interventions to mitigate the consequences of catastrophic events tend to isolate these measures from their larger social contexts and thereby overlook the uneven distribution of their burden across different groups. We use three cases of pre-modern societies in the northeastern Mediterranean - the sixth century Roman Empire, the tenth century Byzantine Empire, and the sixteenth century Ottoman Empire. We demonstrate how the adaptive processes that reinforced resilience at the state level incurred different burdens for those at lower levels of the social hierarchy. We found that some groups sustained losses while others gained unexpected benefits in the context of temporary systemic instability. We also found that although elites enjoyed enhanced buffers against the adverse effects in comparison with non-elites, this did not consistently guarantee them a better outcome. We conclude that the differentiated burden of resilience could in some cases entrench existing political or economic configurations, and in other cases, overturn them. Our case studies indirectly address the pressing issue of environmental justice.

Empreintes du tantrisme en Chine et en Asie orientale: Imaginaires, rituels, influences by Vincent Durand-Dastès

Reviewed by: Empreintes du tantrisme en Chine et en Asie orientale: Imaginaires, rituels, influences by Vincent Durand-Dastès Martin Lehnert Vincent Durand-Dastès, ed., Empreintes du tantrisme en Chine et en Asie orientale: Imaginaires, rituels, influences. Institut Belge de Hautes Études Chinoises, Mélanges Chinois et Bouddhiques, vol. 32. Leuven, Paris, and Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2016. vi, 380 pp. €80 (pb). ISBN 978-90-429-3034-6 As a follow up to a symposium held at the Centre d’études chinoises of INALCO, Paris, on May 15, 2009, this volume traces Tantric practices and beliefs in China and East Asia by focusing on the related imaginations, rituals, and influences in the wider religious contexts both in pre-modern and (to a lesser extent) modern society. The variety of contexts requires a heuristic, subject-related approach that would allow one not to get lost in the diversity of particular phenomena. In his “Introduction,” Vincent Durand-Dastès defines a set of criteria that help to delimit the subject: (1) the importance of sophisticated rituals, in particular rituals of consecration and for the evocation of deities; (2) a particular pantheon related to such rituals; (3) the importance of thaumaturgical practices; (4) the purported immediate “magical” efficacy of ritual actions and objects; (5) affirmation of “passions” and practices in soteriological terms which Buddhist doctrine would not [End Page 73] otherwise consider; (6) implementation of such means for individual as well as governmental ends, the latter often based on notions of sacral kingship. As none of these criteria exclusively apply to Buddhist formations, the editor and authors prefer the concept of “Tantrism” (instead of, e.g., esoteric Buddhism, although this terminological decision is not adhered to in a strictly programmatic manner), which also allows for more flexibility in tracing the variety of relations to Daoism, Shintō, and vernacular religion. Such an approach, on the one hand, keeps up the tradition of Michel Strickmann’s groundbreaking studies (to the memory of whom the volume is also dedicated), and, on the other hand, further differentiates scholarly conceptions of “Tantrism” in the context of East Asian religion. The volume is divided into three sections. The first section, “Imaginaires,” comprises three chapters dealing with Tantric influences on the iconography, literature, and mythology of pre-modern China: Caroline Gyss examines liturgical furnishings and paintings (largely from Baoningsi 寶寧寺) pertaining to the “purificatory ritual of water and land” (shuiluzhai 水陸齋) and highlights local dynamics that helped to define the status of Tantric and/or Daoist deities during the Ming period. Vincent Durand-Dastès gives a detailed analysis of the perceived moral ambiguity of Tantric practices as they are described in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Chinese novels. Finally, Meir Shahar maps out the background, sources, and developments which nourished the Chinese imagination about the Nezha 那吒 deity with particular regard to Kṛṣṇa and Indian mythology. The second section, “Rituels,” deals with the socio-historical aspects of ritual practice: With special focus on the “Records of Yijian” (Yijian zhi 夷堅志), a famous collection of stories about things divine and supernatural compiled around 1198, Liu Hong examines lay Buddhist uses of the still popular “Dhāraṇī of Great Compassion” (Dabei zhou 大悲咒) and highlights its therapeutic and apotropaic significance in the context of medical practice vis-à-vis shamanism. In the only chapter written in English, Ester Bianchi discusses pre-modern as well as modern Chinese versions of the “Chanting of the Names of Mañjuśrī” (Mañjuśrī-nāma-saṃgīti) and their reception in twentieth-century China, which was also motivated by the growing interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Addressing contemporary Daoist ritual and the influence of Tantric mūdra-practice, Brigitte Baptandier gives an account of the various thaumaturgic and therapeutic competences maintained by the ritual experts of the Lüshan pai 閭山派 tradition located in Fujian and Taiwan. The third section, “Contrepoints: Japon et Corée,” comprises two chapters addressing Tantric practices in Japan and Korea, respectively: François Macé outlines certain synthetic aspects of Tantric Buddhism in Japan which reflect the ambiguity of tutelary deities venerated for their protective as well as transgressive assistance to the clergy and the lay people. With a length of 86...

Earthquakes as the Quintessential SCE: Methodology and Societal Resilience

This paper focuses on earthquakes as the most frequent type of SCE (short-term cataclysmic event) with signatures in the three main sources used to reconstruct the premodern environment, namely historical records, archaeological findings, and paleoclimate proxies. We examine methodological issues in archaeoseismology (including earthquake catalogs, statistics, and the measurement of societal resilience to earthquakes in premodern societies in the eastern Mediterranean), before investigating societal earthquake response in the region. The behavior of different groups within these societies, such as the central government or local elites, is assessed in this context. The regenerative or adaptive aspects of seismic events are demonstrated with consideration of their archaeological footprints. This paper concludes that complex societies in the Eastern Mediterranean during the past two millennia were largely resilient to earthquakes at the state-level, though local effects on the aspect and character of urban settlement could be more pronounced.

Reconstructing Tradition: Heritage Authentication and Tourism-Related Commodification of the Ancient City of Pingyao

This paper examines how the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (CCPWCNH) is implemented in China, with specific reference to tourism development at the local level in the Ancient City of Pingyao (ACP). Based on a qualitative methodology and constructivist paradigm, the research employs observation and semi-structured interviews to explore how the interaction between heritage authorization and tourism-related commodification shapes the transformation of the local community. Giddens’ theories, amongst others, on modernity, time–space distanciation, disembedding, and reflexivity, are employed to analyze this case study. The paper argues that the reconstruction of “traditional-style culture” has contributed to the transformative processes in the ACP. Traditional-style culture differs from “traditional culture” in that the former refers to cultural forms that are purposely (re)constructed to serve contemporary political or economic needs, while the latter refers to cultural forms that are rooted in the local contexts of premodern societies. One of the impacts of traditional-style culture, which is the product of the interaction between heritage authorization and tourism development, is the emergence of a commercialized environment. This environment confounds the notion of authenticity that is claimed in authorized concepts of heritage. There, construction of traditional-style culture demonstrates the relationship of powerful actors with hierarchical power, leading to an unequal positioning of external agents (such as heritage experts) and local residents.

The Origins of the Division of Labor in Pre-Modern Times

This research explores the historical roots of the division of labor in pre-modern societies. Exploiting a variety of identification strategies and a novel ethnic level dataset combining geocoded ethnographic, linguistic and genetic data, it shows that higher levels of intra-ethnic diversity were conducive to economic specialization in the pre-modern era. The findings are robust to a host of geographical, institutional, cultural and historical confounders, and suggest that variation in intra-ethnic diversity is a key predictor of the division of labor in pre-modern times.

Short-term Cataclysmic Events in Premodern Complex Societies

This paper surveys a group of natural hazards such as droughts, earthquakes, epidemics, locusts, transient weather events, and volcanos, conceiving of all of them as belonging to a broader category of short-term cataclysmic events (SCEs). Although the event types differ in their primary effects, their secondary and tertiary effects disrupt premodern human societies in similar ways. The main types of SCEs are further examined in light of the three main groups of sources – historical, archaeological and climate proxies – together with references and examples.

BORDERS AND BEYOND: CONTESTED POWER AND DISCOURSE AROUND SOUTHEAST COASTAL CHINA IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

This article focuses on the mobile peoples who engaged in piracy on the borders beyond the territories negotiated by the imperial Chinese and colonial Spanish and Dutch powers, and by doing so, reframe our perception of early modern imperial and maritime history. In pre-modern times, the control of territory within the administrative borders was incomplete, and small pockets of territories with porous borders were beyond governmental rule. The people and the groups that lived along the coast of the northeastern South China Sea were, at different times, recognized differently and many of their activities were at times sanctioned and at other times outlawed. This article reveals a facet of how the non-stateless peoples lived on the borders beyond, claimed their own order in their own way, and worked and became naturalized or classified inside the strengthening borders in pre-modern societies according to the agenda and discourses of the dominant powers. I argue that the coastal societies had their own “order” that created groups “beyond control” or “being registered gradually.”

The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity ed. by John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette

Reviewed by: The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity ed. by John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette Robert Elder The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity. Edited by John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette. Foreword by Edward L. Ayers. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xxii, 360. $54.99, ISBN 978-1-61117-728-2.) When Bertram Wyatt-Brown published Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982), he joined Eugene D. Genovese and other historians who described the South as a place set apart not only from the North but also from the modern world. Over the next three decades slavery and honor were central pillars in the edifice of southern exceptionalism. But in the last few years this view has been significantly destabilized, if not totally demolished, as historians have redefined southern slavery as a particularly rapacious variety of capitalism that formed the lifeblood of a global empire of cotton. If slavery and the South can be so completely redefined as part of the modern world, then what of honor, which seems so firmly intertwined with an interpretation of the region as a premodern society? Is honor still a compelling lens for looking at the South? This collection of essays is an excellent place to begin answering that question, among many others, about honor. John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette have assembled an impressively broad and interdisciplinary group of scholars. There are eighteen essays, not counting Edward L. Ayers's foreword, that range from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries and consider honor in legal, literary, religious, commercial, and political frames, covering topics that include dueling, gossip, writing, infanticide, emotion, conservatism, conjuring, credit, college, corn farming, and one infamous confidence man. Several essays in the collection examine how honor mediated the South's encounter with the capitalist marketplace. In an essay on credit rating in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, Amanda R. Mushal notes that local credit "correspondents often deployed the language, values, and assumptions of southern honor to describe their neighbors' business characters," and she finds that "a reputation for honor or dishonor carried material consequences in the world of business" (p. 56). Honor may have been priceless, but in the case of Charleston merchants William Ravenel and C. K. Huger, their honorable characters led credit correspondent 11007 to rate their creditworthiness at "'say [End Page 745] ab[ou]t 2 1/2'" (p. 55). But the market's ways of figuring worth could also threaten shame. Kathleen M. Hilliard examines a scandal that erupted in 1824 when a member of the Pendleton Farmers' Society in South Carolina claimed to have raised a prodigious crop of corn but failed repeatedly in his attempts to have it verified. The story, Hilliard writes, shows "tensions between deeply subjective understandings of Old South honor and ostensibly objective calculations of productivity and reform" (p. 42). Amid the rising tide of mass production and mobility that accompanied the transition to capitalism, the issue of authenticity—always one of honor's central concerns—was a vexing one. Few figures in the antebellum South better illustrate this anxiety than David Theophilus Hines, whose sins against honor Lawrence T. McDonnell examines in delightful detail. The son of an overseer, Hines became infamous as a confidence man (he may have been the inspiration for Herman Melville's archetype) who aped the manners and mores of the southern man of honor so well that he destabilized the assumptions of honor itself. As McDonnell writes, "if the antithesis of honor could be mistaken for the acme of honor by men who called themselves honorable gentlemen, what did that slip portend?" (p. 182). Some essays extend Bertram Wyatt-Brown's analysis to groups that did not appear prominently in Southern Honor, revealing the stratified layers of honor groupings that existed in the South. For instance, Jeff Forret brings to bear extensive research into court records to establish that, contrary to the beliefs of some modern scholars and slaveholders themselves, the lack of legally recognized marriages under slavery did not lessen the shame of bearing a child out of wedlock for enslaved women. As Forret writes, "these accounts suggest...

Paradoxes of Polarization: Democracy’s Inherent Division and the (Anti-) Populist Challenge

This article carries out a theoretical analysis of the relationship between democracy and polarization. It utilizes examples from a variety of premodern and modern societies to argue that difference and division are inherent to a vibrant democratic life and to representation itself. At the same time, a stable and pluralist democratic culture presupposes the establishment of a common ground required for reflexive democratic decision making. To take into account both requirements, this must be a special type of common ground: an agonistic common ground. Agonism, as opposed to both the politics of raw antagonism and the postpolitics of consensus, values the existence of real alternatives and even ideological distance but aims at sublimating their pernicious effects. However, an agonistic outcome is always the result of a delicate balancing act between oligarchic and populist tendencies. In modernity, it predominantly took the form of a paradoxical blend of the democratic and the liberal tradition. The current crisis of liberal democracy and its postdemocratic mutation obliges one to ask whether democratic crisis may cause polarization, rather than the other way around, and puts in doubt the ability of the “moderate center” to deal with it in ways consolidating democracy. The article illustrates its theoretical rationale with examples from populism/antipopulism polarization in contemporary Greece, where elite-driven antipopulist discourse has consistently employed dehumanizing repertoires enhancing pernicious polarization.

The Ecosystems of Simple and Complex Societies: Social and Geographical Dynamics

We present a spatial agent-based model of the emergence and proliferation of premodern complex societies in an isolated region initially inhabited by simple societies. At the intrasocietal level, the model integrates scalar stress, social fission, sociocultural evolution, societal collapse, and Malthusian-Ricardian demographic dynamics. At the geographical level, the model includes warfare for territory and captives, territorial division due to social conflict, and territorial disintegration due to collapse. We found that a single variable---slow, continuous progress in intensive agriculture---drives the social and geographical dynamics. Consistent with the archaeological and historical record, the model produced three consecutive eras: During the first era, simple societies dominate the region. They use extensive food production methods. Small complex societies of intensive agriculturists emerge intermittently in the core land, where intensification is feasible. Shortly after, they collapse or are annihilated by local simple societies. During the second era, some complex societies avert early collapse and annihilation. They expand by conquest. At all times, they coexist with simple societies. Some complex societies are destroyed in war; others collapse. From time to time, complex societies collapse en masse. During the third era, there are no more mass collapses. Complex societies slowly expand until they dominate the core land. Simple societies take refuge in the marginal land, where intensification is infeasible. Simple and complex societies coexist, separated by a moving frontier. In an ebb and flow, complex societies expand to the marginal land and withdraw to the core land. The results of the simulations are qualitatively consistent with prehistorical and historical case studies. The model replicates the progression from simple to more complex societies, and explains why that progression happened in fits and starts.

Premodern History and the Frontiers of the South China Sea

Convergence 1 A&Q Premodern History and the Frontiers of the South China Sea In this A&Q feature, five scholars working on the premodern history of what is now south China and continental Southeast Asia respond to the following prompts of their choosing, and one provides a metacommentary to evaluate the responses in light of future directions for study. The prompts were designed to elucidate difficulties these scholars encounter when trying to cross boundaries of a variety of sorts: temporal, by virtue of the fact that all of these scholars work on periods predating 1000 ce; spatial, by virtue of the fact that the regions they study were either on the peripheries of great states and empires or outside and in between them; linguistic, by virtue of the fact that most of these cultures and societies were inhabited by peoples speaking languages that were drastically different from each other or from the Sinitic or Vietic spheres currently associated with the regions; and ethnic (boundaries of identity), by virtue of the fact that the diverse communities of premodern south China and Southeast Asia saw themselves and others in terms of distinctions that might be dubbed “ethnic” or, at the very least, “cultural.” Their responses echo a set of convergences that reveal why scholars of premodern societies have much to add to the larger conversation about frontiers as well as the role that nationalism plays in limiting ways forward. 1. In what ways would you respond to the editors’ call to use frontier as a methodological tool to break binaries such as center–­ periphery, core–­ margin, or core–­ frontier? Can you explain your response using an example from your work? 2. How do you prefer to represent the mixing of different cultural or social practices, ideas, peoples, technologies, or political and military systems? Do notions such as hybridity, syncretism, and networks of interaction play a role in your work, and if so, how? 3. How might nationalistic constructions of contemporary states such as China, Vietnam, Korea, or Japan as well as other ethnic 2 A & Q constructions of Han, Japanese, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Korean, Taiwanese, and so on, interfere or interject themselves into your work? 4. What does your work contribute to the current body of scholarship on frontier studies, and where would you like to see the field heading in the future? What about implications for the field of history more generally? Destabilizing Centers: Religious History on the Dali Frontier Megan Bryson My research focuses on the Dali region in what is now southwest China’s Yunnan Province. Between the seventh century and the Mongol conquest of 1253, Dali was home to a series of independent regimes whose territory encompassed parts of modern-­day Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam as well as parts of the Chinese provinces Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan. Dali’s status as a frontier depends on one’s perspective. From the view of Tang (618–­ 907) and Song dynasty records, Dali was a frontier region in the Turnerian sense of demarcating civilization from barbarism. If a frontier is “a territory faced and culturally perceived as being on the fringe of the usual” or a place “looked upon by external peoples and polities to be situated on the fringes of the world of each,” the court in Chang’an, Kaifeng, or Lhasa may have seen Dali as a frontier, but the courts centered in Dali did not (Anderson and Whitmore 2015, 2). From a modern area studies perspective, Dali is a frontier region by virtue of lying on the boundaries of East, South, central, and Southeast Asia and as such can call into question these disciplinary divisions. In examining Dali as a frontier region, I follow Hugh Elton’s (1996) looser definition of frontiers as places where different kinds of boundaries (religious, cultural, political, geographic) intersect and overlap. Dali’s position amid linguistic, cultural, and religious boundaries makes it a fruitful place for thinking about frontiers. Dali’s geopolitical location has also meant that it serves as a litmus test of sorts: the tendency to identify Dali’s origins as Tibetan, Indian, Thai, or Chinese reflects more about the scholar’s interests than evidence from premodern Dali itself. For instance, the view that the rulers...

Essays from The English Institute 2016: Time

Essays from The English Institute 2016:Time Christina Lupton and R. John Williams Time was on our mind at the English Institute in 2016. It was the institution's 75th anniversary and that long axis of continuity came into focus against the fact of our new spatial mobility (what had been an annual trek to Harvard was now a rotating series among Yale, Chicago, and Irvine). That we were interested in time, however, was neither entirely new nor surprising. Topics addressed at English Institute meetings over the last two decades had included Periodization, Repetition, and Tense—each generating its own conversation on literary form and temporality. Reading these conversations carefully, one is left with a sense that nearly every category of literary analysis (historicity, epoch, plot, narration, seriality, meter, linearity, and so on) could be framed as a question of temporal experience. The term postmodernism may have described, in Fredric Jameson's terms, a transition from a modernist obsession with time to a globalist obsession with space, but the term itself (and its accompanying periodization of late capitalism) was already overdetermined by categories of temporal progression. And when high theory was at its highest, it was its attention to the temporality of writing that complicated the philosophical privileging of speech and its various mythologies of presence. Even in what came to be known as the transnational turn in English literary studies—reimagining all kinds of spatial boundaries in more comparative literary forms like the anglophone, the postcolonial, the subaltern, and minority literatures—we have been carefully tuned to questions of time and literary form (demystifying, for instance, colonial fantasies in which certain cultures were declared more "modern" than others). The discipline, it would seem, has always been on time. And yet it could be said that in recent years, time has become a prism through which many material, ontological, and even institutional categories are turned anew. Put simply, the clocks we are watching seem to be getting bigger. Consider, for example, how literature's ability to explore deep time has become a means for the discipline to understand the ecological, cultural, and political dilemmas of the Anthropocene. (Science fiction is certainly no longer a non-academic genre.) Or notice how literature as analyzed by computational algorithms has become an object of inquiry so vast that we are suddenly able to "read" whole [End Page 283] libraries of data—and in a time period no human being could ever hope to replicate. It is a time of big clocks, and these were some of the Institute's considerations as we met in 2016—as well as in the following year, when our topic was Scale. The goal was not so much to replace the discipline's attention to traditional categories of literary temporality as to explore what some of these newer questions respecting time had to teach us about the topics we care so much about. The text assigned for the meeting, E. P. Thompson's "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," anticipates both the political dimension and scalable qualities that work on time can take.1 In this 1967 essay, Thompson famously charts the contrast between the task-orientated practices (of pre-modern societies; of women; of students) and the time-orientated disciplines that came by the late 1700s to characterise modern industrial life. The control of bodies and minds depends in this scenario on the regulation and self-regulation of thought and action in time. Working to the clock, lining up protestant and capitalist logics through the equation of time to money, the modern laborer becomes deprived of a whole set of relations to the world that might open up again if we were to see time differently—as something to be slowed down, for instance, rather than used, spent well, or counted. The piece itself is invested in the big picture because it suggests that we might radically historicize how we occupy and count our days. In Thompson's narrative, literature counts as one of the resources for approaching time otherwise. The optimism of this argument springs, to be sure, firmly from the logic of the 1960s—from a rejection of office routines, of the norms of industrial...

Towards an explanation of inequality in premodern societies: the role of colonies, urbanization, and high population density

AbstractUsing a newly expanded set of 41 social tables from premodern societies, this article tries to identify the factors associated with the level of inequality and the inequality extraction ratio (how close to the maximum inequality the elites have pushed actual inequality). Strong evidence is found to show that elites in colonies were more extractive, and that more densely populated and less urbanized countries exhibited lower extraction ratios. Several possibilities are proposed, linking high population density to low inequality and to low elite extraction.