Disassembling Archeology, Reassembling the Modern World

This article provides a substantive discussion of the relevance of the history of archeology to the history of science. At the same time, the article introduces the papers contained in this special issue as exemplars of this relevance. To make its case, the article moves through various themes in the history of archeology that overlap with key issues in the history of science. The article discusses the role and tension of regimes of science in antiquarian and archeological practices, and also considers issues of scale and place, particularly in relation to the field. Additionally, the piece attends to issues of professionalization and the constitution of an archeological public, at the same time as discussing issues of empire, colonialism, and the circulation of knowledge. Meanwhile, enriching discussions within and beyond the history of science, the article discusses the history of archeology and its relationship with museums, collecting, and material culture and materiality. Finally, the piece discusses the relationship of the history of archeology with wider discussions about scientific ethics. In conclusion, the article questions whether we should speak of ‘the history of archeology’ at all

Repatriation, doxa, and contested heritages: the return of the Altai princess in an international perspective

Using Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and doxa, the authors analyze the contested heritage debates surrounding the sensational Scythian burial discovery of the Altai Princess, also called the Ice Maiden, on the Ukok plateau. Her 2012 repatriation to a special Gazprom-funded museum in the Altai Republic of Russia is politically contextualized and compared to cases of the Kennewick Man in the United States and the Lake Mungo Burials of Australia. The authors stress the importance of "heritage in the making" and conclude that diverse approaches to the Altai Princess must be understood through the historically constituted dispositions of various agents and their interaction with the structures governing society

Citizenship after orientalism: Ottoman citizenship

About the book: A keen analysis of the social, political and economic determinants of Turkish politics with an exploration of the different dimensions of the republican model of Turkish citizenship, providing the reader with a comprehensive account of Turkish modernity and democracy. At the beginning of a new millennium, Turkey finds itself at a critical juncture in its democratic evolution. This momentous event has been precipitated by its desire to enter into the European Union and the recent financial crisis it has faced, both of which have fuelled the need for the creation of a strong, democratic Turkey. Consisting of a collection of innovative and influential essays by leading scholars, this book gives the reader an historical and sociological understanding of Turkey and adds a new dimension to the ongoing discussion surrounding global citizenship and global identity

Shades of empire: police photography in German South-West Africa

This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.International Bibliography of Social Science

Interpreting the Legal Archive of Visual Transformations: Textual Articulations of Visibility in Evidentiary Procedures and Documentary Formats of Colonial Law

This article is concerned with tracing an onto-epistemological break through the archeology of colonial penal law, whereby a historical restructuring of the “visible” and the “articulable” produces modern ways of “seeing” and “knowing.” This epistemic break will be investigated through eighteenth and nineteenth century “Regulation” of Islamic sharīʿa penal law by British administrators of the East India Company in colonial Bengal. The juridico-discursive body, which came to be known as Anglo-Muhammadan law, will be analyzed through court records compiled by Company jurists and their Regulations modifying sharīʿa jurisprudence. Islamic penal law is based on hermeneutical practices of juridical reasoning formed through particular ways of seeing, knowing, and verifying the truth through eye-witness and testimony. In this article I will show that when the British commandeered this system of justice towards their own ends, the regulatory changes they instituted inadvertently brought about visual transformations of the ways in which legal life-worlds of the colony come to be recorded, articulated, and expressed. Under the British administration of colonial Bengal, this dual-process of appropriation and subversion of the law took shape through translation and transliteration of fiqh treatises, to legal amendments and sweeping legislations in substantive law. This process not only provided colonial power access to the bodies of colonial subjects, but also conditioned the relations between criminality, visuality, and juridical veridiction through penal legislation. As this article will show, the East India Company’s regulation of Islamic penal law began incorporating modern forms of evidentiary proofs, indexicality, and documentary formats that restructured the lifeworld of colonial law in 19th century Bengal

Institute of Historical Research Newsletter, Spring Term 2006

The IHR produces a termly newsletter, which gives details of seminars and conferences and other historical news. This is the newsletter for the spring term 2006

Law and compassion: between ethics and economy, philosophical speculation and archeology

This paper examines the relationship between law and compassion from the perspective of two diverse scholars. For philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, rejecting the idea homo homini lupus, there can simply be no organized society but for a primordial, unauthorized, human vocation for compassion (egoism and violence, for him, are nothing but attempts to repress this). Levinas, however, must be understood, as speaking of compassion not in the usual sense, that is as involving a human capacity for, and cultures of, empathy; he defines it, rather, in phenomenological terms, as an irreducible excess of affectivity for the ultimately meaningless suffering of another, beyond all theodicy and causality, whom one is ethically commanded to offer succour to as if s/he is a ‘higher’ and absolutely unique Other, prior to any comparison and judgement. General legal principles and rigorous rules, Natural Justice and positive law are equally ‘born’ of such an-archic, individuated, compassion for which one can only retroactively account. Justice is ‘born’ as one attempts to justify to third parties why one’s care benefits some but not others; the paper argues that this perspective is preferable to prioritizing empathic compassion over law for it binds compassion with responsibility. Turning to Giorgio Agamben, the role of compassion takes on a darker character; his historicized investigations of the ‘western-Christian’ paradigm shows how the Greek and Roman legal principles of epieikeia, and aequitas merged with the Christian postulates of God-dictated philanthropy and ‘divine economy’ (Gr: oikonomia), leading –instead of ethical anarchy followed by with infinite responsibility (Levinas) – to anomie, legal exceptionalism and social control via patronage and other bio-political practices to spectacles of compassion. This suggests that what Levinas calls ‘ethical anarchy’ has been captured by economic rationality and endless processes of anomic management that are equally free of ethical constraints as they are from legal and political decision. With reference to contemporary examples from the ‘law and emotion’ debates, medical laws and humanitarianism, the paper asks the reader to ponder upon the importance, if any, of Levinas’ thesis in a world where the expediency of managerial rationality, the secular heir of divine oikonomia, prevails over moral, legal and political principle

The Socio-Political Contemporary History of Ukraine

The skills, knowledge and experiences that students receive as a result of the studying course “The Socio-Political Contemporary History of Ukraine” would help them to complete and form their general scientific overview, deepen their knowledge of contemporary historical processes, help them to feel themselves much more confident in their public activities and discussions. Knowledge of contemporary historical and social processes is very relevant during the bifurcation period of historical narrative. Our contemporary situation makes the students the witnesses of this process, thus they need relevant knowledge, skills and experiences provided by the course to orientate in this situation