Uses of the Past: Archaeology in the Service of the State (1987)

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don D. Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
New World ◽  
The State ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Past ◽  
Symbolic Resources ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
Symbolic Resource

Nation states, or partisans thereof, control and allocate symbolic resources as one means of legitimizing power and authority, and in pursuit of their perceived nationalistic goals and ideologies. A major symbolic resource is the past. In this chapter I review three cases in which the past and, in particular, relevant archaeological resources were ‘used’ for such purposes, and I refer to several other well-known instances. The three cases discussed are Mexico from c.AD 900 to the present, Britain from c.AD 1500 to the present, and the People’s Republic of China since 1949. The implications of such uses in relation to archaeological theories and interpretations are discussed. In The Uses of the Past, Herbert Müller (1952) sought for ‘certainty of meaning’ in an analysis of the development of Western civilization. The only certainty he found was that the past has many uses. This chapter is concerned with some specific uses of the past: (1) how nation state rulers and bureaucrats have manipulated the past for nationalist purposes, both ideological and chauvinistic, and to legitimize their authority and power; (2) how nation states have used archaeological sites, artefacts, and theories for such purposes; (3) how these uses of the past relate to more general questions about the intellectual and socio-political contexts in which archaeology is conducted. The importance to the state of using or manipulating its past is neatly delineated in two great dystopian novels, George Orwell’s (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Aldous Huxley’s (1932) Brave New World. In the former, the Ministry of Truth totally revamps the past as needed to justify and lend ‘truth’ to the immediate requirements, actions, and policies of the state. In the latter, the past is blotted out. As the Resident World Controller for Western Europe, Mustafa Mond tells the Savage, ‘we haven’t any use for old things here’ (Huxley 1932: 200). In both cases, control and manipulation of the past or its complete denial is critical to state ideology and purposes.

Uses of the Past: Archaeology in the Service of the State

1987 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don D. Fowler
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
People’S Republic Of China ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Past ◽  
Symbolic Resources ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Symbolic Resource ◽  
Power And Authority

Nation states, or partisans thereof, control and allocate symbolic resources as one means of legitimizing power and authority, and in pursuit of their perceived nationalistic goals and ideologies. A major symbolic resource is the past. In this paper I review three cases in which the past and, in particular, relevant archaeological resources were "used" for such purposes, and I refer to several other well-known instances. The three cases discussed are Mexico from ca. A.D. 900 to the present, Britain from ca. A.D. 1500 to the present, and the People’s Republic of China since 1949. The implications of such uses in relation to archaeological theories and interpretations are discussed.

From Black Death to Black Hole

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Piatkowski
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Black Hole ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Black Death ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Past

In this chapter I explain why Poland and most countries in Eastern Europe have always lagged behind Western Europe in economic development. I discuss why in the past the European continent split into two parts and how Western and Eastern Europe followed starkly different developmental paths. I then demonstrate how Polish oligarchic elites built extractive institutions and how they adopted ideologies, cultures, and values, which undermined development from the late sixteenth century to 1939. I also describe how the elites created a libertarian country without taxes, state capacity, and rule of law, and how this ‘golden freedom’ led to Poland’s collapse and disappearance from the map of Europe in 1795. I argue that Polish extractive society was so well established that it could not reform itself from the inside. It was like a black hole, where the force of gravity is so strong that the light could not come out.

The Political Economy of Post-Independence India—A Review Article

1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 787-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhil Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Newly Industrialized Countries ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Balance Of Forces ◽  
The Third World

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely populated, predominantly rural and agricultural China, differing most perhaps in the obstinacy and depth of its poverty. In the predominant role played by the state within an essentially capitalist economy, it is closer to the model of Western social democracies than it is to either prominently ideological capitalist or socialist nation-states; like other countries in the “third world,” the state in India plays a highly interventionist developmental role. Finally, since Independence it has pursued, more successfully than most nation-states in Latin America and Asia, policies of importsubstituting industrialization and relative autarchy. In terms of its political structures, India differs from most newly industrialized countries (NICs) in that it generally continues to function as a parliamentary democracy. The federal political system creates an intriguing balance of forces between central and the regional state governments, which are often ruled by opposition parties with agendas, ideologies, and organizational structures quite different from those of the central government.

scholarly journals From the Greek Revolution of 1821 to the Metapolitefsi: Historiographical Debates in Greece across Two Centuries

HISTOREIN ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vangelis Karamanolakis ◽  
Christos Triantafyllou
Keyword(s):  
Social Power ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Symbolic Resource

Nowadays, with the celebration of the Greek state’s bicentennial, the exploration of how the national past was debated, historicised and narrated through historiographical and political means holds an interesting position: by examining how certain pasts entered the national canon, how events and figures were pantheonised, and how history and memory wars were conducted, we may be able to assess why and how nation-states commemorate themselves and formulate narratives about the shared past. Using the past as a symbolic resource, the agents of political and social power seek to provide the definitive version of how and why did we arrive at the present. Simultaneously, these official versions of the past are constantly contested by opposing social forces, which frequently manage to have their versions merge with, incorporated into or stand alongside those of their opponents. It is through these procedures, namely historiographical debates such as these explored in this issue of Historein, that the past turns into history.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santana Khanikar
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Forms Of Violence

How is it that nation-states running on democratic procedures like elections engage simultaneously in extreme forms of violence towards its own citizens? While introducing this question in this chapter, I discuss the institutional, conceptual, and temporal-spatial aspects of the modern state and how it can be studied ethnographically. As a study of the violent dimension of the state, questions of legality, routinesness and the targets of violence are also addressed. The chapter also outlines how the notion of legitimacy is conceived in the work, by examining various competing theorizations, and also by showing how a distinction between the terms hegemony and legitimacy are sustained in the work. At the end, the chapter gives an outline of the rest of the book and how various chapters engage with the issue of state violence in two field-contexts.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuang Chen
Keyword(s):  
Social Inequality ◽  
The State ◽  
Heavy Industry ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
Registration System ◽  
Hukou System ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
The Past ◽  
Stratification System

This chapter provides an overview of the structural inequality created by the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, especially that produced by the hukou household registration system. It shows that the processes of inequality under the hukou system has many parallels with that in the Qing-dynasty Shuangcheng. In order to develop heavy industry, the state used hukou registration to classify people into urban and rural categories, with urban hukou holders enjoying better economic and political entitlements than rural houkou holders do. This structural inequality not only defined the socioeconomic statuses of people in the socialist period but also produced profound consequences in social inequality in the post-socialist era. These parallels reveal that the stratification system in PRC, which people tend to consider as a socialist extension, has existed in the past. Thus, the Shuangcheng case offers a distinct perspective on how people typically conceive ‘modern’ phenomena.

Historical Sociology in Poland: Transformations of the Uses of the Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542110579
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kolasa-Nowak ◽  
Marta Bucholc
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Social ◽  
Symbolic Resource ◽  
Sociological Studies

The development of Polish institutional sociology since the 1920s reflects the combined effects of domestic political and cultural factors, along with international interdependencies. Historical sociology shares in the vicissitudes of the whole discipline. Although historical sociology was only weakly institutionalized before 1989, some of the best sociological studies produced in Poland under socialism display the keen use of historical imagination, inspired both by the pre-1939 domestic tradition and by Marxist theory. This article examines the path of historical sociology in Poland after 1989 and the connection between the sociological uses of history and the experience of post-communist transformation. We posit that the social transformation experience and how it was addressed by social science directly translate into the use of history in Polish sociology after 1989. We argue that the role of historical sociology in Poland since the end of the 1990s was a function of the potential of the past as a symbolic resource in the growing interdependence between Poland and Western Europe. However, the post-1989 research agendas of historical sociology were forged according to the mode of responsiveness to political agendas predating 1989. An overview of the development of Polish historical sociology demonstrates that the ahistorical transitological thinking after 1989 has been challenged by critical agendas in historical sociology, but it was, in the first place, a reaction to the increased potential of the past as a symbolic resource in political debates. Thus, the rationale for the passage to the third wave of historical sociology was primarily political.

The Understanding of other Cultures: Latin America

1955 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30
Author(s):  
Henry Grattan Doyle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
New World ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
Written Materials ◽  
Vast Area ◽  
Modern Sense

A POPULAR RADIO SERIES a dozen years ago, dealing broadly with the important area that is the subject of my talk tonight, was called (borrowing its title from Shakespeare) “Brave New World.” Braver still, in the modern sense, is the commentator who tries in a brief talk like this to deal with even one phase of the vast area, of some eight million square miles, and constituting about one-fifth of the world’s inhabited continents, that lies South of the continental United States. But I am what is called in Spanish an “Old Christian” in these matters, which may be roughly interpreted as the opposite of a “Johnny-Come-Lately,” as our own phrase has it. I have been a student of this area for nearly fifty years, a teacher of one of its languages, Spanish, and of the literature and other written materials published in that language, for more than forty years. During the past four years I have spent my summer vacations on educational missions that took me to all of the American republics except two—Bolivia and Paraguay. In some instances I have made two or three visits to individual countries during that period, supplementing a number of earlier trips, the first of which was in 1916. So I must be as “brave” as the fascinating and to us tremendously important complex of nations that make up the New World outside of the United States and Canada, which for want of a really accurate term we call Latin America.

The Past as Prologue: Imagining a Brave New World in Philip Osment’s This Island’s Mine

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217
Author(s):  
Andrew Urie
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
International Community ◽  
The Past ◽  
Authoritarian Populism ◽  
Brave New World

AbstractEmploying an interdisciplinary sociopolitical framework, I examine Philip Osment’s play This Island’s Mine (1988) and demonstrate how it interrogates and repudiates Margaret Thatcher’s neoconservative authoritarian populism. Specifically, I argue that Osment’s play constitutes not only a damning indictment of Thatcherism, but also an enduring work that speaks directly to our present sociopolitical conjuncture, which has witnessed varied forms of reactionary populism sweep nations throughout the international community.

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