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Utopia, History, and Revolution
Translator:
A renowned Peruvian historian, Alberto Flores Galindo (1949-1990) wrote fundamental books on Andean utopianism, José Carlos Mariátegui, subaltern Lima, and more. He participated in fiery debates on the left about Marxism, democracy, and socialism.
Written by two specialists in Peruvian history, this book addresses many of his major topics and contributions, including Peru's rupture with Spanish colonialism, his role as a Marxist public intellectual, his relationship with the Cuban Revolution, the Shining Path and human rights, and his passion for literature. The book introduces English readers to the life and work of one of Latin America's major Marxist thinkers.
Written by two specialists in Peruvian history, this book addresses many of his major topics and contributions, including Peru's rupture with Spanish colonialism, his role as a Marxist public intellectual, his relationship with the Cuban Revolution, the Shining Path and human rights, and his passion for literature. The book introduces English readers to the life and work of one of Latin America's major Marxist thinkers.
Utopia, History, and Revolution
A renowned Peruvian historian, Alberto Flores Galindo (1949-1990) wrote fundamental books on Andean utopianism, José Carlos Mariátegui, subaltern Lima, and more. He participated in fiery debates on the left about Marxism, democracy, and socialism.
Written by two specialists in Peruvian history, this book addresses many of his major topics and contributions, including Peru's rupture with Spanish colonialism, his role as a Marxist public intellectual, his relationship with the Cuban Revolution, the Shining Path and human rights, and his passion for literature. The book introduces English readers to the life and work of one of Latin America's major Marxist thinkers.
Written by two specialists in Peruvian history, this book addresses many of his major topics and contributions, including Peru's rupture with Spanish colonialism, his role as a Marxist public intellectual, his relationship with the Cuban Revolution, the Shining Path and human rights, and his passion for literature. The book introduces English readers to the life and work of one of Latin America's major Marxist thinkers.
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Abstract
The mountain hawk-eagle has a special status among the indigenous Paiwan people of Taiwan. This article examines the historical evolution of the use of this eagle’s feathers amid social transformations within Paiwan culture. It also addresses the bird’s endangered status and proposed conservation strategies to protect it. Wildlife management collaborations between indigenous communities and conservationists have sparked conflicts in values and worldviews that are challenging to reconcile. While the Paiwan wish to continue using the eagle’s feathers in important cultural rituals, this increased demand exacerbates hunting pressures on the species. This article seeks to find a better balance between preserving cultural practices and ensuring species survival. Drawing on four years of fieldwork among the Paiwan, it demonstrates the complexities of navigating entangled human–animal relationships in the context of species endangerment.
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This paper aims to explicate the hermeneutic engagement of the commentators with the epic. The engagement is better revealed in the opening of the commentaries, particularly while commenting upon the maṅgala of the epic. This paper offers a comparison of insights on maṅgala and anubandhacatuṣṭaya in the three commentaries: Devabodha (11 ce), Vādirāja (16 ce) and Nīlakaṇṭha (17 ce). The singularity of this engagement is that it deals with the text as one meaningful whole. While doing so they not only analyse the text, but also renew the text by offering it its own due textuality. The due textuality is understood in contrast to the view of modern scholars who have dealt with the epic text as a conglomerate of several parts. The contexts and departures that commentators have with the text of the epic are obviously different from ours and are therefore of significance to us. The antiquity, grandeur and complexity of the epic are the obvious challenges before us as we attempt to comprehend the text. The commentaries come through as a resource as they offer their reading and comprehension of the epic. The very names of the commentaries illuminate the specific hermeneutic engagement of the commentators with the epic. Thus, Devabodha’s commentary is called Jñānadīpikā or the Lamp of Knowledge, whereas Nīlakaṇṭha’s commentary has been named as Bhāratabhāvadīpa, or the Lamp Illuminating Inner Meaning (of the Mahābhārata).
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The understanding of rhetoric has been heavily influenced by the Western tradition, particularly the Greco-Latin tradition. Rhetoric was traditionally considered a creation of the Greeks and a unique feature of the West. However, theoretical perspectives such as Axial Age, Comparative History, Global History, and Comparative World Rhetoric offer new insights into the relationship between communication and persuasion. This paper aims to compare certain characteristics of Greek rhetoric and Indian rhetoric using the perspective of Comparative World Rhetoric. To do this, I analysed the Vedic texts, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and the Nyāya Sūtra. I concluded that the comparison was a fundamental aspect of the rhetorical exercise in antiquity, as it allowed the speaker to better connect with the audience.
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In this paper we investigate lexical materials in Latin and Romance that appear to stem from ancient substrata in the Mediterranean. We focus on plant names and landscape related vocabulary, e.g., words for ‘berries’, ‘shrubbery, herbs and trees’, and words for ‘rocky’ and ‘swampy’ terrains, as both of these semantic fields are parts of the lexicon considered to be of very archaic origin. After investigating evidence for potential cognates in languages in the Mediterranean and exploring the geolinguistic distribution of the investigated words, we try to form conclusions about the involved strata and their chronological organization. We identify two important strata: an older Eurafrican layer (Hubschmid 1960) and a widely attested Euskaro-Caucasian layer associated with the arrival of Neolithic farming (see the discussion in Bengtson (2017a/2022, 2017b) and Bengtson/Leschber (2019, 2021, 2022)).
The so-called ‘Mediterranean Thesaurus’ (in memory of Johannes Hubschmid) aims to establish a compilation of lexical data featuring words with unclear or highly disputable etymologies in the languages around the Mediterranean Sea. As a first step, we are collating words in an open-ended table and their geolinguistic/dialect-geographical distribution across the ranges of the Mediterranean languages, some of which are geolinguistically remote areas. We trace two main questions: (a) whether there are characteristic semantic fields that can be more often identified (such as plant names and topography); (b) whether we can highlight typical phonetic features and sound clusters in these words.
Since the period of the Swiss and Italian etymological pioneers of the 20th century (Johannes Hubschmid, Giovanni Alessio, Carlo Battisti, Vittorio Bertoldi, Jakob Jud, Laura Lombardo, Alfredo Trombetti and many others), there has been great scientific progress in human genetics and archaeology that is increasingly revealing the prehistory of the Mediterranean. We recognize the work of these etymologists who – under much more demanding circumstances – offered suggestions about the origin of etymologically difficult words. Several hypotheses have been revisited in order to include or to reject the contribution of a specific substrate to the linguistic substrata of the macro-area. Our aim is to explore the prehistory of the Mediterranean area to understand the ethnogenesis of its peoples and their rootedness in millennia past, and to find evidence for a tentative stratification of substratum languages.
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In Anatolian archaeology, as it is the case in the neighbouring regions of the Near East and Aegean, the Bronze Age is considered in three consecutive stages, however, defined not in accordance with metallurgical achievements, but on changing modalities in social and economic structures. Before the beginning of the Early Bronze Age there were fully established farming communities across almost all of Anatolia, though subsisting mainly on family-level farming with no indication of complex social structuring. Likewise, during the final stages of the Late Chalcolithic there was a notable decrease in population, particularly in Central and Western Anatolia. In this respect, the south-eastern parts of Anatolia differ considerably from the rest of the peninsula, developing a complex socio-economic model in connection with the bordering regions of Syro-Mesopotamia. This pattern changed by incoming migration from the north, with subsequent dense population patterns in the eastern and western parts of the peninsula. Following the reorganization and consolidation of this system, the Early Bronze Age is characterized by urbanisation, institutionalized long-distance trade, intensification and revolutionized agricultural and weaving practices. The urban model that developed in Anatolia differs considerably from those of the Near East both in size and in organization. The Middle Bronze Age is marked by state formations, which by the Late Bronze Age developed into empires with their own foreign policies. Concerning the role of metals, copper and lead were used since the Neolithic and arsenic bronze by the Late Chalcolithic. The Bronze Age may be viewed as a time of mass production and development of complex technologies in casting, alloying and forming.
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The key term of this volume is bronze: in its basic meaning it is an alloy of two metals, copper and tin, even if there are other combinations, such as arsenical bronze. In Mesopotamia, the area I will discuss here, every form of bronze shared a common characteristic, however. To make bronze it was necessary to bring together two metals with origins in separate and distant places. The sources changed over time, but in Mesopotamia itself bronze was never the product of elements found in the same location. The outcome was something special, a compound stronger and deemed to be more appealing than its separate components. My discussion here will not be about metallurgy or material culture, however, but about literate culture, which in the Mesopotamian Bronze Age, I argue, showed a similar amalgamation of elements from sources that were geographically distinct. We can see bronze as a metaphor for literate culture in Mesopotamia.
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As the scholarly border between China and Southeast Asia has dissipated, so the vast region from the Yangtze River to Malaysia has been integrated into a whole. There was an inexorable expansion of copper-base expertise southward, reaching Lingnan and Yunnan by 1400-1200 bc, and Southeast Asia one or two centuries later, with ultimate origins in the Asian steppes via the Chinese Central Plains and Sichuan. As prospectors identified and exploited the Southeast Asian copper mines, a limited range of copper-base artefacts moved along established exchange routes, including socketed axes, bangles and spears. At first rare and used to advertise status in communities advantaged by a strategic location, with increased production and in situ casting within consumer settlements, bronzes were no longer associated with social elites. Only with different regional stimuli during the Iron Age, were bronzes again employed by societies characterized by social inequality.
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The Bronze Age was a time of pivotal economic change when new long-distance trading networks became associated with a macro-regional division of labour and decentralised political complexity. These developments occurred against the background of a shifting mosaic of subsistence patterns, which included the east-west exchange of crops across Eurasia and (in some areas) greater use of secondary products. As Bronze Age economies became more specialised and diverse, it might be assumed that there was also an increased emphasis on the procurement and trade of fish and other marine resources. However, archaeological analyses of such resources are limited in contrast to land-based subsistence patterns and many questions remain. This essay aims to build a broad interpretive framework for analysing the role of marine resources in the Bronze Age. Our provisional results find that an increased emphasis on specialist systems of agropastoralism reduced the use of marine resources in many parts of Eurasia during this period. However, evidence from Japan and the eastern Mediterranean suggests that, at least in some regions, marine resources became commodities traded over long-distances by the late Bronze Age, though this requires further quantification. Island Southeast Asia displays a different pattern from other regions considered here in a greater continuity of marine resource use from the Neolithic into the historic era, perhaps due to a lower reliance on agropastoralism.