History of Emotions: Where Are We?

As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the CHE, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion (initially focusing on Europe 1100–1800 and with the late Professor Philippa Maddern as its founding Director) and the fifth anniversary of the launch of the journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society (founding Editors: Katie Barclay, Andrew Lynch, Giovanni Tarantino), it is only pertinent that we look back and assess our efforts by hearing from some prominent emotions scholars who contributed in different ways and capacities to this pathbreaking intellectual journey.

Reflections on an academic life

David Harvey traces his intellectual journey reflecting on what he calls “the central animating theme of his thinking” starting from his days as a positivist geographer and the publication of Explanation. Harvey clarifies that his transition from Explanations to Social Justice, which has often been touted as a radical-epistemological break in his work should actually be seen as a complimentary productive tension. In making this transition, Harvey decided to reject the scientific orthodoxy of positivist science and instead, use dialectics derived from Marx as alternative mode of scientific inquiry. Harvey narrates his Baltimore experience of combatting local racial discrimination as formative in his understandings of the motions of capital and dynamics of uneven development thus imbricating personal politics and Marx's theory of capitalism in his work ever after. Harvey also recalls how teaching of Capital furthered his exploration of the urban condition and accumulation of capital, ultimately leading to the concept of “spatial fix.” Conditions of Postmodernity contends Harvey, taught him the importance of gender and feminist perspective and Justice, Nature written under extreme physical, professional, intellectual duress was intended to bring the “metabolic relation to nature” at the forefront. Economic liberalism propelled Harvey to introspect on his many volumes on the global neoliberal conditions, which he argues is now imbricated with issues of identity and intersectionality involving Black Lives and Me too. Harvey concludes that his intellectual journey has been a preoccupation to understand “contradictory unity between social relations in constant transformation” through Marx's power of abstraction to imagine an “anti-capitalist” future.

Patrick O’Brien on industrialization, little Britain and the wider world

Patrick O’Brien has dedicated most of his career to studying British economic history, focusing on the Industrial Revolution, its antecedents, characteristics and consequences. He has always paid attention to long-term developments and never confined himself to strictly economic aspects. From the late 1990s onward, he increasingly turned ‘global’. His importance for global history cannot be overstated. His essay in this issue presents the outcome of his long intellectual journey. I will in this rejoinder try to assess his approach and his findings and comment on Patrick as a scholar and as a person. As we are close friends I will be critical.

Editorial – The Launch of a New Intellectual Journey in Spine Care

On behalf of the editorial board, I am pleased to announce the launch of the official journal of the Saudi Spine Society, the Journal of Spine Practice (JSP), an international peer-reviewed, open access, academic, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary journal that encompasses every aspect of spine care and research. Our goal is to see JSP grow into a space for multidisciplinary scholarly dialogue among spine practitioners to showcase their clinical research, basic science research, health services research, economic analysis, health professionals education, as well as evidence-based statements and guidelines. JSP aims to promote excellence in spine care and produce a significant academic contribution to the field. To read the full text, please download the PDF or view the article HTML.

Jesuits and Jews, and the way we dare to think: A Jesuit’s reflections on James Bernauer’s Jesuit Kaddish

This essay explores James Bernauer’s Jesuit Kaddish as an extended reflection on the centuries-long troubled relationship between Jesuits and Jews, with attention to egregious instances of moral failure on the part of Jesuits. It investigates too Bernauer’s highlighting of instances of Jesuit spiritual resistance both to evil and to the undue prudence of cautious institutions. Forthright in weaving his own intellectual journey into the book, Bernauer movingly renders himself a theme for reflection, a scholar’s life-long interrogation of his own religious community, as gratitude, loyalty, and critical distance stand side by side. The concluding statement of Jesuit Repentance perfectly marks the transition from understanding to a performative expression of responsibility for the personal and systemic failures to which we are heirs.

‘They are all dead that I could ask’: Indigenous Innovation and the Micropolitics of the Field in Twentieth-century Southern Africa

Recovering the agency, skill and innovation of archaeological field assistants from historical encounters is essential to interrogating processes of knowledge production, but is often hampered by access to appropriate archival sources and methods. We detail a field project from early twentieth-century Basutoland (modern-day Lesotho) that is unique both for its aim to salvage details of rock-art production as a dying craft and for its archive chronicling the project's intellectual journey from experiment to draft manuscripts to published work over more than three decades. We argue that critical historiographic attention to this archive offers a guide for examining the intimate dynamics of fieldwork and the effects of these micropolitics on the archaeological canon. We demonstrate how sustained attention to long processes of knowledge production can pinpoint multiple instances in which the usability of field assistants’ scientific knowledge is qualified, validated, or rejected, and in this case how an African assistant is transformed into an ethnographic interlocutor. For rock-art studies especially, this represents a need for interrogating the epistemic cultures—not just the content—of foundational historical data.

Fundamentals of Chinese Culture

Chinese culture, to readers of English, is somewhat veiled in mystery. Fundamentals of Chinese Culture, a classic of great insight and profundity by noted Chinese thinker, educator and social reformist Liang Shuming, takes readers on an intellectual journey into the five-thousand-year-old culture of China, the world’s oldest continuous civilization. With a set of "Chinese-style" cultural theories, the book well serves as a platform for Westerners' better understanding of the distinctive worldview of the Chinese people, who value family life and social stability, and for further mutual understanding and greater mutual consolidation among humanities scholars in different contexts, dismantling common misconceptions about China and bridging the gap between Chinese culture and Western culture. As a translation of Liang Shuming’s original text, this book pulls back the curtain to reveal to Westerners a highly complex and nuanced picture of a fascinating people.