University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation, it grew from 1167 when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled north-east to Cambridge where they established what became the University of Cambridge; the two'ancient universities' are jointly called'Oxbridge'. The history and influence of the University of Oxford has made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world; the university is made up of 38 constituent colleges, a range of academic departments, which are organised into four divisions. All the colleges are self-governing institutions within the university, each controlling its own membership and with its own internal structure and activities, it does not have a main campus, its buildings and facilities are scattered throughout the city centre.
Undergraduate teaching at Oxford is organised around weekly tutorials at the colleges and halls, supported by classes, lectures and laboratory work provided by university faculties and departments. It operates the world's oldest university museum, as well as the largest university press in the world and the largest academic library system nationwide. In the fiscal year ending 31 July 2018, the university had a total income of £2.237 billion, of which £579.1 million was from research grants and contracts. The university is ranked first globally by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings as of 2019 and is ranked as among the world's top ten universities, it is ranked second in all major national league tables, behind Cambridge. Oxford has educated many notable alumni, including 27 prime ministers of the United Kingdom and many heads of state and government around the world; as of 2019, 69 Nobel Prize winners, 3 Fields Medalists, 6 Turing Award winners have studied, worked, or held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford, while its alumni have won 160 Olympic medals.
Oxford is the home of numerous scholarships, including the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest international graduate scholarship programmes. The University of Oxford has no known foundation date. Teaching at Oxford existed in some form as early as 1096, but it is unclear when a university came into being, it grew from 1167 when English students returned from the University of Paris. The historian Gerald of Wales lectured to such scholars in 1188 and the first known foreign scholar, Emo of Friesland, arrived in 1190; the head of the university had the title of chancellor from at least 1201, the masters were recognised as a universitas or corporation in 1231. The university was granted a royal charter in 1248 during the reign of King Henry III. After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled from the violence to Cambridge forming the University of Cambridge; the students associated together on the basis of geographical origins, into two'nations', representing the North and the South.
In centuries, geographical origins continued to influence many students' affiliations when membership of a college or hall became customary in Oxford. In addition, members of many religious orders, including Dominicans, Franciscans and Augustinians, settled in Oxford in the mid-13th century, gained influence and maintained houses or halls for students. At about the same time, private benefactors established colleges as self-contained scholarly communities. Among the earliest such founders were William of Durham, who in 1249 endowed University College, John Balliol, father of a future King of Scots. Another founder, Walter de Merton, a Lord Chancellor of England and afterwards Bishop of Rochester, devised a series of regulations for college life. Thereafter, an increasing number of students lived in colleges rather than in halls and religious houses. In 1333–34, an attempt by some dissatisfied Oxford scholars to found a new university at Stamford, was blocked by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge petitioning King Edward III.
Thereafter, until the 1820s, no new universities were allowed to be founded in England in London. The new learning of the Renaissance influenced Oxford from the late 15th century onwards. Among university scholars of the period were William Grocyn, who contributed to the revival of Greek language studies, John Colet, the noted biblical scholar. With the English Reformation and the breaking of communion with the Roman Catholic Church, recusant scholars from Oxford fled to continental Europe, settling at the University of Douai; the method of teaching at Oxford was transformed from the medieval scholastic method to Renaissance education, although institutions associated with the university suffered losses of land and revenues. As a centre of learning and scholarship, Oxford's reputation declined in the Age of Enlightenment. In 1636 William Laud, the chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, codified the university's statutes. These, to a large extent, remained its gove
Zooarchaeology
Zooarchaeology is the branch of archaeology that studies faunal remains related to ancient people. Faunal remains are the items left behind, it includes: bones, hair, scales, proteins and DNA. Of these items and shells are the ones that occur most at archaeological sites where faunal remains can be found. Most of the time, most of the faunal remains do not survive, they decompose or break because of various circumstances. This can cause difficulties in interpreting their significance; the development of zooarchaeology in Eastern North America can be broken up into three different periods. The first being the Formative period starting around the 1860s, the second being the Systematization period beginning in the early 1950s, the Integration period which began about 1969. Full-time zooarchaeologists didn’t come about until the Systematization period. Before that it was just a technique, applied but not studied. Zooarchaeological specialists started to come about because of a new approach to archaeology known as processual archaeology.
This approach puts more emphasis on explaining. Archaeologists began to specialize in zooarchaeology, their numbers increased from there on. Zooarchaeology is used to answer several questions; these include: What was the diet like, in what ways were the animals used for food? Which were the animals that were eaten, in what amounts, with what other foods? Who were the ones to obtain the food, did the availability of that food depend on age or gender? How was culture, such as technologies and behavior, influenced by and associated with diet? What purposes, other than food, were animals used for? Zooarchaeology can tell us what the environment might have been like in order for the different animals to have survived. In addition to helping us understand the past, zooarchaeology can help us to improve the present and the future. Studying how people dealt with animals, its effects can help us avoid many potential ecological problems; this includes problems involving wildlife management. For example, one of the questions that wildlife preservationists ask is whether they should keep animals facing extinction in several smaller areas, or in one larger area.
Based on zooarchaeological evidence, they found that animals that are split up into several smaller areas are more to go extinct. One of the techniques that zooarchaeologists use is close attention to taphonomy; this includes studying how items are buried and deposited at the site in question, what the conditions are that aid in the preservation of these items, how these items get destroyed. They interpret that information. Another technique that zooarchaeologists use is lab analysis; this analysis can include comparing the skeletons found on site with identified animal skeletons. This not only helps to identify what the animal is, but whether the animal was domesticated or not, yet another technique that zooarchaeologists use is quantification. They make interpretations based on the size of the bones; these interpretations include. As can be seen from the discussion about the name that should be given to this discipline, zooarchaeology overlaps with other areas of study; these include: Anthropology Anthrozoology Archaeology Biology Ecology Ethnography Paleopathology Palaeontology Paleozoology Zoology Such analyses provide the basis by which further interpretations can be made.
Topics that have been addressed by zooarchaeologists include: Human-Animal relationships and interactions were diverse during Prehistory from being a food source to playing a more intimate role in society. Animals have been used in non-economical ways such as being part of a human burial. However, the major zooarchaeology has focused on, eating what by looking at various remains such as bones and fish scales. In the twenty-first century researchers have begun to interpret animals in prehistory in wider cultural and social patterns, focusing on how the animals have affected humans and possible animal agency. There is evidence of animals such as the Mountain Lion or the Jaguar being used for ritualistic purposes, but not being eaten as a food source. Animal burials date back to prehistory with examples emerging from the Mesolithic period. In Sweden at the burial site Skateholm I dogs were found buried with children under eight years old or were found buried by themselves; some of the dogs who were buried alone have grave goods similar to their human contemporaries such as flint weapons and deer antlers.
Meanwhile, during the same time period Skateholm II emerged and was different than Skateholm I, as dogs were buried along on the North and West boundaries of the grave area. Another burial site in Siberia near Lake Biakal known as the "Lokomotiv" cemetery had a wolf burial among human graves. Buried together with, but beneath the wolf was a male human skull; the wolf breed was not native to this area as it was warm and other research for the area shows no other wolf habitation. Bazaliiskiy & Savelyev suggests that the presence and significance of the wolf could reflect human interaction. Another example occurred in 300 B. C. in Pazyryk known as the Pazyryk burials where ten horses were buried alongside a human male, the horses were adorned with saddles, among other valuables. The oldest horse as the horse with the grandest attachments. Erica Hill, a professor in archaeology, suggests that the burials of prehistory animals can shed light on human-animal relationships. Zooarchaeology allows researchers to h
Steve Rayner
Steve Rayner is James Martin Professor of Science and Civilization at Oxford University and Director of the Institute for Science and Society, a member of the Oxford Martin School. He describes himself as an "undisciplined social scientist" having been trained in philosophy, comparative religion and political anthropology. A key research interest is climate policy, in particular adaptation and geoengineering as ways to mitigate climate change’s effects, he has been an outspoken critic of the architecture of the Kyoto Protocol, his paper The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy, co-written with Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics has been cited on this topic. He is interested in wicked problems, uncomfortable knowledge and clumsy solutions, he is principal investigator of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities and co-director of the Oxford Geoengineering Programme. In 2008, he was listed by Wired Magazine as one of the 15 people the next President should listen to and was recognized for his contribution to the joint award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Influenced by his PhD supervisor and colleague anthropologist Mary Douglas, his underlying theoretical interest has always been in the use of ideas about nature to justify moral and political preferences. Having spent much of his research career outside of academia, he professes a commitment to "changing the world through social science", his doctoral research applied and developed Douglas’s Cultural Theory studying the organizational dynamics of British far-left groups in the mid-20th century. He focused on the tendency of Trotskyist sects and the Maoist Workers' Institute of Marxism–Leninism – Mao Zedong Thought group to factionalism and split as well as their propensity to entertain millenarian ideas of social change. Subsequent work has explored the role of organizational culture in the perception and management of environmental and health risks as well as the political culture of climate change. Rayner has authored or co-authored over 175 published works, including nine books, is Series Editor of the Earthscan Science in Society book series.
He is the editor, with Elizabeth Malone, of the four volume assessment of social science relevant to understanding climate change and its governance, in addition to maintaining a consistent critique of the mainstream policy architecture for climate policy. The 2007 report The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy, summarized in the Nature commentary Time to Ditch Kyoto, claimed that the Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol were based on erroneous premises, called instead for massive public investment in energy research, development and deployment; the Wrong Trousers was followed by How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course and subsequently The Hartwell Paper, which argued that the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, marked the crash of the Kyoto Protocol, which had "failed to produce any discernable real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years". Rayner’s recent work addresses problematic issues in the relationship between science and governance as well as the governance of science.
He has expressed concerns about attempts to resolve clashes in values either through appeals to science on the one hand or through extensive public participation on the other. His recent efforts in this area have focused on the emerging technologies of climate change geoengineering and he was a co-author on the influential Royal Society report Geoengineering the Climate and lead author of the Oxford Principles for Geoengineering Governance, he has given nearly 150 invited lectures and conference presentations on topics such as climate policy and governance, including the Jack Beale Memorial Lecture on Global Environment at the University of New South Wales, Australia Prior to his appointment at Oxford University, Steve Rayner was Professor of Environment and Public Affairs in the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, where he directed the Center for Science and Environmental Policy. He held parallel appointments as Professor of Sociology and as the Chief Social Scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction.
Before Columbia University, he held the rank of Chief Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Located in the Washington DC office, he led the Global Change Research Group from 1991 to 1996, he was Deputy Director of the Global Environmental Studies Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he was responsible for research in Policy and Human Systems. Throughout this period he held visiting or adjunct appointments at Cornell University, Virginia Tech, Boston University and the University of Tennessee. Rayner is a Professorial Fellow of Keble College and Honorary Professor of Climate Change and Society at the University of Copenhagen, he is a Senior Fellow of The Breakthrough Institute, a non-partisan environmental think-tank based in California's Bay Area. He is a Member of the Lead Experts Group of the UK Government's Foresight Programme on the Future of Cities, he served as a member of the IPCC for the Second and Fourth Assessment Reports, was a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution from 2003-2009.
Between 2002 and 2008 he directed the ESRC's £5.2 million'Science in Society' Programme. He is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Royal Society of Arts, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Applied Anthropology, his work has been covered by the New York Times, BBC, New Scientist, Nature, Sky News
E. E. Evans-Pritchard
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, FBA, known as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, was an English anthropologist, instrumental in the development of social anthropology, he was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1970. Evans-Pritchard was educated at Winchester College and studied history at Exeter College, where he was influenced by R. R. Marett, as a postgraduate at the London School of Economics. At Oxford he was part of the Hypocrites' Club. There he came under the influence of Bronisław Malinowski and Charles Gabriel Seligman, the founding ethnographer of the Sudan, his first fieldwork began in 1926 with the Azande, a people of the upper Nile, resulted in both a doctorate and his classic Witchcraft and Magic Among the Azande. Evans-Pritchard continued to lecture at the LSE and conduct research in Azande and Bongo land until 1930, when he began a new research project among the Nuer; this work coincided with his appointment to the University of Cairo in 1932, where he gave a series of lectures on religion that bore Seligman's influence.
After his return to Oxford, he continued his research on Nuer. It was during this period that he first met A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Evans-Pritchard began developing Radcliffe-Brown's program of structural-functionalism; as a result, his trilogy of works on the Nuer and the volume he coedited entitled African Political Systems came to be seen as classics of British social anthropology. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft and Magic Among the Azande is the first major anthropological contribution to the sociology of knowledge through its neutral — some would say "relativist" — stance on the "correctness" of Zande beliefs about causation, his work focused in on a known psychological effect known as psychological attribution. Evans-Pritchard recorded the tendencies of Azandes to blame or attribute witchcraft as the cause of various mis-happenings; the most notable of these issues involved the deaths of eight Azande people due to the collapse of a termite infested door frame. Evans-Pritchard's empirical work in this vein became well-known through philosophy of science and "rationality" debates of the 1960s and 1970s involving Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.
During the Second World War Evans-Pritchard served in Ethiopia, Libya and Syria. In Sudan he raised irregular troops among the Anuak to harass the Italians and engaged in guerrilla warfare. In 1942 he was posted to the British Military Administration of Cyrenaica in North Africa, it was on the basis of his experience there that he produced The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. In documenting local resistance to Italian conquest, he became one of a few English-language authors to write about the tariqa. After a brief stint in Cambridge, Evans-Pritchard became professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College, he remained at All Souls College for the rest of his career. Among the doctoral students he advised was the late M. N. Srinivas, the doyen among India's sociologists who coined some of the key concepts in Indian sociological discourse, including "Sanskritization", "dominant caste" and "vote bank." One of his students was Talal Asad. Mary Douglas's classic Purity and Danger on pollutions and uncertainty — what we denote as'risk' — was fundamentally influenced by Evans-Pritchard's views on how accusations and responsibility are deployed though culturally specific conceptions of misfortune and harm.
Evans-Pritchard's work was more theoretical, drawing upon his experiences as anthropologist to philosophize on the nature of anthropology and how it should best be practiced. In 1950 he famously disavowed the held view that anthropology was a natural science, arguing instead that it should be grouped amongst the humanities history, he argued that the main issue facing anthropologists was one of translation—finding a way to translate one's own thoughts into the world of another culture and thus manage to come to understand it, to translate this understanding back so as to explain it to people of one's own culture. In 1965, he published the influential work Theories of Primitive Religion, arguing against the existing theories of what at the time were called "primitive" religious practices. Arguing along the lines of his theoretical work of the 1950s, he claimed that anthropologists succeeded in entering the minds of the people they studied, so ascribed to them motivations which more matched themselves and their own culture, not the one they are studying.
He argued that believers and non-believers approached the study of religion in vastly different ways, with non-believers being quicker to come up with biological, sociological, or psychological theories to explain religion as an illusion, believers being more to come up with theories explaining religion as a method of conceptualizing and relating to reality. Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was born in Crowborough, East Sussex, the son of an Anglican clergyman, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1944. Known to his friends and family as "EP", Evans-Pritchard had five children with his wife Ioma, his daughter Deirdre Evans-Pritchard is Executive Director of the DC Independent Film Festival and consults in the fields of cultural heritage, tourism and the arts. His youngest son, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, is a former foreign correspondent in Latin America, the US, Europe, became International Business Editor for the London Daily Telegraph. Evans-Pritchard died in Oxford on 11 September 1973. Evans-Pritchard was knighted in 1971
Sanremo
Sanremo or San Remo is a city and comune on the Mediterranean coast of Liguria, in north-western Italy. Founded in Roman times, it has a population of 57,000, is known as a tourist destination on the Italian Riviera, it hosts numerous cultural events, such as the Sanremo Music Festival and the Milan–San Remo cycling classic. The name of the city is a phonetic contraction of Sant'Eremo di San Romolo, which refers to Romulus of Genoa, the successor to Syrus of Genoa, it is stated in modern folk stories that Sanremo is a translation of "Saint Remus", a deceased Saint. In Ligurian, his name is San Rœmu; the spelling San Remo is on all ancient maps of Liguria, the ancient Republic of Genoa, Italy in the Middle Ages, the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Kingdom of Italy. It was used in 1924 in official documents under Mussolini; this form of the name appears still on some road signs and, more in unofficial tourist information. It has been the most used form of the name in English at least since the 19th century.
Once the Roman settlement of Matutia or Villa Matutiana, Sanremo expanded in the Early Middle Ages when the population moved to the high grounds. The nobility built a castle and the walled village of La Pigna to protect the town from Saracen raids. At first subjected to the countship of Ventimiglia, the community passed under the dominion of the Genoese bishops. In 1297 they sold it to the De Mari families, it became a free town in the second half of the 15th century, after which it expanded to the Pigna hill and at Saint Syrus Cathedral. The perfectly preserved old village remains. Sanremo remained independent from the Genoese Republic. In 1753, after 20 years of fierce conflicts, it rose against Genoese hegemonical attempts. At that time the latter polity built the fortress of Santa Tecla, situated on the beach near the port; the fortress was used as a prison until 2002. It is now being transformed into a museum. After the French domination and the Savoy restoration in 1814, Sanremo was annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia.
From the middle of the 18th century the town grew in part due to the development of tourism, which saw the first grand hotels built and the town extended along the coast. The Empress "Sissi" of Austria, Empress Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, Emperor Nicholas II of Russia vacationed in Sanremo, while Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel made it his permanent home; the San Remo conference, 19–26 April 1920, of the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council determined the allocation of Class "A" League of Nations mandates for administration of the former Ottoman-ruled lands of the Middle East by the victorious powers. The most notable of these was the British Mandate of Palestine. Sanremo's Mediterranean climate and attractive seacoast setting on the Italian Riviera make it a popular tourist destination. Besides tourism, the city is active in the production of extra virgin-grade olive oil, whose regional "designation of origin" is protected, it is one of the agricultural commodities in western Liguria and in particular within the province of Imperia.
Sanremo is known as the City of Flowers, this being another important aspect of the economy of the city. The nearby towns of Arma di Taggia and Ospedaletti are involved in the cultivation of flowers for the international flower market of Sanremo; the Municipal Casino, built in 1905, is an example of Art Nouveau building. The Ariston Theatre offers annual series of concerts and theatre plays; the Symphony Orchestra is one of twelve symphony orchestras recognized by the state of Italy. The city is connected to Genoa and to Ventimiglia, the border city with France, by the A10 motorway, whose last part is known as the Autostrada dei Fiori, it has a large number of elevated sections with viaducts. The A10 joins the French A8 highway at the border between Menton. Together these national routes are part of the European route E80; the A10 motorway is a toll road, the A8 demands a toll in sections, some sections are free of charge. Notably when travelling from Italy into France, there one does not pay until after the towns of Menton and Monaco.
Other roads of importance are the "Aurelia Bis", which connects Sanremo to Taggia. This is a non-toll bypass route; the coast road follows the route of a Roman road. This can be congested when it passes through towns, as it has only one lane in either direction for most of way around Sanremo. A trolleybus line along the via Aurelia links Sanremo with both Ventimiglia; the closest airport to Sanremo is in France, the Côte d'Azur International Airport in Nice, 75 minutes away by car or train. The railway connects the city to the other Ligurian cities like Imperia, Genoa and to Nice, Milan and Rome; the railway line used to be along the coast, running close to the sea, providing a view for travellers. The line has been moved further underground, which allows for faster trains; the city has refurbished the old railway line and converted it into a biking route and pedestrian area. There are several bike hire kiosks along the route and a choice of beaches to visit in either direction from San Remo; the path stretches 24 km between Ospedaletti in the east.
Sanremo experiences a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. The Ariston Theatre hosts the celebrated annual Sanremo Music Festival
Peter Brown (historian)
Peter Robert Lamont Brown, FBA, is Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is credited with having brought coherence to the field of Late Antiquity, is sometimes regarded as the inventor of the field, his work has concerned, in particular, the religious culture of the Roman Empire and early medieval Europe, the relation between religion and society. Peter Brown was born in Dublin, Ireland, to a Scots-Irish Protestant family; until 1939, he spent winter and spring each year in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where his father worked as a railway engineer based at Khartoum. For the rest of the year, he would return with his mother in Co.. Wicklow, near Dublin. Following the outbreak of war and his mother remained in Ireland, though his father did not return until 1948. Brown has spoken about the influence of the Sudanese connection on several occasions. Speaking to the Daily Princetonian, he has remarked: "Living in the Sudan put in me a love of the Middle East, a real interest in it, distant memories of a sunny world with large, dark Sudanese servants in long white robes", combined with memories of "hippopotami and camels under starry skies".
After his father had returned to Ireland,'a handbook of Sudanese Courtesy Customs, containing delicate Arabic phrases of greeting and polite enquiry, was prominent on his bookshelf, as was a deluxe edition of T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I would read, from cover to cover, every time that I returned home on holiday from my school in England." Such influences, with "roots deep in my childhood ensured that both religion and the'exotic' were both too large, too ever-present and too rich for their intrusion into the classical world to be dismissed out of hand, as unambiguously negative symptoms of decline. The power of both had begun to intrigue me; the collapse of an enlightened empire might, indeed, be a catastrophic event, for all. In 1948, Brown entered Shrewsbury School in Shropshire, one of the prominent "public" schools in England, on a scholarship, it was at Shrewsbury School that Brown, who expected to concentrate on sciences, first studied Ancient Greek and turned in earnest to the study of history: "I myself had become a keen amateur astronomer, had re-invented gunpowder to the detriment of my aunt's carpet.
I intended to enter the Science stream of my new school. My housemaster summoned me to his study. In between puffs of his pipe, he announced with utter certainty:'Brown, you did too well in Entrance to do Science. You shall do... Greek.' And Greek I did, if only for one year, before taking the Junior Certificate and lapsing from the high calling of a classical scholar in the English Public School tradition into the study of mere History."When asked to comment on his intellectual formation, Brown has indicated that he completed his public schooling a year early, returning to Ireland in 1952, the year he turned 17. It was in Dublin that he read Mikhail Rostovtzeff's The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, which he borrowed from the lending library of the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge; the academic year 1952–3 was a "hiatus" for Brown, between school and university, during which he learned to type at a secretarial school, received German lessons from an academic at Trinity College Dublin, a refugee from Nazi Germany.
In 1953, Brown took up a scholarship to read Modern History at New College, from 1953 to 1956. Most of his degree was "devoted to English History in its entirety and to the European High Middle Ages, from 919 to 1127", but in his final academic year, he undertook a Special Subject on The Age of Augustine, was influenced by the writings of Marrou and Piganiol; that Special Subject had a profound influence on Brown: "I was thrilled by the glimpse which both authors offered of the sheer resilience of a pre-Christian society and culture at the moment of the triumph of the Christian church within the Roman empire. Institutions and powerful bodies of ideas, that I had known only in the medieval and post-Reformation periods — and many of which, in their modern form, still hung, like chill clouds, above the heart of any Irish boy, Catholic or Protestant — were shown to have originated first in a distant, ancient world." Following his graduation Brown began, but did not complete, a doctoral thesis under the external supervision of Arnaldo Momigliano.
The potential he had shown as an undergraduate was recognized by the award of the Harmsworth Senior Scholarship at Merton College, a seven-year Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. At a time when it was possible to remain in the college after the Prize Fellowship, All Souls College subsequently elected him a research fellow in 1963 and a senior research fellow in 1970; the Modern History Faculty of the University of Oxford appointed him a special lecturer in 1970 and a reader in 1973. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. Brown left Oxford to become professor of modern history and head of the Department of History at Royal Holloway College in the University of London, he subsequently left Britain to become professor of classics and history in the University of California at Berkeley and Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton Univ
Economic anthropology
Economic anthropology is a field that attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic and cultural scope. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a complex relationship with the discipline of economics, of which it is critical, its origins as a sub-field of anthropology began with work by the Polish founder of anthropology Bronislaw Malinowski and the French Marcel Mauss on the nature of reciprocity as an alternative to market exchange. For the most part, studies in economic anthropology focus on exchange. In contrast, the Marxian school known as "political economy" focuses on production. Post-World War II, economic anthropology was influenced by the work of economic historian Karl Polanyi. Polanyi drew on anthropological studies to argue that true market exchange was limited to a restricted number of western, industrial societies. Applying formal economic theory to non-industrial societies was mistaken, he argued. In non-industrial societies, exchange was "embedded" in such non-market institutions as kinship and politics.
He labelled this approach Substantivism. The formalist–substantivist debate was influential and defined an era; as globalization became a reality, the division between market and non-market economies – between "the West and the Rest" – became untenable, anthropologists began to look at the relationship between a variety of types of exchange within market societies. Neo-substantivists examine the ways in which so-called pure market exchange in market societies fails to fit market ideology. Economic anthropologists have abandoned the primitivist niche they were relegated to by economists, they now study the operations of corporations and the global financial system from an anthropological perspective. Bronislaw Malinowski's path-breaking work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, addressed the question, "why would men risk life and limb to travel across huge expanses of dangerous ocean to give away what appear to be worthless trinkets?". Malinowski traced the network of exchanges of bracelets and necklaces across the Trobriand Islands, established that they were part of a system of exchange.
He stated that this exchange system was linked to political authority. In the 1920s and Malinowski's study became the subject of debate with the French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, author of The Gift. Malinowski emphasised the exchange of goods between individuals, their non-altruistic motives for giving: they expected a return of equal or greater value. In other words, reciprocity is an implicit part of gifting. Mauss, in contrast, has emphasized that the gifts were not between individuals, but between representatives of larger collectivities; these gifts were, he argued, a "total prestation." They were not simple, alienable commodities to be bought and sold, like the "Crown jewels", embodied the reputation and sense of identity of a "corporate kin group," such as a line of kings. Given the stakes, Mauss asked "why anyone would give them away?" His answer was an enigmatic concept, hau, "the spirit of the gift." A good part of the confusion was due to a bad translation. Mauss appeared to be arguing that a return gift is given to keep the relationship between givers alive.
Based on an improved translation, Jonathan Parry has demonstrated that Mauss was arguing that the concept of a "pure gift" given altruistically only emerges in societies with a well-developed market ideology. Mauss' concept of "total prestations" has been developed in the 20th century by Annette Weiner, who revisited Malinowski's fieldsite in the Trobriand Islands, her 1992 critique was twofold: she noted first that Trobriand Island society has a matrilineal kinship system, that women hold a great deal of economic and political power, as inheritance is passed through the female lines. Malinowski missed this and ignored women's exchanges in his study. Secondly, Weiner has developed Mauss' argument about reciprocity and the "spirit of the gift" in terms of "inalienable possessions: the paradox of keeping while giving." Weiner contrasts "moveable goods," which can be exchanged, with "immoveable goods," which serve to draw the gifts back. She argues that the specific goods given, such as Crown Jewels, are so identified with particular groups that when given, they are not alienated.
Not all societies, have these kinds of goods, which depend upon the existence of particular kinds of kinship groups. French anthropologist Maurice Godelier pushed the analysis further in The Enigma of the Gift. Albert Schrauwers has argued that the kinds of societies used as examples by Weiner and Godelier are all characterized by ranked aristocratic kin groups that fit with Claude Lévi-Strauss' model of "House Societies". Total prestations are given, he argues, to preserve landed estates identified with particular kin groups and maintain their place in a ranked society; the misunderstanding about what Mauss meant by "the spirit of the gift" led some anthropologists to contrast "gift economies" with "market economies," presenting them as polar opposites and imply
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