Displaying Ancient Geography

Before the production process of this book began, its author, the British scholar Denis Shaw, passed away. With the help of Janet Hartley, however, Shaw’s volume has been posthumously finished. Reconnoitring Russia may count as a great tribute to his original contribution to the study of Muscovy-Russia in what usually, following the conventions of European history, is called the Early Modern era. As a historical geographer, Shaw followed in the footsteps of the rather few Western historical geographers of the Russian realm, people like John F. Baddeley, Leo Bagrow, or Johannes Keunig. With Valerie A. Kivelson, Shaw was one of the very few who wrote in recent times in English about the Russian use and understanding of geography. Of course, some Russian scholars have written about this topic, while Western experts have fairly frequently looked at the geographic knowledge in Western and Central Europe of the Russian Empire before the nineteenth century, but Shaw’s many articles and particularly this book very much have filled a gap. In seven chapters, the text spans the “geographical endeavour,” as Shaw calls it, of Muscovy-Russia from the early 1600s until 1825 (pp. 2, 5). Pivotal was Peter the Great’s reign, when the Russian interest in geography became systematic and scientific. Shaw suggests that the early seventeenth-century Russia started out as an outlier, collecting geographical knowledge through cadastral surveys for taxation purposes and drafting its own kind of maps, but began to gather geographical information and produce maps from the early eighteenth century onward in a manner that aligned with European conventions. This shift was of course linked to the needs of the Russian state, which laid claim to vast territories about which it initially knew little to nothing at all. As Shaw explains, “European states in this period were all engaged in the process of reinforcing their territorial control in the light of their quest for resources, defensive capacity, administrative efficiency and similar needs” (p. 71). Once Peter was firmly in the saddle after 1689, expeditions—such as those led by Evert Ysbrandts Ides and Daniel Messerschmidt—were undertaken to chart these lands. These explorations became better organized after the Academy of Sciences was founded in 1725. As Shaw writes, “Academy-sponsored expeditions studied the regions of north European Russia, Siberia, the Far East, the north coast and the Arctic, Alaska and the northern Pacific, Central Asia and even further afield” (p. 7). Indeed, regions on the western side of the Ural Mountains remained virtual terra incognita before being investigated by Academy-sponsored investigations under Catherine the Great. Surveying techniques and other research tools, meanwhile, acquired greater accuracy in the eighteenth century. By then, the scientist-geographers themselves were better trained, as apprentices of more senior explorers on expeditions, at the Academy, and after 1755 at Moscow University, while a good number were German speakers who had studied in the Holy Roman Empire. Initially, before Peter’s reign, much of the geographical information had remained in manuscript and secret, but Peter’s Great Embassy of 1697–98 was a watershed, leading to a far more open and regular publication of maps and atlases. Shaw’s book is a fine survey and is quite accessible to the uninitiated reader who has little knowledge about Romanov Russia but wants to find out more about its interest in, and use of, geography. Its maps are quite good, which defies the standard: most maps in books about Russian history are sub-par these days. I am slightly puzzled about why the book ends in 1825 rather than 1796, or perhaps 1801. With respect to geographical knowledge, Tsar Alexander I’s reign (1801–25) seems to be quite different from what previously occurred, and rather little in terms of geographical research is written about it here. Undoubtedly, the round-the-world trip of Krusenstern may be seen as a sort of crowning achievement of the eighteenth-century expeditions, and does remind of James Cook’s travels, but almost everything else of chapter 6 is about eighteenth-century investigations, or about publications that saw the light after 1825 by scholars such as E. F. Ziablovskii and K. I. Arsen'ev, tutor of the later Alexander II. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that “the geographical exploration and survey of the vast spaces of Eurasia, pioneered by Russians, Germans and others, forms an important chapter in the history of European imperialism and of European geographical endeavour … all too frequently overlooked” (p. 183). Shaw’s excellent book provides this hitherto-missing chapter.

The history of geography needs to be more closely connected with recent revisionist accounts of the history of science. After a brief review of some of the newer historiographic insights that have lately been applied to writings on geography's history, this paper sets out some additional principles that historians of the subject might profitably engage. Chief among these are the consequences of taking seriously the “situatedness” and “contingency” of geographical knowledge and practice.

The focus of humanistic geography is on people and their condition. Humanistic geography is thus not primarily an earth science, yet it is a branch of geography because it reflects upon kinds of evidence that interest other branches of the discipline. The following topics are briefly noted from the humanistic perspective: geographical knowledge, territory and place, crowding and privacy, livelihood and economics, and religion. The basic approach to these topics is by way of human experience, awareness, and knowledge. Humanistic geography contributes to science by drawing attention to facts hitherto beyond the scientific purview. It differs from historical geography in emphasizing that people create their own historical myths. A humanist geographer should have training in systematic thought, or philosophy. His work serves society essentially by raising its level of consciousness.

Introduction Historical Geographies in the Present Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies Imperialism and Empire Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism Development Nation-Building and Geopolitics Territory and Place Identity and the Nation Imaginative Geographies and Geopolitics Historical Hierarchies Class, Hegemony and Resistance Race Gender The Built Environment Nature and the Environment Making Sense of Urban Settlement Geographies of Urban Morphology Place and Meaning Landscape and Iconography Conceptualising Heritage Performance, Spectacle and Power Modernity and Modernisation Capitalism and Industrialisation Cultures of Science and Technology Modernity and Democracy Beyond the Border Globalisation Governmentality Nature-Culture The Production of Historical Geographical Knowledge Historical Geographical Traditions Illustrative Geographies Evidence and Representation

This paper describes an approach to combining range data from both a set of sonar sensors as well as from a directional laser range finder to efficiently take advantage of the characteristics of both types of devices when exploring and mapping unknown worlds. The authors call their approach just in sensing because it uses the more accurate but constrained laser range sensor only as needed, based upon a preliminary interpretation of sonar data. In this respect, it resembles just in time inventory control which attempts to judiciously obtain materials for industrial manufacturing only when and as needed. Experiments with a mobile robot equipped with sonar and a laser rangefinder demonstrate that by judiciously using the more accurate but more complex laser rangefinder to deal with the well-known ambiguity which arises in sonar data, the authors are able to obtain a much better map of an interior space at little additional cost (in terms of and computational expense).

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

In the course of the human past the elimination of the testicles of boys and men – what we call castration – has taken place for a variety of reasons. Many times it was meant to deliberately hurt people. It is and was also performed, though, as a therapeutic measure by well-meaning physicians. Studying the motivations of medical practitioners involved in castration practices provides insight into the deontology and cultural context of these healers. This article explores the healing activities of the physicians of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds in this special field of surgery. In the extant literary sources we find medical indications for castration which are quite obvious to a modern eye, but also more mysterious and unexpected occasions which need to be explained from the historical context.

The bear played a not insignificant role in the ancient Greco-Roman world - as a pest, it occasionally disrupted human life and sometimes even killed human beings. Humans, however, were the greater foe to bears by far; in huge numbers, bears were hunted, captured, and - particularly in Rome - killed or set on humans and other animals for the entertainment of the audience. Humans not only fear, hunt, and torment bears, but they also eat them, heal, clothe, and adorn themselves with parts of them. They invoke the power attributed to the bear in ceremony and cult as well as for magical rituals. They name stellar constellations after it, train it, imitate it in their art, tell stories about it, and turn the bear into an object of their scientific curiosity.

This short afterword reflects upon some of the issues raised by the volume as whole, especially those connected with cross-cultural variability in the experience and conceptualization of affectivity and emotion, with the status of emotions as biological and cultural phenomena, with the challenges posed by the overall project of cross-cultural comparison, and with variation within cultures in representations of and approaches to emotion. A substantial emphasis is placed on social functions in specific cultural contexts. In conclusion, the chapter summarizes some of the main results of the volume, draws connections between chapters, and surveys the prospects for further work on these topics.

American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines tells the story of U.S. colonialists who attempted, in the first decades of the twentieth century, to build an enduring American empire in the Philippines through the production of space. From concrete interventions in infrastructure, urban planning, and built environments to more abstract projects of mapping and territorialization, the book traces the efforts of U.S. Insular Government agents to make space for empire in the Philippines through forms of territory, map, landscape, and road, and how these spaces were understood as solutions to problems of colonial rule. Through the lens of space, the book offers an original history of a highly transformative, but largely misunderstood or forgotten, imperial moment, when the Philippine archipelago, made up of thousands of islands and an ethnically and religiously diverse population of more than seven million, became the unlikely primary setting for U.S. experimentation with formal colonial governance. Telling that story around key figures including Cameron Forbes, Daniel Burnham, Dean Worcester, and William Howard Taft, the book provides distinctive chapters dedicated to spaces of territory (sovereignty), maps (knowledge), landscape (aesthetics), and roads (circulation), suggesting new and integrative historical geographical approaches. This book will be of interest to students of Cultural, Historical, and Political Geography, American History, American Studies, Philippine Studies, Southeast Asia/Philippines; Asian Studies as well as general readers interested in these areas.

The Villa of the Papyri is a unique archaeological site and has been very influential in the field of classical studies. The papyri (the only intact library to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity) and bronze sculptures found in the villa have contributed to our knowledge of the ancient world and the villa has become for us the “ideal model” of Roman luxury villa culture. This volume brings together papers delivered by experts in various fields addressing the cultural significance of this ancient site in its contemporary Roman context as well as its cultural reception from its discovery over two hundred and fifty years ago to the most recent excavations in the late twentieth century. They also explore the ways in which digital archaeology can assist our efforts to understand and investigate ancient sites. Topics treated include the Villa’s architecture, decoration, and content (i.e., wall-paintings, sculptures, and papyri); their reception since the 18th century; and the current state of knowledge based on the recent partial excavations in the Villa, presented here in English for the first time. Furthermore, the use of digital models of the Villa that incorporate the data from the new excavations and a discussion on the ways in which such models may be used for educational and research purposes are also presented.

Was atheism in the ancient world really ‘scarcely imaginable’? This thesis confronts the notion that religion was embedded in the environment and mentality of the ancient Greeks to the extent that atheism became cognitively impossible. Instead this thesis proposes that if atheism, rather than atheists, is made the focus then it is possible to examine atheism in the ancient world through a set of different thematic lenses. Atheism in ancient Greece was a highly contextual, varied, and flourishing set of phenomena. Understanding the form and evolution of atheistic ideas and atheism in Greek society is invaluable in helping us more fully understand Greek religion, not least because it was in response to and through opposition to atheism that Greek religious beliefs evolved and Greeks developed their own sense of collective and individual religious identity.

This paper addresses the construction of national unity by Italian geographers in the age of the Risorgimento, analysing this process within the context of the international emergence of national representations, identities and imaginaries which was similarly accompanied by geographers elsewhere during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Based on primary sources, focusing on European circulation of knowledge, and drawing on the study of the cultural and epistemological construction of the geographical objects, this paper contributes to current research on nationalism, identities and national imagination from the standpoint of social, cultural and historical geography. Interrogating how geography constructed objects of cultural identity in Italy, initially through landscape and morphologic analysis, and finally in the geographical invention of the Italian nation, reveals the importance of this discipline for constructing social reality. The study of the role of geography historically in nation‐building can shed light both on territorial challenges of the past, and those potentially to come.

Au XVIII e siecle, les bateaux etaient consideres comme des instruments scientifiques permettant de voyager et connaitre ainsi la geographie, la topographie et la meteorologie a travers le monde