David Inglis

Highland and other haunts: Ghosts in Scottish Tourism

Ghosts and other paranormal entities exist neither in this world or the next, nor in one particular spatial and temporal location. However, ghostly qualities have been used within, and to create, particular sociospatial contexts. This paper traces the history of the parts played by spooks in constructing Scotland as a prime tourism location. Its landscapes, cityscapes, and habitations have been interpretatively re-created over the last two centuries producing conceptions of Scottish history which privilege the mysteriousness of a Highland and Celtic past. By interrogating the shifting relations between ghosts/haunted spaces and tourism, this paper reveals some of the mechanisms developed to stimulate the industry.

Boundary Maintenance, Border Crossing and the Nature/Culture Divide

In recent times developments in the natural sciences and in the sphere of environmental politics have compelled social scientists, and also some natural scientists, to rethink the relations that hitherto have been held, in Western thought generally and within particular disciplines, to characterize ‘nature’ on the one side and ‘culture’ on the other. This article considers the history of this conceptual boundary and looks at new conceptualizations of nature/culture, stimulated by developments both in biotechnology and in the ongoing controversies about environmental degradation. It argues that while some of the contributions to reconfiguring, or abolishing, the nature/ culture division have been productive and stimulating of new ways of conceiving the world, there has nonetheless been an unfortunate tendency for social scientists to bring to bear inherited analytic dispositions on biotechnological and environmental matters. Instead of using these issues as means of challenging social scientific disciplinary dogmas and of engaging in constructive rapprochement with natural scientists, social scientists have in their analyses of such matters often merely asserted the hegemony of ‘culture’ over ‘nature’, and thus in effect the superiority of social scientific over natural scientific conceptualizations of the world. Far from overcoming the nature/culture boundary, social scientists have too often merely asserted the primacy of the sorts of subject matters and analytic techniques they feel comfortable with, rather than subjecting their practices to fully reflexive self-scrutiny.

The Ecumenical Analytic ‘Globalization’, Reflexivity and the Revolution in Greek Historiography

‘Globalization’ has become in recent years one of the central themes of social scientific debates. Social theories of globalization may be regarded as specific academic and analytic manifestations of wider forms of ‘global consciousness’ to be found in the social world today. These are ways of thinking and perceiving which emphasize that the whole world should be seen as ‘one place’, its various geographically disparate parts all being interconnected in various complex ways. In this article we set out how both a general ‘ecumenical sensibility’ involving such ways of thinking, and its specifically academic variant, an ‘ecumenical analytic’, are simultaneously responses to ‘globalizing conditions’ and also products of the latter. We demonstrate how social theories of globalization, locatable in the overall set we call the ‘ecumenical analytic’, are reflexive thought-products, in that they both seek to investigate, and are made possible by, ‘globalizing conditions’. Rejecting the view that both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic are solely products of modernity, we show how such modes of consciousness and analysis were present in the period of Greek history between the death of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Roman Empire. We show how at that period a socio-political situation akin in certain ways to modern ‘globalizing conditions’ generated both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic, the latter most forcefully represented by a revolutionary new genre in historiography called Universal History. By examining the ideas of its most famous practitioner, the historian Polybius, we demonstrate that Universal History both provided a framework for understanding what we today would call ‘globalization’, and exhibited a remarkable degree of reflexive awareness about its own conditions of possibility. We seek to show that an attentiveness to ‘global’ processes and a reflexive understanding of what makes that form of thinking possible in the first place, are not solely confined to modernity but were identifiable features of intellectual production in the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. In this way we argue that scholars today should not imagine that the contemporary ‘global turn’ in social thought is either unique or wholly historically unprecedented.

Cosmopolitan sociology and the classical canon: Ferdinand Tönnies and the emergence of global Gesellschaft

How relevant are figures from the classical sociological canon for present day efforts to found cosmopolitan forms of sociological thought? According to the critique of Ulrich Beck, the classical sociologists remain far too wedded to nation-state-centred ways of thinking to play an important role in the development of cosmopolitan sociology. This paper argues that such a critique fails to account for the ways in which certain classical sociologists were attuned to the emerging cosmopolitical conditions of their own time, were not wholly wedded to nation-state-based conceptualizations, and thus can function as both groundings of, and inspirations for, cosmopolitan sociological endeavours. The apparently unpromising case of Tönnies is focused on, the paper showing how he outlined an account of how and why a planet-spanning condition of Gesellschaft developed a position which diverges from and counterpoints Marxs analysis of similar phenomena in important ways. The stereotype of Tönnies as an arch-conservative is also dissolved, allowing him to be considered as one of the most important antecedents of contemporary cosmopolitan sociological practice and a canonical figure still relevant for present-day purposes.

Culture agonistes: social differentiation, cultural policy and Cultural Olympiads

Cultural policy‐makers and analysts have recently focussed upon the particularly fruitful connections between ‘culture’ and sports. Yet for a long time the Olympic Games have involved an attempted articulation of the cultural–artistic and sportive aspects of human existence. This paper analyses the various attempts to conjoin the separate realms of ‘culture’ and sports that have characterised the Modern Olympics, as Olympic officials and local organising committees have endeavoured to rekindle the original culture–sports nexus of the ancient Greek games. A historical–sociological account of such matters, focussed on the key theme of structural differentiation, is laid out and used to account both for the nature of the ‘Cultural Olympiad’ held at the Sydney 2000 Games and for the cultural events currently being organised for the London 2012 Games. Some suggestions are offered as to how future planning might deal with the problems attendant upon attempts to conjoin two apparently wholly separate and antagonistic realms.

The beautiful game and the proto‐aesthetics of the everyday

Abstract This article provides a critique of the postmodernist notion that there has been of recent years a dissolution of the divide between aesthetics and practical activities, between Art and Life. It does so by considering the game of soccer from a phenomenological viewpoint, which shows that the game possesses intrinsically ‘aesthetic’ qualities. The conditions of possibility of such qualities are understood by introducing the idea of the ‘proto‐aesthetics’ of soccer and other mundane phenomena. By considering the proto‐aesthetics of the quotidian we argue that recent changes in the nature of practical life should not be regarded as due to ‘aestheticisation’ but rather as springing from processes of commodification.

The global animus: in the tracks of world consciousness

In recent years, much has been made of the idea that under conditions of globalization, more and more people in different parts of the planet conceive of themselves as part of a ‘global society’ or ‘global culture’. Often it has been alleged that forms of consciousness centred around a disposition to see ones own life as a single part of the ‘world as a whole’ are relatively recent products. In this paper we argue that such tendencies, or something very much like them, in fact were present in the ancient Mediterranean world. We examine how ways of thinking and feeling, that bear in certain ways close correspondence to modern ideas as to ‘globality’, were prevalent amongst certain social groups in the Roman empire. Those persons regarded themselves as part of a world that was rapidly shrinking through increasing levels of political, commercial and other modes of interconnection between its geographically disparate parts. By examining these ancient attitudes, we demonstrate an important aspect of the pre-history of modern sensibilities as to the nature of a ‘globalizing/globalized world’. Moreover, by attending to ancient evidence as to ‘global’ attitudes and ‘global consciousness’, one may begin to overcome the presentism implicit in many contemporary accounts of globalization.

Beyond the Gates of the Polis Reconfiguring Sociology’s Ancient Inheritance

In recent sociological debates, the concept of ‘society’, understood as a delimited, bounded entity, has come under much critical scrutiny, especially as it seems increasingly inadequate as a frame of analytical reference in an age characterized by ‘global’ flows and processes beyond national boundaries. In this article, we suggest that this understanding of ‘society’ is analogous to, and was in part generated by, the conception of the city-state (polis) favoured by ancient Greek thinkers of the 4th century BC, most notably Plato and Aristotle. Standard accounts of the history of sociology see the roots of the discipline as originating in this type of Greek political theory, for it provided many of the bases of the social analyses of ‘classical’ sociologists such as Durkheim. The development of forms of sociological thought that can grasp phenomena that exist in certain senses beyond ‘society’ requires not only a reconsideration of the relations that can or should pertain between present-day sociologists and the ‘classical’ 19th-century thinkers, but also a rethinking of the connections between these two groups and their ancient predecessors. We suggest that it is today fruitful to reconfigure our understanding of the nature of the history of sociological thought, such that thinkers of a later, Hellenistic, period in Greek history, especially the historiographer Polybius, are recognized as important predecessors in the search for analytic categories that are not restricted to the study of particular bounded social entities. Thinkers of the Hellenistic period rejected the polis as the central analytic category in favour of the study of the whole ‘inhabited world’ (oikoumene). The ways in which Polybius in particular transformed the nature of historiography should be seen as important precursors of modern notions of ‘global sociology’. A recognition of the importance of this Hellenistic revolution in analytic orientation compels us to rethink what texts we take to be ‘classical’ vis-á-vis contemporary sociological endeavours to grasp the ‘global’.

Cosmopolitans and cosmopolitanism: Between and beyond sociology and political philosophy

There has been an explosion of interest in recent years in cosmopolitanism, as both political philosophy and object of sociological investigation. In the empirical sociological literature, there is a strong tendency to present Western cosmopolitan thought as purely theoretical in nature, devoid of empirical referents and underpinnings. This article re-narrates the history of cosmopolitan thinking – stretching from ancient Greece and Rome through Kantian philosophy to the time of Durkheim – to demonstrate that this is a caricature, and that there are important empirical and sociological elements in cosmopolitan thought. This fact must be acknowledged in future cosmopolitanism studies, so that political philosophy and sociological analysis are no longer seen to stand in unhelpful opposition to each other, and such that broader, unproductive divisions between the empirical and normative domains are transcended.

From republican virtue to global imaginary: changing visions of the historian Polybius:

The ancient Greek historian and political scientist Polybius is not as well known in the present day as figures such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. This is in part due to his having lived in the Hellenistic period, an epoch often thought to be characteristic of Greek cultural and political decline, rather than in the earlier ‘golden age’ of Greek intellectual life in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Yet Polybius’s ideas have been of profound importance in modern western thought, in areas as diverse as historiography, philosophy of history and the theorization of political institutions. This article illustrates the main contours of how subsequent thinkers have received and made use of Polybian ideas and themes, and argues for regarding Polybius as an important precursor of contemporary social scientific analyses of ‘globalization’. The article first excavates and identifies some of the main forms of appropriation of Polybius’s ideas that have occurred in the West over the last 500 years. Secondly, it delineates the most important appropriation of Polybius in the human sciences that has been effected in recent times, namely the use made of Polybian themes by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, their influential diagnosis of the contemporary state of world affairs. Thirdly, the article proffers a critique of these authors’ use of Polybius, and in its stead offers an alternative mode of appropriation of his work for the purposes of analytically reorienting the human sciences in light of present-day concerns with globalization and conditions of globality. It is argued that, far from being a figure of only antiquarian interest, Polybius continues to be of much relevance for human scientists today, for he may be seen as a foundational figure in efforts to think about the ‘global’ level in human affairs.