The Upper Palaeolithic Revolution, sometimes called ‘the Creative Explosion’, is seen as the period when the forefathers of modern forager societies emerged. Similarly to the Industrial and Neolithic Revolutions, it represents a short time span when numerous inventions appeared and cultural changes occurred. The inventions were in the domain of technology, that is, shaping of new stone tool forms, longdistance exchange of raw materials, the use of bone, antler and ivory as well as rare minerals for the production of domestic and ritual objects. Spatial analysis of ‘living floors’ indicates the presence of a kitchen area, sleeping grounds, storage facilities (in certain regions) and a discard zone. We can also detect a certain increase in social hierarchy and the presence of shamans. Body decorations indicate the appearance of personal individuality. Several hypotheses were offered as an explanation for the initiation of all these cultural changes often grouped under the term ‘modern behaviour’. It stands to reason that attributing the new successful technologies observed in the Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic to intrinsic social processes and economic innovations by local Middle Palaeolithic populations would need a better archaeological demonstration than that available today. For the time being, the emergence of Modern humans in sub-Saharan Africa, their socio-economic dynamism that caused their expansion through the Nile Valley into the Near East, and their migration along the ‘southern route’ of Asia as far as Australia, is the most plausible scenario though it still leaves much to be desired from future archaeological research.

A myth relates a sacred story, that is to say, it recounts a primordial event that occurred at the beginning of time. But to tell a sacred story is equivalent to revealing a mystery, because the characters in a myth are not human beings. They are either gods or civilizing heroes, and therefore their gesta constitute mysteries: man would not know these tales if they were not revealed to him. Consequently, a myth is a story of what happened—what the gods and supernatural beings did—at the beginning of time. “To recount” a myth is to proclaim what occurred then. Once “told,” in other words, once revealed, the myth becomes the apodictic truth: it establishes truth. “It is so because it is said to be so,” the Netsilik Eskimos declared in order to justify the validity of their sacred history and their religious traditions. The myth proclaims the advent of a new cosmic situation or narrates a primordial event, and so it is always the story of a “creation”; it tells how something has been effectuated, has begun to be. That is why the myth is interdependent with ontology; it deals solely with realities, with what really happened, with what was clearly manifest.

This article starts from the observation that research on conspiracy theories is currently thriving, but that it is also fragmented. In particular there is an increasing divide between disciplines with culturalist and qualitative approaches, such as history, cultural studies and ethnology, and disciplines with quantitative and empirical approaches, such as psychology and political science. The article argues that this ‘great divide’ has to be bridged for research to arrive at a genuine understanding of conspiracy theories. As a first step in such a bridge-building process, the article engages, from the vantage point of (American) cultural studies, with research done on the other side of the divide, namely in psychology and political science. It summarizes the work done in these fields and evaluates it critically, concentrating on methodology; the assumptions about the dysfunctionality of conspiracy beliefs; the circularity of some arguments; the focus on individual rather than social and collective aspects; the lack of engagement with the definition of the phenomenon; and the neglect of cultural and historical difference. The article ends with recommendations for future collaborative research projects.

In this article, the authors review a contemporary social psychological perspective on persuasion with an emphasis on explicating the psychological processes that underlie successful attitude change. Those mechanisms by which variables in the persuasion setting can influence attitude change are: (a) affect the amount of information processing; (b) bias the thoughts that are generated or (c) one's confidence in those thoughts (or other structural features); (d) serve as persuasive arguments or evidence or (e) affect attitudes by serving as simple cues and heuristics. By grouping the persuasion processes into meaningful categories, the authors aim to provide a useful guide to organize and facilitate access to key findings in this literature. They also describe a theoretical framework to understand the circumstances for which the different processes are more likely to influence our judgments, such as when variables precede or follow thought-generation, and when the extent of thinking is relatively low, medium, or high.

To read, to read a book, is, like all the other really human occupations, a Utopian task. I call “utopian” every action whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which had started it. Thus “to read” begins by signifying the project of understanding a text fully. Now this is impossible. It is only possible with a great effort to extract a more or less important portion of what the text has tried to say, communicate, make known; but there will always remain an “illegible” residue. It is, on the other hand, probable that, while we are making this effort, we may read, at the same time, into the text; that is, we may understand things which the author has not “meant” to say, and, nevertheless, he has “said” them; he has presented them to us involuntarily—even more, against his professed purpose. This twofold condition of speech, so strange and antithetical, appears in two principles of my “Axioms for a New Philology,” which are as follows:

1. 1. Every utterance is deficient—it says less than it wishes to say.

2. 2. Every utterance is exuberant—it conveys more than it plans.

A specter is haunting sociologists. It is the specter of “mass society.” This phantasm is not of the sociologist's own making. The conception of mass society, that had its origin in the Roman historians’ idea of the tumultuous populace and its greatest literary expression in Coriolanus, is largely a product of the nineteenth century. In this epoch, it is a product of the reaction against the French Revolutions which ran from 1789, through 1830 and 1848, to 1871. Jakob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, fearful of the inflammability of the mob in the presence of a heated demagogue—that demagogue was Louis Napoléon—came to envisage modern society, particularly modern democratic society, as tending toward an inert and formless mass, lying in brutish torpor most of the time and occasionally aroused to plebiscitary acclamation by a “great simplifier.” Tocqueville's critique of the absolutist ancien régime, centered on a vision of a society which has lost its framework of feudal liberty through the destruction of the autonomous corporations and estates on which it rested, is a cornerstone of that construction. The no-man's land between the absolute prince and the mass of the population became a field open to passion and manipulation.

This article reviews and contrasts research findings in a variety of disciplines seeking corroboration for theories of settlement in Madagascar. Evidence is considered from the fields of linguistics, archaeology (studies of pottery), cultural anthropology and genetic analysis, leading to conclusions broadly supporting the thesis of Austronesian migrations directly to Madagascar from Kalimantan and Sulawesi around the 5th and 7th centuries CE, which combined with a Bantu group originating from the region of Mozambique. The article nevertheless warns against attributing too much to individual discipline studies, concluding that only genetic analysis can provide conclusive proof, and this only when informed by prior anthropological and historical indicators.

A liquid modernity, where the traditional certainties have become fluid and blurred, presents a major challenge for education. The world is changing so quickly that homo sapiens, learning animal par excellence, can no longer rely on strategies acquired through learning experiences, let alone those derived from traditional values or wisdom. The excess of useless information creates a glut. When saturation level is reached, accumulation ceases to be a sign of wealth and becomes undesirable. Knowledge is confined - discarded like refuse - in the infinite capacity of cybercomputers. What should we humans keep and what should we reject in this process? In times of liquid modernity, how and what should our children be taught in order to be able to develop survival strategies throughout their lives?

Contemporary study of language has turned to questions of linguistic structure and cognitive psychology of a sort that aroused little interest in the immediately preceding period. The extent to which this is a return to long neglected topics rather than an innovation is not widely appreciated, however, and I would like to comment briefly on this matter here.

A central topic of much current research is what we may call the “creative” aspect of language use, that is, its unboundedness and freedom from stimulus control. The speaker-hearer whose normal use of language is “creative,” in this sense, must have internalized a system of rules that determines the semantic interpretations of an unbounded set of sentences; he must, in other words, be in control of what is now often called a generative grammar of his language. A generative grammar must determine the structural description of each possible sentence, where the structural description of a sentence is a formal object of some sort that contains what information the rules of the language provide concerning the semantic content and phonetic form of this sentence.

The religious question in China, which is today marked by various conflicts between the state and unrecognized confessional organizations, can be understood only in a historical perspective. In particular the adoption early in the 20th century of a notion of religion coming directly from the West, and narrowly defined, has justified a policy that grants a relative but controlled freedom to five great religions while actively condemning others, which are seen as ‘superstitions’. The article details the implications of this notion of ‘religion’ in modern and contemporary China and looks at how Chinese religious traditions have adapted to it.

Even though utopias are potentially dangerous, we nonetheless need utopian visions. Loss of hope and utopia means loss of humanity. But how can we stop utopia turning into dystopia? Utopia thought of in terms of perfection, purity and exclusivity imposes its version of a better life as the only possible one. On the other hand the utopianism of opposition does not seek perfection, or removal of opportunities for evolution. Its goal is progress and not repression of human beings. It is not utopianism that is at fault, the problem arises rather from the conviction that a particular utopia can bring about the only correct way to live.

In 1933, the rector of the University of Leyden, J. Huizinga, chose as the theme of his solemn speech, “the boundaries of play and of work in culture.” He was to take this subject up again and to develop it in a powerful and original work published in 1938, Homo ludens. Most of the statements in this book are debatable. Nonetheless, it opens the way to extremely fertile research and reflection. It is to Huizinga's lasting credit that he masterfully analyzed the fundamental characteristics of play and that he demonstrated the importance of its role in the development of civilization. He wanted on the one hand to find an exact definition of the essential nature of play; on the other hand, he attempted to shed some light on that part of play that haunts or enlivens the principal manifestations of all culture, the arts as well as philosophy, poetry as well as juridical institutions, and even certain aspects of war.

The idea of sign, σημα (sema), has been popular in philosophy and the history of the sciences. Hippocrates and the Stoics, Plato and Aristotle, Saint Augustine and Descartes, Leibniz and Locke, Hegel and Humboldt figure among those who have dealt penetratingly with it. It has engendered a wide variety of sciences and disciplines: semiology, semiotics, semasiology, semantics, sematology which changed their name and content with the influence of time and sometimes of fashion, becoming forgotten to reappear with the impetus of a great thinker. The history of the sciences of the sign deserves systematic study. We shall content ourselves to point out that, of the terms quoted above, semiotics and semiology (or semeiology) have had a longer and richer career than the others. Since Greek antiquity they were applied to two apparently distant fields: military art (the science of manoeuvring troops with the help of signals) and medicine, in which they showed a greater perseverance. In many countries, throughout the 19th century and even today, medical study of the symptoms of illnesses is called semiology.

Well over five thousand languages are known to exist or to have existed in the world, but hundreds of these are no longer living languages used by speakers and speech communities in their day-to-day activities and lives. Some of them lead a pseudolife as revered monuments of the past which still have some restricted and specialised roles to play today, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, Church Slavonic and others, but most of them are of interest and concern only to a small group of linguists, historians and some other experts who look at the past. Many languages have disappeared without being known to us in any great detail, with only some fragmentary materials in them - written or noted down by speakers or observers of them hundreds or even thousands of years ago - at our disposal to give us some idea as to what those languages were like. Others have disappeared without even that scanty information about their nature being available to us; only their names are known from historical records, or perhaps some remarks were written down by someone many years ago and were preserved over the ages to tell us something about some special features of such a language or such languages and who and what kind of people their speakers were. Many other languages, certainly a much larger number than the dead languages about which we know something, have disappeared without our knowing anything of or about them.

“Thy word (or: essence) is true from the beginning”; thus reads the Psalmist's passage, oft quoted in kabbalistic literature (Psalm 119: 160). According to the originally conceived Judaistic meaning, truth was the word of God which was audible both acoustically and linguistically. Under the system of the synagogue, revelation is an acoustic process, not a visual one; or revelation at least ensues from an area which is metaphysically associated with the acoustic and the perceptible (in a sensual context). This is repeatedly emphasised with reference to the words of the Torah (Deuteronomy 4: 12): “Ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice.” What precisely we are to understand by this voice and what is uttered through it is the very question which the various currents of Judaistic religious thought have constantly posed themselves. The indissoluble link between the idea of the revealed truth and the notion of language—is as much, that is, as the word of God makes itself heard through the medium of human language, if, otherwise, human experience can reach the knowledge of such a word at all—is presumably one of the most important, if not the most important, legacies bequeathed by Judaism to the history of religions.

The existence of monsters throws doubt on life's ability to teach us order. This doubt is immediate, no matter for how long a time we have had confidence, no matter how accustomed we have been to see honeysuckle grow on honeysuckle vines, tadpoles become frogs, mares suckle colts, and in general to see like engender like. It is sufficient that this confidence be shaken once by a morphological variation, by a single equivocal appearance, for a radical fear to possess us. Perhaps, fear, you will say; but why radical? Because we are living beings, real effects of the laws of life, and in our turn future causes of life. A failure on the part of life concerns us doubly: a failure could affect us, and we could cause a failure. It is only because we men are living beings that a morphological failure is, in our eyes, a monster. Suppose we were pure reason, a pure intellectual machine for observing, calculating, and accounting—inert, and indifferent to the objects that give rise to thought: in that case the monster would simply be that which was different from the ordinary, of an order other than the most probable order.

Chosen by English-speaking anthropologists to designate the ritual buffoons discovered among the North American Indians, in Africa and in Oceania, the word “clown” is no misnomer. Our circus clowns are the descendants of these puzzling ceremonial figures, and it is perhaps thanks to their filiation to them (confirmed, as we shall see, by etymology) that our spleenish makers of laughter owe their fascination and their capacity to survive the vicissitudes of the stage. But we shall also see that in tribal society a clown becomes a clown only in a subsidiary way, the origins of this figure going back to a complex of causes having little to do with the jocularity assumed to be his unique purpose to arouse, but which overlays and conceals the true nature of his original role.

Translated by Raoul Makarius.

Among the cultural innovations by which the Upper Palaeolithic period is characterized, those relating to burial practices furnish the possibility of evaluating the profound changes which differentiated this era from the Middle Palaeolithic. The graves of the Upper Palaeolithic offer us a sometimes very compelling glimpse of the complexity of the symbolic, cognitive and social environment of those peoples, as well as of the evolution and diversification over time and space of their rituals associated with death. This article considers the set of burials discovered to date within the boundaries of Italy as particularly representative of these features. Numerous, diverse and well-endowed, they provide important information about the peoples of the Upper Palaeolithic and of the way they responded to death. These graves also represent a significant body of evidence for the debate on the degree to which Palaeolithic man can be considered culturally fully human and the extent to which he intentionally buried his dead.

To say that globalization is on all our minds would be both trite and excessive. Yet for many years we have known that we live in the ‘global village’ and, as humanists, we have even rejoiced in the fact that the various technologies facilitating communications and travel have woven our world into one, concretely and visibly. We know that the Other is not out or down there but right here; that the suffering of the Other, for example that of the Third World, is with us constantly in images and statistics. In many ways this has been the fulfilment of many dreams: Christian, humanist, cosmopolitan dreams in which humanity is indeed one.

The paper argues that the contemporary social sciences and humanities are in a deep crisis, due to the prevalence of obscurantist arguments. Whereas many have denounced the “soft obscurantism” derived from what is sometimes called “French theory”, the “hard obscurantism” of many forms of mathematical and statistical social science also deserves to be singled out for criticism. The paper further argues that obscurantism does not merely represent a waste of intellectual effort, but has caused harm to countless individuals, ranging from parents of autistic children to market investors. Finally the paper considers some of the psychological mechanisms that may sustain obscurantism and constitute obstacles to overcoming it.