(Post)Colonial [1] Encounters: gendered racialisations in Australian courtrooms [2]

This article identifies how the Australian legal system has generated knowledge about ‘traditional’ gender relations in Aboriginal Australia. Using a sample of artefact cases from the Australian judicial system, constructions of Aboriginal gender relations are mapped. By tracing knowledge production in these cases, it demonstrates how the non-Aboriginal Australian legal system has fabricated its own versions of ‘Aboriginal Customary Laws’, or Aboriginal ‘traditions’ about violence committed by Aboriginal men, against Aboriginal women. (Post)colonial understandings about the Aboriginal ‘other’ have occupied spaces in legal understandings and then been enforced in law. The Australian judicial system itself is therefore guilty of perpetuating and privileging the ‘colonial’ in these encounters.     

Magnetic activity (Kp) and quasi-periodic variations of intensity of the oxygen green and red lines

The association between magnetic activity (K_p) and quasi-periodic variations of intensity of the oxygen green and red lines is studied. It is found that, when K_p is greater, the association between K_p and quasi-periodic intensity variations is generally better. It is suggested that some relationship exists between quasi-periodic intensity variations of nightglow emissions and the activity of travelling ionospheric disturbances or magnetospheric substorms.     

The Witches' Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors,or How to Explain (Away) the Impossible [1]

The first part of this paper presents four old Spanish explanations of the witches' flying: (1) that (with the Devil's help) they actually did fly; (2) that the experience of flying was the result of narcotic stimulation; (3) that their flying was pure imagination—methodologically demonstrated in the investigations of the Spanish inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías; and (4) that they fly by means of the soul. The latter, although strongly rejected by the Church, remained the most popular opinion. The second part discusses the flying of the Sicilian donni di fori [“women from outside”] of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were cunning women who served as mediators between the local community and the fairy world. On their nightly excursions “in spirit” they would enter the houses with the fairies, who bestowed their blessing on the homes. Or they would join the fairies in a sort of “white sabbath” where everything was reflective of beauty and delight. In the last part, the author describes his encounter with a contemporary Sicilian “night-goer” who claimed to be able to travel “in spirit.” In the concluding discussion, the author asserts that none of the rationalistic approaches used so far leads to a full understanding of the phenomenon. In his reconstruction of the Sicilian fairy cult, the author leaves open the possibility of out-of-the-body experiences and collective dreaming (rêve a deux) being potential explanations for the phenomenon.     

Marsone, Pierre, The Steppe and the Empire: The Formation of the Khitan [Liao] dynasty-4th-10th Centuries [History]

Conventional treatments of Chinese history include a "Liao/Khitan dynasty" existing on the northern frontier from 907 to 1125,ruled by the ethnically distinctive Khitan (Qidan) people.As Pierre Marsone points out in the foreword to La Steppe et l'Empire,in many histories discussion of this polity is absent or perfunctory.Indeed the work to which Marsone's title alludes,the classic 1938 L'Empire des steppes by René Grousset,presented a comprehensive history of steppe empires yet spared only a few pages of its bulk for the Khitan state.Such neglect obstructs historians' understanding of long-term trends.The Chinese world had seen powerful empires with some degree of "foreignness" before,but this was a new kind of entity that proved immune to the accustomed methods of Chinese policy.Too powerful to play off against other states,with an administration too systematized to succumb to personal politics,the Liao/Khitan empire became such a fixation of Northern Song (960-1127) policymakers that the political history of the latter cannot be effectively told without frequent reference to the former,and it is no coincidence that the two Asian superpowers collapsed nearly simultaneously.In turn,the Liao/Khitan empire set the precedent for the stable hybrid bureaucratic states that were so important in later Chinese history.Marsone's work makes the valuable contribution of clarifying how this empire came into being.The resulting account is an invaluable corrective to dynastically delimited narratives in which the Liao empire appears in the tenth century as an abrupt and novel development,epitomizing the Great Man model of history in the form of its founder,Yelü Abaoji.     

美洲聚落形态研究的过去、现在和未来

1946年 4月, 作为多学科文化史研究计划的一部份, 戈登·威利 (GordonWil ley) 和詹姆斯·福特 (JamesFord) 开始了秘鲁北海岸维鲁河谷的地面勘察。与此同时, 他们的考古学同事唐纳德·科利尔(DonaldCollier)、温德尔·贝内特 (Wen dellBennet)、威廉·邓肯·斯特朗 (Wil liamDuncanStrong)、克利福德·伊文思(CliffordEvans) 和朱尼斯·伯德 (JuniusBird) 进行了一系列层位学研究的发掘工作, 以便在维鲁河谷建立一个初步的文化史编年和陶器的年代序列。威利和福特设计了一个史前聚落形态的试验研究方案, 他们利用吉普车和航空摄…