REPRESENTATION AND IMAGES OF PEOPLE, PLACE AND NATURE IN GRENADA'S TOURISM

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this paper is to examine the visual images occurring in Grenada's place promotion materials. Tourism has become Grenada's principal source of foreign exchange and employment generation. With the increasing popularity of eco- and nature-tourism, the island has looked to this form of specialty tourism as a way to diversify its tourism product. Tourism is a uniquely visual industry; thus semiotics, the study of signs, was chosen for this study because of its ability to analyze the representations a tourist would encounter prior to reaching a destination or prior to participating in activities at the destination that would influence his or her expectations. Emphasis was placed on the images found in promotional materials and advertisements of Grenada to determine the mythology and ideology behind them. These images fell broadly into one of three categories: people, place or nature. Each category was represented as an 'other' that may be discussed in terms of dualities such as natural–artificial, exotic-familiar, and active-passive. The study concludes that images take on the myth of something different breaking the routine of the tourist's ordinary, daily life.     

Anton Raederscheidt's distorted self-portraits and their significance for understanding balance in art

Following a right cerebral stroke, the German artist Anton Raederscheidt produced a remarkable series of self-portraits that depicted his severe visual neglect and gradual recovery. These distorted images, like those drawn by others with this disorder, inform us about lateral balance in art and why it is common in the art of cultures separated in time and space. After describing how artists in various cultures have employed lateral balance, I present Arnheim's view that this aspect of art is the result of visual forces generated by the brain. Following a brief history of visual neglect, I present evidence that this disorder provides us with clues to the origin of the visual forces responsible for lateral balance in art. The relevant brain mechanisms control exploration of visual space by integrating orienting movements with visual spatial information. The prevalence of lateral balance in art becomes understandable when we consider that these brain mechanisms evolved to promote survival in our vertebrate ancestors. I end with a speculative neurological account of the aesthetics of lateral balance--why it is pleasing and its absence is displeasing.     

Anton Raederscheidt’s Distorted Self-Portraits and Their Significance for Understanding Balance in Art

Following a right cerebral stroke, the German artist Anton Raederscheidt produced a remarkable series of self-portraits that depicted his severe visual neglect and gradual recovery. These distorted images, like those drawn by others with this disorder, inform us about lateral balance in art and why it is common in the art of cultures separated in time and space. After describing how artists in various cultures have employed lateral balance, I present Arnheim’s view that this aspect of art is the result of visual forces generated by the brain. Following a brief history of visual neglect, I present evidence that this disorder provides us with clues to the origin of the visual forces responsible for lateral balance in art. The relevant brain mechanisms control exploration of visual space by integrating orienting movements with visual spatial information. The prevalence of lateral balance in art becomes understandable when we consider that these brain mechanisms evolved to promote survival in our vertebrate ancestors. I end with a speculative neurological account of the aesthetics of lateral balance – why it is pleasing and its absence is displeasing.     

The remedies of the machi: visualizing Chilean medicinal botanicals in Alonso de Ovalle’s Tabula geographica (1646).

This art historical study analyzes images of colonial-era medicinal botanicals in South America within a little known seventeenth-century map, the Tabula geographica regni Chile, and proposes that these renderings were central to a visual program by which their author Alonso de Ovalle attempted to construct a positive image of his homeland before the Spanish Crown. These renderings of specific Chilean plants and their expressed medicinal applications are examined in relation to the rise of materia medica for commerce in southern Europe and the Spanish interest to locate botanical medicines for profit. This approach allows us to consider pre-Linnaean botanical renderings as persuasive documents, as purveyors of indigenous knowledge, and as instruments of negotiation (prospecting for new commercial goods) for the advancement of criollo agendas. Finally, looking at Ovalle's images of Chilean medicinal botanicals in comparison with later documents demonstrates that while early pictured conveyances across the Atlantic formulated conceptions of American nature, the transference of actual specimens to Europe involved their adaptation for new functions and uses.     

符号学视角下的旅游体验研究——西溪湿地的个案分析

本文以西溪湿地为例,将符号的解读和建构问题纳入到旅游体验中进行考察。在文献分析和实地调研的基础上,通过分层聚类、交互分析等方法,对西溪旅游者体验动机的符号感知、体验过程的符号解读以及体验质量的符号要素构建进行了实证分析。结果表明,休闲浪漫是旅游者对西溪的基本符号感知,不同符号类型旅游者人口社会属性和旅游行为存在结构差异,体验的质量也不尽相同;结合体验效果的符号要素相关性解读,不仅为研究旅游体验的本质提供了新的符号学理论视野,也为丰富和强化旅游体验提供了有效的操作途径。     

旅游符号学的理论述评和研究内容

旅游符号学是一个蕴藏着重大价值的研究领域。本文首先对符号、符号学和旅游符号学进行了简要介绍。本文还评述了旅游符号学研究现状;国外的旅游符号学研究包括旅游吸引物、旅游营销文本、旅游地表征、旅游体验和旅游想象等方面的研究。本文最后对旅游符号学研究的内容进行了剖析,包括旅游主体、媒介和客体的符号学研究。到目前为止,旅游符号学研究的深度和广度依然是比较有限的。     

„Und setzet eure Worte nicht auf Schrauben”︁ Medizinische Semiotik vom Ende des 18. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts - Gegenstand und Forschung

There is no doubt that medical semiotics are having a revival at the moment. Different aspects of yesterday's and today's interest in semiotics and in the historical interpretation of signs of disease in the context of theory and history of medicine can be illuminated: their deciphering as the history of the sign in medicine by historic science, their overestimation by philosophy during the Age of Enlightenment, their reduction to a phenomenology of medicine and natural science during the first half of the 19th century and their transformation to medical diagnostics since the middle of the 19th century and recently even their functionalization as methodical instrument within the history of science. The following will show the change in meaning of medical semiotics. Modern development and especially the transition to medicine, based on natural science, will be emphasized.     

Rats in Alberta: looking at pest-control posters from the 1950s

How did the rat-control program, launched by the Government of Alberta in 1950, become associated with the identity and heritage of the province? The authors answer this question by undertaking close visual analyses of the anti-rat posters and pamphlets that were distributed by the government throughout the 1950s. Using a visual methodology inspired by semiotics, they argue that the early rat-control program ambitiously promoted Alberta as a unified, clean province that was both distinct from its prairie neighbours and for the most part populated with vigilant, hardworking citizens eager to remove unwanted intruders.     

薄膜试片测试法试片图像采集分析系统

薄膜试片测试法是一种能够全面有效地对博物馆藏展材料进行评估筛选的测试方法,对其腐蚀现象进行图象采集及进行数据化分析能够得到更为客观准确的测试结果.本工作对应该测试法设计了专门图像采集的硬件装置,采用密闭光源和彩色工业摄像机,可以得到清晰的试片图像.软件系统将采集图像、打开原始图像、图像分割处理、材料分级评价等功能模块化,并根据具体功能设计实现了基本应用的可视化界面.实验表明,该系统能够快速、准确地对藏展材料对试片的腐蚀现象进行数据化分析,使藏展材料的评估分级由人工目测走向计算机视觉计算,具有快速、客观、误差小等特点.     

SEEING SPATIAL STRUCTURES: ON THE ROLE OF VISUAL MATERIAL IN THE MAKING OF THE EARLY QUANTITATIVE REVOLUTION IN GEOGRAPHY

This article examines the role that visual material played in the early years of the quantitative revolution in Anglophone geography. It is part of a larger project that attempts to write a history of geography's scopic regimes in the twentieth century and draws on post‐positivist approaches to the history of science. It is argued that there are a number of strategic as well as theoretical reasons for such a reliance on images in the quantitative revolution. Some reasons are unique to the quantitative revolution in geography, some resemble a more general way in which paradigm shifts take place in science and some are located outside of academia. This article is primarily interested in the internal view on the geography of the quantitative revolution and its rationalities. The paper departs from Christaller's hexagon, as one of the most influential and iconic. It then broadens the view to include a much wider range of visual material, arguing for some more general observations on the use of images in geography during the early quantitative revolution. It is argued that there was a significant shift of forms and functions of visual material. Overall, it is argued, visual material gained in importance and while geography was getting “thinner” and more abstract, its role in making visual arguments became stronger. From being merely an aid for seeing, visual material became a prime carrier of knowledge.     

Commentary: New Directions in the History of Ethology

This welcome set of original and instructive papers illuminates and enriches the history of twentieth-century ethology in multiple ways. It adds a wealth of actors, animals, methods, and places to those featured in previous treatments of ethology's development. Some of the papers extend the chronology beyond the heyday of ethology's disciplinary construction to consider exciting developments in the 1970s and beyond. Others consider animal behavior research programs pursued contemporaneously with but independently of mainline ethology's development from the 1930s through the 1960s. Another paper takes us inside an ethologist's archive of visual images to examine the importance of such images (and such a setting) for ethological practice. Collectively, the papers provide new opportunities to contemplate how research programs and disciplines evolve; the relations between concepts, practices, and places; ethology and politics, and much more. At the same time, the individuality of the papers is conspicuous. They have not been constructed on the same model. The authors have followed their own approaches, corresponding to their own, respective interests. A short commentary is not sufficient to do justice to each of them. Rather than attempt to review them one by one, I will consider a pair of themes that may help relate the papers to each other and to the history of ethology: (1) the ongoing challenge of defining ethology and identifying who the ethologists were (or are); (2) the practices and places of animal behavior study.     

Social images through visual images: the use of drawings and photographs in the Western representation of the aborigines of Tierra del Fuego (southern South America)

Abstract

This paper analyses the creation of social images (culturally biased representations) about Fuegian aborigines through the production of visual images (drawings and photographs) by European voyagers, missionaries and ethnographers. The images are evaluated as records that offer rich and complex information about both the recorder and the recorded subjects through a consideration of the context in which they were published and the prevailing socio-historical situation. The creation and manipulation of visual records by Western agents has dual elements, in which the representation of the social ‘other’ (the Fuegians) bears a clear relation to the representation of the social ‘self’ (the Europeans). However, the Fuegians themselves were not necessarily passive subjects, but could act as active agents, negotiating who was photographed and in what situations. Over time, the prevailing representation of Fuegians changes from an initial idealization of their status as aboriginals, to a population of potential religious converts, and finally to their portrayal as ‘unpolluted’ aborigines in ethnographic photography. The paper concludes by considering how Fuegian societies and the impact of Western people have been re-considered through a re-contextualization of these same images within a recent museum display in Argentina.     

The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly)

This article centers Saidiya Hartman's and Hortense Spillers' theorizations of Black fungibility as well as two speculative visual works in order to read Black bodies on plantation landscapes as symbols of transition, process, genderlessness and boundarylessness. I argue that reading Black bodies in this way breaks with the totalizing visual, conceptual and ontological regime of labor that tends to over determine Blackness within critical theories. Two visual fields help me with this counter read: William Gerrard De Brahm's 1757 “Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia”, as well as Julie Dash's 1991 images of the porous indigo‐stained hands of former slaves who worked indigo in the film Daughters of the Dust. While these two images oppose one another, their visual conventions enable a break with colonial and humanist scopic regimes like “Black labor” that tend to subsume multiple and intricate processes into the governing logic of labor.     

旅游、旅游体验和符号--对相关研究的一个评述

本文认为旅游现象的内核是旅游体验,而旅游体验在本质上可以看成是旅游者对符号的解读,将符号的解读和建构纳入旅游体验的研究视野当中,这在国外也是一个比较新颖的议题。为此,本文梳理了国内外旅游体验研究和旅游符号学的研究成果,发现这两个领域的研究现状还比较薄弱,尤其就国内而言．旅游符号学的研究几乎还是一片空白,对旅游体验的关注也远远不够,迫切需要更多学者将目光投射到这两个领域当中来。     

Teaching visualised geographies: towards a methodology for the interpretation of visual materials

Abstract

This paper suggests a number of questions which can be used to structure a small‐group discussion about the interpretation of visual images. As many geographers now are demonstrating, geographical knowledges are very often visualised. However, there is currently little on offer methodologically to help students approach the interpretation of visual images critically. This paper hopes to start to remedy this situation. It begins by sketching a theoretical understanding of the meanings of visual images. It then suggests a number of questions that flow from that understanding, which can be addressed to a particular visual image in order to facilitate a discussion about its possible meanings.     

Drawing,Etching, and Experiment in Christopher Wren’s Figure of the Brain

Abstract

Christopher Wren’s figure of the brain ‘viewed from below’ in Thomas Willis’s Cerebri anatome (1664) set a precedent, not only for subsequent images of the brain, but for scientific illustration. The image is the visual proof of a Baconian experiment conducted by the Oxford dissection team, in which dye was pumped into the carotid arteries of animal and human specimens in order to imitate the natural flow of blood, thereby applying William Harvey’s theory of circulation to the brain. Usually described as engravings, Wren’s images are in fact etchings (produced by the acid process), significant because etching for book illustration was then in its infancy in England. In addition to considering Wren as an experimental etcher, this article frames our understanding of Wren’s contributions to Willis’s project in terms of his virtuosic talents as amateur draughtsman, natural historian, anatomist, and his use of optical and draughting instruments.     

Metamorphoses of the early medieval signum of a ruler in the Carolingian world

This article uses the approach of diplomatic semiotics to explore early medieval signs of authority in charters and on coins, especially the monogram and the sign of the cross used as an individual ‘signature’. Coins and charters used these signs communicating royal or imperial authority differently, addressing diverse regional and social audiences. From the fifth through the ninth centuries, the early medieval signum of a ruler gradually transformed from the individualizing sign of a particular monarch, designed to differentiate him symbolically from other rulers, to the generalizing sign of the king by the grace of God, which as a visual attribute of authority could be shared by several rulers. This transformation signified the inauguration of a new ‘medieval’ tradition in the communication of authority in late Carolingian times.     

Monks and hermits in medieval love stories

Monks and hermits are frequently mentioned in courtly romances. It is an unresolved problem whether these are real men or the product of literary imagination. The monks and hermits of love literature do evolve over time: whereas in the twelfth century they are predominantly monastic figures, later they are laymen. This article examines the literary image of the monk and hermit, including their role as advocates of marital fidelity, and asks how effective these models were for contemporary Christians, especially in cases where poets abandoned their secular life to become monks and hermits. With the rise of the friars traditional literary images were not abandoned. Emphasis is placed on the role of the hermit as a symbol of the quest for divine love.     

Ideology,Semiotics, and Clifford Geertz: Some Russian Reflections

This article, written by a Russian cultural historian, analyzes the concept of “ideology” in the work of Clifford Geertz and his role in understanding the figurative nature of ideology as a cultural system. The author compares Geertz's semiotic approach to culture with the semiotics of culture developed by Russian theorists, particularly Yuri Lotman, showing the convergence and divergence of the two different national traditions. This understanding of the nature and functions of ideology opens new possibilities for discussing the tortured relations of ideology and literature, showing the way fiction can affect the formation of ideological systems and influence practical politics. The analysis is illustrated by examples from Russian political life of the 1990s,when revolutionary changes demanded new sets of ideological metaphors that in their turn shaped the direction of events.