Kokoda: and two national histories

Abstract

Papua New Guinea has had great difficulty distilling the complex experiences of World War II into national history, but at the same time Australians have elevated and celebrated the significance of Kokoda. The 1942 battles on the Kokoda Track have been the subject of major Australian books and a feature film, and the numbers of trekkers on the Track have increased sharply. But in Papua New Guinea, Kokoda has been narrowing to an association with the Koiari and the Kokoda Orokaiva landowners. In Papua New Guinea, where the nation needs a sense of values and experiences in common, Kokoda is neither well known nor ‘national’.     

Fragmented Integration and Business Cycle Synchronization in the Greek Regions

This paper examines the degree of business cycle synchronicity among Greek regions and investigates the determinants of the business cycle co-movements of output associated with specific functional and spatial aspects of the integration process among the Greek regions. We analyse nearly 30 years (1980–2008) of data at the NUTSIII level (prefectures). We conclude that the business cycles of prefectures are more synchronized with the NUTSII regional cycle than with the national business cycle revealing a regional (NUTSII) border effect. Moreover, the intensification of the integration process seems to diachronically affect the structural characteristics of the Greek regions and the geography of cyclical synchronization. Our study reveals a two-stage integration process where in the first stage we detect the existence of urbanization economies, while in the second one the existence of localization economies. Furthermore, our study reveals that the metropolitan regions have a low level of business cycle synchronicity with the other regions, stressing Greece's pattern of economic and structural dualism.     

Dietary life histories in Stone Age Northern Europe

We present here a framework for using stable isotope analysis of bone and teeth to study individual life history. A sampling strategy and analytical approach for stable carbon and nitrogen analysis of bone and dentine collagen optimised for intra-individual purposes is put forward. The rationale behind this strategy, various requirements and constrains, and recommendations on how to modify it according to variations in material and analytical instrumentation, are discussed and explained in detail. Based on intra-individual data for 131 human individuals from Mesolithic and Neolithic sites in Northern Europe, we consider the sources and various kinds of variation one is likely to find, and how the data can be explained and transformed into an archaeologically meaningful interpretation. It is concluded that the use of stable isotope analysis to trace individual life history is not limited to carefully excavated, neatly preserved, single burials with articulate skeletal remains. Even collective burials, disturbed graves, disarticulated human remains in cultural layers, or other depositions that deviate from what is often considered as a “proper burial”, offer the possibility to look at individual life biographies.     

Visual and aural intellectual histories: an introduction

ABSTRACT

If the subject matter of intellectual history is the study of past thoughts, the intellectual history of the visual arts and music may be characterised as the study of past thoughts as they were expressed visually and aurally. Yet this is not always how an intellectual history of art and music has been practiced. More attention is often paid to verbal texts about art or music, rather than to the visual or the aural per se. If we accept that ideas can have visual and aural, as much as verbal form, then the histories of art and music are significant repositories of thoughts of individuals and networks of individuals (creative artists, patrons, institutions) within a given culture and period. But the ways in which those thoughts are articulated as aural or visual “texts”, and the ways in which they can be accessed by those who seek to understand them, will be specific to each art form, and represent a distinctive kind of intellectual activity in each field.     

敦煌莫高窟北区B52窟出土回鹘文--《阿毗达磨俱舍论实义疏》残叶研究

本文对敦煌莫高窟北区出土B52 (乙 ) :1 7一叶回鹘文《阿毗达磨俱舍论实义疏》残叶进行了拉丁字母转写、汉译和注释 ,并在此基础上将该残叶与大英图书馆藏回鹘文同书进行对照 ,指出了二者的异同 ,同时探讨了残叶的年代、版本、译者及翻译方式等问题。     

Enlightened histories: civilization,war and the Scottish enlightenment

The concept of civil society continues to generate considerable interest, while the concept of civilization attracts comparatively little attention. This has led to a tendency to oversimplify the relationship between civil societies and militarily powerful sovereign states. Civil societies, it is often argued, are those societies that have emerged from a successful process of domestic pacification and effective control of state power. In this paper, it will be argued that some prominent Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed theories of civilization grounded in more complex historical narratives, in which the accomplishments of civil society were tied to the achievement of state sovereignty based on the successful monopoly of military might. The purpose of this paper is to trace the role of state sovereignty and military monopolization, and the consequent prominence given to the practice of war, in the “historical” theories of civilization articulated by David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson.     

Dig for Victory! New histories of wartime gardening in Britain

Prompted by the curious fact that both progressive environmentalists and Conservative Party politicians have recently drawn on popular understandings of austerity associated with Britain’s wartime domestic gardening campaign, this article broadens the range of histories associated with Dig for Victory. It suggests firstly that far from simply encouraging self-sufficiency, the government conceptualised Dig for Victory as requiring the extension of order and control into the domestic sphere. Second, it shows how the ideal figure of a national citizen digging for victory elided differentiated gender and class experiences of gardening, and finally the article demonstrates that statistics of food production were more about fostering trust than picturing the realities of vegetable growing. By so doing the paper illuminates the particular ways in which present-day articulations of Dig for Victory’s history are partial and selective.     

柏林吐鲁番文献中的《摩尼教徒忏悔词》残片译释

本文通过对《柏林吐鲁番文书》第五卷中《摩尼教徒忏悔词》的部分残片进行翻译、考释,并与伦敦抄本、柏林抄本和列宁格勒抄本的缀合本译文进行比较分析,揭示了这些残片与上述缀合本不同的内容,从而为研究《摩尼教徒忏悔词》提供了新的研究材料.     

敦煌写本P.3973《往五台山行记》残卷研究

本文通过敦煌写本P .3973《往五台山行记》残卷的研究 ,探讨了该文书与《诸山圣迹志》的关系 ,以及该文书所反映的晚唐五代敦煌与五台山之间的北方交通路线 ,敦煌僧侣巡礼五台山及其晚唐五代敦煌地区的五台山文殊菩萨信仰等。笔者由此认为敦煌与五台山关系密切 ,五台山佛教对晚唐五代敦煌地区佛教具有重大影响。     

Beyond social construction: toward new histories of psychiatry (review essay)

Focusing on symptom classification and on the outcome of somatic interventions, Berrios and Shorter challenge the social constructionist and anti-psychiatry tendencies that have framed the writing of the history of psychiatry for the past quarter-century. Contextualizing clinical interventions, these studies point out the value of examining the proposition that practitioners were motivated as much about curing distress as they were about eliminating nonconformity. Such examinations require an understanding of the strengths and limits of medical science that often have been trivialized or ignored by some social constructionists. Together the studies under review open the possibility that recent biological interventions may have transformed psychiatry in such fundamental ways that they call into question the assumptions that have underlay in an almost two-century-old classification system. Ironically, adherence to the scientific method (falsification) reveals that the biological revolution in psychiatry fits post-modern claims about the tentative nature of knowledge claims, while it simultaneously undercuts the particular historical interpretations of post-modern scholarship.