The dead with golden faces: Dasaretian, Pelagonian, Mygdonian and Boeotian funeral masks

Eleven gold and one gilded silver funeral masks have been discovered in the southern parts of the Central Balkans. They can be dated in the last decades of the 6th–early 5th centuries BC and belonged to the dead nobles of the tribal aristocracy of Dasaretioi, Pelagones and Mygdones. Another gold funeral mask was accidentally discovered in Boeotia and it could be dated to the Archaic period. Although these masks are reminiscent of earlier Mycenaean ones, and although there are several Etruscan and Celtic bronze masks of the 7th century BC, the origin of the Balkan funeral ritual is still obscure. The covering of the faces of the dead aristocrats with gold masks could be connected with their heroization and even deification, and strong belief in the afterlife and rebirth.     

Bad apples,dead souls: understanding Abu Ghraib

This review article centres on Abu Ghraib, and in particular the images of Abu Ghraib as deployed in Standard operating procedure (2008), the film by Errol Morris and the book by Philip Gourevitch. The article probes the meaning of the images and the circumstances of their creation. It asks, inter alia, what do we know of the soldier‐photographers (or photographer‐perpetrators) who took them? What do we know of Abu Ghraib? And how are we to understand what happened there?     

Rites of the living,transformations of the dead

Huntington, Richard, and Peter Metcalf. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. xv + 230 pp. including maps, photographs, bibliography, and index. $34.50 cloth, $10.95 paper.

Bloch, Maurice, and Jonathan Parry, eds. Death and the Regeneration of Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. x + 236 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $29.50 cloth, $8.95 paper.     

The voice of the dead king Chindasuinth: poetry,politics, and the discourse of penance in Visigothic Spain

Around ad 653, Eugenius II, bishop of Toledo, composed a first‐person poetic epitaph for the deceased Visigothic king Chindasuinth (r. 642–53) in which the monarch is made to speak with self‐deprecating candour. This paper offers a reassessment of the poem's language and rhetorical strategy by situating it within contemporary discourses surrounding royal admonition and penance. Rather than interpreting Eugenius's composition as an act of defamation, as the majority of critics have done, it reads the poem as a dignifying literary expression of atonement. This reading corresponds with other specimens of Eugenius's poetry and evidence from a developing literary culture at Chindasuinth's court.     

Raising the dead: war,memory and American national identity*

Abstract. The dead, particularly the war dead, play a central role in the development of nationalism, nowhere more so than in America. America's mid‐nineteenth century Civil War produced a recognisable and influential ‘cult of the dead’, comparable in its construction with similar developments in Europe following World War I. Focused on the figure of the fallen soldier, especially the volunteer soldier, this cult found physical expression in the development of national cemeteries devoted not just to the burial of those who fell in the war but to the idea of America as a nation, in the development of monuments to the dead that, again, reinforced the new national symbolism of the war era, and in the beginnings of Memorial Day, an American sacred ceremony with clear parallels with the later Armistice Day ceremonies in Europe. In all these developments, America preceded the European nations by several decades, making America a valuable case study for the role that the cult of the fallen soldier plays in national development more generally.     

I hear dead people: science,technology and a resonant universe

In recent years the simplistic categorization of Victorian practices and beliefs as either ‘occult’ or ‘scientific’ has been undercut by a series of revisionist analyses that point to an over-arching concern with influence and effect, a concern that was manifest across the sciences and humanities and beyond into popular culture. This paper sets out to further problematize such a distinction via an exploration of twentieth-century research into electronic voice phenomena (EVP), celebrated by its adherents as proof of a spiritual plane of existence beyond the readily observable or audible. In doing so, I focus on the work of one of the most active EVP researchers, Konstantin Raudive, as well as the web pages of the World Instrumental Transcommunication organization, drawing out the pivotal role of technology in the construction of this form of knowledge and some of its associated imaginative geographies. In and of itself, EVP research tells us much about the authoritative status of cause and effect explanatory frameworks, as well as the innocence accorded technological apparatus. An examination of how EVP has been received within academia, however, also reveals how, in our ‘post’-positivist academic environment, efforts are still being made to locate explanation within the human subject, as the charge is made that EVP researchers suffer from a logocentrism or are witness to Freud's doppelgänger. In response to these critiques, I pose the question: can the willingness of EVP researchers to abandon such human-centered certainties resonate with emergent ‘post-human’ ideas on the nature of explanation itself?     

Debt,distraint, display and dead men’s treasure: material culture in late medieval Aberdeen

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the burgh court records of Aberdeen to explore the material culture of medieval Scottish townspeople. Four main areas are explored: the use of pawning and pledges to facilitate commercial transactions and maintain solvency; the practice of distraint as a means of coercion and debt recovery; the passage of burgesses’ moveable goods to their heirs; and the significance of clothing in public display. Precious metal objects featured prominently among the goods deployed to enable their owners to fulfil their obligations although the poor sometimes had to part with the most basic goods. For some in Aberdeen, the sixteenth century saw a rise in ownership of luxuries, including expensive clothes, although this may not have spread to ordinary people in town and country, and possession itself was, for some, insecure. Nonetheless it is clear that Scotland participated in the growing consumerism evident elsewhere in later medieval and Renaissance Europe.     

‘We wouldn't be dead for quids’: Hansonism,Fascism, Death and Difference

There are a number of ways in which the Australian political movement led by Pauline Hanson can be implicated in the totalitarian episodes of the twentieth century. But there are also significant differences between what Hansonism presents us with in Australia and what totalitarianism has presented us with in Europe, in the fascist and Stalinist regimes with which totalitarianism is associated. The suggestion in this paper is that totalitarianism can be understood in schematic terms as a mutation of the symbolic order through which differences have been arranged and evaluated in Western thought since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers. Specifically, it belongs with the history of the binary opposition. Its mutation is that it attempts to realize — that is, to accomplish in reality — the fiction of the binary structure, which is its claim to comprehend or to be able to totalize and exhaust the space over which its positive and negative terms must govern. In a contemplation of death and difference, the question is considered here of what is to be gained for thought in characterizing Hansonism as a neo‐fascist phenomenon.     

Imagining the absent dead: rituals of bereavement and the place of the war dead in German women's art during the First World War

Drawing on women's visual responses to the First World War, this article examines female mourning in wartime Germany. The unprecedented death toll on the battlefronts, military burial practices and the physical distance from the remains of the war dead disrupted traditional rituals of bereavement, hindered closure and compounded women's grief on the home front. In response to these novel circumstances, a number of female artists used their images to reimagine funerary customs, overcome the separation from the fallen and express acute emotional distress. This article analyses three images produced during the conflict by the artists Katharina Heise, Martha Schrag and Sella Hasse, and places their work within the civilian experience of bereavement in war. By depicting the pain of loss, female artists contested the historical tradition of proud female mourning in German society and countered wartime codes of conduct that prohibited the public display of emotional pain in response to soldiers’ deaths. As a largely overlooked body of sources, women's art adds to our understanding of the tensions in wartime cultures of mourning that emerged between 1914 and 1918.     

Patriot Graves: American national identity and the Civil War dead

The Civil War was America’s defining conflict, the war that made the nation and the fulcrum for the development of American national identity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet the role that the Civil War dead played in this process has only begun to be explored. Although the monuments raised to honor the dead, along with the battlefields on which they fought, attract considerable interest, the cemeteries constructed to inter them have been integrated into the landscape – literal and figurative – of the American nation so fully that the need they answered, the manner of their development, the form they took, and their longer‐term symbolic message has been relatively neglected. Yet the Civil War dead were a crucial – indeed, the crucial – component in the construction of American national identity. Although scholars interpret American attitudes toward the Civil War dead within the context of the mourning rituals of the antebellum era, the war required, and produced, a different approach to death, for which antebellum precedent had ill‐prepared Americans. Removed from its antebellum religious and societal framework, death in the Civil War acquired a new and more potent national meaning that not only validated American nationalism through warfare, but anticipated the response to fallen soldiers in future European conflicts.     

学习胡锦涛关于加强党的作风建设理论的几点认识

胡锦涛同志多次论述加强党的作风建设,特别是在中纪委第七次全会上提出要在各级领导干部中大力倡导八个方面的良好作风,明确指出了领导干部作风建设的基本内容。学习和研究胡锦涛同志关于党的作风建设的理论,对于加强党的作风建设具有重大的现实意义。     

"Now if you have only sons you are dead": migration, gender, and family economy in twentieth century northwestern Ghana

This article explores the interconnectedness between labor migration, gender, and the family economy in northwestern Ghana in the 20th century. It focuses specifically on the Dagaaba of the Nadowli and Jirapa administrative districts of what is now the Upper West Region (UWR). It examines how the relationships between men and women in terms of roles, status, access to productive resources and inheritance, changed in tandem with broader changes in society in the 20th century; changes that over time produced enhanced value and elevated status for women in the family. These changes in gender relations are reflected increasingly in the belief among elderly men that ‘now if you have only sons, you are dead’. By focusing on the lived experiences of ordinary women and men in the migration process, it argues that even though indigenous social structures privileged men over women in almost all spheres of life, Dagaaba women were nonetheless significantly active in shaping the history of their communities and that gender relations in Dagaaba communities were not static — they changed over time and generation. This article contributes to the ongoing discussion of the internal migration phenomenon in West Africa, which has so far attracted scant historical analysis.     

Two examples of biogenous dead bone decomposition and their consequences for taphonomic interpretation

Decomposition of dead bone occurs in the later stages of decomposition of a corpse. In addition to general environmental influences, micro-organisms play an important role in destruction of interred skeletal remains. Fungi are known to penetrate actively through hard tissues, but they also decompose dead bone by extensive excretion of secondary metabolites which partially leach the bone tissue. This leads to alterations in quality and quantity of both the organic and the inorganic bone matrix. Interpretation of any taphonomically relevant biochemical analysis has therefore to take these post-mortem events in account. As biogenous decomposition also results in changes in bone microstructure (tunnelling, fissuring by selective loss of material) the potential for histomorphological studies of exhumed hard tissues is limited. Micro-organisms can also impregnate dead bone with persistent fluorophores and chromophores. These impregnations are often similar to various post-mortem or intra-vitam alterations, and can lead to misinterpretation. Histology, scanning electron microscopy, microradiography, comparative crystallographical and biochemical analyses in combination with microbiological isolation and cultivation tests help in interpretation of a given post-mortem change in exhumed bone as the result of either general environmental influence or biogenous decomposition.     

Social monsters and the walking dead in William of Newburgh's Historia rerum Anglicarum

William of Newburgh's Historia rerum Anglicarum (c.1198) is one of the foremost literary artefacts of the late twelfth century. Contained within Book V are four narratives that detail encounters with the walking dead (‘revenants’). This article contends that the specific placement of these narratives within the Historia encourages the reader to make a metaphysical connection between the activities of the revenant and the conduct of social malcontents. The paper analyses the medieval concept of monstrousness and the cultural context of the Historia’s creation, and argues that learned theories of disease causation underscored the base narratology of the four revenant encounters. Following an appraisal of the unrest caused by Williams FitzOsbert and Longchamp, as well as the kings of England and France, the paper concludes by evaluating the ways in which their social monstrosity was encapsulated by the destabilising and destructive tendencies of the walking corpse.     

The expulsion of illness or the domestication of the dead a case study of the Nyamwezi of Tanzania

For the Nyamwezi of North‐West Tanzania, illness has an essential part in their relationship with their ancestors. It is the sign that a person that has recently died is asking to be “settled”; among his kinsmen. The ritual performance will be a second funeral where the journey of the soul will be completed. It will follow the reverse model of the funeral by reuniting body and soul. Only when “settled”; in such a way is the ancestor acting as benefactor to his kinsmen. But he will not stay long in his “house”;. The soul will leave and again a sickness will be awaited in order to settle his soul for a while. Sickness appears as an expected event in the strongly formalized relationship between living and dead. The numerous variations of ritual performance that are described center clearly around a unique model. From the simple spitting on a broken piece of a calabash at a cross‐road to the elaborate blood sacrifice of an animal there is only a distance of degree in the severity of the misfortune. For the Nyamwezi the idea of sacrifice (kuhoja) finds its unit/ not in the uniqueness of the destruction performed but in the invariable concept of the movement of the soul which links life and death, ancestors and living.