Brittany and the Atlantic Rim in the Later First Millennium BC

Recent work on the Iron Age of Brittany, in particular on the ceramics and the decorated stone stelae, has emphasized the distinctive nature of Armorican culture while demonstrating links with Continental Europe. We argue that it is possible to recognize changing axes of communication between the Atlantic faµade and more easterly areas first along the Loire, later along the Seine and finally, as the result of Greek exploration, along the Garonne. These changes are considered against the background of the developing socio-economic systems of west central and Mediterranean Europe.     

Material Matters: Representation and Materiality of the Harappan Body

In the Indus Civilization (ca. 2600–1900 BC), a society with no readable texts and few larger-scale representations, terracotta figurines were the most common representations of the human body. This paper explores the unique construction of the material representations of bodies and other material culture from Harappa, a major Indus site now in Pakistan. Hand-modeling representations of human bodies from dual clay pieces, sometimes decorated with bone pigments, suggests a focus on the process and ideological rather than practical choices in the materialization of the Harappan human body. For the Harappans, material matters as they engage physically with their world and embody themselves and their worldview.     

A Petrographic Study of the Anthropomorphic Stelae from the Megalithic Area of Saint‐Martin‐De‐Corléans (Aosta,Northern Italy)

The Megalithic Area of Saint‐Martin‐de‐Corléans (Aosta, northern Italy) consists of anthropomorphic stelae dated to the Copper Age and the beginning of the Early Bronze Age. They were carved in different lithologies of varying provenance according to two successive artistic styles, ‘ancient’ and ‘evolved’. A minero‐chemical and a petrographic investigation were carried out on 47 stelae and on reference samples collected from eight different outcrops, aiming to define the provenance of the stone materials. The variety of rocks used for the manufacture of the stelae reflects the geological complexity of the Aosta Valley. Most of the stelae examined were classified as foliated impure marbles, grey banded marbles (‘Bardiglio’), calcschists and metabasites belonging to the Combin Zone (Piedmont Nappe), which outcrops in close proximity to the Megalithic Area. Some stelae of the evolved group consisted of massive marbles with silicate‐bearing layers, attributed to the Sion–Courmayeur Zone. Similar stone materials were reported for the stelae of the same age found at the archaeological area of Petit Chasseur (Sion, Switzerland). This is archaeometric confirmation of the archaeological affinity between the stelae occurring at the two prehistoric sites, supporting the hypothesis of cultural exchanges over the Grand St Bernard Pass since the Early Copper Age.     

“In the Truth of Our Political Nature”: Pierre Manent's Defense of Political Reason in Cours familier de philosophie politique

Abstract

Throughout the 1980s, Polish trade unions generated enormous interest among researchers as a vivid example of the power and influence of mass social movements in politics. Following the reemergence of Solidarity and the downfall of the communist regime in 1989, the focus of attention has shifted. Analyses of elite choices and strategies, rather than studies of social groups and organizations, have begun to dominate the scholarship on postcommunist Eastern Europe. Although the new perspectives have made it possible to compare democratization in Poland and other former Marxist-Leninist states with postauthoritarian transitions in Southern Europe and Latin America,¹ they often fail to provide an accurate assessment of the actual significance of the trade union movements and organizations in this process.     

Middle pleistocene adaptations in Central Europe

The biological evolution documented in the fossil and archaeological record of Central Europe between about 700,000 and 100,000 years ago reflects the transition fromHomo erectus to the earliestHomo sapiens. These populations created different types of industries, ranging from assemblages of small artifacts and industries with simple pebble tools to standardized units such as the Evolved Acheulean and the Early Mousterian. The industries of the Last Interglacial (Taubachian) show some regression in technological standardization and a reappearance of small artifacts. Other aspects of cultural adaptation (settlements, dwellings, hunting activity, symbolic and aesthetic expressions) are also summarized. It is suggested that the impact of climate and climatic changes on human settlement and behavior was greater in Central Europe (where two glaciations advanced from both north and south) than in the Mediterranean and Western Europe. The general trend of cultural veolution was toward greater technological and social complexity, but its course was not unilinear.     

Suit of power: fashion,politics, and hegemonic masculinity in Australia

In 2010 the Australian Labor Party selected Julia Gillard as leader, making her Australia’s first female Prime Minister. Between 2010 and 2015 there was a renewed focus on issues of gender inequality in the way that women politicians have been treated in Parliament and in the media. Specifically, women in positions of political and institutional power such as Julia Gillard, Julie Bishop, and Quentin Bryce, were critiqued on their clothing choices in the Australian media. In this article, I argue that the Australian media’s attention to the fashion choices of women in politics is problematically gendered, because it subordinates aesthetic features that do not conform to hegemonic masculinity. I argue that in response to the dominant masculine aesthetic norm in politics, women politicians are using their sartorial choices to challenge this marginalisation of femininity in the political sphere.     

Founder effect, drift, and adaptive change in domestic crop use in early Neolithic Europe

We document and quantify a significant reduction in crop diversity in the early central European Neolithic using a large multi-site database of archaeobotantical remains we compiled from published Neolithic sites across southwest Asia and Europe. Two hypotheses are proposed to account for the observed changes: one which claims that the different environmental conditions of central Europe selected for a different set of crop choices and strategies than in use in southeast and Mediterranean Europe; and a null hypothesis that explains the change as a drift process associated with a small founding population that subsequently undergoes rapid expansion. Through an agent-based simulation model, we test the null hypothesis and demonstrate that the drop in diversity exceeds that predicted by a drift process. We conclude by re-evaluating the possible adaptive changes underlying crop use in early Neolithic Europe.     

金陵大报恩寺御碑遗址结构性能及保护技术研究

为了对金陵大报恩寺南北两块御碑遗址进行科学保护,首先通过有限元模拟对南北御碑遗址的现状结构性能进行分析,找出其在正常使用和地震作用时存在的安全隐患;然后根据计算分析结果及整体设计要求提出增设隔震支座的保护技术方案,采用有限元模拟计算对南北两块御碑遗址在增设隔震支座后的结构性能进行分析。计算结果表明:带有御碑的北碑的第一阶自振频率约为不带御碑的南碑的0.087;地震作用下,带有御碑的北碑最有可能破坏的部位是御碑,而不带御碑的南碑最有可能破坏的部位是龟趺头部。施加隔震支座后,南北两块御碑遗址结构的振动频率、最大主拉应力和最大主压应力均明显减小,在7度罕遇地震的情况下均不会发生破坏。研究结果对石碑的结构保护工程研究有参考价值。     

Waterfalls,science and aesthetics

Waterfalls and rapids are a subject of study by scientists and scholars from a variety of academic and professional backgrounds. Unlike cave research, known as speleology, which also involves many different disciplines, the study of waterfalls is not generally regarded as a distinct branch of knowledge. Long neglected as subjects of research, waterfalls have received considerable attention since the 1980s. This paper traces the study of waterfalls from the late eighteenth century, a period when both a scientific and an aesthetic interest in landscape developed in Europe, to the present. The work of geographers, geologists and others who studied landforms and landscapes is examined, with particular attention to those who expressed a special interest in waterfalls, notably Alexander von Humboldt. The study argues that the scientific and aesthetic approaches to landscape research are not incompatible and supports the view that both are necessary for a full understanding and appreciation of the environment in which we live.     

A ‘Europe of the regions’? A view from Liverpool on the Atlantic Arc periphery

The paper attempts to address recent debates surrounding the supposed emergence of a ‘Europe of the Regions'—from the perspective of a city situated at the core of a lagging region’ on the European periphery, Liverpool. After briefly exploring whether the social and economic regeneration of Liverpool makes sense in this European context, the paper attempts to explain why the city's political participation in Europe has hitherto been relatively limited, drawing upon a combination of economic, social, political and cultural factors. Some of the constraints and choices that the city is facing in its attempts at urban regeneration are used to throw light on broader issues surrounding local and regional development in the European context and political and policy lessons are suggested.     

Cultural policy as general will and social-order protectionism: Thailand’s conservative double movement

This article interprets the work of Thailand’s Cultural Surveillance Unit through the lens of social-order protectionism. It argues that apparently facile interventions of the CSU into culture debates are underlined by genuine concerns about social disorder and the capacity of citizens to make morally sound choices. Secondly, it interprets cultural policy as implicit social contract making: those who make and activate cultural policy do so invisibly mandated by a higher order of legitimacy than the ballot box – they do so seemingly in the name of the general will. Culture policy as presently constituted provides conservatives with an aesthetic weapon against populism and the assumed deficiencies in the practice of democratic citizenship.     

清进士题名碑考述

立于北京孔庙内、镌刻有清朝全部进士姓名及甲第、籍贯的进士题名碑,是清朝重要的科举文献.本文讨论了题名碑的建立、规制、书写、改刊等问题,对题名碑的文献价值、题名碑的讹误等也作了分析.     

The Levelling Process as a Function of the Masses in the View of Kierkegaard and Ortega Y Gasset

The present article is an analysis of the emergence of a new Uruguayan author, Armonía Somers (1914–94), as well as the publication in 1950 of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman). It focuses on the Uruguayan social body of the 1950s, when society lived the paradox of recognizing women in its legal structure, but limiting them in the everyday social and cultural life. In this context, Somers's novel symbolically explores what I call the “crisis of feminine subjectivity,” through the creation of a woman who on her thirtieth birthday decided to throw away all the costumes and masks with which society and tradition imposed feminine roles and, naked, tried new ways of being, new subjectivities. Central to this study is an analysis of the different ways in which historical, social, and cultural demands produce certain kinds of human bodies, especially how they produce a woman's body. The specific argument that underlies this article is that the body inserts itself in conflictive and tense manners with the marks imposed on the genders. This article's theoretical contribution lies in its emphasis on the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of “feminine subjectivities” and “historical marked bodies” in a fiction that presents itself as a black box in which Somers finds herself as a woman who became a novelist in the 1950s and in which readers also find themselves questioning the persistence of gender marks on their own social bodies.     

Alone or together in the neighbourhood? School choice and families’ access to local social networks

This study explores how the everyday geographies of city life and families’ access to social networks in the neighbourhood influence families’ school choices. The data consist of thematic interviews with parents of 8–14-year-old children (n?=?170) in three urban areas located in the cities of Paris (France), Milan (Italy) and Espoo (Finland) and are analysed via qualitative content analysis. The findings indicate that the families’ access to local social networks influences the reasoning behind school choice to the local school. The children’s relationships with other children and adults in the neighbourhood are considered important, but additionally, the parents’ networks with other parents in the area, mediated by the school, play their role. School choices as practices should therefore be analysed not merely as choices of an institution, as they comprise various aspects concerning the surrounding neighbourhood as a physical and social space.     

The deacon and the dove: on some early Christian (?) grave stelae from al‐Maqsha and Shakhura (Bahrain)

Three grave stelae in the Bahrain National Museum are discussed. Their iconography and possible Christian affinities are explored, as well as the earlier, non-Christian background of several symbols attested. Comparisons are made with the situation at Hatra where a broadly Parthian style is encountered on statuary.     

The Origins of European Fascism: Memory of Violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readings of The White Ribbon as a cinematic exploration of the causal relationship between the authoritarian formation of the juvenile subject and her susceptibility to fascism’s redemptive illusions, I propose an anti-psychological interpretation of the film. This reading seeks to understand The White Ribbon in terms of Haneke’s aesthetic and formal choices, which underpin his notion of “ethical spectatorship.” I argue that the film offers a dual metaphorical construction of the nexus between memory and the cinematic image, and of the mnemonic and affective aspects of the history of violence. Haneke forges a link between the European attitude to its history of fascism and its ongoing politics of exclusion, arising from its covert fascist desire for the unified self. The significance of The White Ribbon in the ongoing debate on history/memory thus lies in its critique of Europe’s current self-understanding as having outgrown its violent past.     

Mimi Pinson Goes to War: Taste,Class and Gender in France, 1900–18

In the years leading up to the First World War, the Frenchwomen of a free performing‐arts programme for female workers, known as the Mimi Pinsons, began to appear frequently in popular stories, articles, poems and songs as cultural shorthand for a renovated social vision of France. Founded by composer and philanthropist Gustave Charpentier in 1900, the Oeuvre de Mimi Pinson taught its worker–students elementary music, song and dance, and gradually expanded to include a charitable organisation and social network. A closer examination of the OMP reveals that its members were also used to reconcile early twentieth‐century French anxieties about working‐class militancy and even war by way of a potent cultural association of female sexuality, aesthetic refinement and labour. In the years before the First World War, the Mimi Pinsons were defined by journalists, government officials and the OMP's own organisers according to a formulaic type which at once modernised and constrained the role of the female Parisian worker. Associated almost exclusively with the luxury‐garment trades – seamstresses, flowermakers, milliners and department‐store clerks – the new Mimi Pinsons were embraced by the public as naturally chic yet diligent guardians of French art and craft. These female worker–students allowed an easy merging of the body of the female worker with particularly French notions of the patriotic responsibility of feminine taste. When the First World War came, many of the Mimi Pinsons joined the war effort as workers and nurses, yet they were embraced by the public primarily for their service as tasteful creators of patriotic decorative objects, and as an ideal symbolic figure for managing anxieties about the social dissolution that came with the war.     

明清西北筑城碑记的形成、特征及历史地理学价值

据不完全统计,明清西北筑城碑记大约存有269篇,其中原碑尚存于世者32方,是研究明清西北城池史宝贵的一手资料。甘、宁、青三省现存明代碑记最有特色,有大量卫所营堡的筑城碑保留。州县碑记大多有若干时段连续的拓城记,连缀起来就是城池形态扩展的整体叙事。明清西北筑城碑记所反映的城镇类型也多种多样,州县城镇最多,卫所营堡占有一定比例,其他如驿城、巡检司城、厅城、寨城、关城都有一部分存留,非常难得。这些碑记作为第一手资料,详述了筑城过程、工程耗时、销银数量、捐资人户,对于考证原委、制度复原、社会阶层以及城镇职能与形态扩张都有极重要的史料价值。