Tanzania's endangered heritage: A call for a protection program

There is no doubt that heritage resource loss in Tanzania is proceeding at an alarming rate. Natural and human agencies, adverse storage infrastructures and techniques, and lack of trained conservators and curators and of a proper protection program are the major threats that endanger the heritage resources of Tanzania. As our natural and cultural environments bring irreparable damage to the resources that document our human history, we need to preserve and protect them before they vanish. A preservation and protection program for Tanzania should include public education, the establishment of heritage preservation laws, more progress in the inventory and protection of in situ heritage resources, research into preservation and conservation methods, training of staff, and improvements in the curation of collected heritage resources and records. Preservation and protection of heritage resources are collaborative exercises. The scientific and world community need to support and engage in this proposed program both technically and financially, if the preservation and protection of heritage resources in Tanzania are to succeed.

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Résumé Il ne fait pas de doute que la perte des ressources du patrimoine historique se poursuit à un rythme alarmant en Tanzanie. Les agents naturels et humains, des techniques et des locaux de conservation inadaptés, el manque de conservateurs bien formés et d'un programme de sauvegarde adéquat sont les principales menaces qui pèsent sur les biens historiques et culturels en Tanzanie. Comme notre environnement naturel et culturel provoque des dommages irréparables aux sources historiques, nous devons les préserver et les protéger avant qu'elles ne disparaissent. Un programme de préservation et de protection pour la Tanzanie devrait inclure l'éducation du public, l'adoption de lois relatives à la sauvegarde du patrimoine, de nouveaux progrès dans l'inventaire et la protection in situdes vestiges, des recherches sur les méthodes de préservation et de conservation, la formation des responsables et l'amélioration des conditions de conservation et de récolte des objets et de la documentation. La préservation et la protection des vestiges du patrimoine impliquent une large collaboration. Pour arriver à la préservation et à la protection des ressources du patrimoine tanzanien, el faut que la communauté scientifique et mondiale s'implique et soutienne ce projet à la fois techniquement et financièrement.

     

Thirty years of modern Chinese history studies: past experiences and prospective trends

This paper presents an overview of and comments on a symposium concerning modern Chinese history held in Beijing, China in October 2009. It is composed of four parts: first, the paradigm issues of modern Chinese historical studies; second, indigenous reorientation and the study of regional social history; third, the relationship between social history and regional social history; fourth, the history of scholarship on the Chinese revolution. All the conference participants were prestigious scholars in the fields of modern Chinese history and Ming–Qing historical studies in Mainland China. The attending scholars provided in-depth and well considered views about the macro issues of this discipline. Furthermore, the discussion was very active and productive. This paper reflects the latest trends in the field of modern Chinese historical studies in Mainland China.     

Mapping grief. A conceptual framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of bereavement,mourning and remembrance

This paper highlights the significance of the spatial dimensions of the universal human phenomena of bereavement. Grief, mourning and remembrance are experienced in and mapped upon (i) physical spaces, including the public and private arenas of everyday life; (ii) the embodied-psychological spaces of the interdependent and co-producing body-mind and (iii) the virtual spaces of digital technology, religious-spiritual beliefs and non-place-based community. Culturally inflected, dynamic emotional-affective maps of grief can be identified, as a form of deep-mapping, which reflect the ways in which relationality to particular spaces and places is inflected by bereavement, mourning and remembrance. Individual’s emotional-affective cartographies can intersect, overlap, or conflict with, others’ maps, with social and political consequences. The conceptual framework outlined here is illustrated by a schematic representation of grief maps. This framework provides geographical scholars with a lens on the dynamic assemblage of self-body-place-society that constitutes culturally inflected individual and shared everyday grief maps, providing insight to relational spaces, emotional-affective geographies and therapeutic environments. The reflexive identification of such maps represents a potential resource for the bereaved and their therapeutic counsellors, facilitating the identification of places which evoke anguish or comfort etc. and which might be deemed emotionally ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ at particular junctures.     

A call for a new Japanese foreign policy: the dilemmas of a stakeholder state

Japanese foreign policy is at a crossroads. A global power transition is under way; while the United States remains the leading global power, across the globe non‐western developing states are on the rise. Within Asia, China is a growing presence, wielding expansive claims on islands and maritime rights, and embarking on a defence buildup. As power shifts across Asia and the wider world, the terms of leadership and global governance have become more uncertain. Japan now finds itself asking basic questions about its own identity and strategic goals as a Great Power. Within this changing context, there are three foreign policy approaches available to Japan: (1) a classical realist line of working closely with the US in meeting China's rise and optimizing deep US engagement with China by pursuing a diplomacy focused on counterbalancing and hedging; (2) a transformative pragmatist line of rejuvenating itself through Abenomics and repositioning itself in East Asia; and (3) a liberal international line of pursuing a common agenda of enhancing global liberal‐oriented norms and rules through multilateral institutions along with the United States and the Asia–Pacific countries. Current Japanese foreign policy contains a mix of all three approaches. The article argues that a greater focus on the second and the third lines would enhance the current approach; it would ensure that Japan is more in harmony with the global environment and help it work positively for global and regional stability and prosperity, thus enabling Japan to pursue an ‘honorable place in the world’ (as stated in the preamble to its constitution).     

Composing Einstein: exploring the kinship of art and science

Abstract

The work Albert Einstein published in 1905 led to a revolution in physics and the way nature is explained. At the same time, his physics touches on profound existential questions which are also dwelt upon in the arts. This article addresses the relatedness of music and physics, art and science. The point of departure is my composition The Einstein Resoundings, and how writing it refined my sensitivity to the deeper layers of creative effort. I discuss points of contact between the spheres of music and physics: the phenomenon of quantum leaps, continuous and discontinuous structures in tone and atom, and the role of continuity and discontinuity in the act of creation. My reflection on the kinship of art and science is based on the notion of complementarities. This allows a double perspective on art and science as different in regard to activity and language, but similar in regard to their mutually complementing characters.     

Worldwide cross-cultural studies and their relevance for archaeology

Archaeological inference based on ethnographic analogy may or may not be correct. What is worse, there is no systematic way to tell. With certain provisos, it is better to generate archaeological inference from the results of worldwide cross-cultural tests of relational hypotheses. Such tests may provide more benefits than within-region comparisons. This paper discusses a number of ways in which worldwide cross-cultural research may be used in archaeological inference, including: generalizing about societal types, inferring from presumed causes, inferring from material correlates, and inferring from noncausal associations. The paper concludes with a discussion of how comparative archaeology could help cross-cultural researchers test causal theories diachronically.     

建国五十年来我国西夏文献整理研究简述

本对近50年来我国西夏献整理研究,取得的成就进行了概述。内容涉及俄藏黑水城献、国内存世出土的西夏物献、汉西夏献的整理研究及综述研究等几方面。     

Gender,race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy

This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.     

Vernacular memorialization in the military: personal acts of remembrance at RAF Thorpe Abbotts

ABSTRACT

In September 2017, an archaeological excavation at RAF Thorpe Abbotts (also known as Station 139) uncovered 7 identification ‘dog’ tags belonging to airmen of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF). It is the thesis of this article that these were purposefully buried by individuals within the 100th Bomb Group (Heavy) as acts of remembrance. Alongside the dog tags were a number of other artefacts, including coins, bottles, and a canteen cup. These likely formed the material culture of self-developed grieving rituals established by the primary group responsible for the deposition of the dog tags.     

Memorialisation and remembrance: on strategic forgetting and the metamorphosis of psychiatric asylums into sites for tertiary educational provision

This paper builds on earlier investigations of psychiatric asylum closure by focusing on their not infrequent successor role as educational facilities. We ask two questions: what conditions underpin a transition to educational re-use, and how is former asylum use remembered and memorialised in the successor context? Through recounting and interpreting the histories of acquisition and adaptation at two sites (Carrington, Auckland and Lakeshore, Toronto), we build a narrative that suggests a variable response to the shadows cast by stigma and the vilification of asylum. We distinguish between memorialisation (material reminders on site) and remembrance (narratives of past use). Former asylum sites, we contend, are attractive for educational users for their campus-like settings, range of buildings and (now) suburban locations. For city residents and planners replacing one institutional use with another keeps the site green, brings employment, and retains semi-public access. Memorialisation is often strategically low-key and remembrance more personal and individual. The net result is a relict landscape that speaks to the transcendence of stigma despite the relatively recent demise of the asylum.