Between Land and Water: Being a Settler at Ile-aux-Oies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

This paper first describes the particular environment represented by the middle estuary where Ile-aux-Oies lies. Secondly, it reconstructs an early French farming settlement on the basis of archaeological remains and demonstrates the place it occupies in this special environment. And thirdly, it places the process of adaptation and appropriation in a more global perspective through a discussion of our research in the light of Ian Hodder’s thesis on the domestication of space during the Neolithic Revolution in Europe.     

Reconfiguring the French nation: Public debates on the Left and national identity

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalisation has shaped the fate of local and national cultural productions, from movies to music, from entertainment to food. How did French intellectual and political elites respond to this unprecedented challenge? What were the implications for the politics of nationalism and national identity? Two books respond to these questions, although in very different ways – the first directly and the second indirectly. Vincent Martigny's Dire la France explains how a new way of narrating French national identity emerged in the 1980s within an internationally oriented French Left, attentive of the coming challenges of cultural pluralism. Patrick Boucheron's (ed.) Histoire mondiale de la France advances into a more challenging direction by skilfully unsettling the ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ clichéd narrative. French history is thus redefined by moving away from the Frankish/Gallic myth of descent, thereby reconfiguring national identity along new lines. This article identifies how crucial debates on the cultural nation and cultural identity emerged in the wake of the May 1968 uprising, asking how much they contributed to the current shape and meaning of French national identity. It thus reviews what can be described as a new historiographical turn in French history.     

中西文化的一次对话:清初传教士与《易经》研究

By the early 18^th Century, the “Rites Controversy” among the missionaries themselves has evolved into a culture conflict between the Qing Empire and Europe. To make the European missionaries in China follow the rites of Matteo Ricci, Emperor Kangxi had French Jesuit missionaries Joachim Bouvet and Jean Francoise Foucquet study the Book of Changes in his royal palace and had further conversions with the European missionaries based on their researches. Not only did this cultural conversation reveal the Figurist’s tendencies, as represented by Bouvet, and the interior conflict among the missionaries themselves after the “Rites controversy,” but also showed Kangxi’s policies towards the missionaries, as well as his attitude towards Western culture and religion. __________ Translated from Lishi Yanjiu 历史研究 (Historical Research), 2006, (3): 74–85     

Keeping Up Appearances: Dress, Architecture, Furniture, and Status at French Azilum

Situated in northern Pennsylvania, French Azilum was a late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century community of elite French refugees escaping the French Revolution. Inhabitants of the isolated community expressed the need to reconstitute themselves as the privileged class of the ancien régime by attempting to dress, build their homes, and furnish them in a certain fashion to distinguish themselves as elites and to reestablish the social hierarchy of the ancien régime in a frontier outpost. In this paper, we explore how the settlers at French Azilum used architecture, furnishings, and dress in an attempt to keep up appearances.     

Safeguarding Archaeological Cultural Resources in Africa—Policies,Methods and Issues of (Non) Compliance

This paper approaches the safeguarding of Africa’s physical cultural resources in the context of development cooperation, infrastructure and environmental management. I focus on the World Bank’s physical cultural resource policy, as it constitutes to this day the most comprehensive tool for mitigating the adverse impacts of infrastructure development. However, it will also be shown that issues of noncompliance still persist in bank-financed projects, especially concerning Africa’s cultural resources. The European Commission’s policies toward heritage preservation will also be touched upon for purposes of contrast. I will close with suggestions for future activities that may have a positive impact on safeguarding those resources.     

Five Decades of Canadian and Québec Content in French Textbooks in the United States

This study investigates the evolution of Canadian and Québec content in a sample of 65 first-year university French textbooks in the United States from the 1960s through 2010. Overall indicators of Canadian and Québec contexts and cultural notes were tabulated for each decade in addition to particular content such as Canadian history, Québec identity, and Canadian French language. The chronological analysis challenges the popular notion that teachers and textbooks authors are inherently uninterested in Canada. Instead, the analysis finds Canadian and Québec content increasing over the five-decade period reaching an all-time high point in the most recent decade. Results are explained by dynamic Québec-based factors of language politics and foreign relations initiatives rather than static US-based attitudes toward Canadian French. The analysis offers optimism for the role of Canadian and Québec Studies as a source of content for the teaching of French in the United States.     

Our Privilege and Co-responsibility in the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History established an ethical program for the protection and research of the country’s underwater cultural heritage (UCH). Its Vice-Directorate of Underwater Archaeology trains archaeology and conservation students, participates in national and international initiatives regarding UCH, and develops multidisciplinary projects in maritime and continental waters. During negotiation of the UNESCO Convention, the Latin American and Caribbean Group united in a strong voice and contributed to its adoption in 2001; in 2006, Mexico ratified the Convention. This article highlights Mexico’s adoption of the 2001 UNESCO Convention as a case study, to stimulate all countries to ratify the convention and to cooperate in protecting the world’s UCH.     

Notes from a French perspective

This article uses John Kingdon's “multiple streams” model of the policy process to explore the role of French public intellectuals in processes of cultural and educational policy formation. The relative autonomy attributed by Kingdon to the “primeval soup” of ideas constituted by the policy stream (as distinct from the “problems” and “politics” streams posited by his model) provides the basis for this exploration. However, Kingdon's model is not developed with any reference to France, public intellectuals or cultural policy. The corresponding adjustments required are themselves enlightening. Public intellectuals must thus be distinguished from policy experts. They are characterised by their public visibility, the broad frame of reference that they bring to bear on the issues of the moment, certain limitations in technical expertise, and a capacity not simply to work through policy alternatives, but also to project their own counter‐agendas. These issues are explored particularly in relation to a selection of policy reports produced by public intellectuals.     

Sur les traces de Cortés: L'expédition du Mexique d'après Le Monde illustré

Unlike L'Illustration, with which it competed under the Second Empire, the weekly Le Monde illustré, which first appeared in 1857 and which was protected by the imperial government, did not count among the political newspapers overtaxed under Napoléon the Third's repressive regime. For this reason, it made great strides thanks to its blind allegiance to a French imperialism that had asserted its authority during the Crimean war, but which spent itself during the war against Juárez and his republican partisans in Mexico. While the French liberal press criticized the Second Empire foreign policy, Le Monde illustré persisted in turning the Mexican war into an antijuarist pacification favorable to a new Latin colonial empire, as well as to an application of the Saint-Simonian doctrine on Mexican industry and economy. In order to achieve this, the illustrated reports on the expeditionary force, military operations, and French victories were a warmongering that aimed to place this campaign in the afterglow of the conquistadors' era, as well as to idealize the imperial army as a symbol of the French nation.     

“We Wia Ragai”: Missionary Collection and Synergetic Assemblages in the Solomon Islands 1920–1942

An entry in Edith Safstrom’s diary, We Wia Ragai, marks her first posting to the girl’s mission school in the Solomon Islands, and is a Mota phrase told to her by lay missionary colleague, Ida Wench. The phrase essentially means “it is good to be here among you all” and echoed Edith’s thoughts on life at the school on tiny Mbungana Island. The Safstrom collection of artifacts held in the Museum of Victoria and Edith’s diaries unwrap a synergetic dialogue between lay missionary women and Indigenous women and children. The collection circumscribes a lay missionary’s collective experience of Christianity and acceptance of Indigenous cultural heritage from 1921 to 1942 in the Solomon Islands.     

可疑的繁盛——日军阴影下的都市女性文化探析

Wartime Shanghai (1937–1945) was a crucial period in women’s Yue opera history, during which the opera took roots in the city and was transformed into a modern art form. The opera established itself as a dominant presence in the city’s popular entertainment in the first half of the 1940s and gained national and international influence in the 1950s and 1960s with its masterpiece plays such as The butterfly lovers and Dream of the red chamber. The rise of women’s Yue opera in wartime Shanghai was more a ramification of long-term developments in urban migration, urban cultural transformation, and women’s integration into society that ran through the entire Republican even the early PRC periods. Translated and revised from Huadong Shifan Daxue Xuebao 华东师范大学学报 (Journal of East China Normal University), 2008, (2): 56–67     

The romance of the Inland Isle: Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the landscape of Providence

Nearly two centuries after its publication, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1990a) remains among the most influential accounts of American political culture. This essay argues that the rhetorical foundation of the Democracy's enduring cultural power is its “imaginative geography” (Said 2000), about which I make two, interrelated claims. The first has to do with the Democracy's identification of the American land with divine Providence. I claim that the providential landscape is the chief means by which Tocqueville contains and organizes the account of the tension between achieved liberty and natural freedom that drives the Democracy. My second focus is on the romantic character of the providential landscape. Cosgrove (2005, p. 302) reflects upon the “tenacity of the island condition on the Western imagination” as frame and vessel of “imagination, desire, hopes and fears.” I argue that the Democracy's “Inland Isle,” as I call it, is a metaphorical island in this sense, and that its theoretical capacity and exhortative power derive from Tocqueville's use of an idiom expressive of a distinctively French tradition of landscape theorizing in which garden metaphor was used to construct meanings of equality and freedom, and voice and identity, in an emerging national, bourgeois order.     

Playing with Flint: Tracing a Child’s Imitation of Adult Work in a Lithic Assemblage

This paper examines the potential for identifying play and children’s imitation in the archaeological record and reviews cultural constructions of play and cross-cultural behaviour. A case study, using a lithic assemblage from a discrete knapping area for Scandinavian Neolithic axe production in Southern Sweden which identifies a child’s activity area, is discussed. The theoretical and methodological assumptions behind play, imitation and its identification as well as its social implications are also examined.     

Drowned Memories: The Submerged Places of the Winnemem Wintu

This article is a brief overview of an instance where landscape inundation has disconnected culture from place. The Winnemem Wintu, a Native American tribe in Northern California, had most of their ancestral landscape along the McCloud River submerged by the construction of Shasta Dam just after World War II. The tribe’s remaining traditional cultural properties are under continual threat of loss and/or destruction, leaving the tribe’s ability to practice traditional ceremonies crippled by legal battles and fights against the continual assertion of United States hegemonic power over tribal cultural identity. As part of archaeological research on these submerged places, the tribe’s spiritual leader, Caleen Sisk-Franco, and Tribal Headman, Mark Franco, spoke with the author about these threats and how their culture must adapt to meet them.     

American Girls and French Jeunes Filles: Negotiating National Identities in Interwar France

This essay is a transnational and comparative study of how gendered national stereotypes structured the experience of American women who studied in France in the 1920s and 1930s and how this cross‐cultural exchange contributed to cultural internationalism. In both the French and American popular imaginations, American girls and French jeunes filles connoted opposite modern and traditional notions of femininity. In the process of negotiating these two competing identities in popular consciousness and in daily life, some American women students came to appreciate the limitations of the stereotypes, as well as more complex underlying cultural differences, notably in their encounters with French youth's heterosocial practices and with French women students. I argue that the outcome of this process included women's construction of alternative identities for themselves and a new tolerance and appreciation for cultural difference that represents a distinctive development toward cultural internationalism. This study challenges the cultural asymmetry of United States and European relations between the wars and locates gender and women at their centre.     

The history of modern and contemporary Italy: Made in France (from the late 1970s to the late 1990s)

Abstract

Over the past three centuries Italy has been the focus of numerous studies by French historians, who have taken advantage of the great wealth of sources available there. While no new synthesis has yet been achieved, we can identify certain main lines of development in French historiography. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s international relations and, especially, the relations between France and Italy were given the greatest attention, before a new focus on forms of sociability and political pedagogy began to be more common. However, the shifting of focus of historical studies to the centres of political decision making often coincided with less attention being paid to social stratification. Beyond these major themes, some researchers have reconstructed ‘global’ historical models, which have been characteristic of the renewal of post‐war French historiography.     

Hunting and Foraging in the Eyasi Basin, Northern Tanzania: Past, Present and Future Prospects

In this paper I document the history of hunting and foraging in the Eyasi Basin, northern Tanzania, from about 130,000 bp to contemporary times, by reviewing the available archaeological, palaeontological, historical and ethnographic data. The review reveals a complex co-existence and interactions between hunter-foragers and herders and farmers from about 3,000 bp until the present. In addition, the review exposes intricate opportunities and at the same time risks/constraints that face extant Hadzabe hunter-foragers in the 21st century. The Hadzabe are a group of about 800–1,000 people who live in the Eyasi Basin. Traditionally, they are viewed as hunter-foragers—people who acquire nearly all of their food by hunting wild animals and foraging wild plant foods and honey. Although Hadzabe have been closely surrounded by other ethnic and cultural groups with whom they have interacted, for at least the last 100 years, their existence as a cultural group in the 21st century is in doubt. Mitigation measures are required in order to enhance the existence of this important cultural group.

---

Résumé Cet article est une présentation de l’histoire de chasse et d’affourragement au Bassin Eyasi dans le nord de la Tanzanie, dès les environs de 130.000 ans avant présent, aux périodes contemporaines. On fait une revue des données archéologiques, anthropologiques, paléonthologiques, historiques ainsi que éthnographiques disponibles. La revue indique qu’il y a une coexistence et interaction complexes entre les chasseurs-fourrageurs, bouviers, et cultivateurs il y a 3.000 ans jusqu’au présent. En outre, la revue présente des occasions et en même temps des risques et contraintes complexes qui se posent aux Hadzabé: un groupe d’environ 800–1000 personnes (chasseurs-fourrageurs) qui vivent dans le bassin Eyassi. Traditionnellement, les Hadzabé sont regardés comme, les personnes qui obtiennent présque toutes leurs nourritures de la chair des animaux sauvages, des aliments végétaux sauvage et du miel. Bien que les Hadzabé aient été étroitement environnés et qu’ils aient interagis avec d’autres groupes éthniques et culturels au cours de 100 années passées leur existence au 20ème siècle en tant que groupe culturel est incertaine. Donc, des mesures sont exigées pour soutenir l’existence de ce groupe culturel important.

     

Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity

ABSTRACT

Across a broad range of late nineteenth-century French medical texts that described the newly denoted sexual pathologies of frigidity, inversion, fetishism, nymphomania, sadism and masochism, one finds a term being used for which no current equivalent exists. This term is l’amour morbide – morbid love. Its use was initially as common in respectable medical texts as it later became in erotic fictional writings. In some cases, it appeared to refer to a particular sexual pathology, albeit one which troubled the very notion of perversion as aberrant or abnormal. This article considers the role that l’amour morbide played in the sorting of medical terminology for describing sexual perversions in late nineteenth-century France, and examines what its relationship was to degenerationist thought. Engaging with Ian Hacking’s notion of “transient mental illnesses” produced by unique cultural ecologies, it is proposed that morbid love occupied the space between decadent culture of fin-de-siècle France on the one hand, and on the other hand degenerationist frames adopted by French doctors in the context of international medical and psychiatric conversations.     

Down Little Lon: An Introduction to the Casselden Place Archaeological Excavations, Melbourne

In 2002 Melbourne’s Casselden Place excavation provided a window into the urban past opened by an innovative relationship between the development industry, heritage consultancy and La Trobe University. The project demonstrated that with the support of consent authorities and the co-operation of the development industry, collaborations between the academic world and heritage consultants could be highly successful. The Casselden Place Project made a significant contribution to the ‘slum debate’ in Australia and delivered an enhanced understanding of the cultural, social and scientific significance of an inner-city block, and shed new light on a notorious chapter in the city’s history.