Bound by blood: the ethnic and civic nature of collective identities in the Basque Country,Catalonia and Valencia

This paper explores the factors determining collective identities in the Basque Country and Catalonia, paying special attention to language and birth as key domains of ethnolinguistic divide. We will also make a comparison to the case of Valencia, a region with a native language that nevertheless has not developed a nationalist movement. We have performed a cluster analysis to compare the differences between collective identities in these regions using data from the survey on National Identity in Spain, and discriminant analysis is used to test the validity of our model. Results show that an ethnolinguistic division, based on parental origin and linguistic skills, defines peripheral identities in the Basque Country and Catalonia, but this singularity cannot be found for Valencia. Finally, our model corroborates the relevance of ethnolinguistic factors in defining collective identities in the Basque and Catalan regions, while the civic factor may be more relevant in Valencia.     

From institutions to events – structural change in Norwegian local cultural policy

In this paper we discuss the ongoing restructuring of local cultural policy in Norway. Since the 1990s, we argue, the local cultural sector has been undergoing a structural change, in the form of a movement from institutions to events. As public resources granted to traditional local cultural institutions such as libraries and culture schools decrease, there is a rise in resources granted to new arenas of local cultural life, such as cultural festivals and culture houses. We explain this shift of balance from institutions to events in local cultural policy with reference to three types of mechanism. First, we point to the ‘flexibilisation’ of the cultural sector, which ensues from its sensitivity to changes in the funding of the local governments. Second, new forms of earmarked state funding schemes pull local resources in the direction of cultural festivals and cultural events. A third mechanism that explains the shift from institutions to events is local policymakers’ adoption of theories of culture as a source of urban and regional regeneration.     

Applying the H/V Method to Dense Cities. A Case Study of Valencia City

The aim of this study was to apply Nakamura's technique to Valencia city center, after some preliminary tests in Barcelona. Previous studies of Barcelona had measured periods in restrictive conditions and in various types of material ranging from very soft soil (with a predominant period of approximately 2 s) to rock (0.3 s), and under different measurement conditions. The Valencia city center measurements were taken by using the distance from buildings and car and pedestrian traffic to construct a measurement grid that was as regular as possible. We also estimated possible soil-structure interaction to detect potential vulnerability.     

The dark side of cultural policy: economic and political instrumentalisation,white elephants,and corruption in Valencian cultural institutions

Cultural policy is usually assessed as a positive element for socio-economic development and therefore, its criticism is generally confined to poor implementation and discussion of its social effects. However, it is occasionally analysed as an instrument that produces unsustainable development, as a generator of white elephants, or as a means of waste, corruption, and clientelistic domination of the political sphere. This is what we might call the ‘dark side’ of cultural policy. Our case study of the city of Valencia (Spain), focussing on two of its major cultural institutions, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art and the Palace of Arts, exemplifies this cultural policy dimension. This article aims to analyse the systemic and contextual causes of this phenomenon of cronyistic behaviour and to elucidate in what sense it can be understood as a contingent drift specific to a particular territory or as a structural condition of cultural policy.     

The costs of putting Valencia on the map: the hidden side of regional entrepreneurialism, ‘creative city’ and strategic projects

ABSTRACT

Strategic projects based on culture and sports have been one of the vectors of regional development since the 1990s. Accordingly, local and regional governments have drawn up entrepreneurial strategies to project their image internationally and foster investment and tourism. These developments have been described in Spain as ‘The Calatrava Model’ for putting a city/region on the map and for boosting tourism. However, from the study of the case of Valencia and four strategic projects (The Fifth World Meeting of Families, The America's Cup, Formula 1 and The City of Arts and Sciences), we will show how there is a hidden side to this paradigm, which boils down to an unsustainable, top-down system whose sole purpose is to gain and maintain political hegemony. We will also assess the medium and long term impacts of these projects in terms of: opportunity costs, snowballing debt, corruption, and an utter breakdown of democratic controls as a result of Valencia’s poor regional governance.     

Urban Development and Cultural Policy “White Elephants”: Barcelona and Valencia

The importance of culture in defining new models of local development has been increasingly emphasized. However, less attention has been paid to the influence of local development models on local cultural policy. This article will focus on analysing two cities that have used culture as a central element in their economic and urban development. In both cases, they have followed different strategies but the two have finally finished generating two “white elephants”: the Universal Forum of Cultures in the case of Barcelona and the City of Arts and Sciences in the case of Valencia. From a comparison of the two cases, the paper analyses the causes of this urban phenomenon, which combines cultural legitimation, wasteful investments, financial and social unsustainability and, last but not least, corruption. These four characteristics of cultural white elephants express the depletion of a neoliberal city model based on real estate speculation and tourism, which de facto relegates culture – in spite of discourses about social cohesion and sustainability – as an instrument of urban branding and elite socio-economic domination.     

Frequencies of Rare Incisor Variations Reflect Factors Influencing Precontact Population Relationships in Mexico and the American Southwest

Mexican prehistory is characterized by migration and population isolation in its earliest phase, followed by later inter‐population cultural interactions, such as politics and trade. While shared, common morphological variants are often informative about recent population events, rare trait variants have not been widely investigated to see whether they might be informative about earlier events. Here, we consider populations that show several rare variants at frequencies high enough to warrant such an investigation. Examining past population structure can help us understand population interactions across different periods of time, levels of migration, and population isolation/drift. Multiple‐origin populations may have more variation, including more and higher rates of rare traits. We examined maxillary lateral incisors in 1117 dentitions from 76 samples of Preclassic/Classic and Postclassic pre‐European contact Mexico and the American Southwest for the prevalence of rare lateral incisor variants. Variants observed included barrel, congenital absence, interruption groove, mesial marginal bending, peg, reduced, supernumerary, and talon teeth. The most common variant overall is interruption groove. Central Mexico, Huasteca, and the Lowland Yucatan region samples present the highest overall number of incisor variants. Higher frequencies of single unusual traits are commonly found in samples from smaller populations, while samples from larger population centres show a greater range of these rare variants. We investigated to see whether the pattern of rare incisor variant frequencies reflected early or later population history by comparing similarity/distance matrices and factor model matrices using Mantel tests and Generalized Procrustes analysis. Results show a weak relationship with the Postclassic period and shared migration/language and trade interaction models. We suggest that later cultural interactions have acted to mask earlier population history. Research on serial founder effects should be approached multiregionally and across time, to avoid missing inter‐region biological relationships. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hollywood's insidious charms: the impact of American cinema and television on the Soviet Union during the Cold War

Using various archival documents, memoirs, diaries, periodicals and more than 70 personal interviews with contemporaries of the events, this essay is an attempt to show the paradoxes of the cultural Cold War in Soviet consumption of the American visual media – films and television from the United States.     

Mobility-driven cultural transmission along the forager-collector continuum

Hunter-gatherers mobility regimes are often treated as discrete adaptive strategies. Here we present a model of forager mobility which treats collectors and foragers as two ends of a continuous spectrum. We show that a mobility regime can be situated along this spectrum by specifying the number of foraging moves a group makes before returning to its home base. The model allows us to explore the behavioural space between forager (i.e. residential mobility) and collector (logistical mobility) adaptations. We discuss the heuristic value of the model by showing how it can be used to make testable predictions about the impact of mobility strategies on archaeological measures such as occupation intensity and raw-material transportation distance. We then use the model to investigate the impact of mobility on rates of cultural transmission. We show that mobility-driven cultural transmission may be equivalent to a Poisson process and that the time it takes for a cultural behaviour to be transmitted between two mobile groups is optimized when the mobility regime is somewhere between pure forager and pure collectors adaptations. In addition, we find that rates of cultural transmission decline in a very regular way, as the inverse of the square root of the number of moves made before returning to home base. This suggests that there is a mechanistic connection between the mean-squared displacement of hunter-gatherers in space and the transmission of cultural traits.     

Government and (non)event: the promise of control

Control rooms routinely deal with happenings that might become events. They attempt to hide events and their possibility from the users of infrastructure by undertaking various forms of action to stop events coming to pass. Based on ethnographic research in a motorway control room, in this paper we describe how events are grasped and handled and subject to the effect of control. Focusing on how the promise of control is provisionally achieved through detection–diagnosis–response work, we show how control room action is situated on the ambiguous line between event and non- or quasi-event and involves making happenings that might be or might become events into their opposite: non-events, or routine occurrences. We use the case of the work of control rooms in dialogue with Michel Foucault on the relation between ‘government and event’ and Lauren Berlant on ‘modes of eventfulness’ to challenge the emphasis on the event as dramatic transformation in some current research on securing life and some geographical work on events. Paying close attention to what control rooms do shows the multiplicity of relations between government and (non)event, and invites us to expand the ‘modes of eventfulness’ that social and cultural geographers learn to sense and disclose.     

Time-Averaging Slows Down Rates of Change in the Archaeological Record

Measuring the pace of cultural change, and understanding its determinants is a fundamental goal of anthropological research. The archaeological record is the main source of information about the pace of cultural change, but it is an imperfect one, as taphonomic loss and mixing distort rate measurements. Here, I focus on the impact of time-averaging on rate measurements. Time-averaging arises when archaeological materials associated with activities and events that took place at different points in time are mixed into the same unit, whether because of depositional processes, disturbance factors, or because archaeologists lump together archaeological contexts when creating analytical units. I use analytical models to show how time-averaging can slow down the observed rates of change under two general modes of cultural change: random drift and directional change. I test this prediction using empirical rates of change from the archaeological record of North America. I show that empirical rates of change are indeed inversely correlated with the duration of time-averaging and provide a range estimate for this correlation.     

Between Monoculture and Cultural Polarization: Agent-based Models of the Interplay of Social Influence and Cultural Diversity

Social influence is one of the most important processes in human social interaction. Very often in human social interaction, influence is assimilative in that individuals become more similar to others they interact with. Nevertheless, cultural differences continue to remain in many realms of human life, for example, in the form of technological boundaries. Research on social influence points to a range of possible reasons for persistent cultural diversity, but there is much less clarity about the interplay of various factors and conditions for cultural influence with fundamental processes of social interaction at the micro-level. In this article, I show how agent-based computational modeling can be used as an approach for unraveling the complex interplay between simple first principles of interpersonal social interaction and emergent societal outcomes. I give a brief overview illustrating some of the main approaches agent-based modelers have developed in recent decades to understand conditions and processes of the emergence of cultural diversity. Models will be discussed that generate mainly cultural consensus as long-term behavior, but also models that generate clustering of cultural attitudes in geographical or social space, and models that imply cultural polarization with sharp cultural boundaries between emergent factions. It will be discussed how model dynamics depend on further assumptions, for example about random events, or the scaling of cultural attitudes, and what are further developments in the literature, possible future directions and challenges for the application of computational agent-based modeling in archeological research on cultural boundaries.     

Sex ratios and life tables: Historical demography of the age at which women outnumber men in seven countries, 1850–2016

Abstract

The male/female sex ratio (SR) and its age-specific patterns vary considerably across time and place. The SR generally begins male-biased at birth and becomes female-biased later in life, but this relationship should respond to historical trends and events. Temporal trends in SRs remain largely unstudied and formal demographic relationships are not well defined. We (1) define SRs in a life table framework, (2) estimate the age at which the number of males and females achieves parity—the sex ratio crossover (SRX)—using basic life table methods, and (3) explore historical and international patterns in these trends. Using publicly-available data from the Human Mortality Database, we construct SR and SRX measures from period and cohort life tables. Analyses explore temporal patterns for seven countries in different global regions since 1850. Overall temporal trends show the SRX advancing to older ages. The SRX also appears to respond to historical events such as wars and epidemics. The measure is simple to construct from life table data, and provides additional insight into the historical context of gender dynamics.     

Le Conte de deux cités1 : Analyse comparative des conflits urbains de Montréal et Valence, 1995–2010

A tale of two cities: 9 Comparative analysis of urban conflicts of Montreal and Valencia, 1995–2010 Metropolization processes at work in contemporary societies produce social and spatial change, which can raise strong opposition from a variety of urban actors, leading to acts of dissent. While such urban conflict has been examined in the past, geographical analysis of urban conflicts as sociospatial processes is more recent. Systematic quantitative research on urban conflict is virtually nonexistent in terms of comparative analysis conducted with an international perspective. Systematic comparative analysis sheds light on the existing relationship between urban conflicts and the socio‐territorial contexts in which conflicts emerge and evolve. This article presents a comparative analysis of urban conflict that occurred in a selection of boroughs in two cities characterized by different geographical realities, Valencia (Spain) and Montreal (Canada), between 1995 and 2010. Spatial autocorrelation techniques applied to a conflict database show a significant relationship between the emergence of urban conflict and the spatial distribution of some contextual variables. Indeed, for Montreal as for Valencia, the concentration of urban conflict is the greatest in the most deprived neighbourhoods. Also, regarding the management and regulation of urban conflict, results shed light on important differences between Montreal and Valencia. These differences include the outcome of urban conflicts, repertoire of action of actors involved in conflict activity, and the type of contestation faced by actors who promote the challenged urban projects.     

江苏史前考古的发现和研究

近50年来,江苏境内发现了许多旧石器时代和新石器时代的文化遗址,对这些史前文化遗址按文化区域阐析文化性质、文化时代和年代,并提出江苏史前考古今后需要探索的问题。     

Evolution of Innovation Policy in Emilia-Romagna and Valencia: Similar Reality,Similar Results?

This paper examines the evolution of regional innovation policy in Emilia-Romagna and Valencia, two regions with similar economic features that implemented close innovation policies in the 1970s and 1980s. We investigate whether their similarities have led to parallel targets, policy tools and governance developments. We show that innovation policy in both regions suffered from the effects of privatization, budget constraints and changes to manufacturing during the 1990s and we highlight the consequences. Although Emilia-Romagna experienced deeper changes to its innovation policy, privatizations and/or the replacement of public funds promoted commercial approaches and induced market failures in both regions. The worst effects of these policies were the implementation of less-risky innovation projects, the shift towards extra-regional projects and markets, and the favouring of large firms.     

Palaeoenvironmental significance of grain-size distribution of river flood deposits: a study of the archaeological sites of the Apengjiang River Drainage,upper Yangtze region,Chongqing, China

The grain-size distribution (based on cumulative probability curves) in the sediments produced by potential palaeofloods at the Shiniusi archaeological site is similar to that of modern flood sediments from the Wujiang River Drainage in the upper Yangtze River. There is an obvious pattern in the curves, with two segments, and the mean grain size (Mz), standard deviations (σ1), skewness, and kurtosis are all similar. Combined with the AMS¹⁴C dating data and the ages judged based on the presence of cultural remains, our data suggests frequent palaeoflood events within the Wujiang River Drainage. We hypothesize the existence of seven high flood possibility layers in the QST4 unit from Shiniusi archaeological site: during the periods of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD) to the Qing Dynasty (1616–1911 AD), and the end of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (770 BC–256 BC) to the Shang Dynasty (1600–1100 BC). We also hypothesize ten high flood probability layers in the QST2 unit from Shiniusi archaeological site: during the periods of the Ming Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, the periods of Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD) to the Yuan Dynasty (1206–1368 AD), as well as during the Han Dynasty (207 BC–220 AD) to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (770 BC–256 BC). These results are consistent with palaeoflood events inferred from pollen and spore analysis and from historical records in other rivers.     

THE MEANING OF CULTURAL FESTIVALS

Cultural festivals and events are increasingly becoming arenas of discourse enabling people to express their views on wider cultural, social and political issues. Often the debates polarise into those advocating change and those wishing to preserve “traditional” or “local” culture in the face of modernisation and globalisation. This article analyses the discourse on cultural festivals from the perspective of stakeholders involved in traditional and popular culture events in Catalunya. There is generally a high level of agreement about the aims of cultural events and the cultural content that is appropriate for them. In particular, the importance of cultural events in underpinning Catalan identity is seen as being important. However, stakeholders tend to differ more in the meanings attached to concepts such as identity, with policy makers exhibiting a greater emphasis on economic and political issues, whereas cultural producers are more concerned with social aspects of identity. However, the general consensus on the social role of cultural events between the different stakeholders may be one explanation for the relatively vibrant festival culture in Catalunya.     

Macrophysical climatic modeling of Africa’s late quaternary climate: Site-specific, high-resolution applications for archaeology

Macrophysical climatic modeling (MCM) is based on the relationship between large-scale atmospheric dynamics and synoptic climatology to develop simulations of late Pleistocene and Holocene climate in specific localities. Climatic events are calculated at 200-year intervals for the last 14,000 and 500 years for the period from 14,000 to 40,000 B.P. The model has been applied to more than 200 localities in Africa. We present examples from different parts of the continent at locations of archaeological significance. The results indicate that the transition from glacial maximum to postglacial conditions shows both temporal and inter- and intraregional variability. In addition to long-term differences among early, middle, and late Holocene climatic regimes, the model also shows incidences of sharp, abrupt events at some intervals. The applications of MCM invite comparison with inferences based on proxy data and assist in formulating and cross-examining socioecodynamic models based on climatic change, e.g., the continuity of cultural interactions along the Mediterranean littoral, the emergence and spread of cattle pastoralism, and the depopulation of the Sahara during the glacial maximum.