Historical Archaeology in Africa: An Appropriate Concept?

The term ‘ historical archaeology’ originated in the United States and was subsequently adopted in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, all places subjected to European colonization during the last few centuries. The idea of historical archaeology has had relatively little application in Europe, birthplace of the antithetical idea of prehistory. In Africa, other than at the southern tip of the continent, the practice of what is called historical archaeology has developed only recently and the relevance of the concept in Africa might be questioned. There are chronological problems in its application: not only are the interfaces between preliterate and literate societies spread over thousands of years in different areas but they can at times be regressive. The matter is further complicated if the term historical archaeology is used for societies whose history is oral not written. However, there is an ambiguity in this concept that also has methodological and other connotations. In these respects the idea of historical archaeology does perhaps have a place in Africa as a whole, but it represents a compartmentalization of our discipline still inadequately defined.     

Magic Bullets for Mental Disorders: The Emergence of the Concept of an “Antipsychotic” Drug

When “antipsychotic” drugs were introduced into psychiatry in the 1950s, they were thought to work by inducing a state of neurological suppression, which reduced behavioral disturbance as well as psychotic symptoms. This view was reflected in the name “neuroleptic.” Within a few years, however, the idea that the drugs were a disease-specific treatment for schizophrenia or psychosis, and that they worked by modifying the underlying pathology of the condition, replaced this earlier view, and they became known as “antipsychotics.” This transformation of views about the drugs' mode of action occurred with little debate or empirical evaluation in the psychiatric literature and obscured earlier evidence about the nature of these drugs. Drug advertisements in the British Journal of Psychiatry reflect the same changes, although the nondisease-specific view persisted for longer. It is suggested that professional interests rather than scientific merit facilitated the rise of the disease-specific view of drug action. The increasing popularity of atypical antipsychotics makes it important to examine the origins of the assumptions on which modern drug treatment is based.     

The Rise of the “City-region” Concept and its Development Policy Implications

As well as enjoying a rich scientific history, the concept of the “city-region” has also attracted particular attention in recent years. Combinations of an urban core or cores, linked to semi-urban and rural hinterland by functional ties, are increasingly regarded as the “adequate” scale for the implementation of development policies. The popularization and widespread use of the city-region concept for policy-making has important implications for the design and implementation of development strategies. It first signals a change from sectoral to territorial approaches to development and requires the adjustment of development strategies to widely varying contexts, leading to much greater policy diversity and innovation. It also involves a more complex governance structure, characterized by the horizontal and vertical coordination of numerous institutional public and private actors, and enables experimentation with bottom-up and participatory policy-making. This paper evaluates these changes and critically addresses their normative implications, especially in light of the facts that there is still little agreement on how the city-region is defined, that the term has become appropriated by urban elites, and that the problems faced by city-regions may not be that different from those operating at other geographical scales.     

The Discourse of “Encultured Nature”in Japan: The Concept of Satoyama and its Role in 21st-Century Nature Conservation

The term satoyama gained currency in Japan in postwar decades as a term that describes a sphere of “encultured” nature that has traditionally existed on the periphery of rural settlements, but which is increasingly threatened by industrialisation, urban development, rural depopulation and changing lifestyles. Satoyama is appealing as a concept because it represents a sphere in which nature and culture intersect, and is reminiscent of a more idyllic rural lifestyle of the past, when the Japanese “lived in harmony with nature”. This article examines the role of this term in the nature conservation discourse in Japan, and in particular its appropriation by the Ministry of the Environment and the Japanese host organisations for the Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which was held in Japan in 2010. The article will explore the way the concept of satoyama has been “showcased” as a model of sustainable resource management based on traditional methods of agriculture. The satoyama concept is used to demonstrate that Japan not only possesses the knowledge to live in harmony with nature, but also offers a model of sustainable resource management that the rest of the world can learn from.     

Seismic Assessment of a Historical Masonry Building in Switzerland: The “Ancien Hôpital De Sion”

This article presents the results of the evaluation of the seismic safety of the Ancien Hôpital de Sion, an important Swiss architectural heritage building, situated in the Canton of Valais, the region with the highest seismic hazard in Switzerland. Three-dimensional Applied Element (AEM) modeling of the whole structure has been performed and validated. The adopted modeling strategy, together with nonlinear dynamic analysis, was able to represent the actual behavior and failure mechanisms typical of complex masonry structures, in addition to a good computational efficiency compared to other available numerical approaches. The local collapse mechanisms have been also studied through a kinematic limit analysis based on rigid block rotation. Both linear and nonlinear approaches have been followed together with the capacity spectrum method. The results provided by the different methodologies have been compared with the aim to provide possible insights concerning a general procedure for the assessment of the safety of such type of structures.