Remembering Things Seen: Experimental Approaches to the Process of Information Transmittal

The persistent problem of determining the factors that lead to continuity or variation when information is transmitted in different kinds of cultural situations is addressed here experimentally in a series of reproduction tasks. Art students were given varying degrees of exposure to different kinds of images and objects from different cultures and were asked to make reproductions. The results indicate that the most important factors leading to accurate reproductions are length of exposure, meaningful associations, and especially cultural knowledge. These factors can be used to develop more realistic archaeological models that posit the kinds of information transmitted in different kinds of contact situations.     

Exploring the potential of the popular culture and world politics agenda: actors,artefacts and the everyday

ABSTRACT

The PCWP agenda has contributed a great deal to the discipline of world politics, empirically, methodologically and theoretically. However, there is scope to expand upon certain aspects of this body of scholarship. In particular, the agenda is developing some unfortunate hierarchies in its focus on high-budget ‘blockbusters’ at the expense of data from the everyday. It is displaying a lack of imagination in terms of its methodologies and forms of output, despite the aesthetic and creative nature of many of the artefacts. Finally, it is evincing a reluctance to explore representations beyond the textual or the visual, at the expense of other forms of representation, including sound, taste or, as I argue in this paper, artefactuality.     

The Ilisu Dam: WAC protests to the British government

This paper focuses on two trends in the debate over the scope and nature of public archaeology. The first is a growing concern to define and codify its disciplinary boundaries. The second trend, arguably in tension with the first, is the ever-widening exploration of how people engage with their past, and the ramifications for the way archaeology, in its widest sense, is practised. It is argued that an excessive preoccupation with demarcating the disciplinary boundaries of public archaeology may risk obscuring a far more important objective, tied to the second trend referred to above. Debates on the relationship between the public, the past, and archaeological practice have resulted in a sea-change in attitudes to the responsibilities of the archaeologist, in the relationship between scientific knowledge and popular and indigenous knowledge, and in ideas about the relevance and usability of the past. Public archaeology is concerned with all these issues. It is argued that, to fulfil this wider vision, public archaeology cannot afford the strictures of a specialized discipline within archaeology, but must remain a persistent, essential, and foundational ingredient in the competencies and sensibilities of every archaeologist and co-worker in the field.     

From the Ground Up: Agency,Practice, and Community in the Southwestern British Bronze Age

Embodied, sensual, engagements between people, earthly elements, and celestial bodies during focused, periodic acts of ritual construction and artifact deposition in the southwestern British Bronze Age resulted in the remaking of identities, local communities, symbolic/mythical knowledge, and the landscape itself. To appreciate how material culture, time, and space were employed to define the criteria by which people understood themselves and their world necessitates an archaeological focus upon shared practices in particular settings that served to define rules of engagement with the environment based upon shared human perceptions. Agency appears in this encounter as central in the construction and perpetuation of symbolic perception, shared social memory, and community identity.     

“贵文贱艺”思想与近代知识分子阶层重心的转移

近代以降,随看中国内忧外患形势的日益加剧,知识分子阶层勇敢地承担起了救国救亡地历史使命。他们或以艺见长,或以突出。然而由于中国传统之重轻艺思想的深远影响,近代知识分子阶层只能遵循“学而优则仕”这条中国传统知识分子所走过的老路子。随着中国日益走向世界,此种情形直接阻碍了中国进一步现代化的进程。     

Performing Academic Practice: Using the Master Class to Build Postgraduate Discursive Competences

How can we find ways of training PhD students in academic practices, while reflexively analysing how academic practices are performed? The paper's answer to this question is based on evaluations from a British–Nordic master class. The paper discusses how master classes can be used to train the discursive skills required for academic discussion, commenting and reporting. Methods used in the master class are: performing and creative arts pedagogical exercises, the use of written provocations to elicit short papers, discussion group exercises, and training in reporting and in panel discussion facilitated by a meta-panel discussion. The authors argue that master classes have the potential to further develop advanced-level PhD training, especially through their emphasis on reflexive engagement in the performance of key academic skills.     

Forced to Concede: Permanent Restructuring and Labour's Place in the North American Auto Industry

Abstract: The stunning decline of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler over the past decade has rendered the once “Big Three” US automakers a vulnerable “Detroit Three”. In their attempts to return to profitability, the Detroit Three have undertaken a series of “turnarounds” aimed at renewing their competitive edge. Through this corporate restructuring agenda, 250,000 assembly jobs in North America have been lost, upwards of 50 auto plants have been closed, wages and benefits for new hires have been cut substantially and once strong, independent auto unions have been thoroughly overwhelmed. Permanent restructuring, then, represents a crisis strategy on the part of the corporate elite to continually intensify the demands placed on labour in the hopes of creating new conditions for capital accumulation. Working within labour geography, this paper documents the “regional race to the bottom” in the North American auto industry while reminding labour geographers that capitalist restructuring is a powerful constraint on labour agency.     

检方施治:防疫方书与清代的疫情防控

抄录、编撰、刊印、传播、参阅防疫方书,是清代疫情期间常见的医疗实践活动。防疫方书的大量涌现是一次次疫病流行激发的结果,是疫情防控实践本身的重要组成部分。它们在染疫病人救治、防疫力量动员、防疫知识整合和普及等方面发挥着独特的媒介作用,是相关人、事、物实现链接和互动的一种重要途径,是人们积极主动地应对疫病、控制疫情、维护生命健康的一种"原动力"。相较于其他常见防疫举措,防疫方书深度参与到多种疫情防控实践中,实际构成了一种自发性、分散性、非制度性的疫病应对机制,具有成本低廉、传导性强、覆盖面广、溢出效应大等特征。     

Contemporary visual art and the construction of identity: maintenance and revision processes in older adults

This article explores how older visitors use meanings created through encounters with contemporary visual art in art galleries for identity maintenance and revision processes. The analysis is based on the results of a 28-month study of the responses of older people to contemporary visual art in art galleries in north-east England, UK. The identity processes used in this study are those defined as maintenance and revision as understood by Kroger (2002) Identity processes and contents through the years of late adulthood. Identity, 2, (1), 81-99, Kroger and Adair (2008) Symbolic meanings of valued personal objects in identity transitions of late adulthood. Identity, 8, (1), 5-24. and Marcia (2002) Identity and psychosocial development in adulthood. Identity, 2, (1), 7-28. Respondents who did not have an existing identity-defining commitment towards art and who had less ability to decode the art works used the art to make symbolic links to aspects of their identity. The meanings created were then used to help satisfy current identity needs. In contrast, those with an existing commitment to art used the experience of the visits to deepen their current knowledge. Engaging with contemporary visual art facilitated identity processes that contributed to participants’ well-being. This study contributes to studies on identity by exploring how content and identity processes interact and provides new perspectives on the role of art in identity formation for older people. It also has significance for museum, gallery and heritage policy and practice.     

Telling small stories: spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography

This article examines how the practice of learning geography, and the arenas in which knowledge-making takes place, can be usefully positioned within changing histories of the discipline. It contends that networks of action – understood through the intersection of social sites, subjects and sources – present a conceptual framework and narrative focus for the re-consideration of specific episodes from geography's past. The interventions made here are informed and illustrated by a 'small story' about the doing of geography. Based on different personal accounts, the story revives a series of events, encounters, dialogues and images dating back to the winter of 1951 at Glenmore Lodge, Scotland. This educational institution in the Cairngorm mountains offered children from urban areas the opportunity to learn field studies and the skills of 'outdoor citizenship'. Initially, the focus falls on Margaret Jack, a 14-year-old field-course participant. Her learning experiences are traced through personal letters, a diary and a field journal dating from that time, and her recent recollections of this event. Margaret's account dovetails with the story of her field studies instructor, Robin Murray. Robin's role is traced through his learning experiences as a geography undergraduate at Aberdeen University, and the recent recollections of Catriona Murray, his wife.     

Purity and Power: Anthropology From Colonialism to the Global Hierarchy of Value

These four books focalize the links between sociocultural anthropology and the national or cultural identities of its theoreticians and empirical practitioners. Historically caught between the forces of nationalism and colonialism, the subdiscipline has largely transcended its now rejected past, of which significant traces nonetheless remain embedded in its conceptual inheritance. Ranging from vernacular as well as English-language Indian writings to the compromised achievements of German scholars and to the sharp divergences within and among the dominant traditions, the material of these books indexes the emergence of a self-conscious marginality that has engendered a distinctive and productive idiom of sociocultural critique.     

Neolithic rock art in context: Landscape history and the transition to agriculture in Mediterranean Spain

Rock art is one of the most salient features of Neolithic societies in eastern Spain and an explicit form of landscape history. This paper summarizes current debates of Mediterranean rock art chronology and interpretation and explores the contextual differences in two areas of Neolithic settlement with rock art: the Canyoles Valley (Valencia) and the Alcoi Basin (Alicante). Large-scale survey of the Canyoles Valley resulted in a clearer understanding of agricultural land use during the Neolithic that contrasts with evidence from the Alcoi Basin. By analyzing Neolithic rock art in its archaeological context, we discuss the significance and limitations of rock art analysis for understanding and characterizing landscape histories and the transition to agriculture in the region.     

Futurism from foundation to world war: the art and politics of an avant-garde movement

The cultural influence of the Futurist art movement on the modern era is undisputed. Of course, it is also undisputed that the movement was deeply involved in the politics of both liberal and Fascist Italy. Futurist politics were characterized by a pronounced nationalism and imperialism, but in the early years were also known for advancing ideas more associated with the extreme left, such as republicanism, anti-clericalism, and workers’ advancement through revolution. There is no consensus on how to narrate Futurist politics, or their relationship to Futurist art. Were the politics more of the left or the right? And, more to the point, should the politics be studied in isolation, or as integral to the broad ‘Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’? This article takes the latter approach and offers an interpretation that unifies the art and politics of the Futurist movement from its foundation in 1909 through to Italy’s entry into the Great War. I argue that the Futurists themselves did not differentiate between their cultural initiatives to modernize Italy or their political interventionism. In looking at key moments in the political evolution of the movement, and the corresponding artwork of the period, I show that Futurism offered a confused political message in its first years, mixing elements of the left and right, but after the Libyan War and especially in the interventionist period, the political message became much more stridently nationalistic and bellicose, and such themes became prevalent in the art of that time.     

Rock art and social geography in the Upper Paleolithic. Contribution to the socio-cultural function of the Roc-aux-Sorciers rock-shelter (Angles-sur-l’Anglin,France) from the viewpoint of its sculpted frieze

This article is about the contribution of rock art to current studies on the social geography of European Paleolithic populations. The socio-cultural function of the Roc-aux-Sorciers decorated and occupied rock-shelter is considered through its monumental sculpted frieze. This approach is based on the intended audience, analyzed through the perception of this rock art and the archaeological context of the associated occupations. The site is also considered with regard to the other local decorated sites dated to the Middle Magdalenian with which it shares strong similarities (La Marche, Les Fadets, Réseau Guy Martin).     

辽宁省世界文化遗产保护与管理研究

文化遗产研究是近年来学术研究的一个热点问题。随着中国世界文化遗产数量的不断增加,文化遗产管理模式的研究也提上了议事日程。本文在系统梳理以往研究成果的基础上,通过选取辽宁省世界文化遗产的典型案例进行分析,提出了一套适合辽宁省的文化遗产管理模式,同时。对于中国不同地区的世界文化遗产管理也有一定的借鉴意义。     

Japanese Working Holiday Makers in Australia and their Relationship to the Japanese Labour Market: Before and After

The Working Holiday is a relatively new but rapidly growing form of transnational mobility. In Australia, Working Holiday Makers (WHMs) form the largest group of Japanese temporary migrants, and their numbers have been increasing. In this paper, I will discuss the experience of returned WHMs in the light of Japanese labour practice. For my interlocutors, the motivations for taking a Working Holiday were frequently related to their dissatisfaction with their status and future prospects as workers. In order to understand this popular but under-researched form of transnational migration, it is therefore important to consider their self-perceptions about their worker status when they re-entered the Japanese workforce, and how they think their life course has changed due to the Working Holiday experience. The employment experience of WHMs upon their return to Japan illuminates their position in the home society in which their migratory decision-making was situated.