Everyday Mediation: The Politics of Public Service Delivery in Gujarat,India

This article follows a municipal councillor in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) on his daily routine in order to explore the various ways in which politicians in India operate as mediators between state institutions and citizens. Political mediation is deeply entrenched in the procedures, policies and habits that guide the daily functioning of Gujarat's state institutions. This article argues that this institutionalization of political mediation is the outcome of a dialectic between the limited capacity of the state to provide public services and the strategies that local politicians employ to win elections.     

World Heritage and the Local Community: The Case of Atapuerca (Burgos,Spain)

As social constructions, heritage properties require the participation of all their stakeholders, especially in the case of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain) World Heritage Site is used as a test case for assessing the fulfilment of the local community’s development expectations, perceptions, and values. This paper is the first formal attempt to ascertain the opinions of residents in the surrounding villages — Ibeas de Juarros and Atapuerca — regarding the initiatives taken by the authorities, and the changes produced, since the site was included in the World Heritage List. The results show that many improvements can be made with the aim of democratizing the decision-making process, ensuring the involvement of the local community and improving their quality of life, in order to fulfil the spirit and recommendations of UNESCO.     

The DEEPSAL Project: Using the Past for Local Community Futures in Jordan

ABSTRACT

The Deep Past as a Social Asset in the Levant (DEEPSAL) project, conducted in 2015–16 by the Council for British Research in the Levant, examined two communities in southern Jordan, Beidha and Basta, who live near significant Neolithic archaeological sites. The project collected information on the communities’ current socioeconomic conditions, their relationship with local cultural heritage and how that cultural heritage currently benefits or hinders them. The information was used to inform nascent strategies to utilize the sites sustainably as development assets and suggest alternative strategies as necessary. The results showed that a tourism-based strategy is suitable for Beidha but there was a need to focus on basic business skills. For Basta a tourism-based strategy is currently unsuitable, and efforts should rather focus on supporting educational activities. The results of the project are presented here within the context of archaeology’s increasing interest to use archaeological resource to benefit local communities, and outlines lessons for that effort.     

Sentimental Capitalism in Contemporary India: Art,Heritage, and Development in Ahmedabad,Gujarat

Using a critical cultural politics approach and deploying the concept of sentimental capitalism, this article problematizes the burgeoning creative economy discourse while analyzing spaces of art and heritage production in Ahmedabad, India. I situate the Cotton Exchange exhibit (April 2013) in an erstwhile mill in recent histories of mill closures, genocide, creative economy initiatives and development aspirations of revitalizing degraded space. I argue that in remaking place, art mobilizes sentiments—here, nostalgia and hope—while erasing violence and inequality. Sentimental capitalism is at work in the exhibition by mobilizing artisans as entrepreneurial agents not victims of capitalism; constructing art's aura of grassroots participation and artisanal empowerment while obscuring displacement and exploitation; and fostering cult‐like regard for art's intrinsic and instrumental value as non‐profit and its capacity to engender opportunity, recognition, and even property. While another spatial politics is possible, in Ahmedabad today, art is being mobilized to obscure dispossession and exploitation in the name of urban revitalization and heritage production.     

清代前期棉花棉布的运销

本文通过对清代前期棉花、棉布在全国各地运销情况的历史考察,说明在清代前期,全国绝大部分州县的棉花、棉布是自给不足,或者是自给有余的,人们都要依靠棉花或者棉布市场。正是大多数人的这种需求,才形成了棉花、棉布在省际间、县际间、城乡间、乡村间的流通。这也是棉花、棉布流通的最基本条件。     

Local Ceramics from the Islamic Trade Center of Harlaa,Eastern Ethiopia: Markers of Chronology and Contacts

Locally made ceramics from Islamic sites in Ethiopia have been neglected in most archaeological studies, which tend to privilege imported Middle Eastern and Chinese/Southeast Asian ceramics. An assemblage of the local ceramics from the important trading site of Harlaa, in eastern Ethiopia (mid-sixth and fifteenth centuries AD), is the subject of this article. The study emphasizes the value of these ceramics as chronological markers, and for understanding regional and long-distance contacts, cultural innovations, processes of Islamization, and foodways.

     

槟城领事谢湘与该地华人社会及其免职风波

藉1931年至1933年《光华日报》及《槟城新报》的报道,讨论了粤籍人士谢湘任中华民国驻槟榔屿领事期内,在履行保护和管理华侨、组织劝导华侨捐款救灾、促进商务交流提倡国货、发展海外华文教育及履行国府任务等职责中的表现,探讨了其上任一年半被免职的原因及该事件所折射出的槟城华人社会的种种侧面。从槟城华文报纸对谢湘免职的不同立场,可以看出这是一个有争议的历史问题,谢湘之被免职不仅与其任内的表现有关,还与槟城华侨社会不同方言群间的复杂权力关系有关,在深层次上凸显了福建方言群与广东方言群在主导当时槟城华人社会中的重要作用。被免职的谢湘极有可能是槟城华人社会帮权争斗下的一个牺牲品。     

Fashion,Commerce and Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Shawl Trade

Abstract

The way that the identifiable print sources used as patterns for the total of 170 emblems in the borders of the Four Seasons tapestries at Hatfield House are handled can tell us something not only about the meaning of the emblems in their new medium and setting but also about their weaving process. Changes to the Latin mottoes and to pictorial detail are shown to be purely pragmatic in some cases but clearly motivated in others, whilst both are influenced not only by the received iconology but also by the art of rhetoric as taught in the Elizabethan schoolroom. These changes are highly likely to have been decided on by the patron who commissioned them, Sir John Tracy.