Involutions of Materiality

The neo-materialist ontology outlined by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda has several implications for archeology. This text primarily discusses their replacement of the general and the specific with universal and individual singularities which creates emergent properties. This is both a process of evolution and involution where materialities create multi-scalar assemblages. Causeway assemblages from two sites, Ichmul and Yo’okop in the northern Maya lowlands in southern Mexico, are used to operationalize this perspective. Rather than focusing on a human-centered perspective, the text sees the causeways as parts of technologies that can help us to reach an anorganic perspective where we can become-materiality.     

Cultural Materiality and Spiritual Alienation

Abstract

This article takes its point of departure in Phillip Blond’s Christian criticism of secular materialisms and the failure of modern thought to appreciate the true materiality of creation. He challenges secular thought and returns to a combination of Greek and Christian Trinitarian thought, in order to reach for a new ground for political theology. Blond’s Christian ontological claims are contested, but an aspect of them is brought into the context of cultural creation and related to questions of the spiritual dimension of cultural arte-facts in a secular setting. Against the background of Friedrich Nietzsche’s struggle with the difficulty of singling out a pure secular culture from the old and (in his view) stifling religious heritage in society and culture, this article suggests that a radical notion of human intentional (but finite) creation, analogous to Blond’s idea of God’s infinite creative intention, may be helpful for a construction of a materialistic critical theory about contingent spiritual obstacles to political change.     

Homeland In the Snowland

Modern Tibetans cherish a natural love for the great nature and this love turns out to be even deeper than their predecessors who lived and multiplied in this region for so many centuries.Lhalu Wetland: Oxygen BarThe residents of Lhasa take great pride in the Lhalu Wetland within the city. Skirted by Damn Road West, the wetland covers a total area of 6.2 square km, or 11.7 percent of the total area of     

The Measures and Materiality of Improvement in Ireland

This paper examines the impact and evidence of Improvement thinking on domestic and social spheres. Taking the example of Ireland it examines the origin and development of improving strategies and methodologies from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, in particular the widening application of reform to incorporate domestic, educational and moral concerns. Improvement measures were imposed on communities often by a land-owning class of differing social and religious origin, engendering socio-political tension still evident in Ireland today. Equally it was a period of new commercial opportunities and social betterment creating new class divisions that have been previously undervalued. This paper draws on work on a group of islands on the northern periphery of the country, where archaeological and historical evidence demonstrate that the reforms associated with the Improvement project were still underway well into the nineteenth century.     

Cherish Our Homeland

To encourage the return of a wandering soul, Moinba people in Medog would sing in the capacity of sorcerers who talk the wandering souls into coming home:Oh, souls! Don't indulge in life in Paradise. Oh, souls! Don't stay in the Land ofHappiness.A good place, but belonging to others, Sweet water and delicious food, but in aplace which is not the homeland, None of these is better than what you can     

乡情凝聚人心

飘色、花灯、剪纸、乡曲、乡祭……大庙会凝聚乡情凝聚人心。岭南人拯救还原民俗的同时也善用民俗——呼唤情感回归建设美好家园。 考察非物质化遗产,不能不考察大庙会。在普查中,大庙会被分类为化空间。这个空间是古庙、老店、戏曲、手工技艺、宗教信仰、饮食、民间舞蹈、年画、武术、杂技……的集合体,根本就是一幅幅生动的《清明上河图》。 大庙会仅仅是乡间民俗的集合体吗？我们在调查中似乎还找到了另一种回答——大庙会是乡情的最好的载体。在人的所有社会情感当中,乡情是最为温暖柔软的部分,当心中涌起这种美好情感的时候,眼前流动的,往住就是大庙会的某个画面了,一张剪纸、一盏花灯、一缕乡曲、一次乡祭……[编按]     

Material Matters: Representation and Materiality of the Harappan Body

In the Indus Civilization (ca. 2600–1900 BC), a society with no readable texts and few larger-scale representations, terracotta figurines were the most common representations of the human body. This paper explores the unique construction of the material representations of bodies and other material culture from Harappa, a major Indus site now in Pakistan. Hand-modeling representations of human bodies from dual clay pieces, sometimes decorated with bone pigments, suggests a focus on the process and ideological rather than practical choices in the materialization of the Harappan human body. For the Harappans, material matters as they engage physically with their world and embody themselves and their worldview.     

故土与边疆:满洲民族与国家认同里的东北

本文从满族的角度探讨边疆研究的一个中心问题:族群领域性(territoriality)的再定义与其身份(identity)的重塑如何互动关联。满族的历史与文化在近几十年来的清史研究中地位卓著。然而,在清史之外的其他领域,尤其在北美有关二十世纪中国或东亚史的学术领域,满族常常被忽视。本研究立足边疆研究,中外关系,及满汉关系领域的交叉路口,分析清末民初满族的故土认知变化与其对族/国的多元再定义的过程。     

Introduction: The Materiality of Traces and Legacies

This Special Issue presents issues in contemporary archaeological theory and practice as influenced by the work of H. Martin Wobst. Wobst came to study in the U.S. nearly 50 years ago and has contributed to many changes in the theory and practice of archaeology since then. Though the papers cover a wide range of topics they share common interests in seeing materiality as constitutive of culture, archaeologists as participants in the present as well as observers of the past, and an interest in transcending traditional definitions of archaeological research.     

Twisted Lives: On the Temporality and Materiality of Biographical Presences

People??s biographies are dominated by a multitude of factors. In recent years it has come to a general understanding that people??s life histories are embedded in things just as things are premising the biographies of people. Still, the scholarly discussion has concentrated heavily on individual biographies resulting in life-histories of bodies and individuals confined by their bodily framework rather than conceptualizing the person through the mutual interaction between people and things and the interrelationship between various presences in the revelation of the temporality and materiality of biography. In this paper I aim to explore the category of personal biography resting upon aspects of Heideggerian philosophy. I argue for biographical presences that are spread across time, subjected to shared participation and intrinsically intertwined with the narratives they generate. The argumentation rests upon my personal involvement with the biography of a seventeenth-century peasant from the farm Búearárbakki in southern Iceland. The site and its material culture have emerged as the cause and consequence of our shared life-histories manifesting the notion of multi-temporality and materiality to the category of biography.     

Materiality and Mutable Landscapes: Rethinking Seasonality and Marginality in Rural Ireland

Drawing on examples from Achill Island, County Mayo and from the north Antrim uplands, notions of marginality, isolation, and cultural stagnation associated with upland landscapes are explored in light of contradictory material and documentary data, raising questions about the materiality of marginality and challenging static, nationalist presentations of rural Irish life in the post-medieval period. Discussion of the Irish evidence is contextualized with reference to the twentieth-century construction of marginality in southern Appalachia.     

The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age

This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of shared transatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urban America. The paper focuses on figurines recovered from nineteenth-century sites in London and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many early nineteenth-century material patterns and ideological practices that were well-established in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Age affluence. This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goods and focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrowing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike.     

Assessing Measures Designed to Protect the Homeland

Some general parameters are proposed for evaluating homeland security measures that seek to make potential targets notably less vulnerable to terrorist attack, and these are then applied to specific policy considerations. Since the number of targets is essentially unlimited, since the probability that any given target will be attacked is near zero, since the number and competence of terrorists is limited, since target-selection is effectively a near-random process, and since a terrorist is free to redirect attention from a protected target to an unprotected one of more or less equal consequence, protection seems to be sensible only in a limited number of instances.     

论非洲华侨对祖国抗日的贡献

卢沟桥事变后,非洲华侨纷纷成立抗日救国组织,通过各种方式支援反法西斯战争。他们支持抗战的形式主要有：捐款捐物、抵制日货、进行抗日宣传、亲自投身于反法西斯的伟大战争等。非洲华侨无论在人力、物力、财力各方面都为反法西斯战争作出了重大的贡献。在抗日救亡史上写下了可歌可泣的光辉篇章。     

文化移植与重建家园--评《越洋再建家园--新加坡华人社会文化研究》

近代以来,在中国和东南亚社会历史变迁的大背景下,中国的华南移民越过海洋抵达新加坡后重建社会与文化家园.在精英文化和上层制度缺失的状态下,华人移民利用祖籍地的文化传统,并以血缘、族群和信仰为纽带,重新建立了他们自己的华人文化,并进一步完成了社群的整合与文化的重植.作者在<越洋再建家园>一书中选取了华人社会的本土视角与民间视角,以历史人类学和文化人类学的方法考察了新加坡华人社会从移民到定居转变过程中文化移植与重建家园的历程.     

The New Mexico-Centered Hispano Homeland

Like mexicano for Mexican, Hispano is a gender-neutral term that has been used increasingly since the 1960s as a substitute for the more cumbersome Spanish American. In their New Mexico-centered homeland, Hispanos adjusted to the natural environment, stamped it with their culture, and from both the natural environment and the cultural landscape created a sense of place or a homeland identity. The word in Spanish that comes closest to capturing the Hispanos' concept of their homeland is patria, which means fatherland.