Competence,representations, rules,and inquiry

Anderson, Stephen R. Phonology in the Twentieth Century: Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. x + 373 pp. including references and name and subject indices. $40.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.

Paikeday, Thomas M. The Native Speaker is Dead! Toronto: Paikeday Publishers, 1985. xiv + 109 pp. including appendices, references, and name index. $7.50.     

Mushrooms Their Consumption,Production and Culture Development

Abstract

In the last 20 years, mushroom consumption and production have increased at a faster rate than almost any other agricultural food product. The consumption and production of Agaricus (A. bisporus and A. bitorquis) and the Shiitake (Lentinus edodes) mushrooms account for 74% and 14%, respectively, of the total world production and demand for cultivated mushrooms. Since the origin of Agaricus cultivation in France, much progress has been made and the bulk of the scientific and engineering progress has been achieved since the beginning of this century. Mushroom science, a composite science of many disciplines including plant pathology, entomology, horticulture, food science, agricultural engineering, agricultural economics and rural sociology has contributed a great deal to the worldwide growth of the industry. Future improvements in mushroom culture will come not only from a more thorough understanding of single facets within the overall process, but from a more complete understanding of the interrelationship of these facets with each other.     

Photius,Phlegon, and Virgil

Abstract

In his Bibliotheca, codex 97, Photius passes under review the Compilation of Olympic Victors and Chronicles by Phlegon of Tralles, a freedman of Hadrian. This work was dedicated by Phlegon to an imperial official, P. Aelius Alcibiades. Neither the official nor the book are mentioned in the Historia Augusta or the extant Byzantine epitomes of Dio Cassius, or indeed in any literary source. The name Aelius, however, might have helped the HA to create one of its many bogus sources, to wit Aelius Maurus, a supposed freedman of Phlegon himself and supplier of an anecdote about Septimius Severus on his deathbed.     

Hizbullah as a regional brand: not all parties are equal

Although the term Hizbullah (Party of God) has become synonymous with the Lebanese group that bears its name, the reality is that many more groups have, and currently do use the term. Sharing the same generic name however, is not necessarily indicative of ideological affinity let alone operational cooperation. This paper discusses the origins of the term and the groups that have adopted the name, as well as the links between them and with Iran. Besides some outlier Sunni groups who use the name, the best way to view the groups’ ideological leanings is to think of them as either intellectually supporting the Iranian concept of governance (khat al-Imam) or as more actively and practically advancing Iranian interests in the region (khat al-Hizbullah).     

How the Missionary got his Mana: Charles Elliot Fox and the Power of Name‐Exchange in Solomon Islands

Charles Elliot Fox (1878–1977) was one of the Anglican Melanesian Mission's most emblematic figures, extending its reputation for scholarship and respect for Pacific traditions. Uniquely among the Mission's European figures, however, Fox is also credited with exceptional powers (mana). Based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork among the Arosi (Makira, Solomon Islands), I argue that Fox's name‐exchanges with Makirans have contributed in unrecognized ways to his reputation for mana. In so doing, I show how, in contrast with name‐exchange in Polynesia, Arosi name‐exchange implies the internalization of a gap between ontological categories that renders name‐exchange partners two persons in one body, endowed with access to one another's being and ways. Fox's writings indicate that he understood this aspect of Arosi name‐exchange as a prefiguration of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. This understanding, in turn, shaped his mission method and motivated his otherwise puzzling claims that he was a Melanesian.     

The Grant,the Hare,and the Survival of a Medieval Folk Belief

In the third book of Otia Imperialia (c. 1211), Gervase of Tilbury describes numerous wonders, among them an English belief regarding the Grant, a sparkling-eyed entity shaped like a bipedal foal, whose appearance racing through the streets forewarns of fire. This creature, attested to nowhere but in Gervase’s work, is something of a mystery for folklorists, who have tried to draw connections to other supernatural beings based on its name and its appearance. What has gone overlooked is the fact that the same elements of the Grant’s fire-omen belief existed well into the twentieth century in parts of England, albeit applied to hares. This article suggests that the Grant is an exaggerated hare, while exploring the larger topic of why it is that hares are so often associated with fire in European folklore.     

‘In gente Britanniarum,sicut quaedam nostratum testatur historia …’: national identity and perceptions of the past in John of Salisbury's Policraticus

This article examines the construction of national identity in John of Salisbury's Policraticus (c.1159). This well-known treatise has not been included in recent discussions of identities in medieval Britain. The focal point of the analysis is the author's contradictory representations of Britones. John of Salisbury emphasised the distinction and hostility between the Britons/Welsh and the English; at the same time, he claimed that the ancient Britons (Brennius and his companions-in-arms from Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum) were ‘compatriots’ and ‘ancestors’ of the ‘contemporary’ inhabitants of the English kingdom. Comparison with other twelfth-century texts reveals specific features of the model of national identity traced in the Policraticus: the appropriation not only of the British past, but also of the British name and identity, and the imagining of a unified people of Britain. This culminated in the invention of the unique term gens Britanniarum, which nevertheless did not exclude the ‘English’ as an alternative or even interchangeable name. The article discusses political agendas behind John of Salisbury's use of the language of ‘Britishness’, most importantly, support for the pan-British ambitions of the archbishops of Canterbury. The example of the Policraticus, with its combination of both conventional and original elements, nuances our understanding of how and for what ideological purposes national identity might have been constructed in twelfth-century England.     

Growth,decay and burial compaction of Dickinsonia,an iconic Ediacaran fossil

Retallack, G.J., September, 2007. Growth, decay and burial compaction of Dickinsonia, an iconic Ediacaran fossil. Alcheringa 31, 215-240. ISSN 0311-5518.

Dickinsonia is a Neoproterozoic, Ediacaran fossil, variously considered a polychaete, turbellarian or annelid worm, jellyfish, polyp, xenophyophoran protist, lichen or mushroom. Its preservation as unskeletonized impressions in quartz sandstones has been attributed to a Neoproterozoic regime of aerobic decay less effective than today, microbial pyritization much nearer the surface than today, or agglutinate-mineralization as in xenophyophorans. However, the great variation in thickness independent of width or length of South Australian Dickinsonia is evidence of decay like the wilting of a fossil leaf, lichen or mushroom, but unlike clotting and distortion during decay, wilting or osmotic shrinkage of modern and fossil worms and jellyfish. Decayed specimens of Dickinsonia arrayed in arcs have been interpreted as slime trails or tumble tracks, but can also be interpreted as rhizinous bases of decayed crustose lichens or mushrooms arranged in fairy rings. Dickinsonia is interpreted to be sessile because adjacent specimens show reaction rims indicative of competitive interaction, and because no overlapping well-preserved specimens have ever been found. Folded and bent Dickinsonia reveal firm attachment and limited flexibility, but no brittle deformation indicative of pyritic, sideritic or calcitic ‘death masks’ or xenophyophoran agglutinate skeletons. Dickinsonia was resistant to compaction by overburden, like fossil lichens such as Spongiophyton and Thucomyces, and more compaction-resistant than fossil logs, jellyfish or worms. Dickinsonia also shows indeterminate growth like lichens, fungi, plants, xenophyophorans and colonial animals. Growth, decay and burial compaction of Dickinsonia were more like those of plants, lichens and fungi, than of worms, jellyfishes or anemones.

G.J. Retallack [gregr@uoregon.edu], Department of Geological Sciences, University of Oregon. Eugene, OR 97403-1272, USA; received 18.11.05, revised 23.3.06.     

A Witch-Doctor's Kit,from Magila,East Central Africa.

The long shared history and traditions of Spain and Mexico have given rise to similar stereotypes and folkloric figures. These relationships are often explained through myths that take the form of historical accounts. Here we will discuss some of these discourses to try to understand the relationship between two iconic figures that define similar customs and share a single name in Europe and America: El charro.     

Cartoons,secularism, and inequality

In this article, I discuss the tragic attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015. First, I comment on Didier Fassin's article ‘In the name of the Republic’, published in anthropology today in April 2015. I express my disagreement with him on the issue of laïcité, and offer a critical examination of the concept, taking into account what I call ‘the Christian heritage of the secular state’. I then examine the various French reactions to the tragedy and focus on the history of the French state and its (post)colonial relations with French Islam to offer an explanation of the events.     

Belowicysta nom. nov., a new name for the Jurassic dinoflagellate cyst Belowia Riding & Helby, 2001

The Jurassic dinoflagellate cyst genus Belowia Riding & Helby, 2001 is a junior homonym of Belowia Moquin-Tandon, 1849, a genus of the Chenopodiaceae. The new generic name Belowicysta is proposed here to replace Belowia Riding & Helby, 2001.     

Welsh Indians and savage Scots: History,antiquarianism, and Indian languages in 18th-century Britain

This paper compares late eighteenth-century claims for the authenticity of Macpherson's Ossian and for the existence of Welsh Indians. It shows that although both claims were supported in part by appeals to similarities between Celtic and American Indian languages, the appeals in each case were very different. On the one hand, the Edinburgh literati who supported Ossian's authenticity focused on expressive structures shared by all primitive societies. On the other hand, radically Protestant antiquarians and philologists focused on lexical similarities that they argued demonstrate a genetic link between certain American Indians and the Welsh. The paper uses this fundamental difference underlying a superficial similarity, to explore in greater detail the distinction between philosophical historians among the Edinburgh literati, who were religiously moderate, politically conservative, and promoted Scotland's integration into a modern, polite, commercial and English-speaking empire, and the Welsh antiquarians, who were religious and political radicals and whose interest in the Welsh Indians reflected and reinforced their attempts to resurrect a distant golden age of Celtic Britain.

pe’nguin. (1) A bird. This bird was found with this name, as is supposed, by the first discoverers of America; and penguin signifying in Welsh a white head, and the head of this fowl being white, it has been imagined, that America was peopled from Wales …     

Transformations of the Indo-Iranian Snake-man: Myth,Language, Ethnoarcheology,and Iranian Identity

This article sets forth a history (with literary-textual focus) of the Iranian mythological Snake-man, from the earliest Vedic and Avestan evidence, down to Ferdowsi. The continuous development of the myth in Iran is accompanied by changes in the monster's name, which show linguistic reassociations, while a constant in all of this is the figure's representation as an inimical outsider. The Vedic name of the brute's fortification, the background of which in etymology and realia will be shown to be the pre-Aryan Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex, finds a clear but hitherto unobserved correlation in Pahlavi. This illuminates the Indo-Iranian antiquity of the myth in terms of prehistoric inter-ethnic rivalries.     

Defining the OE hearg: a preliminary archaeological and topographic examination of hearg place names and their hinterlands

The OE term hearg is interpreted variously as ‘pagan temple’, ‘hilltop sanctuary’ and even ‘idol’. It is a rare survival in the English place‐name record. When it can be identified, the place name is commonly considered to refer to a location of pre‐Christian religious activity, specifically a pagan Anglo‐Saxon temple. Taking inspiration from the extensive and methodologically well‐advanced studies in Scandinavia, which have successfully related place‐name evidence for cultic and religious sites with the archaeology and topography of these localities, this paper adopts and uses a similar methodology to investigate the archaeological and topographic character of a selection of hearg locations. The traditional interpretations of the place name are questioned and evidence is presented that these sites are characterized by long‐lived, localized cult practice spanning the late prehistoric to early historic periods, but with activity reaching a zenith in the late Iron Age to Romano‐British eras, rather than the fifth to seventh centuries AD.     

Four English ‘Bohemians’ Manqués: A Short-Term Resident,a Lost Opportunity,One to Do Without,and a Case of Confused Antecedents

Abstract

The article reflects the author’s longstanding interest in the appearance in the English lexicon of items emanating from the Bohemian/Czech environment, including the incidence of the very word Bohemian/bohemian. It discusses four cases where ‘Bohemian’ does not feature, though might well do so. These are: one bird name, the waxwing, once the ‘Bohemian waxwing’, which name survives only in American English because of the local need to distinguish the bird from another in the family; one spring flower, the early star-of-Bethlehem, restricted in Britain to a single site on the Welsh border, which could, on the basis of its Latin name, Gagea bohemica, have become the ‘Bohemian star-of-Bethlehem’; one pernicious hybrid knotweed, Reynoutria × bohemica, which has no common English name, but was identified and named in Bohemia, and would be potentially nameable geographically as ‘Bohemian knotweed’, like one of its parents, the Japanese knotweed; and one modest vegetable, the swede, which owes its name to a perceived origin in Sweden, though it is conjectured that during or after the Thirty Years’ War it was first taken to Sweden from Bohemia and so might have become analogously the ‘bohemian’. The article contains other conjectures as to the items’ origins and explores the history of their naming in Czech and German as well as English.     

Welsh Indians and savage Scots: History, antiquarianism, and Indian languages in 18th-century Britain

This paper compares late eighteenth-century claims for the authenticity of Macpherson's Ossian and for the existence of Welsh Indians. It shows that although both claims were supported in part by appeals to similarities between Celtic and American Indian languages, the appeals in each case were very different. On the one hand, the Edinburgh literati who supported Ossian's authenticity focused on expressive structures shared by all primitive societies. On the other hand, radically Protestant antiquarians and philologists focused on lexical similarities that they argued demonstrate a genetic link between certain American Indians and the Welsh. The paper uses this fundamental difference underlying a superficial similarity, to explore in greater detail the distinction between philosophical historians among the Edinburgh literati, who were religiously moderate, politically conservative, and promoted Scotland's integration into a modern, polite, commercial and English-speaking empire, and the Welsh antiquarians, who were religious and political radicals and whose interest in the Welsh Indians reflected and reinforced their attempts to resurrect a distant golden age of Celtic Britain.

pe’nguin. (1) A bird. This bird was found with this name, as is supposed, by the first discoverers of America; and penguin signifying in Welsh a white head, and the head of this fowl being white, it has been imagined, that America was peopled from Wales …

—Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1755.