An estimator for bidirectional (naviform) blade productivity in the Near Eastern Pre-Pottery Neolithic B

A method is presented for calculating the blade productivity of bidirectional (naviform) blade cores, a hallmark of Near Eastern Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) chipped stone tool assemblages. This approach involves estimating the volume of the core that furnished serial blades, together with the mean volume of a typical targeted blade blank. Simple computation of the volume of a wedge in both instances provides an estimate of the number of targeted blades that were produced in an average single reduction sequence. The method is checked against two replicated bidirectional blade reduction sequences, and a refitted bidirectional blade core from the site of Kfar HaHoresh, Israel. Finally, a case study from Kfar HaHoresh is presented in order to illustrate the application of the method, which may have ramifications concerning the evaluation of incipient craft specialization in the region.     

Heritage Interpretation and Politics in Kfar Etzion,Israel

Kfar Etzion is a Kibbutz first established in Palestine in the 1930s. At the end of the British Mandate, in 1948, it became a de facto Israeli military outpost that controlled access to Jerusalem from the south. Kfar Etzion fell to Arab forces in 1948 and the area became Jordanian territory until 1967 when Israeli forces occupied the West Bank. Kfar Etzion was re-established in the same year. Kfar Etzion now interprets its history through a sophisticated multilingual audio-visual presentation offered in a museum built over a former bunker where Jewish defenders were killed. This presentation is analysed to illustrate the ways in which an historical narrative is constructed for interpretive purposes and to show that Bloc and Israeli perspectives are conflated for political purposes. The battle for the Bloc continues through the interpretation of heritage.     

Mussels,Tourism and Community Development: A Case Study of Place Branding Through Food Festivals in Rural North Jutland,Denmark

Abstract

Rural areas are facing prospects of marginalization and peripherality in an age of globalization where the attention of governments and media focuses increasingly on the (lack of) competitiveness of urban and metropolitan regions in Europe. Many rural areas have, therefore, searched for ways to improve their position vis-à-vis other localities by mobilizing local resources and employing policy tools that are believed to foster indigenous social and economic development, including place branding. Unsurprisingly, using food as a means to profile rural localities has become widespread, with branding efforts revolving around local food festivals that commodify local cultural resources. The article attempts to illuminate the challenges faced by branding processes in rural areas through a case study of Løgstør, a small rural town in North Jutland, Denmark, which builds its branding efforts around an annual mussel festival. The analysis focuses on the relationship between stakeholders and branding strategies, and in particular aims to uncover the role of the food festival in aggravating or alleviating inherent tensions between different stakeholders and target groups. It is argued that in the case of Løgstør making a food festival pivotal, a signature event for the place branding efforts has been created, which appeals to both external and internal audiences, and that this may hold wider lessons for place-branding initiatives in other small towns across Europe.     

Helping the enemy? Why transnational Jewish philanthropic foundations donate to Palestinian NGOs in Israel

ABSTRACT. This article asks why transnational Jewish donor organisations have been increasingly providing financial support to Palestinian social movements and NGOs in Israel when many of the main recipients are strong critics of the Jewish character of the state and act to promote Palestinian national claims within Israel. The article evaluates a number of plausible explanations, some generated by interest‐centric theories while others are driven by ideational underpinnings. The study concludes that the donors do not view the interests of the Jewish state and the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel (PAI) in zero‐sum terms. Having internalised liberal values of minority rights and pluralism in their countries of residence (mainly the United States), donating foundations believe that the development of the PAI is both normatively desirable and strengthens Israel as a whole because it facilitates the minority's integration into Israel's society and bolsters its civic culture, and therefore, it also contributes to the country's security. These findings are theoretically significant because they demonstrate how the interpretation of communal interest is strongly related to the normative social environment in which transnational activists operate.     

Creating the semi-living: on politics, aesthetics and the more-than-human

Though geographers have remarked on the aesthetic and political character of a technoscientific biology, there has been an accompanying tendency, following disciplinary trends and social theory more broadly, to read these as being separate issues at the analytic as well as substantive level. Whereas the former becomes read as a matter of artistic practice and appreciation, or visual appraisal, the latter is considered to be the exercise of power through discipline and regulation. Here, I draw upon Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics (2007, Continuum, London) to make a stronger claim for the role of the aesthetic, wherein a political regime is understood to be comprised of a 'distribution of the sensible' that orders what can be seen and what can be said about it, that determines who has the ability to see and to speak, that organises the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time, and that locates the identity of the quick and the dead within a grid of intelligibility. Political struggle is necessarily aesthetic insofar as it is an attempt to reconfigure the place not only of particular groups, but also the social order within which they are embedded. For Rancière, artistic practices are but particular ways of making and doing; they can have a distinctly political function, however, in the way that they reorder the relations among spaces and times, subjects and objects. To animate this discussion I draw on examples from critical BioArt that address the more-than-human world of Semi-Living Objects. From overt manifesto to ironic commentary, the practices, understandings and artefacts that comprise BioArt work to challenge the political, economic, cultural and ethical contexts within which a modern-day technoscientific biology operates.     

Race and the Pitfalls of Emotional Democracy: Primary Schools and the Critique of Black Pete in the Netherlands

A centrepiece of the Dutch festival of Sinterklaas, the blackface character Black Pete, has met with growing contestation in the past decade over its caricatural representation of people of African descent. Attacks on this national “happy object” elicited a host of majority responses that converged in professing non‐racism. As the celebration is primarily thought of as a children's festival, schools across the Netherlands had to decide whether to maintain, alter or suppress the Black Pete character. This article considers the spatial politics of race that informed school decisions about the festival. We show geographical variation in the distribution between change and non‐change. However, we find that both strategies were justified in the name of respect for “black feelings”, even as majority calls for mutual tolerance between proponents and opponents of Black Pete normatively portrayed multicultural society as conflict free and ultimately strove to disarm anti‐racist critique by framing it as anti‐democratic.     

The “Nation of Poetry”: Language,Festival and Subversion in Macedonia

This article critically examines the Struga Poetry Festival established in 1961 when it placed Macedonian poets and writers on the wider map of world poetry, international literature and language. With this the festival carried a subversive and an emancipatory task that not only promoted Macedonia's national poetry but also pushed the nation itself onto the world stage. Although highly politicized (and deeply political), the festival emerged as a seemingly apolitical event that celebrated the “universal language of poetry”. Yet, with its aesthetic form of an open event devoted to poetry, this festival (in a very Bakhtinian manner) pinpoints the obvious carnivalesque element in manoeuvring and subverting established social and political hierarchies. Initially, it allowed Macedonian language and poets to join established national states that have “undisputed” (or less disputed) literary traditions. The subversive nature of this festival after the 2001 military conflict in Macedonia changed the direction and intensity of the Albanian struggle for improving their status into the Macedonian society. This event has effectively allowed a minority group to initiate social movement and engage in serious identity politics related to territorial self-governance, language and cultural representation.     

The Festival of St John: Norm and Change in Civitella Roveto in Abruzzo (Italy)

This essay describes the festival of Saint John (24 June) at Civitella Roveto in the province of Aquila, Italy. The ritual is analysed as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century and in its contemporary form, in order to reconstruct the norm of the festival and thereby to show the main transformations of the event, and its shifting social context. In addition, the research highlights the connection between the festival and the ritual cycle, investigated in terms of its interaction with the productive cycle of the community and with the cosmic cycle. Finally, the new social and symbolic meanings assumed by the figure of St John and his festival are brought to light.     

Plastic arts and nation‐building in Israel

This article begins as an attempt to analyse an apparently paradoxical situation created by two events, which occurred simultaneously in 1948: the establishment of Israel as an independent state and the emergence of the Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons) group of artists, acknowledged as the most renowned local artists at the time. The creation of the state of Israel may be considered the high point of Jewish nationalism, when the nation celebrated its distinctiveness. On the other hand, Ofakim Hadashim was a group of intellectuals who aspired to disengage their artistic work from the dominant political processes of the time. The basic claim of its members was l'art pour l'art, which ostensibly contradicted the significance of the general political process. This situation is highly interesting since it challenges the general sociological assumptions about the role of intellectuals in nation‐building processes, and also contradicts the usual explanation regarding the Israeli state‐building process. It concludes that an explanation of the social complexity existing in 1948 can be found in an understanding of modernity as a multifaceted phenomenon embracing a diversity of inherently contradictory practices.     

古代小说中棋戏描写的艺术功能

古代小说中具有大量关于棋戏的描写,其不仅具备娱乐的实用价值,而且被赋予独到的文学艺术功能,成为小说的一个有机组成部分。概而言之,不仅能够借以展开矛盾冲突,推动情节发展,并能刻画人物性格,塑造人物形象,还能展现社会风尚,创造典型环境,更能体现出作者的批判意识与价值取向。     

异托邦：音乐节事活动的空间实践——以迷笛音乐节为例

文章使用异托邦理论为概念框架,以迷笛音乐节为案例,通过参与式观察与深度访谈法,试图揭示音乐节空间实践中构建的另类特征。研究发现,迷笛音乐节所承载的功能逐渐由叛逆的“出口”转变为“好玩”的生活方式;音乐节事空间实践中呈现出多元的功能并置,矛盾与流动的融合;音乐节事空间的文化实践也呈现出日常结构的超越与反抗,以及作为理想的补偿空间。周期性节事时空实践中文化的稳定性则使其成为对称而不可分割的系统性时空。该研究为节事空间提供了新的认知途径,也从节事的角度丰富了异托邦理论的微观案例。     

The Dormition of the Virgin Mary on the Island of Tinos: A Performance of Gendered Values in Greece

On the Greek island of Tinos, the Dormition of the Virgin Mary is celebrated on 15 August. This death, fertility, and healing festival is important for several reasons: the church of the “Annunciation” owes its fame to a miraculous holy icon; the miracles worked by this icon have made Tinos a centre of pan‐Orthodox worship; and pilgrimages are particularly made to the shrine during the Dormition. The celebration is also an important ideological festival for the Greek nation‐state, as illustrated through several ceremonies, particularly the procession when the icon is carried from the church to the harbour. The date 15 August is a special one for Hellenism; it combines religion with patriotism, and the Dormition is a profound social event. There are several meanings and values connected to the festival — female and male, popular and official — the pilgrimage site on Tinos presents an interrelationship of history, ritual, and gender.     

Seeds: Contracting the Audience in a Play about Science

Abstract

In pursuing the question ‘what can scientists learn from theatre?’ Particularly, ‘what can scientists, as scientists, learn from theatre?’ this paper argues that science lacks a normative framework that theatre is capable of providing. Despite science’s well-earned epistemic reputation, there is adequate reason to question its ethical reputation, particularly at the point where cutting edge scientific technology impacts society. I consider science as operating in four categories: the scientific method; the scientific hypothesis; the scientific experiment; and the scientist’s personal character. The realms of the scientist’s hypothesis and personal character are those where social pressures are reciprocally exerted, where imaginative play mentality and epistemic values are most in evidence. Theatre can examine these realms effectively because it is able to use narratives that appeal not only to logical and social moral judgements but to emotional and visceral responses, so as to situate science in the social context in which the pressures of law, funding, experimentation, society, and personal ambition converge in ‘the game of life’.

This can be seen in the theatrical process known as ‘contracting with the audience’. I point out a spectrum of traditional narrative tropes by which science makes “contracts with” audiences. The paper draws on theories of entrainment and theatrical game-play from Peter Stromberg and Philippe Gaulier, as well as my own practice and research into the process of contracting with the audience, to propose how to reach beyond tradition and to shift normalising contracts “outside the box”. To illustrate my proposition, I examine the play Seeds by Annabel Soutar as directed by Chris Abraham for Crow’s Theatre and Theatre Porte Parole. Seeds follows the controversial court battles of Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser against agricultural-biotech corporation Monsanto, which sued him for patent infringement of its Genetically Modified Organism Roundup Ready Canola. Seeds helps its audience define a public arena for discourse even as it brings to our attention the factors that make this difficult to do, while making an excellent contribution to the genre of ‘Documentary Theatre’. It is a successful contract with the audience that creates a public forum for discussion about contemporary ethical debates in science, thereby merging artistic ambiguity and scientific theory.     

节庆事件对区域旅游流空间网络的影响效应和机制研究

以洛阳牡丹花节为例,通过多源数据的融合,运用社会网络、因子分析方法,探究节庆事件对区域旅游流空间网络的影响效应及机制。结果表明：节庆事件对区域旅游流空间网络影响表现为协同、弱化及蜂聚三种效应,不同效应影响机制不同。其中,节点的等级和知名度优势非常明显的态势下,产生显著的协同效应;节庆游憩区内的低等级节点出现轻微的节庆弱化效应,区域外节点主要受到空间交通距离限制产生了显著的节庆弱化效应;旅游等级很强且旅游承载量优势非常明显的非节庆旅游节点,以及等级、知名度或地理区位较强的节庆旅游节点呈现出强蜂聚效应,以上条件均不强的节庆旅游节点仅发生弱集聚效应。     

ARE WE HARD‐WIRED TO THINK ABOUT HISTORY?

This book assumes that basic ways of thinking about history are hard‐wired in the brain. Since different styles of discourse with which we talk about the past are hardwired, Blum infers that a protohistorical consciousness is necessary for the existence of language. Historical logics reflect some preconceived part–whole relation. Blum discerns four kinds of part‐whole structure, which he terms continuity, quantum, continuum, and dialectic. Blum believes that these part–whole relations rest on universal, prereflective intuitions. He concludes that humans have different prelinguistic intuitions of time. Blum claims that people's variable innate temporality is expressed in their historical style. It follows that historical style antedates history as a genre. Hence we are not talking about historical style, but about how individuals apply their sense of the relation between parts and wholes to the problem of time. Our study of historical context becomes secondary to the assumptions we make about the interface between part–whole relations and time. The temporality of history is derivative of a phenomenon that is not historical. Certain conclusions are suggestive. First, modality precedes tense in evolution. Second, we ourselves are continuing to evolve. Blum believes that we are moving “towards a selection of abstract thinkers ruled by pure reason.” Instead of viewing cultures as organisms, it is more profitable to think of the evolution of structures of thinking, and to show that some are more prominent at present than they have been in the past. For Blum, historical thinking is a dependent variable. It depends on tense and modality, which are given before language and culture. Historical thinking reflects a primary experience, but it is not such a primary experience itself.     

南宋临安节日活动的时空结构研究

在城市地理学研究中,由于缺乏有关历史城市物理空间的基础性研究工作及受研究资料所限等原因,关于历史时期的城市居民生活空间方面的研究较少开展。本文选择南宋时期的临安作为城市空间研究对象,在全面梳理相关历史文献记载的基础上,尝试结合目前应用最广泛的功能分区法和时间地理学两种方法,对南宋临安节日活动空间进行剖析,揭示其城市节日活动的时空间结构特征。同时,文章还探讨了城市社会空间的形成机制,提出物理空间奠定了临安节日活动空间的基本格局、都城地位是临安节日活动空间形成的控制因素、城市经济主导了临安节日活动的空间分异过程等结论。     

‘The Colonial Children Cry’: Jo the Crossing-Sweep Goes to the Colonies

In this article I explore the affective power of Charles Dickens's character Jo, the crossing-sweep from his novel Bleak House, and his broader cultural significance. Contemporary audiences were deeply moved by Jo's tragic death, sparking a vast popular, and especially visual, culture around the homeless white child. Yet, by establishing an affective and moral opposition between white waif and black ‘heathen’, in a relationship Dickens termed ‘telescopic philanthropy’, audiences were directed to care about the white poor with the inference that black people were not a proper object of compassion. Jo's touching story circulated widely across the colonies of Australia and New Zealand, and was put to work in transmitting inherited British values and making sense of local political and social circumstances. By the late nineteenth century the emotional regime symbolized by Jo the crossing-sweep effectively consolidated racial exclusions.     

南阳汉代花纹砖

南阳汉代花纹小砖图案内容丰富,题材广泛,多涉及社会生活、自然山水、动物禽兽和追求光明的理念,多视角地展示了汉代人们的生活意境和审美情趣,具有鲜明的时代特征.     

Performing Trans in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Gender Transitions in Islamic Law,Theatre, and Film

In the wake of a string of sensationalist documentaries about transsexuality in Iran, Iranian theatre and film artists began crafting groundbreaking trans performances to educate audiences and depict characters living non-heteronormative lives without the translating influence of queer theory or identity politics. Investigating transsexual bodies as assembled by jurists in Iranian Shi?a jurisprudence and by artists on stage and screen reveals the ways in which the transsexual body is constructed in Islamic legal discourse and represented in narrative and bodily form in the public imaginary in Iran. Representations of transsexuality in theatre and film highlight the role of the arts as a vehicle for social change, communal recognition, and self-cognition. In particular, performances of female-to-male gender transitions in theatre and film have expanded the boundaries of how gender presentation is translated onto Iranian stages, into Tehran coffeehouses, and onto global screens. These trans performances usher Iranian spectators into new forms of viewership and artistic consumption in their attempt to creatively represent transsexual bodies and narratives to increase tolerance towards transsexuals; further, they have ignited a conversation among artists and activists about the assemblage of transsexual bodies in artistic productions and the most effective narrative and emotional forms of catharsis to inspire change.     

The production of emancipatory feminist spaces in a post-socialist context: organization of Ladyfest in Romania

Ladyfest – a Riot Grrrl feminist do-it-yourself festival – has been organized independently in cities around the world since the year 2000. The emancipatory spaces that activists at Ladyfest seek to cultivate through workshops, music, and art provide seeds of inspiration for transformative social change. The main strength of the festival is the capacity to strengthen networks. This article discusses how the idea for this festival arose in Olympia, Washington, expanded to other locations, and was later organized by young feminists in Romania. In 2005, young women in Timisoara organized the first such festival in their city with a community of women from both inside and outside of Romania, and held another festival in Bucharest in 2007. Retrospective interviews are used to unpack the meaning of such organizing in a post-socialist context with reflections on how feminism has changed in Romania over the past decade. Specifically, the analysis of this event offers insight on how the production of space can be used to catalyze interconnections between emancipatory feminist spaces, the mode of production, and flows of feminist knowledge and concepts.