Cultures of Knowledge: Investigating Intellectual Property Rights and Relations in the Pacific

Although often presented as inherently normative, Euro-American systems of intellectual property rights (IPRs) law are, like earlier systems of biological classification, best understood as particular, culturally defined systems for codifying knowledge employed to discipline objects, phenomena and social relations. Despite their partiality, such systems have successfully colonised new domains, recently underpinning a new uniform global regime for the protection of IPRs (GATT/WTO TRIPs). In this paper I reveal the central role that global institutions now play in accelerating the universalisation of specific "cultures of regulation": acting as powerful vectors for the transmission of particular types of knowledge and arbiters of the "normative" bases of global regulatory regimes. Recent empirical evidence from the Pacific illustrates how the TRIPs regime facilitates the commodification and appropriation of intellectual, cultural and biological resources in that region and highlights the development of alternative sui generis systems of IPR protection that challenge the normativity and hegemony of this regime. The article serves as an entry point for further research into the geography of knowledge systems—the way in which the colonisation of certain regulatory systems and forms facilitates the pursuit of particular interests or sustains relations of domination.     

吐谷浑东西两京巡礼

(接上期)白兰地望何在?初步归纳,中外史学界大体上提出如下六种观点:一、顾颉刚、李文实说:认为白兰在今果洛州属六县,白兰山即为巴颜喀拉山。见李文实著《西陲古地与羌藏文化》(青海     

“滇游凿鸿荒 山水为生色” ——论近代诗人贝青乔黔滇游历诗作

近代道成诗坛著名诗人贝青乔以诗集《咄咄吟》和黔滇游历时所作诗歌获誉最高。本文试图探讨他黔滇游历诗作深得山川之助,内蕴着江山奇气,并揭橥他创作上“独辟蚕丛’’对文学发展所具有的启发意义。     

2009土族作家创作活动巡礼

2009年我省土族作家文学创作活动较之往年更趋活跃,下面作—巡礼式回顾。全国少数民族作家"祖国颂"创作研讨班于2009年6月13日在北京开班,历时十天。我省土族     

学人游幕与晚期北方桐城派之维系——以贺葆真与徐世昌交谊为中心

由于与桐城派的深厚渊源,徐世昌对桐城之学进行了不遗余力的阐扬.在其幕府中聚集了大批的桐城文人,从而使桐城派在北方得以形成群体,并保持长久的影响.贺葆真作为晚期桐城名家贺涛之子,他的参幕经历虽有其特殊性,但也是晚期桐城文人由家学传承、桐城渊源而入幕徐府的缩影.通过梳理贺葆真与徐世昌的交谊及其参幕经历,可借之考察徐世昌幕府与晚期北方桐城派维系之关系.     

民和三川地区旅游开发之探讨

一、民和三川地区旅游业发展条件1.全省最为优越的自然地理条件三川地区位于民和回族土族自治县南面,这里是一个呈东西长约20余公里,宽4～8公里狭长形展布的盆地地形,称之为官亭盆地。整个区域包括官亭镇、中川乡全境,还包括杏     

Touring as labour: mobilities and reconsideration of tour guiding in everyday life

Abstract

The research adopts the mobilities approach to examining the everyday experience of tour guides. Scholars tend to highlight guides as service providers and cultural brokers, whose activities and feelings seem to be subordinate to tourism consumption. In contrast, the research moves beyond the context of business and economy and seeks to resituate tour guiding in ordinary life. It draws on the ethnographic fieldwork in Sanya, a coastal city in south China, and adopts the methods of secondary data collection, interviews and participant observation for data generation. Specifically, the research scrutinises how tourism mobilities are embedded into the production of local guides’ daily practices, emotions and feelings. Tour guiding is characterised by movement/stillness, instability and contested meanings. On working days, guides travel with tourists between scenic sites, receiving unstable income. The mobile work greatly shapes their everyday rhythms, social networks, familial lives and identities. On jobless days, guides are likely to confine ordinary practices to residence and suffer from deep anxiety. Immobilities arouse their feelings of inability and worries about the future, thus lowering their expectations of career and personal development. The research problematises the idiosyncrasy of tour guiding and underscores its close relationship with the production of everyday practices and experience, thus giving a wider view on tourism work. In so doing, it also enriches our understanding of the complexity of tourism mobilities and contributes to the debate on the de-differentiation of tourism.     

Two Careers across Two Cultures

Beginning with my recollection of hearing C. P. Snow's ‘Two Cultures’ lecture, I sketch my experience of building two academic careers in succession, first in one of the natural sciences and later in the history of such sciences. I outline both the difficulties and the rewards that I encountered in crossing the alleged gulf between the sciences and the humanities, but also emphasise the diversity of cultures that I experienced within each. I describe my own encounter with the academic culture of continental Europe, within which the concept of a monolithic singular ‘Science’ could be dismissed as an ‘anglophone heresy’, and viewed from which the Two Cultures debate could seem both provincial and redundant.     

A Tale of Two Cultures

My life has been framed by the two-cultures debate. A scientific education, good but narrow, led me into history of science just as anxiety about specialisation opened opportunities for ‘bridge’ subjects, and History and Philosophy of Science seemed just that bridge. My DPhil thesis (1964), on the reception of chemical atomic theory in the nineteenth century, led to a new lectureship at Durham that involved giving courses right across the different faculties, and close, stimulating involvement with other institutions where it was also being taught and researched; with the business of examining, reviewing, editing, and publishing; with the various societies set up to promote history of science; and with scientific societies like the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Chemistry, finding science losing public esteem, and becoming interested in their past and how it might promote understanding and enthusiasm in the present. Encounters with historians of science, technology, and medicine at home and abroad, with coal miners and with museum curators, all wrestling with very different histories, indicated that Snow's ‘two cultures’ were a feature especially of 1950s Britain, that cultures were deeply divided in all sorts of ways, and that the social history of science was as important as its intellectual history. So over time I found myself teaching course s, and writing, on science and religion in the nineteenth century as well as on Butterfield and Hall's ‘Scientific Revolution’ that had dominated the subject in the 1960s and the ‘Second Scientific Revolution’ that had excited young Turks of my generation. Finally, I launched a course on Two Cultures as a historical phenomenon, focussing upon science, its developing institutions, reception, and place in the culture of the nineteenth-century Age of Science.     

河姆渡遗址与河姆渡文化

河姆渡遗址与河姆渡文化是既有联系又有区别的两个不同的考古学概念,本文通过宁绍平原相关遗址的河姆渡文化遗存地层及内涵整合梳理、排比归纳、结合 14C测年,来阐述认识,讨论相关问题。     

斜腹杯与三苗文化

三苗化指分布在长江中游和豫南地区的屈家岭化和石家河化,斜腹杯则是其最典型的器物之一。斜腹杯不但在三苗化区大量存在,而且还传播到豫西、晋南、陕北和皖北等地,其形制、分布范围和数量的变动,很大程度上反映了三苗化的发展兴衰过程,从中也可较清晰地观察到其与周围化关系的若干变化。     

Working/Touring the Past: Latin American Identity and the Political Frustration of Heritage

This article explores the pervasive impact of the pre-Hispanic past on contemporary Latin American identity, using the Ecuadorian Indian movement and the Yucatacan town of Izamal as two symbolic sites where many of these factors vie for official recognition. Therefore, the central topic of this article is also an essential element of the debate contained within the global development discourse: How is it possible for Latin American to face the constant onslaught of powerful North America and European iconic images and not in some way embody its own inherent internalized forms of colonial oppression?