The cultures of Native North American language documentation and revitalization

The reviewed books comprise an emerging ethnographic literature on endangered language documentation and revitalization in Native North America. Language loss and preservation are pressing concerns for tribal communities, galvanizing activists and researchers to develop classroom curricula and literacy traditions in hopes of producing new speakers. While the reviewed books show that this goal often goes unrealized, we nevertheless read them as grounds for optimism. Even if language revitalization rarely increases the everyday use of particular lexical and grammatical codes, it may succeed in accomplishing another important goal: facilitating indigenous communities’ efforts to create for themselves more meaningful contemporary cultures.     

Toward redesigning national health systems

Four recent books on myth, like myth itself, range well beyond anthropology. One is a précis that defines myth as both ubiquitous and ultimately insoluble, regardless of one's disciplinary tools. It uses a single myth, that of Adonis, to show how interpretation can swing wildly from theory to theory. Giving us vertigo atop its intricate scaffolding of technical devices, a second book wrangles with creation myths as it ascends to a stellar interpretation of the biblical flood. The third and fourth books, with Job-like patience, take it upon themselves to thoroughly address all the points lightly aired in the first book.     

Straight Pins,Gauze, and Linotypes: The Cuban Post-Soviet Artists’ Book

Matanzas’s Ediciones Vigía and Holguin’s Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro construct an arc from the revolutionary 1960s and its investment in collective and communal goods, to the increasingly privatized 1990s and 2000s through their materials and procedures, as well as through their engagement with the figure of the archive. I contend that the books printed by Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro are both artists’ books – that is, books that are art unto themselves – and books as ‘archives’. Here, I understand the ‘book’ as ‘archive’ in a similar fashion as art historian Hal Foster interprets ‘archival art’: that is, art, in this case book art, that ‘draws on informal archives but produces them as well’ in an effort ‘to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’. The hand-made books of Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro project a new figure of the reader and occupy social spaces that are radically different from their predecessors. Where Cuban institutional archives have left incomplete territories of the Revolutionary-era and pre-Revolutionary book, the 1990s and 2000s ‘archival book’ incarnated in Ediciones Vigía and Cuadernos Papiro has come to occupy these voids in a compensatory fashion as an ‘archival’ product.     

Hunters and gatherers past and present: Perspectives on diversity,teaching, and information transmission

This article reviews four books on hunters and gatherers. It begins with a discussion of the debates over the concept of hunter-gatherers. Theoretical approaches to hunter-gather studies are examined briefly. The view then assesses the four books and the various subjects which they address. These subjects include the issue of ethnographic analogy, diversity, evolution, and archaeological perspectives as well as understanding contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. Additional topics include land use, the assignment of meaning to landscapes, way finding, territoriality, boundary-marking, and networks. Social learning, teaching, and information dissemination are discussed, with emphasis on some of the things that are learned, such as sharing, fair treatment of others, the importance of compassion, and moral values. Hunter-gatherer studies have evolved to the point where both archaeologists and anthropologists are taking into careful consideration the need to consider both past and present in their investigations and to focus also on the non-hunter-gatherer societies with whom they are interacting. As people who defined themselves as indigenous, hunter-gatherers are well aware of the social, economic, environmental and political challenges that they are facing, and they are seeking to address these challenges along with support organizations and researchers in an attempt to ensure their long-term security and well-being.     

Men in the Communities of Dominican Nuns – Sister‐Books Discussing Priests and Friars

This article discusses the relationship between Dominican nuns and their caregivers (priests and friars) with the help of sister‐books written by the Dominican nuns themselves in the first half of the fourteenth century. My main focus will be on analysing the way religious men were described in these books and asking how this discussion was related to the everyday life of the nuns in the Dominican convents. I will suggest that the sister‐books can give a new and perhaps unexpected view of the relationships between Dominican nuns and their spiritual caregivers, as these texts suggest that nuns preferred local secular priests over the friars, even though they accepted the religious authority of the latter. I will argue that although the sister‐books were literary products, they had a close connection to the lived reality of nuns and that they can tell us about the interaction between nuns and religious men in their service. However, these texts also formed the ideas of nuns and kept the old attitudes towards priests and friars live, even when the interaction might have already taken other forms in practice.     

The character of English geographyc. 1660–1800: a textual approach

This article re-evaluates the character of geography in England in the 150 years after the Restoration. Most historians have focused either on exceptional geography books or on texts of geographical knowledge, rather than on geography booksper se. Drawing on cultural–historical approaches to the book, this article looks at the character of geography as a textual tradition. This requires an analysis of geography books from three points of view: the texts themselves and the definition of their function and audience; the readership and their sites of reading; and authorship and the milieu of book production. This analysis shows that geography was consistently related to two social and intellectual traditions: a commercial and practical tradition, and a humanistic and scholarly tradition. Such a position allies geography as a textual tradition with recent characterizations of the English Enlightenment.     

Some approaches to traditional Māori knowledge

In this essay I review two books of rather different focus, but with a common thread that is oral tradition: age-old tales passed orally down the generations to maintain the histories and used to educate the young. The focus of the Metge book is traditional methods of education, while McRae’s focus is on the stories themselves.     

略谈古籍注释中的逻辑思维

正确注释中国古代典籍,需要具有古代汉语、古典文献等诸方面的学术功力,同时,也需要了解、掌握一些逻辑学知识。本文从形式逻辑、辩证逻辑等具体逻辑规律入手,就如何运用现代逻辑学的基本原理指导古籍注释过程中的工作思路进行了初步的探索。     

Lanhydrock’s autobiographical instillation: books,reputation, and habitat in early modern England

The library at Lanhydrock in Cornwall contains many books annotated by its seventeenth-century owners. The complex meanings these books carried depended on their physical location in the Cornish landscape, and the meaning of that landscape was in turn shaped by the presence of the marked books. Early moderns were adept at creating and interpreting such context-specific assemblages of books which projected autobiographical personae. These habits were a means by which book-users could simultaneously fit themselves to their environments (or “habitats”) and reshape those environments in a reciprocal process of fashioning. Public reputation was an important consideration guiding these practices. This model of the interaction of books, reputation, and habitat can be extended beyond physical locations like Lanhydrock to help understand how early moderns inhabited their economic culture. Customizing books shaped users as agents equipped with the kind of habitus demanded by the “credit economy” and reproduced its moral codes.     

四川大学博物馆部分馆藏线装书病害调查与研究

四川大学博物馆馆藏书籍档案数量多、时间久、价值丰富。但历经长时间的保存后,出现了不同程度的病害,亟需科学的保护修复。为此,本次研究首先对该馆线装书的病害情况进行了抽样调查;在不破坏文物的基础上,利用无损或微损分析技术,包括酸度计、光学显微镜、傅里叶变换红外光谱仪、扫描电镜-能谱分析仪等,对样品进行分析研究。调查发现,这些线装书均存在不同程度的虫蛀、霉害、受潮、污染、断裂、脆化等病害。分析研究结果表明,这些馆藏线装书的纸张原料以竹纤维和草纤维为主,亦有添加麻纤维、韧皮纤维以改善其机械性能;CaCO_3的存在能有效减缓纸张的酸化;纸张原料中CaCO_3等碱性物质的缺乏、霉菌的滋生、Fe等金属元素的混入等可能是造成部分纸张酸化的原因。     

谈清代内府的铜活字印书

在中国印刷史、出版史的研究中,学者们对清代内府铜活字印书的问题颇为关注,关于印书的数量、品种及活字的制作方法、插图版画的制作工艺、铜活字套印技术等问题,研究者多有不同看法。本文根据故宫博物院图书馆现存实物,结合著录文献进行考订,核实了现存铜活字本的数量,并对铜活字的铸刻、活字印本的套色诸问题进行了探讨。     

Defining Difference from China's Margins

Uniformities and discontinuities in Chinese culture have long animated anthropological debates. The books reviewed here reflect an emerging scholarly consensus about the diversity of China, expressed not only in religions and populations marginal to more mainstream Chinese culture, but among the Han Chinese themselves. Much of the discussion of China's diversity hinges on identity, a social phenomenon freighted with rhetoric and sentiment and inflected by the forces of local and national politics.     

史密森早教中心“基于实物的学习”之理念与实践研究

时下,我国博物馆针对幼童(0—6岁)阶段的教育项目相对较少,还常常与小学阶段的混合,不具备足够的契合度,也未从幼童的特点和需求出发,未发挥博物馆展览、展品展项等资源优势。幼童早在通过语言和书本学习之前,是通过实物来探索世界的。博物馆作为藏品库,需要拓展他们手动探索馆内实物的机会,帮助其理解自己以及身处的世界。史密森早教中心自1988年起,即开始为幼童提供早期学习体验。它作为将早教实践与博物馆学习糅合的全球典范,其核心的"基于实物的学习"、在熟悉物与非熟悉物之间嫁接桥梁以及超越实物聚焦概念等的理念与实践,值得我们深入研究和广泛应用。     

印谱古籍中的印油老化研究

存世印谱中比较常见的一类病害是印蜕中印油老化导致的渗化问题。研究表明,印油渗化不仅会在印蜕四周形成黄色或棕色的油渍,而且会导致纸张pH值降低,影响印谱的长久保存。通过对印泥中常用的蓖麻油、菜籽油、茶油、调和印油等六种油脂进行模拟老化实验,发现油脂老化后普遍存在变色、pH值下降和渗化问题。采用气相色谱-质谱联用技术分析老化前后的油脂样品,发现油脂在老化过程中,不饱和脂肪酸含量降低,饱和脂肪酸占比增加,并形成了壬二酸等脂肪族羧酸。油脂老化过程中的成分变化,导致了变色、酸化、渗化等一系列问题。在印谱实物样品中也发现了饱和脂肪酸。在印谱的保护工作中,应对油脂的老化进行有针对性的处理。     

清乾隆朝官修史书考论

清代的乾隆朝,是中国古代官方修书的鼎盛时期,尤以史部书籍为最。统治者出于总结历史经验、倡导伦理纲常、颂扬赫赫武功、厘定本朝历史、疏理学术源流等多方面的考虑,同时出于制定条例法则,规范用人行政的现实需要,先后编纂了130余种史书。这些门类齐全,数量众多的官修史书,不仅保留了极为丰富的历史资料,也可以反映出清朝统治者的某些思想主张和文化政策特点及其缺失,值得深入探究。     

天一阁藏书保护经验谈

天一阁经历了430余年的风雨考验,至今藏书丰富,但破损严重。调查结果证实,书虫确是直接危害害古籍的最大杀手,在现有条件下,手工除虫和日常养护结合是一种切实可行的保护措施。     

French anarchists and the continuing power of May 1968

Abstract

The social insurrection of May 1968 in France continues to provoke strong political debate. Compared to most French politicians and social commentators who dismiss or condemn it as an excessive adolescent rebellion, French anarchists contend that it was a substantial political rupture because participants challenged the legitimacy of all hierarchy and domination in every realm of society. Research into a wide range of French anarchist books and articles from 1988 to the present reveals several distinct approaches to May 68. Beyond narratives of the events themselves, anarchists emphasised the rapid spread and delight with horizontalist social relations of mutual aid and respect on campuses and in workplaces and neighbourhoods as 10 million French people went on strike for several weeks. This liberating experience, they contend, transformed the social consciousness of large numbers and led to the great surge of anarchic autonomous social movements in different realms in the 1970s. These writings also reveal important debate among anarchists themselves on whether May 68 was a revolution, whether revolution is even possible and how to organise a revolutionary movement.     

Reconstructing aesthetics

This [effect of the discovery of the New World on Renaissance Europe] is among the most difficult problems which face us, and it is one to which I can see no clear answer. Some work has been done, and much more could be done, on the printing and translation of books relating to America in comparison with those on other parts of the globe. But unless we can find more about their readership, the printing statistics, however valuable in themselves, afford only a certain indicator of a highly complex phenomenon.     

浅谈《清史稿艺文志拾遗》的美中不足

王绍曾主编《清史稿艺文志拾遗》,堪称当代一部拾遗补阙、嘉惠学林的目录学著作。该书虽以体例创新,著录宏富,考辨求是见长,但又略显美中不足,诸如重复著录、著录之书归属不一、漏收《清史稿·艺文志》著录之书的瑕疵,亦复不少。     

Demagoguery as Pathology: Interpreting European Politics Today

The End of Europe by James Kirchick and The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray evince many of the very same political and discursive pathologies which they successfully diagnose in European politics. Both authors have discovered that Europe’s current situation is as much a result of irresponsible public policies and mismanaged crises as of a decay in European political thinking, a decay manifested in Europe’s ever-more simplistic, anti-deliberative—in a word, demagogic—public discourse. And yet, Europeans of today find themselves in a social, political, and economic crisis in part because they lack the discursive means to recognize and deliberate on the very crisis they are in. The result is a damaging political state of affairs which makes escape from itself nearly impossible—a political pathology. Kirchick and Murray do a fine job of capturing the true character of this discourse in their books, yet they do so by unwittingly reproducing it themselves, thereby revealing the difficulties inherent in reforming a political culture from within.