Ribbon Pulls in Wedding Cakes: Tracing a New Orleans Tradition

The ritual of cutting the wedding cake at weddings in the New Orleans area is preceded by another ritual tradition: unmarried female friends of the bride each “pull a ribbon,” to which a silver charm or “favour” is attached, from the cake. Charms can include a ring, a heart, a thimble, a button, a horseshoe, and a clover, each with a traditional meaning. An exploration of the possible derivations and routes of diffusion of this custom reveal that it has much more complex origins and meanings than is commonly assumed by most New Orleanians.     

山西兴县红峪村元至大二年壁画墓

2008年5月,考古工作者在山西兴县康宁镇红峪村发掘了一座壁画墓。墓葬坐西朝东,由墓道、封门石、甬道、墓门及墓室组成,墓室为八角形,为夫妇合葬墓。墓顶和墓室皆绘有壁画,包括花卉、鞍马、墓主夫妇对坐图、备茶图及孝行故事等。西壁墓主夫妇之间有一牌位,题有墓主武庆及其妻景氏名字,其后座屏上题传马致远所作《天净沙.秋思》。西南壁上题记中有元代至大二年(1309年)纪年。     

Inga Clendinnen,Historian (1934–2016)

Inga Clendinnen has been described as an anthropologist, a public intellectual, a writer, a poet in prose, a Mesoamericanist, and a student of the Holocaust and Australia. She was all this, but she insisted that she was always and mainly a historian. A cultural historian without portfolio, I would say. This essay aims to introduce her written work as a whole, its main purposes, themes, and approach.     

Readjusting Cultural Codes: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

In this article I seek to apply the notion of anti-Semitism as a cultural code, which I initially developed 25 years ago with relation to the antimodernist trends in late-nineteenth-century Germany, to the phenomena of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism today. From the 1960s anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism formed part of a larger ideological package consisting of anticolonialism, anticapitalism, and a deep suspicion of US policies. In the eyes of members of the developing countries, Jews became a symbol of the West and legitimate targets for hatred. Thus, the position on the Jewish question, even if not in itself of paramount importance, came to indicate a belonging to a larger camp, a political stand and an overall cultural choice. The question is whether the position towards Israel today, which has become a central issue for the European left, can still be considered a cultural code or whether it rather indicates a more direct anti-Jewish attack, above all as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.     

Portraits in the Background of “Nothingness” Sheikh Jabber Burnt House, an Object of Persian Gulf War

War is a common heritage of Middle East, the experience of war was changed to a dramatic propaganda in Iran while the southern neighbor of Iran experienced it in another way: oblivion. In such a context, both states attempt to change the facts of the war, one to a process of sanctification and one to the portraits of nothingness. We, as archaeologists, were accidentally encountered with a heritage of Persian Gulf War during a contemporary archaeology project. Our curiosity made us to take a look at Jabber house, a forgotten building, a domestic architecture destroyed by a racket during the war. What was recorded in our frames was actually an artistic work, out of its original context. Our subjectivity as archaeologists made us to think about the other objects fossilized in museums, they are out of their painful context and structure, they are only beautiful, the portraits in the background of nothingness, in a burnt gallery. Persian Gulf War is treated in Kuwait as a negative heritage, what is discussed in this article as the main theme??a negative heritage lost its original context and meaning: Sheikh Jabber house.     

Political Theology,Religious Diversity and the Nature of Democratic Citizenship

ABSTRACT

Driving this essay is a question central to political theology; that is, how can I keep faith with my distinctive commitments while also forming a common life with neighbors who have a different vision of life to me? My response has four parts. First, I develop a normative definition of politics within which to situate an account of citizenship and the political implications of deep religious plurality in a shared polity. Second, I examine how citizenship is not just a legal status that entails certain rights and duties, but also denotes an identity, a performance of politics, and a shared rationality. Third, I identify the dominant ways in which citizenship is understood in the contemporary context, namely, through either a nationalist or cosmopolitan framework, contrasting these with a consociational conception of citizenship. And lastly, I lay out how a consociational framework provides a more generative basis for conceptualizing religious diversity.     

论用典在文化传承和发展中的作用——以中国历史话语中的著名三钓为例

用典除了增加语言表达效果、增加语言审美因素等作用外,还有另外一个重要作用——传承发展文化。但长期以来,人们更多的只是看到了用典的前两个作用,而对于它的第三个作用则视而不见,以致出现了反对用典的现象。正如本文所举著名三钓典故所展示的,用典既是一种传递,也是一种启发,还是一种讨论,正是通过不同形式的用典,一个民族的精神内核才越来越丰富充盈,一个民族的文化才越来越具有活力。任何一个用典的行为,都不是一个单纯的语言表达、语言修辞问题,不是一种简单的无意义的陈词滥调和掉书袋行为,更不是一种所谓守旧古板的体现,它和民族文化的继承与发展息息相关,在民族的发展进步中具有重要意义。     

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CAIRNS AND SETTLEMENT SITES

Summary. This article discusses the problem of how to relate a special grave construction to a particular settlement site. An example from the West Swedish Bronze Age is presented to pinpoint the difficulties of the chronological criteria and the drawbacks of using 'nearness' as a criterion.
The idea presented is that a relationship between a grave monument and a settlement site may be reflected in areas where the building material, the stones, were picked up. Such areas can be demonstrated in a test example from West Sweden, which showed that, under special circumstances, such a link may be valuable for solving the problem of how to relate a cairn to a settlement site.     

A EUBOEAN WARRIOR TRADER

Summary A recently discovered burial in the Toumba Cemetery at Lefkandi, Euboea, differs from others previously found there in the shape of the tomb and the method of burial, which is a cremation contained in a bronze cauldron. The offerings, which include a sword, spearhead and iron arrowheads, make it certain that it is the burial of a warrior, but others, such as a series of stone weights, a N. Syrian cylinder seal and vases from Cyprus and Phoenicia indicate that he was a trader as well. In this preliminary acount, these and other aspects of the burial are considered.     

Hospitality in pre-viking Anglo-Saxon England

This article studies the question of Anglo-Saxon hospitality, that is, in the first place, the gift (from a host to a guest) of food, fodder, roof and bed for a night or for a longer term. Contrary to Romantic visions, it was nothing like a spontaneous and free practice: Marcel Mauss and other anthropologists after him have shown that giving and receiving were obligations, compulsory acts in pre-market societies. In Anglo-Saxon England, hospitality was always a duty, strictly limited and framed by custom. It may have been provided to a single traveller, to a member of a formal or informal network (particularly ecclesiastical), to a king or to his agents in the form of a pastus or feorm: a kind of 'guesting' or compulsory hospitality which was progressively given up by kings as they booked lands to religious institutions. The forms and beneficiaries may vary, but the opposition between 'spontaneous' feasting and 'compulsory' guesting must not be stressed too much: hospitality was always a kind of binding exchange, even when it assumed the shape, the aspect, and even the values of a free and open practice .     

Foucault, fields of governability, and the population–family–economy nexus in China

It was only in the early twentieth century that China discovered that it had a population, at least if a population is understood not as a simple number of people but instead in terms of such features as variable levels of health, birth and death rates, age, sex, dependency ratios, and so on—as an object with a distinct rationality and intrinsic dynamics that can be made the target of a specific kind of direct intervention. In 1900, such a developmentalist conception of the population simply did not exist in China; by the 1930s, it pervaded the entire social and political field from top to bottom. Through a reading of a series of foundational texts in population and family reformism in China, this paper argues that this birth of the Chinese population occurred as a result of a general transformation of practices of governing, one that necessarily also involved a reconceptualization of the family and a new logic of overall social rationalization; in short, the isolation of a population–family–economy nexus as a central field of modern governing. This process is captured by elaborating and extending Foucault's studies of the historical emergence of apparatuses (dispositifs) into a notion of fields of governability. Finally, this paper argues that the one-child policy, launched in the late 1970s, should be understood not in isolation from the imposition of the “family-responsibility system” in agriculture and market reforms in exactly that period, but as part—mutatis mutandis—of a return to a form of governing that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century.     

The Organized Anthroposphere

The evolution of life on earth, the appearance of man, and social and historical progress are viewed as stages in a single process of development of the surface of the earth. Using the forum of a popular-science journal, a Soviet geographer noted for his theoretical work on regionalization envisages a time when the natural geographic envelope of the earth (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere) will be so saturated with man-made engineering structures as to become a new entity called anthroposphere. This entity will have the characteristics ot a world-wide city with its municipal institutions. It will be highly organized in combined functional-nodal regions, benefitting from a multilevel system of services and a hierarchy of transport centers. It will be a “superorganism” with remarkable analogies to a living organism.     

The emergence of agropastoralism: Accelerated ecocultural change on the Andean altiplano, ∼3540–3120 cal BP

In the fourth millennium BP, there were major environmental and cultural changes on the Andean altiplano of South America, but the chronology remains vague. A recent synthesis describes a slow, gradual transition from hunting and gathering to agropastoralism. This proposal is tested by refining the date of the onset of more humid and stable conditions, around 3550 cal BP, based on a Bayesian model of 26 dates from Lake Wiñaymarka and an updated calculation of the lacustrine offset. This is compared to Bayesian models of 191 dates from 20 archaeological sites, which incorporate a number of recently processed radiocarbon dates. A synthesis is presented of 15 full coverage surveys, a summed probability distribution, and a Bayesian model of the transition to ceramics, which together support a scenario of a very rapid demographic increase. Fourteen models from archaeological sites are cross-referenced in a composite model, which identifies a brief, altiplano-wide emergence of agropastoralism with starting and ending boundaries of 3540 and 3120 cal BP, respectively. This starting boundary correlates strongly with the onset of improving environmental conditions, indicating synchronous cultural and environmental change. The suite of accelerating cultural changes included a marked reduction in mobility, a demographic surge, increased subsistence diversity, the adoption of ceramics, farming and the integration of camelid herding into a remarkably resilient economic strategy still in use today. This is a highly relevant but yet to be used comparative case study for the variable tempos of ‘big histories’, and ecocultural interactions that generate rapid, emergent episodes of wide-spread and enduring cultural change.     

‘Together apart’ or ‘apart together’? – middle-class parents’ choice of playgrounds and playground interactions in socially diverse neighbourhoods

Taking an everyday life setting, namely playgrounds, as a starting point, the paper foregrounds a nuanced analysis of the internal differentiations of the middle class’s positioning in regard to social diversity. In so doing, the paper contributes to debates on contemporary segregation research, (dis-)affiliation of the middle classes in inner-city diverse neighbourhoods and geographies of encounter. Empirical findings are based on an analysis of the narratives and daily spatial routines of middle-class parents in three inner-city neighbourhoods in a major German town. The findings contradict the conventional wisdom that middle-class parents would always seek a socially homogeneous environment in which to raise their children and show the presence of a middle-class fraction with a collective orientation. The analysis highlights the need for a closer look at playgrounds as a setting for cross-social interaction and, in terms of micro-level politics, a setting to promote diverse and inclusive neighbourhoods.     

A diasporic right to the city: the production of a Moroccan diaspora space in Granada,Spain

In this paper, I bring together ideas of ‘diaspora space’ and ‘the right to the city’ and empirically demonstrate how the formation of diasporas is frequently dependent on migrants attaining certain rights to the city. These rights, I argue, are conditioned and attained by the interplay of urban structural context with the place-making strategies of migrants. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that Moroccan migrants in Granada, Spain, have achieved a partial right to a neighbourhood of the city, producing a multi-sensory, self-orientalised diaspora space. First, I show that certain urban conditions in Granada provided a foothold for Moroccan migrants to begin to form a diaspora and transform urban space. Second, I demonstrate that through the mobilisation of a strategically self-orientalised cultural capital, the diaspora have partly appropriated the valuable history of Al-Andalus, a key component in the city’s tourist imagery. These factors and strategies have enabled Moroccan migrants to gain a right to have a visible presence in the city, a right to produce and transform urban space and a right to spatalise diverse identities – all key rights, I argue, in the formation of a diaspora.     

幕末与明治时期日本人的上海认识——从高杉晋作的《游清五录》到远山景直的《上海》

对于幕末与明治时期的日本人而言,上海首先是中国的上海;同时上海也是世界、尤其是西洋的上海,租界区域出现了与此前的中国本土迥然相异的新的样态;再次是与日本紧密相关的上海,19世纪末期以后,在虹口一带形成了以日本居留民为主体的日本人社会。这样一个多元组合、多重叠加、既相对分离又互相交融、同时其经济政治文化的影响力日益凸显的都市,对于正在走向东亚乃至世界舞台的近代日本而言,无疑是一个巨大的存在,因此,这一时期日本人对于上海的认识,首先是对于以上海为媒介的中国的认识,其次是对于与上海相关的世界的认识,同时也是对于通过上海所体现出来的中日关系的认识因此,近代上海对于这一时期的日本人,实际上具有三层意义：观察中国的现场;透视世界的窗口;反观日本本身的泰照系,     

Account of a Roman Sepulchre at Geldestone,Norfolk

Rescue excavation between 1988 and 1990 in advance of river erosion examined a substantial part of the small medieval rural hospital of St Giles by Brompton Bridge and later post-medieval farm. Established in the latter half of the twelfth century for the infirm, including lepers, the hospital layout consisted of a detached stone chapel adjacent to the river crossing, with a timber hall to the west. This hall was destroyed by fire, and a sequence of timber buildings were then constructed in adjacent areas. By the fifteenth century these structures also included a stone building, possibly a refectory. The first small chapel was replaced in the thirteenth century by a larger structure, which went through a period of expansion and then subsequent contraction by the fifteenth century. Only in the fourteenth century were a hall, probably a guesthouse or the master's lodgings, and dovecote built adjacent to the chapel. The cemetery to the south of the chapel was partially examined. The site appears to have been a largely economically self-sufficient unit with an attached farm. The hospital was abandoned during the latter half of the fifteenth century, but the site and some of the buildings were subsequently reoccupied as a farm from the mid-seventeenth century. The farmhouse underwent conversion from a longhouse to a house of hearth-passage plan in the early eighteenth century. The former chapel was reused as a byre and additional stables constructed. The farm was moved to its present location to the south in the mid-eighteenth century and the former hospital site finally abandoned.     

Finials on stone flakes

When a conchoidal flake is detached from a stone the fracture can either terminate at a small angle to the stone's surface, creating a feather flake, or turn to end at rightangles, creating a hinge or step flake. If a crack turns towards the surface of the stone its path is unstable, and the crack often turns once again, to propagate parallel to the surface of the stone and form a retroflexion or an inflexion on the end of the flake. The retroflexion on the end of a hinge termination has long been recognized, but the inflexion, and its combination with a retroflexion to form a pseudo-bifurcation, has not. Recognition of these finials is important in use-wear analysis for the accurate identification of the various flake scar types and the determination of stone tool function.     

Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America

This article explores the political, as opposed to the philosophical, impact of Leo Strauss’s exile in America on his thought. After a consideration of anti-Semitism and the importance Strauss attached to being a Jew, I argue that the fact that in America he no longer wrote in his Muttersprache but in English was central to his becoming a political theorist rather than a philosopher. Whereas as a philosopher he was unable to speak to the demos, as a political theorist what he needed was a group of “rhetors” who would carry a particular message to the demos.     

Why a British referendum on EU membership will not solve the Europe question

This article scrutinizes the merits of holding a referendum over UK membership of the EU. It queries the assumption that direct democracy can somehow resolve the longstanding Europe question in British politics. To do this, the analysis traces the existence of an exceptionalist approach to the EU within Britain, now associated with re‐negotiating UK membership in the shadow of a referendum. The article argues that the prospects for a radical reconfiguration of the UK's treaty obligations are slim, thereby increasing the risk of a vote to withdraw. Yet withdrawal would be the opposite of a simple solution to the Europe question. Political and economic interests dictate lengthy politicking over a highly complex post‐Brexit settlement revisiting free movement of goods, services, capital and people. Such negotiations undermine any mooted cathartic benefits of a popular vote, while Eurosceptics will remain dissatisfied in the event of a yes, a result likely to further destabilize the Conservative Party. Consequently, the simplicity and decisiveness that a referendum—particularly one that spurns the EU—promises is merely a mirage as relations with the EU necessarily form part of an enduring British political conversation.