The place of the symbol in the practice of anthropological reasoning

Marshall Sahlins. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976. xii + 252 pp. Figures, table, references, and index. $17.50.     

Disability and the practice of public history: an introduction

Museums, exhibitions, and public history have long engaged with the subject matter of disability. Shared social conventions and exhibition traditions about people with disabilities--the common stereotypes of people as persevering heroes or objects of pity--have often led to skewed and inaccurate historical presentations. The medical model of disability, equally strong in framing disability, has also reduced the range of possibilities for including content for the public. More recently, greater understanding of diversity and of the importance of interpreting the history of all people has begun to push inclusion beyond simple issues into content.     

French cultural history from theory to practice

Rioux, J.‐P. and Sirinelli, J.‐F. (eds), Pour une histoire culturelle (Seuil, 1997), 456 pp., 185F., ISBN 2 02 025470 0

Rioux, J.‐P. and Sirinelli, J.‐F. (eds), Histoire culturelle de la France, vol 3, Baecque, A. de and Mélonio, F., Lumières et libertés: les dix‐huitième et dix‐neuvième siècles (Seuil, 1998), 390 pp., 340F., ISBN 2 02 019793 6

Rioux, J.‐P. and Sirinelli, J.‐F. (eds), Histoire culturelle de la France, vol. 4, Rioux, J.‐P. and Sirinelli, J.‐F, Le temps des masses: le vingtième siècle (Seuil, 1998), 404 pp., 340F., ISBN 2 02 013537 X     

Relational concepts of space and place: Issues for planning theory and practice

This paper seeks to conceptualize and explore the changing relationships between planning action and practice and the dynamics of place. It argues that planning practice is grappling with new treatments of place, based on dynamic, relational constructs, rather than the Euclidean, deterministic, and one‐dimensional treatments inherited from the ‘scientific’ approaches of the 1960s and early 1970s. But such emerging planning practices remain poorly served by planning theory which has so far failed to produce sufficiently robust and sophisticated conceptual treatments of place in today's globalizing’ world. In this paper we attempt to draw on a wide range of recent advances in social theory to begin constructing such a treatment. The paper has four parts. First, we criticize the legacy of object‐oriented, Euclidean concepts of planning theory and practice, and their reliance on ‘containered’ views of space and time. Second, we construct a relational understanding of time, space and cities by drawing together four strands of recent social theory. These are: relational theories of urban time‐space, dynamic conceptualizations of ‘multiplex’ places and cities, the ‘new’ urban and regional socio‐economics, and emerging theories of social agency and institutional ordering. In the third section, we apply such perspectives to three worlds of planning practice: land use regulation, policy frameworks and development plans, and the development of ‘customized spaces’ in urban ‘regeneration’. Finally, by way of conclusion, we suggest some pointers for practising planning in a relational way.     

Reimagining the Iglu: Modernity and the Challenge of the Eighteenth Century Labrador Inuit Winter House

The Inuit sod winter house or iglu has undergone a host of alterations over the past millennium, as housing styles were accommodated to changing local milieus during the colonization of the Eastern Arctic. Many of these changes relate to subtle shifts in gendered work and household social relations, and in Labrador from the eighteenth century some appear to reflect engagements with a more or less hostile European discourse on architectural modernity. Far from a static form subjected to convulsive contact-era transformations, however, dwellings were gradually remade in the context of a long-running Inuit effort to house work and sociality within a meaningful space.     

Reimagining blockchain in a pluriversal world: Digital land governance in the Global South and the metaverse

Blockchain technologies are increasingly live-tested in experiments aimed at improving governance in a growing range of activities. A key question often lost amongst these efforts is whether such projects redistribute wealth and power, and, if so, in which ways. Examining the case of blockchain-based land governance, this contribution explores the tensions between ambitious visions and their actual scales of implementation around the redistributional promises of distributed ledger technologies. Bringing together the concepts of ‘imaginaries’ and ‘infrastructures’, we analyse land governance blockchainization emerging in the Global South and the metaverse. Identifying a contrast between imaginaries ‘scaling up’ redistributive promises yet tending to materialize in ‘scaled-down’ forms, we argue for more sustained attention to pluriversal perspectives that foreground local concerns and diverse voices.     

From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space

Abstract

The paper questions the basic assumption that the nation-state is one city, within which there is a division of goods and a division of labour, which follow certain well-worn binaries: civil society and state, sacred and secular, eternal and temporal, religion and politics, church and state. It explores some deficiencies of John Courtney Murray's conceptualization of the political space in this way, and turns to Augustine's tale of two cities for a more adequate conceptualization. The paper especially argues that the two cities are not two institutions but two performances, two practices of space and time.     

Citizens and scientists: toward a gendered history of scientific practice in post-revolutionary France

Because the French Revolution failed to produce a widely acceptable definition of citizenship, the limits of manhood suffrage in the early nineteenth century were uncertain. Social practices, in particular scientific activity, served as claims to the status of citizen. By engaging in scientific pastimes, bourgeois Frenchmen asserted that they possessed the rationality and autonomy that liberal theorists associated both with manliness and with civic capacity. However, bourgeois science was never a stable signifier of masculinity or of competence. As professional science emerged, the bourgeois amateur increasingly became the feminised object of satire rather than the sober and meritorious citizen-scientist.     

融入可持续发展目标:博物馆"重塑"的一个重要努力方向

《2030年可持续发展议程》和"可持续发展目标"显示了 21世纪联合国主导的社会、环境和经济领域最雄心勃勃的努力.因其覆盖面广、适用性强,故成为各国政府和各专业领域竞相研究和应对的对象,文化遗产和博物馆领域也不例外.国际博物馆协会在对2021年"国际博物馆日"主题"博物馆的未来:恢复与重塑"的阐释中,呼吁博物馆和博物馆从业者充分认识博物馆之于可持续发展的关键价值,并积极参与到实现联合国可持续发展目标的历史进程中.博物馆与可持续发展目标存在广泛的内在和外在关联性,通过引领社会方向、支持其他领域和变革博物馆自身,博物馆可以为人类可持续发展事业作出不可替代的贡献,这也是博物馆成功实现社会重塑过程中的一个重要方向.     

Reimagining political economy as a foundation for archaeologies of the past,present and future

SUMMARY: This paper examines some of the philosophical and epistemological issues surrounding current theories of political economy. By focusing on the historicism that postcolonial theorists have employed to critique the writings of Karl Marx and the lack of focus on the environment on the part of many political theorists, this paper argues for a political economy that accommodates the role of the disenfranchised and the environment as part of an archaeology of the future.     

Manners of the market place

William G. Davis. Social Relations in a Philippine Market: Self‐interest and Subjectivity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973. xiii + 315 pp. Appendixes, bibliography and index. $12.50.     

Captain Cook upon Changing Seas: Indigenous Voices and Reimagining at the British Museum

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the British Museum exhibition, Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives, 29 November 2018–4 August 2019. It situates the exhibition within a global context of exhibitions held around the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage, and critically considers its attempt to reframe dominant narratives surrounding Cook, his voyages and more broadly the colonization of the Pacific through a focus on Pacific Islander perspectives within a changing museum sector.