Crossing traditional boundaries: grub to glamour in Byzantine silk weaving

Abstract

Byzantine silk research evokes images of glamour but it is prudent to consider grass roots as well as exotic aspects of this enticing subject: without the grub there would be no glamour. In its fullest sense a study of Byzantine silk weaving entails research on many and varied levels, across a broad range of disciplines. An immense variety of topics require consideration: the production of the silk yarn; the various workshop practices involved in weaving the yarn into silk cloth; the relationship between technique and design; the marketing and the numerous uses of the silks both at home and abroad, and the implications of the distribution of Byzantine silks purely through diplomatic channels.     

Crossing boundaries: women's gossip, insults and violence in sixteenth-century France

Using evidence from cases recorded in the registers of the consistories of southern France, the author investigates the way in which Languedocian women policed each other's behaviour, enforcing a collective morality through gossip, sexual insult and physical confrontation. In contrast to case studies by other historians, it is argued here that gossip does appear to have been a peculiarly female activity, but far more than simply being an outlet for malice or prurience, it gave women a distinctive social role in the town. No less evident is the involvement of women in physical violence both against each other and against men, violence which, though less extreme than its male counterpart, nonetheless occupies a significant role in the proceedings of the consistories.     

Crossing disciplinary boundaries: On Gutorm Gjessing's archaeology and his conversion to ethnography

Gutorm Gjessing was one of the most influential investigators in Norwegian archaeology. He is particularly known for his monumental works on the Arctic Stone Age, which proposed an alternative to south‐north diffusionism. In 1947 Gjessing suddenly left archaeology in favour of ethnography at the Oslo Ethnographic Museum, which also led his carrier in a downhill direction. This article is partly biographical and partly analytical and claims that Gjessing's archaelogical works and theories in the 1930s ‐ 40s were only marginally non‐conformist, since they largely reflected current viewpoints in European culture‐historical archaeology. Gjessing's view of culture is located in culture‐historical archaeology and American cultural anthropology and it is compared with the anthropology of the “British School”. Also analyzed is how Gjessing in some respects placed himself on the fringe of the establishment. It is not pretended to give any definite answers, rather it is focused upon questions which can be raised and provides a more nuanced picture of” the mythology which has surrounded Gutorm Gjessing, both as archaeologist and anthropologist.     

Crossing boundaries: bras,lingerie and rape myths in postcolonial urban middle-class India

Abstract

With the processes of modernization, urbanization and the entry of women in the formal labour market in Indian metropolitan spaces, this article examines how the modern middle-class woman’s sartorial choices become enmeshed in popular rape myths (false beliefs) that serve to blame her for the wearing of western clothing. The article articulates the ways in which middle-class women’s social realities are shaped by historical, colonial and nationalist ideologies of modernization, constructed and mediated through moral codes of dressing. By drawing upon original and contemporary empirical narratives from the urban spaces of Delhi and Mumbai, we emphasise how everyday sartorial choices, in relation to particularly the bra and lingerie, can reveal the nuanced ways in which Urban Indian Professional Women (UIPW) seek to understand, negotiate, and resist patriarchal power. Our findings shed light on conflicting and contradictory spatial experiences, where some women internalize and negotiate moral codes of dressing, out of fear, and others who transgress are subject to sanctions. Given the paucity of scholarly literature in this area, the article makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution with its focus on postcoloniality and everyday discursive material spaces of gendered and sexualized dress practices. It argues for the consciousness raising of everyday urban geographies of dress that reveal complicated structures of power that are often deemed hidden.     

Introduction: stretching the boundaries of care

Over the past few decades, geographies of care have flourished, and have offered important insights into the importance of care in our worlds. This introduction provides a broad review of the literature on care ethics and introduces the key themes evident in this special issue that stretch the empirical and theoretical boundaries of care. In particular, the four papers in this special issue de-emphasize the role of the conventional dyadic care-giving relationships in the home and focus on wider structural power relations within which individual care relations are often formed. Such analysis reveals the workings of hegemonic white masculinity in perpetuating unequal caring and uncaring relations and reminds us that care is not always good or positive; rather care can cause harm and exacerbate violence. While ‘care’ is often seen as the antidote to resolve the vastly uncaring practices and politics evident across time and scale, this special issue acknowledges that more critical engagement with care ethics and the politics of care are necessary to achieve such a goal.     

重走晋商万里茶路 走进武夷山(下)

<正>6.万里茶路的金钥匙在走进下梅村之前,我曾经在网上读到过一段如诗一样的文字,那是关于下梅村的:那些青山和旧舍,微笑着的斑驳的记忆在那发黑的屋瓦下,在那狭长幽深的弄堂中,在那静谧深沉的流水中,在那古老石雕的纹路里,在那孤独而迷茫的石桥上,散发着属于时光、属于记忆独有的馨香。     

Weak Ties and Expertise: Crossing Technological Boundaries

In this article, we question how new technological traits can penetrate cohesive social groups and spread. Based on ethnographic narratives and following studies in sociology, the hypothesis is that not only weak ties are important for linking otherwise unconnected groups and introducing new techniques but also that expertise is required. In order to test this hypothesis, we carried out a set of field experiments in northern India where the kiln has been adopted recently. Our goal was to measure the degree of expertise of the potters distributed between early and late adopters of the kiln. Our results are discussed in the light of oral interviews. Our conclusions suggest that expertise is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for weak ties to act as bridges and thereby for new techniques to spread. As an example, they explain how turntables could have been adopted by potters from the northern Levant during the third millennium BC.     

Crossing the Maelstrom: New Departures in Viking Archaeology

Journal of Archaeological Research - This paper reviews the achievements and challenges of archaeological research on Viking Age northern Europe and explores potential avenues for future research....     

拦截非法穿越--一起非法穿越可可西里国家级自然保护区案件跟踪

2019年11月初,可可西里国家级自然保护区查处了一起非法穿越的案件,记者对此案件进行了全程跟踪报道。11月3日晚,正在参加联合巡护任务的可可西里管理处森林公安局工作人员尼玛扎西、闹布东周、巴义尔3人发现,在可可西里勒斜武担湖北岸发现有灯光闪烁。根据情报信息和巡护经验,他们判断极有可能是非法穿越的人员。     

Transitional geographies: making mobile children

Geographers of childhood have variously accounted for the experiences of mobile children. Less has been said about the practices of becoming mobile, including the acquisition of skills, engagement with travel technologies and the shifting child–parent relations implicated in the process. This article explores the making of mobile children through ethnographic research with 7–12-year-olds practising the journey between home and school in Helsinki, Finland. Elaborating on the work of psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, it argues that families enact flexible spatial arrangements—transitional spaces—to experiment with their attachments to urban environments. Transitional spaces foreground the diverse relations between children, parents and the world, allowing the replacement of standard notions about growing up with situated accounts of how families make space for children's expanding mobilities. Against a cultural atmosphere stressing the risks and uncertainties of childhood, this view opens an affirmative approach to children's geographies—one that emphasises the trust, play and collaboration between adults, children and environments.     

Heritage and scale: settings,boundaries and relations

While recent years have seen increasing interest in the geographies of heritage, very few scholars have interrogated the difference that scale makes. Indeed, in a world in which the nation state appears to be on the wane, the process of articulating heritage on whatever scale – whether of individuals and communities, towns and cities, regions, nations, continents or globally – becomes ever more important. Partly reflecting this crisis of the national container, researchers have sought opportunities both through processes of ‘downscaling’, towards community, family and even personal forms of heritage, as well as ‘upscaling’, towards a universal understanding of heritage. While such work has had critical impact within prescribed scalar boundaries, we need to build a theoretical understanding of what an emergent relationship between heritage and scale does within the context of dynamic power relations. This paper examines how heritage is produced and practised, consumed and experienced, managed and deployed at a variety of scales, exploring how notions of scale, territory and boundedness have a profound effect on the heritage process. Drawing on the work of Doreen Massey and others, the paper considers how the heritage–scale relationship can be articulated as a process of openness, pluralism and relationality.     

The boundaries of property: lessons from Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter's classic children's book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit , offers an example of a well-entrenched view of property and its geographies. Drawing on this, and current scholarship on law and geography, I explore the ways in which the spatial boundaries of property are formally conceived. I then compare this model with the findings of a qualitative research project on people's everyday practices and understandings of their garden boundaries in inner city Vancouver. While this provides partial support for the formal model, I find more pervasive evidence for a very different view of the boundaries of property. While the dominant account assumes a determinate, individualistic and ordered view of the boundary, my findings suggest a more relational, porous and ambiguous alternative. The gap, however, proves instructive. In conclusion, therefore, I return to law and geography to reflect on the importance of thinking through the ways legal forms, such as property, are materially and spatially enacted within particular places. Finally, the study alerts us to the multivalent political possibilities of property. While property can, indeed, be individualistic and reified, it also contains more collective and fluid meanings.     

Innovation and convergence: expanding boundaries of chemical industry

Abstract

The chemical industry has been a major driver of industrialisation for the last hundred years, but during the past decade the pace of change has accelerated. This paper examines the major innovations in chemical industry and goes on to examine the important changes that diffusion of information technology, e-business, and new techniques of molecular design have brought about. Convergence inducing innovations are today a major driver of change, and the paper concludes by suggesting that chemical industry is at the beginning of a phase of megaconvergence, involving digital convergence, genetic convergence, and nanoconvergence.