(de)Constructing Place-Myth: Pitcairn Island and the “Bounty” Story

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the relationship between literature and the construction of place-myth relating to the story Mutiny on the Bounty. In 1790, nine British mutineers together with their Tahitian companions settled on Pitcairn Island where they remained hidden for nearly 20 years. The story of the mutiny is not myth but has served to mythologize Pitcairn through the various tropes of literature written about the Bounty saga. As literary place Pitcairn represented the image of a ‘utopian paradise’. This discussion, through qualitative literary analysis and the process of textualization, evokes the idea of mapping, naming, and imagining islands. It identifies how the utopia/paradise place-myth of Pitcairn has persisted through time and become ultimately inseparable from its textual topography. But conversely, discussion exposes the paradoxical problem between myth and reality of islands and their representations. It highlights complex internal and external boundaries of identification that arise in the host visitor experience. Literary place-myth is rendered as powerful, persistent, mutable, and historically-rooted.     

Recent developments in social and cultural geography in Spain

Controversy has erupted in Selma, Alabama, over recent efforts to commemorate the career of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate cavalry officer and founding member of the original Ku Klux Klan. More generally, the controversy in Selma is emblematic of an enduring regional pattern in which contests over the future are couched in terms of the past. Relative to other media, monuments appear to be trustworthy and lasting. Despite this appearance of historical consensus and stability, the city's public spaces are the product of and conduit for ongoing politics. The current conflict pits memorial activists associated with the Civil Rights Movement against neo‐Confederates. Interpreted in the context of Selma's increasing promotion of Civil Rights heritage and the recent election of the city's first African American mayor, the Forrest affair highlights the utility of the concept of symbolic accretion for understanding the complexities of commemorating antagonistic histories in the same place. Symbolic accretion describes the appending of commemorative elements onto already existing memorials. The situation in Selma suggests two different types of symbolic accretion, allied and antithetical. More generally, the act of commemoration itself may be understood as a process of accretion in that heretofore anonymous spaces are formally recognized via the grafting of memorial elements.     

Influence of climate change on carbon and oxygen isotope fractionation factors between glucose and α-cellulose of pine wood

We present the first analysis of the influence of climate change on carbon and oxygen isotope fractionation factors for two saccharides (glucose and α-cellulose) of pine wood. The conifers grew in the Niepo?omice Forest in Poland and the annual rings covered a time span from 1935 to 2000 AD. Glucose samples from acid hydrolysis of α-cellulose were extracted from annual tree rings. The carbon and oxygen isotope fractionation factors between glucose and α-cellulose were not stable over time. The mean value for the carbon isotope fractionation factors between glucose and α-cellulose was greater than unity. The mean value for the oxygen isotope fractionation factors between glucose and α-cellulose was lower than unity. We established, with respect to climate change, the significance of the interannual and intraannual variation in the carbon and oxygen isotope fractionation factors between both saccharides. We used moving interval correlation results for May of the previous year through September of the current year using a base length of 48 years. The relationship with summer temperature is the main climate signal in the carbon isotope fractionation factor between glucose and α-cellulose. The relationship with autumn sunshine is the main climate signal in the oxygen isotope fractionation factor between glucose and α-cellulose for the tree ring chronology.     

Behind the scenes of public funding for performing arts in Italy: hidden phenomena beyond the rhetoric of legislation

This paper focuses on how Italian performing arts organizations were funded between 2003 and 2005. How does policy regulate the financing system for performing arts? What are the underlying logics that govern financing choices? In this paper the authors move beyond the simple examination of formal policies by analysing the funding data and organizational routines of the ministerial offices responsible for the allocation of grants. The authors implemented a multi‐method research methodology consisting of document analysis, in‐depth interviews, and quantitative analysis of funding data. The main findings can be summarized as follows. First, funds are continuously allocated to the same group of organizations. Second, although rigid, the system is imbued by a ‘rhetoric of the project’. Third, the system does not reward innovation. In conclusion, only by studying how the law is actually implemented can one capture the choices that underlie financing actions, and thus unravel unanticipated outcomes and inconsistencies between rhetoric and conduct.     

Cajal's Brief Experimentation with Hypnotic Suggestion

Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, one of the most notable figures in Neuroscience, and winner, along with Camillo Golgi, of the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries on the structure of the nervous system, did not escape experimenting with some of the psychiatric techniques available at the time, mainly hypnotic suggestion, albeit briefly. While a physician in his thirties, Cajal published a short article under the title, “Pains of labour considerably attenuated by hypnotic suggestion” in Gaceta Médica Catalana. That study may be Cajal's only documented case in the field of experimental psychology. We here provide an English translation of the original Spanish text, placing it historically within Cajal's involvement with some of the key scientific and philosophical issues at the time.     

Testing Methods of Record Linkage on Swedish Censuses

Abstract.

Research benefits a great deal when different kinds of registers can be combined. Record linkage is an important tool for connecting sources to create longitudinal databases of individual data. In this article, researchers test and evaluate different methods of record linkage used when linking two censuses. By comparing the results of the census linkage with other continuous Swedish parish registers, they find that applying constructed name variables and household links considerably increases the success rate without the risk of introducing bias. Missing links are mainly related to name problems, and appear most frequently among children and when the family structure has changed between the censuses. Faulty links are very few and must be regarded as only a marginal problem for analysis. The study underlines the importance of adapting the linkage process to the special characteristics of the sources.     

Exactly As People Tell,or an Ethnography of the (In)Visible Things of Mayajigua

This paper explores some of the consequences of using archival materials produced by an anthropologist's informants. What happens when a resident from a rural area of Cuba is hired to write about the “world”, a term used by Carl L. Withers, in which he, his relatives and his neighbours live? By reading letters and other papers sent during the late 1940s, and kept by Withers for more than thirty years, my hypothesis is that his informants took seriously their capacity to create something other than a simple “testimony”. Withers's principal informant, created himself, his neighbours, strange beings and the world in which they cohabited as a certain type of artefact, as “data”.