Imagining the absent dead: rituals of bereavement and the place of the war dead in German women's art during the First World War

Drawing on women's visual responses to the First World War, this article examines female mourning in wartime Germany. The unprecedented death toll on the battlefronts, military burial practices and the physical distance from the remains of the war dead disrupted traditional rituals of bereavement, hindered closure and compounded women's grief on the home front. In response to these novel circumstances, a number of female artists used their images to reimagine funerary customs, overcome the separation from the fallen and express acute emotional distress. This article analyses three images produced during the conflict by the artists Katharina Heise, Martha Schrag and Sella Hasse, and places their work within the civilian experience of bereavement in war. By depicting the pain of loss, female artists contested the historical tradition of proud female mourning in German society and countered wartime codes of conduct that prohibited the public display of emotional pain in response to soldiers’ deaths. As a largely overlooked body of sources, women's art adds to our understanding of the tensions in wartime cultures of mourning that emerged between 1914 and 1918.     

Famines past, famine's future

Famine, like poverty, has always been with us. No region and no century has been immune. Its scars — economic, psychological and political — can long outlast its immediate impact on mortality and health. Famines are a hallmark of economic backwardness, and were thus more likely to occur in the pre-industrialized past. Yet the twentieth century suffered some of the most devastating ever recorded. That century also saw shifts in both the causes and symptoms of famine. This new century's famines have been "small" by historical standards, and the threat of major ones seemingly confined to ever-smaller pockets of the globe. Are these shifts a sign of hope for the future?     

澳大利亚山火烧向总理

假如时间可以倒流,澳大利亚总理斯科特•莫里森或许不会选择在2019年年末“潇洒走一回”了。毕竟,当时澳大利亚山火势头正盛,不仅造成上十亿只动物葬身火海,还导致30多人死亡,2000多栋民居化为灰烬。在大半个国家火灾肆虐时他拖家带口去夏威夷吹海风,这怎么看都不像一位称职总理的做派。     

欧版“还珠格格”:父亲视我如污点

“父亲将我视为‘肮脏的污点’,从来不肯承认我的存在,并告诫我永远都不要再和他联系。”英国雕刻艺术家德尔芬•波尔曾在《割断亲情》一书中愤愤不平地自述。一向干脆直率、无拘无束的波尔没料到,欧洲现存血统最纯正、政治影响力最大的王室比利时王室会因自己而掀起轩然大波--不是因为她的雕刻作品,而是因为她的出身。     

Foucault's and Arendt's "insider view" of biopolitics: a critique of Agamben

This article revisits Arendt's and Foucault's converging accounts of modern (bio)politics and the entry of biological life into politics. Agamben's influential account of these ideas is rejected as a misrepresentation both because it de-historicizes biological/organic life and because it occludes the positivity of that life and thus the discursive appeal and performative force of biopolitics. Through attention to the genealogy of Arendt's and Foucault's own ideas we will see that the major point of convergence in their thinking is their insistence upon understanding biological thinking from the inside, in terms of its positivity. Agamben's assessment of modern politics is closer to Arendt's than it is to Foucault's and this marks a fascinating point of disagreement between Arendt and Foucault. Whereas Arendt sees the normalizing force of modern society as being in total opposition to individuality, Foucault posits totalization and individuation as processes of normation, which casts a light upon the relative import they place upon politics and ethics.     

William Pulteney Alison, the Scottish philosophy, and the making of a political medicine

This article considers the public health and social-reform agitations of Dr. William Pulteney Alison (1790-1858), professor of medicine at Edinburgh University and leader of the Scottish medical profession, in the context of Scottish moral philosophy. Throughout his career, Alison reflected on what has come to be recognized as a central problem of social medicine: where did its domain end? At what point did the medical mission of identifying and eliminating factors that harm health pass into a non-medical domain-the provinces of political economy, individual liberty, participatory politics, or acceptance of nature's dictates? On these issues Alison was an expansionist, relentlessly pushing back the borders of medicine. Drawing on Alison's writings on such disparate topics as the philosophy of mind, the epidemiology of infectious diseases, and modes of agrarian organization, the article argues that the trajectory of much of Alison's work was to discover the structural implications of a comprehensive biological reading of human capacity and behavior. It is therefore appropriate to see him as a promulgator of a "political medicine," which he presented as a critical alternative to the classical political economy of the Scottish Malthusians. The article concludes by suggesting that Alison's work (and influence) have been under-recognized and remain pertinent to modern social epidemiology, public health, and medicine more broadly.     

简述在中国发现的拜占庭帝国金币及其仿制品

迄今为止在中国境内已经出土发现了36枚拜占庭帝国金币及其仿制品,这36枚所发现的拜占庭金币及其仿制品都是通过当时的丝绸之路流入,它们是当时东西方商品相互交易流通的必然产物,且根据它们的铸