Visions of visibility: LGBT communities in Turin

Recent anti-discrimination campaigns by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) activists in Italy have increased the visibility of these communities and individuals, but have not resulted in the desired improvements to legislation. In light of this situation, this article analyses modalities of ‘visibility’ as defined and desired by the active LGBT community in Turin, host city for National Pride 2006. The Pride committee scheduled an unprecedentedly ‘visible’ year-long programme of consciousness-raising and cultural events that went far beyond the more usual one-day march. Drawing on a series of interviews with members of the committee and of the lesbian community conducted in Turin in March and June 2006, the discussion explores social, cultural and political visibility in this LGBT community as it hosted National Pride.

I think people live in a state of non-visibility, lacking self-acceptance; there are gay men and lesbians in Italy who are in hiding. (Andrea Benedino)1 1.?Interview conducted by the author, 31 March 2006.      

Spiders,Horror, and Animal Others in Late Victorian Empire Fiction

By the 1850s, the representation of the spider in Victorian natural history was beginning to change. No longer associated solely with ingenuity and industry, the spider took on more disturbing connotations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Unable to pin down the creature's precise rhetorical and metaphorical function, naturalists could not decide whether the spider ought to be loved or feared and at the same time the spider began to emerge as a ubiquitous, protean and unstable Gothic trope in popular fiction. While natural history books warned of the hazards of the foreign spider's bite, in adventure fiction the alien arachnid lurks in liminal spaces far from the safety of British shores. Much maligned as the unfamiliar Other, the spider caused – and mitigated – anxieties about the limits of the human. In the Gothic empire fiction of Bertram Mitford and H.G. Wells, the spider takes on the role of the harbinger of death on both sides of the colonial encounter.     

Reviews

The Art of Persian Music, Jean During, Zia Mirabdolbaghi, and Dariush Safvat, Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 1991, 280 pp. + Compact Disc entitled Anthology of Persian Music: 1930–1990, $100.

Les Kurdes et le Kurdestan, Bibliographie critique 1977–1986

Abstracta Iranica (volume 5), ed. Joyce Blau, Tehran and Paris: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1989, xvi + 146 pp.

La Révolution française, la Turquie et l'Iran, special issue of the Cahier d'études sur la Méditerraée orientale et le monde turco‐iranien, no. 12 (Juin‐Décembre 1991), 161 pp., with additional articles and book reviews 264 pp.

The History of al‐Tabari, Volume 3: The Children of Israel, trans, and annot. William M. Brinner, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991, xii + 194 pp.

Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah, Marvin Zonis, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991, x + 350 pp.

Sufi Women, Javad Nurbakhsh, trans. Leonard Lewisohn, rev. ed., London: Khanigah‐i Ni'matullahi, 1990, xv + 263 pp., bibliography and index.

Die persische Gesellschaft unter Nasiru'd‐Din ?ah (1848–1896), Heinz‐Georg Migeod, Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1990, 430 pp.

States and Urban‐Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua, Farideh Farhi, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990, x + 147 pp., including notes, bibliography, and index, cloth $ 29.95.

Women's Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi (ed.), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990, Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs 25, 78 pp., $9.95.

A Shi'ite Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1885–1886: The Safarnameh of Mirza Mohammad Hosayn Farahani, ed., trans., and annot. Hafez Farmayan and Elton L. Daniel, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, xxxii + 380 pp.; cloth $40, paperback $17.95.     

Hair today,gone tomorrow: Analysing potential mercury exposure in 19th-century New Zealand gold miners using Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry

Toxic metal or element exposure has the potential to cause significant negative health effects in human populations. During the goldrushes of the colonial period, mercury amalgamation was one of the most common methods of extracting gold from alluvial deposits or crushed ore, and exposure to mercury was an occupational health hazard. In this study we examine mercury exposure in mining populations from New Zealand’s first major goldrush, which began in Central Otago in 1861. We explore mercury toxicity through laser ablation inductively coupled mass spectrometric analysis of archaeological hair and sediment samples associated with the Tuapeka goldfields. Our analysis highlights ubiquitous low-level mercury exposure on the goldfields, as well as one individual with such high mercury concentrations in their hair that we suspect direct mercury intake, perhaps medicinally, rather than from environmental contamination.     

Making the Dead Visible: Problems and Solutions for “Big” Picture Approaches to the Past,and Dealing with Large “Mortuary” Datasets

There can be few “bigger” questions than the nature and development of human experience and self-awareness and few better ways to study it than through the changing treatment of the dead over time. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, the ‘Invisible Dead’ project (Durham University) is exploring diachronic changes in mortuary practices across two regions: Britain and the Levant. In doing so, it uses archaeology as a way to approach fundamental questions about the human condition. This paper explores the principal difficulties faced during the construction of a database for this project and their wider relevance for the development of robust and successful methods for the study of large “mortuary” datasets in the future. It discusses the issues and biases identified within the mortuary record and how the project has sought to mitigate some of these. By adopting a flexible and ultimately expandable approach to data entry and analysis, value can be added to legacy datasets and “grey” literature, allowing us to make comparisons between regions which are both geographically and chronologically distinct.     

Modeling life expectancy and surplus production of dynamic pre-contact territories in leeward Kohala, Hawai‘i

Hawaiian territoriality evolved in response to the ecodynamics of changing populations set within shifting socio-political structures. Modeling agricultural surplus production and life expectancy of various prehistoric and protohistoric territorial configurations in the leeward Kohala dryland field system identifies the costs and benefits associated with dynamic territorial units. The results of the modeling indicate that if people lived autonomous lives within their territories the 18-km long landscape containing the field system would have been optimally divided into 14 territories. The archaeological and ethnohistorical data suggest that at European contact the area was divided into 32 generally smaller territorial units. This configuration, while lowering average life expectancy and increasing levels of spatial variability in surplus production, maximized average yearly surplus and reduced its temporal variability. Dividing the field system into 32 units provided opportunities for elite managers to monitor production and control the redistribution of resources. The modeling and archaeological data suggest selection occurred differentially among social units, with certain segments of society having enhanced fitness in terms of agricultural resources at the expense of others, while maximizing the potential for surplus generation and possible redistribution.     

Microscopical findings associated with the diagnosis of osteoporosis in palaeopathology

This paper presents some preliminary results on microscopical identification of microfractures in human skeletal remains which may be associated with osteoporosis. A technique is described for the examination of cancellous bone and applied to a number of vertebrae and one radius. All the material used is Romano-British or English medieval. However, microscopical screening for osteoporosis could form a useful part of comparative studies on historically or geographically different populations. The archaeological significance of osteoporosis in terms of skeletal ageing and nutritional status is discussed.