Intangible cultural heritage and the better angels of folklore’s nature

Abstract

Folklore research in the United States typically is completed either through academic departments or in organisations designed to create public presentations of traditional expressive culture. These two approaches are termed ‘academic folklore’ and ‘public folklore’. The intellectual history of both approaches has recently been critiqued. One result of this deconstruction is an ambivalence over the historical legacy of key concepts in the study of folklore. Assessing elements of the critical study of folklore’s history – in both academe and the public sector – suggests opportunities for reconstituting the study of traditional culture to establish a more socially responsive approach that is relevant to ways that heritage professionals assess folklore as intangible culture heritage.     

An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect

This paper contributes to a rethinking of the ethical sensibilities of geographical research in the context of an emerging interest amongst geographers in non-representational registers of thinking and moving. Rather than undermining geographical engagements with questions of the ethical, the paper argues that this emerging interest in questions of the non-representational actually extends the range and repertoire of empirical contexts and conceptual vehicles within and with which such an engagement can take place. The paper argues that attending to and through the relation between affect and ethics is particularly important to this effort. The importance of affect in this regard is illustrated through a series of examples drawn from an 18-month participatory encounter with a specific therapeutic practice, Dance Movement Therapy. Drawing upon such examples, the paper offers some lines of ethical potential that might provide orientation to further geographical research. In doing this, the paper concentrates in particular on the necessity of cultivating a fidelity to the affective event of geographical ethics as much as remaining faithful to the subject or object of an ethical code.     

Bruce Smith,Edward Shann,W.K. Hancock: The Economic Critique of Democracy in Australia

This paper argues that there were a number of writers in Australia from the late 1880s to the early 1930s who developed what is best described as an economic critique of the workings of democracy. The three writers considered by this paper, Bruce Smith, Edward Shann and W.K. Hancock, all developed critiques of Australian democracy along similar lines. The central feature of their argument was that Australian majoritarian democracy was making poor policy decisions because it attempted to override the laws of economics in the name of the popular will and ethics. They seemed to have believed that this problem would only be resolved once Australia possessed a mature and economically literate population.     

Petrography as a technique for investigating Iroquoian ceramic production and smoking rituals

Petrographic data and macroscopic observations are used to examine some of the social contexts and functional considerations underlying the production of pottery containers and smoking pipes at Antrex, a Middle Ontario Iroquoian village site located in southern Ontario. Results suggest that while pottery was produced by small groups of people for widespread consumption within the community, pipes were made by individuals for their own personal use. Overall, this research supports the hypothesis that by the beginning of the Late Woodland period, a shift away from communal ritual practices led by ritual specialists or shamans had occurred. Smoking might have, in some contexts, become a solitary religious experience.     

Thermoluminescence as a technique for determining the nature and history of small solar system particles

The thermoluminescence phenomenon has been used for pottery dating and radiation dosimetry for sixty years and for forty years has been applied to the study of meteorites, being successful in quantifying metamorphic histories and providing new insights into terrestrial age and orbits. Here we review some of the fundamental properties of thermoluminescence with particular focus on the study of small extraterrestrial particles. We suggest that natural TL data can be used to identify the burial and release history of cometary particles and that induced TL measurements can provide in-sights into the mineralogy of particles (even when largely amorphous) and the metamorphic history of those particles. We illustrate the use of TL to study small particles by describing recent studies on micrometeorites and 10–100 μm fragments taken from the matrix of a meteorite Semarkona which is type 3.0 ordinary chondrite.     

Dynamic Stability and Design of C-Bent Columns

Symmetrically reinforced bridge columns with a horizontal cantilever in one direction, called C-bent columns, tend to deform predominantly in the direction of applied moment when subject to strong earthquake shaking. For this reason, the strength in the direction of applied moment is generally increased in design. This article describes the use of inelastic dynamic time history analyses with a suite of ground motion records to quantify the amount of strength increase required to minimize likely peak and permanent displacement demands. It is shown that the strength should be increased by approximately 2.3 times the applied moment in design.