Ground-Motion Prediction Equations Based on Data from the Himalayan and Zagros Regions

This study derives ground-motion prediction equations for the horizontal elastic response spectral acceleration for 5% damping for application to the Indian Himalayas. The present equations include a consideration of site category (rock/soil) and style-of-faulting (strike-slip/reverse). Due to a lack of near-field data from India, additional strong-motion data have been included from the Zagros region of Iran, which has comparable seismotectonics to the Himalayas (continental compression). A set of 201 records from 16 earthquakes were used within the regression. The derived model predicts similar ground motions to previously published equations for the Himalayan region but with lower standard deviations.     

‘Le Temps du plastique’: The Critique of Synthetic Materials in 1950s France

The increasing pervasiveness of plastics in 1950s France was accompanied by a profoundly ambivalent critique of synthetic materials. Much postwar French culture tended to affirm traditional craft-based production, treating plastics with suspicion. Synthetic materials symbolised a ‘bad’ modernity, the emergence of a new consumer society of mechanised mass production and the death of an older artisanal way of life. More fundamentally, synthetics challenged the very notion of materials itself, questioning through their capacity for imitation and transformation the accepted identities and hierarchies of the material world. Works by Roland Barthes, Roger Vailland, Jacques Tati, Alain Resnais and Raymond Queneau engage with the implications of plastic, revealing a deep ambivalence about social and economic modernisation through their treatment of materials whose simultaneously polymorphous and homogeneous character both seduces and repels. Beginning as a project of demystification, the cultural critique of plastic ultimately reveals its complicity with what it ostensibly rejects.     

Where the battle rages: war and conflict in Post-Medieval Archaeology

SUMMARY: War and conflict has been well represented in Post-Medieval Archaeology over the last 50 years with a range of research exploring the archaeology of conflict in the modern world. The aim of this article is to review themes of war and conflict as presented in Post-Medieval Archaeology and to track the changing nature of their scope and focus, such as the move towards an increasingly multidisciplinary approach encompassing all aspects of human conflict. By highlighting key articles and innovative research, this article also reflects on the impact and influence of the journal on the burgeoning discipline of conflict archaeology.     

Book reviews

Etudes hégéliennes: Raison et décision. Bernard Bourgeois (Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, Questions, 1992). 404 pp. FF 198.00 paper.

Name, Hero, Icon: Semiotics of Nationalism through Heroic Biography. Anna Makolkin (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 264 pp. DM 148 cloth.

A History of Women in the West: II. Silences of the Middle Ages. Edited by Christiane Klapisch‐Zuber (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992).

Examination of Pharisaic Traditions. Exame das tradiçoes phariseas. By Uriel Da Costa. Facsimile of the only copy, Royal Library of Copenhagen. Supplement by Samuel Da Suva's Treatise on the immortality of the soul. Tratado da immortalidades da alma. Trans., notes and introduction by H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon (E. J. Brill: Leiden, New York, Köln, 1992) 578 pp. $143.00 cloth.

La transparence du mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes. By Jean Baudrillard (Paris: Galilée, 1990) 180 pp. (English translation: The Transparency of Evil: Essay on Extreme Phenomena [New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992] 200 pp.)

Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France. (Women in Culture and Society). By Penelope D. Johnson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) pp. xv, 294, £11.95/ $17.25 paper in the U.K. and Eire.

Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries. Edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 447 pp. m.p.g. paper.

Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, Paul Hoy‐ningen‐Huene, translated by Alexander T. Levin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 310 + xx pp. $40.00 cloth $15.95 paper.

Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth‐Century French Thought. By Martin Jay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) xi + 632 pp. $35.00 cloth $16.00 paper.

Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue. By Lester H. Hunt (London/New York, 1991) xxiii + 200 pp. £12.99 paper.

Empire, Welfare State, Europe: English History, 1906–1992 (Short Oxford History of the Modern World), 4th ed. By T. O. Lloyd (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1993) 587 pp. paper.

Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917. By Anna Geifman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) xii + 376 pp. $39.50 £32.50 cloth.

Thucydides, Hobbes and the Interpretation of Realism. By Laurie M. Johnson (DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993). xiv + 214 pp. $32.00 cloth.

Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age. By Luc Ferry, trans. by Robert de Loazia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) viii + 276 pp.

Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz: The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics. By R. S. Woolhouse (London and New York: Rout‐ledge, 1993) 214 pp., £10.00 paper.

Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers. By John Tolan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993) xv + 288 pp. £31.50 cloth £15.50 paper.

To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. By Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993) pp. ix + 705.

Speculative Freemasonry and the Enlightenment: A Study of the Craft in London, Paris, Prague, and Vienna. By R. William Weisberger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1993) vii + 244 pp. $52.00 cloth.

Spain's First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931–1936. By S. G. Payne (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 470 pp. £53.95 cloth £17.95 paper.

Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment. The Debate over Maladies des Femmes. By Lindsay Wilson (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) vii + 246 pp. cloth, n.p.g.

Pragmatism and Social Theory. By Hans Joas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 272 pp. $45.00 cloth $16.95 paper.

Karl Kautsky: Marxism, Revolution & Democracy. By John H. Kautsky (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Books, 1994) 256 pp. $32.95/£24.95 ISBN 1–56000–109–7.

The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes. By Mark Hulliung (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) 293 pp. $45.00 cloth.

What is Property? By Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, edited by Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) xxxviii + 225 pp. $49.95 cloth $16.95 paper.

Sophocles, 2 vols. Trans, and edited by Hugh Lloyd‐Jones, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1994) vii + 486 pp. and viii + 599 pp. $16.95 per volume, cloth.

The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello. By Margaret L King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) xviii + 484 pp. $22.95 paper $74.75 cloth.

Men Writing the Feminine: Literature, Theory and the Question of Genders. Edited by Thaïs E. Morgan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) vi + 207 pp. $16.95 cloth.

Stone. By John Sallis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994) 147 pp. $24.95 cloth $11.95 paper.

The Humanity of Thucydides. By Clifford Orwin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) x + 235 pp. n.p.g.

Bruno Kreisky: Chancellor of Austria. A Political Biography. By H. Pierre Secher (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 1994) vii + 223 pp. $17.85 cloth.

Visions of America since 1492. Edited by Deborah L. Madsen (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994) xv + 164 pp. $39.95 cloth.

Flying Out of This World. By Peter Greenaway (The Parti‐Pris Series) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) vi + 199 pp. £31.95/$45.95 paper £59.95/$86.25 cloth.

Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought. By Louis A. Sass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) x + 595 pp. n.p.g., paper.

Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker. By Julia Stapleton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 249 pp. £35.00/$59.95 ISBN 0–521–46125–1.

Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires. By Leslie Hill (Routledge, 1994) viii + 200 pp. £11.99 paper.

The Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis: Displacement of Evidence by Theory. By Donald P. Spence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) 228 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Nietzsche, God, and the Jews. By Weaver Santaniello (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) 232 pp. $17.95 cloth.

Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida. By Rodolphe Gasche (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) vii + 286 pp. $45.00 cloth $22.95 paper.

Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy. By Jonathan Steele (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) xviii + 427 pp. $27.95 cloth.

Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture. By John Gascoigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 324 pp. £35, $59.95.

National Cultures and European Integration: Explorative Essays on Cultural Diversity and Common Policies. Edited by Staffan Zetterholm (Oxford/Providence USA and Berg, 1994) vii + 175 pp. £24.95 cloth £12.95 paper.

English Mystics of the Middle Ages. Edited by Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) xi +311 pp. £37.50, $59.95 cloth.

Schumann and His World. Edited by R. Larry Todd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) xi + 396 pp. n.p.g.

English Traits: The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 5, Historical introduction by Philip Nicolof, notes by Robert E. Burkholder, text established and textual introduction and apparatus by Douglas Emery Wilson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) lxxiii + 433 pp. $65.00.

To Destroy Painting. By Louis Marin, trans. by Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) $49.95 cloth, $18.25 paper.

Italian Fascism, 1919–1945. By Philip Morgan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995) xii + 209 pp. $45.00.

Leaders and Masses in the Roman World: Studies in Honour of Zvi Yavetz. Edited by I. Malkin and Z. W. Rubinsohn (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1995) xviii + 243 pp. 110.00/ $63.00 cloth.

From Newton's Sleep. By Joseph Vining (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) xvii + 398 pp. cloth.

A Requiem for Karl Marx. By Frank E. Manuel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) xi + 255 pp. ISBN 0–674–76326–2, $24.95 cloth.

The Romans. Edited by Andrea Giardina, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) pp. x + 393 $15.95 paper.