Rivet's Mission in Colonial Indochina (1931–1932) or the Failure to Create an Ethnographic Museum

By focusing on a transfer of a museological model from the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro to colonial Indochina, the paper examines the failure to create an ethnographic museum. The paper analyses, on the one hand, the collecting practices in the field and the circulation of knowledge, people, and objects from metropole to colony and vice versa. On the other hand, it seeks to highlight why Rivet and the École Française d'Extrême-Orient focused their research programme on the Montagnards from 1932 onwards at a time when French administration attempted to control the Highlands due to its strategic importance in terms of controlling Indochina. The concern with establishing ethnographic collections in Indochina extending from 1920s to 1938 attests the ways in which museums could be evolved in the governance of colonial populations. However, this concern underestimated the very fact that ethnographic museums differed for metropolitan populations and for colonizers.     

The ‘Semblance of Immortality'? Resinous Materials and Mortuary Rites in Roman Britain

There is increasing evidence for complexity in mortuary practices in Britain during the Roman period. One class of burials demonstrates an association between inhumation in stone sarcophagi or lead‐lined coffins, ‘plaster’ coatings, textile shrouds and natural resins. It has been suggested that this ‘package’ represents a deliberate attempt at body preservation. Fragments with a resinous appearance found in one such burial from Arrington, Cambridgeshire, UK were analysed using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. The triterpenic compounds identified are biomarkers for the genus Pistacia and provide the first chemical evidence for an exotic resin in a mortuary context in Roman Britain.     

Cerebral White Matter — Historical Evolution of Facts and Notions Concerning the Organization of the Fiber Pathways of the Brain

Gross and microscopic studies by early investigators led the cerebral white matter from being regarded as an amorphous mass to an intricately organized system of fasciculi that facilitate the highest expression of cerebral activity. Here we pay homage to the anatomists whose observations resulted in the evolution of ideas about the cerebral white matter. We also draw attention to limitations of the earlier methodologies and to some of the conflicts and controversies that have characterized this field and that persist in the current literature. We conclude with brief reference to the principles of organization of the fiber pathways derived from our studies in the monkey using the autoradiographic tract tracing technique, another step in the ongoing investigations of the cerebral white matter. This historical review has contemporary relevance because the fiber pathways of the brain are crucial components of the distributed neural circuits that subserve nervous system function; the clinical manifestations of white matter damage are recognized with greater frequency and clarity; and magnetic resonance imaging tractography has made it possible to view these fiber bundles within the living human brain.