Situated Creativity: A Way out of the Impasse of the Heidegger-Cassirer Debate

Summary

This paper criticizes the dualism of “thrownness” and “spontaneity” in Peter Gordon's interpretation of the Heidegger-Cassirer debate and shows that American pragmatism and other currents of thought offer an alternative in the form of a conception of situated creativity.     

An Ancient Irrigation Canal in the Pampa Tamarugal (Chile)

Southwest of Tarapacá Valley, in the Pampa Tamarugal of northern Chile, the remains of a canal were discovered running south for more than 6 km. Mapping and excavations indicated that this narrow (about 3 m) and shallow (about 0.5 m) construction was intended to divert water from the perennial Tarapacá River, combine this with occasional run-off from the mountains to the east, and irrigate a system of agricultural fields in a depression on the pampa. Several piles of rocks (cairns) and cleared lines (geoglyphs) were seen in the vicinity of the canal. The recovered pottery sherds were identified as belonging to the Pica-Charcollo tradition (800–1500 c.e.), while four radiocarbon dates from excavated wood and charcoal clustered around 1400–1600 c.e. This places the canal around the time of the colonization of the area by the Inka Empire, which made Tarapacá Valley into a regional center for mining and marine resources. The rationale behind its construction is likely a combination of the need to mitigate fluctuations in the availability of water for agriculture and the production of a larger food surplus.     

Notes from Batavia, the Europeans' graveyard: the nineteenth-century debate on acclimatization in the Dutch East Indies

Since the advent of European colonial expansion, medical theories of acclimatization have been inextricably related to convictions about the possibility and desirability of white settlement in the colonies, and political ideas of colonial governance. Before 1800, acclimatization theories emphasized the inherent flexibility of the human constitution and its ability to adapt to new environments. During the first half of the nineteenth century, European theorists came to highlight the vulnerability of white Europeans in the tropics to disease, degeneration, and death instead. They consequently argued that white settlement in the tropics was impossible and inadvisable. European physicians in the British and French colonies presented similar views. By contrast, their colleagues in the Dutch East Indies remained optimistic. They associated themselves with the colonial European settler community and shared their grievances against autocratic colonial rule. They presented medical theories which related acclimatization to prudent behavior, morality, and proper management of the environment, thereby downplaying the significance of climate and high temperatures. During the following decades, their views on acclimatization were transferred to the Netherlands, where they were deployed as an argument against the cultivation system, the then-current approach of colonial governance, which emphasized the trade of cash crops grown by the indigenous population, severely limited European settlement, and curtailed the rights of Europeans living in the Indies. Throughout the nineteenth century, the influence of climate and the possibility of acclimatization became recurring themes in debates about colonial governance in both the Dutch East Indies and the Netherlands.     

Minimally destructive DNA extraction from archaeological artefacts made from whale baleen

Here we demonstrate the successful extraction and amplification of target species DNA from artefacts made of whale baleen collected from excavations of past palaeo-Eskimo and Inuit cultures in Greenland. DNA was successfully extracted and amplified from a single baleen bristle of 1.5 cm length dated based on archaeological context to the period of the Saqqaq culture, more than 4000 years ago and following decades of storage at room temperature at the National Museum. The results reveal ancient baleen in archaeological material as a potential source of DNA that can be used for population genetic studies. We conclude that genetic investigation of historical baleen collections can contribute to our knowledge of the prehistoric population genetics of baleen whales, for example by quantifying the impact of modern whaling on the genetic diversity of bowhead whales.