Who governs culture? Actors,federalism and expertise in Swiss regional cultural policy

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a novel approach to cultural policies and cultural policy change, drawing on public policy and institutional analysis to study how decision-making power is distributed between actors in the public and private sectors and at different state levels, as well as the precise roles of public administrations, elected officials and cultural actors. Indeed, rather than directly defining cultural policy, laws on culture mostly designate actors in charge of policy implementation. Based on an empirical application of this analytical framework to the case of Swiss cantons and focusing specifically on the positions of cultural actors, findings show that cultural policies are transformed in different ways, affording more or less power to actors from the cultural sector in implementation arrangements generally dominated by administrative actors.     

Exploring Roman Ritual Behaviours Through Plant Remains from Pannonia Inferior

The recovery of new plant remains from eastern Croatia are discussed here in order to determine their ritual significance and how this evidence may fit into chronological and regional observations on ritual plant offerings in the Roman world. Samples collected from inhumations, cremations and an altar dedicated to Silvanus Domesticus, dating from the 2nd to 4th centuries AD, are presented and show that a range of more ‘common’ plant remains, such as cereals and pulses, were an important part of ritual life. These results are also compared to the growing archaeobotanical data collected from shrine and cremation burials across Europe. Although the archaeobotanical data from the Croatian sites are limited, the increasing evidence of ritual plant use allows observations regarding the wider context of Roman social and religious change.     

The Early Modern Sensorium: The Rosary in Seventeenth-Century Rome†

My purpose in this article is to explore the relationship between emotion and the senses in relation to the rosary and rosary confraternities in seventeenth-century Rome, with a particular emphasis on the experience of women.The rosary is well suited to an approach grounded in sensory methodology, as it is defined both as a prayer and as an object. As a object it was always kept close to the body. Praying the rosary was not only tactile (each bead was handled during prayer) but also auditory, as the prayer was said aloud. Scented rosaries were also common, adding an olfactory component to the ritual. The sense of sight was also important: as confraternities of the rosary obtained their own chapels, large altarpieces of the Madonna of the Rosary were commissioned as visual aids to prayer. Artists incorporated haptic and olfactory prompts into these images, knowing that the audience would be praying in front of them. The rosary, therefore, constituted a ‘sensorium’, defined here as the intertwining and interdependence of multiple sense modalities.The complex interaction in the rosary between prayer, bead and the scenes from the mysteries, developed gradually from older tradition of prayer beads, which is summarised here.     

‘We’re not very good at soccer’: gender,space and competence in a Victorian primary school

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on findings from a pilot project conducted at an inner city primary school in Melbourne, Australia. Inviting grade six girls and boys (aged eleven and twelve) to focus on spaces of their schoolground, we learned about the ways in which gender, age, ethnicity, language ability and sporting competence influenced active play and belonging. Informed by the understanding that schoolgrounds, gender and active play are socially constructed, and children are active agents in these constructions, the paper examines how girls and boys consider and negotiate spatial politics. The methods of participant-led photography, focus groups and thematic analysis, reveal how children understand gendered spatialities. A strong story emerged of girls’ experience of exclusion from active play spaces in particular, providing a perspective on the spatial and social performance of gender. The findings highlight the value of integrating a spatial analysis of schoolgrounds – and the gendered dynamics therein – for health, education and equity programmes.