瑞士周末华文学校——一种全球性的社会迁移策略

本文根据对瑞士华文学校和华文夏令营的观察和对瑞士华人和台湾教师的访谈,描述了华人移民瑞士的主要情况及其多样化的网络和社会性;介绍了传授华文的组织机构概况和大陆与台湾在支持华文教育举措上的异同;分析探讨了在不同背景下认同类型的变化;意图反映受访者对＂文化＂和＂语言＂这两个概念的不同理解和阐释。主要观点是,保持这种被认定为统一的＂华人＂认同,是一种全球性的社会迁移策略,有助于他们更好地融入瑞士或者中国。     

Indispensable Sons: Negotiating reproductive desires in rural Vietnam

The decline in fertility that has taken place in most countries of Asia over the past few decades has presented a challenge to demographic theory. While most families have shrunk considerably in size and the desire for only a few children is shared by most, the importance of producing a male child has persisted in some regions and strata of many Asian societies. The clash between the desire for only a few children and for a male child causes many individuals to experience conflicting reproductive aspirations, particularly women, who are generally held responsible for the sex of their children and whose status depends on their production of male heirs. Based on ethnographic material, I document the different strategies women in rural northern Vietnam use throughout their reproductive years in their quest to have a son. I discuss the construction of reproductive desires with special attention to the need for a son, as such need was the most central element of discourses on reproductive desire in the narratives collected. The article also elaborates on how women maneuver to negotiate these desires between different scales: the local, particularly family, kin and community members; the national, more specifically Vietnam's two-child family planning policy; and the global, with its notions of a good family and of ‘good quality’ children.

Hijos Indispensables: Negociando los deseos reproductivos en Vietnam rural

La disminución de fertilidad que ha ocurrido en la mayor parte de países asiáticos durante las últimas tres décadas ha planteado un desafió a la teoría demográfica. Mientras que la mayoría de familias se ha reducido el tamaño y desean menos hijos, en algunos regiones y estratos de las sociedades asiáticas la importancia de producir un niño masculino ha persistido. El choque entre el deseo de tener menos hijos y un niño masculino resulta en que muchos individuos tengan aspiraciones contradictorias de reproducción, en particular las mujeres quien se responsabilizan generalmente del sexo de sus hijos y también quien depende en la producción de herederos masculinos para su posición social. Haciendo uso de material etnográfica, documento las estrategias distintas que utilizan las mujeres del campo de Vietnam del Norte en sus búsquedas de tener un hijo durante sus años reproductivos. Discuto la construcción de deseos reproductivos, fijándose en la necesidad de un hijo, ya que aquella necesidad era el elemento más central de los discursos de deseos reproductivos en las narraciones recopiladas. Este artículo elabora también en cómo las mujeres manejan negociar estos deseos entre diferentes escalas: la local, especialmente la familia, parientes, y miembros de la comunidad; la nacional, mas específico, la política vietnamesa de dos hijos por familia; y el global, con sus ideas de la familia buena y de niños ‘bien educados’.     

From photography to cinematography: recording movement and gait in a neurological context

The major challenge of photography has been freezing movement, to transform it into a fixed image or series of images. Very soon, photographers became interested in movement itself and tried to use photography as a tool to analyze movement. At the early stages, physicians interested in movement, perhaps surprisingly, made important technical contributions. Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, by Duchenne, the first book with physiological experiments illustrated by photographs, is a landmark in this historical development. At the Salpêtrière, thanks to Charcot, photography officially entered clinical neurology. Medical journals with photographs were actively developed by Bourneville. Londe established a clinical photographic laboratory and published the first book on medical photography. The study of animal and human movement by Muybridge and Marey in the 1880s led to chronophotography and later cinematography. Clinicians such as Dercum and Richer took advantage of these new techniques to study pathological movement and gait in neurological diseases.     

Scepticisme et politique

Scepticism is generally considered as leading to political conformity. But obedience to custom is not the only consequence of the separation between the private and the public spheres. The main result of this separation is to create an area of private life which is a space of freedom, away from the crowd and the authorities. It is thus easier to understand the sceptical stance in politics, advising the Prince secretly, while keeping out of the limelight. Above all, this helps us to appreciate the contribution of scepticism to modern conceptions of liberty in providing a social model for the free pursuit of truth.     

The Impact and Compensation of Offshore Wind Farm Development: Analysing the Institutional Discourse from a French Case Study

Abstract

In France, the public acceptability of marine renewable energies and their impacts on ecosystem services (ES) involves questions about compensation for stakeholders, who may perceive some of their activities and interests to be modified. This paper seeks to understand how impacts on ES are perceived by institutional stakeholders and what is expected in terms of compensation. It also seeks to identify the communities of practice affected. We focus our study on the planned offshore wind farm in the bay of Saint-Brieuc. Our results show that institutional discourse is heterogeneous, depending on sensitivities, interests, and who or what the stakeholders surveyed represent or defend. Stakeholders' discourse can be interpreted on various gradients of perception. Six distinct communities of practice have been identified, based on the impacts perceived by institutional stakeholders. Lastly, we show that the community of practice seems to be a proper level at which to study perceptions and assess the no-net-loss goal.     

Problems of Identification and Quantification in Archaeozoological Analysis,Part I: Insights from a Blind Test

In archaeozoology, counts are generally considered as replicable data that accurately represent the initial abundances of elements, individuals, or taxa, although perhaps only at the ordinal scale. However, few studies have tested these assumptions with control data. To improve our knowledge of these issues, we conducted a blind test that involved the analysis of two large experimental samples composed of modern ungulate specimens of known element and taxon. Because the samples differed in level of fragmentation, the blind test provides substantial information on the impact of bone processing on faunal identification and quantification. Our results suggest that Number of Identified SPecimens (NISP) and Minimum Number of Elements (MNE) provide measures of abundance for whole assemblages and for samples limited to non-long bones that are both replicable and accurate at the ratio scale. However, the same metrics generally failed, even at the ordinal level, to predict abundances in analyses restricted to long bones and long bone portions. Given these mixed results, it seems judicious, in agreement with the current majority view among archaeozoologists, to treat faunal tallies as ordinal-level information. Despite issues of reproducibility and the difficulty of aggregating counts with MNE, the blind test also indicates that this measure is more robust at predicting skeletal abundances than NISP. Substantial variations in rates of long bone fragmentation and identification probably explain the poorer performance of NISP in the blind test.     

Problems of Identification and Quantification in Archaeozoological Analysis,Part II: Presentation of an Alternative Counting Method

Archaeozoologists commonly use Number of Identified SPecimens (NISP) and Minimum Number of Elements (MNE) as measures of anatomical abundances. According to a blind test examining the reproducibility and accuracy of identifications of ungulate remains (Morin et al., Part I, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, doi: 10.1007/s10816-016-9300-4), NISP provides estimates of skeletal abundances that are less robust than those based on MNE. However, although results were improved with the latter method, MNE is not free of problems. Here, we show through an analysis of paired NISP-MNE data for 24 classes of elements that MNE is prone to inflate the representation of rare parts (as measured by NISP), a phenomenon more strongly expressed in certain elements than in others. Moreover, some elements show a wide scatter of points, which raises issues of data reproducibility. MNE is also known for being seriously affected by aggregation methods. These fundamental problems severely undermine the value of MNE as a measure of abundance. This article introduces an alternative counting method that avoids many of the weaknesses of MNE. This counting method, called the Number of Distinct Elements (NDE), focuses on the occurrence of pre-determined, invariant landmarks counted on mutually exclusive specimens. Preliminary experimental results suggest that NDE counts are robust predictors of skeletal, and perhaps taxonomic, abundances. Moreover, the NDE approach eliminates the complex and time-consuming task of spreading or drawing specimens to identify fragment overlap. Furthermore, NDE values are additive and easy to calculate. Given these features, the NDE approach represents a compelling alternative to MNE in archaeozoological analysis.