Madonna and Child of Soweto: Black Life Beyond Apartheid and Democracy

ABSTRACT

South African artist Laurence Vincent Scully’s 1973 painting, Madonna and Child of Soweto, offers an analytical tool for understanding the capacity of public religion to advance black life. The author argues that this image censures apartheid violence against black persons and reimagines a just sociality by displaying sacred, black motherhood and infancy in the figures Mary and Jesus. Their temporality and corporeality, when analyzed with a queer womanist method, gestate sacred public religion that exceeds both the apartheid governance of the past and also the secular, post-apartheid democracy of today.     

Performing identity within a multicultural framework

The role of music in community festivals is often to assist in constructing a particular identity of place, and music functions in such instances as a means to provide a sense of belonging for participants. However, multicultural festivals complicate any simple relationship between place and identity, because such festivals demonstrate the heterogeneous state of both identity and place. Anxieties that arise around issues of cultural authenticity within such festivals point to concerns of hybrid identities that may challenge and threaten the maintenance of clearly demarcated identities in the face of transnational relations. Drawing on ethnographic material and theoretical conceptualizations of the self, this paper explores the dynamic and fluid constructions of identity at two Australian community music festivals, and raises questions on the sorts of practices that seek to regulate the ways in which these identities are constituted and performed.     

Obituary—The Rev. Robert Mackenzie,M.A.

Abstract

This paper examines how CCTV-assisted bird-watching mediates people's relationship with a particular representation of an animal world. By focusing on people's interpretations and responses to CCTV camera technology at three bird-watching sites around Scotland, it is argued that the use of CCTV technology represents a qualitatively different mode of engaging with birds which has bearing on how this mediated animal world appears in and to people's everyday lives. It is asserted that the spatial relations invoked in the act of looking at birds through a CCTV lens inscribe a conceptual hyper-separation between see-er and seen that serve to normalise a vision of humanity inherently separate from and dominant over the wildlife on screen. As a technologically mediated way of seeing, the paper explores the use of CCTV cameras as inscribing particular ‘ways of being’ that serve to define and limit people's conduct towards the birds on view. By drawing attention to the conservation discourses that support, and are supported by the use of CCTV-assisted bird-watching, it is argued that the notion of ‘keeping an eye on nature’ is embedded in a cultural agenda that assists with the construction of nature as tele-visual commodity.     

Establishing collagen quality criteria for sulphur isotope analysis of archaeological bone collagen

Sulphur isotope measurements of bone collagen from archaeological sites are beginning to be applied more often, yet there are no clear criteria to assess the quality of the collagen and therefore the validity of the sulphur isotope values. We provide elemental data from different methods (DNA sequences, amino acid sequences and mass spectrometric measurements) which are used to establish a reliable system of quality criteria for sulphur isotope analyses of bone collagen. The difference in the amount of sulphur from fish and mammalian collagen type I led to the suggestion to use different criteria to assess the in vivo character of the collagen between these two categories. For establishing quality ranges, the bone collagen of 140 modern animals were analysed. The amount of sulphur in fish and mammalian bone collagen is 0.63 ± 0.08% and 0.28 ± 0.07%, respectively. Based on these results we define for mammalian bone collagen an atomic C:S ratio of 600 ± 300 and an atomic N:S ratio of 200 ± 100, and for fish bone an atomic C:S ratio of 175 ± 50 and an atomic N:S ratio of 60 ± 20. These quality criteria were then applied to 305 specimens from different archaeological contexts.     

Engaging in the disablement process over space and time: narratives of persons with multiple sclerosis in Ottawa, Canada

This article presents an interpretive analysis of the narratives of 15 men and women who have been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) living in the city of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Relatively little is known about how people who are affected by MS cope with the challenges posed by social and physical barriers in their environment. Our research investigates two objectives: (1) to explore how those who have developed MS cope with their disease and resulting impairments, both in terms of the bodily experiences of becoming a chronically ill person and in terms of how they cope with changing relationships, changing identities and challenges in their physical environment; and (2) how they engage in the process of disablement over time and space as a result of these changing social and spatial relationships. We argue that the physical body and its social placings in public and private spaces are intertwined and both affect experiences of health, ability, impairment, disability and chronic illness. We further argue that these relationships are experienced across time and space, and in place, as people who have developed a chronic illness, such as MS, engage in, with and through the process of disablement. This article demonstrates the need for researchers to pay more attention to the role and significance of the simultaneity of space, place and time in shaping the experiences of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, as it has been shown that these variables played a significant role in regulating the everyday experiences of this study's respondents.     

王伟忠带你翱翔新西兰

当轰轰作响的小飞机在皇后镇海拔5000米高空打开舱门时,每个人都能感到剌骨的寒意。跳伞体验者此时-与自己的教练“绑”在一起,等待指令完成这次挑战自我的过程。巨大的噪声掩盖了其他声音,交流只能靠简单的手势,但这样的氛围更加重了每个人内心的恐惧。     

Probing dietary change of the Kwädąy Dän Ts'ìnchį individual,an ancient glacier body from British Columbia: II. Deconvoluting whole skin and bone collagen δC values via carbon isotope analysis of individual amino acids

The remains of the Kwäd?y Dän Ts'ìnch? individual, a frozen male human, were recovered from a retreating glacier within the Tatshenshini-Alsek Park in British Columbia in August 1999. In order to provide information on both the geographical origin of this individual and low long he spent in the remote interior region prior to his death, molecular analysis and compound-specific carbon isotope analyses were performed on individual amino acids purified from his skin and bone. Gas chromatographic quantification of constituent amino acids of both tissues revealed a molecular distribution characteristic of collagen, dominated by glycine and to a lesser extent proline, hydroxyproline and alanine. Chiral gas chromatography indicated that protein preservation in both tissues was exceptional. Carbon isotope analysis of a faunal assemblage from an earlier prehistoric site from southern British Columbia provided reference dietary amino acid δ¹³C values for terrestrial (deer and domestic dog) and marine species (salmon and sealion), showing clear separation in all amino acids, particularly glycine which was extremely ¹³C-enriched in the marine animals. The distinction between terrestrial and marine organisms was increased by exploring Δ¹³C_{Glycine-Phenylalanine} values (6.6 ± 0.6‰ and 15.0 ± 2.1‰, respectively), which were higher in the latter by approximately 8‰, mirroring the increased δ¹⁵N_{Bulk collagen} values observed for the marine animals (R² = 0.78; p < 0.001). The Kwäd?y Dän Ts'ìnch? individual's bone had a similarly elevated Δ¹³C_{Glycine-Phenylalanine} value of 15.6 ± 1.0‰, indicating his extreme reliance on marine dietary resources throughout early life. The skin amino acid δ¹³C values were consistently lower than those observed for bone, with a concurrently lower Δ¹³C_{Glycine-Phenylalanine} value of 12.7 ± 0.9‰. The shift between the carbon isotope composition of bone (long-term diet) and skin amino acids (short-term diet) confirmed a sudden divergence away from marine food sources in the last months of life, consistent with his discovery 80 km inland.