Contested heritage at the Cape Town waterfront

Abstract

Cape Town's Victoria and Alfred Waterfront is a prime example of the international trend of revitalising economically defunct harbour areas for tourism and retail usage. This paper examines the various contested images of heritage evoked at the site during the period of South Africa's political transformation in the early 1990s:‐ a nostalgic perception of a harmonious past (by middle‐class Capetonians) versus a place of privilege and exclusion (by predominantly black working‐class inhabitants); academic concerns to commemorate the social history of the area versus commercial sensitivity to current marketing image; and the multiplicity of images in a postmodern space of spectacle and pastiche.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.     

Goble,Andrew Edmund,Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan： Buddhist Healing,Chinese Knowledge,Islamic Formulas,and Wounds of War

This PhD thesis deals with the infamous plundering of the Imperial garden Yuanmingyuan in the wake of the British-French capture expedition of 1860. The approach and the strategies of the British and French actors involved are described from a micro-perspective. In the nineteenth century, plundering took center stage in a number of actions by colonial armies worldwide, as discussed by the author, Ines Eben v. Racknitz.     

Investigating the processes necessary for satisfactory freeze-drying of waterlogged archaeological wood

Preliminary studies into methods for improving and safeguarding the preservation of waterlogged archaeological wooden artefacts are presented. Mannitol, sorbitol and trehalose have been tested as replacements for polyethylene glycol (PEG) as a treatment prior to freeze-drying of wooden archaeological objects. The highest anti-shrink efficiency achieved in this short experiment was (70 ± 15) % using a 20% weight per volume solution of sorbitol after soaking for one week. The collapse or eutectic temperature of each solution used was determined using a freeze-drying microscope. Importantly, it was noted that the collapse temperature of the solutions was reduced by several degrees after use for treatment of the wood samples for one month. A freeze-drying microscope with a cold light source has been used to observe the real-time freeze-drying behaviour of various treatments inside a thin section of wood, confirming that this novel technique is indeed possible and useful. Lastly, the effects of magnesium phytate as an iron chelator have been studied. It was found that the treatment lowers the collapse temperature of a PEG 600/2000 solution by roughly 3 °C meaning that objects must be freeze-dried at a correspondingly lower temperature. Iron K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy analysis showed that the treatment extracted approximately half of the iron(III) ions present in the timbers.     

But malice aforethought: cities and the natural history of hatred

I take as my starting point the fact that Western cities are often depicted as on the brink of catastrophe. Indeed some contemporary authors would argue that they have never been closer to that brink. The first part of this paper argues against this tendency by focusing on the preponderance of activities of repair and maintenance. Having looked at the state of this forgotten infrastructure, in the second part of the paper I turn to an examination of why this Cassandra interpretation is so prevalent. I argue that, in particular, it draws on wellsprings of misanthropy which are rarely voiced in writings on cities because sociality is too often confused with liking. Yet it seems vital to me to tackle misanthropy head on. Then, in the third part of the paper, I argue that currently there is a coming together in cities of all kinds of affective politics of concern which can act, through all manner of small achievements, as a counter to misanthropy but which do not mistake the practice of this politics for a search after perfection.     

The technology of early platinum plating: a gold mask of the La Tolita culture,Ecuador

A metallurgical study of platinum plating on a gold pendant of the La Tolita culture of northern Ecuador was carried out, using high‐magnification examination by scanning electron microscopy with analytical facilities. The plating layer was found to comprise a 25 µm thick foil of platinum grains sintered with a gold–silver alloy. The high silver content of this alloy suggests the deliberate selection of pale‐coloured, silver‐rich alluvial gold. The foil had been bonded on to the pre‐formed gold sheet by hammering and heating. It is postulated that a strip of gold sheet was plated by this method and that several pendants were cut from it.     

QUANTITATIVE METHODS FOR INVESTIGATING THE VARIABLES THAT UNDERLIE PREFERENCE FOR LANDSCAPE SCENES

A series of quantitative methods for investigating the basis for preference for landscape scenes was applied to photographs of alpine and subalpine landscapes in Alberta. The procedure incorporates a multidimensional scaling analysis with the repertory grid technique and also employs a property vector-fitting algorithm as an aid in interpreting the dimensional solution. The preferences of a sample group were based on three criteria. In order of importance, these are character of vegetation cover, depth of field, and elevation of terrain. Additional validation of the results was obtained through a principal components analysis of the repertory grid data.     

Archaeogenetic study of prehistoric rice remains from Thailand and India: evidence of early <Emphasis Type="Italic">japonica</Emphasis> in South and Southeast Asia

We report a successful extraction and sequencing of ancient DNA from carbonized rice grains (Oryza sativa) from six archaeological sites, including two from India and four from Thailand, ranging in age from ca. 2500 to 1500 BP. In total, 221 archaeological grains were processed by PCR amplification and primary-targeted fragments were sequenced for comparison with modern sequences generated from 112 modern rice populations, including crop and wild varieties. Our results include the genetic sequences from both the chloroplast and the nuclear genomes, based on four markers from the chloroplast and six from the nuclear genome. These markers allow differentiation of indica rice from japonica rice, the two major subspecies of Asian rice (O. sativa) considered to have separate geographical origins. One nuclear marker differentiates tropical and temperate forms of subspecies japonica. Other markers relate to phenotypic variation selected for under domestication, such as non-shattering, grain stickiness (waxy starch) and pericarp colour. Recovery and identification of sequences from nuclear markers was generally poor, whereas recovery of chloroplast sequences was successful, with at least one of four markers recovered in 61 % of archaeological grains. This allowed for successful differentiation of indica or japonica subspecies variety, with japonica identified in all the Thai material and a mixture of indica and japonica chloroplasts in the two Indian assemblages. Rice subspecies was also assessed through conventional archaeobotanical methods relying on grain metrics, based on measurements from 13 modern populations and 499 archaeological grains. Grain metrics also suggest a predominance of japonica-type grains in the Southeast Asian sites and a mixture of japonica and indica in the Indian sites with indica in the minority. The similar results of grain metrics and ancient DNA (aDNA) affirm that grain measurements have some degree of reliability in rice subspecies identification. The study also highlights the great potential of ancient DNA recovery from archaeological rice. The data generated in the present study adds support to the model of rice evolution that includes hybridization between japonica and proto-indica.