Howden Church

Shrewsbury's late sixteenth-century Old Market Hall—recently restored and returned to public use—is among the most prominent buildings in the town centre and, or so it would seem, a reminder of the town's pre-eminence as a marketing centre in the central Marches in the early modern period. Combining documentary evidence, archaeology, and the evidence of the building itself, this inter-disciplinary study sets out to examine the real reasons for the Hall's construction, how it was built, and the way in which it functioned. The paper also looks backwards to the growth of marketing in this part of Shrewsbury in the thirteenth century, and its promotion by considerable civic investment in the 1260s when a new market square was created from what was previously a wet wasteland. Looking forward, it tells the story of the Hall's use in the post- medieval period, and of past attempts to deal with inherent structural defects in the original design.     

Ethnic Performance and the State in Laos: The Boun Greh Annual Festival of the Khmou

Following the 1975 revolution, the Laotian statesmen adopted a modernising discourse that targeted “backward” traditions as undesirable. But since the 1990s, authorities have mitigated this standpoint, distinguishing “good” from “bad” traditions according to their compatibility with the program of national development, and professing their will to (re)instate the former as suitable expressions of culture in a multi-ethnic nation. This is manifest everywhere from the National Constitution to TV shows and ethnic catalogues. This paper analyses the implementation of these principles through the case of the boun greh New Year festival, an invented ethnic tradition of the Khmou, the largest ethnic minority in Laos. The article demonstrates that this implementation has consequentially implied the adoption of a grammar of national ethnicity; that this official framework paradoxically allows the Khmou to articulate demands for better recognition of their group; and that this process does not mute expressions of “cultural intimacy” at variance with this matrix. The official frame of ethnicity has been eventually adopted by the Khmou, but this state effect has multiplied the layers of expressed ethnicity: it cannot be equated with a unilateral regimentation that would deprive the Khmou of their agency.     

Notice of an Example of Decorative Coloured Brickwork in the Neighbourhood of Rouen

The Mycenaean world of the late Bronze Age was one of domination and expansion. Such expansion can be seen in the distribution of Mycenaean ceramics in the eastern and western Mediterranean basin. In contrast to the west, Mycenaean culture in the east came into contact and perhaps conflict with well established cultural traditions and civilizations which had achieved a marked degree of sophistication. These native cultural traditions effectively limited the external growth of the Mycenaean world to the coastal fringes of the Near East. However, the impact of Mycenaean culture is evident, especially in the adaptation and imitation of ceramic styles and motifs typically classified as Mycenaean. Such influence is readily seen in south-western Turkey as Mycenaean cultural traditions penetrated inland to distant inland sites in the lower Maeander river valley.     

Morphometry of Middle Bronze Age palstaves. Part II – spatial distribution of shapes in two typological groups,implications for production and exportation

For archaeologists, metallic artifacts are key materials to assess Middle Bronze Age production areas and cultural exchanges. Here, a set of 629 bronze palstaves excavated in northern France, belonging to Breton and Norman typological groups, was treated by (open) outline-based morphometrics with orthogonal polynomial regression. Using robust statistics developed for outlier detection, these Norman and Breton palstave outlines can be divided into two groups: those for which the shape fluctuates close to the standard shape, called “congruent” axes, and those which are far enough from this standard to be considered as “non-congruent”, although they possess most of the features of the typological group. The highest density of discovery (whether congruent and non-congruent in shape) is in the extreme east of Brittany for the Breton axes, while the Norman axes are concentrated in northern Normandy, hence the choice of names. However, the distribution of congruent and non-congruent artifacts appears to be spatially dependent for the Norman group, and to a lesser extent for the Breton group, as there are proportionally more congruent specimens inside the supposed production areas than outside. This contradicts the generally accepted archaeological scheme which hypothesizes that all axes in a group originate from the same production center, and that some items were exported from there to supply neighboring regions. Other minor production centers probably existed, copying the original model with greater shape variation.     

The original spaciality of the body itself: phenomenology and neurosciences

The phenomenological tradition stands opposed to contemporary cognitive science in this, that so far from being a mere thing in the physical world, a thing whose mind would contain some mental representation, the lived body is constituted in its sense of being for the subject by being used and actively appropriated by this self-same subject, as agent. Though not already generally acknowledged, there are important similarities between this conception and one, which emerges from the literature of brain cartography over the last twenty years, that of a functional morphogenetic neurodynamics, induced and modulated by experience in a relatively autonomous way, in relation both to the anatomic structures of the body, as well as the cytoarchitectonic frontiers of brain tissue. Taking advantage of the latter similarities, neuroscientific data can be employed to confirm the Husserlian theory of constitution against the attempts on the part of cognitive science to discredit it, and this whether we are talking about its later modification at the hands of Merleau-Ponty or the original version, which is that of a subjective (transcendental) auto-constitution of the lived body on the basis of the practico-kinaesthetic experience of .