VICO'S NEW SCIENCE AND A NEW POETIC PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

This review essay discusses Giambattista Vico and the New Psychological Science, which contains seven essays that challenge traditional anthropological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions that define psychology as a social science and instead interpret it as an embodied understanding of human cultural activity. The authors use Vico's New Science to support this endeavor because, they suggest, it traces the creation of human existence from a prehuman animal state with the agency of poiesis, an embodied meta‐phoric language and social practices that are inseparable from that language. This effort is a potentially transformative reinterpretation of Vico, whose verum factum principle scholars interpret as challenging Cartesian epistemology. Identifying the true with the made, Vico's principle limits human knowing to what humans make—that is, their historical world. The authors rightly emphasize the embodied nature of making with poetic language and social practices. However, they undermine the significance of that embodiment by assuming that knowing what is made with poiesis is, like traditional understandings of knowledge, epistemic. Thus, they implicitly retain humanism's metaphysical assumption that grounds epistemology: humans know intelligible reality because they are dualistic beings who possess rational, subjective natures. By contrast, I claim that Vico's poetic humanism is a more radical move from traditional humanism's belief in epistemology toward a culturally active anthropology. For Vico, bodily skills of perception, memory, and imagination create a metaphoric language based on random perceptions, images, and sounds. This metaphoric language is inseparable from social practices and physical skills, creating a meaningful human world. The making achieved by embodied poetic language cannot lead to epistemic knowledge; it can only lead to the self‐referential hermeneutic understanding that humans are the creators of their human existence. Vico's verum factum is not an epistemological principle in the Cartesian tradition but an ontological unity of knowing and making through sociophysical skills that are inseparable from poetic language. Humans make their ontologically real, meaningful human world and know themselves as its creators.     

Pneumatic Networks as Geographs

The Jordan–Sylvester graph center theorem provides an established and well‐known method for calculating the center of a graph. We visualize this theorem in the context of a historical network, the Berlin Rohrpost of 1901, and interpret that visualization using contemporary visualization tools (Google Earth). Technology serves to bridge a visualization gap over time and, through this example, suggests direction for updating other historical studies. It also serves to guide further the direction of methodological research in regard to space filling as Fractalyse software offers planners ideas of how densely packed, with network nodes, an urban environment might become over time. El teorema del centro del gráfico de Jordan‐Sylvester (Jordan 1869), proporciona un método establecido y bien conocido para calcular el centro de un gráfico. Visualizamos este teorema en el contexto de una red histórica, la de Berlín Rohrpost de 1901 e interpretamos dicha visualización utilizando herramientas contemporáneas de visualización (Google Earth). La tecnología sirve para llenar el vacío de visualización a través del tiempo y a través de este ejemplo indica la dirección para actualizar otros estudios históricos. También sirve para guiar la investigación metodológica en lo que respecta a la ocupación de espacios ya que el software de Fractales ofrece a los planeadores ideas acerca de qué tan densamente ocupado de nodos puede un medio urbano volverse con el tiempo. Jordan–Sylvester 图中心理论(Jordan 1869)提供了一种确定的且广为人知的图中心计算方法。本文在1901年的柏林Rohrpost的历史网络中对该理论进行了可视化,并利用现代可视化工具（Google Earth）对可视化结果进行了说明。本文填补了早期研究中可视化技术的缺失,为提升其他历史研究提供了方向。同时也为空间填充方法研究指引了新方向,由于Fractalyse软件能不规划人员提供网络节点密集填充方案,这样可以演示一个城市环境随着时间逐渐形成的过程。     

The Beginnings of Word Order Change in the Arabic Dialects of Southern Iran in Contact with Persian: A Preliminary Study of Data from Four Villages in Bushehr and Hormozgan

This preliminary study explores the hypothesis that Arabic dialects spoken on the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf exhibit the beginnings of contact-induced shift in word order from VO to OV. Although the basic VO order is still stable, there is some variation even in this very limited data set. Specifically two phenomena point to a change in progress: clause-final copulae and auxiliaries that are placed after the lexical verb, lending further evidence to the observation that a clause-final copula is an areal feature of western Asia. The study also investigates semantic and pragmatic factors that influence word order choice, pointing to a strong effect of information structure in terms of narrow focus and theme-rheme partition. Furthermore, the study also reveals an effect of semantic role, specifically as far as the preferred placement of goals and recipients in post-verbal position is concerned.     

Good Tongues,Bad Tongues: Denunciation,Rumour and Revenge in the French Basque Country, 1943–1945

This article provides the first ethnographic study of denunciation and rumor during the Gernam Occupation and its aftermath. In one French Basque village, “a good tongues” accused a female shopkeeper of adultery, multiple denunciations and economic collaboration with the enemy. She, in turn, played wtth “public rumour”, a product of human communication and imagination that citizens constantly reshaped as they evaluated and responded to accusations of wrongdoing. By making public, oral denunciations to the Germans, the shopkeeper competed with a female arch rival in the Resistance.

Basques had their own traditional means of sanctioning moral treachery in their community. I show how one particular practice, La Jonchée, provided an anonymous, non‐violent alternative to female head‐shaving, carried out by men who wished to punish women for sexual collaboration.     

Nursing mothers and feeding bottles: reconstructing breastfeeding and weaning patterns in Greek Byzantine populations (6th–15th centuries AD) using carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios

Traditionally, documentary evidence (mainly medical works and the vitae and miracles of saints) served as the primary source of information for perinatal nutrition in the Byzantine era. In the last decade, however, stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis has also been applied for the reconstruction of Byzantine breastfeeding and weaning practices. This paper reviews the documentary evidence for Byzantine weaning and compares it to isotopic data for eight Greek Byzantine skeletal samples from the sites of Eleutherna, Kastella, Messene, Sourtara, Stylos, Nemea, Petras and Servia (6th–15th centuries AD). The documentary evidence suggests that Byzantine children were weaned at a relatively late age. The age patterning of the stable isotope data is not as clear as normally seen at single sites. However, the presence of a higher proportion of elevated values in juveniles aged three years or less suggests that weaning was completed by the fourth year—a pattern consistent with the written sources. The data available from this study allow us to make some tentative suggestions about cultural and temporal differences in weaning, and to recommend directions for further research. A comparison of the Byzantine data presented here to data published for Roman-era sites from the Mediterranean and Western Europe suggests that the Byzantines maintained a Roman-era practice of relatively late weaning. In contrast, medieval data for Western Europe and the few measurements made on post-Byzantine Greek material suggest more variation, with some groups weaning late and others weaning earlier, by two years of age.     

A new method of dentine microsampling of deciduous teeth for stable isotope ratio analysis

Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratio analysis of dentine is a powerful tool for examining early childhood diet in past populations. Serial sampling of the dentine can reconstruct an individual's changing diet. Previous serial studies have used homogenized samples that give broad results for age categories. This study presents a new dentine microsampling technique for use in stable isotope ratio analysis that provides stable isotope signals for three important juvenile life stages: fetal life, breastfeeding, and weaning.