The Value of Culture: Congolese Art and the Promotion of Belgian Colonialism (1945–1959)

Based on the scholarship of Frans M. Olbrechts and the changes implemented in the Museum of the Belgian Congo during his directorship (from 1947 until 1958), this article argues that the institutionalization of African artefacts as art served the late Belgian colonial regime in promoting its renewed postwar commitment to the Congolese colony. In their reinvention as art and subsequent re-installation in modernist displays, the objects acquired not only a cultural, but also an economic and political value as resources, which led to their co-option in the mise-en-valeur, or valorization, of the colony and fuelled a colonial rhetoric that replaced an earlier emphasis on the civilizing mission with a construction of cultural guardianship based on the universal value of the objects as art.     

New models of North West European Holocene palaeogeography and inundation

This paper presents new 500 year interval palaeogeographic models for Britain, Ireland and the North West French coast from 11000 cal. BP to present. These models are used to calculate the varying rates of inundation for different geographical zones over the study period. This allows for consideration of the differential impact that Holocene sea-level rise had across space and time, and on past societies. In turn, consideration of the limitations of the models helps to foreground profitable areas for future research.     

Intangible heritage embodied and Intangible heritage

Over the past decade, intangible cultural heritage (hereafter, ICH), the significance which it possesses and the continuation of its myriad manifestations have reached unprecedented levels of recognition and attention on international and national policy agendas. Traditional Medicine (hereafter, TM) has long been included under the vast umbrella of ICH, yet there have been few attempts to explore that relationship. This paper examines the practical implications of applying the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage to TM, alongside the relationship of traditional medicine to the fields of human rights, public health and development. It considers, and reaches the conclusion that the cultural significance of traditional medicine combined with the fundamental principles of the Convention render the Convention significant in safeguarding traditional medicine for the future.     

Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and Late-Victorian Dress Culture

This article explores how the late-Victorian poets Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote under the collaborative pseudonym Michael Field, used fashionable dress to construct and advertise their unique poetic identity. Using evidence from their journal Works and Days, I contextualise Bradley and Cooper's clothing in terms of late-Victorian dress culture, and the major dress reform movements of the nineteenth century. I demonstrate that Bradley and Cooper used fashion as a distinctively feminine way of participating in aesthetic culture, marking significant life events, and to advertise their poetic identity. This self-fashioning also exposed them to aesthetic scrutiny from their peers Oscar Wilde and Bernard Berenson. Finally, I argue that fashion played a crucial role in Bradley and Cooper's desire for one another – and that this desire can be understood in terms of erotic reciprocity.     

On reductionism and emergence in geomorphology

Much geomorphological enquiry has been devoted to the understanding of landscapes via the construction of models based on the relationships between process and form. This paper examines the philosophical, theoretical and practical problems involved in bridging the gap between studies of geomorphological processes and explanations of landscape development. It argues that process geomorphology is essentially reductionist and discusses the practical and logical limitations of such an approach to science. It suggests that landscapes are emergent phenomena and, by drawing from the philosophical and practical lessons derived from the physics of non-linear systems, demonstrates that they are not amenable to reductionist explanations.