Arrested: Orangutan sexuality and the rehabilitation of wildness through captivity in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

How is sexuality pivotal for paradoxically both proving and causing rehabilitation? This paper engages a captor’s interest in the sexual lives of captives, specifically at a wildlife centre for displaced, semi-wild orangutans on Malaysian Borneo. It suggests a bigger problem in captivity at large: rehabilitation might always be an impossible horizon.     

Moving with the Times: An oral history of a geography department

The 30-year story of the geography department at Oxford Brookes University is presented as an oral history in the words of the experienced full-time staff. The department has gained a reputation in the UK and beyond for innovative active-learning methods and its story is an example of how a pedagogic culture can develop in a geography department. The story can also be read as a case study of a workplace in higher education, or as a contribution to the history of education. Most importantly, though, it offers insight into the key factors concerning the development of innovative teaching practice.     

Northern Laboratories of Nature and the Quest for Scientific Honour in Early Modern Sweden

Abstract

This article studies the role of climate and geography in the scientific networks which were taking form in Europe in the early modern period. It seeks to contribute to an analysis of the meanings attributed to the North as a scientific environment or an object of study and, in particular, show the wider contextual motivations behind the research of the northern lights as well as phenomena related to physical cold. The analysis will concentrate on the learned discussions taking place between scholars in the Kingdom of Sweden and the Académie des Sciences in Paris. The great scholarly interest in the aurora borealis starting in the early eighteenth century emerged rapidly after the sudden appearance of this striking and enigmatic phenomenon across a large part of Europe during the first decades of the eighteenth century. In a similar manner, cold winters experienced all over Europe during the late seventeenth century had inspired the first scientific societies in Europe to carry out experiments that under ordinary circumstances could not have been pursued. These events underlined the dependency of early empiricists on nature's help when extending the scope of their scientific inquiries. The awareness of the constraints of empirical study, combined with a new ideological view of scientific societies as seats of a collective scientific effort, prompted a new kind of specialization in science. The idea was introduced that each scholar or country should take care of producing experiments and observations that were best attainable in their particular environment. The need became most obvious in research topics such as the cold which – unlike heat – could not be produced artificially. As a demand for observations that were specific to northern tracts emerged in Europe, northern scholars discovered in their expertise on the northern issues a niche to negotiate a new prestige in the European scientific networks. Traditional views had maintained that only the warm, southern climates offered a natural environment for civilisation and arts to flourish. New empirical sciences practised by the scientific societies seemed to provide a convenient break with this assumption.     

The Role of the Societas Meteorologica Palatina (1781–1792) in the History of Auroral Research

Abstract

The Societas Meteorologica Palatina, or Meteorological Society of Mannheim, was set up in 1781 to coordinate observations of the weather on an international scale. In addition to temperature, pressure and humidity, observers connected to the network were instructed to record various atmospheric phenomena, among these the aurora borealis. The 39 stations of the network reported about 1400 individual sightings of auroras during the Society's dozen years of existence. The reported sightings are subjected to a statistical analysis that brings out striking discrepancies between the number of auroras that one would expect and the number that was reported. The statistical analysis is supplemented by an analysis of the theoretical and phenomenological comments in the Society's annual reports. The study suggests that observers on the Continent considered themselves just as advantageously situated as observers further north when trying to solve the riddle of the northern lights. It also illustrates the variety of conflicting ideas about the aurora borealis that existed during the late Enlightenment, and how these might have influenced the number of reported auroras. This lack of consensus contributed to many anomalies in the data presented in the Society's reports. By combining linguistic and scientific competence it is possible to shed light on these anomalies and on the historical context that shaped them.     

Foucault, fields of governability, and the population–family–economy nexus in China

It was only in the early twentieth century that China discovered that it had a population, at least if a population is understood not as a simple number of people but instead in terms of such features as variable levels of health, birth and death rates, age, sex, dependency ratios, and so on—as an object with a distinct rationality and intrinsic dynamics that can be made the target of a specific kind of direct intervention. In 1900, such a developmentalist conception of the population simply did not exist in China; by the 1930s, it pervaded the entire social and political field from top to bottom. Through a reading of a series of foundational texts in population and family reformism in China, this paper argues that this birth of the Chinese population occurred as a result of a general transformation of practices of governing, one that necessarily also involved a reconceptualization of the family and a new logic of overall social rationalization; in short, the isolation of a population–family–economy nexus as a central field of modern governing. This process is captured by elaborating and extending Foucault's studies of the historical emergence of apparatuses (dispositifs) into a notion of fields of governability. Finally, this paper argues that the one-child policy, launched in the late 1970s, should be understood not in isolation from the imposition of the “family-responsibility system” in agriculture and market reforms in exactly that period, but as part—mutatis mutandis—of a return to a form of governing that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century.     

Pig domestication and husbandry practices in the middle Neolithic of the Wei River Valley,northwest China: evidence from linear enamel hypoplasia

Linear enamel hypoplasia is a physical deficiency occurring during the process of enamel formation and it is visible on the crowns of mammal teeth. It can be used to trace physical stresses during life. In this study, linear enamel hypoplasia in samples of pigs from three Neolithic sites in the Wei River valley (China) were recorded and analysed, to investigate the status of pigs at these sites, their living conditions, and furthermore to explore husbandry strategies for pigs during the Neolithic in the valley. The results suggest a domesticated status for pigs in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age. Also the frequency of LEH occurrence for the pigs corroborates a presumed intensification processes of pig husbandry, and the presence of environmental fluctuations during the period are considered. Some evidence also points to the fact that for pig, spring farrowing was the most common reproductive strategy in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age in this region.     

论“半启门”

"半启门"(以往习称"妇人启门")是中国古代绘画和雕刻中常见的一个画面,从汉代开始出现,唐辽宋金元时期再度盛行。本文讨论了这种图像的形式特征,以及这种形式与古代墓葬意义之间的关联。     

首阳斋藏■器与西周宗法社会的贵族教育

本文对新近公布的首阳斋藏西周早期簋铭文作以考释,认为其反映了西周早期宗法社会贵族的教育问题,并得出了庶子虽不能直接继承祖考职事,但才艺考核优秀者亦可被任以官职的结论。簋铭文为研究周代贵族子弟尤其是庶子的教育和任官问题提供了新材料。     

中日早期招商局借款考

1877年前后,中日之间曾经有过一次鲜为人知的轮船招商局借款交涉。为筹集收购旗昌轮船公司的款项,招商局会办朱其诏曾经向日本探询借款之事,日本也派人到上海与其谈判。双方虽然有过几次会谈,但在抵押品、利息等问题上存在分歧。此议最终由于种种原因而不了了之。然而这次短暂的谈判却非常特殊,它不仅是招商局的首次对外借款交涉,还是近代中国的首批实业借款交涉之一,在近代中日经济关系史上也具有重要意义。     

明代西安下马陵方位变迁考——兼论董仲舒墓所在地之争

拙文详考了明代西安下马陵从城南胭脂坡处演变为地处城内今和平门内西侧的过程,并且指出,正德初年陕西提学王云凤曾组织民力修筑城南下马陵和董子祠。嘉靖三年(1524年)陕西巡抚王珝与巡按御史喻茂坚首设城内董子祠,因其处原有墓,遂被时人认作董仲舒墓。笔者认为今之董墓所在之争在无可信证据前提下展开,并无意义。