The bourgeoisification of the Green-Line: The new Israeli middle-class and the Suburban Settlement

This paper focuses on Kochav-Yair and Oranit, two localities that exemplify the Israeli Suburban Settlement phenomenon. With the first being developed by a selective group of families and the latter by a single private entrepreneur, yet both with the full support of the state, they represent the selective privatisation of the national settlement project during the 1980s. Examining the geopolitical, social and economic interests that accompanied their development, this paper illustrates how both projects incorporated the upper-middle-class bourgeoisie in the national territorial effort along the border with the occupied West-Bank (the Green-Line). Analysing the planning and construction process of both case studies, as well as their spatial characteristics, this paper explains how the upwardly middle-class and its contractors were granted substantial planning rights. Consequently, enabling them to influence the production of space while promoting a new local suburban typology that is based on better living standards, private family life and a distinctive isolated community. Therefore, this paper illustrates the Suburban Settlement typology as an outcome of the bourgeoisification of the Green-Line, which domesticated the former frontier area and enabled its inclusion in the greater national consensus.     

成都博物馆藏东汉陶仙山插座初探

成都及周边地区东汉晚期墓葬中出土有一种明显为仙山造型的陶质插座,倾向于为摇钱树的树座。其整体的三山、平台、洞穴造型及其上较为丰富的人物、羽人、伏羲、女娲、西王母形象应是当时观念中以昆仑、西王母为中心的神仙信仰的表现。将其制作为专门的丧葬用品,一方面反映了当时丧葬文化中的神仙信仰成分和超越死亡的升仙愿望,另一方面也再次印证了西南地区流行的摇钱树的主要内涵应与升仙有关。     

红外光谱在传统年画红蓝色料分析中的应用研究

年画是中国特有的民间艺术形式。本研究介绍了传统年画印制所用红蓝色料的发展历史,选取15种中国古代与近现代常用红蓝色料进行红外光谱分析,并归纳总结了标准样品的化学结构与红外谱图特征。在此基础上,利用衰减全反射傅里叶变换红外光谱仪对三幅清末民初时期的传统年画开展无损检测。结果显示三幅年画的红蓝色料均为合成颜料或染料,包括酸性大红G、酸性墨水蓝G、普鲁士蓝等。本研究扩展了红外光谱在书画文物分析检测中的应用范围,为传统年画色料的无损鉴定提供科学依据。     

Zionist identity and the British Mandate: Palestine's internment camps and the making of the Western native

This paper examines the relationship between British police officers, Jewish guards, and German internees in Palestine's internment camps during World War II. Using the reports of the Jewish guards, the paper investigates the role of Western‐identified actors in the Zionist identity‐making project. The reports evince a surprising rapport between the British and their German prisoners and the mistreatment of the Jewish guards by their British superiors. The paper analyses these Jewish accounts in the context of identity‐ and ethnic boundary‐making and argues that they illustrate Zionism's intent to construct itself as a Western but noncolonial movement and Zionists in Palestine as natives but not “Orientals.” The reports also reveal a breach between the formal hierarchy—British officers, Jewish guards, German internees—and the ethnic order, which situated British and Germans at the apex and the Jews at the bottom. The paper highlights the utility of researching group‐making interactions in different contexts to develop a more nuanced understanding of identity‐making processes.     

Turkish nationalism and the evolutionary idea (1923–1938)

This paper sheds light on the role of evolutionary ideas in the making of Turkish nationalism during the Kemalist era (1923–1938). By so doing, it aims to challenge some of the dominant historiographical viewpoints as to the nature of Turkish nationalism. One is related to the Kemalist elites' predisposition towards the so‐called “scientism” seen as one of the bases for nationalism. We intend to turn upside–down the relation between the Kemalists' use of science and Turkish nationalism. Second, we problematize the “culturalist” origins of Turkish nationalism arguing that the seemingly “culturalist” reflections of the time were, indeed, materialist formulations based on the science of the times. We discuss in this respect the Kemalist elites' use of evolutionary ideas. By synthesizing the ways in which these elites employed evolutionary ideas in the fields of history, language, geography, anthropology, biology, eugenics, and pedagogy, we aim to understand the specific nature of Turkish nationalism before 1945. This secular nationalism conceived culture as having materialist bases and differed fundamentally from the culturalist varieties of Turkish nationalism coloured by Islam in the post‐1945 era. Furthermore, the paper empirically enriches the complex and entangled story of evolutionary ideas in the early Turkish Republic.     

Celebrity humanitarianism and the popular geopolitics of hope along the Thai-Burma border

In June of 2014 Angelina Jolie, actress and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador, visited camps—home to 130,000 Burmese exiles—along the Thai-Burma border to draw international attention to one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world. Her fourth trip to the border since 2002, Jolie's day-long visit was widely commended in popular media. I draw on ethnographic research among Burmese exiles in northern Thailand to argue that the popular geopolitics of hope she engendered is constituted through contradictory impulses of, on one hand, her signification of global capital and the concurrent widespread geoeconomic hope around Burma's deepening integration into global capitalism, and on the other, the far-reaching geopolitics of fear that has materialized around the threat of repatriation resulting from rapid political-economic change in Burma. Thus, this paper builds on recent work in popular geopolitics and geographies of emotion and affect to offer a grounded illustration of the micro-macro linkages between popular culture and everyday geopolitical experience, as well as the often politically nuanced role of celebrities in humanitarian interventions. This paper contributes to ongoing conversations around the relationship between celebrity humanitarians from the global North and the political-economic implications of the affective enrollment of their intended benefactors from the global South.     

Counter-narratives of coping and becoming: Karen refugee women’s inside/outside figured worlds

The purpose of our research is to understand the socially and culturally constructed architecture within which refugee women produce and negotiate identity. This ethnographic case study discusses findings from data collected through participant observation and informal interviews in two refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. As Karen refugee women described their positionality within and negotiation between the socially constructed Inside and Outside Figured Worlds of the refugee camp, they depict the negotiation of a hybrid Third Space. Created at the intersection of the refugee camp structures that dominate individual agency and the discourses of gender and displacement that influence the social practices of women, this third space is characterized by the response strategies Karen women engage to support individual, family, and community health. Within the transformational spaces that refugee women constructed, the processes of coping and becoming reflected the relationship between structure and agency. Within these intersections a woman could express her resistance to a system that in its design represented a majority she was not a part of. As Karen refugee women moved to redesign their position within these systems, shifts in meaning of cultural norms resulted, inclusive of those that influence or define the role of women.     

‘Culture’, ‘sustainable development’ and cultural policy: a contrarian view

Abstract

This essay offers a critical analysis of the ‘culture and sustainable development’ discourse, notably among cultural activists and in actually existing cultural policy. It interrogates the utility of the narrative, seeks to uncover the semantic manoeuvres it employs and challenges the conventional wisdom it represents. The essay first explores the itinerary of the ductile notion of ‘sustainability’, the ways in which it has been stretched far beyond the original intent of those who coined the term, and identifies the conceptual discontents that this semantic multiplication has entailed. It hypothesizes that precisely because the term ‘sustainable’ and its derivatives are so acceptable and malleable at the same time, they have been easy to yoke to the bandwagon of the many-faceted and totalizing process that is ‘development’, allowing many different actors to project their interests, hopes, and aspirations under this composite banner. The essay then analyses the campaign to make culture ‘the fourth pillar of sustainability’ under the banner of the movement called ‘Agenda 21 for Culture’. It concludes with a plea for a return to the original ecological focus of the term ‘sustainability’ – notably as regards climate change – and outlines some cultural policy responses such a focus can and should generate.     

Two Remarks on Michael Attaleiates’ Account of the Preliminaries to the Battle of Mantzikert†

The ability to extract fully the contextualized interpretations of Michael Attaleiates’ Historia is a rather difficult task without the parallel study of sources chronicling the same period. This article reconsiders Attaleiates’ justification for the division of the army by Diogenes before the battle of Mantzikert in 1071, and argues that the author is as critical of this emperor’s strategy as his close contemporary, Psellos, though his criticism is more subtly formulated. Another section discusses a gap in the narrative structure of the Historia and goes on to fill it with information derived from the Hyle Historias of Bryennios and from the chronicles of al-Bundari and Ibn al-‘Adim.     

A third road to the past? Historical scholarship in the age of big data

Is a third passage to the past possible, beyond Elton's and Fogel's two roads of narrative history and scientific/quantitative history? One that would combine narrative history's focus on the event, on individuals and their actions, at a particular time and place, to scientific/quantitative history's emphasis on explicit behavioral models based on social-science theories? That is the question this article addresses. It illustrates a computer-assisted methodology for the study of narrative—quantitative narrative analysis (QNA)—that does just that. Based on the 5 Ws + H of narrative—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How—QNA quantifies events without losing the event itself, without losing people behind numbers, diachronic time behind synchronic statistical coefficients. When used in conjunction with dynamic and interactive data visualization tools (and new natural language processing tools), QNA may provide a third unforeseen road to the past.