The Politics of Open Defecation: Informality,Body, and Infrastructure in Mumbai

This paper examines the politics of open defecation by focusing on everyday intersections of the body and infrastructure in the metabolic city, which produces profoundly unequal opportunities for fulfilling bodily needs. Specifically, it examines how open defecation emerges in Mumbai's informal settlements through everyday embodied experiences, practices and perceptions forged in relation to the materialities of informality and infrastructure. It does so by tracing the micropolitics of provision, access, territoriality and control of sanitation infrastructures; everyday routines and rhythms, both of people and infrastructures; and experiences of disgust and perceptions of dignity. It also examines open defecation as embodied spatial and temporal improvisations in order to investigate the socially differentiated efforts and risks that it entails. More broadly, the paper seeks to deepen understandings of the relationship between the body, infrastructure and the sanitary/unsanitary city.     

“Et nulle autre me faict plus proprement homme que cette cy:” Michel de Montaigne's embodied masculinity

Writing in a period of considerable anxiety about gender roles, Montaigne (1533–92) developed a series of reflections on gender and masculinity in which he destabilized the gender and sexual hierarchies of early-modern France. First, drawing on an increasingly global archive of information about non-European societies, he argued that culture plays a major role in shaping the lives and experiences of women. Secondly, his understanding of nature enabled him to foster a notion of the equality of the sexes, even as he recognized that nature creates certain differences between men and women. Finally, on these foundations, Montaigne constructed a vision of masculinity that stresses it as an ethical value, one that he opposes above all to cruelty. Montaigne's sexual politics were, I suggest, at least in part a response to the Wars of Religion that had led to an excess of barbarity in early-modern France.     

邢窑六世纪晚期制瓷原料的同位素和微量元素分析

白瓷的出现是我国陶瓷历史上较为重要的技术突破,白瓷的烧制成功为后世青花瓷、彩绘瓷的繁荣奠定了重要基础,被誉为中国古陶瓷工艺发展史中的“第四里程碑”。因此,关于白瓷起源的问题就成为考古界和科技考古界关注的重要学术问题,而邢窑2012年考古发掘出土的北朝晚期窑炉和器物遗存自然成为研究白瓷起源的重要实物资料。本研究利用电感耦合等离子体质谱(ICP-MS)和热电离质谱(TIMS)分析技术,对河北内丘城关服务楼窑址出土的北朝晚期至隋朝初期的早期瓷器样品胎釉原料进行分析,为邢窑早期瓷业的发展演变提供科学依据。结果表明邢窑早期瓷胎的微量元素统计模式明显可以分为两类,说明邢窑早期制瓷存在两种不同的胎料来源。邢窑陶工在开发早期白瓷这一新品种的过程中有意识地选择了一种有别于青瓷的更为优质的原料制胎,这种胎料中与锆石、锐钛矿等杂质赋存密切相关的V、Cr、Ni、Nb、Ta、Zr和Hf等微量元素含量普遍小于青瓷胎。锶(Sr)同位素混合模式分析表明,邢窑早期的大部分样品不符合草木灰配以胎料的制釉方式,应该是采用了草木灰混合其他制釉黏土。同时,早期白瓷釉与青瓷釉的锶同位素特征存在一定差异,说明在制作过程中邢窑陶工为...     

Little waifs: estimating child body size from historic skeletal material

Child body weight formulae are developed from two radiographic studies that have measured the mid-diaphyses anteroposterior diameters of the humerus, femur and tibia. The results show that formulae that include a stature component are more reliable than those derived only from bone diameters and that formulae that use diameters of the femur or tibia to estimate body weight appear more to be reliable than those that use the diameter of the humerus. These formulae are applied to a historic nineteenth century child skeletal population excavated from a Sydney orphans cemetery. The results show that the orphans were shorter and lighter than comparable nineteenth century children. This difference is attributed to disrupted growth rates due to poor nutrition and health of children prior to their admission to the orphanage. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

西安市南郊马腾空唐墓发掘简报

2001年4月至10月间,我们在西安市南郊马腾空清理了15座唐代墓葬。所有墓葬皆为南北向,单室墓室,墓道在南,墓室居北。墓葬形制可分为A、B、C三型。可以看清的几例葬具、葬式皆为单棺单人,仰身直肢。随葬品以陶俑最为丰富,计有镇墓俑、男俑、女俑、动物俑等,其中男俑、女俑的中的半身俑时代特征明显,女俑的发式新颖奇特,造型生动,在隋唐考古中较为少见。加之又出土了四盒墓志,具有明确的纪年,可以作为判断其年代的标形器。这批墓葬的发掘为关中地区唐墓谱系的建立增加了新资料,同时对其它地区唐墓的研究也有借鉴作用。     

Interpreting Urban Food Supply and Distribution Systems from Faunal Assemblages: An Example from Colonial Massachusetts

Animal bone assemblages from four historical sites in eastern Massachusetts are analysed in a comparative framework to interpret aspects of urban food systems. Characteristics of the urban environment and the nature of food supply and exchange systems are interpreted from taxonomic representation, body part representation, butchery patterns, and age and seasonal slaughtering patterns. These analyses show that specialized husbandry to supply urban markets was limited during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that many aspects of urban food distribution systems followed traditional rural patterns. A model that explores the relation between patterning of bone collections and characteristics of urban areas is applicable to other studies of urban assemblages. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

从漠视到觉醒：西方旅游研究对身体的再认识

旅游是一个身体体验的过程。旅游中的身体是物质性的身体和社会建构的身体的统一体。自20世纪90年代以来，伴随着人文社科领域“身体转向”、“感官转向”和“非表征转向”的到来，西方旅游学界的研究者开始关注到旅游者的身体和具身性话题。在梳理西方旅游研究关注与身体话题相关文献的基础上，总结了旅游研究关注身体话题的几个发展阶段和相应特征，并从身体与旅游目的地形象表征，身体政治与性旅游、医疗旅游，身体展演与旅游节庆仪式，身体、感官与旅游景观，具身性与旅游体验五大议题进行了归纳和探讨。提出了基于身体理论视角下的旅游研究的路径和框架，并进一步提出了国内未来研究需要重点关注的话题。以期推动国内旅游研究对身体的进一步的关注。     

Embellishing Appearances with Fragrant Cosmetic Cases : Transforming Women’s Bodies to Nourish Life in the Late Ming

Through a close examination of late Ming publisher Hu Wenhuan’s Embellishing Appearances with Fragrant Cosmetic Cases, this article shows how beautification techniques became part of the culture of nourishing life. Hu encouraged women to make and use cosmetics as a way of practicing womanly work. For men, these techniques became a means of investigating things and cultivating the self. Hu’s text is an example of amateur experimentation involving medical knowledge in late imperial China that went beyond proprietary expertise. The practice-oriented recipes in Fragrant Cosmetic Cases helped readers to translate written knowledge into practical knowledge, and to circulate them to a broad group of users that included women, the less literate, and even the illiterate. By the early seventeenth century, what Hu marketed as knowledge to nourish the lives of women had become common knowledge for male elites.     

Terminal Pleistocene Later Stone Age Human Remains from the Mlambalasi Rock Shelter,Iringa Region,Southern Tanzania

This paper introduces research at the Mlambalasi rock shelter in the Iringa Region of southern Tanzania. The deposits are composed of a historic and Iron Age occupation, a microlithic Holocene Later Stone Age (LSA), and then a macrolithic Late Pleistocene LSA. Middle Stone Age deposits are also present on the slope in front of the rock shelter. Excavations in A.D. 2002, 2006, and 2010 yielded fragmentary human remains as well as pottery, iron, stone tools, faunal bone, and glass and ostrich eggshell beads. Among the human remains, four individuals are present: two adults and a juvenile were found in the same LSA context, and another adult associated with the Iron Age/historic period. The most complete skeleton is an adult of indeterminate sex that was found in situ in an LSA deposit. Charcoal in proximity to the bone was AMS radiocarbon dated to 12,925 cal BC (OxA‐24620), which is consistent with radiocarbon dates on giant land snail shells from above and below the remains. The skeleton exhibits a series of pathological changes such as extensive dental wear and carious lesions, as well as damage most likely caused by termites, post‐mortem. The most striking aspect of this individual is its small size; stature and body mass estimations place it in the range of historic Khoesan from southern Africa. Consequently, this research adds to the discourse regarding the existence of small‐bodied people in the East African LSA. Findings from this new skeletal sample will contribute to studies of human biology and variation in Africa during the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The body politic and “political medicine” in the Jacobean period: Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique

ABSTRACT

The use of metaphors and analogies was widespread in English political literature during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and for contemporary readers they were more than merely rhetorical artifices – they were used to illustrate and, in some cases, even to provide evidence. In this regard, none was more apt than the most prominent of these analogies: that between the human body and the state. The political thought of the time established an unshakeable connection between the two, building an argument for how their structures and ways of functioning mirrored each other. This paper examines one of the most extensive and thorough examples of corporal analogies in early modern English political literature – that of Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606) – and shows how such corporal analogies were used to construct an absolutist political model wherein the king was depicted as the soul, the head and the heart of the body politic. The paper integrates Forset’s A Comparative Discourse within the context of the ideological struggles from the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, while its place within the larger picture of the medieval and early modern metaphor of the body politic is also examined, in order to assess the lineage and originality of Forset’s ideas and point out how the same kind of analogies could be used to provide significantly different political interpretations.