Una relectura de la cronología de los incas de la Miscelánea antártica de Miguel Cabello Valboa (1586)

El presente artículo propone una lectura de la cronología de los incas presente en la Miscelánea antártica (1586) de Miguel Cabello Valboa a la luz de nueva evidencia histórica y textual. La crónica de Cabello ofrece años concretos asociados a la duración y expansión del Tawantinsuyu, razón por la cual fue utilizada por John Rowe (1945) para construir una cronología absoluta para el incario. No obstante el trabajo de Rowe ha sido cuestionado en las últimas décadas por la arqueología, la cronología de Cabello nunca ha sido abandonada del todo. El presente artículo postula que la comparación de fechas entre el registro arqueológico y etnohistórico no es correcta, puesto que parten de premisas distintas. Proponemos que los cálculos de Cabello se basaron en supuestos no empíricos los cuales, más que retratar el pasado verdadero de los incas, buscaban posicionar su historia dentro del providencial esquema que Dios había trazado para la Monarquía hispánica.     

Beta Phase Communities: Open Source Software as Gift Economy

In this paper, I discuss how gift economy tenets exist within capitalist systems and in what ways the alternative logic of gift economies could be used within capitalist firms to create a more fair economy overall, citing open source software within the technology sector as one example.

To do this, I begin by striking a dialectic between John Milbank's theological and David Graeber's anthropological conceptions of gift economies, illuminating crucial aspects of each to uncover what alternative economic principles are applicable to standard capitalist economic ideologies.

I then turn to a practical application of where these gift economy ideologies are already being utilized to a degree, arguing specifically that open source software provides an alternative economic logic for countless members of the technology sector. On a broad level, I hope to show that capitalism provides the means to alter itself within its own ethos, as certain economic ideologies – like gift economies – could potentially assuage those economic models that contribute to economic inequality. By accentuating these alternative logics within technology firms, they can be expanded and made more substantial, subsequently altering capitalism from the inside out.     

Darwin’s missing links

The historical process underlying Darwin’s Origin of Species (Origin) did not play a significant role in the early editions of the book, in spite of the particular inductivist scientific methodology it espoused. Darwin’s masterpiece did not adequately provide his sources or the historical perspective many contemporary critics expected. Later editions yielded the ‘Historical Sketch’ lacking in the earlier editions, but only under critical pressure. Notwithstanding the sources he provided, Darwin presented the Origin as an ‘abstract’ in order to avoid giving sources; a compromise he acknowledged and undertook to set right in later editions, yet failed to provide throughout the six editions under his supervision. Darwin’s reluctance to publish the historical context of his theory and his sources, particularly sources which were also ‘precursors’, may be attributed as much to the matter of intellectual ownership as science, or even good literary practice. Of special concern to Darwin were issues of priority or originality over ‘descent with modification’ and especially over Natural Selection. Many later historians have argued that Darwin was unaware of the work of his precursors on Natural Selection. Darwin’s theory was an example of independent discovery, albeit along with such obscure precursors as Matthew or Wells, who were unknown to Darwin until after the publication of the Origin. Both Matthew and Wells had a medical education, like James Hutton or Erasmus Darwin earlier in the eighteenth century, or even (in part) Charles Darwin. Evolutionary theory, at least in Britain was a product largely of the medical evolutionists rather than the natural historians which ‘history’ has chosen to select for the focus of attention; and among the medical evolutionists the figure of John Hunter stands out as theorist, experimentalist and teacher: the medical evolutionists were predominantly the product of Hunter’s legacy or of the medical profession and particularly the Scottish Universities. Much recent Darwin scholarship has focused on the private Notebooks, to establish Darwin’s discovery of Natural Selection around 1837–1838 and demonstrate Darwin’s ignorance of his precursors; requiring an explicit acknowledgement by Darwin as the legitimate substantiation of any claim to prior influence. The precursors have been categorized as uniformly obscure or irrelevant to the science of evolution which may be defined exclusively as ‘Darwinian’. The inclination to acknowledge influences, however was not something Darwin was gratuitously given to doing, especially on matters of priority. The Notebooks are not Darwin’s private thoughts; from an early stage he considered them incipient public documents and later sought to protect them as proof of his originality. William C. Wells was not an obscure thinker, but a celebrated scientist whom Herschel, Darwin’s guide to scientific methodology, had recommended as providing a model of scientific method. Darwin discovered Wells through Herschel, and quickly acquired a copy of Wells’ recommended work, no later than 1831, and held it thereafter in his library at Down House. This book, the 1818 edition of Wells’ Two Essays contains a third essay, Wells’ account of Natural Selection. Later, in the Descent of Man (1871) Darwin acknowledged his separate discovery of the correlation of colour and disease immunity in man, also earlier recounted by Wells.     

Crowd control in restoration tragedy

This article traces the development of heroic drama into a more affective mode of tragedy. Using contemporary reappraisals of Aristotelian catharsis as an optic for this generic development, it shows that the emotions involved in the love plots and melodramatic endings that distinguished affective tragedy from its forebears were thought to have a normative ethical content as well as a purgative effect. This view poses a challenge to the accepted wisdom that affective tragedies neutralised or avoided political controversy by divesting audiences of their judgement. With particular reference to Nahum Tate’s The Ingratitude of the Commonwealth and Thomas Otway’s Caius Marius, two plays written at the cusp of the transition described here, this article demonstrates the role pathos played in granting audience members access to one another’s subjectivity. It makes the case that the emotional response to such overtly sentimental tragedies was intended as a means of modelling the intersubjective relations at the heart of all political communities, whose make-up and power were crucial points of contention in the period’s ongoing disputes over sovereignty.     

John Francis Davis as governor and diplomat on the China Coast (1844–1848)

This paper explores the role of the nineteenth-century sinologist-cum-diplomat, John Francis Davis, in Sino-British relations after the ratification of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1843. It examines his time as governor of Hong Kong and as Britain's effective minister to China from 1844 until 1848, in which he attempted to have the city of Canton opened to foreign trade. Arguing that Davis's view of Sino-British relations was as cultural in character as it was political, this paper suggests that Davis fundamentally sought to establish strict equality between the two empires. He attempted to use his knowledge of Chinese civilization to build an equal international relationship between two sovereign nations rather than an imperial relationship between a conqueror and the conquered people. While this conviction laid the groundwork for Hong Kong to become a bilingual Anglo-Chinese colony, it fractured diplomacy with Qing officials. Davis's insistence on political equality would amount to an aggressive imposition of European diplomatic norms on his dealings with the Qing representative Qiying. More precisely, the paper explains how the policies of this archetypal British ‘China Hand’ bifurcated in the directions of both progressive cultural policy but also gunboat diplomacy.     

How the nerves reached the muscle: Bernard Katz,Stephen W. Kuffler,and John C. Eccles—Certain implications of exile for the development of twentieth-century neurophysiology

This article explores the work by Bernard Katz (1911–2003), Stephen W. Kuffler (1913–1980), and John C. Eccles (1903–1997) on the nerve–muscle junction as a milestone in twentieth-century neurophysiology with wider scientific implications. The historical question is approached from two perspectives: (a) an investigation of twentieth-century solutions to a longer physiological dispute and (b) an examination of a new kind of laboratory and academic cooperation. From this vantage point, the work pursued in Sydney by Sir John Carew Eccles’ team on the neuromuscular junction is particularly valuable, since it contributed a central functional element to modern physiological understanding regarding the function and structure of the human and animal nervous system. The reflex model of neuromuscular action had already been advanced by neuroanatomists such as Georg Prochaska (1749–1820) in Bohemia since the eighteenth century. It became a major component of neurophysiological theories during the nineteenth century, based on the law associated with the names of François Magendie (1783–1855) in France and Charles Bell (1774–1842) in Britain regarding the functional differences of the sensory and motor spinal nerves. Yet, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that both the histological and the neurophysiological understanding of the nerve–muscle connection became entirely understood and the chemical versus electrical transmission further elicited as the mechanisms of inhibition. John C. Eccles, Bernard Katz, and Stephen W. Kuffler helped to provide some of the missing links for modern neurophysiology. The current article explores several of their scientific contributions and investigates how the context of forced migration contributed to these interactions in contingently new ways.     

A convenient “inconvenience”: The eponymous legacy of Sir William Richard Gowers (1845–1915)

A century since his passing, the legacy of the great Victorian clinical neurologist, Sir William Richard Gowers (1845–1915), remains traceable to students and practitioners of medicine worldwide through eponymous medical terms named in his honor. Popular designations like “Gowers’ sign” continue to lead curious minds to learn more about the pioneering neurologist’s lifework and influence, and yet Gowers himself was not fond of medical eponyms. Memorably remarking that eponyms were an educational “inconvenience” in medicine, Gowers was apt to disfavor the system in the very same lecture in which he reportedly first referred to the spinal cord fasciculus that later took his name. This article will examine Gowers’ own use of eponyms alongside the eponymous medical terms named for him, and, in the process, will show how Gowers’ “inconvenience” may be of great service to the historically inclined modern clinician today.     

“It Felt More like a Revolution.” How Behavioral Ecology Succeeded Ethology, 1970–1990

As soon as ethology's status diminished in the early 1970s, it was confronted with two successor disciplines, sociobiology and behavioral ecology. They were able to challenge ethology because it no longer provided markers of strong disciplinarity such as theoretical coherence, leading figures and a clear identity. While behavioral ecology developed organically out of the UK ethological research community into its own disciplinary standing, sociobiology presented itself as a US competitor to the ethological tradition. I will show how behavioral ecology took the role of legitimate heir to ethology by rebuilding a theoretical core and an intellectual sense of community, while sociobiology failed to use its public appeal to reach disciplinary status. Meanwhile, ethology changed its disciplinary identity to encompass all biological studies of animal behavior.     

福蒂斯丘与英法封建君主制比较

福蒂斯丘爵士是15世纪英国的法学家和政治理论家,他最早研究了中世纪末英国的君主制类型及其与其他君主制的区别。他的特殊经历使其首次提出英国实行的是"政治且王室的统治",以区别于法国的"王室的统治"。上述两种类型的封建君主制在形成过程和统治方式上大相径庭,统治结果也截然分明,两者的优劣判若两途。福蒂斯丘有关"政治且王室的统治"的理论不仅揭示了中世纪末英国封建君主制的类型,对宪政理论的发展也具有奠基意义。     

Science, sovereignty and nation: Canada and the legacy of the International Geophysical Year, 1957–1958

This paper considers some of the Canadian scientific and political responses to the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957–1958. Histories of the IGY have hitherto often concentrated on scientific activity in Antarctica and advances in satellite technology, made manifest in the Soviet launch of Sputnik. Such histories hint at a contradiction at the heart of the IGY – attempts at international scientific cooperation were always concurrent with cold war national rivalries. These tensions were not limited to the superpowers and the IGY helped focus scientific competition between other national polities, including Canada. By examining the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Government of Canada's Polar Continental Shelf Project in April 1958, the paper investigates attempts to mobilize a pan-Canadian nationalism in response to perceived American and Soviet incursions upon territorial sovereignty during the IGY. The PCSP's ostensible purpose was to collect geophysical data for US satellite launch tests in the Canadian High Arctic. However, by placing the founding of the PCSP within the political context of the First UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1958, and the unprecedented electoral success of the Progressive Conservatives across Canada during the same year, the paper develops a more sensitive appreciation of the complicated historical geographies of the IGY.