A reexamination of the reasons for the closure of the Dunhuang Library Cave

Abstract

Cave 17 or the cave library is located on the northern wall in the hallway of Cave 16 in Mogao Caves, Dunhuang. The murals on the cover layer of Cave 16 are closely connected with the reason why the cave library was sealed. The transformation tableaux of the thousand Buddhas on the cover layer of Cave 16 seems to reflect the thought of the Final Dharma, which could be dated in the late Guiyijun period when Dunhuang was ruled by the Cao family. In 1052, the trend of the Final-Dharma thought flourished in the Liao Dynasty. With the frequent communications between the Guiyijun regime and the Liao, this trend came to Dunhuang and merged with the original thought of the Final Dharma in this region, which tremendously impacted the Buddhist community in Dunhuang. So the local Buddhist community made the transformation tableaux on the mural of Cave 16 and also transformed Cave 17 for storing Buddhist texts as a response to the coming Final Dharma. These activities seem to have led to the eventual sealing of Cave 17.     

Compared to What? Changes in Interest Group Resources and the Proposal and Adoption of State Teacher Policy

What is the relationship between changes in interest group resources and the proposal and adoption of state policy? Using a dataset of proposed and enacted teacher policies across five legislative cycles in all 50 states and measures of interest group relative and absolute resource strength, I estimate a series of within-state fixed effects models that gain identification from changes in interest group resources and teacher policy over time. I find that legislatures propose more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies toward teachers' unions in states where teachers' union opposition interest groups are expending more election (but not lobbying) resources over time. Further, I find that more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies are adopted in states where teachers' union opposition groups are growing in election resource strength. Expanding on prior empirical work, this study suggests that interest group resources matter for policy change and highlights the importance of capturing interest group resource dynamics over time.     

Contesting scale: A space of the political in a post-disaster context

Disasters create spaces for the political to unfold. This paper contributes to the recurring debates on space and the political in geography by providing a novel empirical focus: following a fire in Lærdal, Norway in 2014, contesting discourses on how emergency services should be spatially organized revealed themselves. A scalar discourse of the local, situated in discourses on periphery and rurality in Norway, emerged to contest a neoliberal discourse promoted by the government. I illustrate the scalar discourse of the local through four identified narratives in Norwegian newspapers that emphasize different aspects of the local. This demonstrates how scalar categories are meshed with everyday vocabulary, and hence are important to study. Although a space of the political was realized following the fire, in the last part of the paper I reflect on why the scalar discourse of the local has not gained recognition as legitimate contestation, as reforms aiming to centralize and/or merge continue to be rolled out in Norway.     

民族地区政区调整与民族区域自治的实现路径--以20世纪50年代广西都安瑶族自治县设置为中心的探讨

20世纪50年代初期,以民族为名称的各层级自治区非均衡地建立,致使政府在已建立民族区域自治的地区与尚未建立区域自治的民族地区执行经济政策时出现偏差,经济政策偏差产生的优惠差异引发了都安瑶族群众谋求民族区域自治的问题。为了解决瑶族谋求民族区域自治问题,在采取经济政策调整和相应政治措施调整无果之后,为配合民族区域自治政策的落实,政府继而采取政区调整的方式,通过一系列行政区划调整的探索,最大限度地将瑶族纳入瑶族自治县内。最终,通过政区调整满足了少数民族对民族区域自治的需求,实现了民族地区各民族的和解与社会稳定。     

黄河中下游地区史前二层台墓研究

黄河中下游地区40余处遗址的400多座二层台墓资料显示,生土二层台墓的数量在仰韶中晚期以前较熟土台墓多,龙山时代式微。该变化的背后是棺椁的逐渐成熟,生土台墓中小部分带有盖板或原始棺椁,同时熟土台并非判断墓葬带有棺椁的充要条件。通过生土台高度和墓葬深度的二元变量分析,墓葬开挖时预留生土台并未考虑稳固墓室,而应该与构建殓尸空间(或椁室)、进行一系列丧葬活动有关,在台面上放置随葬品的情况存在一定的时空差异。二层台墓的分布具有集中埋葬的倾向,采用二层台墓的群体并无明显的性别和死亡年龄指向,从仰韶中期以来,其所代表的社会群体占据着更为优越的社会财富。     

“The Old New-Intellectuals” in the May Fourth New Cultural Movement*

During the May Fourth New Cultural Movement, three debates on new/Western and old/Chinese cultures were respectively carried out between the journal New Youth and Lin Qinnan, Chen Duxiu and Du Yaquan, as well as Zhang Dongsun and Fu Sinian. New Youth, Chen Duxiu and Zhang Dongsun were regarded as the “new school,” whereas their opponents “the old new-intellectuals.” The difference between them lies in their attitudes towards traditions instead of their new or old knowledge. After three heated debates, New Youth won a total victory in big cities, because the so-called “urban youths” needed a radical cultural reform plan and a simple guide for action. On the contrary, “town youths” who lived in small cities and towns did not care about the attitudinal difference of two sides. They paid more attention to absorbing new knowledge from both sides and were more sympathetic to tradition.     

Negotiations of Irish identity in the wake of terrorism: the case of the Irish in Birmingham 1973–74

This article explores the Irish migrant experience in Birmingham during and in the wake of terrorist campaigns carried out in Britain between 1969 and 1975 and attributed to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Beginning with a discussion of the competencies with which Irishness was associated at the close of the 1960s in England, many of which were hinged on a notion of the Irish predisposition towards violence, the article continues on to take the political, cultural and religious “temperature” of the Irish community in Birmingham between 1969 and 1975, and follows on with a discussion of the specific strategies sought out by Irish immigrants to come to terms with the effect of events such as the “Birmingham Bombings” on their daily lives. Principle findings that emerge from the study indicate that IRA terrorism forced the Irish in Birmingham to engage with and adopt a number of distinct linguistic and cultural strategies in the post-1974 period, the cultivation of which indefinitely altered their relationship with Ireland as “home”, their visibility in the public British sphere and their associational patterns and practices within the migrant enclave.     

固定和浮放条件下文物展柜动力响应分析与试验研究

目前对文物保护的研究主要以试验为主,本研究试图用数值方法分析文物展柜的动力学特性,以解决试验分析方法所导致的缺陷。为此,对固定和浮放两种不同边界条件的文物展柜进行地震作用和简谐激励下的动力响应分析,给出了展柜展台面处的加速度动力放大系数(简称放大系数)上限值。以某博物馆展柜为原型,按1∶1/0.39进行缩尺振动试验,得出两种边界条件下展柜展台面处的放大系数。对试验展柜建立有限元模型,通过与试验对比,验证模型及分析方法的正确性。然后,建立展柜模型的有限元模型,对5种尺寸的展柜进行了动力响应分析,并考虑激励幅值、激励频率等对放大系数的影响。分析结果有助于指导文物的防震保护工作。