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.     

四件唐代铁镞的修复

为了将4件出土的唐代铁镞修复展出,通过对其保存状况仔细观察和分析后,借鉴德国修复方法和材料,制定科学的修复方案。修复效果明显,铁镞基本恢复原貌。     

白蚁对古代建筑的危害及防治方法研究现状

白蚁是一种古老的害虫,给国民经济带来巨大的损失,也严重危害原址保护的木质文物。本文综述了近年来国内外原址保护木质文物遭受白蚁侵害的情况以及灭治方法。其中,以昆虫生长调节剂(IGRs)为毒饵,采用监测-毒杀-再监测的方法杀灭白蚁低毒高效,对文物损害最小。另外,以寄生虫、细菌、病毒等生物感染白蚁,或采用植物及其提取物灭杀白蚁,是有待探索的灭蚁新途径。     

BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the ‘morpho-logics’ of fat,female bodies

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigaray's critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty's account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Saville's bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do.     

Sex differences in musculoskeletal stress markers: Problems with activity pattern reconstructions

This study examined six musculoskeletal stress marker (MSM) scores that showed reverse sex differences in the previously published research. MSM scores often differ by sex within a population. Most often females have lower MSM scores than do males; however, reverse sex differences do occur. If reverse sex differences are culturally specific, then these MSM scores are more likely caused by activity patterns than biology. Yet, if the same MSM scores show reverse trends in multiple populations, then perhaps these reversals may be the result of biological sex differences, such as hormonal differences and body size, or methodological reasons, such as MSM location. In the current study, deltoideus, pronator quadratus and trapezius MSM scores were significantly more pronounced in males in the California Amerind population examined. Most MSM scores examined significantly correlated with body size and age. With articular size and age controls, only the pronator quadratus and trapezius continued to display significant sex differences. Males had greater MSM pronator quadratus and trapezius scores than did females. The lack of sex differences in four out of six MSM scores may relate to the confounding factor of body size. Thus, it is suggested that some reverse sex differences in the published literature may not relate to activity patterns whereas other MSM sites show more promise. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

山西壶关县上好牢村宋金时期墓葬

2010年5月,有关单位对山西省壶关县上好牢村的三座墓葬进行了抢救性发掘。其中一号墓和三号墓墓室均有精致的仿木结构。两墓室内都经过粉饰并绘有色彩和种类丰富的彩画,墓室四壁都绘有不同题材的壁画。从仿木结构和壁画题材等分析,两座墓的时代应在宋代晚期或金代初期。     

基于传统木构建筑健康安全监测与全信息采集、利用的物联网技术需求的思考

本研究从物联网概念和技术介绍开篇,分析了物联网环境中各个要素之间的关系,并通过元素关系分析出物联网技术的应用领域和范围。同时,针对这种新型技术的特点和限制,探讨了关于在中国古代木建筑保护保存修复方面可即由物联网技术获得的优势及对于现状不足的改善,以及在物联网的技术下文物建筑保护的用户需求、产品形式和获取产品方式的探讨。最后递归出关于物联网技术需求的思考。     

思想政治课堂如何实现以学生为主体的教学

以学生为主体是教学的基本出发点,是进行素质教育,提高教学质量的必要条件。课堂教学发挥学生的主体性,是教学改革的必然趋势。只有充分调动“教”与“学”两方面的积极性,才能真正把课堂还给学生,使学生成为学习的主人。