“Count What You Have Now. Don't Count What You Don't Have”: The Japanese Television Drama Around 40 and the Politics of Women's Happiness

Voted top new Japanese word of 2008, “arafô”, abbreviated from the English “around forty”, has been used in various media to describe women born between 1964 and 1973, who came of age during Japan's Bubble Era, and who entered the workforce as the country's Equal Employment Opportunity Lawwas being implemented in 1986. Arafô, or “forty-something women”, theoretically have more choices in relation to work and family than previous generations. During a time when society is ageing, their choices in employment, marriage and childbirth have been judged in journalistic and government discourses to be both progressive and problematic. At the same time, arafô have been associated with difficulties regarding individual freedom in the spate of television programs, books and magazines for and about them. The term and the gender trends it encapsulates were brought to national attention by the critically acclaimed 2008 television drama Araundo 40: Chûmon no ôi onnatachi (trans. Around 40: Demanding Women). We situate Around 40 in discussions about Japan's demographic crisis to argue that the series presents a wide array of life courses available for women near age 40 but ultimately recasts postwar gender roles for the 21^st-century sociopolitical climate. Around 40 shows how the diversification of life courses is interpreted in the influential medium of television drama.     

The Achill Yawl: vernacular boats in historical context on Achill Island,Ireland

Achill yawls, originally introduced to Ireland as ships' boats aboard Norwegian merchantmen, developed into distinct working vessels along Achill Island's shores during the 19th century. These boats were subsequently modified for recreational racing in the mid‐20th century. Despite changes to their design, they are often nostalgically viewed as traditional symbols of an Achill islander identity, though their popularity may have been prompted by late‐19th‐century British legislation. The authors take an ethnographic approach in interpreting Achill yawls over time, contextualizing their social functions through an exploration of primary historical and photographic archives, extant vessels, and interviews with Achill islanders. © 2010 The Authors     

Geophysical Methods for Wreck‐Site Monitoring: the Rapid Archaeological Site Surveying and Evaluation (RASSE) programme

Rapid advances in geophysical techniques over the past decade have provided the maritime archaeological community with significant opportunities for re‐defining the procedures for wreck‐site mapping, evaluation and monitoring. The techniques which offer most potential for high‐resolution survey are acoustic‐based and include sidescan sonar, swath‐bathymetry sonar and multibeam sonar. These techniques were tested on an artificial test‐site in Plymouth Sound and over the wreck of the Stirling Castle. Results demonstrate that the techniques can provide the maritime archaeologist with the opportunity to rapidly and cost‐effectively map and monitor small, centimetric changes on sites, with the potential for long‐term monitoring and management. © 2009 The Authors     

Knowledge production and border nationalism in northern Mexico

ABSTRACT. This article examines the transformations in the cultural sphere of Tijuana, one of Mexico's largest and fastest growing cities, in order to emphasise the border as a crucial site of nation‐building in northern Mexico. I propose that cultural and intellectual actors, through particular sites, are changing the way the city is positioned in relation to the national political space of Mexico. Two institutions are considered specifically, both of which are integral to the propagation of an array of representations of Tijuana. In looking to articulations of nationhood and practices of knowledge production, this article delineates how urban identities reclaim and reconfigure key aspects of national identity in a region heretofore unrecognised as central to the creation of a national imaginary.     

Use of ulan-khada bay at lake baikal in the holocene (based on fauna remains)

The article presents the results of studies of faunal remains from the Ulan-Khada multilayered settlement – one of key habitation sites in the Cis-Baikal region providing information for reconstructing environmental and cultural changes during the Holocene. A complete analysis of the fauna assemblage obtained over the course of long-term excavations is given. For the fi rst time, the site's ichthyofauna is described. The mammalian species composition is revised. Species diversity is evaluated across the time span from the Final Mesolithic to the Late Iron Age. These studies have demonstrated that the main activities at the site during the Neolithic and Bronze Age included seal and ungulate (roe and red deer) hunting. Fishing was also important, especially 4.2–3.8 thousand years ago (Bronze Age).     

Fish ’n chips: ZooMS peptide mass fingerprinting in a 96 well plate format to identify fish bone fragments

Fish are a large, highly diverse, and anthropologically important group of vertebrates. However, fish bones are underrepresented in the archaeological literature because they are less stable than those of other taxa and identification of bone to species is often difficult or impossible. We explore a new identification system, ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry), which is based upon protein barcoding. As proteins can be cleaved enzymatically and analyzed by mass spectrometry in a repeatable way, protein barcoding is used widely in microbiological contexts for quick and inexpensive protein identification; mass spectra reflect the differences in protein sequence and can therefore be reproducibly linked to a particular protein or protein fragment. ZooMS uses peptide fingerprinting of bone collagen as a method for rapid identification of archaeological bone. This has involved the identification of masses related to peptides of known sequence. For mammals, sufficient sequence information is available for this approach but for groups, such the teleost fish, species are highly diverse and there are few available collagen sequences. Here we report a preliminary investigation into the identification of fish species by peptide mass fingerprinting that does not require sequence information. Collagen mass spectra are used to identify eight species of bony fishes (Osteichthyes) from four orders: Clupeiformes, Salmoniformes, Gadiformes, and Perciformes. The method is applied to both modern and archaeological fish remains and offers the capacity to identify traditionally unidentifiable fish fragments, thus increasing the Number of Identified Specimens (NISP) and providing invaluable information in specialized contexts.     

The Sun and the Shakers,Again: Enga,Ipili, and Somaip Perspectives on the Cult of Ain Part One

ABSTRACT In the middle 1940s, at a time when white people were just beginning to penetrate the western highlands of what would become Papua New Guinea, a cult spread quickly among Engas, Ipili speakers, and Somaips. In the seminal article ‘The Sun and the Shakers' published almost 40 years ago, Mervyn J. Meggitt would call this cult the ‘Cult of Ain.’ The cult's core feature involved a massive sacrifice of pigs to the sun in an attempt to enlist the sun's aid. Participants stared at the sun and shook, entering a trance‐like state. While massive pig sacrifices to the sun occurred in all cult variants, local versions of the cult differed in emphasizing one or two themes: acquiring wealth (pigs and pearlshells but also white manufactured goods) and/or ascending to the sky. Interpretations of the cult reflect this variation, some focusing on apparent cargo cultic dimensions while others train on the cult's millenarian aspects. This reprise of Meggitt's article argues that the themes of wealth acquisition and ascent to the sky were at base the same, intelligible with respect to the cosmological discourse that so clearly informed all the cult's manifestations (hence the emphasis upon the sun), a discourse that this article attempts to interpret. This, the first of a two‐part article, summarizes what is known of Cult of Ain variants, highlighting the features other reporters have emphasized as well as those that may provide insight into underlying cultural and even transcultural logics.     

A Study on the Paleolithic-Neolithic Transition in the Northern Region of Northeast China from the Perspective of Cultural Ecology

Lithic technology, subsistence modes, mobility strategies, and habitation modes in the northern part of Northeast China co-evolved during the Paleolithic-Neolithic transitional period, from the end of the Pleistocene through the beginning of the Holocene, exhibiting notable continuity and the phases of development. The investigation of climate, environment, population, technology, subsistence, and mobility is helpful in understanding environmental adaptation strategies and reconstructing cultural adaptation processes. The study of paleoclimatic records in this region indicates that remarkable climatic turbulence during the late Pleistocene, alongside extreme fluctuations in temperature and humidity, significantly influenced human technological systems and behavior.     

以杭州西湖文化景观为例探索利益相关者遗产话语权

联合国教科文组织世界遗产项目在各国的世界遗产申报过程中重视国际专家话语权,而忽视当地居民和游客的话语.在杭州西湖文化景观申遗的过程中,由于中西文化的差异性,国际专家不能全面地理解国内专家在西湖申遗文本中陈述的价值.而游客与当地居民的话语不仅能够理解西湖所体现的中国传统文化价值,也会将其与个人的情感、经历和记忆联系,构建...     

宋元时期景德镇窑装烧工艺的研究——景德镇装烧工艺研究之一

宋元时期是景德镇制瓷工业历史上非常重要的一个阶段,正是在这一时期,景德镇开始逐渐形成了具有自身特色的区域生产传统和产品面貌,并在窑业技术上多有创新,表现在窑炉的改进、窑具的创新和装烧方法的变革三个方面。本文从考古发现的景德镇窑宋元时期的窑炉与窑具入手,通过系统梳理其发展演变的脉络,以点带面,管窥景德镇制瓷工艺在10~14世纪的探索与进步,并尝试分析其他窑业生产传统对景德镇的影响。