Experimental Pesah or,How do you Eat a Lamb while Holding a Staff in your Hand?

The Passover festival has been the ritual expression of Jewish cultural identity ever since the Old Testament got the form it has today. This article looks at the ways cultural identity was expressed in antiquity, critiques the traditional prioritising of the story of exodus over its biblical ritual expression in understanding ancient Jewish identity and explores various Pesah sacrifice instructions in Exodus 12 as an implicit polemical ritual discourse engaged in constructing a ritual of cultural distinction. The article pays close attention to the tension between the invented and the real of the instructions, and attempts to identify the possible cultural other against whom some of the Exodus instructions were constructed.     

Do behaviours in cultural markets affect economic resilience? An analysis of Italian regions

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between the economic resilience and cultural behaviour, resorting to the evidence provided by 20 Italian regions at the time of Great Recession. We consider specific cultural behaviours, which provide a specific meaning of culture; its relation with the economic resilience of regions is analysed. We document that higher levels of supplied and demanded quantity of cultural goods in a region are associated with higher regional economic resilience as measured by the ability of limiting employment drop; the relation with the considered cultural behaviours is weaker in the case of economic resilience as measured by the ability of limiting income drop. We propose possible explanations for this asymmetry.     

消费地理学视角下非物质文化遗产的消费研究——姊妹节中的传统手工艺苗绣

消费研究的爆炸式增长始于20世纪80年代的消费热潮。消费地理的研究领域在过去的三十年里已经大大扩展,超越了经济和文化之间的传统分歧,并逐渐占据了主导的地位。本研究关注传统节庆中非物质文化遗产苗绣的消费实践,从不同的空间主体（在地的身体、流动的身体、固定的空间、临时的空间）对苗绣的消费过程进行分析,采用参与式观察法和深度访谈法解译施洞地区苗族和游客在传统节庆姊妹节中对苗绣的消费实践。研究发现,消费的话语和实践在特定的空间中定位身体,反过来地方又影响着具身化的消费实践。     

多元场和集群创新：河南省神垕钧瓷文化创意产业的案例分析

通过考察多元场对钧瓷文化创意产业知识创造、流动及学习创新的影响发现：①场为主体的地理、社会及文化认知等临近等提供了条件,有助于经验意会及符号知识的获得、共享与传播,有利于思想的交流碰撞及创意萌生;②生产现场、地方关系场、地方社会场与临时性场在钧瓷的学习创新中发挥着不同而又相互补充的作用。生产场推动着集群知识积累和增进,地方关系场促进了行业知识、生产经验及家族核心知识的传播传承,地方社会场形成了地方共享知识信息,而临时场建立起外部通道联系,发挥着更新地方知识库的作用;③地方性的历史文化资源与传统以及地理-社会-文化等临近造就了外围地区文化创意经济的动力,但若未来本地知识更新的机制不够强大,则易产生发展锁定,这是需要未来引起关注的问题。     

NMR as a new tool for cultural heritage application: The provenance of ancient white marbles

Identifying the origin of marble used in antiquity brings back to light details of the economic, social and political organization of classical societies, and characterizing in depth the chemistry of marble is key to discovering its provenance. Beyond X‐ray diffraction, which could reveal the presence of discriminant secondary crystalline phases and the quantification of accessory minerals combined with a multivariate analysis approach, solid‐state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) enables one to recognize the local structure arrangement of both crystalline and amorphous materials by looking at one or more selected atoms. In present paper targets the ¹³C nuclide, and thus the major component of marble, calcium carbonate. Whatever their geological origin, marbles ¹³C‐NMR spectra present only one resonance corresponding to the carboxyl function whose intensity and line width vary from one marble to another. If the variation of the NMR signal intensity observed is the result of great T1 variations (from 220 to 5300 s) and is linked to iron content, the line width reflects defects in the calcite crystal in which calcium has been replaced by another element such as magnesium, aluminium or strontium. The specific profile of the NMR signal has been used successfully to help determine the origin of some archaeological items.     

Designing a socially efficient cultural policy: the case of municipal theaters in Warsaw

While public support for culture has become a less self-evident privilege than in the past, the economic evidence for benefits a society gains from these goods has become essential for both cultural economics and cultural policy. The aim of our study is to investigate socially preferred ways of allocating scarce public resources among municipal theaters in Warsaw. The problem investigated is a current issue for local policy-making, but in a broader sense, it illustrates how state-of-the-art stated preference methods can be employed to support cultural policy. We find that inhabitants of Warsaw assign a positive value to the broader accessibility of the theaters, and their willingness to pay for making them a truly public good (by introducing a program of highly discounted tickets) exceeds the costs of such a policy. However, we also find that the cost-benefit relationship varies across theaters with different types of plays in their repertories. Our results imply a different level of socially efficient support for experimental, drama, children’s and entertainment theaters.     

Researchers,bureaucrats and the lifeworlds of cultural policy

This paper reflects on the value of cultural policy research, particularly when such research forms part of projects that seek to produce insights or ‘outcomes’ that are useful to non-university research partners. The paper draws from the author’s involvement in a project examining cultural diversity in the arts that was funded as part of the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Project scheme. It addresses Eleonora Belfiore’s provocation that this kind of instrumental cultural policy research routinely amounts to ‘bullshit.’ However, in order to understand the critical function of such research, there needs to be greater attention to the lifeworlds of cultural policy and the multiplicity of the policy-making process. This multiplicity both complicates the possibilities for usefulness in policy research, at the same time that it enables such research to be generative in unpredictable ways.     

Australian energy diplomacy

While Australia is considered an energy superpower, Australian foreign policy has often overlooked energy diplomacy. Given the transformations taking place in global energy markets, the time is ripe to begin a policy discussion in Australia on energy diplomacy. I argue that Australian diplomatic efforts should broaden beyond a historical focus on promoting fossil fuels and securing export markets, to driving global energy governance reforms through the G20. This will not only help to ensure that the international energy architecture is capable of achieving governance objectives around energy security, energy access and climate change, but significantly, it will also help Australia to achieve broader foreign policy goals, such as ensuring emerging economies become responsible stakeholders within the international system.     

Co-chairing Asia-Pacific defence diplomacy: the case ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus

This article assesses co-chairs’ roles in affecting the outcomes of Asia-Pacific defence diplomacy, which have been under-examined. Attempting to mend this intellectual gap, our study examines: ‘What shapes specific agreement details?’ We contend that co-chairs’ effectiveness is not borne out of resource possession but in fact derived from their ability to manage the resources. In order to be effective, co-chairpersons must convert the available resources at hands into bargaining leverage. To validate our argument, empirical analysis of military medicine (MM) collaboration under the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus (ADMM-Plus) framework was conducted. We demonstrate how the Thai and Russian co-chairs altered the bargaining dynamics to shape the outcomes regarding the ASEAN Center of Military Medicine (ACMM). Insights from our analysis not only extends the existing academic literature on Asia-Pacific defence diplomacy and international negotiation, but also provides practitioners with lessons useful for conducting defence diplomacy and enhancing security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific and beyond.     

六世纪中后期的中国联珠纹织物

联珠纹在中国虽有更早的源头,但它从6世纪中期才开始流行。那时中国的联珠纹虽以粟特地区为中介受到萨珊艺术的影响,但也融入了自身的文化理解和艺术形式,这令联珠纹在很大程度上丧失了原有的萨珊图案寓意、改变了西方原貌。邺城等黄河中下游的丝织重镇,应是联珠纹织物在内地的重要产地。