The social value of culture: learning from revolutionary Cuba

As the tide turns against econometric calculations of cultural value, scope exists for careful reconsideration of the social value of culture. In Cuba after 1959, culture was placed at the heart of a society undergoing radical transformation. This article examines the socially orientated initiatives to which this revalidation gave rise. It shows that substantial changes were wrought in professional circles as art was acknowledged as a form of social production and remunerated accordingly. It also outlines the sustained efforts that were made to diminish the gap between creative intellectuals and the rest of society, by encouraging widespread appreciation of, and participation in, creative activity. This comprehensive programme was underscored by ideas around democratisation and emancipation that remain vital to contemporary discussions.     

3. INDIGENOUS EMPIRES AND NATIVE NATIONS: BEYOND HISTORY AND ETHNOHISTORY IN PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN'S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE

How should historians write Native history? To what extent should one privilege Native terms, sources, chronologies, and epistemologies? And to what extent should historians align Native history with concepts developed for other peoples and places? These crucial questions about emic (insider) and etic (outsider) approaches to the past are cast into sharp relief in Pekka Hämäläinen's award‐winning The Comanche Empire. This essay charts the perils and possibilities of each position. It then explores possible ways to move beyond the emic/etic division that has dominated many of the recent debates about Native history through a rereading of an episode in which Comanche history collides with US and Mexican history.     

Fenced In: Intimacy and Mobility in Highlands Papua New Guinea

This paper is organised around the analysis of an ‘event’; a truck trip from Kwima, a Maring speaking settlement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, to Banz in the Wahgi Valley and an evening spent on the road. The event forms a standpoint from which to assess the impact of the decline of civic space, and faltering legacy of colonial governmentality, in the Jimi since 1980. I describe the emergence of new forms of mobility based around the nexus between local forms of business and trucks. In particular I focus on new and anxious forms of masculine inside relationships, understood as a transformation of a habitus of intimacy, round which such mobility is built. I argue that this transformation should be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive profit oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. At the same time the event provides a vantage point to reflect on the nature of long‐term fieldwork, the methodological significance of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, and the nature of ethnographic error.     

The Growth Cone as Seen Through Cajal's Original Histological Preparations and Publications

Abstract

Multiple sclerosis (MS) was first presented in a clinical setting in 1838. In this paper the presentation and treatment of a transient hemiparesis in a drummer in 1789 is discussed. This may have been an early case of MS and presents evidence against the theory that MS is an infectious disease beginning in the 19th century.     

Pre-Columbian Ring Ditches along the Yacuma and Rapulo Rivers,Beni, Bolivia: A Preliminary Review

Abstract

Pre-Columbian farmers built a variety of earthworks in the Llanos de Mojos, part of the Bolivian Amazon. Raised fields, canals, causeways, and mounds of various types in this region date to ca. 800 B.C.–A.D. 1600. In central Mojos, archaeological work was carried out along the Yacuma, a large west-bank tributary of the Mamoré River. Four ring ditches and two areas of associated raised agricultural fields were mapped. The Global Positioning System was used to document earthworks under the forest canopy which were analyzed within a Geographic Information System. Ceramic evidence is also included. The ring ditches in this study expand the known range of such earthworks in Mojos by 200 km. This revised distribution of ring ditches changes interpretations of the long-term history of Arawak speakers in Mojos and throughout Amazonia. While earthworks in Mojos clearly represent systems of intensive agriculture, they cannot be associated only with Arawak speakers or with Arawak languages.     

Between Large-N and Small-N Analyses: Historical Comparison of Thirty Insurgency Case Studies

Abstract

The authors study the 30 insurgencies occurring between 1978 and 2008 using four methods crossing the qualitative/quantitative divide. The four approaches are narrative, bivariate comparison, comparative qualitative analysis, and K-medoids clustering. The quantification of qualitative data allows the authors to compare more cases than they could “hold in their heads” under a traditional small-n qualitative approach, improving the quality of the overall narrative and helping to ensure that the quantitative analyses respected the nuance of the detailed case histories. Structured data-mining reduces the dimensionality of possible explanatory factors relative to the available observations to expose patterns in the data in ways more common in large-n studies. The four analytic approaches produced similar and mutually supporting findings, leading to robust conclusions.     

Machiavelli's scientific method: a common understanding of his novelty in the sixteenth century

This paper argues that Machiavelli's method, his inductive and comparative use of history and experience for political analysis, and his fashioning of historical-political analysis as ‘science’, played an important and still unrecognised role in his reception in the sixteenth century. It makes the case that Machiavelli's inductive reasoning and stress on historia and experientia offered a model for scientific method that open-minded sixteenth-century scholars, eager to understand, organise and augment human knowledge (scientia), could fit to their own epistemology. By focusing on the question of method—a crucial issue for sixteenth-century contemporaries—the paper offers more than a key to the understanding of Machiavelli's positive reception. It also helps in apprehending the crucial importance of Lucretius to Machiavelli's scholarship; the role of the late Renaissance fascination with historia in his reception; and the breadth of appropriation of his method exactly in the decades when anti-Machiavellianism became official politics all over Europe. These claims are sustained through the cases of Machiavelli's early translators and promulgators; the French legal humanists and historiographers; the Swiss, Italian and French scholars engaging with medicine, Paracelsism and astronomy; the authors of political maxims from all over Europe; and finally Francis Bacon.     

The Golgi Stain: Invention,Diffusion and Impact on Neurosciences

The black reaction, invented in 1873 by Camillo Golgi (1843-1926), was the first technique to reveal neurons in their entirety, i.e. with all their processes. This important development passed unnoticed at first and only received wide international attention after a long delay. The Golgi stain was widely employed for almost thirty years and was directly responsible for major advances in our knowledge of the microscopic anatomy of the nervous system, as well as in other fields of study. In the hands of other researchers, the black reaction provided vital evidence that helped to establish the neuron theory. The Golgi stain was almost forgotten in the period between the two World Wars, but the introduction of the electron microscope to neurocytological research revived its use around the middle of the twentieth century. Today, the black reaction is still used extensively not only in combination with electron microscopy, but also as an autonomous technique in studies on the evolution, ontogeny, and organization of the nervous system.     

Guerilla art,social value and absent heritage fabric

There is extensive commentary on the role of unauthorised art, but little on the coincidence of heritage value and guerilla art. This paper analyses the relationship of the two in a 2007 statue which is a monument to a lost place for which there is no surviving historic fabric. The statue functions not just as a place of memory, but of guerilla art; a complex interplay has emerged between an official piece of government art and unsanctioned community performance. Growing heritage emphasis on social value over the previous dominance of original fabric suggests that the delight with which the statue has been greeted illuminates evolving heritage philosophy, monument language and the emergence of the importance of the heritage community especially for its potential performance value at a site. The dramatic contribution that the statue has made to the city has an impact on the fields of landscaping, planning, history and heritage.