古栉拾零

我国古代的栉,既是一种重要的首服饰物,又是一种必备的梳理用具。作为人类精神创造和物质创造的结晶,栉以其独特的方式,不仅记录了社会生活状态的变化,同时也记录了人们审美理念的变化,在人类文化发展史上占有相当重要的地位。可是,由于人们对栉的使用习以为常,乃至于忽视了它们的存在价值。本文运用对比分析的方法,辨识出"不为人识"、"不明全貌"、"不辨其形"的三例古栉,并通过对相关遗存的分析,指出了这些古栉不仅在标识使用者身份方面具有重要的作用,而且在反映不同地区、不同人群的精神面貌方面同样具有不可忽视的作用。     

Despairing at ‘A World Made New’? South Africa Encounters the Post-war Human Rights Idea

ABSTRACT

This article surveys the efforts of the South African state to respond to the reconfigured world that emerged after 1945. Focussed on those years around the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), it argues that South African governments and officials were well attuned to the rising threat of human rights. Drawing on South African archives, it demonstrates that representatives of late United Party and early apartheid era governments were insightful observers of the mortal danger universal human rights posed to the racialised ideological architecture which governed essentially all of the country’s politics and society. Paradoxically, the most avowed opponents of the new crusade for universal human rights perceived its significance with equal or greater acuity than those more enthusiastic about the nascent rights order.     

Mobile sovereignty: The case of ‘boat people’ in Australia

State sovereignty, in terms of the organisation and expression of political authority by nation states, is traditionally interpreted as a political container that is being weakened by increasing human and non-human mobilities. However recent research indicates that states are themselves becoming more mobile as executive bodies move and sovereign spaces are tactically reduced and expanded to intercept and control global mobilities. While challenging dichotomous notions of mobility and sovereignty, such research frames the movements of governments, territory and sovereign agents as the tactics of already established states. This paper builds on extant research by drawing on both a mobile ontology and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to examine how mobilities constitute modern state sovereignty. To do so I examine Australian sovereignty and the related material and symbolic exclusion of asylum seekers arriving by boat. My analysis finds that mobilities, in terms of material movements and their representation, are essential to the construction of Australian sovereignty and the position of maritime asylum seekers as its outsider and limit identity. Through their mobile interception and management, and their representation as mobile ‘others’, maritime asylum seekers are used to create sovereign borders between specific types of movement; between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (im)mobilities. I argue that this form of state sovereignty is disarticulated from space and follows populations who construct territories as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the Australian state as they move.