京郊四村80年:乡民社会的历史图景与现实处境

20世纪20年代李景汉调查的京郊四村长期以来一直得到学术界的关注,2006～2008年,我们又对京郊四村进行了田野调查和文献研究,目的意在秉承前辈学者的研究理路,以村民的收入和消费为主线,呈现其从乡土社会到城市街区的转换历程,以及失地农民在适应城市生活中所面临的诸多问题。作为城乡关系的"连接点",大城市边缘村落既是乡土社会转型的前沿地带,也是都市化引发社会矛盾和冲突的焦点。因此,对京郊四村的再研究,不仅续写了村庄的历史,更突显了认识和记录中国社会变迁的价值所在。     

略谈宋代官窑瓷器研究中存在的问题

宋代官窑是中国古陶瓷研究中的重要内容之一。长期以来,由于对相关历史文献的理解不同以及考古发掘的局限性,致使在宋代官窑瓷器研究中存在许多悬而未决的问题,诸如何为北宋官窑,北宋朝廷是否在都城汴京设置过官窑,北宋官窑是否就是汝窑,河南汝州张公巷窑是否是北宋官窑,南宋修内司官窑的称谓是否准确,南宋官窑是否只有郊坛下官窑一处,何为文献上所说的内窑,老虎洞窑是修内司官窑还是文献上所说的续窑,等等。本文在对专家学者们对上述问题的看法进行疏理的基础上,指出对宋代官窑瓷器的研究离不开传世宋代官窑瓷器、现代科学技术手段和考古发掘资料,只有将这三者结合起来开展综合研究,才能最终解决上述问题。     

Rice fields and modes of rice cultivation between 5000 and 2500 BC in east China

Recently, rice fields dated between 5000 and 2500 BC were found at the Tianluoshan sit in east China. The early rice fields dated between 5000 and 4500 BC are the oldest rice fields known. The discovery has provided data of recovering reclamation, cultivation, and the ecological system of rice fields in the Neolithic age. People opened up marshes of dense reeds with fire and wooden or bone spades, in order to create rice fields. In the rice fields, there was not only rice, but a lot of weeds as well. The excavations proved that little or even no weeding or irrigation was adopted. However, tilling soil by wooden and bone tools was evidenced. The average yields are estimated to have been about 830 kg for the early period and 950 kg per hectare for the later period. The cultivation system was low-level. Although the Tianluoshan people cultivated rice, they still obtained a great deal of food by gathering and hunting.     

Producing liminal space: gender,age and class in northern Ontario's tree planting industry

Drawing upon qualitative data, this article examines how tree planters in northern Ontario, Canada engage with liminality in terms of gender, class, age and space. In doing so, it provides insight into concepts of gender liminality and the variegated experiences of males and females in liminal space. The article focuses on four aspects of the liminal engagement. First, the spaces of tree planting are liminal as they are marked by homelife and worklife, but dominated by neither. Second, gender performances are liminal, as males perform masculinities seldom necessary or appropriate – yet often valorized – in their permanent communities, while females (who make up nearly half of the workforce) are offered opportunities to work and succeed in a traditionally male industry. However, success often requires that they adopt certain masculine traits. Third, most tree planters are in the interstitial age of ‘youth’, somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Finally, tree planters are generally members of affluent urban middle-classes, yet the work they perform is more readily associated with rural or peripheral working-classes.     

Holy cow!: the miraculous cures of animals in late medieval England1

Interactions between saints and animals have been the focus of modern scholarship, yet an important aspect has been neglected, namely that of the saint as healer of animals, when a third party has requested help on behalf of the animal. This article therefore examines, through examples drawn from saints' Vitae and other sources, the types of animals for which saintly intervention was sought, the ailments from which they suffered, and the form which their cure took, in order to understand why medieval people turned to the saints when their animals were ill. An examination of this relationship between saint and animal will not only elucidate the role of saint as thaumaturge, but will also shed light on the veterinary aspect of animal welfare.     

The bishop and the Basques: The diocese of Calahorra and the Basque provinces of Alava and Vizcaya under Bishop Rodrigo Cascante, 1147–1190

Under Bishop Rodrigo Cascante (1147–90), the northern Iberian diocese of Calahorra made its first significant administrative inroads into Alava and Vizcaya since its nominal assimilation of those Basque provinces around 1090. An examination into the fluctuating history of Calahorra's administrative penetration of its Basque provinces during this period highlights the extreme difficulty of this undertaking, which was severely hampered by the opposition of a strong Basque regional nobility. It also reveals a close connection between the fluctuations that characterized Calahorra's administrative fortunes north of the Ebro and the see's turbulent political context, defined by its position straddling a volatile frontier between Castile, Navarre and Aragon. Finally, it provides a useful opportunity to analyse Rodrigo Cascante's changing relationships with the secular powers that competed for the territory of his Riojan see. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the bishop of Calahorra was not a passive partner in these relationships, but actively adjusted his stance with respect to the crowns of Castile and Aragon, primarily in function of how well they did, or might, contribute to the realization of his Basque agenda.     

‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London

From the middle of the Second World War until the early 1950s, architects, planners and designers in Britain made an unprecedented investment in reforming the built environment as a means to ensure a stable and secure post-war society. This essay considers the importance of movement, trajectory and repetition within this reconstruction vision and how the organisation of these things provided a basis for imagining a new form of consensual urban community. The essay begins by exploring how the County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw, 1943) and the Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, 1945) articulated a set of spatio-temporal logics, based on the prescribed trajectory of the individual embedded within a programme of quotidian repetitions. These logics suggested that urban space could be built to foreclose the possibility of historical conflict. The essay then explores the material design of two post-war exhibitions, Britain Can Make It (1946) and the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition (1951), which offered visitors an experiential taster of what these new urban choreographies would feel like. To end, the essay explores the recurrent figure of the atom within post-war public pedagogy. Within this briefly ubiquitous mechanistic image lay an unacknowledged assurance about how hierarchical structures of movement and repetition sustained the material world, just as these things were being invoked to secure London's position across a range of scales from the local urban neighbourhood to the post-war Commonwealth.     

Laying it down in stone: delimiting and demarcating Iraq's boundaries by mixed international commission

Mixed international commissions have been centrally involved in shaping the outer margins of the state territory of Iraq over the last century and a half. Laborious Anglo-Russian efforts to narrow the traditional Perso-Ottoman frontier in the seventy-year period before the Great War contrasted with the League of Nations' ostensibly speedy treatment of Iraq's more arbitrary northern and north-western territorial limits in the early inter-war years. Most recently, a team appointed by the UN Secretary-General finalised definition of Iraq's international boundaries with Kuwait when the emirate was liberated from Iraqi occupation in the spring of 1991. This article scrutinises the role played by these bodies in the boundary evolutionary process from a review of their primary records. It highlights the fact that the evolution of Iraq's (and those of its Ottoman forbears) international boundaries to the east, north and west was rarely straightforward and reflected both regional considerations and imperial contexts. The problem of reconciling inadequate textual definitions with features on the ground has been a constant phenomenon. Deciding whether commissions actually delimited or demarcated territory was as valid a question following the UN's Iraq–Kuwait settlement as in the mid-nineteenth century. Whether many historical treaty delimitations were ever designed to be anything more than territorial allocations is another theme explored in this article.     

The lenses of nationhood: an optical model of identity

ABSTRACT. This paper tries to make the case for a model of political identity based on an optical metaphor, which is especially applicable to nations. Human vision can be separated into sentient object, lenses and inbuilt mental ideas. This corresponds well to identity processes in which ‘light’ from a bounded territorial referent is refracted through various lenses (ideological, material, psychological) to focus in certain ways on particular symbolic resources like genealogy, history, culture or political institutions. Distinguishing between referent, lenses and resources helps us more precisely situate many hitherto disparate problems of national identity. These include the ‘ethnic‐civic’ dilemma, the mystery of national identity before nationalism, and the relationship between local and national, and individual and collective, identities. The model also clarifies the place of universalist ideology, which currently fits poorly within the leading culturalist and materialist theories of nationalism.     

The Office of Housekeeper of the House of Lords

This note illustrates one aspect of the process whereby the palace of Westminster evolved from a royal residence into the seat of parliament, explains how the housekeeper of that palace came to be associated with the house of lords and lists the holders of the office from the 16th to the 19th century.