Finding likeness: Neural plasticity and ritual experience

To efficiently survive, living creatures require some means of recording their experiences, predicting future experiences on the firm basis of such recordings and deciding on actions that help survival and reproduction. For us humans, this is provided by our very large brains. Our brains are adaptable; indeed, we never use the same brain twice. There are two main mechanisms: reversible synaptic plasticity and the irreversible myelination of axons. Culture can be seen as the store of world knowledge, tacit and explicit, that individuals must acquire to facilitate decision-making by defining their range of options and to become acceptable social persons. Such knowledge is encoded, in ways not yet fully understood, in the pattern of our brain’s connections. In rites of passage, one’s social identity is transformed, entailing a significant modification of this pattern. Liminal status, brought about by entrainment with the ritual’s powerfully affective actions, appears to remove the cultural feedbacks that maintained one’s former social identity and enables durable modification to brain connections by means of a greater myelination of existing pathways and myelination of previously unused pathways. Such changes might be empirically observable using non-invasive MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) techniques. The shared intense experience during the liminal period encourages a sense of likeness among participants, which is embedded in their brains by shared patterns of durable connections.     

Beginning to Write Separately: The Origins and Development of Concurring Judicial Opinions

While political scientists and legal academics have both evinced a “fascination with disagreement on courts,” ¹ this scholarly concentration on conflict rather than consensus has tended to focus on dissent and dissenting opinions. As far as we can tell, there is no authoritative history of concurring opinions in the U.S. Supreme Court. This article is a first effort to correct that oversight by examining developments and change in concurring behavior from the founding through the White Court (1921). This period covers the emergence of an institutionally independent national judicial branch and ends before the start of the modern, policy‐making Court era, which we argue begins with the Taft Court and the creation of a fully discretionary docket.     

DRAWING POTSHERDS: A LOW-COST COMPUTER-BASED SYSTEM

When an archaeological site is investigated large numbers of potsherds may be recovered. These have to be drawn. This is a very time-consuming and labour-intensive task which is usually undertaken by skilled draughtsmen. The system described in this paper aims to speed the process of sketching potsherds by using software techniques developed for computer-aided drawing (CAD), together with hardware which allows the user to digitize the profile of a sherd. The resulting system is cheap and portable, and may be used in the field in conjunction with a battery-powered computer. A novel method of calculating the position of the original axis of a pot has also been developed for sherds lacking a section o f rim or base.     

Death,Passion and Politics: The Power of Grief and the Charisma of Loss

Caves used in antiquity had multiple functions and often long use histories. While many were employed for shelter, some became ritual sites. Revitalized interest in caves in Mesoamerica combines archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, epigraphy, and osteology. The current, general anthropological study of caves offers exceptional insights into early Mesoamerican customs, ceremonies, and beliefs, and indicates that caves played a significant role in religion. The evidence suggests that some caves were perceived as vital aspects of a sacred landscape and connections to the supernatural underworld. Continuity of indigenous ritual practices associated with caves remains to the present.