The Monumental Cemeteries of Northern Pictland

THE EMERGENCE OF FORMAL CEMETERIES is one of the most significant transformations in the landscapes of 1st millennium ad Scotland. In eastern and northern Scotland, in the lands of the Picts, square and circular burial monuments were constructed to commemorate a small proportion of the population — perhaps a newly emerging elite in the post-Roman centuries. This paper presents the results of a project that has consolidated and reviewed the evidence for monumental cemeteries of the northern Picts from Aberdeenshire to Inverness-shire, transcribing the aerial evidence of many sites for the first time. In addition, the landscape location of the cemeteries is assessed, along with their relation to Pictish symbol stones, fortified sites and settlement landscapes of the 1st millennium ad. Two particular elements of the burial architecture of northern Pictland are highlighted — barrow enlargement, and the linking of barrows through the sharing of barrow/cairn ditches. Both of these practices are suggested here to be implicated in the creation of genealogies of the living and the dead during an important transitional period in northern Europe when hereditary aristocracies became more prominent.     

The French Republic and Women's Access to Professional Work: Issues and Controversies in France from the 1870s to the 1930s

While the French feminist movements campaigning to obtain the right to vote between the 1870s and the 1930s are well known, the struggles for women's access to higher education and professional work have not yet been studied in depth. Although the French Third Republic (1871–1940) claimed to adhere to the principles of equality, meritocracy and the ‘free competition of talents’, which translated concretely into the creation of a system of scholarships, competitions and professional degrees which provided access to many of the professional careers, these doors remained largely closed to the first women attempting to enter them. The controversies that this situation provoked are the subject of this article, which draws from professional, parliamentary, press and activist sources. More broadly, through examining this particular series of controversies, the article aims to give an account of the mechanisms and arguments that are generally used to make such discriminations publicly acceptable within institutional spaces that are formally governed by the principle of equal access.     

Filming Fairies: Popular Film,Audience Response and Meaning in Contemporary Fairy Lore

This study examines the idea of fairy lore (faery) as a modern concept with personal and humanistic overtones transmitted through mass media phenomena such as films. Analysis of the relationship between folk and popular culture has become increasingly sophisticated and has widened our appreciation of the ways in which mass-culture audiences use tradition to shape popular culture. Fantasy films draw on recognised traditional elements, but the significance of these elements has been mediated through nineteenth-century interpretations of fairy lore. Contemporary audiences are more likely to be exposed to such legends and beliefs in the context of mass media than by any other means, and visualisation of fairies in fantasy films is closely linked to these modern interpretations of traditional material. For cinema audiences, the idea of faery is no longer a traditional and immediate response to experience, it already carries overtones of nostalgia for the past, childhood innocence, utopian societies or sexual discovery. However, personal response and exegesis of this material, reinforced by repeated viewing, access to Internet sites and related activities such as role-play and merchandising, means that the interactions of these virtual communities can transmute and insert themselves into daily life through a shared appreciation of fantasy worlds. The ways in which these consumers of mass culture resemble or differ from a folk audience presents an interesting arena for understanding folklore as a living contemporary phenomenon.     

All the World’s a Stage: Promotional Politics and Branded Identities in Asia

ABSTRACT

This article highlights key questions raised by the growing concern for global competitiveness and promotional politics in contemporary Asia. Global politics is increasingly governed by promotional imperatives and in the last two decades it has become a common practice for governments to engage in nation branding. Asian states have been particularly eager to implement such promotional strategies, as their rapid development in the last decades has increased their international presence and the overseas expansion of their national corporations. Why and how do Asian states promote themselves? Where and how do promotional imperatives interact with traditional state policies? How are national identities produced, reproduced and challenged through promotional practices in Asia? This article introduces a series of three articles that underline the significance of these policies with regard to renewed, market-based forms of nationalism in the region. It highlights the way questions of image projection within a global capitalist order are becoming crucial for major emerging Asian economies such as China as they integrate and seek to reshape the global political economy. Finally, it considers how, in several regimes in the region, nation branding and the necessities of image projection serve as powerful governance tools to recreate apolitical versions of national identities that serve domestic political purposes.     

Fairies,Fractious Women,and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture

TABOU ET TOTÉMISME À MADAGASCAR: ÉTUDE DESCRIPTIVE ET THÉORIQUE. Par ARNOLD VAN GENNEP. Paris: E. Leroux, 1904. Reviewed by E. Sidney Hartland.

THE MASAI, THEIR LANGUAGE AND FOLK-LORE. By A. C. HOLLIS, with Introduction by Sir Charles Eliot Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1905, 8vo Pp. xxxii + 364. Price 14s. net. Reviewed by N. W. Thomas.

ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH POPULAR BALLADS. Edited from the Collection of Francis James Child by HELEN CHILD SARGENT and GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE. London: D. Nutt 1905. Reviewed by A. Lang.     

A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales,I & II / Studies on the Book of Deer

The web portal of the Folklore Archive of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain, gives access to three databases: ArxiuFolk, the Database of the Folklore Archive; RondCat, the Catalan Folktale Search Engine; and BiblioFolk, the Bio-bibliographic Repository of Catalan Popular Literature. This article describes how these databases work and the possibilities they offer for researchers.     

Branding South Korea in a Competitive World Order: Discourses and Dispositives in Neoliberal Governmentality

Since 2008, the South Korean administration has invested significant budgetary and political resources in its nation branding strategy, involving the private sector and Korean citizens in this endeavour. This article takes Korea as an exemplary case study of the way many states have enrolled their citizens, through nation branding, in the construction of a collective competitive identity. This study is based on an empirically deductive methodology, looking at the industry literature on nation branding, official sources, iconography and videos from the Korean nation branding campaign, and drawing on interviews with actors and observers of this campaign. I suggest that Korean nation branding should be seen as a continuation of the capitalist developmental project initiated by Park Chung-Hee in 1960s. Lee Myung-Bak’s nation branding campaign belongs to a series of strategies aiming at transforming South Korean into a successful global site of capitalist accumulation. This path dependency involves citizen mobilisation, and this is analysed through a Foucauldian prism: this article shows that although modalities of social control have evolved with the democratisation in 1987, they still play a role, combining coercion and non-coercive technologies of the self, in seeking to transform Korean citizens into competitive capitalist subjects.