Territorialising Movement Parties: The Case of Nuevo Encuentro in Buenos Aires

How and why do political parties, seemingly focused on electoral politics, also mobilise within contentious arenas? Drawing on qualitative research with a centre-left Argentine party called Nuevo Encuentro (NE) in the city of Buenos Aires this paper demonstrates the importance of a geographical reading of “movement parties” for responding to this question. Specifically, the paper analyses NE’s territorialisation, understood as a strategy for organisation building via the political appropriation of space, typically by opening branches and mobilising activists in neighbourhoods. Between 2007 and 2019 NE’s strategy of territorialisation mobilised across multiple scales—the neighbourhood, city and national—yet in so doing its organisation became overstretched and struggled to engage across both contentious and electoral arenas. Through an analysis of NE’s territorialisation, grounded in the historical and geographical context of contemporary Argentina, the paper provides an original attempt to spatialise the concept of movement party.     

A Man and a Perpetuum Mobile? Assigned Hermaphrodite Andreas Bruce's Memoirs

This article presents the memoirs of Andreas Bruce, a Swedish man that was assigned female sex at birth and later re-assigned sex as a male hermaphrodite. His memoirs, written by the end of the nineteenth century, are unique. They exhibit a rare example of what life could be like for gender transgressors during the nineteenth century. According to the memoirs, Bruce's transition and legal gender recognition was the source of some attention, but once he had gained a certificate of hermaphroditism and a male first name, his masculinity seldom seems to have been contested. Bruce navigates between describing himself as an ordinary man and describing his life story as unique.     

A geometric morphometric relationship predicts stone flake shape and size variability

The archaeological record represents a window onto the complex relationship between stone artefact variance and hominin behaviour. Differences in the shapes and sizes of stone flakes—the most abundant remains of past behaviours for much of human evolutionary history—may be underpinned by variation in a range of different environmental and behavioural factors. Controlled flake production experiments have drawn inferences between flake platform preparation behaviours, which have thus far been approximated by linear measurements, and different aspects of overall stone flake variability (Dibble and Rezek J Archaeol Sci 36:1945–1954, 2009; Lin et al. Am Antiq 724–745, 2013; Magnani et al. J Archaeol Sci 46:37–49, 2014; Rezek et al. J Archaeol Sci 38:1346–1359, 2011). However, when the results are applied to archaeological assemblages, there remains a substantial amount of unexplained variability. It is unclear whether this disparity between explanatory models and archaeological data is a result of measurement error on certain key variables, whether traditional analyses are somehow a general limiting factor, or whether there are additional flake shape and size drivers that remain unaccounted for. To try and circumvent these issues, here, we describe a shape analysis approach to assessing stone flake variability including a newly developed three-dimensional geometric morphometric method (‘3DGM’). We use 3DGM to demonstrate that a relationship between platform and flake body governs flake shape and size variability. Contingently, we show that by using this 3DGM approach, we can use flake platform attributes to both (1) make fairly accurate stone flake size predictions and (2) make relatively detailed predictions of stone flake shape. Whether conscious or instinctive, an understanding of this geometric relationship would have been critical to past knappers effectively controlling the production of desired stone flakes. However, despite being able to holistically and accurately incorporate three-dimensional flake variance into our analyses, the behavioural drivers of this variance remain elusive.     

Immigration and the making of place in Paris

Since the late nineteenth century, France has been a destination for people outside its borders. In recent decades, most immigrants have come from outside of Europe, often from ex-colonies in Northern Africa, West Africa, and Indochina. The Parisian area has welcomed a disproportionate share of these immigrants and neighborhoods have been shaped and reshaped to reflect their presence. This paper examines three neighborhoods in Paris—Belleville, the Triangle de Choisy, and the Goutte d'Or—which are each composed of and shaped by separate ethnic populations. To a great extent, these neighborhoods are imprinted by commercial activity, often involving customers who come from well outside the neighborhood and networks that extend beyond the nation. They also show patterns of multiethnicity which allows for difference between groups to be maintained, even as the space shared between them is effectively negotiated.     

Solomon Carter Fuller, M.D. (1872-1953): American pioneer in Alzheimer's disease research

The appointment of Alois Alzheimer to Emil Kraepelin's clinic and laboratory at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital, University of Munich in 1903 offered new opportunities for clinical and pathological studies of the brain. At the opening of the facility in 1904, Alzheimer selected five foreign visiting students as his graduate research assistants, among whom was an American, Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller. A glimpse of Fuller's background as an African-American (born in Liberia) at the turn of the century, his continuing research after leaving Germany in 1906, and his critical view of the Alzheimer dementia entity are recounted. He was held in high esteem as a practicing neuropsychiatrist and teacher in the Boston area.     

Freemasonry as a playground for civic nationalism

This article explores correspondences between the ideals of ‘civic nationalism’ (hereafter CN) and the practices of Freemasonry, a worldwide male fraternity. Freemasons practice an elitist stance of civilizing the self, translated into a collective mission of society‐building. Though not a national movement, Freemasonry shares conceptual similarities with CN and was implicated in civic‐national revolutions in the Americas and the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic research on Israeli Freemasonry, the study explores Masonic sociability as a playgound for practicing civic friendship and negotiating the inherent tensions of CN. Freemasons straddle between particularist and universalist understandings of fraternity, virtue and charity, which carry over to questions of citizenship, patriotism and nationalism. This boundary work over collective attachments represents a pragmatic attempt, not to resolve universalist and particularist preferences, but to contain and incorporate both within exclusivist Masonic practices. Far from marking the failure of CN, Masonic sociability illustrates its political significance, envisioning the nation as a social club of chosen friends.     

The pearls and pitfalls of skull trephination as described in the Hippocratic treatise "On Head Wounds"

The purpose of our current study is to describe the guidelines regarding trephination as suggested in the Hippocratic writer's book, "Peri ton en cephali traumaton" ("On Head Wounds"). The ancient Greek text was reviewed as well as two English translations. The Hippocratic author described the indications, timing, and techniques of trephination for patients with head injury. He emphasized that attention should be paid to the details of the employed technique. He also commented on the difference of skull thickness at different anatomical sites and also between different age groups. The Hippocratic recommendations provided details for the performance of trephination by the ancient Greek physicians that are still considered important in modern neurosurgery.     

Political Accommodation and Functional Interaction along the Northern Italian Borderlands

Borderlands are places where large–scale and small–scale politics interact. Relationships between national states at the largescale affect local relations at the smallscale. Likewise, activities at the small–scale redound to the larger scale. While the politics of boundaries and borderland regions is often viewed at the scale of the national states, we argue that politics at the borderland needs to be examined in two other ways: in terms of relations between regions across national boundaries (small–scale) and in the relations between the borderland region itself and the national state (cross–scale). This article examines the nature of 'cross–scale' and "small–scale" political relations in the northern Italian borderlands. This is explored through (1) the degree of autonomy granted by the Italian government towards regions and cultural minorities on the border, and (2) the nature and extent of contacts and shared projects with neighboring regions across the boundary. Two conclusions are drawn. First, that the nature of cross–scale concessions to regional autonomy depends on the strength of the minority groups involved. Second, that the extent of small–scale contact and collaboration across the boundary depends on pre–existing economic interrelationships and cultural ties.     

Warton,George Washington and the Lancashire Roots of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’, C. 1880–1976

This article takes as its starting point the ancestral connection linking George Washington, first president of the United States, to the parish of Warton in north Lancashire. But rather than simply repeating the various details of this ancestry, this article considers instead the ways in which the Warton–Washington connection has been used within acts of ‘commemorative diplomacy’ — informal and often unofficial activities that deploy cultural memory in the interests of international relations. From the antiquarian endeavours of the 1880s, to the Washington-focused commemorations organized during the world wars, to the Bicentenary events of July 1976, places like Warton have long played a vital role in Anglo-American relations. Indeed, what Winston Churchill famously called the ‘special relationship’ has always been a carefully cultivated ‘myth’ as much as a political reality, and thus rooting it in specific places has been essential, ensuring it seems ‘organic’ rather than constructed, real rather than artificial, old and robust rather than new and superficial. Commemorative activities at Warton therefore offer an important perspective on twentieth-century Anglo-American relations, showing how a north Lancashire connection to the first president has provided an invaluable vector for defining, imagining and celebrating the transatlantic ties of the past and present.