The Imperial Subject: Geography and Travel in the Work of Mary Kingsley and Halford Mackinder

How do places shape and interact with subjectivity? By exploring how a change of location had implications for the way the effects of imperialism were registered, this paper shows how imperialism shaped subjectivity both at home and abroad. It takes the travels and mountain climbing of Mary Kingsley and Halford Mackinder as case studies for a consideration of gender as an effect and as a part of these processes.     

Early Evidence for Domestic Chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) in the Horn of Africa

Domestic chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus L. 1758) are one of the most valued farm animals in the world today. Chickens are widespread and economically and socially significant in Africa. Despite their importance, little is known about the nature of their introduction and subsequent integration into African economies. One reason for this is the morphological similarity of domestic chickens to wild galliform birds in Africa such as guineafowl and francolin. Here, we present direct dates and morphological evidence for domestic chickens recovered from Mezber, a pre‐Aksumite (>800–450 BCE) rural farming settlement in northern Ethiopia. Key morphological markers differentiated these domestic chickens from francolins. The Mezber direct chicken element accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates of cal 820–595 BCE and indirect/charcoal AMS dates of cal 921–801 BCE constitute the earliest osteological evidence for chickens in Africa. Chicken bones in the domestic food waste of an early rural settlement at Mezber and their presence in later Aksumite urban contexts show that chickens were integrated into diverse Ethiopian highland settings. The Mezber specimens predate the earliest known Egyptian chickens by at least 550 years and draw attention to early exotic faunal exchanges in the Horn of Africa during the early first millennium BCE. These findings support previous archaeological, genetics and linguistic data that suggest maritime exchange networks with South Arabia through ports along the African Red Sea coast constitute one possible early route of introduction of chickens to Africa. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

股东资格确认的法律问题研究

本文针对新《公司法》第33条确立的股东资格确认标准,就实践中出现的股东资格确认问题,对股东资格确认应当遵循的原则、要件及可能证据的效力进行了阐述,并进一步提出解决股东资格确认问题的对策。     

BALANCED TRUTH: STEVEN SPIELBERG'S SCHINDLER'S LIST AMONG HISTORY,MEMORY, AND POPULAR CULTURE1

Looking at the public reaction to it, one might say that Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is undoubtedly the most successful film about the Holocaust. The film's success in the U.S. and other Western countries can be traced back mainly to the fact that it creates the impression of telling a true, apparently authentic, story. This essay investigates how this impression of historical truth and authenticity emerges in a fiction film. For this purpose the essay reverts to a concept developed by Jörn Rüsen, which distinguishes among three dimensions of historical culture, namely political, aesthetic, and cognitive. In addition to the historical context that serves as a specific precondition for the film's success, the essay primarily investigates the strategies of authentication Spielberg applied at both the visual and narrative levels. The investigation concludes that the impression of evidence produced by the movie is significantly a result of the sophisticated balancing of the three dimensions mentioned above. The film utilizes artifacts of an existing and increasingly transnational (visual) memory for the benefit of a closed, archetypical narrative. It follows the aesthetic and artistic rules of popular narrative cinema, and largely recurs to conventions of representation that were common in film and television programs of the 1990s. Although these forms condense the historical course of events, the film manages to stay close to insights gained by historiography. The hybrid amalgamation of history and memory, and of the imaginary and the real, as well as the combination of dramaturgies of popular culture with an instinct for what can (not) be shown—all of these factors have helped Schindler's List to render a representation of the founding Holocaust myth in Western societies that can be sensually experienced while being emotionally impressive at the same time.     

Medieval Italian pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela: New literary evidence

This paper offers literary evidence of the interest in the cult of St James on the part of late medieval Italian pilgrims. While extant written itineraries are few, occasional literary references demonstrate this interest without furnishing precise details of the route to Santiago de Compostela. Compostela holds a special place in chivalric literature: the legendary wars against Muslims in Spain and the status of the warrior Roland as a popular saint derive much of their impetus from the piety centred on Santiago. One episode of the widely-circulated chivalric romance Guerrino il Meschino by the Florentine Andrea da Barberino displays its genre's concern with the Spanish shrine and details and route from Rome to Compostela. Andrea, known for his verisimilar style, incorporates a virtuoso display of contemporary geographical knowledge which gives his fiction the texture of a chronicle. The author's inclusion of towns not found in the chivalric literary corpus argue for his reliance on maps or the testimonies of returned pilgrims. Places named tally with those in actual pilgrim accounts. The passage in Guerrino furnishes evidence of Italian pilgrimages to Santiago in the early fifteenth century, a period for which no historical accounts remain.     

The Imperial Visual Archive: Images,Evidence, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Hispanic World

This article examines the role of images as evidence and sources of knowledge in the early modern Hispanic world, arguing for the continued importance of visual epistemology as a technique for producing and circulating knowledge from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Visual materials played a central role in the production of knowledge, scientific and imperial, and served as key instruments for addressing the considerable challenges of distance and place posed by the geographical expanse of the empire. Historiographically, the article highlights the active generation of scientific knowledge in the Hispanic world and connects it to imperial and administrative practices; it highlights trans-regional channels of circulation, demonstrating the connected histories of the viceroyalties and peninsula and the multidirectional trajectories in which information and knowledge moved; and it points out deep connections between earlier and later colonial periods. Methodologically, the essay explores the potential of images as historical sources, suggesting that the high status of images in the early modern Hispanic world led to the creation of an enormous pictorial archive that deserves the same level of scholarly attention and rigor that has been lavished on the textual archive.     

Auf der Suche nach der Politik in der Wissensproduktion: Plädoyer für eine historisch‐politische Epistemologie

In Search of Politics in Knowledge Production. A Plea for a Historical‐Political Epistemology. Knowledge production has an intrinsic political dimension. Starting from this presupposition, it is argued that the systematic integration of and reflection on the political dimension is necessary for an adequate understanding of historical processes of knowledge production in the sciences. The consecutive plea for a historical‐political epistemology proceeds in two steps: First, it is illustrated that in a number of recent historical science study cases, the political dimension is frequently marginal, or even absent. After a short discussion of previous theoretical concepts to describe the impact of politics for the production of scientific knowledge, an approach is sketched which builds on Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger's historical epistemology and Bruno Latour's symmetrical anthropology. It is argued that in addition to Rheinberger's program to describe epistemic systems, the political dimension is intrinsic to three stages of the process of data production: First to an initial phase which consists in the arrangement socio‐technical configurations to produce new evidence. Here, factors such as the culturally shaped perception and evaluation of ?relevant”? problems, as well as the perception of career resources have to be taken into account. Second, the political dimension is relevant in view of the continuous re‐adjustments of the configuration of epistemic systems, e. g. towards newly available financial, technical, or intellectual resources and ?relevant”? challenges from outside the system. Thirdly, the data produced and represented by epistemic systems – “evidence” – are yet in need of interpretation. This process is in itself imbued with continuously shifting mechanisms of selecting and creating hierarchies amongst the pool of available data.     

Extraterrestrial encounters: UFOs,science and the quest for transcendence, 1947–1972

Beginning in 1947, with the first waves of UFO sightings, and continuing in the subsequent decades, debates on the existence and gestalt of extraterrestrial life gained unprecedented prominence. Initially an American phenomenon, flying saucer reports quickly became global in scope. Contemporaneous with efforts to legitimize the possibility of spaceflight in the years before Sputnik, the UFO phenomenon generated as much sensation in Europe as in the USA. In the public imagination, UFOs were frequently conflated with technoscientific approaches to space exploration. As innumerable reports of sightings led to a transnational movement driven by both proponents and critics, controversial protagonists such as ‘contactee’ George Adamski became prominent media celebrities. Incipient space experts including Willy Ley, Arthur C. Clarke, and Wernher von Braun sought to debunk what they considered a great swindle, or, following C.G. Jung, a modern myth evolving in real-time. Yet they failed to develop a response to the epistemic-ontological challenge posed by one wave of UFO sightings after another. Studying a phenomenon whose very existence has been non-consensual since its genesis presents a particular challenge for historians. Posing complex questions of fact and fiction, knowing and believing, and science and religion, this article analyzes the postwar UFO phenomenon as part of a broader astroculture and identifies transcendental and occult traditions within imagined encounters with extraterrestrial beings.