The Left(s) and Nationalism(s) in contemporary Western Europe

This article introduces our themed section on The Left(s) and Nationalism(s), which provides a comparative analysis of the relationship between nationalism and different left-wing parties in Western Europe. It highlights the innovative comparative perspectives offered by this themed section, which not only concerns a series of different geographical cases studies but also involves the ideological plurality of the Left. The larger research question that our contributors address is how different left-wing parties have dealt with the inherent ideological tension between the universality claimed by the Left and the particularism inherent in nationalism, as a doctrine and a principle of political legitimacy. The article stresses three main contributions of our themed section: (1) Western European left-wing parties do engage with the themes of nationalism and nationhood, but they often rely on convenient silence to solve some of the contradictions with their progressive ideology. (2) None of these parties have formulated thick versions of the respective national identities. (3) State-wide left-wing parties have used instrumental conceptions of nationhood to address the challenge of separatist parties, but only with mixed results.     

Improvements in Archaeomagnetic Dating in Western Europe from the Late Bronze to the Late Iron Ages: An Alternative to the Problem of the Hallstattian Radiocarbon Plateau

We present a new curve of the directional secular variation of the geomagnetic field in Western Europe between 1500 bce and 200 ce . Its computation relies on a Bayesian framework. The fast secular variation during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages makes archaeomagnetic dating efficient with a respective precision of 150–200 and 60–100 years during these periods. The Bayesian method also provides posterior date distributions that refine the dating of reference data, especially during the period of the Hallstattian radiocarbon plateau. Archaeomagnetism becomes a valuable alternative to radiocarbon and will help to improve the archaeological chronologies.     

Norse Animal Husbandry in Liminal Environments: Stable Isotope Evidence from the Scottish North Atlantic Islands

ABSTRACT

This paper employs δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N analysis of bone collagen to explore animal management at large Norse settlement sites in the liminal environments of the Scottish North Atlantic Islands. The Norse period was a time of social, cultural and economic change; the need to feed an expanding population and the demand for trade meant that domestic stock were a crucial resource. Our results indicate that rearing animals in these challenging insular environments required careful management. At all sites, the diet and movement of domestic cattle and sheep were highly similar and carefully controlled and, despite many of the analysed settlements lying close to the coast, there was no use of shorefront grazing or fodder resources. In contrast, pig rearing strategies varied across the island groups. In the Western Isles pig diets were diverse, indicative of household or ad hoc management, whilst on Orkney all pigs consumed a more restricted diet based primarily on terrestrial protein. A comparison of red deer with domestic stock on the Western Isles indicates that both groups were exploiting similar grazing niches.     

Woman's Work in the Service of Empire: Lady Margaret Field (1905–94) from School Teacher to Governor's Wife

The presence of single and also of married British women in overseas colonies, especially those employed by or married to men in the Colonial Service in the later colonial period, has been the subject of scholarly enquiry. Their lives, roles and values and their distinctive contribution, if any, to the development of empire and of its ending have been debated. Their gendered roles were usually subordinate in a masculine culture of empire, and especially as wives they are commonly regarded as marginalised. The archived records left by Lady Margaret Field reveal her commitment as a single woman to a colonial mission and her sense of achievement as a school teacher and educational administrator, while also acknowledging the independence and career satisfactions she subsequently lost when she married a senior Colonial Service officer who rose to be a governor. But it is also apparent that, though incorporated and subordinate as a governor's wife to her husband's career, she was not marginalised to a separate sphere. As is evident from this case study, governors’ wives had important and demanding political duties, and such responsibilities need to be acknowledged.     

The Jaws Effect: How movie narratives are used to influence policy responses to shark bites in Western Australia

This article examines the way political actors use film narratives to influence policymaking following shark bites. To analyse these relationships I propose the concept of the Jaws Effect, where film-based historical analogies are used as a political device to frame real-life events in ways that make the events governable and prejudice certain policy options. Three elements of the Jaws Effect are reviewed including the intentionality of the shark, perception that these events are fatal and the belief that ‘the shark’ must be killed. These elements are applied to a case study of policy responses to shark bite episodes in Western Australia in 2000, 2003, 2011 and 2014. The reasons why this political device may not always work are also suggested.

本文研究了政治主体以什么方式使用电影叙事来影响鲨鱼咬人之后的政策制定。笔者提出“《大白鲨》效应”的概念,也就是以取自电影的历史类比为政治手段来言说现实生活中的事件,让事件根据言说者的需要,不利于某些政策选择。本文分析了《大白鲨》效应的三要素：鲨鱼的目的性;现实生活的事件性命攸关;鲨鱼必须被杀死。笔者将三要素用于研究2000、2003、2011和2014年西澳大利亚鲨鱼要人事件之后的政策反应。文章也探讨了为什么这种政治手法并不总能凑效。     

Middle Bronze Age Arsenical Copper Alloys in Southern Portugal

In the Iberian Peninsula, the copper metallurgy from the Chalcolithic to the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) was mostly characterized by low arsenic contents. A collection of 53 MBA artefacts from southern Portugal was analysed by micro‐EDXRF, optical microscopy, SEM–EDS and Vickers to investigate the metal composition and manufacture. No technological distinction was found between artefacts from domestic and funerary contexts, which were radiocarbon‐dated to 2000–1500 cal bc . The arsenic contents of almost 100 MBA artefacts from this region, including the above‐mentioned set, have a Gaussian distribution with a high average (3.9 wt% As). Possible explanations are discussed for this distinctive metallurgy at the south‐western end of the Iberian Peninsula.     

Contemporary Irish theatre,the new Playboy controversy,and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the economic crisis on contemporary Irish theatre. More specifically, I contend that the legal controversy surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s second production of Playboy of the Western World: A New Version in 2008 provides a case study of how professional theatre productions that dramatised stories of immigrant empowerment during the Irish economic boom were profoundly inhibited by the bust that followed. Their collaborative version of the new Playboy was widely regarded as Ireland’s most successful intercultural play and a commercial success when it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2007. The subsequent breakdown in their relationship and ensuing legal dispute is more symptomatic of Celtic Tiger Ireland in economic collapse, I suggest, than the content of the play itself, or most other productions mounted in the period. I argue that this dispute did not simply reflect but also reinforced the social effects of the economic crisis, through its prolonged litigation, enormous expense, and especially the missed opportunity that it represented to position the multicultural and migrant themed Playboy within the Irish theatrical mainstream. More broadly, I suggest that the economic crisis has been marked by the disappearance of immigrants from the professional Irish stage, a void which was only partially filled by community theatre productions. A case in point is Adigun and Arambe’s most recent adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), a play which I positively appraise as an example of successful “intercultural re-appropriation”.     

江苏邳州梁王城遗址西周墓地出土人骨研究

江苏邳州梁王城遗址西周墓地出土了67例西周人骨,对其性别、年龄、人口寿命、体质类型、身高情况的分析特别是对颅骨形态特征的研究表明,梁王城西周组居民属于蒙古人种,具有中颅型结合高颅、狭颅的特点,同时具有狭额、高眶、阔鼻、正颌的面部特征,并且具有长狭的下颌。梁王城西周组居民的颅型与现代亚洲蒙古人种的东亚类型最为接近;面部特征与东亚类型、北亚类型比较接近;体质形态与河南、陕西、甘肃、青海出土的同时代人骨存在一定差异,但这种差异小于梁王城西周组与梁王城大汶口组、殷墟中小墓III组、滕州前掌大B组之间的差异。     

How clothing design and cultural industries refashioned frontier masculinities: a historical geography of Western wear

Gendered subjectivities emerge historically and geographically, not only in situ, within an ‘authentic’ origin period or site, but through later retrospective commodifications and fantastical popular culture depictions. This article traces the masculine identity of the cowboy as commodified and performed through clothing. The cowboy emerged from colonial origins as a model and myth of frontier masculinity: the ‘rugged outdoor type’. But it was then formularized and stylized when subject to popular culture diffusion, and as accompanying clothing design evolved. Through clothing – advertised by metropolitan manufacturers and consumed across America and beyond – an archetypal, sexualized cowboy ‘look’ thus emerged. The author traces a historical geography of cowboy masculinities in clothing design, from early ‘frontier garments for the outdoor man’ to later Western-wear ‘for that long, lean look’. Related constructions of femininity are also considered, after women's Western-wear clothing lines were produced in the 1950s. To illustrate, I draw on archival brochures, catalogs, and advertising materials from the 1920s to 1970s, as well as discuss the material design of the clothes themselves. I focus especially on the Western snap shirt – an apparel item never actually worn on the nineteenth-century colonial frontier, but that became an ‘essential’ element of the cowboy look, and a vehicle for masculine appearance. Western-wear epitomizes how gendered subject positions are visually constituted in relational fashion via bodies, materials, media, and imagined geographies.