Snail assemblages: interrogating an environmental controversy involving Powelliphanta augusta and the mining industry in Aotearoa New Zealand

In 2004, a controversy arose in Aotearoa New Zealand's coal mining sector that involved Powelliphanta augusta, a species of land snail. This paper considers that controversy in terms of emergent assemblages involving the snail, the mining industry, the Department of Conservation, political action by environmental non‐government organisations, and public expressions of environmental and other values. Three sets of relations embedded in those assemblages are examined—those related to positioning and organising nature; values, politics, and power relations; and human and non‐human materialities. Those relations illuminate how a protracted controversy and its objects form a “social test bed” for contested views in legislation and guidelines dealing with economy, conservation, and restoration. To assess the dynamics, complexities, and contingencies of such relations, attention is paid to the controversy's detailed time line and legal framing, as well as to ontological shifts of snail and habitat and snail metrics. This analytical focus highlights the shifting quality of ideas about how the snail and its habitat are understood as entangled in fraught and mutating strategies of translocation that are played out in a particular regulatory setting. It also provides insights into international geographical efforts to re‐shape environmental governance and management.     

日本学界各流派的日美同盟论争

日美同盟之于日本国家安全与国家大战略的合法性与合理性问题,在冷战后成为日本国是论争的核心。日美同盟的地位与作用、形式与结构、进程与前景的论争,仍是当前日美两国无法回避的课题。本文依据日本学者的日美同盟观与同盟前景的预测,在有限区分几个有代表性的学派或流派的基础上,对日本国内的同盟论争进行了整体性的归纳和梳理,力图通过日本国内的议论揭示出冷战后日美双边同盟面临的困境与问题,从而对日美同盟的维持与变革问题的思索提供一点有益的参考。     

日本的海权观及其海洋领土争端——一种建构主义的尝试分析

东北亚国家对于海洋权益的认知渐进深入,以及地缘政治实况和国家实力消长等,构成了社会意识与物质力量变迁的合力,加剧了日本与周边国家之间普遍存在海洋领土争端这一社会情势。当代西方国际关系理论中的建构主义为上述实况提供了一种新的思维尝试、分析框架与消解困境的方案补充。东北亚海洋领土争端困境的解决关键在于如何利用预留的政治空间。     

存在争议的籀文

将历来有不同看法的籀,汇聚一处,通过对几个重要本的比勘对照,参以出上和献字材料．探讨各家主张之是非得失：目前尚无法论断,仅将不同意见忠实罗列,评判则付阙如。意在为字工作提供一份可资参考的材料。     

蒋太后与嘉靖前期政治

武宗死后无子,世宗以＂兄终弟及＂祖训继皇帝位,世宗生母蒋太后也因此在嘉靖政治史上有了重要的地位,不仅在大礼议过程中起了重要作用,而且由于圣母身份和世宗孝心的双重作用,使得蒋太后对嘉靖十八年以前的政局产生了不小的影响。     

Die Entwürfe der Schlachtenkupfer der Kienlung- und Taokuang-Zeit

Henkama, ?Daddy Heng“ – A Mediator between the Kangxi Emperor and Jesuit Missionaries during Chinese Rites Controversy in the 18th Century

The author's main concern is to turn the somewhat enigmatic person of Henkama (1645/1646–1708), known under many (also false) names, into a more tangible historical figure. For this purpose, all the available sources in European languages, Manchu, and Chinese are taken into account. Beginning with investigating the very name of this Manchu official who was responsible for the administration of the affairs of the Europeans, the author tries to obtain available and solid knowledge of Henkama's life and work, possibly year by year, which goes far beyond what is normally known about him, i.e., his role as main intermediary during the papal legation in Beijing (December 1705 – August 1706). However, this mediatory role cost him the trust of all around him, including the Kangxi Emperor, who was convinced that Henkama had been paid off by the papal legate and cardinal Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon (1668–1710). At the end of his life, being in ill health, he became a Catholic. Henkama died in 1708 in disfavor due to slander. In the rest of his article, the author depicts another four important contact persons between the Kangxi Emperor (state administration) and Jesuit missionaries, all of whom are to be considered as Henkama's co-workers or his successors. Among these four, there are two Chinese – Zhao Chang (1654–1729) and Wang Daohua (fl. 1706–1720) and two persons of Manchu origin – Bursai (fl. 1705–1706) and Zhang Changzhu/Carki (fl. 1707–1722).     

The Ryti Case: language,gender and the rules of the game in Finnish academic medicine in the 1920s

This article focuses on a controversy that took place in the academic medical circles of Helsinki in c. 1925–1927. Among the main actors in this controversy was Elsa Ryti, MD, one of the first women to make herself a name in medical science in Finland. The controversy became public in early 1926 and was then discussed by the Board and the Council of the Finnish Medical Association. The dispute is historically interesting because of its capacity to disclose tensions, power structures and lines of power within the field of academic medicine. In order to understand the course and outcome of the controversy, it is necessary to take into account several intersecting lines of power: the asymmetrical distribution of power and knowledge at the university clinics, the acute language strife at the time between speakers of Finnish and Swedish, the tension between the clinic and the laboratory and, last but not least, the matter of gender.     

Animal Electricity at the End of the Eighteenth Century: The Many Facets of a Great Scientific Controversy

In the 1790s, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta were the main protagonists of a lively debate on the role of electricity in animal organisms. Significant developments originated from this debate, leading to the foundation of two new disciplines, electrodynamics and electrophysiology, that were to play a crucial role in the scientific and technological progress of the last two centuries. The Galvani-Volta controversy has been repeatedly reconstructed, sometimes in an attempt to identify the merits and the errors of one or the other of the two protagonists, sometimes with the aim of demonstrating that the theories elaborated by the two Italian scholars were irreconcilable, reflecting completely different ways of looking at phenomena and conceiving of scientific research. In this article a different interpretation is offered, based on a discussion of the scientific issues that were central to Galvani's and Volta's research, and with reference to the context of science and society of the eighteenth century.     

Social divisions carved in stone or cenotaphs to a new identity? Policy for memorials,monuments and statues in a democratic South Africa

Popular protests in 2015 in South Africa around statues and memorials, sparked off by the #RhodesMustFall campaign, drew attention to heritage policy and practice in the country since the advent of democracy in 1994. The protests and commentary in social and other media revealed the extent of polarisation along racial fault lines in South African society. They also exposed the apparent failure of official policy implemented for more than 20 years of promoting heritage for the purposes of nation building and social cohesion. Numerous writers have analysed heritage in South Africa since the transition to democracy, but none has traced the details of the evolution of heritage policy within the ruling party and government. This study seeks to shed light on the current debates on the politics of heritage in South Africa by examining the various policy processes and practices within the ruling African National Congress and the government. It argues that many of the heritage practices and policies in South Africa are rooted in the apartheid past and that failure, especially by decision-makers, to critically interrogate these has led to the stunted transformation of society and the current ferment.     

The Cave Who Never Was: Outsider Archaeology and Failed Collaboration in the USA

Abstract

The alleged 1982 discovery of a phantasmagorical Late-Antique necropolis in southern Illinois has largely escaped the attention of professional archaeologists, despite thousands of artefacts having been sold to naive collectors and would-be revolutionary scholars for more than a quarter of a century. The site (named Burrows Cave after its notorious finder) is a staple of outsider archaeology, like 10,000-year-old pyramids and ancient astronauts. Burrows Cave flourishes in the extra-disciplinary realm of hyperdiffusionist archaeology, terra incognita outside the bounds of the traditional science and thus not considered worthy of examination by scholars. This essay explores the significance of US archaeologists’ failure to critically yet respectfully engage with a public who is extremely interested in archaeological discoveries but sceptical of scholarly elitism. Professionals’ disinterest has resulted in a dismissal of outsider archaeology en masse, leaving the worst abuses unchecked. This leaves the public with few clues to distinguish the impossible from the improbable, unorthodox, or iconoclastic. Audacious enterprises such as Burrows’ are left to flourish, driving wedges between archaeologists and the interested public, preventing effective collaboration and dialogue. Burrows Cave is a lesson for aspiring archaeologists: proof of what happens when professionals turn up their noses at opportunities for engagement with community interests.