Homemaking and Mature Age Gay Men ‘Down-Under’: Paradox,intimacy, subjectivities,spatialities, and scale

The article investigates homemaking processes of mature age gay men living in a provincial Australian town. All too often the experience of older gay men living in non-metropolitan centres has slipped the attention of scholars. The article draws on interview data collected in Townsville (Queensland, Australia) from ten men over 40 years of age who self-identified as gay. These men were asked to explain why they live in Townsville, their understanding of home, and if they understand Townsville as home. We investigate the spatialised understandings of home articulated by these gay men, focusing on two mutually constituted geographical scales: Townsville-as-home and house-as-home, including the material objects within domestic space. For older gay men to call a provincial town home is an ongoing, complex process of reconciling multiple and contradictory subjectivities across different geographical scales. How older gay men constitute Townsville-as-home provides important insights about both non-heterosexual life in provincial centres and how to conceptualise home—as a paradoxical space, contested site, and as multiscalar.     

Implications of Reappraising the Iron‐Deficiency Anemia Hypothesis

In 2009, Walker and colleagues questioned the validity of the iron‐deficiency anemia hypothesis as an explanatory mechanism for the presence of porotic hyperostosis (PH) and cribra orbitalia. They presented evidence demonstrating that iron deficiency inhibits, rather than promotes, marrow hypertrophy and argued a link between both PH and hemolytic or megaloblasic anemias (including vitamin B₁₂ deficiency). This paper suggests that dismissing the iron‐deficiency anemia hypothesis may be premature, but, if dismissed, may result in unforeseen consequences. Vitamin B₁₂ deficiency and iron deficiency often result from similar proximate causes, i.e. lack of animal protein in the diet and sanitation problems that lead to parasitic or diarrheal diseases, thereby promoting nutrient losses. As a result, vitamin B₁₂ deficiency and iron deficiency commonly co‐occur. In individuals with a co‐occurrence of iron deficiency and vitamin B₁₂ deficiency, a possible inhibition of marrow hypertrophy caused by iron deficiency may prevent the development of PH, despite the presence of (vitamin B₁₂) nutritional deficiency. The implications of dismissing the iron‐deficiency anemia hypothesis are that many skeletal populations may exhibit hidden heterogeneity, i.e. individuals who are the most nutritionally stressed, with multiple nutrient deficiencies, would mimic the non‐stressed individuals and neither would show evidence of PH. However, the inclusion of multiple stress indicators and greater understanding of biocultural context in bioarchaeological analyses may mitigate the potential impacts of hidden heterogeneity in the expression of PH. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Becoming Smaller: Autobiographical Spaces of Weight Loss

Abstract: This research focuses on the spaces and politics of weight loss. It is informed by “fat studies”, critical geographical scholarship on fat, and two contrasting feminist readings of Michel Foucault's notion of “care of the self”. Using autobiography as a method of inquiry I share my experience of “becoming smaller” through weight loss dieting. I argue that losing weight for me has been paradoxical on at least three counts: first, by being a feminist scholar who critiques discourses around women and slimness while at the same time desiring to be slim; second, by my new eating patterns marking me simultaneously as both a disciplined and a disordered subject; and third, by publically and politically supporting the Health at Every Size movement but privately in my “quest” to recreate myself emphasizing shedding kilos over fitness. The article concludes that understanding these paradoxes that surround weight loss is useful for furthering understanding of a complex embodied, gendered and spatialized process.     

The tourist landscape paradox

This paper is about tourist practices of landscape. Landscape has long been a key reference point in the construction of tourist imaginaries and, to this day, plays an important role in tourists' experience of travelling and their encounters with Otherness. Yet the ambivalent ways in which tourists conceptualize landscape is inherently paradoxical; indeed, it is by travelling that tourists try to overcome the tension produced by such a paradox. Putting into practice two alternative conceptions of landscape at once—a ‘Vidalian’ landscape-as-essence and a ‘Cosgrovian’ landscape as ‘way of seeing’—the tourist inevitably falls into an intriguing epistemological trap. Tourists' embodiment of the landscape experience becomes an attempt to evade that trap. In this paper, I note how this is exemplified in the ways in which tourist rhetoric frames the idea of Morocco and, in particular, the Jamaa el Fna square in Marrakech, the most ‘landscaped’ (and photographed) tourist site in the Maghreb. To help unpack this paradox, I take a brief look at what tourists actually do in the Jamaa el Fna, in order to reproduce, in place, their landscape-driven idea of Moroccan cultural space. The spatial practices of most tourists in that iconic place reveal, indeed, that the landscape paradox that drives tourist readings of the Jamaa el Fna cannot be avoided, but only endlessly performed, for this paradox is constitutive of the very formation of the Modern travelling European subject.     

城市人均受教育水平对居民主观幸福感的影响——基于多尺度模型的研究

提升居民幸福感是和谐宜居城市建设和实现人民美好生活愿望的重要目标。地理背景特征对居民幸福感的影响在社会学、地理学、经济学等学科领域受到极大关注,但尚缺乏城市人均受教育水平及其异质性影响研究。基于2016年中国劳动力动态调查数据,采用多尺度线性模型探讨了我国城市人均受教育水平、人均收入与居民幸福感的关系。研究发现：①居民幸福感存在显著区域差异,东部城市居民幸福感最高,西部整体偏低。②作为重要的城市背景特征之一,与人均收入相比,人均受教育水平对居民幸福感有正向提升作用,即城市人均受教育水平越高,居民幸福感越高。③城市人均受教育水平对居民幸福感的影响是复杂的,在不同学历群体间存在明显差异,对高中及以下学历群体幸福感的提高具有积极影响,但对本科及以上学历群体的幸福感产生消极影响。     

旅游景观形成与演变机制的符号学解释——兼议符号学视角下的旅游城市化与旅游商业化现象

旅游景观形成与演变机制的研究对于旅游景观的建设与保护具有重要意义。本文借助于符号学的相关理论,对旅游景观的形成与演变机制进行分析,并指出:在旅游景观形成与演变过程中,基于旅游景观意义的博弈,旅游文化主体不仅把自在景观符号作为一个整体加以改造而形成旅游景观符号的"能指",而且在此基础上赋予它的新的文化内涵,形成旅游景观符号的"所指",从而完成旅游景观的符号化过程。旅游城市化和旅游商业化现象是这一过程中的必然产物,是基于文化主体意义博弈的旅游景观符号的现代化重构。     

Child Health in Five Early Medieval Irish Sites: A Multidisciplinary Approach

With the aim to reconstruct child health in five early medieval (5th–12th c. CE) Irish sites, an osteoarchaeological study of three biological stress indicators – cribra orbitalia, linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) and periostitis – has been conducted on 229 skeletons. In addition, Irish early medieval written sources testifying on child health during this period were consulted. These data were furthermore combined with the results of stable isotope analyses (nitrogen and carbon) conducted on subadult bone specimens. Cribra orbitalia was found in 27.5% of the studied individuals (48.6% of subadults were affected), with only two cases active at the time of death. The prevalence of LEH per individual is 63.5% (78.9% in subadults and 59.7% in adults). The age ranges of LEH formation vary between 1.9 and 4.8 years for the maxillary teeth and between 1.8 and 6.2 years for the mandibular teeth. Periosteal inflammations were recorded in over one third of the studied subadults (36.2%) with six cases active at the time of death. The stable isotope results suggest a diet based on terrestrial food sources, with little or no marine input. The presented data strongly suggest that most of the individuals were exposed to a high level of physiological stress during their childhood, and as such does not support the so called ‘osteological paradox’ hypothesis. The observed disturbances were probably caused by a synergistic effect of various biological and socio‐cultural factors. Although the historical records indicate certain differences in diet and lifestyle between social classes and the sexes, this study showed that the children of all ages had poor health in all social classes across a wide geographical location for the full time period of the early medieval. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

我国民主政治建设的逻辑起点

我国的民主政治建设离不开中国共产党的领导。社会主义市场经济的发展和繁荣、人们对合法利益的追求,这些都是孕育民主意识的温床,是我国民主政治建设新的逻辑起点。     

Books Received

This article is an analysis of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges's short text “Kafka and His Precursors.” Although appearing to be an example of literary criticism, Borges's essay is in fact the exploration of a certain logical paradox. It is a paradox that is to be found throughout Borges's work, with the result that “Kafka and His Precursors” can be read as a disguised literary manifesto on the part of Borges. I also explore the consequences of Borges's essay for thinking about questions of cultural transmission. I argue that Borges’ work lives on—like those literary, religious and philosophical traditions he admires—because its most profound subject is the relationship it has with the person who reads it.     

Vielfalt der Wissenschaften bei Carnap,Lewin und Fleck. Zur Entwicklung eines pluralen Wissenschaftskonzepts

The Diversity of Science in Carnap's, Lewin's and Fleck's Philosophy: Toward a Pluralistic Point of View. In the 1920s and 1930s three different but simultaneous approaches of philosophy of science can be distinguished: the logical approach of the physicist Rudolf Carnap, the logico‐historical approach of the psychologist Kurt Lewin and the socio‐historical approach of the medical scientist Ludwik Fleck. While the philosophies of Lewin and Fleck can be characterized as contextual appraisals which account for the interactions between particular sciences and their historical, socio‐cultural or intellectual environments, Carnap's philosophy is narrowed to an internal methodology centered on scientific propositions and logical structures in general. In addition to these differences in aim and practice of methodological analysis the estimation of the real disunity and diversity of the special branches of science differs. Instead of Carnap's ideal of a unified science from the new pluralistic point of view the evaluation of the empirical multiplicity of particular sciences obtains philosophical acceptance.