The art of nationalism: Artists' perspectives on the Latvian Centenary film programme

In the aftermath of several decades of neoliberalism in Eastern Europe, the social fabric of post-socialist societies is frayed. In this context, nationalist cultural policies and everyday displays of national belonging have emerged as key instruments of social solidarity. There has recently been a drive of state initiatives in Latvia in the field of cultural policy aimed at strengthening national identity. In this paper, we focus our attention on one particular cultural policy initiative, Latvian Films for Latvian Centenary. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 16 film directors who participated in the Centenary film programme, the paper explores how artists and cultural operators involved in this programme are mobilised as national(ist) subjects and how they see their work within such a framework. We argue that nationalist cultural policy can be successfully implemented because the artists, themselves formed as responsible political and moral subjects in the tradition of Latvian cultural nationalism, share a regard for culture and the arts as a resource for sustaining the political statehood and the national community. However, the artists also recognise the limitations of their work as a source of social cohesion and solidarity in a society that is ethnically divided.     

Anatomy,behavior, and modern human origins

The fossil record suggests that modern human morphology evolved in Africa between 150,000 and 50,000 years ago, when the sole inhabitants of Eurasia were the Neanderthals and other equally nonmodern people. However, the earliest modern or near-modern Africans were behaviorally (archaeologically) indistinguishable from their nonmodern, Eurasian contemporaries, and it was only around 50,000-40,000 years ago that a major behavioral difference developed. Archaeological indications of this difference include the oldest indisputable ornaments (or art broadly understood); the oldest evidence for routine use of bone, ivory, and shell to produce formal (standardized) artifacts; greatly accelerated variation in stone artifact assemblages through time and space; and hunting-gathering innovations that promoted significantly larger populations. As a complex, the novel traits imply fully modern cognitive and communicative abilities, or more succinctly, the fully modern capacity for Culture. The competitive advantage of this capacity is obvious, and preliminary dates suggest that it appeared in Africa about 50,000 years ago and then successively in western Asia, eastern Europe, and western Europe, in keeping with an African origin. Arguably, the development of modern behavior depended on a neural change broadly like those that accompanied yet earlier archaeologically detectable behavioral advances. This explanation is problematic, however, because the putative change was in brain organization, not size, and fossil skulls provide little or no secure evidence for brain structure. Other potential objections to a neural advance in Africa 50,000-40,000 years ago or to the wider Out-of-Africa hypothesis, include archaeological evidence (1) that some Neanderthals were actually capable of fully modern behavior and (2) that some Africans were behaviorally modern more than 90,000 years ago.     

Chronicle of an early demise,surname extinction in the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries

It has been amply demonstrated that individuals' reproductive capability is the key explanatory phenomenon for understanding onomastic disappearance during the early modern period. This article analyzes the evolution and consequences of surname extinction in a specific population: Catalonia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this article two aspects are examined. First, the observed disappearance of surnames is estimated through historical data collected in the Llibres d'Esposalles (Marriage Books) from 1481 to 1600 at Barcelona Cathedral. Second, the estimated natural extinction of those surnames registered in 1481 is forecast by applying a statistical branching process.     

Resistance politics of non-violence: Jean Paulhan’s ’Fautrier the Enraged’ (1943)

ABSTRACT

The idea of adequately ‘representing’ violence was an important point of discussion amongst Resistance artists and intellectuals at the time of the French Occupation. In particular, intellectual resistant Jean Paulhan had written on the subject in his text introducing Jean Fautrier’s retrospective exhibition of November and December 1943 in occupied Paris, ‘Fautrier the Enraged’. While the thematic of the exhibition proposed an academic and traditional subject matter, Paulhan demonstrated that Fautrier’s typically matierist and anti-naturalistic approach was instrumental in ‘suggesting reality’. Fautrier’s individual creative process, Paulhan argued, led to a transparent experience to be shared between viewer and artist not only on an aesthetic level, but also from a political point of view. At the time of ‘Fautrier the Enraged”s writing, Paulhan had indeed been concerned with issues of political engagement, as is evident from his essay ‘The Flowers of Tarbes or Terror in Literature’ (1941), which reflects upon the human condition and is concerned with reconciling poetry, politics and ethics. The author believes that such questions were being addressed in Paulhan’s text on Fautrier and by Fautrier’s art and that an aesthetic reading of Paulhan’s text is inseparable from a political interpretation of Fautrier’s art within the context of the Occupation. Indeed, the aesthetic criteria used in Paulhan’s text as framework to his argument were then loaded with political meaning. For instance, Paulhan considered virtuosity as an essential artistic characteristic to be opposed to the art of imitation based on the technical ability to observe and simulate ‘nature’ as imposed by the occupants. With excerpts from Paulhan’s essay and exchange of letters with Fautrier as well as visual analysis of some of the artworks presented in the exhibition, this paper deals with the wider issues of ‘representation’ in the historical and cultural context of the Second World War in France.     

New Architectural Models and Building Tradition: A Dialogue in Early Modern Sardinia – The Jesuit Church in Sassari

Architecture in early modern Sardinia is characterized by a strong continuity with previous practices. In the second half of the 16th century, new models join the Gothic building tradition, linked in particular to trends in military engineering and Classicism of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Jesuit church in Sassari offers an interesting example of the intertwining of these architectural modes, which originated with a sudden change of leadership at the site. Giovan Maria Bernardoni, an Italian Jesuit architect, initially modeled the church after the Gesù in Rome, and it was partially built under his direction. After his departure from Sardinia, local master builders finished the construction, following the Gothic tradition and possibly some external influences. This article analyzes the church, particularly focusing on the challenges presented by its articulated vaulting system completed between 1587 and 1609.     

论安徽东至周馥家族对我国近代社会发展的贡献

安徽东至周馥家族自19世纪60年代以来,为我国社会发展做出了积极的贡献。主要有:参与制订了多项有利于我国社会发展的政策,并努力付诸实施;创办或参与创办了一系列近代工商企业;开创或参与开创了我国近代教育事业;丰富和发展了我国的科学文化事业;积极推动和热心从事社会慈善与公益事业。     

Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America

Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a ‘life-work model’ employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the ‘artist’ whose ‘artwork’ was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the viceroyalties leads to dead ends: indigenous artists who efface their individuality; painters who exist with little social or historical context; and artworks whose conservation denies finding the traces of the hands that made them. Because artworks were and are the connective tissue of complex social networks, reconfiguring concepts of ‘artist’ and ‘artwork’ and recasting them in accordance with social practices within Latin America, gains us purchase on how colonial subjects, in their engagement with their material worlds, came to be constructed.

Resemblance to European prototypes is an essential historical reality of colonial artworks: much artwork, particularly the painting, of colonial Latin America ‘looks’ like that of early modern Europe and thus has generated a foundational expectation, laid out in purest form by Manuel Toussaint (Mexico, 1890–1955), that Latin American art history might also look like Europe's. We argue that a mismatch with Europe and its methodologies means that certain, foundational historiographic assumptions about writing art history for Latin America need to be reassessed, in particular the ‘artist’ and ‘artwork.’     

Politics and Eschatology: Reassessing the Appeal of the “Jewish Indian” Theory in England and New England in the 1650s

This article examines the “Jewish Indian” theory — which claimed that American Indians were the ten lost tribes of Israel — in 1650s England and New England. The theory found support in England while failing in New England. This difference in reception can be explained by considering its ecclesiological, political, and eschatological implications. Biblical commentators in both England and New England held to a form of “Judeo‐Centric” eschatology, which looked for a sudden, miraculous conversion of the Jews and their eventual superiority to Gentile believers. Such beliefs undermined crucial elements of New England ecclesiology when applied to Native Americans. Conversely, the New England Company used the theory in its publications as a fund‐raising tool in England. These publications impacted upon debates on Jewish readmission to England in the mid‐1650s, with New England missionary models suggested as a way of evangelising Jews. This article therefore argues for the importance of understanding eschatological beliefs in local contexts, while demonstrating the way in which such beliefs can be maintained and reoriented in the face of apparent disconfirmation.     

Theories of the Sublime in the Dutch Golden Age: Franciscus Junius,Joost van den Vondel and Petrus Wittewrongel

This article explores how writers from the Dutch Golden Age thought about human contact with that which is elevated far above everyday life. The Dutch Republic offers an interesting context because of the strikingly early use there by seventeenth-century humanists of the Greek concept ?ψο?, from (pseudo-)Longinus, to discuss how writers, artists and their audiences were able to surpass human limitations thanks to an intense imagination which transported them to supreme heights. Dutch poets also used the Latin sublimis to discuss how mankind constantly aims at that which is far above it, but, despite this, can never entirely be a part of it. Thirdly, protestant writers discuss the concept of the Fear of God by explaining that elevated contact with God should be accompanied by the contrasting emotions of attraction and fear. With reference to the humanist Franciscus Junius, poet Joost van den Vondel and preacher Petrus Wittewrongel, I will discuss how these artistic, literary and religious discourses concerning contact with the sublime are related to one another.     

Nomadic,ecstatic, magic: Arctic primitivism in Scandinavia around 1900

The aim of this article is to delineate the term “Arctic primitivism” in an aesthetic context and, by means of three examples from Scandinavian artists whose works were also the subject of ethnological discussions, to give an illuminating impression of Scandinavian Arctic primitivism around 1900. First some conceptual considerations about the combination of Arctic and primitivistic discourse will be presented. Then three examples for the “primal conditions” of an aesthetic conception of Arctic primitivism will be discussed: the nomadic, the ecstatic, and the magical. They serve as counter principles to modern categories such as spatial fixedness, linear chronology, and rational thought. Emilie Demant Hatt’s visual art stands for the nomadic principle; the Swedish cartoonist Ossian Elgström deals with ecstatic states; and the poems of Danish “eskimologist” William Thalbitzer show his fascination with indigenous magical incantations as an alternative to rational thought. All examples illustrate the artists’ interest in an authentic and uncorrupted culture, which they reflect on with awareness of inauthenticity and second-hand acquisition. The effects of duplication, simultaneity, and secundarity arising from the three principles drive a reflective discourse on media through which awareness of the crisis of modernity is sublimated, revealed, or made the subject of artistic exploration.