Mediterranean heritage: ancient marvel,modern millstone

ABSTRACT. The wealth, variety and seaborne accessibility of Mediterranean societies since late prehistory have made the region's cultural heritage the world's most widely acclaimed. But since the fall of the Roman Empire the Mediterranean has been increasingly disadvantaged, its history compromised, its legacy beleaguered. Two millennia of invasion and rapine, religious vendetta, foreign conquest, imperial dominion and colonial subjugation have left Mediterranean peoples with fewer resources and weaker infrastructures than those of transalpine and transatlantic nation‐states. The consequences for the care and control of Mediterranean heritage are parlous. That heritage is both the region's self‐defining pride and its economic mainstay, yet a crippling burden to protect and maintain, let alone to interpret and celebrate. It is everywhere beset by natural and human attrition. Weathering and erosion, illicit excavation and pillage, tomb robbery and the international antiquities market exact tolls that legal codes and police forces are all but impotent to stem. Recent social and political trends suggest potential remedies for some of these dilemmas.     

苏联社会文化定式的形成、特点和演变

文化定式是指在跨文化交际过程中,人们将具有相同特征的一群人或者任何民族、种族塑造成一定的形象。不同的社会文化背景和历史条件下,人们对事物的认识会发生变化,有时认识与真实情况完全相悖。苏联不同时期社会对外部世界的认识不一,根本原因在于官方宣传的引导,次要原因是社会传统和文化传承。既有的社会文化定式将长期影响人们对事物的认识。     

Anthropological race psychology 1820–1945: a common European system of ethnic identity narratives

ABSTRACT. This article examines ethnic stereotypes in biological race classification of Europeans between the 1830s and 1940s as part of political discourse on national identity. Anthropologists linked physical‐psychological types to nations and national character stereotypes through ‘national races’, achieving an often quite enduring international consensus on each race's mentality. The article argues that race mentality narratives were therefore partly dictated by their place within a dynamic interlocking European system. I focus on two key interacting elements that structured this system: the central role of the Germanic‐Nordic blond and the geographically uneven process of modernisation. I consider the spatiality of socio‐cultural and political factors ‘external’ to the stereotype system, such as geopolitics and modernisation, but also emphasise that discursive relationships between national stereotypes helped structure the international stereotype system. My conclusion argues for greater consideration of the influence of both scientific and international systemic factors in research on national identity.     

The tourist gaze: cycling tourists’ impressions of Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

Cyclists’ written records of their Irish tours in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been overlooked by those scholars who have studied travellers’ impressions of Ireland in this period. The tricycle and the bicycle opened Ireland to a new form of tourism in the form of cycling tourism, and many of these holidaymakers, both Irish and foreign, were keen to record their experiences and impressions awheel, either in the cycling press or in other publications. This article is the first sustained effort to present a scholarly analysis of this material. It shows that the cycling tourists’ writings, as is the case with other travel writings, reveal more about the authors’ prejudices and their preconceived ideas about the places that they would visit and the people that they would encounter than they necessarily do about the realities of Irish life.