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1

Szabó, Bernadett. "Measuring Development of Settlements by Using Category Numbers." Acta Agraria Debreceniensis, no. 11 (September 15, 2003): 72–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.34101/actaagrar/11/3449.

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Several approaches are used to define the development and disparities of settlements. The investigation of four settlements in the County of Hajdú-Bihar, such as Balmazújváros, Hortobágy, Tiszacsege and Egyek, suggests that previous methods using few indicators are not suitable enough to measure economic, social and ecological development. My starting point was the complex index of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (HCSO). I examined the economic, ecological and social development of the communities by separating the 19 indicators and determined that complex indexes or indicators hide the real consideration of the main functions of rural development and opportunities for comparison in a community level. Furthermore, I established that the 19 indicators were not enough to analyse the situation, in this way I raised the number of indicators. I used more indicators, altogether 116 ones, than the previous research. I handled these indicators from economic, ecological and social aspects and carried out a method development. While only Egyek and Tiszacsege were considered to be backward according to the complex index of the HCSO, even Balmazújváros and Hortobágy proved to be lagged behind from economic and social aspects on the basis of my calculations. The methodical development justified the hypothesis that few indicators are not suitable for establishing decisions objectively. New developmental ranges evolved. Using this method this method, determining development may be more realistic and may contribute to strengthening decisions in rural development and help in spreading financial subsidies.
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Sengupta, Paramita, Anoop I. Benjamin, and Bontha V. Babu. "Status of maternal and child health services amongst migrants in Ludhiana slums – how far from the MDG targets?" International Journal Of Community Medicine And Public Health 4, no. 4 (March 28, 2017): 1188. http://dx.doi.org/10.18203/2394-6040.ijcmph20171347.

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Background: It is essential to monitor the coverage of health interventions in subgroups of populations, especially the marginalized and those at higher risk, because national averages can hide important inequalities. This study was carried out to find out the utilization and coverage of MCH services among migrants in the slums of Ludhiana, Punjab.Methods: Cross-sectional sample study. 370 women, who had childbirth within two years prior to the survey, were randomly selected from the 3947 newer migrant households in 30 slum settlements in Ludhiana surveyed for provision of health care, and information obtained from them with regard to MCH services availed by them for their last pregnancy and childbirth. Their children 12-23 months old, 195 in number, were studied for child health services.Results: Antenatal care (ANC) was availed by 44.0% of the women, with 24.6% of them going for minimum 4 antenatal visits and 29.1% having an institutional delivery but only 35.9% by trained health personnel. Place of delivery was found to be a significant predictor of antenatal care. Women staying in Ludhiana availed the least ANC. Complete immunization coverage in the 12-23 month olds was 37.4%. Government health worker visited 7.8% of the homes.Conclusions: Despite the relative proximity and concentration of health centers in urban compared to rural areas, migrant slum-dwellers are still not able to access quality MCH care. The problem of non-availability of essential healthcare and uneven distribution of skilled health care providers is the central challenge in meeting our health goals.
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Wang, Hai-fan, and Shang-chia Chiou. "Study on the Sustainable Development of Human Settlement Space Environment in Traditional Villages." Sustainability 11, no. 15 (August 2, 2019): 4186. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su11154186.

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The sustainability of the human settlement space environment is an eternal subject of human exploration. There hides the idea of human settlement space in an externally displayed material environment. This paper takes Dai villages in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan as the research object. Dai villages are the place where the ancestors of Dai people live, produce, and collectively construct human settlement, production, and spirit. Taking field investigation data and maps of Dai settlement areas as data sources, this paper explores Dai people’s view of human settlement space, analyzes the spatial cultural connotation of Dai villages, and the concept of sustainable human settlements ecology through the analysis of the factors of the villages’ spatial form. The survey results are as follows: (1) the villages are usually located at river valleys and basin areas, which are characteristic of facing the sun and near the water, embodying the persevering ecological concept of “adapting to local conditions and coexisting with nature”. (2) Dai people are one of the earliest “rice-growing nationalities”. Dai people’s settlements have formed a sustainable human settlement ecological space and the spatial pattern of “water-forest-field-village” is an organic whole. (3) The combination of Dai’s primitive religious ecology and Southern Buddhist culture has formed the characteristic of “advocating nature and Buddhism” and a unique concept of settlement space.
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Brown, Antony G., Steven R. Davis, Jackie Hatton, Charlotte O’Brien, Fiona Reilly, Kate Taylor, K. Emer Dennehy, et al. "The Environmental Context and Function of Burnt-Mounds: New Studies of Irish Fulachtaí Fiadh." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 82 (August 17, 2016): 259–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ppr.2016.7.

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Burnt mounds, or fulachtaí fiadh as they are known in Ireland, are probably the most common prehistoric site type in Ireland and Britain. Typically Middle–Late Bronze Age in age (although both earlier and later examples are known), they are artefact-poor and rarely associated with settlements. The function of these sites has been much debated with the most commonly cited uses being for cooking, as steam baths or saunas, for brewing, tanning, or textile processing. A number of major infrastructural development schemes in Ireland in the years 2002–2007 revealed remarkable numbers of these mounds often associated with wood-lined troughs, many of which were extremely well-preserved. This afforded an opportunity to investigate them as landscape features using environmental techniques – specifically plant macrofossils and charcoal, pollen, beetles, and multi-element analyses. This paper summarises the results from eight sites from Ireland and compares them with burnt mound sites in Great Britain. The fulachtaí fiadh which are generally in clusters, are all groundwater-fed by springs, along floodplains and at the bases of slopes. The sites are associated with the clearance of wet woodland for fuel; most had evidence of nearby agriculture and all revealed low levels of grazing. Multi-element analysis at two sites revealed elevated heavy metal concentrations suggesting that off-site soil, ash or urine had been used in the trough. Overall the evidence suggests that the most likely function for these sites is textile production involving both cleaning and/or dyeing of wool and/or natural plant fibres and as a functionally related activity to hide cleaning and tanning. Whilst further research is clearly needed to confirm if fulachtaí fiadh are part of the ‘textile revolution’ we should also recognise their important role in the rapid deforestation of the wetter parts of primary woodland and the expansion of agriculture into marginal areas during the Irish and British Bronze Ages.
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Esakia, Ketevan, Natalia Skakun, and Vera Terehina. "Hide-Scrapers from Arukhlo I Settlement in Georgia (on Correspondence of the Shape and Function of Prehistoric Implements)." Povolzhskaya Arkheologiya (The Volga River Region Archaeology) 3, no. 21 (September 20, 2017): 89–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.24852/pa2017.3.21.89.96.

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Kesby, Mike, Mikaela Vasstrøm, and Ragnhild Lund. "Refstie, Hilde. 2018. Voicing Noise — Action Research with Informal Settlement Groups in Malawi." Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography 72, no. 5 (October 20, 2018): 313–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2018.1541929.

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7

Bosenbecker, Patricia. "Private Companies of Colonisation and Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Brazil." Journal of Migration History 3, no. 1 (April 12, 2017): 157–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/23519924-00301007.

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During the second half of the nineteenth century, southern Brazil received numerous migratory contingents, attracted by the Imperial State or by provincial governments. However, the main difference with colonisation organised by private companies was that it aimed primarily at the commercialisation of farmland and the establishment of trade in agricultural and artisanal products. The private colonisation companies were often run by groups, families or individuals who were also immigrants. This process was fraught with conflict. With great visibility in Brazilian society, these entrepreneurs took advantage of commercial openings by exploiting farmers and workers without political rights and with little knowledge of the country of settlement. The same system however did hide political and economic disputes between local and immigrant elites. To discuss the role of immigrant entrepreneurs, this article presents some results of research on the trajectory of the Rheingantz family.
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Pál, Márton, Fanni Vörös, István Elek, and Béla Kovács. "Possibilities of high precision GPS data in autonomous driving." Abstracts of the ICA 1 (July 15, 2019): 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/ica-abs-1-286-2019.

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<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> A self-driving car is a vehicle that is able to perceive its surroundings and navigate in it without human action. Radar sensors, lasers, computer vision and GPS technologies help it to drive individually (Figure 1). They interpret the sensed information to calculate routes and navigate between obstacles and traffic elements.</p><p>Sufficiently accurate navigation and information about the current position of the vehicle are indispensable for transport. These expectations are fulfilled in the case of a human driver: the knowledge on traffic rules and signs make possible to navigate through even difficult situations. Self-driving systems substitute humans by monitoring and evaluating the surrounding environment and its objects without the background information of the driver. This analysing process is vulnerable. Sudden or unexpected situations may occur but high precision navigation and background GPS databases can complement sensor-detected data.</p><p>The assistance of global navigation has been used in cars for decades. Drivers can easily plan their routes and reach their destination by using car GPS units. However, these devices do not provide accurate positioning: there may be a difference of several metres from the real location. Self-driving cars also use navigation to complement sensor data. Although there are already autonomous system tests on motorways and countryside roads, in densely built-in areas this technology faces complications due to accuracy problems. The dilution of precision (DOP) values can be extremely high in larger settlements because high buildings may hide southern sky (where satellite signs are sensed from on our latitude).</p><p>We can achieve centimetre-level accuracy (if the conditions are ideal) with geodesic RTK (real-time kinematic) GPS systems. This high-precision position data is derived from satellite-based positioning systems. Measurements of the phase of the signal’s carrier wave are real-time corrected by a single reference or an interpolated virtual station.</p><p>In this research we use RTK GPS technology in order to work out a spatial database. These measurements can also be less precise in dense cities, but there is time during fieldwork to try to eliminate inaccuracy. We have chosen a sample area in the inner city of Budapest, Hungary where we located all traffic signs, pedestrian crossings and other important elements. As self-driving cars need precise position data of these terrain objects, we have tried to work with a maximum error of a few decimetres.</p><p>We have examined online map providers if they have feasible data structure and some base data. The implemented structure is similar to OpenStreetMap DB, in which there are already some traffic lights in important crossings. With this preliminary test database, we would like to filter out dangerous situations. If the camera of the car does not see a traffic sign because of a tree or a truck, information about it will be available from the database. If a pedestrian crossing is hardly visible and the sensor does not recognize it, the background GIS data will warn the car that there may be inattentive people on the road.</p><p>A test application has also been developed (Figure 2.), in which our Postgres/Postgis database records have been inserted. In the next phase of the project we try to test our database in the traffic. We plan to drive through the sample area and observe the GPS accuracy in the recognition of the located signs.</p><p>This research aims to achieve higher safety in the field of autonomous driving. By having a refreshable cartographic GIS database in the memory of a self-driving car, there is a smaller chance of risking human life. However, the maintenance demands a high amount of work. Because of this we should concentrate only on the most important signs. Even the cars can be able to supervise the content of the database if there is a large number of them on the road. The frequent production and analysis of point clouds is also an option to get nearer to safe automatized traffic.</p>
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Messineo, Pablo G., Marcela S. Tonello, Silvina Stutz, Alfonsina Tripaldi, Nahuel Scheifler, Nélida Pal, Guillermina Sánchez Vuichard, and Diego Navarro. "Human occupation strategies and related environmental-climate during the middle and late Holocene in central Pampas of Argentina." Holocene 29, no. 2 (November 28, 2018): 244–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0959683618810407.

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The main objective of this work is to generate and integrate interpretations of human occupation strategies and inferences of the environmental-climatic conditions in the central Pampas during the middle and late Holocene. We present a novel archeological–geological–paleoecological analysis in the area of the Cabeza de Buey lake, placed in an aeolian landscape. During the middle Holocene, two events of human occupations were recognized at Laguna Cabeza de Buey 2 archeological site. Both events present a small amount of lithic materials, a low diversity of tools and activities developed with them (principally hard material), and the hunting and primary processing of artiodactyls. These evidences suggest a locus of specific activity associated with an ephemeral human settlement under climate conditions drier than present and the presence of small, brackish, and shallow water bodies. For the late late Holocene, the hunter-gatherer occupation has a higher depositional rate of lithic assemblage, stones with diverse origins, presence of pottery fragments, a great lithic tool diversity, knapping techniques, and activities developed with these tools (processing wood, bone, hide, non-woody plant, and soft material). These evidences reveal an occupation with a higher degree of recurrence represented by a locus of multiple activities associated with a more stable landscape, such as an environment of dunes fixed by grass vegetation, and the establishment of a permanent water body. The different environmental characteristics for the middle and late Holocene in this area promoted that human groups develop two different patterns of mobility, settlement and use of space.
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Maldonado, Norma Valentín, and Reyna B. Solís Ciriaco. "Technology and Taxidermy of Two Nacreous Zoomorphic Pendants from Tula, Hidalgo." MRS Proceedings 1618 (2014): 181–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1557/opl.2014.467.

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ABSTRACTDuring an archaeological rescue on Tula’s southwestern urban settlement, two zoomorphic pendants made of the nacreous bivalve Pinctada mazatlanica were found. Such elements belong to a residential compound dedicated to the production of prestige goods for the elite at the Toltec capital.The importance of these objects analysis lies on the fact that both are on-site taxidermy renderings of two canines. This essay main purpose is to identify the biological zoomorphic renderings and its character, since it’s possible that the samples were not living animals but a depiction of their hides. This research will also analyze the manufacturing technology of these pendants using experimental archaeology, Optical Microscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy, which indicate a local production controlled by the ruling class.
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11

Kachushkin, Sergey V. "The Issue of the Correlation between Legal Regimes of Territories of National Parks and Settlements Located Therein in the Russian Federation." Ecological law 5 (November 5, 2020): 36–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.18572/1812-3775-2020-5-36-39.

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The study devotes its text to the important problem of the actual coexistence of Russian Federation’s national parks and some Russian settlements, mainly on the Irkutsk region example. The scientific article includes in its structure, among other things, the Pribaikalsky National Park’s brief description, as well as specific examples from the Irkutsk Region practice, in which settlements are still preserved and actively developed in the Pribaikalsky National Park. The work objectively takes into account the prevailing set of the Russian Federation’s environmental and land laws that regulate the national parks formation and functioning, in the sense that it allows to ensure genuine environmental safety within the borders of Russian national parks. The study actively criticizes the some individuals’ point of view, being regularly observed and permanently promoted at various levels of national government, supporting the idea of indispensable legal and actual preservation of the current state of affairs, as well as the idea of easing the existing environmental legislation norms admissibility, as a position that hides the true aspirations of these persons for achieving goals for the population well-being. At the same time, contrary to this position, the article proposes some different ways to improve national legislation in order to reduce and neutralize existing risks for the Russian ecological system. The article has a fairly high scientific and educational value, it is designed for a wide range of readers, both being related to the political or legal professions, and to environmental or other socially significant activities.
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Hill, Matthew G., David J. Rapson, Thomas J. Loebel, and David W. May. "Site Structure and Activity Organization at a Late Paleoindian Base Camp in Western Nebraska." American Antiquity 76, no. 4 (October 2011): 752–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.7183/0002-7316.76.4.752.

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Paleoindian archaeology on the Great Plains is often characterized by the investigation of large mammal kill/butchery bonebeds with relatively high archaeological visibility. Extensively documented aspects of Paleoindian behavioral variability include the form and composition of weaponry systems, hunting strategies, carcass exploitation, and hunter mobility. Non-hunting oriented aspects of settlement and subsistence behavior are less documented. Information from Component 2 at the O.V. Clary site, in Ash Hollow, western Nebraska, lessens this imbalance of knowledge. It provides a fine-grained, spatially extensive record of Late Paleoindian (Allen Complex) activities at a winter base camp occupied for 5-7 months. This paper highlights elements of site structure and activity organization, emphasizing domestic behaviors including hearth use, site maintenance, and hide working. ArcGIS 9.3.1 (ESRI) and GeoDa 0.9.5-1 (Anselin 2003; Anselin et al. 2006) are employed in conjunction with middle-range observations and expectations to document and interpret spatial patterning in the distribution of over 57,000 artifacts, ecofacts, and red ochre nodules. More broadly, results are related to two models of Paleoindian residential mobility: the place-oriented model and the high-tech forager model. Rather than mutually exclusive scenarios, Component 2 indicates that these models reflect complementary structural poses within the overall behavioral system.
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Zabolotnykh, Elizaveta A., and Elena M. Glavatskaya. "“Hey, Guys, Hide behind Stones and Bushes… ”: The Life and Fate of Jewish Soldiers in Yekaterinburg, Russia: 1843–58." Herald of an archivist, no. 2 (2021): 555–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.28995/2073-0101-2021-2-555-568.

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While the Jewish studies in Russia include many publications devoted to the history of Jewish population beyond the Pale of Settlement, the historiography on the Jewish cantonists is rather limited. Most studies are based almost exclusively on the negative experiences and sad memories of the cantonists themselves. This article aims to reconstruct the environment in which the Jewish soldiers lived when serving in the Orenburg Line Battalion No. 8 housed in Yekaterinburg between 1843 and 1858. We have based our research on administrative records of the battalion stored in the State Archive of the Sverdlovsk Region. Thorough analyses of the newly discovered documents permits quite balanced view on the Jewish conscripts’ fate in the Urals. The newly discovered and analyzed documents have allowed us to reconstruct the soldiers’ everyday life: what they were doing; what they ate; what opportunities they had for maintaining Judaism and how they adapted to the new conditions. The study has revealed that Jewish soldiers were often involved in work unrelated to military service; many took their opportunity to learn new crafts of military musicians, shoemakers, tailors, and barbers. During their years of service in Yekaterinburg, many Jewish soldiers received awards, regular military ranks, some got married and fathered children. Jewish soldiers had the opportunity to preserve their ethno-religious identity: they could gather on Saturdays for collective prayer, celebrate major religious holidays, conduct life cycle rituals, and follow main religious prescriptions. Former cantonists were not barred from contacts with their relatives and other Jewish residents of the Ural-Siberian region. At the same time, they actively contacted the urban Orthodox population, which sometimes entailed conversion to Orthodoxy. This could have been prompted by such factors as unfavorable personal circumstances and desire to radically change their fate. Baptism could provide opportunity for extraordinary promotion, it enabled them to marry Orthodox girls, to obtain the status of a city dweller, to join one of the Orthodox parishes in Yekaterinburg, and to obtain legal residence in the city. According to our calculations, about 20% of the Jewish soldiers converted to Orthodoxy during their stay in Yekaterinburg. The study has allowed us to detail the situation of Jewish soldiers and to assess the Yekaterinburg period in the cantonists’ life with regard to preserving traditional religion and to integration into the urban community as well. How unique was the Yekaterinburg 15-year episode in the life of former cantonists can only be ascertained after studying similar documents from other battalions.
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Hafner-Burton, Emilie M., Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld, and David G. Victor. "Predictability Versus Flexibility." World Politics 68, no. 3 (May 23, 2016): 413–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s004388711600006x.

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There is heated debate over the wisdom and effect of secrecy in international negotiations. This debate has become central to the process of foreign investment arbitration because parties to disputes nearly always can choose to hide arbitral outcomes from public view. Working with a new database of disputes at the world's largest investor-state arbitral institution, the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, the authors examine the incentives of firms and governments to keep the details of their disputes secret. The authors argue that secrecy in the context of investment arbitration works like a flexibility-enhancing device, similar to the way escape clauses function in the context of international trade. To attract and preserve investment, governments make contractual and treaty-based promises to submit to binding arbitration in the event of a dispute. They may prefer secrecy in cases when they are under strong political pressure to adopt policies that violate international legal norms designed to protect investor interests. Investors favor secrecy when managing politically sensitive disputes over assets they will continue to own and manage in host countries long after the particular dispute has passed. Although governments prefer secrecy to help facilitate politically difficult bargaining, secrecy diminishes one of the central purposes of arbitration: to allow governments to signal publicly their general commitment to investor-friendly policies. Understanding the incentives for keeping the details of dispute resolution secret may help future scholars explain more accurately the observed patterns of wins and losses from investor-state arbitration as well as patterns of investment.
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Shukra(pseudonym), A. "Caste — A Personal Perspective." Sociological Review 41, no. 1_suppl (May 1993): 169–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1993.tb03405.x.

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The author, a member of the Dalit caste of Chamars, describes and analyses his own experience of caste. He recalls that a sense of his own low caste identity was impressed upon him at a very early age, especially at school. Yet the practice of the high castes was not always consistent and inflexible – a low caste person who has influence or whose skills are sought after might be offered hypocritical respect. In any case the high caste view of the low castes is not internalised by the latter, especially those who have been influenced by the modern Dalit movement. Caste consciousness and behaviour pervades all communities in India in some form; it is not a monopoly of Hindus. When the author came to Britain at an early age he was initially more concerned by the effects of racism, but soon found that castism was as strong among Indians living in Britain as in India. This is not always made explicit, but most Asian organisations are in fact caste-based. If anything, this castism is stronger than it was in the early days of Indian settlement in Britain when migrants were more inclined to share facilities with each other. Even those who did not practise caste openly effectively support the institution by marginalising the issue of caste intellectually and politically. The only explanatory model which can make sense of the contradictions in Indian society is a model of groups with conflicting interests which however survives because of the capacity of the thin cement of Brahminism to hide the rifts in the structure.
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Antunes, Catia. "The Commercial Relationship between Amsterdam and the Portuguese Salt-Exporting Ports: Aveiro and Setubal, 1580-1715." Journal of Early Modern History 12, no. 1 (2008): 25–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/138537808x297144.

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AbstractSalt was a vital product in pre-industrial societies. Its value is associated with its preserving characteristics, which allowed foodstuffs and hides to be preserved for a relatively long time. This quality made it vital for the maintenance of pre-industrial activities like the fisheries. During the Middle Ages, most of the South Western European ports produced enough salt to respond to the needs of their urban and rural populations. With the growth of maritime activity and commercial expansion during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, salt became one of the most important bulk products in Europe, second only to grain.This article explores the surge of Aveiro and Setubal, two Portuguese ports specialized in the export of salt to the international markets and their contribution to the establishment, growth and development of an intricate set of commercial networks linking these ports to Amsterdam, Northern Europe and the Baltic. In the Portuguese context these ports were vital to the survival of the kingdom of Portugal, since most of the mid- and late seventeenth century diplomatic settlements were paid for by salt cargos and duties. For the Portuguese, salt was more than a bulk product. After 1640, it had become a hard currency.
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Balcorta Yépez, Francisco Antonio, Montserrat Alavez Ortúzar, Zulema Berenice Flores Montes de Oca, Miguel Ángel Martínez-Carrillo, Corina Solís, María Rodríguez-Ceja, and María Esther Ortiz. "RADIOCARBON DATING OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIAL RECOVERED FROM THE BASIN OF MEXICO." Radiocarbon 63, no. 4 (March 9, 2021): 1123–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/rdc.2021.11.

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ABSTRACTThe Mexico City Basin has had exceptional plant and animal diversity since ancient times due to its varied orography and benign climate. This environment attracted diverse human groups, from hunter-gatherers to one of the most influential pre-Hispanic cultures of Mesoamerica: the Mexica, also known as the Aztec. The subsoil of Mexico City hides a rich and varied cultural heritage. The Archaeological Rescue Department works to preserve cultural heritage, review archaeological studies, and expand archaeological information with new findings. We report on archaeological rescue works carried out at two sites in the Mexico City Basin prior to the beginning of new construction projects. The first one is the Reforma Hidalgo Complex Office in Teocaltitlán, one of the neighborhoods of ancient Mexica City, Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Some wooden post samples were selected for accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon (AMS 14C) dating, believed to have been used as chinampa supports. We seek to determine their temporality and possible reuse by Hispanic builders. The second one, the La Otra Banda Site, is part of the human settlements that were founded around Cuicuilco, one of the main ancient urban centers of the highlands of Central Mexico. Some human bones and coal samples were selected to be dated, aiming to establish the site’s occupation time.
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Kupferschmid, Andrea D., and Kurt Bollmann. "Direkte, indirekte und kombinierte Effekte von Wölfen auf die Waldverjüngung." Schweizerische Zeitschrift fur Forstwesen 167, no. 1 (January 1, 2016): 3–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.3188/szf.2016.0003.

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Direct, indirect and combined effects of wolves on tree regeneration The wolf currently returns to its traditional distribution area in central Europe. As a large carnivore, he will change the interactions between the organisms there. The impact of wolves on wild ungulates and on the vegetation cover and its composition is manifold: besides direct, numeric effects of wolves on the abundance and demography of their prey populations (like chamois, roe deer and red deer), indirect functional effects through mediated behavior of ungulates are also reported. In a first phase of wolf recolonization with low population density in a region, the functional effects as changes in the spatio-temporal use of habitats and resources are considered to be dominant because the wild ungulates attempt avoiding to become a prey. Later, in phases with higher wolf densities, direct numeric effects on the abundance of prey species should become more obvious. Such interactions among predator and prey species also have an impact on the browsing of tree regeneration. Since the spatio-temporal habitat use of prey species is mediated by the occurrence and abundance of large predators, we cannot assume that the browsing level will gradually decrease in general. Wild ungulates could more often hide or retreat into steep and rocky terrain or towards human settlement. Hence, trophic interactions between predators, herbivores and forests are complex and multilayered, in particular because forest ecosystems in central Europe are strongly influenced by forestry and hunting practices. This limits the trophic cascading impact of carnivores on forest. Our review demonstrates that the equation “wolf = less ungulates = fewer browsing” is not a general rule.
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Clayden, T. "Kish in the Kassite Period (c. 1650–1150 B.C.)." Iraq 54 (1992): 141–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021088900002552.

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After over half a century systematic excavation is once again underway at Kish. A team of Japanese archaeologists led by Prof. Hideo Fujii has reopened the archaeological investigation of this large ancient site where many periods of occupation are to be found. This study focuses on only a small fragment of the history of settlement at Kish, drawing together the evidence for habitation on the site in the Kassite Period.The evidence may broadly be separated into three groups: inscribed objects found at Kish; references to Kish in texts of the Kassite Period; and artifacts peculiar to the Kassite Period found on the site.The history and results of the excavations conducted at Kish before the Second World War have been well summarized by Moorey [1978]. I do not intend to present an even briefer summary in this paper. Suffice it to note that the bulk of the material discussed below derives from the two major campaigns at Kish: those of de Genouillac in 1912 [1925; Gibson: 1972: 69–70], and those of the Oxford–Field Museum Expedition between 1923 and 1933 [Field: 1929; Langdon: 1924; Mackay: 1925, 1929; Watelin: 1930, 1934; Gibson: 1972: 69–70]. Important supplementary evidence is also contained in the results of the surface survey work conducted at and around Kish by Gibson [1972].
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Archambault, Julie Soleil. "Taking Love Seriously in Human-Plant Relations in Mozambique: Toward an Anthropology of Affective Encounters." Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 2 (May 4, 2016): 244–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca31.2.05.

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Behind some of the tall fences that compartmentalize domestic space in Inhambane hide luxurious gardens that are usually under the care of an individual who answers requests for cuttings and who seeks out, in everyday meanderings, new species to add to his or her collection. In this Mozambican city, gardeners articulate their engagement with plants as guided by an overriding principle: the love of plants. One gardener even described his plants as his lovers. What makes human-plant relations in Inhambane even more ethnographically intriguing is that the most romantic gardeners tend to be either young men or older women. In this essay, I engage with the growing posthumanist literature on multispecies ethnography and explore what it would entail to take the love of plants seriously. I ask whether the statement “my plants are my lovers” should be taken metaphorically or literally. I situate human-plant relations in Inhambane against the backdrop of the region’s particular social and historical geographies—from a Portuguese settlement to a postsocialist, postwar society wrestling with growing inequality and the commodification of intimacy—and show how human-plant relations deserve to be understood both as ontological relations in their own right and as a response to the commodification of intimacy. I do not argue that the commodification of intimacy has led young men, in their search for new forms of affection, to fall in love with plants; falling in love with plants is contingent, not reactive. Rather, I suggest that human-plant relations are not only experienced and constructed in contrast to commodified forms of intimacies, but also offer a template for new interpersonal intimacies. My analysis of human-plant relations is informed by my wider interest in affective encounters, in the transformative potential of everyday engagement with the material world. I explore the transformative potential of affective encounters between plants and gardeners to start thinking about how new intimacies, new ways of being and relating, emerge and take shape.
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Sulyak, S. G. "N.I. Nadezhdin and Carpathian Rus." Rusin, no. 61 (2020): 41–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.17223/18572685/61/4.

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Nikolai Ivanovich Nadezhdin (1804–1856), a Russian philologist, literary and theater critic, philosopher, journalist, editor, historian, archaeologist, ethnographer, art critic, and educator, was the son of a poor village priest. The surname Nadezhdin was given to him by the Ryazan archbishop Theophilact (Rusanov), who pinned great hopes on the boy. N.I. Nadezhdin made a significant contribution to the development of science in Russia. Back in 1834, he spoke of the need to study the Russian language in various fields, in addition to belles-lettres and theological literature. He defended the idea of using philology as a supporting discipline in history. Nadezhdin was one of the founders of historical geography and played a significant role in the formation of ethnography in Russia. In his works, N.I. Nadezhdin focused on the history of Carpathian Rus. His first materials on Rusins appeared when he lived in Odessa. The earliest articles explored the history of Rusins in Bessarabia, the north of which is thought to belong to Carpathian Rus (A Walk in Bessarabia (1839), On the location of the ancient city of Peresechen, belonging to the Uglich people (1844)). In 1840–1841, on behalf of the Odessa educational district trustee D.M. Knyazhevich, Nadezhdin traveled through the southern and West Slavic lands. In his Note on the Journey Through the South Slavic Countries (1842) and in The Report on the Journey Made in 1840 and 1841 in the South Slavic Lands (1844), he mentions the Russian population of Hungary and Transylvania. Unfortunately, according to Nadezhdin, “South-West Russia, whose purest and most unique part was leaving the Russian Empire” was hardly studied by Russian scholars. N.I. Nadezhdin reported about the surviving Russian settlements in Transylvania, whose inhabitants had spoken the “Little Russian language”. He drew attention to the need for further development of the diplomacy of the Danube principalities, especially Moldova, which was initiated by Yu.I. Venelin. Nadezhdin noted that the geographical nomenclature not only in the Moldavian and Wallachian principalities, which were adjacent to Russia, but in Transylvania and Hungary, almost up to the Danube, hides its Slavic and actually Russian nature “under a thick layer of Romanian and Magyar sediment.” In his article On the ethnographic study of the Russian nationality (Notes of the Russian Geographical Society. Book. 2. SPb., 1847), N.I. Nadezhdin once again raised the question of studying the “population of the Russian outside Russia.” He pointed to the “Russian element” in the Austrian Empire, to the Rusins (Rusnaks) living in Galicia and Hungary. The scholar recalled that the remnants of the Russian population could still be found in Transylvania, “At present, in most of the local Russian villages, only women still speak Russian; men, however, refused from their native language for the dominant languages around: Madyar or Volosh. In Moldavia and Wallachia, the presence of the Russian element was even more obvious. Especially in Moldova, where it shines everywhere through the ruling stratum of the Romanian population; and most of all – in the so-called Upper Moldavia (Țara de Sus).”
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Nugrahadi ; Franseno Pujianto, Pandu Adikara Hidayat. "TERRITORIAL ANALISYS OF KERATON KANOMAN." Riset Arsitektur (RISA) 4, no. 02 (March 21, 2020): 190–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.26593/risa.v4i02.3806.190-204.

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AbstractKeraton Kanoman is an important building in the history of Cirebon city. Keraton Kanoman was built on 1678, where it was intended as a government building and a key point of the spreading of Islam in Sunda regions. The territory of Keraton Kanoman is strengthened by the presence of Kanoman Mosque in the west side of the keraton, also the presence of Kanoman Market Centre in the east side, while in the north side of the keraton lies the city square or alun-alun. There’s a residential area built surrounding Keraton Kanoman. The residential area was inhabited by the royal family as well as their servant or abdi dalem, this residential area was dubbed magersari. Magersari serves a purpose to the keraton, it is to be used as a barrier that protects the keraton from invaders and to exist as a marker that defines the keraton’s territorial area. Magersari was built in a 100 meters radius around the keraton.In the year of 1924, the Dutch colonial built a huge market place on the north side of keraton, continuing Pasar Kanoman in the east side. This development was done in order to lessen the influence of Keraton Kanoman to the locals and to deface its existence to the surrounding buildings. The new Pasar Kanoman was equipped with a movie theatre so the locals would go to the movies instead of joining the hearings in the keraton. The new Pasar Kanoman was so massive and tall in scale compared to Keraton Kanoman. Pasar Kanoman blocks the keraton entirely from the front side, hiding the keraton from the main roads and inhibiting its main access. Because of the growth that happened to the commercial area, the residential area also grew accordingly. The residential area used to be inhabited only by the royal family and their servants, but in the 1970s the settlements grew exponentially and was inhabited by outsiders.The new Pasar Kanoman and also the uncontrollable growth of the residential area invades the territory of Keraton Kanoman and thus, diminish its existence and hides it from the main roads. This invasion towards the territory of keraton takes shape in the change of land functions and activity.The purpose of this study Is to find out the territorial system of Keraton Kanoman in the existing physical order of the research location. The territorial system is studied by the types of territory and activites which occurs in the Kanoman region.This study uses descriptive method with place centered mapping technique. The data used was gathered by studying literatures of Keraton Kanoman’s history, building mapping on the site, and from interviews with the royal family and some of their servants. From analyzing the data based on the theory that is used to define territory, the results stated that there’s hierarchy order of territory, ranging from peripheral territory to central territory that holds the highest hierarchy. The central territory resides within the keraton building complex, while the peripheral lies within Keraton Kanoman’s jurisdiction. But there’s a lack of keraton’s existence and markings in the main road and access towards the keraton main ground, where there should be clear markings and indications that it is a part of Keraton Kanoman’s territory.This was caused by the massive growth on the commercial area and the new Pasar Kanoman building which was built on the north side of Keraton Kanoman. Key Words: personalization, territory, territorial system, Keraton Kanoman
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"Migration from Traditional Village to Group Settlement Area: AN Analysis of Felda Experience." International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering 9, no. 1 (November 10, 2019): 729–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.35940/ijitee.a4214.119119.

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At the time the country gained independence, most Malays were still living in traditional village and in poverty. In order to overcome this problem, the government had introduced a form of well-planned migration. This migration was established with specific goals such as offering land to people without one, eradicating poverty, eliminating communist’s hide-outs and boosting country’s economic growth. By allocating some amount of fund, the government cleared-up forest land and provided basic facilities such as houses, roads, worshipping places and schools. This well-planned migration was top-down, locating only qualified migrants through process of interview. In order for this migration to be successful, the government introduced the motto best land for the best people. The first settlement of this agricultural migration is in Lurah Bilut, Bentong Pahang. A total of 616 migrants of all races and religions, from all over the country were located in FELDA of Lurah Bilut. The programme was then expanded to the whole country following its success. After 50 years of operation, there are now 317 settlements, dwelt by 112,653 families. FELDA agricultural migration programme is the only well-planned and most successful in the world. Currently, in average, participants of settlement enjoy higher standard of living than before, whereas their children benefit from highest education standard.
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"US lawsuit settlement may hike drug prices." PharmacoEconomics & Outcomes News 47, no. 1 (February 1996): 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf03269796.

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25

Chakraborty, Kalyan Sekhar, Greg F. Slater, Heather M. L. Miller, Prabodh Shirvalkar, and Yadubirsingh Rawat. "Compound specific isotope analysis of lipid residues provides the earliest direct evidence of dairy product processing in South Asia." Scientific Reports 10, no. 1 (September 30, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-72963-y.

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Abstract The early evidence of domesticated animals and human–animal interaction in South Asia can be traced back to the seventh millennium BCE; however, our understanding of their use is incomplete and limited to the analysis of animal bones from archaeological sites. By the third millennium BCE with the emergence of the Indus Civilization, cattle and water-buffalo became the primary domesticates and outnumbered any other animals at the majority of the Indus settlements. Based on the analysis of skeletal remains and ethnographic data, a number of studies have suggested that cattle and water-buffalo were utilized for their meat, dairy, hides, and other labor-oriented jobs. While some of these claims are backed by empirical data, others are primarily discussed as hypotheses, for example, the exploitation of dairy. In this paper, by analyzing the absorbed lipid residues from fifty-nine ceramic sherds recovered from an agro-pastoral settlement that was occupied during the peak of the Indus period around mid- to late third millennium BCE, we provide the earliest direct evidence of dairy product processing, particularly from cattle and possibly from some water-buffalo. By providing direct evidence of animal product processing, we identify the use of primary domesticated animals and other resources in the diet during the Indus Civilization.
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Supardi.S, Lusiana Lamture,. "The Urgency of Public Prosecution Service of The Republic of Indonesia In The Settlement of Replacement Money In Criminal Acts of Corruption Based on Law Number 3 of 1971." International Journal of Social Science and Human Research 04, no. 07 (July 24, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.47191/ijsshr/v4-i7-42.

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In ensnaring the corruptors, not from the upstream, but from the downstream, namely by tracing where the flow of corruption funds ends up. It must be understood that a corruptor who then drains the proceeds of corruption means that he has committed two crimes at once. Therefore, the follow the money method is more effective than the follow The Suspect method, namely the handling of criminal acts that prioritize the perpetrators of crimes. With the follow the money approach, activities to hide or disguise the proceeds of corruption can be prevented and eradicated. However, this must still be regulated so that its implementation can be carried out in a concrete manner so that there is no legal vacuum in the implementation of its execution by the Indonesian Prosecutor's Office. The data collection technique in this research is using the library research method. While the analysis technique carried out on the legal materials that have been collected by the author will be done deductively. The results of this study indicate that the regulation of replacement money in criminal acts of corruption is contained in Law Number 3 of 1971 and has been revoked and amended by Law Number 20 of 2001 jo. so that in this case, there is an important role by the Attorney General's Office of the Republic of Indonesia, finally the Attorney General's Office issued Perja Number PER-020/A/JA/07/2014 and then upgraded to Perja Number 19 of 2020 and followed up with a Circular Letter of the Deputy Attorney General for Civil and Administrative Countries with Number SE-001/G/Gs/03/2021 dated March 26, 2021.
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27

Haftel, Yoram Z., Soo Yeon Kim, and Lotem Bassan-Nygate. "High-Income Developing Countries, FDI Outflows and the International Investment Agreement Regime." World Trade Review, August 25, 2021, 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1474745621000434.

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Abstract The international investment agreement regime (IIA Regime) is composed of thousands of IIAs and a system of investor–state dispute settlement. Historically, high-income developing countries (HIDCs) were part of the global South and thus ‘hosts’ of foreign direct investment (FDI). Increasingly, however, these countries have become ‘home’ to investors who are hosted and exposed to political risk abroad. Representing both home and host country interests simultaneously, how do HIDCs balance these crosscutting pressures? We argue that as the position of an HIDC shifts from mostly a recipient towards a sender of significant amounts of FDI, it will be more willing to provide protection to foreign investors at the expense of state regulatory space in its IIAs, thereby increasing its exposure to the IIA Regime. Employing an original data set that measures this exposure for sixty-four HIDCs over six decades, we first show that the degree of HIDC exposure to the IIA Regime varies a great deal. Using a general method of moments (GMM) analysis and controlling for a host of confounding factors, we demonstrate that, indeed, higher levels of FDI outflows as a share of the national economy result in greater exposure to the IIA Regime.
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Zaurbekov, S. S., A. A. Shaipov, L. I. Ozdoyeva, R. Z. Janargaliev, A. M. Movlayeva, A. A. Batukayev, Z. I. Gadayeva, and T. H. Ozdiyeva. "Problems of Drinking and Domestic Water Supply in Mountainous Areas of the Chechen Republic." KnE Life Sciences, November 25, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.18502/kls.v4i14.5640.

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The article presents the results of assessment works on drinking groundwater of alluvial sediments of the river valleys, perspective for water supply of mountainous regional centers of the Chechen Republic (Itum-Kale, Khimoi, Shatoi and Vedeno villages). The problem of providing quality water to more than 65,000 people living in four regions of the Chechen Republic mountainous areas is becoming more and more critical every year. According to the technical (geological) task, water demand for drinking and domestic water supply of the population is 4.0 thousand m3/day. The assessment of groundwater reserves for domestic and drinking purposes directly in the areas of the above-mentioned settlements was not made earlier, except for Itum-Kalinskoye, where in 2012–2013 HIDEK CJSC performed prospecting and assessment of the underground water reserves in the area of the projected riverbed water intake for the needs of the ”All-season ski resort Veduchi”. Based on the results of these works, the Khacharoiakhk field of fresh groundwater was explored in the alluvial deposits of the Khacharoiakhk River valley, which belong to the upper quaternary and modern quaternary system.
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Skvortsov, V. N., T. A. Skvortsova, L. A. Shlyakhova, A. D. Mazur, T. V. Stepanova, and A. A. Shabeikin. "Spread of anthrax in Korocha Uyezd of Kursk Guberniya in 1890s." Veterinaria i kormlenie, no. 4 (July 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.30917/att-vk-1814-9588-2021-4-15.

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The first occurrence of anthrax for Korocha Uyezd of Kursk Guberniya in sta-tistics was in the zemstvo veterinary doctor's report for 1888. The disease was report-ed in the uyezd every year. The data registered in the reports did not always reflect the real situation with spreading anthrax. The veterinary staff as a rule learnt about an-thrax by chance or while treating sick livestock in veterinary outpatient clinics or while on business trips in the uyezd. In some years the number of livestock animals afflicted with anthrax rose sig-nificantly (over 300 cases per year). The mortality rate was very high for sheep. Peas-ants skinned deceased animals and dried their hides on the ground, and that contributed much to the high loss of cattle. The veterinary doctor approached the zemstvo council asking to offer a reward for hides from livestock animals which had died of anthrax as it was necessary for better dealing with anthrax. The money was paid only if dead animals were reported within 2 weeks from onset of the disease. In 1896 the uyezd held the first vaccination of livestock against anthrax, the total number of vac-cinated animals in 4 vaccination centers was 750. The reasons of anthrax spreading easily included leaving anthrax carcasses to lie in the open instead of disposing of them properly, absence of animal burial sites near settlements, skinning anthrax animals, concealing dead animals by their owners, refusal to cooperate by both rural and uyezd police in implementing veterinary and police regulations and procedures aimed at containing the epizootic. Vaccination of livestock as the only rational method of an-thrax prevention was used more and more widely every year. In 1900 the total of 10,837 animals were vaccinated in 46 vaccinations centres.
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30

"Data Recovery at Justiceburg Reservior (Lake Alan Henry), Garza and Kent Counties, Texas: Phase III, Season 2." Index of Texas Archaeology Open Access Grey Literature from the Lone Star State, 1993. http://dx.doi.org/10.21112/ita.1993.1.31.

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The second of three seasons of Phase III data recovery at Justiceburg Reservoir (Lake Alan Henry), located on the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River in Garza and Kent counties, Texas, was conducted during the summer of 1991. 11le work included survey of dam borrow areas and site recording in and near these construction zones, limited work at selected rock art sites, geological investigation of an upland playa, and intensive investigations at two primarily Protohistoric period archeological sites. Pedestrian survey of active borrow areas resulted in the discovery and emergency recording and evaluation of site 41GR606 at the mouth of Grape Creek. Although this site is unusual because of its high frequency of ground stone tools, it lacks temporaIly diagnostic artifacts or datable organic materials and has an extremely low artifact density. In addition, site 4lKTl61 was discovered because of recent erosion along Grape Creek. This site also lacks diagnostic or datable materials and is characterized by a low artifact density. Due to their low research potentials, no further work was recommended for either of these sites, and they are considered ineligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Investigations at the rock art sites included the salvage of pictograph pigments from sites 41GR423, 41GR426, and 41GR437, which will !>e destroyed by inundation. These samples have been submitted for extraction of organic components and radiocarbon dating, but the results are not yet available. In addition, a consultant visited selected rock art sites in the project area and proposed preservation alternatives for several sites that will not be impacted directly by construction or inundation. Geological investigation of Morgan Playa, a smaIl upland playa located approximately 3 km north of the Double Mountain Fork, included excavation of a 2.5-m-deep backhoe trench from which a series of stratified sediment samples were taken for paleoenvironmental reconstruction. A single radiocarbon date indicates ·that the playa sediments probably accumulated from approximately 9000 B.P. to the present. Fossil poIlen was found to be poorly preserved, and the resulting data are uninterpretable. But opal phytoliths appear to document a sequence of changing grassland environments. Although more dates are needed to refine the chronology, the phytolith data are interpreted as evidence of Holocene climatic changes which generally correspond with regional paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Archeological investigations at the Headstream (41KT51) and Longhorn (41KT53) sites revealed evidence of chiefly Protohistoric period occupations by nomadic hunter-gatherers who were heavily involved in trade with the New Mexico pueblos. The archeological investigations at these sites have significant implications for understanding seventeenth-century settlement patterns in the Texas South Plains. Both sites are interpreted as residential base camps with multiple occupation episodes, which date mainly to the seventeenth century. The sites probably were inhabited by bison-hunting peoples during nonhunting seasons, and at least three tipi structures may be represented at the Longh0!J1 Site. Activities suggested for these sites include the staged processing of hides and maintenance of hide-processing tools, intensive utilization of wild plant foods, and extensive use of ceramics for cooking and storage. A petrographic analysis of the ceramic assemblages indicates that the majority of the wares are Puebloan in origin and that Pecos Pueblo was the major source, with other wares coming from the Tewa pueblos of the northern Rio Grande and perhaps the Taos/picuris region and the southern Salinas district. Of particular interest is the interpretation that almost all of the plainwares may he from the same Puebloan sources as the decorated glazewares and that the inhabitants of the sites did not make much, if any, of their own pottery.
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"The dimensions of peripherization from the viewpoint of the development policy through the example of a Hungarian periphery, the Encs district." Human Geography Journal, no. 25 (2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.26565/2076-1333-2018-25-01.

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During the last decades many financial and other typed supports were spent for the rise of the peripheries by both the international (European) and the state development policies. However, these efforts actually are often unable to reverse the backwardness of the most disadvantaged districts. Thus the issue of peripherization is an appreciating subject of also the contemporary geographic studies. In this article we aim to analyse the different faces of the peripherization (the spatial marginalization). It is a key question what kind of factors hide behind the reproduction of the peripheries. According to some critical, neo-Marxist approaches, the peripheral existence is not a predestined situation, ‘periphery as destiny’ (Kühn, M. 2014), but a resultant of dynamic processes, the peripherization, which is reversible. The peripheries should not remain necessarily as peripheries. According to our experiences based on the example of a real Hungarian periphery, the Encs district with a typical pathway development, we would like to call the attention for the area- and dimension-specific character of the peripherization. It is argued that there are two types of peripherization; processes originated from spatial (potential) and local causes. The previous one is inevitable due to its geographic frames, the development policy can hardly do anything with it, only trying to reduce, compensate the initial handicaps through e.g. infrastructural investments, which have huge social costs. Nevertheless, the regional policy can do something with the latter, the local causes! Even a relative small district could be heterogeneous at intraregional level from the viewpoint of the peripherization. Furthermore, the lagging behind varies in different dimensions too. The success of the de-peripherization depends on some local factors (e.g. creative utilization of the supports and systematic settlement policy by the local mayors). However, the structural mismatches (e.g. not an adequate development policy for the ability for absorption of the supports) plays also a crucial role result in the reproduction of the peripheries.
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Lymn, Jessie. "Migration Histories, National Memory, and Regional Collections." M/C Journal 22, no. 3 (June 19, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1531.

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IntroductionThis article suggests extensions to the place of ‘national collections’ of Australia’s migration histories, and considers the role of regional libraries and museums in collecting, preserving, and making accessible the history of migration. The article describes a recent collaboration between the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site, the Albury LibraryMuseum and the regionally-based Charles Sturt University (CSU) to develop a virtual, three-dimensional tour of Bonegilla, a former migrant arrival centre. Through this, the role of regional collections as keeping places of migration memories and narratives outside of those institutions charged with preserving the nation’s memory is highlighted and explored.What Makes a Nation’s Memory?In 2018 the Australian Research Council (ARC) awarded a Linkage grant to a collaboration between two universities (RMIT and Deakin), and the National Library of Australia, State Library of South Australia, State Library of Victoria, and State Library of New South Wales titled “Representing Multicultural Australia in National and State Libraries” (LP170100222). This Linkage project aimed to “develop a new methodology for evaluating multicultural collections, and new policies and strategies to develop and provide access to these collections” (RMIT Centre for Urban Research).One planned output of the Linkage project was a conference, to be held in early 2019, titled “Collecting for a Society’s Memory: National and State Libraries in Culturally Diverse Societies.” The conference call for papers suggested themes that included an interrogation of the relationship between libraries and ‘the collecting sector’, but with a focus still on National and State Libraries (Boyd). As an aside, the correlation between libraries and memories seemed slightly incongruous here, as archives and museums in particular would also be key in this collecting (and preserving) society’s memory, and also the libraries that exist outside of the national and state capitals.It felt like the project and conference had a definite ‘national’ focus, with the ‘regional’ mentioned only briefly in a suggested theme.At the same time that I was reading this call for papers and about the Linkage, I was part of a CSU Learning and Teaching project to develop online learning materials for students in our Teacher Education programs (history in particular) based around the Bonegilla Migrant Arrival Centre in Wodonga, Victoria. This project uses three-dimensional film technology to bring students to the Centre site, where they can take an interactive, curriculum-based tour of the site. Alongside the interactive online tour, a series of curricula were developed to work with the Australian History Curriculum. I wondered why community-led collections like these in the regions fall to the side in discussions of a ‘national’ (aka institutional) memory, or as part of a representation of a multicultural Australia, such as in this Linkage.Before I start exploring this question I want to acknowledge the limitations of the ARC Linkage framework in terms of the project mentioned above, and that the work that is being done in the “Representing Multicultural Australia in National and State Libraries” project is of value to professional practice and community; in this article I am using the juxtaposition of the two projects as an impetus to interrogate the role of regional collaboration, and to argue for a notion of national memory as a regional collecting concern.Bonegilla: A Contested SiteFrom 1947 through to 1971 over 300,000 migrants to Australia passed through the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre (“Bonegilla”) at a defining time in Australia’s immigration history, as post-World War II migration policies encompassed non-English speaking Europeans displaced by the war (Pennay "Remembering Bonegilla" 43). Bonegilla itself is a small settlement near the Hume Dam, 10 km from the New South Wales town of Albury and the Victorian town of Wodonga. Bonegilla was a former Army Camp repurposed to meet the settlement agendas of multiple Australian governments.New migrants spent weeks and months at Bonegilla, learning English, and securing work. The site was the largest (covering 130 hectares of land) and longest-lasting reception centre in post-war Australia, and has been confirmed bureaucratically as nationally significant, having been added to the National Heritage Register in 2007 (see Pennay “Remembering Bonegilla” for an in-depth discussion of this listing process). Bonegilla has played a part in defining and redefining Australia’s migrant and multicultural history through the years, with Bruce Pennay suggesting thatperhaps Bonegilla has warranted national notice as part of an officially initiated endeavour to develop a more inclusive narrative of nation, for the National Heritage List was almost contemporaneously expanded to include Myall Creek. Perhaps it is exemplary in raising questions about the roles of the nation and the community in reception and training that morph into modern day equivalents. (“Memories and Representations” 46)Given its national significance, both formally and colloquially, Bonegilla has provided rich material for critical thinking around, for example, Australian multicultural identity, migration commemorations and the construction of cultural memory. Alexandra Dellios argues that Bonegilla and its role in Australia’s memory is a contested site, and thatdespite criticisms from historians such as Persian and Ashton regarding Bonegilla’s adherence to a revisionist narrative of multicultural progress, visitor book comments, as well as exchanges and performances at reunions and festivals, demonstrate that visitors take what they will from available frameworks, and fill in the ‘gaps’ according to their own collective memories, needs and expectations. (1075)This recognition of Bonegilla as a significant, albeit “heritage noir” (Pennay, “Memories and Representations” 48), agent of Australia’s heritage and memory makes it a productive site to investigate the question of regional collections and collaborations in constructing a national memory.Recordkeeping: By Government and CommunityThe past decade has seen a growth in the prominence of community archives as places of memory for communities (for example Flinn; Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd; Zavala et al.). This prominence has come through the recognition of community archives as both valid sites of study as well as repositories of memory. In turn, this body of knowledge has offered new ways to think about collection practices outside of the mainstream, where “communities can make collective decisions about what is of enduring value to them, shape collective memory of their own pasts, and control the means through which stories about their past are constructed” (Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez 58). Jimmy Zavala, and colleagues, argue that these collections “challenge hierarchical structures of governance found in mainstream archival institutions” (212), and offer different perspectives to those kept on the official record. By recognising both the official record and the collections developed and developing outside of official repositories, there are opportunities to deepen understandings and interpretations of historical moments in time.There are at least three possible formal keeping places of memories for those who passed through, worked at, or lived alongside Bonegilla: the National Archives of Australia, the Albury LibraryMuseum in Albury, New South Wales, and the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site itself outside of Wodonga. There will of course be records in other national, state, local, and community repositories, along with newspaper articles, people’s homes, and oral lore that contribute to the narrative of Bonegilla memories, but the focus for this article are these three key sites as the main sources of primary source material about the Bonegilla experience.Official administrative and organisational records of activity during Bonegilla’s reception period are held at the National Archives of Australia in the national capital, Canberra; these records contribute to the memory of Bonegilla from a nation-state perspective, building an administrative record of the Centre’s history and of a significant period of migration in Australia’s past. Of note, Bonegilla was the only migrant centre that created its own records on site, and these records form part of the series known as NAA: A2567, NAA A2571 1949–56 and A2572 1957–71 (Hutchison 70). Records of local staff employed at the site will also be included in these administrative files. Very few of these records are publicly accessible online, although work is underway to provide enhanced online and analogue access to the popular arrival cards (NAA A2571 1949-56 and A2572 1957–71) onsite at Bonegilla (Pennay, personal communication) as they are in high demand by visitors to the site, who are often looking for traces of themselves or their families in the official record. The National Archives site Destination Australia is an example of an attempt by the holder of these administrative records to collect personal stories of this period in Australia’s history through an online photograph gallery and story register, but by 2019 less than 150 stories have been published to the site, which was launched in 2014 (National Archives of Australia).This national collection is complemented and enhanced by the Bonegilla Migration Collection at the Albury LibraryMuseum in southern New South Wales, which holds non-government records and memories of life at Bonegilla. This collection “contains over 20 sustained interviews; 357 personal history database entries; over 500 short memory pieces and 700 photographs” (Pennay “Memories and Representations” 45). It is a ‘live’ collection, growing through contributions to the Bonegilla Personal History Register by the migrants and others who experienced the Centre, and through an ongoing relationship with the current Bonegilla Migrant Experience site to act as a collection home for their materials.Alongside the collection in the LibraryMuseum, there is the collection of infrastructure at the Bonegilla Migrant Experience (BME) site itself. These buildings and other assets, and indeed the absence of buildings, plus the interpretative material developed by BME staff, give further depth and meaning to the lived experience of post-war migration to Australia. Whilst both of these collections are housed and managed by local government agencies, I suggest in this article that these collections can still be considered community archives, given the regional setting of the collections, and the community created records included in the collections.The choice to locate Bonegilla in a fairly isolated regional setting was a strategy of the governments of the time (Persian), and in turn has had an impact on how the site is accessed; by who, and how often (see Dellios for a discussion of the visitor numbers over the history of the Bonegilla Migrant Experience over its time as a commemorative and tourist site). The closest cities to Bonegilla, Albury and Wodonga, sit on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, separated by the Murray River and located 300 km from Melbourne and 550 km from Sydney. The ‘twin towns’ work collaboratively on many civic activities, and are an example of a 1970s-era regional development project that in the twenty-first century is still growing, despite the regional setting (Stein 345).This regional setting justifies a consideration of virtual, and online access to what some argue is a site of national memory loaded with place-based connections, with Jayne Persian arguing that “the most successful forays into commemoration of Bonegilla appear to be website-based and institution-led” (81). This sentiment is reflected in the motivation to create further online access points to Bonegilla, such as the one discussed in this article.Enhancing Teaching, Learning, and Public Access to CollectionsIn 2018 these concepts of significant heritage sites, community archives, national records, and an understanding of migration history came together in a regionally-based Teaching and Learning project funded through a CSU internal grant scheme. The scheme, designed to support scholarship and enhance learning and teaching at CSU, funded a small pilot project to pilot a virtual visit to a real-life destination: the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site. The project was designed to provide key teaching and learning material for students in CSU Education courses, and those training to teach history in particular, but also enhance virtual access to the site for the wider public.The project was developed as a partnership between CSU, Albury LibraryMuseum, and Bonegilla Migrant Experience, and formalised through a Memorandum of Understanding with shared intellectual property. The virtual visit includes a three-dimensional walkthrough created using Matterport software, intuitive navigation of the walkthrough, and four embedded videos linked with online investigation guides. The site is intended to help online visitors ‘do history’ by locating and evaluating sources related to a heritage site with many layers and voices, and whose narrative and history is contested and told through many lenses (Grover and Pennay).As you walk through the virtual site, you get a sense of the size and scope of the Migrant Arrival Centre. The current Bonegilla Migrant Experience site sits at Block 19, one of 24 blocks that formed part of the Centre in its peak time. The guiding path takes you through the Reception area and then to the ‘Beginning Place’, a purpose built interpretative structure that “introduces why people came to Australia searching for a new beginning” (Bonegilla site guide). Moving through, you pass markers on the walls and other surfaces that link through to further interpretative materials and investigation guides. These guides are designed to introduce K-10 students and their teachers to practices such as exploring online archives and thematic inquiry learning aligned to the Australian History Curriculum. Each guide is accompanied by teacher support material and further classroom activities.The guides prompt and guide visitors through an investigation of online archives, and other repositories, including sourcing files held by the National Archives of Australia, searching for newspaper accounts of controversial events through the National Library of Australia’s digital repository Trove, and access to personal testimonies of migrants and refugees through the Albury LibraryMuseum Bonegilla Migration Collection. Whilst designed to support teachers and students engaging with the Australian History Curriculum, these resources are available to the public. They provide visitors to the virtual site an opportunity to develop their own critical digital literacy skills and further their understanding of the official records along with the community created records such as those held by the Albury LibraryMuseum.The project partnership developed from existing relationships between cultural heritage professionals in the Albury Wodonga region along with new relationships developed for technology support from local companies. The project also reinforced the role of CSU, with its regional footprint, in being able to connect and activate regionally-based projects for community benefit along with teaching and learning outcomes.Regional CollaborationsLiz Bishoff argues for a “collaboration imperative” when it comes to the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector’s efficacy, and it is the collaborative nature of this project that I draw on in this article. Previous work has also suggested models of convergence, where multiple institutions in the GLAM sector become a single institution (Warren and Matthews 3). In fact the Albury LibraryMuseum is an example of this model. These converged models have been critiqued from resourcing, professionalisation and economic perspectives (see for example Jones; Hider et al.; Wellington), but in some cases for local government agencies especially, they are an effective way of delivering services to communities (Warren and Matthews 9). In the case of this virtual tour, the collaboration between local government and university agencies was temporal for the length of the project, where the pooling of skills, resources, and networks has enabled the development of the resource.In this project, the regional setting has allowed and taken advantage of an intimacy that I argue may not have been possible in a metropolitan or urban setting. The social intimacies of regional town living mean that jobs are often ‘for a long time (if not for life)’, lives intersect in more than a professional context, and that because there are few pathways or options for alternative work opportunities in the GLAM professions, there is a vested interest in progress and success in project-based work. The relationships that underpinned the Bonegilla virtual tour project reflect many of these social intimacies, which included former students, former colleagues, and family relationships.The project has modelled future strategies for collaboration, including open discussions about intellectual property created, the auspicing of financial arrangements and the shared professional skills and knowledge. There has been a significant enhancement of collaborative partnerships between stakeholders, along with further development of professional and personal networks.National Memories: Regional ConcernsThe focus of this article has been on records created about a significant period in Australia’s migration history, and the meaning that these records hold based on who created them, where they are held, and how they are accessed and interpreted. Using the case study of the development of a virtual tour of a significant site—Bonegilla—I have highlighted the value of regional, non-national collections in providing access to and understanding of national memories, and the importance of collaborative practice to working with these collections. These collections sit physically in the regional communities of Albury and Wodonga, along with at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, where they are cared for by professional staff across the GLAM sector and accessed both physically and virtually by students, researchers, and those whose lives intersected with Bonegilla.From this, I argue that by understanding national and institutional recordkeeping spaces such as the National Archives of Australia as just one example of a place of ‘national memory’, we can make space for regional and community-based repositories as important and valuable sources of records about the lived experience of migration. Extending this further, I suggest a recognition of the role of the regional setting in enabling strong collaborations to make these records visible and accessible.Further research in this area could include exploring the possibility of giving meaning to the place of record creation, especially community records, and oral histories, and how collaborations are enabling this. In contrast to this question, I also suggest an exploration of the role of the Commonwealth staff who created the records during the period of Bonegilla’s existence, and their social and cultural history, to give more meaning and context to the setting of the currently held records.ReferencesBishoff, Liz. “The Collaboration Imperative.” Library Journal 129.1 (2004): 34–35.Boyd, Jodie. “Call for Papers: Collecting for a Society’s Memory: National and State Libraries in Culturally Diverse Societies.” 2018. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/2079324/collecting-society%E2%80%99s-memory-national-and-state-libraries>.Caswell, Michelle, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez. “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing': Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives.” The American Archivist 79.1 (2016): 56–81.Dellios, Alexandra. “Marginal or Mainstream? Migrant Centres as Grassroots and Official Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21.10 (2015): 1068–83.Flinn, Andrew. “Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 28.2 (2007): 151–76.Flinn, Andrew, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd. “Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream.” Archival Science 9.1–2 (2009): 71.Grover, Paul, and Bruce Pennay. “Learning & Teaching Grant Progress Report.” Albury Wodonga: Charles Sturt U, 2019.Hider, Philip, Mary Anne Kennan, Mary Carroll, and Jessie Lymn. “Exploring Potential Barriers to Lam Synergies in the Academy: Institutional Locations and Publishing Outlets.” The Expanding LIS Education Universe (2018): 104.Hutchison, Mary. “Accommodating Strangers: Commonwealth Government Records of Bonegilla and Other Migrant Accommodation Centres.” Public History Review 11 (2004): 63–79.Jones, Michael. “Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for Australia’s Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.” Archives & Manuscripts 43.2 (2015): 149–51.National Archives of Australia. “Snakes in the Laundry... and Other Horrors”. Canberra, 29 May 2014. <http://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/media/media-releases/2014/25.aspx>.Pennay, Bruce. “‘But No One Can Say He Was Hungry’: Memories and Representations of Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre.” History Australia 9.1 (2012): 43–63.———. “Remembering Bonegilla: The Construction of a Public Memory Place at Block 19.” Public History Review 16 (2009): 43–63.Persian, Jayne. “Bonegilla: A Failed Narrative.” History Australia 9.1 (2012): 64–83.RMIT Centre for Urban Research. “Representing Multicultural Australia in National and State Libraries”. 2018. 11 Feb. 2019 <http://cur.org.au/project/representing-multicultural-australia-national-state-libraries/>.Stein, Clara. “The Growth and Development of Albury-Wodonga 1972–2006: United and Divided.” Macquarie U, 2012.Warren, Emily, and Graham Matthews. “Public Libraries, Museums and Physical Convergence: Context, Issues, Opportunities: A Literature Review Part 1.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (2018): 1–14.Wellington, Shannon. “Building Glamour: Converging Practice between Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum Entities in New Zealand Memory Institutions.” Wellington: Victoria U, 2013.Zavala, Jimmy, Alda Allina Migoni, Michelle Caswell, Noah Geraci, and Marika Cifor. “‘A Process Where We’re All at the Table’: Community Archives Challenging Dominant Modes of Archival Practice.” Archives and Manuscripts 45.3 (2017): 202–15.
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33

Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. "The Loseable World: Resonance, Creativity, and Resilience." M/C Journal 16, no. 1 (March 19, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.600.

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[Editors’ note: this lyric essay was presented as the keynote address at Edith Cowan University’s CREATEC symposium on the theme Catastrophe and Creativity in November 2012, and represents excerpts from the author’s publication Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Reproduced with the author’s permission].Essay and verse and anecdote are the ways I have chosen to apprentice myself to loss, grief, faith, memory, and the stories we use to tie and untie them. Cat’s cradle, Celtic lines, bends and hitches are familiar: however, when I write about loss, I find there are knots I cannot tie or release, challenging both my imagination and my craft. Over the last decade, I have been learning that writing poetry is also the art of tying together light and dark, grief and joy, of grasping and releasing. Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination. (Threading Light 7) ———Greek katastrophé overturning, sudden turn, from kata down + strophe ‘turning” from strephein to turn.Loss and catastrophe catapult us into the liminal, into a threshold space. We walk between land we have known and the open sea. ———Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory, makes anthropologists of us all. When Hermes picked up the lyre, it was to her—to Remembrance —that he sang the first song. Without remembrance, oral or written, we have no place to begin. Stone, amulet, photograph, charm bracelet, cufflink, fish story, house, facial expression, tape recorder, verse, or the same old traveling salesman joke—we have places and means to try to store memories. Memories ground us, even as we know they are fleeting and flawed constructions that slip through our consciousness; ghosts of ghosts. One cold winter, I stayed in a guest room in my mother’s apartment complex for three days. Because she had lost her sight, I sat at the table in her overheated and stuffy kitchen with the frozen slider window and tried to describe photographs as she tried to recall names and events. I emptied out the dusty closet she’d ignored since my father left, and we talked about knitting patterns, the cost of her mother’s milk glass bowl, the old clothes she could only know by rubbing the fabric through her fingers. I climbed on a chair to reach a serving dish she wanted me to have, and we laughed hysterically when I read aloud the handwritten note inside: save for Annette, in a script not hers. It’s okay, she said; I want all this gone. To all you kids. Take everything you can. When I pop off, I don’t want any belongings. Our family had moved frequently, and my belongings always fit in a single box; as a student, in the back of a car or inside a backpack. Now, in her ninth decade, my mother wanted to return to the simplicity she, too, recalled from her days on a small farm outside a small town. On her deathbed, she insisted on having her head shaved, and frequently the nursing staff came into the room to find she had stripped off her johnny shirt and her covers. The philosopher Simone Weil said that all we possess in the world is the power to say “I” (Gravity 119).Memory is a cracked bowl, and it fills endlessly as it empties. Memory is what we create out of what we have at hand—other people’s accounts, objects, flawed stories of our own creation, second-hand tales handed down like an old watch. Annie Dillard says as a life’s work, she’d remember everything–everything against loss, and go through life like a plankton net. I prefer the image of the bowl—its capacity to feed us, the humility it suggests, its enduring shape, its rich symbolism. Its hope. To write is to fashion a bowl, perhaps, but we know, finally, the bowl cannot hold everything. (Threading Light 78–80) ———Man is the sire of sorrow, sang Joni Mitchell. Like joy, sorrow begins at birth: we are born into both. The desert fathers believed—in fact, many of certain faiths continue to believe—that penthos is mourning for lost salvation. Penthus was the last god to be given his assignment from Zeus: he was to be responsible for grieving and loss. Eros, the son of Aphrodite, was the god of love and desire. The two can be seen in concert with one another, each mirroring the other’s extreme, each demanding of us the farthest reach of our being. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, phrased it another way: “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have also said Yes to all Woe as well. All things are chained, entwined together, all things are in love.” (Threading Light 92) ———We are that brief crack of light, that cradle rocking. We can aspire to a heaven, or a state of forgiveness; we can ask for redemption and hope for freedom from suffering for ourselves and our loved ones; we may create children or works of art in the vague hope that we will leave something behind when we go. But regardless, we know that there is a wall or a dark curtain or a void against which we direct or redirect our lives. We hide from it, we embrace it; we taunt it; we flout it. We write macabre jokes, we play hide and seek, we walk with bated breath, scream in movies, or howl in the wilderness. We despair when we learn of premature or sudden death; we are reminded daily—an avalanche, an aneurysm, a shocking diagnosis, a child’s bicycle in the intersection—that our illusions of control, that youthful sense of invincibility we have clung to, our last-ditch religious conversions, our versions of Pascal’s bargain, nothing stops the carriage from stopping for us.We are fortunate if our awareness calls forth our humanity. We learn, as Aristotle reminded us, about our capacity for fear and pity. Seeing others as vulnerable in their pain or weakness, we see our own frailties. As I read the poetry of Donne or Rumi, or verse created by the translator of Holocaust stories, Lois Olena, or the work of poet Sharon Olds as she recounts the daily horror of her youth, I can become open to pity, or—to use the more contemporary word—compassion. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of art are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice. Art grounds our grief in form; it connects us to one another and to the world. And the more we acquaint ourselves with works of art—in music, painting, theatre, literature—the more we open ourselves to complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief. Why else do we turn to a stirring poem when we are mourning? Why else do we sing? When my parents died, I came home from the library with stacks of poetry and memoirs about loss. How does your story dovetail with mine? I wanted to know. How large is this room—this country—of grief and how might I see it, feel the texture on its walls, the ice of its waters? I was in a foreign land, knew so little of its language, and wanted to be present and raw and vulnerable in its climate and geography. Writing and reading were my way not to squander my hours of pain. While it was difficult to live inside that country, it was more difficult not to. In learning to know graveyards as places of comfort and perspective, Mnemosyne’s territory with her markers of memory guarded by crow, leaf, and human footfall, with storehouses of vast and deep tapestries of stories whispered, sung, or silent, I am cultivating the practice of walking on common ground. Our losses are really our winter-enduring foliage, Rilke writes. They are place and settlement, foundation and soil, and home. (Threading Light 86–88) ———The loseability of our small and larger worlds allows us to see their gifts, their preciousness.Loseability allows us to pay attention. ———“A faith-based life, a Trappistine nun said to me, aims for transformation of the soul through compunction—not only a state of regret and remorse for our inadequacies before God, but also living inside a deeper sorrow, a yearning for a union with the divine. Compunction, according to a Christian encyclopaedia, is constructive only if it leads to repentance, reconciliation, and sanctification. Would you consider this work you are doing, the Trappistine wrote, to be a spiritual journey?Initially, I ducked her question; it was a good one. Like Neruda, I don’t know where the poetry comes from, a winter or a river. But like many poets, I feel the inadequacy of language to translate pain and beauty, the yearning for an embodied understanding of phenomena that is assensitive and soul-jolting as the contacts of eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin. While I do not worship a god, I do long for an impossible union with the world—a way to acknowledge the gift that is my life. Resonance: a search for the divine in the everyday. And more so. Writing is a full-bodied, sensory, immersive activity that asks me to give myself over to phenomena, that calls forth deep joy and deep sorrow sometimes so profound that I am gutted by my inadequacy. I am pierced, dumbstruck. Lyric language is the crayon I use, and poetry is my secular compunction...Poets—indeed, all writers—are often humbled by what we cannot do, pierced as we are by—what? I suggest mystery, impossibility, wonder, reverence, grief, desire, joy, our simple gratitude and despair. I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, writes Mary Oliver (4). Eros and penthos working in concert. We have to sign on for the whole package, and that’s what both empties us out, and fills us up. The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears. We cultivate awe, wonder, the exquisite pain of seeing and knowing deeply the abundant and the fleeting in our lives. Yes, it is a spiritual path. It has to do with the soul, and the sacred—our venerating the world given to us. Whether we are inside a belief system that has or does not have a god makes no difference. Seven others lean forward to listen. (Threading Light 98–100)———The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a rare thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. – Simone Weil (169)I can look at the lines and shades on the page clipped to the easel, deer tracks in the snow, or flecks of light on a summer sidewalk. Or at the moon as it moves from new to full. Or I can read the poetry of Paul Celan.Celan’s poem “Tenebrae” takes its title from high Christian services in which lighting, usually from candles, is gradually extinguished so that by the end of the service, the church is in total darkness. Considering Celan’s—Antschel’s—history as a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the Nazi death camps, and his subsequent years tortured by the agony of his grief, we are not surprised to learn he chose German, his mother’s language, to create his poetry: it might have been his act of defiance, his way of using shadow and light against the other. The poet’s deep grief, his profound awareness of loss, looks unflinchingly at the past, at the piles of bodies. The language has become a prism, reflecting penetrating shafts of shadow: in the shine of blood, the darkest of the dark. Enlinked, enlaced, and enamoured. We don’t always have names for the shades of sorrows and joys we live inside, but we know that each defines and depends upon the other. Inside the core shadow of grief we recognise our shared mortality, and only in that recognition—we are not alone—can hope be engendered. In the exquisite pure spot of light we associate with love and joy, we may be temporarily blinded, but if we look beyond, and we draw on what we know, we feel the presence of the shadows that have intensified what appears to us as light. Light and dark—even in what we may think are their purest state—are transitory pauses in the shape of being. Decades ago my well-meaning mother, a nurse, gave me pills to dull the pain of losing my fiancé who had shot himself; now, years later, knowing so many deaths, and more imminent, I would choose the bittersweet tenderness of being fully inside grief—awake, raw, open—feeling its walls, its every rough surface, its every degree of light and dark. It is love/loss, light/dark, a fusion that brings me home to the world. (Threading Light 100–101) ———Loss can trigger and inspire creativity, not only at the individual level but at the public level, whether we are marching in Idle No More demonstrations, re-building a shelter, or re-building a life. We use art to weep, to howl, to reach for something that matters, something that means. And sometimes it may mean that all we learn from it is that nothing lasts. And then, what? What do we do then? ———The wisdom of Epictetus, the Stoic, can offer solace, but I know it will take time to catch up with him. Nothing can be taken from us, he claims, because there is nothing to lose: what we lose—lover, friend, hope, father, dream, keys, faith, mother—has merely been returned to where it (or they) came from. We live in samsara, Zen masters remind us, inside a cycle of suffering that results from a belief in the permanence of self and of others. Our perception of reality is narrow; we must broaden it to include all phenomena, to recognise the interdependence of lives, the planet, and beyond, into galaxies. A lot for a mortal to get her head around. And yet, as so many poets have wondered, is that not where imagination is born—in the struggle and practice of listening, attending, and putting ourselves inside the now that all phenomena share? Can I imagine the rush of air under the loon that passes over my house toward the ocean every morning at dawn? The hot dust under the cracked feet of that child on the outskirts of Darwin? The gut-hauling terror of an Afghan woman whose family’s blood is being spilled? Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are only alive when we live the sufferings and the joys of others. He writes: Having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask one who has died for others. (66)Our breath is a delicate thread, and it contains multitudes. I hear an echo, yes. The practice of poetry—my own spiritual and philosophical practice, my own sackcloth and candle—has allowed me a glimpse not only into the lives of others, sentient or not, here, afar, or long dead, but it has deepened and broadened my capacity for breath. Attention to breath grounds me and forces me to attend, pulls me into my body as flesh. When I see my flesh as part of the earth, as part of all flesh, as Morris Berman claims, I come to see myself as part of something larger. (Threading Light 134–135) ———We think of loss as a dark time, and yet it opens us, deepens us.Close attention to loss—our own and others’—cultivates compassion.As artists we’re already predisposed to look and listen closely. We taste things, we touch things, we smell them. We lie on the ground like Mary Oliver looking at that grasshopper. We fill our ears with music that not everyone slows down to hear. We fall in love with ideas, with people, with places, with beauty, with tragedy, and I think we desire some kind of fusion, a deeper connection than everyday allows us. We want to BE that grasshopper, enter that devastation, to honour it. We long, I think, to be present.When we are present, even in catastrophe, we are fully alive. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more fully we engage with our losses—the harder we look, the more we soften into compassion—the more we cultivate resilience. ———Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. – Carl FolkeResilent people and resilient systems find meaning and purpose in loss. We set aside our own egos and we try to learn to listen and to see, to open up. Resilience is fundamentally an act of optimism. This is not the same, however, as being naïve. Optimism is the difference between “why me?” and “why not me?” Optimism is present when we are learning to think larger than ourselves. Resilience asks us to keep moving. Sometimes with loss there is a moment or two—or a month, a year, who knows?—where we, as humans, believe that we are standing still, we’re stuck, we’re in stasis. But we aren’t. Everything is always moving and everything is always in relation. What we mistake for stasis in a system is the system taking stock, transforming, doing things underneath the surface, preparing to rebuild, create, recreate. Leonard Cohen reminded us there’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. But what we often don’t realize is that it’s we—the human race, our own possibilities, our own creativity—who are that light. We are resilient when we have agency, support, community we can draw on. When we have hope. ———FortuneFeet to carry you past acres of grapevines, awnings that opento a hall of paperbarks. A dog to circle you, look behind, point ahead. A hip that bends, allows you to slidebetween wire and wooden bars of the fence. A twinge rides with that hip, and sometimes the remnant of a fall bloomsin your right foot. Hands to grip a stick for climbing, to rest your weight when you turn to look below. On your left hand,a story: others see it as a scar. On the other, a newer tale; a bone-white lump. Below, mist disappears; a nichein the world opens to its long green history. Hills furrow into their dark harbours. Horses, snatches of inhale and whiffle.Mutterings of men, a cow’s long bellow, soft thud of feet along the hill. You turn at the sound.The dog swallows a cry. Stays; shakes until the noise recedes. After a time, she walks on three legs,tests the paw of the fourth in the dust. You may never know how she was wounded. She remembers your bodyby scent, voice, perhaps the taste of contraband food at the door of the house. Story of human and dog, you begin—but the wordyour fingers make is god. What last year was her silken newborn fur is now sunbleached, basket dry. Feet, hips, hands, paws, lapwings,mockingbirds, quickening, longing: how eucalypts reach to give shade, and tiny tight grapes cling to vines that align on a slope as smoothlyas the moon follows you, as intention always leans toward good. To know bones of the earth are as true as a point of light: tendernesswhere you bend and press can whisper grace, sorrow’s last line, into all that might have been,so much that is. (Threading Light 115–116) Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Lekkie Hopkins and Dr. John Ryan for the opportunity to speak (via video) to the 2012 CREATEC Symposium Catastrophe and Creativity, to Dr. Hopkins for her eloquent and memorable paper in response to my work on creativity and research, and to Dr. Ryan for his support. The presentation was recorded and edited by Paul Poirier at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thanks go to Edith Cowan and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. ReferencesBerman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Bantam, 1990.Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.Folke, Carl. "On Resilience." Seed Magazine. 13 Dec. 2010. 22 Mar. 2013 ‹http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience›.Franck, Frederick. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.Hausherr, Irenee. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Penguin, 1978. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oliver, Mary. “The Word.” What Do We Know. Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002.Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Tenth Elegy). Ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House/Vintage Editions, 2009.Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005 (1952).Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2004.Further ReadingChodron, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Tao de Ching and the Teachings of Chuang Tzu. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1993.Dalai Lama (H H the 14th) and Venerable Chan Master Sheng-yen. Meeting of Minds: A Dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. New York: Dharma Drum Publications, 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander toward Writing." Alaska Quarterly Review. 21.1 (2003).Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Arthur Waley. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Neilsen, Lorri. "Lyric Inquiry." Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98. Ross, Maggie. The Fire and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. York: Paulist Press, 1987.
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34

Macarthur, David. "Pragmatist Doubt, Dogmatism and Bullshit." M/C Journal 14, no. 1 (February 1, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.349.

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Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“Let us not doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” (C. S. Peirce) Introduction Doubting has always had a somewhat bad name. A “doubting Thomas” is a pejorative term for one who doubts what he or she has not witnessed first-hand, a saying which derives originally from Thomas the Apostle’s doubting of the resurrected Christ. That doubt is the opposite of faith or conviction seems to cast doubt in a bad light. There is also the saying “He has the strength of his convictions” which seems to imply we ought correspondingly to say, “He has the weakness of his doubts”. One might recall that Socrates was likened to an electric eel because his peculiar form of questioning had the power to stun his interlocutors by crushing their pet convictions and cherished beliefs under the weight of the wise man’s reasonable doubts. Despite this bad press, however, doubting is a rational activity motivated by a vitally important concern for the truth, for getting things right. And our capacity to nurture reasonable doubts and to take them seriously is now more important than ever. Consider these examples: 1) In the modern world we are relying more and more on the veracity of the Internet’s enormous and growing mass of data often without much thought about its epistemic credentials or provenance. But who or what underwrites its status as information, its presumption of truth? 2) The global financial crisis depended upon the fact that economists and bank analysts placed unbounded confidence in being able to give mathematically precise models for risk, chance and decision-making under conditions of unavoidable ignorance and uncertainty. Why weren’t these models doubted before the crisis? 3) The CIA helped build the case for war in Iraq by not taking properly into account the scant and often contradictory evidence that Saddam Hussain’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. The neat alignment of US neo-conservative policy and CIA “intelligence” ought to have raised serious doubts that might have derailed the justification for war and its inevitable casualties and costs. (See Burns in this issue — Eds.) 4) On the other hand, it is quite likely that corporations that stand to lose large sums of money are fuelling unreasonable doubts about climate change—to what extent we are responsible for it, what the chances are of mitigating its effects, etc.—through misinformation and misdirection. In this paper I want to go a step beyond these specific instances of the value of appropriate doubt. Learning how to doubt, when to doubt and what to doubt is at the heart of a powerful pragmatist approach to philosophy—understood as reflective thinking at its best. After considering two ways of thinking about doubt, I shall outline the pragmatist approach and then briefly consider its bearing on the problems of dogmatism and bullshit in contemporary society. Two Notions of Doubt It is important to distinguish doubts about beliefs from doubts about certainty. That is, in everyday parlance the term “doubt” seems to have two connotations depending on which of these notions it is contrasted with. First of all, doubt can be contrasted with belief. To doubt a belief is to be in “twosome twiminds” as James Joyce aptly put it: a state of neither believing nor disbelieving but hovering between the two, without committing oneself, undecided. To doubt in this sense is to sit on the fence, to vacillate over a truth commitment, to remain detached. In this context doubt is not disbelief but, rather, un-belief. Secondly, doubt can be contrasted with certainty, the absence of doubt. To doubt something that we thought was certain is not to doubt whether it is true or reasonable to believe. If someone asks what the colour of my car is and I say it’s painted blue they might then say, “How do you know that someone has not painted it red in your absence?” This is, of course, possible but it is not at all likely. Even if it causes me to be very slightly doubtful—and, as we shall see, pragmatism offers reasons to block this step—it would not lead me to actually doubt what the colour of my car is. To be less than fully certain is consistent with continuing to believe and doing so for good (even overwhelming) reasons. Of course, some forms of belief such as religious faith may require certainty, in which case to doubt them at all is tantamount to undermining the required attitude. There is also a notion of absolute certainty, meaning the impossibility of doubt. Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy by employing a method of extreme and radical doubting in order to discover absolutely certain (i.e. indubitable) truths. His Meditations involves solipsistic doubts about whether there is an external world, including one’s own body and other people, since perhaps its all a myriad of one’s own subjective experiences. Clearly such philosophical doubt concerns matters that are not ordinarily doubted or even seen as open to doubt. As we shall see, pragmatism sides with common sense here. A Pragmatist Perspective on Doubt With this preliminary distinction in place we can now list four pragmatist insights about doubt that help to reveal its fruitfulness and importance for critical reflection in any field, including philosophy itself: 1) Genuine doubts require reasons. Genuine doubts, doubts we are required to take seriously, arise from particular problematic situations for definite reasons. One does not doubt at will just as one does not believe at will. I cannot believe that I am the Wimbledon tennis champion just by willing to believe it. So, too, I cannot doubt what I believe just by willing to doubt it. I cannot doubt that it is a sunny day if everything speaks in favour of its being so: I’m outside, seeing the sun and clear blue skies etc. Some philosophers think that the mere conceivability or possibility of error is enough to generate a live doubt but pragmatists contest this. For example, is knowledge of what I see before me now undermined because I am not able to rule out the possibility that my brain is being artificially stimulated to induce experiences, as seen in The Matrix? Such brain-in-a-vat doubts are not genuine for the pragmatist because they do not constitute a legitimate reason to doubt. Why? For one thing we have no actual machine that can create an artificial temporally extended “world image” through brain stimulation. These are merely conceivable or “paper” doubts, unliveable paradoxes that we think about in the study but do not take seriously in everyday life. Of course, if we did have such a machine—and it is not clear that this is even technically possible today—this situation would no doubt change. 2) There are no absolute certainties (guaranteed indubitable truths). As we have seen, ordinarily the term “certainty” stands for the actual absence of doubt. That is what we might call subjective certainty since where I am free of doubt another might be doubtful. Subjective certainty is the common state of most people most of the time about many things such as what their name is, where they live, who their family and friends are, what they like to eat etc. There is also Descartes’s notion of what cannot be doubted under any circumstances, which we might call absolute certainty. Traditional philosophy believed it could discover absolute certainties by means of reason alone, these truths being called a priori. At the heart of pragmatism are doubts about all propositions that were previously regarded as absolute certainties. That is, there are no a priori truths in the traditional sense according to the pragmatist. Nothing is guaranteed to be true come what may, even the truths of logic or mathematics which we currently cannot imagine being false. It was at one time thought to be a necessary truth that two straight lines both perpendicular to another straight line never meet… that was, until the nineteenth century discovery of Riemannian geometry. What was supposedly a necessary a priori truth turned out to be false in this context. That anything can be doubted does not mean that everything can be doubted all at once. The attempt to doubt all one’s worldly beliefs presumably includes doubting that one knows the meaning of the words one uses in raising this very doubt (since one doubts the meaning of the term “doubt” itself)—or doubting whether one knows the contents of one’s thoughts—in which case one would undermine the sense of one’s doubts in the very attempt to doubt. But that makes no sense. The moral is that if doubt is to make sense then it might be wide-reaching but it cannot be fully universal. The human desire for absolute certainty is probably inescapable so the lessons of fallibilism need to be hard won again and again. Anything can be doubted—in so far as it makes sense to do so. This is the pragmatist doctrine of fallibilism. It is the position one gets by making room for doubt in one’s system of beliefs without lapsing into complete skepticism. 3) Inquiry is the fallibilistic removal of doubt. Doubt is an unsettled state of mind and “the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion” (Peirce, "Fixation" 375). We are, by nature, epistemically conservative and retain our body of beliefs, or as many of them as possible, in the face of positive reasons for doubt. A doubt stimulates us to an inquiry, which ends by dissolving the doubt and, perhaps, a slight readjustment of our network of beliefs. Since this inquiry is a fallible one nothing is guaranteed to be held fast: there are no eternal truths or indispensable methods. Ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics developed techniques for doubting whether we have any reason to believe one thing rather than another. A famous argument-form they explored is called Agrippa’s Trilemma. If we ask why we should believe any given belief then we must give another belief to serve as a reason. But then the same question arises for it in turn and so on. If we are to avoid the looming infinite regress of reasons for reasons we seem to only have two unpalatable options: either to argue viciously in a circle; or to simply stop at some arbitrary point. The argument thus seems to show that nothing we believe is justified. Pragmatism blocks this trilemma at its origin by arguing that our beliefs conform to a default-and-challenge structure. Current beliefs have the status of default entitlements unless or until specific challenges to them (real doubts) are legitimately raised. On this conception we can be entitled to the beliefs we actually have without requiring reasons for them simply because we have them and lack any good reason for doubt. In an image owed to Otto Neurath, we rebuild our wooden ship of beliefs whilst at sea, replacing planks as need be but, since we must stay afloat, never all planks at once (Quine). Inquiry demands the removal of all actual doubt, not all possible doubt. A belief is, as Charles Peirce conceives it, a habit of action. To doubt a belief, then, is to undermine one’s capacity to act in the relevant respect. The ancient philosopher, Pyrrho, was reputed to need handlers to stop him putting his hands into fire or walking off cliffs because, as a radical skeptic, he lacked the relevant beliefs about fire and falling to make him aware of any danger. The pragmatist, oriented towards action and human practices, does not rest content with his doubts but overcomes them in favour of settled beliefs by way of “a continual process of re-experimenting and re-creating” (Dewey 220) 4) Inquiry requires a democratic ethics. The pragmatist conception of inquiry rehabilitates Plato’s analogy between self and society: the norms of how one is to conduct one’s inquiries are the norms of democratic society. Inquiry is a cooperative human interaction with an environment not, as in the Cartesian tradition, a private activity of solitary a priori reflection. It depends on a social conception of (fallible) reason—understood as intelligent action— which conforms to the democratic ethical principles of the fair and equal right of all to be heard, an invitation and openness to criticism, the toleration of dissenting voices, and instituting methods to help cooperatively resolve disagreements, etc. We inquire in medias res (in the middle of things)—that is, from the midst of our current beliefs and convictions within a community of inquirers. There is no need for a Cartesian propaedeutic doubt to weed out any trace of falsity at the start of inquiry. From the pragmatist point of view we must learn to live with the ineliminable possibility of error and doubt, and of inevitable shortcomings in both our answers and methods. Problems can be overcome as they arise through a self-correcting experimental method of inquiry in which nothing is sacred. A key feature of this conception of inquiry is that it places reasonable doubt at its centre: 1) a sustained doubting of old “certainties” of traditional authorities (e.g. religious, political) or of traditional a priori reason (philosophy); 2) a constant need to distinguish genuine or live doubts from philosophical or paper doubts; 3) and the idea that genuine doubts are both the stimulant to a new inquiry and, when dissolved, signal its end. Dogmatism The importance of the pragmatist conceptions of inquiry and doubt can be appreciated by seeing that various pathologies of believing—pathologies of how to form and maintain beliefs that—are natural to us. Of particular note are dogmatism and fanaticism, which are forms of fixed believing unhinged from rational criticism and sustained without regard to such matters as evidential support, reasonableness and plausibility within the wider community of informed inquirers. Since they divide the world into us and them, fellow-believers and the rest, they inevitably lead to disagreements and hostility. Dogmatists and fanatics loom large in the contemporary world as evidenced by the widespread and malevolent influence of religious, ideological and political dogmas, confrontational forms of nationalism, and fanatical “true believers” in all shapes and forms from die-hard conspiracy theorists to adherents of fad diets and the followers of self-appointed gurus and cult-leaders. The great problem with such forms of believing is that they leave no room for reasonable doubts, which history tells us inevitably arise in matters of human social life and our place in the world. And as history also tells us we go to war and put each other to death over matters of belief and disbelief; of conviction and its lack. Think of Socrates, Jesus, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Oscar Romero to name only a small few who have been killed for their beliefs. A great virtue of pragmatism is its anti-authoritarian stance, which is achieved by building doubt into its very methodology and by embracing a democratic ethos that makes each person equally answerable to reasonable doubt. From this perspective dogmatists and fanatical believers are ostracised as retaining an outmoded authoritarian conception of believing that has been superseded in the most successful branches of human inquiry—such as the natural sciences. Bullshit To bullshit is to talk without knowing what one is talking about. Harry Frankfurt has observed, “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit” (117); and he goes on to argue that bullshitters are “a greater enemy of truth than liars are” (132). Liars care about the truth since they are trying to deceive others into believing what is not true. Bullshitters may say what is true but more often exaggerate, embellish and window-dress. Their purposes lies elsewhere than getting things right so they do not really care whether what they say is true or false or a mixture of the two. Politicians, advertising agents, salesmen and drug company representatives are notorious for bullshitting. Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” is a famous example of political bullshit. He said it for purely political reasons and when he was found to have lied (the evidence being the infamous unwashed dress of Monica Lewinsky) he changed the lie into a truth by redefining the word “sex”—another example of bullshit. The bullshitter can speak the truth but what matters is always the spin. The bullshitter need not (contra Frankfurt) hide his own lack of concern for the truth. He plays at truth-telling but he can do this more or less openly. The so-called bullshit artist may even try to make a virtue out of revealing his bullshit as the bullshit it is, thereby making his audience complicit. But the great danger of bullshit is not so much to others, as to oneself. Inveterate bullshitters are inevitably tempted to believe their own bullshit leading to a situation in which they do not know their own minds. Only one who knows his own mind is aware of what he is committed to, and what he takes responsibility for in the wider community of inquirers who rely on each other for information and reasonable criticism. Doubting provides a defence against bullshitters since it blocks their means: the doubter reaffirms a concern for the truth including the truth about oneself, which the bullshitter is wilfully avoiding. To doubt is to withhold a commitment to the truth through a demand not to commit too hastily or for the wrong reasons. A concern for the truth, for getting things right, is thus central to the practice of reasonable doubting. And reasonably doubting, in turn, depends on knowing one’s own mind, what truths one is committed to, and what epistemic responsibilities one thus incurs to justify and defend truths and to criticise falsehood. Democracy and fallibilist inquiry were borne of doubts about the benevolence, wisdom and authority of tyrants, dictators, priests and kings. Their continued vitality depends on maintaining a healthy skepticism about the beliefs of others and about whether we know our own minds. Only so can we sustain our vital concern for the truth in the face of the pervasive challenges of dogmatists and bullshitters. References Descartes, R. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Vols. I-III. J. Cottingham et. al., eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985/1641. Dewey, J. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 Vol 12. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Dewey, J. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 Vol 14. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Frankfurt, H. “On Bullshit.” The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988. Joyce, J. Finnegan’s Wake. Penguin: London, 1999/1939. Peirce, C.S. “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” 1868. In The Essential Peirce.———. “The Fixation of Belief.” 1877. In The Essential Peirce. ———. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” 1878. In The Essential Peirce. ———. The Essential Peirce: Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. ———. The Essential Peirce: Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Quine, W.V. Theories and Things. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Scepticism. Trans. J. Barnes & J. Annas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Wittgenstein, L. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.
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Gardiner, Amanda. "It Is Almost as If There Were a Written Script: Child Murder, Concealment of Birth, and the Unmarried Mother in Western Australia." M/C Journal 17, no. 5 (October 25, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.894.

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BASTARDYAll children born before matrimony, or so long after the death of the husband as to render it impossible that the child could be begotten by him, are bastards.– Cro. Jac. 451William Toone: The Magistrates Manual, 1817 (66)On 4 September 1832, the body of a newborn baby boy was found washed up on the shore at the port town of Fremantle, Western Australia. As the result of an inquest into the child’s suspicious death, a 20-year-old, unmarried woman named Mary Summerland was accused of concealing his birth. In October 2014, 25-year-old Irish backpacker Caroline Quinn faced court in Perth, Western Australia, over claims that she concealed the birth of her stillborn child after giving birth in the remote north west town of Halls Creek during May of the same year. Both women denied the existence of their children, both appear to have given birth to their “illegitimate” babies alone, and both women claimed that they did not know that they had ever been pregnant at all. In addition, both women hid the body of their dead child for several days while the people they lived with or were close to, did not appear to notice that the mother of the child had had a baby. In neither case did any person associated with either woman seek to look for the missing child after it had been born.Despite occurring 182 years apart, the striking similarities between these cases could lead to the assumption that it is almost as if there were a written script of behaviour that would explain the actions of both young women. Close examination of the laws surrounding child murder, infanticide and concealment of birth reveals evidence of similar behaviours being enacted by women as far back as the 1600s (and earlier), and all are shaped in response to the legal frameworks that prosecuted women who gave birth outside of marriage.This article traces the history of child murder law from its formation in England in the 1600s and explores how early moral assumptions concerning unmarried mothers echoed through the lived experiences of women who killed their illegitimate babies in colonial Western Australia, and continue to resonate in the treatment of, and legal response to, women accused of similar crimes in the present day. The Unlicensed ChildThe unlicensed child is a term coined by Swain and Howe to more accurately define the social matrix faced by single women and their children in Australia. The term seeks to emphasise the repressive and controlling religious, legal and social pressures that acted on Australian women who had children outside marriage until the mid-1970s (xxi, 1, 92, 94). For the purposes of this article, I extend Swain and Howe’s term the unlicensed child to coin the term the unlicensed mother. Following on from Swain and Howe’s definition, if the children of unmarried mothers did not have a license to be born, it is essential to acknowledge that their mothers did not have a license to give birth. Women who had children without social and legal sanction gave birth within a society that did not allocate them “permission” to be mothers, something that the corporeality of pregnancy made it impossible for them not to be. Their own bodies—and the bodies of the babies growing inside them—betrayed them. Unlicensed mothers were punished socially, religiously, legally and financially, and their children were considered sinful and inferior to children who had married parents simply because they had been born (Scheper-Hughes 410). This unspoken lack of authorisation to experience the unavoidably innate physicality of pregnancy, birth and motherhood, in turn implies that, until recently unmarried mothers did not have license to be mothers. Two MothersAll that remains of the “case” of Mary Summerland is a file archived at the State Records Office of Western Australia under the title CONS 3472, Item 10: Rex V Mary Summerland. Yet revealed within those sparse documents is a story echoed by the events surrounding Caroline Quinn nearly two hundred years later. In September 1832, Mary Summerland was an unmarried domestic servant living and working in Fremantle when the body of a baby was found lying on a beach very close to the settlement. Western Australia had only been colonized by the British in 1829. The discovery of the body of an infant in such a tiny village (colonial Fremantle had a population of only 436 women and girls out of 1341 non-Aboriginal emigrants) (Gardiner) set in motion an inquest that resulted in Mary Summerland being investigated over the suspicious death of the child.The records suggest that Mary may have given birth, apparently alone, over a week prior to the corpse of the baby being discovered, yet no one in Fremantle, including her employer and her family, appeared to have noticed that Mary might have been pregnant, or that she had given birth to a child. When Mary Summerland was eventually accused of giving birth to the baby, she strongly denied that she had ever been pregnant, and denied being the mother of the child. It is not known how her infant ended up being disposed of in the ocean. It is also not known if Mary was eventually charged with concealment or child murder, but in either scenario, the case against her was dismissed as “no true bill” when she faced her trial. The details publically available on the case of Caroline Quinn are also sparse. Even the sex of her child has not been revealed in any of the media coverage of the event. Yet examination of the limited details available on her charge of “concealment of birth” reveal similarities between her behaviours and those of Mary Summerland.In May 2014 Caroline Quinn had been “travelling with friends in the Kimberly region of Western Australia” (Lee), and, just as Mary did, Caroline claims she “did not realise that she was pregnant” when she went into labour (Independent.ie). She appears, like Mary Summerland, to have given birth alone, and also like Mary, when her child died due to unexplained circumstances she hid the corpse for several days. Also echoing Mary’s story, no person in the sparsely populated Hall’s Creek community (the town has a populace of 1,211) or any friends in Caroline’s circle of acquaintances appears to have noticed her pregnancy, nor did they realise that she had given birth to a baby until the body of the child was discovered hidden in a hotel room several days after her or his birth. The media records are unclear as to whether Caroline revealed her condition to her friends or whether they “discovered” the body without her assistance. The case was not brought to the attention of authorities until Caroline’s friends took her to receive medical attention at the local hospital and staff there notified the police.Media coverage of the death of Caroline Quinn’s baby suggests her child was stillborn or died soon after birth. As of 13 August 2014 Caroline was granted leave by the Chief Magistrate to return home to Ireland while she awaited her trial, as “without trivialising the matter, nothing more serious was alleged than the concealing of the birth” (Collins, "Irish Woman"). Caroline Quinn was not required to return to Australia to appear at her trial and when the case was presented at the Perth Magistrates Court on Thursday 2 October, all charges against her were dropped as the prosecutor felt “it was not in the public interest” to proceed with legal action (Collins, "Case").Statutory MarginalisationTo understand the similarities between the behaviours of, and legal and medical response to, Mary Summerland and Caroline Quinn, it is important to situate the deaths of their children within the wider context of child murder, concealment of birth and “bastardy” law. Tracing the development of these methods of law-making clarifies the parallels between much of the child murder, infanticide and concealment of birth narrative that has occurred in Western Australia since non-Aboriginal settlement.Despite the isolated nature of Western Australia, the nearly 400 years since the law was formed in England, and the extremely remote rural locations where both these women lived and worked, their stories are remarkably alike. It is almost as if there were a written script and each member of the cast knew what role to play: both Mary and Caroline knew to hide their pregnancies, to deny the overwhelmingly traumatic experience of giving birth alone, and to conceal the corpses of their babies. The fathers of their children appear to have cut off any connection to the women or their child. The family, friends, or employers of the parents of the dead babies knew to pretend that they did not know that the mother was pregnant or who the father was. The police and medical officers knew to charge these women and to collect evidence that could be used to simultaneously meet the needs of the both prosecution and the defence when the cases were brought to trial.In reference to Mary Summerland’s case, in colonial Western Australia when a woman gave birth to an infant who died under suspicious circumstances, she could be prosecuted with two charges: “child murder” and/or “concealment of birth”. It is suggestive that Mary may have been charged with both. The laws regarding these two offences were focused almost exclusively on the deaths of unlicensed children and were so deeply interconnected they are difficult to untangle. For Probyn, shame pierces the centre of who we think we are, “what makes it remarkable is that it reveals with precision our values, hopes and aspirations, beyond the generalities of good manners and cultured norms” (x). Dipping into the streams of legal and medical discourse that flow back to the seventeenth century highlights the pervasiveness of discourses marginalising single women and their children. This situates Mary Summerland and Caroline Quinn within a ‘burden on society’ narrative of guilt, blame and shame that has been in circulation for over 500 years, and continues to resonate in the present (Coull).An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard ChildrenIn England prior to the 17th century, penalties for extramarital sex, the birth and/or maintenance of unlicensed children or for committing child murder were expressed through church courts (Damme 2-6; Rapaport 548; Butler 61; Hoffer and Hull 3-4). Discussion of how the punishment of child murder left the religious sphere and came to be regulated by secular laws that were focused exclusively on the unlicensed mother points to two main arguments: firstly, the patriarchal response to unlicensed (particularly female) sexuality; and secondly, a moral panic regarding a perceived rise in unlicensed pregnancies in women of the lower classes, and the resulting financial burden placed on local parishes to support unwanted, unlicensed children (Rapaport 532, 48-52; McMahon XVII, 126-29; Osborne 49; Meyer 3-8 of 14). In many respects, as Meyer suggests, “the legal system subtly encouraged neonaticide through its nearly universally negative treatment of bastard children” (240).The first of these “personal control laws” (Hoffer and Hull 13) was the Old Poor Law created by Henry VIII in 1533, and put in place to regulate all members of English society who needed to rely on the financial assistance of the parish to survive. Prior to 1533, “by custom the children of the rich depended on their relations, while the ‘fatherless poor’ relied on the charity of the monastic institutions and the municipalities” (Teichman 60-61). Its implementation marks the historical point where the state began to take responsibility for maintenance of the poor away from the church by holding communities responsible for “the problem of destitution” (Teichman 60-61; Meyer 243).The establishment of the poor law system of relief created a hierarchy of poverty in which some poor people, such as those suffering from sickness or those who were old, were seen as worthy of receiving support, while others, who were destitute as a result of “debauchery” or other self-inflicted means were seen as undeserving and sent to a house of correction or common gaol. Underprivileged, unlicensed mothers and their children were seen to be part of the category of recipients unfit for help (Jackson 31). Burdens on SocietyIt was in response to the narrative of poor unlicensed women and their children being undeserving fiscal burdens on law abiding, financially stretched community members that in 1576 a law targeted specifically at holding genetic parents responsible for the financial maintenance of unlicensed children entered the secular courts for the first time. Called the Elizabethan Poor Law it was enacted in response to the concerns of local parishes who felt that, due to the expenses exacted by the poor laws, they were being burdened with the care of a greatly increased number of unlicensed children (Jackson 30; Meyer 5-6; Teichman 61). While the 1576 legislation prosecuted both parents of unlicensed children, McMahon interprets the law as being created in response to a blend of moral and economic forces, undergirded by a deep, collective fear of illegitimacy (McMahon 128). By the 1570s “unwed mothers were routinely whipped and sent to prison” (Meyer 242) and “guardians of the poor” could force unlicensed mothers to wear a “badge” (Teichman 63). Yet surprisingly, while parishes felt that numbers of unlicensed children were increasing, no concomitant rise was actually recorded (McMahon 128).The most damning evidence of the failure of this law, was the surging incidence of infanticide following its implementation (Rapaport 548-49; Hoffer and Hull 11-13). After 1576 the number of women prosecuted for infanticide increased by 225 percent. Convictions resulting in unlicensed mothers being executed also rose (Meyer 246; Hoffer and Hull 8, 18).Infanticide IncreasesBy 1624 the level of infanticide in local communities was deemed to be so great An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children was created. The Act made child murder a “sex-specific crime”, focused exclusively on the unlicensed mother, who if found guilty of the offence was punished by death. Probyn suggests that “shame is intimately social” (77) and indeed, the wording of An Act to Prevent highlights the remarkably similar behaviours enacted by single women desperate to avoid the shame and criminal implication linked to the social position of unlicensed mother: Whereas many lewd Women that have been delivered of Bastard Children, to avoyd their shame and to escape punishment [my italics], doe secretlie bury, or conceale the Death of their Children, and after if the child be found dead the said Women doe alleadge that the said Children were borne dead;…For the preventing therefore of this great Mischiefe…if any Woman…be delivered of any issue of the Body, Male or Female, which being born alive, should by the Lawes of this Realm be a bastard, and that she endeavour privatlie either by drowning or secret burying thereof, or any other way, either by herselfe of the procuring of others, soe to conceale the Death thereof, as that it may not come to light, whether it be borne alive or not, but be concealed, in every such Case the Mother so offending shall suffer Death… (Davies 214; O'Donovan 259; Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Osborne 49; Rose 1-2; Rapaport 548). An Act to Prevent also “contained an extraordinary provision which was a reversion of the ordinary common law presumption of dead birth” (Davies 214), removing the burden of proof from the prosecution and placing it on the defence (Francus 133; McMahon 128; Meyer 2 of 14). The implication being that if the dead body of a newborn, unlicensed baby was found hidden, it was automatically assumed that the child had been murdered by their mother (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Osborne 49; Rapaport 549-50; Francus 133). This made the Act unusual in that “the offence involved was the concealment of death rather than the death itself” (O'Donovan 259). The only way an unlicensed mother charged with child murder was able to avoid capital punishment was to produce at least one witness to give evidence that the child was “borne dead” (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Meyer 238; McMahon 126-27).Remarkable SimilaritiesClearly, the objective of An Act to Prevent was not simply to preserve infant life. It is suggestive that it was enacted in response to women wishing to avoid the legal, social, corporal and religious punishment highlighted by the implementation of the poor law legislation enacted throughout earlier centuries. It is also suggestive that these pressures were so powerful that threat of death if found guilty of killing their neonate baby was not enough to deter women from concealing their unlicensed pregnancies and committing child murder. Strikingly analogous to the behaviours of Mary Summerland in 19th century colonial Western Australia, and Caroline Quinn in 2014, the self-preservation implicit in the “strategies of secrecy” (Gowing 87) surrounding unlicensed birth and child murder often left the mother of a dead baby as the only witness to her baby’s death (McMahon xvii 49-50).An Act to Prevent set in motion the legislation that was eventually used to prosecute Mary Summerland in colonial Western Australia (Jackson 7, Davies, 213) and remnants of it still linger in the present where they have been incorporated into the ‘concealment of birth law’ that prosecuted Caroline Quinn (Legal Online TLA [10.1.182]).Changing the ‘Script’Shame runs like a viral code through the centuries to resonate within the legal response to women who committed infanticide in colonial Western Australia. It continues on through the behaviours of, and legal responses to, the story of Caroline Quinn and her child. As Probyn observes, “shame reminds us about the promises we keep to ourselves” in turn revealing our desire for belonging and elements of our deepest fears (p. x). While Caroline may live in a society that no longer outwardly condemns women who give birth outside of marriage, it is fascinating that the suite of behaviours manifested in response to her pregnancy and the birth of her child—by herself, her friends, and the wider community—can be linked to the narratives surrounding the formation of “child murder” and “concealment” law nearly 400 years earlier. Caroline’s narrative also encompasses similar behaviours enacted by Mary Summerland in 1832, in particular that Caroline knew to say that her child was “born dead” and that she had merely concealed her or his body—nothing more. This behaviour appears to have secured the release of both women as although both Mary and Caroline faced criminal investigation, neither was convicted of any crime. Yet, neither of these women or their small communities were alone in their responses. My research has uncovered 55 cases linked to child murder in Western Australia and the people involved in all of these incidences share unusually similar behaviours (Gardiner). Perhaps, it is only through the wider community becoming aware of the resonance of child murder law echoing through the centuries, that certain women who are pregnant with unwanted children will be able to write a different script for themselves, and their “unlicensed” children. ReferencesButler, Sara, M. "A Case of Indifference? Child Murder in Later Medieval England." Journal of Women's History 19.4 (2007): 59-82. Collins, Padraig. "Case against Irish Woman for Concealing Birth Dropped." The Irish Times 2 Oct. 2014. ---. "Irish Woman Held for Hiding Birth in Australia Allowed Return Home." The Irish Times 13 Aug. 2014. Coull, Kim. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014.Damme, Catherine. "Infanticide: The Worth of an Infant under Law." Medical History 22.1 (1978): 1-24. Davies, D.S. "Child-Killing in English Law." The Modern Law Review 1.3 (1937): 203-23. Dickinson, J.R., and J.A. Sharpe. "Infanticide in Early Modern England: The Court of Great Sessions at Chester, 1650-1800." Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Ed. Mark Jackson. Hants: Ashgate, 2002. 35-51.Francus, Marilyn. "Monstrous Mothers, Monstrous Societies: Infanticide and the Rule of Law in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England." Eighteenth-Century Life 21.2 (1997): 133-56. Gardiner, Amanda. "Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia." Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014.Gowing, Laura. "Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England." Past & Present 156 (1997): 87-115. Hoffer, Peter C., and N.E.H. Hull. Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558-1803. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Independent.ie. "Irish Woman Facing Up to Two Years in Jail for Concealing Death of Her Baby in Australia." 8 Aug. 2014. Law Reform Commission of Western Australia. "Chapter 3: Manslaughter and Other Homicide Offences." Review of the Law of Homicide: Final Report. Perth: Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, 2007. 85-117.Lee, Sally. "Irish Backpacker Charged over the Death of a Baby She Gave Birth to While Travelling in the Australia [sic] Outback." Daily Mail 8 Aug. 2014. Legal Online. "The Laws of Australia." Thomson Reuters 2010. McMahon, Vanessa. Murder in Shakespeare's England. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Meyer, Jon'a. "Unintended Consequences for the Youngest Victims: The Role of Law in Encouraging Neonaticide from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries." Criminal Justice Studies 18.3 (2005): 237-54. O'Donovan, K. "The Medicalisation of Infanticide." Criminal Law Review (May 1984): 259-64. Osborne, Judith A. "The Crime of Infanticide: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater." Canadian Journal of Family Law 6 (1987): 47-59. Rapaport, Elizabeth. "Mad Women and Desperate Girls: Infanticide and Child Murder in Law and Myth." Fordham Urban Law Journal 33.2 (2006): 527-69.Rose, Lionel. The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain, 1800-1939. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1986. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Swain, Shurlee, and Renate Howe. Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Teichman, Jenny. Illegitimacy: An Examination of Bastardy. Oxford: Cornell University Press, 1982. Toone, William. The Magistrate's Manual: Or a Summary of the Duties and Powers of a Justice of the Peace. 2nd ed. London: Joseph Butterworth and Son, 1817.
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