T. E. Bowdich: The Dueling Ideologies of Racialism and Naturalism

Cape Coast was one of the most politically and socially significant towns in West Africa. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was one of the main trading emporia on the West African coast. By the early twentieth century Cape Coast had developed into the centre of the West African proto-nationalist movement. Longstanding trading, familial and social connections with Europe, had created a social infrastructure that nurtured political activity. Throughout the period of establishment of permanent European settlements, there was increasing indigenous conflict between fte Fante, (an immigrant group who favoured systems of matrilineal inheritance) and the native EfUtU, who maintained patrilineal systems of lineage. By the eighteenth century, the mercantile success of the Fante gave their families and institutions a disproportionate amount of power within Cape Coast. As Cape Coast grew in size and influence, the two systems of lineage created independent and competing histories which legitimised their respective claims to jurisdiction of the town. Over generations the histories supported by the two lineages diverged to a point where they could no longer be reconciled. The political differences of the two lineages served to reinforce the opposition they held in their histories, which in turn fuelled their vehement support for their separate customs and institutions. Toward the end of nineteenth century, as the church's influence grew and British law became increasingly accepted, the stool ceased to be the sole source of indigenous reaction to colonial and Asante encroachments. The stool's relative loss of power to the British had been exacerbated by an extended interregnum at the end of the nineteenth century and the continuance of lineage disputes between the stool families. From within the Fante section of the stool family, several individuals stepped forward to voice the opinions of the town. Although such men could justify their roles through their genealogical links to the stool, they chose not to. In the first two decades of the twentieth century the political agenda of certain local politicians broadened beyond the bounds of Cape Coast, and then beyond the bounds of the colony. The weakness of the Cape Coast stool and a catastrophic downturn in trade pushed the town into recession. Cape Coast never recovered A major stool dispute enquiry in 1916, underlined how obscure and contradictory the stool history had become. It was only at that point that people realised that the demise of the stool history ran parallel to the decay of the extended stool family. The stool families' cohesion was inextricably linked to the general acceptance of specific homogenising genealogical accounts of stool history. As the history became obscured by time, so the stool family went into decline.

春秋時期的夷夏觀念是學術上一個重要的議題，不但具有歷史意義，同時也具備經學上的意義。本文試圖結合這兩者進行探討，關注春秋當時的夷夏觀念為何，包含夷夏之間透過怎樣的標準進行區分，這種區分意識的運作具有何種性質與意義，以及這樣的觀念對《春秋》經傳的影響為何，《春秋》與三傳又闡發出具有何種特色的夷夏觀念。 在夷夏區分的標準方面，本文歸結當時建立於文化以及血緣兩項標準之上。不過當時各地的文化面貌相當複雜，顯出以文化區分的主觀特性。在透過秦、楚、吳為例探討夷夏身份歸屬問題時，發現秦被視為諸夏，楚被視為蠻夷，但是兩國在春秋時期卻同時不認為自己歸屬於夷或夏；吳則是姬姓國家被視為蠻夷，應是蠻夷國家透過血緣的攀附，試圖融入諸夏圈的案例。分析春秋時期的的夷夏關係時發現夷夏各國之間牽動的政治利益相當複雜，不利於族群認同的凝聚，因此將夷夏對立視為當時局勢的發展核心，恐有過於誇大的嫌疑。另一方面透過上國與辟陋這組政治地理觀念的產生，顯示春秋中晚期後族群意識正逐漸加強，代表春秋時期夷夏觀念的進一步開展，奠定之後發展的方向。 春秋時期的夷夏觀念提供了若干的養分，使得《春秋》與三傳吸收後轉化出儒家經典意義上的夷夏觀，這是本論文另一個側重的面向。孔子堅持夷夏的分別，這點顯現在《春秋》大義上，但是其夷夏觀念拋棄血緣區分，專注在文化上，並賦予更深刻的涵義。重視夷夏之別的孔子並不歧視蠻夷，也不贊成武力征討蠻夷而主張和平相處。三傳的夷夏觀雖有其不同的面貌，但是基本精神則是承襲孔子的夷夏觀而發展，形成儒家的詮釋傳統。而隨著《春秋》與三傳成為通經致用所憑藉的典範，《春秋》學上的夷夏觀就又輾轉影響後代的政治格局與思想，於是經學上的主張又回歸到歷史脈絡之中，夷夏觀也就成為中國政治歷史上重要的一環。

史政組織為近代軍事參謀組織下之重要一環，各國藉由史政組織研究歷次戰爭，總結戰史經驗，減少或避免再度發生之前錯誤，做為日後作戰之鑑戒。德國是最早設置近代軍事參謀組織之國家，19世紀初期德國開始重視研究戰史，19世紀中後期，世界列強如美、日、俄、法等國之軍事參謀組織開始成立相關單位編纂戰史。 中國自古以來雖有史官負責紀錄正史，但並無專門記錄有關軍事史之組織，有關軍事之記載則分散於浩瀚史書群或個人著作中，直到清末設置近代軍事參謀組織「軍咨府」，中國開始有專門負責編纂戰史之單位。國民政府成立後，設立軍事委員會，該會下設參謀團（或名參謀部、參謀廳），其職掌有負編纂戰史之責，民國17年改為參謀本部，該部總務廳負責編纂戰史，同時也設置「戰史編纂組」，27年改編為軍令部，第一廳負責蒐編戰史，第二廳負責蒐編敵軍戰史，同時亦設置戰史編纂委員會負責蒐編中日戰史。 戰後，軍事委員會改組國防部，成立國防部史料局負責蒐編戰史之責，施行一陣後更名為史政局，民國38年因為國共內戰配合戰鬥內閣縮編人員，史政局縮編為史政處。史政處員額較之前少，但史政處時期處於「反共抗俄、反攻大陸」剛開始的階段，需要編輯大量與「共匪」、登陸與反登陸、對國民政府有正面宣傳等類的軍事史書，因編制人員不足及蔣中正先生等軍事高層逐漸重視史政的教育、借鑑等功能之因，希望藉由史政，強化軍方及一般民眾精神上的戰力，因此在民國46年7月，史政處再度擴編為史政局，史政局時期，繼續推行史政處時期業務，人員亦有增減，相較於史政處仍是較多；同時因為史政推行已久，累積之檔案極多，因此建立「國軍檔案室」，作為永久保存國軍檔案之單位。後來因應國軍需求實施精簡案，民國62年5月1日，史政局與編譯局合併為史政編譯局。 本文主要研究時間為民國35年國防部史料局成立62年5月1日國防部史政局與編譯局合併為止，亦會稍加敘述戰前國軍史政組織與部分列強史政組織。本文研究可分為三部分，首先國軍各時期史政組織名稱說法不一，本文試圖釐清戰前國軍史政組織之名稱、職掌、編制等。第二，試圖釐清戰後史政組織演變經由擴編、縮編與再擴編之原因，並描述戰後國軍史政組織之組織規模、人員編制、行政制度、訓練制度等制度；第三，試圖重建戰前、戰後國軍史政組織編纂史書之過程、方法。

This empirical study explores the influence of Hollywood product placements on cultural perceptions and teaching practices of preservice English teachers in higher education in China. Hollywood movies and TV series routinely use product placements as a tactic to blend commercial goals with compelling storylines, which could possibly influence the perceptions, and potential teaching practice of Chinese preservice English teachers. The purpose of this study is to determine the degree to which material culture in the form of product placement in Hollywood affects preservice English teachers’ image of America, and their future teaching practice, altering their expectations and goals as well as how they view the West. The study uses a quantitative study method by means of an online questionnaire (N = 497) and applies structural equation modelling to conduct data analysis. The results find notable significant relationships including those from food, architecture, transportation, and electronic devices to positive image of America, as well as architecture and transportation to potential teaching practice. The most prominent path is from image to teaching. However, certain relationships, including those from fashion to image and food to teaching, do not demonstrate statistical significance. These results contribute to the theoretical and practical understanding of how preservice English teachers see Hollywood’s material culture, and how it affects their perception and possible teaching methods. The findings also demonstrate how preservice teachers’ perceptions and educational approaches are shaped by Hollywood’s material culture in the form of product placement, while simultaneously emphasizing the significance of integration of media literacy and upholding their cultural identity amidst these influences.

Review| November 01 2022 Archaeology and History: A Late Antiquity for Britain Robin Fleming, The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300–525 CE. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 333 pp. + 22 b/w figs. ISBN: 9780812252446. $45, £36.Mateusz Fafinski, Roman Infrastructure in Early Medieval Britain: The Adaptations of the Past in Text and Stone. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 239 pp. + 2 b/w figs. ISBN 9789463727532. €106. Helena Hamerow Helena Hamerow University of Oxford Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Studies in Late Antiquity (2022) 6 (4): 734–739. https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2022.6.4.734 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Helena Hamerow; Archaeology and History: A Late Antiquity for Britain. Studies in Late Antiquity 1 November 2022; 6 (4): 734–739. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2022.6.4.734 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentStudies in Late Antiquity Search Archaeology was, once upon a time, referred to as “the handmaiden of history.” Images of artifacts served primarily to adorn the pages of historical accounts regarded by publishers as needing enlivening. How times have changed. Material culture—uncovered for the most part by archaeological excavation—is increasingly playing a central role in the writings of early medieval historians. Notable examples include Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005) and, more recently, John Blair’s Building Anglo-Saxon England (2018).1 The two volumes under review here—both written by historians—bear witness to this growing engagement with material culture and how it is changing the way we view early medieval Britain. The Material Fall of Roman Britain has the archaeological record at its core and uses it to challenge conventional understandings of the notoriously elusive late Roman to post-Roman transition. Refusing to be constrained by traditional disciplinary and chronological divides, the book spans the period... You do not currently have access to this content.

Artifacts from the Perspective of Effutu Masquerade Performance: An Aesthetic Album

Prior to the European colonial expansions of the past several centuries the Austronesian (AN) language family had the greatest geographical extent of any on earth, including in its territory areas that had never previously been settled. Although predominantly distributed in a tropical or subtropical environment, AN-speaking peoples exhibit a wide range of physical types, material cultures, and types of social and political organization. This paper addresses ways in which linguistic comparison can contribute toward answering such questions as the following: Where was the AN homeland? What was the nature of early AN material culture, social and political organization? What can we infer about early AN pathology? How did early AN speakers view the spirit world? It concludes with a discussion of culture loss, many examples of which can be inferred both from the Pacific and from insular Southeast Asia.

This paper deals with Bato the Daesitiate, a high-ranking military and political official of the peregrine civitas of Illyrian nation Daesitiates, the political organization of the Daesitiates, and the idea of creating a common Illyrian political and military organization during the Great Illyrian Uprising. On the basis of ancient sources which are related to the subject matter, it can be concluded that Bato the Daesitiate was a well-known and experienced politician and military leader in the Illyrian world, well acquainted with the Roman political and military organization. For the first time in the well-known history of the Iliro-Slavic countries, he attempted to establish an independent political organization that would unites the Illyrian countries. Unfortunately, his undertaking has faced serious resistance from the strong particular tendencies of individual leaders, communities and nations. And this division is one of the causes that led to the suppression of the uprising and the ultimate introduction of the Illyrian world into the Roman Empire.

This essay seeks to look further at adolescents and younger children who were militarised, and to explore the contradictions and complicities of the State and the family through an examination of boys as mascots, orphans, and war heroes. It highlights the impact of contradictory policies on military age that sustained traditional positions for boys in the Armed Services, while incoherently policing underage voluntarism at that same time that official recruitment campaigns targeted youths. The paper emphasises the role of visual and material culture, which strengthened boys’ resolve to ‘pass as a man’. The family is positioned as playing an important role in being unable or unwilling to restrain the will of adolescents. It explores how military masculine heritage was communicated through the male line when families dressed up boys in miniature uniforms or enabled them to act as regimental mascots. As well, the paper considers how orphaned and stray children in Europe negotiated kinship-like relationships with Allied armies of ‘temporary fathers’. Complex attitudes to childhood and youth are identified in flexible attitudes to child victimhood versus the valorisation of boy heroes, assessing the issue of children killed or wounded in service to the State. The essay seeks to explain the impact of material and visual culture, rituals and photography, which evoked a range of emotional and social relationships to the military at a time of particular significance in the life of children and adolescent boys.

Research interest in studying culture-grounded concepts such as time or space and their contribution to the development of intercultural communicative competence would be incomplete without some focus on what surrounds them, the context of our mono- and multilingual functioning. Thus, the major focus of this paper is on material culture and cultural awareness. There are two factors which bring these things together: the perception of culture as a significant element in one’s language competence (both in a monolingual and multilingual context) and the role environment plays in the development of this language competence. The artefacts of material culture are “a reflection of identity, individual and group values. These include: ideas, morals, ethics and standards.” (Aronin L, Singleton D. Multilingualism. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2012, p. 170). It is also argued that rituals and events are part of material culture (ibid.). Cultural awareness partly means having some understanding of this point. The context of the present study is Portugal and its expression of material culture in relation to an important aspect of Portuguese life, that is, coffee drinking and all the culture and paraphernalia surrounding it. I would like to look at the Portuguese sugar bag, so different from any others. For instance, a typical sugar bag, say a Polish one, can seldom be treated as the expression of national culture; it is rather informative (of sugar type) or an instrument for advertising either a coffee brand or a restaurant/cafeteria.

Doran Ross: The Scholar of Akan Art

People live amidst objects, things, articles, items, artefacts, materials, substances, and stuff – described in social sciences and humanities as material culture, which denotes both natural and human-made entities, which form our physical environment. We, humans, relate to this environment by using, depicting, interacting with or thinking about various material objects or their representations. In other words, material culture is never just about things in themselves, it is also about various ideas, representations, experiences, practices and relations. In contemporary theorising about material culture, the watershed between the tangible and intangible has started to disappear as all the objects have multiple meanings. This paper theorises objects mostly in terms of contemporary socio-cultural anthropology and ethnology by first giving an overview of the development of the material culture studies and then focusing upon consumption studies, material agency, practice theory and the methods for studying material culture.
 Both anthropology and ethnology in the beginning of the 20th century were dealing mostly with ‘saving’; that is, collecting the ethnographical objects from various cultures for future preservation as societies modernised. The collecting of the everyday items of rural Estonians, which had begun in the 19th century during the period of national awakening, gained its full momentum after the establishment of the Estonian National Museum in 1909. During the museum’s first ten years, 20,000 objects were collected (Õunapuu 2007). First, the focus was on the identification of the historical-geographical typologies of the collected artefacts. In 1919, the first Estonian with a degree in ethnology, Helmi Reiman-Neggo (2013) stressed the need for ethnographical descriptions of the collected items and the theoretical planning of the museum collections. The resulting vast ethnographical collection of the Estonian National Museum (currently about 140,000 items) has also largely influenced ethnology and anthropology as academic disciplines in Estonia (Pärdi 1993).
 Even though in the first half of the 20th century the focus lay in the systematic collection and comparative analysis of everyday items and folk art, there were studies that centred on meaning already at the end of 19th century. Austrianethnologist Rudolf Meringer suggested in 1891 that a house should be studied as a cultural individual and analysed within the context of its functions and in relation to its inhabitants. Similarly, the 1920s and 1930s saw studies on the roles of artefacts that were not influenced by Anglo-American functionalism: Mathilde Hain (1936) studied how folk costumes contribute to the harmonious functioning of a ‘small community’, and Petr Bogatyrev (1971) published his study on Moravian costumes in 1937. This study, determining the three main functions – instrumental, aesthetic and symbolic – of the folk costume, and translated into English 30 years after first publication, had a substantial influence on the development of material culture studies.
 The 1970s saw the focus of material culture studies in Western and Northern Europe shifting mainly from the examination of (historical) rural artefacts to the topics surrounding contemporary culture, such as consumption. In Soviet Estonian ethnology, however, the focus on the 19th century ethnographic items was prevalent until the 1980s as the topic was also partially perceived as a protest against the direction of Soviet academia (see Annist and Kaaristo 2013 for a thorough overview). There were, of course, exceptions, as for instance Arved Luts’s (1962) studies on everyday life on collective farms. Meanwhile, however, the communicative and semiotic turn of the 1970s turned European ethnology’s focus to the idea of representation and objects as markers of identity as well as means of materialising the otherwise intangible and immaterial relationships and relations. The theory of cultural communication was established in Scandinavian ethnology and numerous studies on clothing, housing and everyday items as material expressions of social structures, hierarchies, values and ideologies emerged (Lönnqvist 1979, Gustavsson 1991). The Scandinavian influences on Estonia are also reflected in Ants Viires’s (1990) suggestion that ethnologists should study clothing (including contemporary clothing) in general and not just folk costumes, by using a semiotic approach.
 Löfgren’s (1997) clarion call to bring more ‘flesh and blood’ to the study of material culture was a certain reaction to the above focus. Researchers had for too long focused exclusively upon the meaning and, as Löfgren brought forth, they still did not have enough understanding of what exactly it was that people were actually and practically doing with their things. Ingold’s (2013) criticism on the studies focusing on symbolism, and the lack of studies on the tangible materiality of the materials and their properties, takes a similar position. In the 1990s, there was a turn toward the examination of material-cultural and those studies that were written within the framework of ‘new materialism’ (Hicks 2010, Coole and Frost 2010) started to pay attention to objects as embodied and agentive (Latour 1999, Tilley et al 2006). Nevertheless, as Olsen (2017) notes, all materialities are not created equal in contemporary academic research: while items like prostheses, Boyle’s air pumps or virtual realities enjoy increased attention, objects such as wooden houses, fireplaces, rakes and simple wooden chairs are still largely unexamined. The traditional material culture therefore needs new studying in the light of these post-humanist theories.
 Where does this leave Estonian ethnology? In the light of the theoretical developments discussed above, we could ask, whether and how has the material Making sense of the material culture turn affected research in Estonia? Here we must first note that for a significant part of the 20th century, Estonian ethnology (or ethnography as the discipline was called before 1990s) has mostly been centred on the material culture (see the overview of the main topics from vehicles to folk costumes in Viires and Vunder 2008). Partly because of this aspect of the discipline’s history, many researchers actually felt the need to somewhat distance themselves from these topics in the 1990s (Pärdi 1998). Compared to topics like religion, identity, memory, oral history and intangible heritage, study of material culture has largely stayed in the background. There are of course notable exceptions such as Vunder’s (1992) study on the history of style, which includes analysis of theirsymbolic aspects. It is also interesting to note that in the 1990s Estonian ethnology, the term ‘material culture’ (‘materiaalne kultuur’) – then seen as incorporating the dualism between material and immaterial – was actually replaced with the Estonian translation of German ‘Sachkultur’ (‘esemekultuur’, literally ‘artefact culture’). Nevertheless, it was soon realised that this was actually a too narrow term (with its exclusion of natural objects and phenomena as well as the intangible and social aspects of culture), slowly fell out of general usage, and was replaced with ‘material culture’ once again. Within the past three decades, studies dealing with material culture have discussed a wide variety of topics from the vernacular interior design (Kannike 2000, 2002, 2012), everyday commodities (Kõresaar 1999b) and spiritual objects (Teidearu 2019), traditional rural architecture (Pärdi 2012, Kask 2012, 2015), museum artefacts (Leete 1996), clothing, textiles and jewellery (Kõresaar 1999a; Järs 2004; Summatavet 2005; Jõeste 2012; Araste and Ventsel 2015), food culture (Piiri 2006; Bardone 2016; Kannike and Bardone 2017), to soviet consumer culture (Ruusmann 2006, Rattus 2013) and its implications in life histories (Kõresaar 1998, Jõesalu and Nugin 2017). All of these these studies deal with how people interpret, remember and use objects.
 The main keywords of the studies of European material culture have been home, identity and consumption (but also museology and tangible heritage, which have not been covered in this article). Material culture studies are an important part of the studies of everyday life and here social and cultural histories are still important (even though they have been criticised for focusing too much on symbols and representation). Therefore, those studies focusing on physical materials and materialites, sensory experiences, embodiment, and material agency have recently become more and more important. This article has given an overview of the three most prevalent thematic and theoretical strands of the study of material culture: objects as symbols especially in the consumer culture, material agency and practice theory as well as discussing some methodological suggestions for the material culture studies.
 To conclude, even though on the one hand we could argue that when it comes to the study of material culture there indeed exists a certain hierarchy of „old“ topics that relate to museums or traditional crafts and „new“ and modern materialities, such as smart phones or genetically modified organisms. However, dichotomies like this are often artificial and do not show the whole picture: contemporary children are often as proficient in playing cat’s cradle as they are with video games (Jackson 2016). Thus, studying various (everyday) material objects and entities is still topical and the various theories discussed in this article can help to build both theoretical and empirical bridge between different approaches. Therefore, there is still a lot to do in this regard and we invite researchers to study objects form all branches of material culture, be they 19th century beer mugs in the collections of the Estonian National Museum that can help us to better give meaning to our past

This special issue of the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies addresses the topic of “Social Influence and Politics in Organizational Research,” a topic which spans more than a century and represents one of the oldest areas of inquiry in the field. In this article, we first review the literature to extract what we seem to know about this area of the field, and then we shift to an identification of some areas about which we still need to know more. Nine articles were selected to be published in this special issue, and they reflect different aspects of some these “need to know more” areas of social influence and politics in organizations. We believe these articles represent solid contributions to new knowledge in this area, and we hope they stimulate further and renewed scholarly interest.

Reviewed by: The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo by Cécile Fromont Andrea Mosterman The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo. By Cécile Fromont. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2014. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA. Pp. xx, 283. $45.00. ISBN 978-1-4696-1871-5.) In 1491, only eight years after the Portuguese first visited the Kingdom of Kongo in 1483, Kongo King Nzinga a Nkuwu (r. 1470–1509) converted to Christianity, changing his name to João I. With his conversion, a centuries-long relationship commenced among the Kingdom of Kongo, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Catholic Church. João’s son Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga (r. 1509–42) strengthened these close connections when he made Christianity Kongo’s state religion. Christianity continued to be an important part of Kongolese religious, social, and political life until it slowly began to decline in the nineteenth century due to European colonization in the region. In her book The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo, Cécile Fromont argues that the Kongolese elite did not just adopt Christianity; instead, they made it distinctly Kongolese, which Fromont calls Kongo Christianity. Fromont reveals how Kongo Christianity manifested itself in swords, crosses, clothing, regalia, architecture, rituals, and celebrations. Through examination of these cultural objects, Fromont shows that Kongolese engagement with Christianity transformed their beliefs, political discourses, and social organizations. She argues that these cultural objects became “spaces of correlation” (p. 1) in which deliberate cross-cultural interactions were mutually transformative for both Christendom and the Kongo worldview. Due to the Kongo elite’s close connections with Europeans and the frequent visits of missionaries, such as Jesuits and Capuchin Friars, to the region, a large body of written sources describes precolonial Kongo. Over the years, several scholars, including John Thornton, James Sweet, and Richard Gray, have used these documents to examine Christianity in the Kongo Kingdom, but thus far scholars had not thoroughly examined Kongo’s material and visual culture. Through analysis of these materials, Fromont provides new insights into the development of Kongo Christianity. In particular, her examination of Kongo-produced art and material culture shows how Kongolese elite reshaped Christianity to fit their religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms. She further demonstrates that Kongo Christianity permeated all parts of society. Although Fromont centers her analysis on the Kingdom of Kongo, she shows that Kongo Christianity extended its influence far beyond West Central Africa. Due to its involvement in Atlantic commerce and politics, the Kingdom of Kongo and the Kongolese people became important participants in the Atlantic world. Enslaved Kongolese who were brought to Europe and the Americas exported their Christian beliefs, imagery, symbolism, and rituals, which reappeared in celebrations [End Page 651] such as the Pinkster festival in New York and congadas in Brazil. But free Kongolese people, including Kongolese ambassadors, also traveled throughout the Atlantic, displaying Kongo Christianity in, for example, their clothing and regalia. The Art of Conversion is divided into five chapters, each of which focuses on different cultural objects, from the central African ritual of sangamento to the Kongo crucifix. The chapters include multiple illustrations of the various objects of analysis, including drawings of Kongolese rituals by Capuchin Friars; European paintings of Kongolese ambassadors; and images of Nkisi, Kongo crucifixes, swords, and mpu caps. The Art of Conversion includes ninety-three illustrations, which makes it a valuable reference work for anyone interested in religious, Christian, and precolonial African art and material culture. The Art of Conversion is published at a time of great interest in Kongo material and visual culture. In 2014–15 “The Kongo Across the Waters” exhibition brought Kongo artifacts usually housed in Belgian’s Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren to several museums across the United States. In 2015–16 the exhibition “Kongo: Power and Majesty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York further highlighted Kongo arts and culture. Like those exhibitions, The Art of Conversion draws attention to the rich cultural heritage of this Central African kingdom and reveals how much of it...

Between the Neolithic and the Late Bronze Age (LBA) a long lasting tradition, with temporary interruptions, of lake-dwelling occupation is well recorded in the northern Circum-Alpine region (Switzerland, southern Germany, eastern France; nCA). Traditional interpretations for the intermittent or permanent decline of this tradition have focussed on the role of climatic change influencing lake water levels, and thereby directly affecting the settlers through inundation of settlements and agricultural land. Such monocausalistic explanations would result in the movement of settlements to higher or lower altitudes depending on the prevailing contemporary lake-level. Such factors may have influenced the temporary abandonment of the lakeshore, e.g. during the Middle Bronze Age. The final decline of the lake-dwelling tradition at the end of the LBA and beginning of the early Iron Age (eIA), around 800 BC, breaks this pattern, suggesting other cultural factors may be involved. The material culture record from across central Europe broadly suggests that trade and communication routes linking northern and southern Europe were changing during this period. Could these networks have influenced cultural changes in the nCA lake-dwelling communities, and contributed to the decline of the lake-dwelling tradition?
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\nA combination of robust theoretical background and thorough review of specific types of LBA and eIA material culture provides insights to communication routes flowing through the nCA, and changing social attitudes towards objects within the nCA between the two periods. Four theoretical principles were adopted and developed to provide a solid basis for interpretation:
\n1) Relational Theory: emphasising that the links between communities, objects, people, and social structures are mutually constructive. A proposed relational model suggests that the material culture and social expression of communities (and societies) is influenced by the involvement in exchange and communication relationships with other groups.
\n2) Biography of Objects: details how objects accumulate biographies throughout their use depending on the relationships in which they were used. The archaeological contexts in which objects are found also provide indications of their social value.
\n3) Cultural Memory: recognises that the interpretation of ancient remains may have formed significant guiding factors in the cultural landscape of past communities.
\n4) Object Translation: it is well accepted that objects do not have an inherent value, but that any value is socially ascribed. This ascription of value occurs as objects are ‘translated’ from one cultural setting to another.
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\nThe principle of Object Biographies can be applied to immovable material culture (i.e. settlements) in addition to traditional forms of material culture (objects). A proposed theoretical biography of northern Alpine lake-settlements links various social factors to the establishment and decline of settlements. For example, the role of cultural memory in the interpretation of ancient settlement remains visible in the landscape may be considered as one of the factors directing communities to found new settlements. The well documented remains from Ürschhausen-Horn suggest that some buildings were deliberately abandoned in a planned event rather than evacuated in a catastrophic flooding or fire. Social factors were of great significance to the rhythm of settlement construction. A comparative study of lake-settlements from the nCA and Baltic regions suggests that there is no apparent link between the two lake-dwelling traditions of these regions – this is also reflected in the distribution of objects.
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\nMany forms of material culture show that the nCA lake-dwellings, particularly around Lake Neuchâtel and the Zurich Bay, formed nodal points on the long-distance exchange network between northern Europe and the Mediterranean. Strong links to Frattesina (Italy), and around Mainz and Frankfurt are demonstrated, for example by ring jewellery and Pfahlbau beads. During the eIA the material culture used in the nCA is predominantly local in distribution, but a change of in the social valuation of objects social value is evident, with items predominantly deposited in burials.
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\nCombining the evidence of settlements, burial practices, and material culture use, it is clear that the nCA region was largely removed from long-distance inter-regional exchange network during the eIA, while, at the same time, burial practices became more pronounced in society. The loss of these trade connections may have reduced the materials and practices available to social elites to legitimize their position, which was replaced by increased focus on the burial practices and the role of hilltop settlements as visible social indicators. These changes to legitimization practices and social structures rendered the former lake-dwelling way of living no longer suitable to communities of the early Iron Age and beyond.
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