Elaboration Of Culture Research Articles

Disadvantages of Miao medical technology inheritance

Miao medicine is restricted by its own deficiencies and external challenges, which leads to poor prospects for development. For the problems such as the loss of medicine prescriptions and the inheritance of technology, only by recognizing its own deficiencies can it give play to its subjective initiative and solve the problems with appropriate medicine. In addition, Miao medicine is a part of the "quintessence" of China, and the understanding of Miao medicine is also the way to understand Chinese traditional culture. Miao medicine is a secret magic medicine accumulated from the long-term experience of the Miao people. The theoretical knowledge system formed in the development process includes astronomy, geography, history, herbology, science and technology and other scientific contents. Today, Miao medical technology and its culture play an important role in the survival, reproduction and development of the Miao people, and also contribute to the progress of human society. After thousands of years of tempering and inheriting, Miao traditional medicine has been recognized by domestic and foreign pharmacists, and has become a powerful national brand. While enriching traditional Chinese culture, Miao medicine also makes the national brand of "Chinese pharmaceutical" go to the world. However, Miao medicine, which is particularly theoretical and effective, gradually shows a trend of extinction. When the monogeneity meets Chinese medicine and Western medicine, it presents a phenomenon of exclusion and suppression, which is a topic worth pondering. Since industrialization, changes in human life style, accompanied by environmental damage, health diseases and ecological damage, have brought new challenges to mankind. Therefore, it is time to carry forward the Miao medical culture.[1]Through the elaboration of the traditional Miao medicine culture, You Lailin analyzed its influence on the development of Miao medicine, and pointed out that the traditional Miao medicine practice concept and the extensive planting of medicinal materials have promoted the economic development of Guizhou ethnic medicine industry.[2]Starting from Weber's "legitimacy theory", Liao Xiaoyu and Zhu Lu thought about the legitimacy value of Miao's medical culture, transplanted it to the cultural field, and constructed the legitimacy of Miao's medical culture from the aspects of theoretical logic, humanistic value and system.[3]It is not difficult to see that most of the previous research contents elaborated the positive effects of the theoretical system of Miao medicine and the transmission and inheritance of Miao medicine culture, but there was little ink on the consciousness of why Miao medicine culture was hindered and the mysterious idea of Miao medicine "witch doctor peer". "It is never too late to change the good", the development and progress of things in the learning from others at the same time need to recognize their own shortcomings, after the pool of wisdom can reach a hundred feet rod head, further realm. On the basis of previous studies, this paper focuses on the factors that hinder the development of Miao medicine, and understands the essence and indispensable of Miao medicine culture from the direction of rebellion.

The Cultural Perception of Space: Expanding the Legacy of Edward T. Hall

Abstract In 1963, Edward T. Hall coined the term proxemics to describe what he then termed “the interrelated observations and theories of humans’ use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture” (Hall, 1966). Expanding on this theme in his book The Hidden Dimension, Hall inspired a generation of scholars to look more closely at the myriad ways in which people perceived and interacted with each other and with the physical environments, natural and built, in which they found themselves.Hall’s focus, however, was mainly on interpersonal space, looking for instance at differences in social distance compared across cultures, and on how these differences were reflected in such phenomena as conversations, queueing, or seating arrangements. As people from different cultural backgrounds come more frequently into contact with each other, other aspects of proxemics have become more salient. It is too often assumed that any two or more people in a certain setting, irrespective of cultural background, will tend to perceive their surroundings in similar ways and, to a large extent, share similar cognitive and emotional experiences. Consequently, there is a focus on the content of the interaction, with a corresponding neglect of the physical and cultural context. In this article the author expands Hall’s pioneering insights by suggesting a model that considers a wider range of intercultural perceptions and responses in the aspects of cosmology, geography, community, environment, residence and personal space.

El humorismo tragicómico en dos cuentos de Tinieblas (1923), de Elías Castelnuovo

La mayor parte de la crítica literaria elabora sus hipótesis sobre la poética de Elías Castelnuovo a partir de la lectura de Tinieblas (1923), su primer libro de cuentos, al tiempo que señala que es el autor más representativo del llamado grupo de Boedo, conjunto de artistas, escritores e intelectuales que se propuso contribuir a la elaboración de una cultura revolucionaria. Los principales desarrollos críticos sobre este libro destacan sus rasgos “naturalistas”, “tremendistas”, “pietistas” y “mesiánicos” así como una intencionalidad política “ingenua” y “esquemática”. No obstante, una relectura de dos de los cuentos de Tinieblas, en consideración del humor tragicómico que su temprana recepción advierte en su obra, permite reconsiderar las conclusiones críticas contemporáneas y elaborar nuevas hipótesis de lectura.

Cultural field and literature in minority languages: Basque under Francoism

The concept of the cultural field allows us to address the emergence of literatures in minority languages ​​before these literatures can constitute autonomous fields. Located within a broader dialogue involving different expressions of culture, the concept of the cultural field requires that one considers the field’s relationship to different sources of heteronomy – traditionally vis-à-vis the political and the economic field. In the case of a minority-language literature, one must also examine its relationship to the dominant cultural field. A Multiple Correspondence Analysis of the Basque cultural publication space during Franco’s dictatorship in Spain reveals the cultural field as a site for the definition, elaboration and legitimation of a minority culture. The results show a dual structure in which cultural production oscillates between two poles based on the elaboration of content and of form: between publications focusing on Basque culture thematically and publications addressing different themes in the Basque language, and in doing so, construct its literariness. The place literature occupies on the pole of form along with the different trajectories involved in becoming a writer and receiving consecration may explain the generational rupture occurring in Basque literature based on writers’ habitus.

The Relationship between leadership style, organizational culture and organizational effectiveness: A conceptual study of organizational effectiveness

The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between leadership style, organizational culture and organizational effectiveness. In this study independent variables are leadership style and organizational culture. Here the leadership style was discussed based on the transformational and transactional leadership model. Elaboration of organizational culture was based on competing values model which is one dominant typology and also it has become a popular and validated framework. Thus, the dependent variable of this study, organizational effectiveness was discussed based on the competing values model. Based on the literature, the study found that there is a positive impact on leadership style on organizational effectiveness as well as there is a positive impact of organizational culture on organizational effectiveness. Further, as the literature, the study found that impact of leadership style on organizational effectiveness was moderated by the organizational culture.

Ceramics and Society in Mahan and Paekche: A Comparison of Pottery Geochemistry and Craft Production Patterns at the Sites of P'ungnap T'osŏng and Kwangju Palsan

The archaeological cultures of the Korean peninsula provide numerous case studies of the formation, structure, and function of ancient complex societies and states. In southwestern Korea, the Mahan (ca. 50 b.c.e.–c.e. 475) occupied a large region marked by similarities in material culture, but decentralized politically. The Paekche kingdom (ca. c.e. 250–660) had its origins as a Mahan polity in the Han River valley, later centralizing its authority and expanding its territory. This article discusses two sites: the Paekche capital of P'ungnap T'osŏng in modern Seoul and a large Mahan town recently excavated in Chŏlla Province known as Kwangju Palsan. The political economy and social structure of each site is investigated using ceramic remains, artifacts that played a large role in daily life across classes and in the elaboration of elite culture. With high-resolution chemical data from Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) on potsherds, specific production signatures can be identified for each site. This allows comparison of the proportion of locally produced and imported pottery at each site and even reveals when P'ungnap T'osŏng and Kwangju Palsan exchanged ceramic goods. These patterns reveal similarities and differences in Mahan and Paekche political economies, ultimately illuminating the Mahan roots of Paekche social organization.

Democracia, política e participação: a museóloga Waldisa Rússio

In this issue, they are showed and analyzed professional and personal aspects of Waldisa Rússio Carmago Guarnieri path. It is presented her family references in her activities, specially, the influence of her grandfather and mother. Her social origin, gender and schooling are highlighted in order to observe her professional performance. The aim is pointing out that her ideas about workers and work conditions became important structures since they developed her worldview and her way to handle work routine. This context provides why she struggled for the social work dimension in the musuologist career. If it is considerate her path in São Paulo public service, besides her master and doctorate degrees, Waldisa has a singular position in Brazilian museology field. Moreover, this paper presents a political perspective about her career and that it is not usually mentioned. In the political-administrative dimension, it is emphasized her participation in the elaboration of culture and museological policies. To sum up, it is possible to see that Brazilian woman assumed a critical position in the field which she worked because it was a strategy took by her to be heard and authorized in museology. Therefore, it is admited that Waldisa’s political behavior was related to the context that she lived. Finally, it is noticed that some challenges who were perceived in the eighties remain nowadays in those fields. Keywords: Waldisa Rússio Camargo Guarnieri; museological policy, participation,

Matrix Production in Large Engineered Cartilage Constructs Is Enhanced by Nutrient Channels and Excess Media Supply.

Cartilage tissue engineering is a promising approach to resurfacing osteoarthritic joints. Existing techniques successfully engineer small-sized constructs with native levels of extracellular matrix (glycosaminoglycans [GAG] or collagen). However, a remaining challenge is the growth of large-sized constructs with properties similar to those of small constructs, due to consumption and transport limitations resulting in inadequate nutrient availability within the interior of large constructs. This study employed system-specific computational models for estimating glucose requirements of large constructs, with or without channels, to enhance nutrient availability. Based on glucose requirements for matrix synthesis in cartilage constructs, computational simulations were performed to identify the media volume (MV) and the number of nutrient channels (CH) needed to maintain adequate glucose levels within tissue constructs over the 3-day period between media replenishments. In Study 1, the influence of MV (5, 10, 15 mL/construct) and number of nutrient channels (CH: 0, 3, 7, 12 per construct) on glucose availability was investigated computationally for ∅10 × 2.34 mm cylindrical constructs. Results showed that the conventionally used MV 5 led to deleterious glucose depletion after only 40 h of culture, and that MV 15 was required to maintain sufficient glucose levels for all channel configurations. Study 2 examined experimentally the validity of these predictions, for tissue constructs cultured for 56 days. Matrix elaboration was highest in MV 15/CH 12 constructs (21.6% ± 2.4%/ww GAG, 5.5% ± 0.7%/ww collagen, normalized to wet weight (ww) on day 0), leading to the greatest amount of swelling (3.0 ± 0.3 times day-0 volume), in contrast to the significantly lower matrix elaboration of conventional culture, MV 5/CH 0 (11.8% ± 1.6%/ww GAG and 2.5% ± 0.6%/ww collagen, 1.6 ± 0.1 times day-0 volume). The computational analyses correctly predicted the need to increase the conventional media levels threefold to support matrix synthesis in large channeled engineered constructs. Results also suggested that more elaborate computational models are needed for accurate predictive tissue engineering simulations, which account for a broader set of nutrients, cell proliferation, matrix synthesis, and swelling of the constructs.

Articulating Babel: An approach to cultural evolution

After an initial discussion of the character of interdisciplinary linkages between complex disciplines, I consider an area with confluences of many diverse disciplines—the study of cultural evolution. This must embrace not only the traditional biological sciences, but also the multiple often warring disciplines of the human sciences. This interdisciplinary articulation is in its early stages compared, e.g., to that of evolutionary biology or evolutionary developmental biology, and I try to lay out major axes along which its articulation should plausibly occur, given the relevant causal processes acting at different levels. One cannot have an adequate account of cultural evolution without recognizing a central role for cognitive and social development (since culture is cumulatively acquired by individuals through the life-cycle) and the social and cultural organizations and institutions and artifactual tools and infrastructure that support and structure these developmental processes. These induce a population structure that mediates the transmission, expression, and elaboration of culture, and in particular the different ways in which they scaffold learning and the development and articulation of complex skills. I consider how these elements should articulate the disciplines that tend to focus separately on them. Intentions and the market are not explicitly included in this account, and I consider ways in which these perspectives might enter.

Elaboration of Leadership and Culture in High-Performing Nursing Units of Hospitals as Perceived by Staff Nurses

The leadership-culture phenomenon, a known explanatory construct for organizational performance, is understudied in nursing. Building on our previous work, we further addressed this knowledge gap through explorations of demographics and hospital variables which may have a significant influence on staff nurses' (SNs) perceptions of their nurse managers' (NMs) leadership and nursing unit culture. Furthermore, we explored the extent to which the NMs' leadership predicted specific cultures which typify nursing unit effectiveness. Using dissertation data provided by278 SNs, we found that SNs educated at the baccalaureate level or higher had favorable perceptions of their nursing unit performance and viewed their NMs' leadership differently than the SNs with diploma or associate degrees. The frequent portrayals of transformational (TFL) leadership behaviors (e.g., visionary) by the NMs were paramount in shaping culture traits which exemplify high performance outcomes. TFL leaders were more likely to shape unit cultures which are flexible and adaptive to the environmental challenges within and outside the nursing unit. Thus, the type of NMs' leadership and unit culture may provide an added value in explaining the performance level in patient care units which consequently affects the overall hospital/organizational outcomes. Implications for research and leadership practices are presented.

Primary identities in the lower Omo valley: migration, cataclysm, conflict and amalgamation, 1750–1910

This article applies the notion of primary identity to explore the emergence of ethnic identities in the southern-most tract of the lower Omo valley. Current identities here are the result of two correlated patterns of movement that have occurred over the past 150 years: migration to the valley by organised pastoralists and scattered groups, and a general movement down the river and into the Omo delta, where the ecological niche generated by the regular flooding of the Omo River provided a rich variety of livelihood alternatives. The major migrations reported here were connected to great population movements that occurred in East Africa from the nineteenth century, often provoked by cataclysmic events: thus, Daasanach recall the occurrence of large floods, Nyangatom stress the destructive impact of the Ethiopian conquest, while Kwegu and Kara were hit by sleeping sickness epidemics. These cataclysms led to the disappearance of some of the primary groups whose existence and prosperity were recorded by earlier explorers, and to processes of assimilation. The historical reconstruction presented here shows that the notion of primary groups needs to be linked to an understanding of “clusters” of peoples, gathered in localities characterised by high interaction and co-presence of different primary groups. It will be argued that these “clusters” were the crucial nodes for the elaboration of culture and identity.

The Co-ordinating State and the Economy: The Nizamat in Eighteenth-Century Bengal

AbstractThe economy of eighteenth-century Bengal was closely tied to the political, with the indigenous state, theNizamat, maintaining a stake in the success of commercial circuits. TheNizamatplayed a positive role in keeping the structure operative through its patronage and regulating activities. Besides its direct involvement in trade, the article examines the indirect facilitating and co-ordinating role it played, the elaboration of a distinct court culture and the policies it pursued which had a bearing on the health of the economy. The conditions necessary for the functioning of marketing networks—protection of property and enforcement of contract—were maintained. It was a mutually beneficial system with the state with its seat in Murshidabad, the landed élite of the region, and the commercial sector symbiotically tied together.

Argentina: what went wrong

Why has Argentina failed so spectacularly, both economically and politically? It is a puzzle because the country seemed to have all the requirements for greatness, including a well-established middle class of professionals. Its failure raises the specter that other middle-class societies could also fail. In Argentina, MacLachlan delivers history with a plot, a sense of direction and purpose, and fascinating conclusions that reveal a much more complex picture of Argentina than one might have had in mind prior to reading this book. Argentina traces the roots of the nation from the late colonial period to the present, and examines the impact of events that molded it: the failure of political accommodation in 1912, the role of the oligarchy, the development of a middle class, gender issues, the elaboration of a distinct culture, the era of Peron, the army, and the dirty war. The conclusion suggests the reasons for the nation's difficulties. The IMF, World Bank, and international financial markets play a role, but so does a high level of political corruption and mismanagement of the economy that emerged from political and economic failure. Juan and Eva Peron tried to override politics to create an economic and social balance between urban labor and agriculture interests, but failed. The dirty war arose from that failure. Nationalism forged a culture of victimization and resentment that continues to this day. Laying aside standard explanations, MacLachlan presents a portrait of Argentina that emphasizes the role of a destructive nationalism-and a form a corruption that turns citizens into clients.

Discourses of Scandal: Bourgeois Respectability and the End of Slavery and Transportation at the Cape and New South Wales

Discourses of Scandal: Bourgeois Respectability and the End of Slavery and Transportation at the Cape and New South Wales, 1830 – 1850 Kirsten McKenzie The question of bonded labour, whether in the form of slavery or transportation, was amongst the most pressing issues occupying the collective mind of the British empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. These debates were concurrent with the emergence of a bourgeois imperial culture of manners which stressed the importance of personal respectability and domestic morality. If we examine the critiques mounted against slavery at the Cape and transportation to New South Wales in the 1830s we find that they were imbued with the discourses of sexual scandal. Similar objections were voiced against the resumption of transportation to New South Wales and the conversion of the Cape Colony to a penal settlement a decade later. The language of moral transgression which informed everyday social interaction, and which was invoked in private scandals, was also marshalled to promote and resist social change in the political arena. This discussion of the manner in which scandal (especially sexual scandal) became a propagandist tool to discredit the reputations of colonies supported by unfree labour draws on wider research about the place of scandal in constructing social boundaries within the colonial worlds of Cape Town and Sydney in the first half of the nineteenth century. Respectability had concrete implications in daily life for men and women who aspired to inclusion within the ranks of the colonial middle classes. It was a weapon to be wielded in the small politics of everyday life; the social competition whereby each would find their level in the new society. Reputation was equally important at the colony-wide level, and had implications for issues such as assisted emigration, political concessions to self-government, and investment.1 While scandals publicise the transgression of a society’s norms and values, such norms and values are contested features of social life, especially in communities undergoing such rapid social change as Sydney and Cape Town. They are not just, therefore, about the transgression of the culture of manners, but also ‘about the cultivation or assertion of the values or norms themselves’.2 Bonded labour was an especially troubling force in the construction of the bourgeois culture of empire. Tracing the elaboration of a respectable culture in two cities which had to deal with the problem of slavery and convict labour respectively is particularly pertinent to the broader question of white colonial reputation. While the Cape had a far longer history as a Dutch colonial settlement, by the 1830s Cape Town and Sydney belonged to established British colonies. Both, however, were troubled by debates over the impact of bonded labour. The transition to a new kind of society which was deemed worthy of self-government (a key aim of the urban bourgeoisie) was in part dependant upon the transition to a free labour system. Slavery and convict labour tainted the reputations of the Cape and New South Wales in the eyes of the metropole. This had both symbolic and practical effects. Both were used as arguments against giving the colonies representative government. At a deeper level, scandals deriving from the relations between masters and servants compromised white colonial efforts to represent Sydney and Cape Town as respectable communities. The small struggles to define respectability in the colonial setting were writ large in the debates over bonded labour. The trajectory of development in New South Wales and at the Cape was thus as strongly influenced by the emerging definitions of reputation as were the individual fates of their inhabitants. The 1830s saw an unprecedented wave of parliamentary investigation and the reform of diverse aspects of British imperial society, not least in the mother country itself. Although they built upon the achievements of the Tories in the 1820s, it was a trend associated with the ascendancy of the liberal Whigs, whose parliamentary victory in 1830 ushered in a decade heralded by its advocates as the ‘Age of Reform’. The enfranchisement of middle-class men through the Reform Act underlined the new world order which parliament increasingly endorsed. It was the culmination of a gradual process of change from the late eighteenth...

Realizing the Sacred: Power and Meaning in Chinua Achebe'sArrow of God

ike nationalist discourses, African literary criticism revolves around question of authenticity. The distinctiveness of African text and its distance from or subversion of European literary forms consti- tutes, it seems, its authentic quality. Thus, Africanness of African text is elaborated and celebrated through positing its appropriation of, on one hand, oral tradition, both in terms of form and content, and on other, and ritual. Within African literary criticism, these considerations often provide impetus for political judgments, prescrip- tive and proscriptive. This ideological move establishes primacy of political in discipline. This is not surprising as African postcolonial cultural praxis has, from its beginning, allied itself in varied ways to process of decolonization and social critique. The relation between text and was pre-eminent. Writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Ayi Kwei Armah engaged with extratextual through different narrative strategies that were often oppositional and disjunctive. If we agree with Jonathan Culler that the novel serves as model by which society conceives of itself, discourse through which it articulates world (189), then African presented to us was one rent by confl icts and contradictions: scatological and sublime, demonic and utopian, and historical. Yet, at same time it was also a of profound unity. In both mythical and realist writers, early postcolonial literary production aims towards a sense of totality—an idea of interconnectedness of African world. In dealing with political imperative, Chinua Achebe employs a strategy of metonymic recuperation, of substituting his specifi c traditional framework for an elaboration of African culture in pan-Africanist agenda. He mobilizes Igbo history and culture to articulate upheav- als and dislocations of colonial and postcolonial existence. Implicit in this procedure is belief in unity and certain homogeneity, both political and metaphysical, of Africa. Similarly, Wole Soyinka offers Yoruba myths as a basis for understanding of African religious, political, and philosophi- cal thought and practice. This primal phenomenon posits a cosmological order in which man exists in a cosmic totality (3). The reciprocal porosity of natural, social, and supernatural spheres derives from an animistic religious framework. Soyinka's appropriation of term myth and its institutionalization through his theoretical writings have come to deter- mine terms in which his work and those who share similar aesthetic strategies have been analyzed. Myth, which minimally refers to a narrative about gods or mythic per- sonalities, in common usage, often indicates error, fi ction, make-believe,

"Household Business": Domestic Plays of Early Modern England by Viviana Comensoli

316Comparative Drama Viviana Comensoli. "Household Business": Domestic Plays of Early Modern England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. ? + 238. $50.00. Viviana Comensoli takes as her subject the genre of the English Domestic play, those products of the popular stage which flourished in the decades around 1 600 and drew their plots and inspiration from the chapbook, chronicle, or pamphlet reportage of sensational crimes. She focuses chiefly on "those tragedies and comedies that interrogate generic and ideological codes" (16) and offers a reading of these plays which is also a discussion of early modern notions of domesticity and social decorum and of male and female sovereignty in the semi-public sphere of the household. The book begins with a speculative analysis of the origins of these plays and of the apparently modern notions of bourgeois domesticity and individualism upon which they draw. Building on recent research which has undermined pessimistic views about the status ofkinship ties and the existence of distinct notions of childhood in the medieval period, Comensoli points to the affective piety of the Corpus Christi plays, especially their focus on emotionally intense parent-child and marital relationships, as further evidence of"modern" sensibilities in the pre-modern period. In medieval drama's delineation and exploration of domesticity (not only the sorrows of the Virgin and the mothers of the Innocents at the loss of their children, but the mundane nocturnal rituals of Pilate and Procula, and the petty squabbles chez Noah), she argues, one can see precursors ofthe concerns ofearly-modern domestic drama. Further chapters continue the analysis. A discussion of the Patient Griselda story and related texts examines their different treatment of marital codes and ideas of male supremacy, and charts an increasing "scepticism towards the cult of domesticity" (64) which will find its full expression in domestic tragedy. Turning to the plays themselves, the book examines, inter alia, the moralized elaboration of material culture in A Woman Killed With Kindness, in which the lute and bed taken into exile with the adulterous Anne Frankford act as markers of both her sin and her civility, and also display the sheer bourgeois affluence and respectability ofher husband's household as well as her own subservient place within it. More radically, perhaps, Arden ofFaversham, betraying an unease with male sovereignty and bourgeois moral homily alike, allows its adulterous, murderous wife, Alice Arden, an independent voice and desires, prefiguring such later "heroic" women as the Duchess of Malfi. More fundamentally alienated—and consequently independent— are the central female figures in the witch plays, such as The Witch of Edmonton and The Late Lancashire Witches, who are the subject of another stimulating chapter. Honest wives and prodigal husbands, solid householders, misers, mad-women, witches, and whores: early modern domestic society is portrayed in Comensoli's book in guises as various as the plots of the Reviews317 plays concerned. Settings as diverse as the Macbeths' castle, the prosperous bourgeois town-house, and the rural artisan's cottage are taken in within an itinerary that ends with satisfying homiletic inevitability in the House of Correction in Dekker's 2 Honest Whore. The analysis, alive to anthropological as well as literary theory, mixes Mary Douglas and Norbert Elias with Althusser, Foucault, and Freud. In an epilogue, parallels are sought, a little awkwardly, with subsequent domestic dramas, chiefly those of Diderot, Ibsen, and Miller. And here, the profoundly different material, cultural, and theatrical conditions under which the later plays were produced and received makes the attempt to see continuities, rather than simply similarities, a perilous enterprise. Otherwise, however, the book is stimulating and richly allusive. GREG WALKER University ofLeicester Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken, eds. English Parish Drama. Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama, 1. Amsterdam : Rodopi, 1996. Pp. 157. $31.00; Hfl 50. Readers can be forgiven if the first mental image that came into their minds on seeing the title of this book was a Christmas play performed by children. A glance at the back cover should be enough to dispel this impression and challenge the same readers to look behind the modest title for a fine collection of essays that will answer many questions about English...

Lands of Corn: Guatemalan-Romanian Analogies in the Work of Miguel Angel Asturias

During his apprentice years in Paris, from 1924 to 1933, Miguel Angel Asturias struggled to define and express Guatemalan cultural identity. 1 The problem of how to achieve this in a European context drew Asturias into the use of analogy. Cultural identity, like other forms of identity, acquires definition through juxtaposition with identities already assumed to be defined. Alejo Carpentier, whose Parisian apprenticeship overlapped with, and in some respects paralleled, that of Asturias, described culture as 'el acopio de conocimientos que permiten a un hombre establecer relaciones, por encima del tiempo y del espacio, entre dos realidades semejantes 0 amilogas'. 2 This process presupposes that the subject begins by generating or accepting an image of the culture which is taken as already defined. But in the case of a marginal culture defining itself in relation to a metropolitan culture, the danger exists that the initial image may prove paralyzingly intimidating, impeding the elaboration of the marginal culture's identity. Asturias confronted this problem shortly after his arrival in Paris, when he began submitting articles to the Guatemalan newspaper El Imparcial. Measuring the conditions of Guatemalan life against those of life in Paris, Asturias was able to expose the failings of Guatemalan' institutions and suggest ideals to which Guatemala should aspire. His early journalism repeatedly invokes France as a pretext for discussing Guatemala. At times this linkage is clumsy to the point of disingenuousness, as when Asturias writes: 'Hojeando el Libro del Estudiante de la Universidad de Paris (1925-26) he recordado por contraste se asocian las ideas la situaci6n precaria en que se encuentran nuestros estudios superiores (Pads, p.27). By appealing to French successes, Asturias throws into relief Guatemalan inadequacies.

Posture and Reaching in Tufted Capuchins (Cebus apella)

This research investigated the effects of posture on lateral bias for food reaching in tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) by comparing hand preferences for quadrupedal and bipedal reaching. Several findings of this investigation warrant discussion. First, we found a population-level bias towards use of the right hand for bipedal reaching but not for quadrupedal reaching. Second, adults exhibited a greater right-hand preference for bipedal reaching than did immatures. Third, subjects showed a greater right-hand preference, and a greater strength of preference independent of direction, for bipedal reaching than for quadrupedal reaching. Fourth, we found a significant positive relation between the direction of hand preference for quadrupedal and bipedal reaching. We believe that capuchins provide an alternative primate model to chimpanzees for the evolution of human bipedalism and right-handedness. One implication of this model is that righthandedness emerged in hominids prior to extensive expansion of brain size and elaboration of material culture.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE PRINCELY COURT IN NORTH-WEST EUROPE, c1270–c1384

T project, which has been supported by a two-year award to the Fac ulty of Modem History at Oxford by the Leverhulme Trust, began about twenty years ago. At that time Iwas working towards a book which eventually appeared as War and Chivalry: Waifare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages (1981). Most of the work on the book was done at the University of York, where the Centre for Medieval Studies brought together medievalists of all kinds. The York B.Phil (as it then was) in Medieval Studies included a course on 'Courts and Cities in the Later Middle Ages' and I suppose it was in part through that course that the ideas which were to inform my current project began to form. So there is a relationship between teaching and research: in this case, it was teaching-led research, rather than research-led teaching. A major component was, of course, the court of Burgundy: that is the court society and culture which developed in the age of the Valois dukes of Burgundy between 1363 and 1477. Both course teaching and research demonstrated that, although we knew much about the court of Burgundy, we knew little about its predecessors in north-west Europe. There was a sense of Burgundian culture emerging almost from a vacuum its splendour solely a product of the dukes' immense wealth, its novelty exemplified by the 'new' art of the brothers Van Eyck and their contemporaries, and in some way related to the fact that the Valois house of Burgundy was a new force in European politics, increasingly independent of both France and the Holy Roman Empire. But questions remained. Whence did Burgundian culture spring? Was it merely a development and elaboration of French court culture, made possible by the power and wealth of the dukes? Was the 'Frenchness' of the Burgundian court perhaps yet another Inanifestation of French cultural 'supremacy', which also applied to other periods (e.g. the thirteenth century)? By 1384, on the other hand, the house of Burgundy had begun its rise to hegemony in the Low Countries, and questions about the effects of the absorption and integration of Netherlandish territories into the Burgundian dominions had also to be asked. To what extent were the four Valois dukes and their entourages the 'true, good and complete Frenchmen' that the Chancellor Nicholas Rolin maintained they were in 1435?

Boundaries: Mathematics, Alienation, and the Metaphysics of Cyberspace

Boundaries: Mathematics, Alienation, and the Metaphysics of Cyberspace Robert Markley (bio) I To listen to its proponents, one would think that cyberspace has no past. Since William Gibson coined the term in Neuromancer, his “consensual hallucination” has become almost a brand name for life in the postmodern, postindustrial age—a cyborg existence irrevocably dependent on technological interventions in and augmentations of our bodies. 1 Most descriptions of cyberspace emphasize that it is, in Michael Benedikt’s words, “a new stage, a new and irresistible development in the elaboration of human culture and business under the sign of technology.” 2 For Benedikt and for many others, the role of breakthrough technologies in restructuring human nature is axiomatic. 3 Those involved in developing virtual technologies—our ports of entry to cyberspace—are usually upbeat about this reconstruction of the self and society. Throughout the growing literature on cyberspace, as discussed in my introduction to this special issue, cybernauts present the integrative technologies of Virtual Reality as an almost phenomenological means to heal the ruptures within our postmodern, postindustrial identities. 4 [End Page 485] Paradoxically, they contend, accepting our fate as cyborgs will allow us to become more fully human, to free our inherently creative natures from the belatedness, the alienation, of representation. 5 If many cyberpunk writers (and critics) regard our electronically mediated future with suspicion, those involved in developing virtual systems characteristically promote cyberspace as a technological panacea for our postmodern malaise. I want to begin my critique of this view by suggesting a more guarded approach to virtual technologies—and a different definition of cyberspace. Cyberspace is a consensual cliché, a dumping ground for repackaged philosophies about space, subjectivity, and culture; it does not offer a breakthrough in human, or cyborgian, evolution, but merely (though admittedly) a seductive means to reinscribe fundamental tensions within Western concepts of identity and reality. I remain skeptical of the notion that a technologically mediated existence offers a radical break with our “modernist” past, and suspicious of the leaps of faith we are asked to make from experimental, jury-rigged, and often gremlin-ridden virtual technologies to the nearly mystical unity of human and machine in cyberspace. In my mind, there is nothing necessarily “irresistible” about the development of cyberspace; rather than a consensual hallucination, it represents a contested and irrevocably political terrain that is unlikely to determine the future “elaboration of human culture.” My critique of cyberspace, then, is concerned less with the problems of access to new technologies (though an analysis of the ideology of informatics, as Donna Haraway, Anne Balsamo, and Gary Chapman have demonstrated, is crucial to a democratic politics in the age of information) than with the largely unchallenged discourses of the metaphysics of cyberspace—the philosophizing that ignores or mystifies the theoretical and historical underpinnings of this hallucinatory realm and that consequently downplays the technological and political difficulties involved in creating and disseminating virtual worlds. 6 My purpose, I would emphasize, is [End Page 486] not to attack the development of virtual technologies, but to suggest that their usefulness in education, medicine, architecture, art, engineering, and other fields depends precisely on our resistance to their being collapsed into “cyberspace”—the naive, totalizing incarnation of Western tendencies to privilege mind over materiality. 7 Many of the people involved in developing the software and hardware for virtual technologies are deeply, often vocally, suspicious of the motives and expertise of cultural critics intent on colonizing cyberspace. Like other scientists, many have retreated to the bulwarks of technological literacy to defend their positive, even utopian, views of what virtual technologies will mean for humankind. 8 Significantly, however, the scientific and technical literature on cyberspace is framed consistently, often unapologetically, in a millenarian rhetoric that, recasting the legacy of the 1960s counterculture, celebrates a technology that promises rewards exceeding the expenditures of labor and capital required to bring it into being. Cyberspace, in effect, is a metaphysical construct, shot through with the assumptions and values of an idealist philosophy. Its proponents, from Michael Benedikt to Timothy Leary, favor rhetorical jump cuts between technological jargon and mystical incantations: these leaps of faith from the still-primitive technologies of virtual reality to the fictional realm of...