Matter Of Taste Research Articles

The Role of Behavioral Research in Management Accounting Education in the 21st Century

Behavioral accounting research (BAR) has a long history in management accounting. It has not had as significant a presence in the management accounting courses. It has tended to be relegated to the responsibility accounting chapter in textbooks. Thus, the extent to which behavioral materials appeared in a course depended on the interests of the instructor. It can safely be described as a matter of taste. In this paper the history of management accounting dating back to the end of World War II is divided into three periods. In each period, the extent of behavioral materials in the management accounting curriculum is reviewed. These periods, called the “cost accounting,” “modern management accounting,” and “postmodern management accounting” periods, reflect increasing emphasis on behavioral materials in the management accounting courses. The paper focuses on the reasons why the demand for behavioral material in the management accounting curriculum is likely to increase and offers conjectures about what form those materials will take. It is, implicitly, also a call for research on the issues discussed here.

Real Jordanians Don't Decorate Like That! The Politics of Taste among Amman's Elites

Elites in Amman are divided over matters of taste, and preferences for particular villas, furnishings, and clothing extend far beyond the problem of keeping up with the Husseini's; more broadly, ideas about taste and corresponding consumption practices instantiate Jordanian conceptions of membership in various moral and political communities. This paper explores the articulation of elites' consumption practices with conceptions of the modem and the traditional as well as the role of consumption in ongoing disputes among elites over the question of who is and who is not a legitimate Jordanian citizen. [Middle East, taste, consumption, national identity, modernity]

The across-fiber pattern theory and fuzzy logic: A matter of taste

This article discusses a Fuzzy Logic (FL)-based model of neural coding and integration, proposed to be a formal extension of the Across-Fiber Pattern (AFP) theory. FL integration is conceptually similar to Bayesian reasoning, thus providing close-to-optimal decisions, and is also robust in that it does not require complete information. As a formal extension of AFP theory, the FL model describes sensory integration given multiple sources of information. When applied to gustation, the FL model is suggested to describe integration of information at the level of real-time pattern of single neural responses, population coding, and taste perception, as well as to provide a suitable description of taste mixtures.

Privacy as a Matter of Taste and Right

Privacy is something we all want. We seek privacy to prevent others from securing information about us that is immediately embarrassing, and so causes us pain but not material loss. We also value privacy for strategic reasons in order to prevent others from imposing material and perhaps psychic costs upon us. I use the expression “securing information” so that it covers everything from the immediate sensory data that a voyeur acquires to the financial data a rival may acquire about our businesses. In the degenerate case of the Peeping Tom's invasion of our privacy, suffering is caused just by the voyeur's having acquired the information, even if nothing is ever done with it beyond the voyeur's recalling it from time to time. In all other cases, privacy prevents others from imposing costs or harms on us in ways that require that they secure information about us.

Mr. Spaceman (review)

commitments or treats them so lightly that they may as well not exist. No idea or institution is sacred. Billman's satire targets, among other things, public schools, the Church of Latter Day Saints, local law enforcement, the Forest Service, and especially marriage . Billman seems to depend on the flaws of these institutions to make the irresponsible and often immoral behavior of his characters appear less harmful, even redemptive. It works up to a point; but has he gone beyond that point? In part, ifs a matter of taste. If you like satire, you'll probably enjoy these stories. Full of high energy, quirky characters and plenty of local color, this is fiction that sticks with you from a promising new writer. (JL) Mr. Spaceman by Robert Olen Butler Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000, 224 pp., $24 Robert Olen Butler's newest novel, Mr. Spaceman, is a little book that tackles big mysteries—among them the nature of human language and the significance of dreams. This delightful mythical tale explores humanity from a perspective detached , literally, by light years. Based on a short story from Butler's previous coUection, Tabloid Dreams, the novel begins on December 30, 2000, when the extraterrestrial narrator, Desi, abducts a busload of Earth's "primary species." Throughout the novel Desi interviews a diverse cross-section of the American population before revealing himself to the world at the turn of the new millennium. Mr. Spaceman is the product of a skilled literary ventriloquist. Desi, who has learned about the human race through intercepted radio waves and a mere handful of interviews with humans, narrates the novel in an objective tone laced with the ad slogans and clichés he's picked up from the broadcast media. Commenting on the American attitude toward homosexuality, he says, "The mores are different on my home planet. Even there, however, I, Desi the Spaceman, am clearly a Manly Man, Fresh as an Irish Spring with a Lot to Like—Filter, Flavor, and a Flip-top Box. . . ." Desi also possesses the ability to assume the voice of his subject, so that person's words become his own. His interview sessions provide colorful and poignant breaks from a narrative voice that would otherwise become droning and annoying. Mr. Spaceman becomes almost unbearably suspenseful as Desi's mission deadline approaches. The risks inherent in revealing himself to all of humankind become increasingly clear to him, and his human subjects warn him of the "danger of crucifixion for an unarmed spaceman appearing in a flying saucer and scaring the hell out of a big, drunken crowd." The only disappointment in the story is the rather anticlimactic ending. Despite sometimes obscure religious symbolism in the latter half of the novel, Mr. Spaceman is a remarkable fable in the tradition of well known novelists Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez—one of those rare stories that is a reminder of all the magic inherent in us mere humans. (SF) The Missouri Review · 181 ...

A Crown for the King (review)

Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 348 Reviews A CROWN FOR THE KING. By Solomon Ibn Gabirol. David R. Slavitt, trans. pp. xii + 88. New York, NY: Oxford, 1998. David R. Slavitt's A Crown/or the King brings Solomon Ibn Gabirol's philosophical poem into its third English translation. Israel Zangwill's bilingual edition (The Royal Crown. JPS: 1923), and the solid translation of Bernard Lewis (The Kingly Crown. London: Vallentine, Mitchell: 1961) are both out of print but still available on library shelves. Do we need a new translation? After forty years, an accessible and contemporary version of a classic text is welcome. Surely, too, a great poem cannot have too many translators, and, at least according to its translators, Ibn Gabirol's Keter Malkhut is a great poem. If you like reading philosophical poetry, particularly of the neo-Platonic type, perhaps it is. Slavitt has reproduced (literally, by photo offset) the Hebrew text of Zangwill's edition, unfortunately without any of the critical apparatus Zangwill painstakingly appended to his work. Although Slavitt never claims to be producing a scholarly study, some readers may find problematic his unacknowledged reliance on a Hebrew text Zangwill constituted carefully from some two dozen manuscripts. I. A. Zeidman's critical edition of the text in Hebrew (Jerusalem: 1950) seems not to have attracted Slavitt's attention at all. Moreover, both Zangwill's and Lewis's English texts have influenced Slavin's interpretation of the Hebrew, so that his translation often echoes and even rephrases the earlier works. The brief introduction depends heavily on Lewis; the first half (especially pp. vii-x) essentially abridges parts of Lewis' introduction (see pp. 14-19). There is no extended discussion or overview of the poem, whose tripartite thematic structure is highlighted both in Lewis' introductory remarks and in the subdivided format of his translation. Zeidman concisely captured the essence of this structure in the triad c-t.-m i1"'''~' .-.,,~, ("the Creator, Creation and Mankind" p. 6). In contrast, Slavitt's compares Ibn Gabirol's solitary religious ecstasies to Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav (p. ix) and the poet's use of biblical citation to Eliot's Waste Land (p. xii). The analogies are unfortunate. "Solitary contemplation and private prayer" (p. ix), for one, were never considered an adequate substitute for public worship in eleventh-century Spain. And shibbutz, the weaving together of biblical verses and fragments to construct a new text, was not unique to Ibn Gabirol but a hallmark of the Spanish Jewish poetic school. Slavitt's spare bibliography will not provide Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 349 Reviews additional context; only two of the twenty cited works actually treat Ibn Gabirol or his work. Slavitt is capable of a pliant English style, which sometimes achieves the tone of "intimacy and power" he ascribes to his source (p. ix). Of all three translators, Slavitt tries most to harness the vitality of common speech, and his text is generally easy to read. Ibn Gabirol's sleek elegance of expression can result in extremely spare Hebrew constructions, which Slavitt often refonnulates in an expansive, sometimes improvisatory, style. Sometimes the additions are overdone, although this is a matter of taste as well as accuracy . For instance, at the end of section VII, Ibn Gabirol states succinctly: i'Min MS, ,r,o, i'Min 'b~p ~ .nnrn 9~~n ,., s,:lOm l'lTI .c'1Il1 "M nnM [1l.6~9]. Literally, the passage reads: "You are the Light of the world. The eye of the intellect yearns for You and is astounded; it can see the [light's] edge but not its entirety." Slavitt translates, "You are light that is eternal: the intellect's eye that was made to behold you and yearns for you catches only glimmerings, but all of you we cannot see: it is at once so glorious and blinding." Or, as another example, the end of section I reads: ,,0., n.un rum rr:::n 1S, "o'm [1.14]. This becomes: "Yours is the secret of secrets: your love of creation, the yearning of all the fonns for material being, your love, that is, of your creatures, of us" [2]. (And compare Zangwill: "In Thee is the veiled...

Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS263 "Ugie" Allen, a young, prosperous planter from west-central Georgia, volunteered for Confederate service in spring 1861 and was appointed second lieutenant in a company that became part of the 21st Georgia Infantry. Until his mortal wounding at Chancellorsville, Allen served in Virginia and wrote more than 130 letters home, mostly to his wife, Susie. Though capably edited by Randall Allen and Keith Bohannon, it must be said that the writings offer more than enough dull commentary on routine or personal matters. The author himself was aware of this, either because he lacked epistolary talent ("you know my facilities for writing are frequently very poor" [153-54]), or because he was often rushed ("who can write anything more than mere generalities when everything is in a figit" [134]), or because he just lacked vim ("too lazy to write, too lazy to even think, too lazy to do anything but eat and scratch" [170]). When Allen rises above these shortcomings, though, the result is truly noteworthy . In camp he writes of the prevalence of lice, shortage of shoes, and shocking manners at mess ("it is quite common to see a person wipe his knife on his boot and commence eating" [91]). There is a glimpse or two of Stonewall Jackson, ajudgement of Gen. Dick Ewell as "one of these crabed dispeptic kind of fellows" (145), and a fine story of D. H. Hill, who punished a soldier for duplicitously capturing a Yankee (and released theYank). He confessed his feelings , too: fear under first fire in March 1862; longing to be home (amid dreams of lovemaking with his wife), and remorselessly shooting Yankees like ducks, but showing compassion to a wounded enemy. Promoted to captain in May 1862, Allen fought under Jackson at Cross Keys, Gaines'Mill, CedarMountain, Sharpsburg, andFredericksburg, buthis limited observations onthese battles arenotvery illuminating. More memorablearehis commentaries on the humbuggery of military glory which was, he sniffed, "the dream of the enthusiast, fit only to be disapated by a simple night march or bomb" (180). On the whole, however, these glints of insight and interest are far too infrequent to rescue Ugie Allen's letters from a dreary blandness. Of course, it is a matter of taste whether this correspondence would have profited from publication in a shorter, more excerpted format. One should not go so far as to generalize from Allen's own criticism of his missive of September 23, 1862: "You will find this a remarkably stupid epistle" (166). When he added, "but I hope it is better than none," he conceived a rather bleak but not altogether unfitting characterization of his letters home. Stephen Davis Oglethorpe University Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson. Edited by J. Gregory Acken. Forward by Edwin C. Bearss. (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1998. Pp. xii, 500. $34.95.) Upon hearing of Fort Sumter's surrender, twenty-one-year-old Francis Adams Donaldson left his job as a Philadelphia shipping clerk to help raise what 264CIVIL WAR HISTORY became the ist California (later 71st Pennsylvania) Volunteer Infantry. In that regiment's first engagement, the ignominious Union defeat at Ball's Bluff, he was captured and spent the next three and a half months as a prisoner of war in Richmond. Exchanged in early 1 862, Donaldson returned to his regiment and received two promotions, to sergeant major and then to second lieutenant. Assigned to the 2d Corps, the California Regiment served throughout the Peninsula Campaign, but Lt. Donaldson took a minié ball in the arm at Fair Oaks and was sent home to recover. During his convalescence, the 71st Pennsylvania dropped five of its fifteen original companies; having recovered from his wound, Donaldson unhappily became a casualty of that reorganization. When directors ofthe Philadelphia Corn Exchange raised a new regiment, the 1 1 8th Pennsylvania , the boyish-looking combat veteran became one of its company commanders . Assigned to the 5th Corps, the 11 8th Pennsylvania was blooded at Shepherdstown, Virginia, during Lee's retreat from Antietam and remained with theArmy ofthe Potomac until war's end. Donaldson saw action at Shepherdstown, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Bristoe Station, Rappahannock Station, and Mine Run...

A Didactic Framework for Audiovisual Design

In contrast with many other design tasks, the design of audiovisual sequences seems to depend highly on the designers’ particular talents, insights and creativity. Some customers experience the intangibility or rather the sheer impossibility of discussion on design decisions, due to the lack of an overall audiovisual design methodology. Especially at the microlevel, that is the level of concrete images and sounds, audiovisual programme development tends to be a matter of taste instead of well‐considered decisions. To provide a vocabulary for functional programme design, the present article introduces a didactic framework that serves as a classification scheme. It constitutes some 49 microlevel functional categories that support both the design and the analysis of audiovisual sequences. The structure and content of the framework are based on empirical evidence on learning and instruction. The present article describes and discusses all categories of the framework.

The Influence of Layout on the Perceived Tone of News Articles

Are design arguments just a matter of taste, or does layout affect how readers understand news stories? The question applies broadly to all media. This experiment measured whether respondents found horizontal layout more tranquil and whether their responses depended on the content. Horizontal layouts did relate to measures of comfort and human interest. Presented with a horizontal layout, respondents rated an article more comforting, pleasant, light, and so forth. The effects depended on the content, interacting with form in complex ways. The results show that design decisions matter and should be taken with care. In the media, form is content.

Black British Feminism: A Reader

Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction: Mapping a Geneology of Black British Feminism Heidi Safia Mirza, South Bank University I. Shaping the Debate 1. Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain Amrit Wilson 2. Black Women, the Economic Crisis and the British State Amina Mama 3. Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe 4. White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boudaries of Sisterhood Hazel V. Carby 5. Challenging Imperial Feminism Valarie Amos and Pratibha Parmar 6. Transforming Socialist Feminism: The Challenge of Racism Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Margaret Coulson 7. Theories of Gender and Black Families Anne Phoenix 8. Other Kinds of Dreams Pratibha Parmar 9. Feminism and the Challenge of Racism: Deviance or Difference? Razia Aziz II. Defining Our Space 10. Raregrooves and Raregroovers: A Matter of Taste, Difference and Identity Bibi Bakare-Yusuf 11. (Mis)Representing the Black (Super)Woman Tracey Reynolds 12. Shades of Blackness: Young Black Female Constructions of Beauty Debbie Weekes, Nottingham Trent University 13. Diaspora's Daughters, Africa's Orphans?: On Lineage, Authenticity, and 'Mixed-Race' Identity Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, University of East London 14. 'It's a sun tan, isn't it?': Auto-biography as an Identificatory Practice Sara Ahmed, Lancaster University 15. Charting the Spaces of (un)Location: On Theorising Diaspora Magdalene Ang-Lygate 16. Fractured or Flexible Identities? Life Histories of 'Black' Diasporic Women in Britain Naz Rassool, University of Reading 17. In my Father's House there are Many Mansions: The Nation and the Postcolonial Desire Nalini Persram 18. Two Stories, Three Lovers and the Creation of Meaning in a Black Lesbian Autobiography: A Diary Consuelo Rivera Fuentes, Lancaster University 19. My Body, Myself: How Does a Black Woman Do Sociology? Felly Nkweto Simmonds, University of Northumbria, Newcastle Upon Tyne 20. The Fabulous Adventures of the Mahogany Princesses Gargi Bhattacharyya, University of Birmingham III. Changing Our Place 21. Third Wave Feminism and Black Women's Activism Pragna Patel 22. Black Women in Education: A Collective Movement for Social Change Heidi Safia Mirza, South Bank University, London 23. The Language of 'Womanism': Rethinking 'Difference' Helen (charles) Bibliography

The Salonnieres and the Philosophies in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment

The Salonnières and the Philosophes in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment* Jolanta T. Pekacz During the eighteenth century a significant shift occurred in the perception of the authority of aesthetic judgment in France, from a group usually referred to as “polite society” and widely considered the exclusive source of taste (goût) to various competing groups arrogating to themselves the right to judge artistic matters. 1 In the present article I discuss the changing recognition of the genders as arbiters of taste, exemplified by Parisian salonnières on the one hand, and the philosophes on the other, during two eighteenth-century quarrels over the French and Italian operas: the Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s and the controversy between Gluckistes and Piccinistes in the 1770s. I argue that by the end of the 1770s, as a result of the collapse of the old paradigm of “polite society” of which salons were a part, Parisian salon women lost the position (however illusory it might have been) which they enjoyed in the seventeenth century as arbiters of taste. While the philosophes attended feminine salons, [End Page 277] they rejected the idea of consulting salonnières on the matters of taste (and on other matters), as was previously the case, and relegated them to formal, if not merely decorative, roles of guardians of good manners and propriety, the roles accepted by salonnières. The ousting of the salonnière from aesthetic arbitration exemplified by the two operatic quarrels may be viewed as a continuation of the process of exclusion of salon women from discursive development that began in the seventeenth century, as discussed by Erica Harth in Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (1992) and, most recently, by Joan DeJean in Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (1997). In the seventeenth century the norms of feminine bienséance (decorum, propriety) allowed a woman to establish a salon but made it impossible for a salonnière to create a space intellectually comparable to that of the French Academy. After having lost a gendered competition for intellectual space with the Academy by the 1680s, the salon, as Erica Harth put it, “proved a discursive dead end for women.” In this essay I carry through this argument into the eighteenth century and demonstrate that salon women lost a competition with the philosophes not only in the intellectual but also in the aesthetic sphere. Salonnières did not choose not to make aesthetic judgments out of respect for the exclusive right of the philosophes to make such judgments 2 but rather were silenced by the philosophes and complied in order not to violate the limits of feminine bienséance in the public sphere, that is, to survive as salonnières. The seventeenth-century ideals of feminine bienséance taken over by eighteenth-century salonnières were no longer perceived as sufficient (or legitimate) to recognize women as arbiters of taste. In fact these ideals proved to be as detrimental as a source of authority for salon women in the siècle des lumières as they were ambiguous in the grand siècle. Ironically, not only were the eighteenth-century Parisian salonnières ousted from aesthetic arbitration, but neither did they succeed in their roles as guardians of propriety and good manners for the philosophes, that is, in keeping the Enlightenment discourse civil. In both operatic quarrels the dominant genre of discourse was a pamphlet, a libelle, not a salon conversation. While during the Querelle des Bouffons the philosophes were unanimously pro-Italian, the Gluck-Piccini quarrel caused a deep split among them, followed by fratricidal fighting, which seriously undermined their authority in public matters. I. The negative connotation associated with the epithets pedant, savant, and their derivatives in seventeenth-century French treatises on honnêteté indicates [End Page 278] that the authority of judgment of “persons of quality” in matters of taste resulted from the code of bienséances in social relations. Blaise Pascal probably best summarized arguments for the superiority of an honnête person (as opposed to a professional) in the realm of aesthetics; being an...

House style preference and meanings across taste cultures

Theorists have speculated that taste cultures differ in their design preferences. To test this, we interviewed 150 adults (30 representing each of the five taste cultures) in central Ohio. We obtained their responses to photographs of house exteriors representing 15 different styles. Did the taste cultures differ as predicted by the theorists? Not really. The results showed strong similarities in the responses across the groups. However, the similarities decreased as the educational/occupational distance between the groups increased. In findings echoing many other studies, we found strong similarities with highest preferences for the Tudor style, and highest friendliness score for the Farm style. Even for style, preference is not a matter of taste. Widely different groups show commonalities.

The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Many Worlds or Many Words?

As cutting-edge experiments display ever more extreme forms of non-classical behavior, the prevailing view on the interpretation of quantum mechanics appears to be gradually changing. A (highly unscientific) poll taken at the 1997 UMBC quantum mechanics workshop gave the once all-dominant Copenhagen interpretation less than half of the votes. The Many Worlds interpretation (MWI) scored second, comfortably a head of the Consistent Histories and Bohm interpretations. It is argued that since all the above-mentioned approaches to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics give identical cookbook prescriptions for how to calculate things in practice, practical-minded experimentalists, who have traditionally adopted the “shut-up-and-calculate interpretation”, typically show little interest in whether cozy classical concepts are in fact real in some untestable metaphysical sense or merely the way we subjectively perceive a mathematically simpler world where the Schrödinger equation describes everything – and that they are therefore becoming less bothered by a profusion of worlds than by a profusion of words. Common objections to the MWI are discussed. It is argued that when environment-induced decoherence is taken into account, the experimental predictions of the MWI are identical to those of the Copenhagen interpretation except for an experiment involving a Byzantine form of “quantum suicide”. This makes the choice between them purely a matter of taste, roughly equivalent to whether one believes mathematical language or human language to be more fundamental.

Hymns of Prudentius. The Cathemerinon; or, the Daily Round (review)

Reviewed by: Hymns of Prudentius. The Cathemerinon; or, the Daily Round Thomas A. Smith Prudentius. Hymns of Prudentius. The Cathemerinon; or, the Daily Round. Translated by David R. Slavitt, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xix + 61. $19.95. Anyone who has tried to translate Latin poetry—or any foreign-language poetry, for that matter—into graceful English verse knows how fiendishly difficult a task it is. Just reproducing its sense clearly, to say nothing of meter, rhyme, or that elusive quality of voice, is the stuff of chewed pencils and wadded sheets of paper. Owing, perhaps, to this difficulty, translations of Latin Christian poetry and hymnody can be notably wooden, the sort of stuff that would lead the ordinary reader to suspect that whatever their merits as didacts, ancient Christian poets did not move the soul as poets. Such a conclusion would, of course, be tragically wrong, especially in the case of so influential a figure as Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (348–410?). To the rescue comes David Slavitt, distinguished translator of Ovid, Vergil, and Seneca, and soi-disant “skeptical Jewish aesthete of the late twentieth century.” He has given us a really elegant, moving, singing translation of the Spanish poet’s Cathemerinon, a series of twelve hymns connected to hours of the day and to feasts and fasts. Slavitt’s rendering breathes life into these verses, [End Page 334] infusing them with the sort of world-weary longing one can easily imagine from an aging, aristocratic Roman prefect-turned-poet. Something has to give in any attempt at translation. Slavitt, as he says, has “tried to do the voice and suggest to others something of what I admire in it.” To “do” Prudentius’s voice, he opts for recreating an atmosphere, frequently at the expense of a more literal rendering of the Latin such as that found in the 1962 translation of Sister M. Clement Eagan. An idea of Slavitt’s approach can be gained by comparing his translation of the beginning of Hymn 2, a morning hymn, with the Latin and with the translation of Eagan: Nox et tenebrae et nubilae, / confusa mundi et turbida, / lux intrat, albescit polus, / christus uenit, discedite! caligo terrae scinditur / percussa solis spiculo / rebus que iam color redit / uultu nitentis sideris. Eagan: Ye shades of night and turbid clouds, confusion of the world, depart, For light pervades the whitening sky, And Christ, the Sun of Justice, comes. Asunder now earth’s gloom is rent, Pierced by the sun’s transfixing dart. the day-star’s shining glance restores The hues of meadow and of plain. Slavitt: An endless night, obfusc and shrouded so that even our thoughts are roiled and clouded . . . But then in a gentling of the air the sky relents and our despair lifts as if Christ were come again, returning to the hearts of men the colors of hope and, in restoration of every subtle tint and hue, repairing for us the Lord’s creation. Certainly Slavitt’s rhymed rendering shows more of the poet’s craft and less of the scholar’s verbal precision than some might like (the adjective “obfusc” surely merits an award for neologism!), and perhaps the bias of a jaded modern shows itself, for example, in the rendering of the strong “Christus uenit” as the wistful “as if Christ were come again.” Whether this translation improves on earlier attempts will be a matter of taste, to be sure. But Slavitt has “done the voice” admirably, such that the pious hymns of a Spaniard in the early fifth century come alive not as relics but as poetry. This Prudentius is a work to put into the hands of those who would use his (Slavitt’s? Prudentius’s?) words to make an imaginative bridge across time. Though one seldom sees such a recommendation in a scholarly journal, this slim volume is, and would make, an excellent gift. Thomas A. Smith Loyola University, New Orleans Copyright © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois

In unique assignment for Independent in 1904, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois reviewed his own book, Souls of Black Folk. He characterized style as African. Du Bois made no apology, contending that the blood of my fathers spoke through me and cast off English restraint of my training and surroundings. The resulting accomplishment, he concluded, matter of taste. It lost in authority but gained in vividness because of its African perspective: It might tempt certain readers to contest every statement impatiently, but revelation of how world looks to me cannot easily escape even those readers. One who is born with cause -for so he assessed himselfis predestined to certain narrowness of view, and at same time to some clearness of vision within his limits with which world often finds it to reckon.' world has found it well to reckon with Souls of Black Folk ever since. Du Bois's ideas about color line and double consciousness have guided discussion of race relations from moment book appeared. It received immediate attention not only from African Americans but on national and international scale as well. Booker T. Washington, whom Du Bois criticized severely in most controversial essay in book, saw to it that it received little notice in African American newspapers he influenced. Nonetheless, it was read widely. For many, including Langston Hughes andJohn Hope Franklin, it served as a cultural initiation rite. Several classic African American novels are based on its ideas. response of mainstream white press ranged from neglect to guarded praise to fanatical

On global conservation laws at null infinity

In this paper the standard values for total energy, linear momentum and also angular momentum of asymptotically flat Bondi metrics at null infinity are obtained from differential conservation laws on asymptotically flat backgrounds, derived from a quadratic Lagrangian density by methods currently used in classical field theory. It is thus a matter of taste and commodity whether to use a reference spacetime in defining these globally conserved quantities. Backgrounds lead to N ther conserved currents; the use of backgrounds is in line with classical views on conservation laws. Moreover, the conserved quantities are explicitly related to the sources of gravity through Einstein's equations. The relations depend, however, on a rule for mapping spacetimes onto backgrounds.

A Social History of Truth by Steven Shapin

238 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE nine: the body divine (from biblical text to early modern saint); the body natural (from Greek treatises to Harvey); the body and destiny (from Aristotle through Freud and Masters andJohnson to a poem by W. D. Snodgrass); mind and body (from Hippocratic to Freudian, including the account of “Anna O”); disease and purity (from lep­ rosy to the germ theory); the healer (from Hippocratic Oath to Sara Lawrence Lightfoot); medical experimentation (from Jenner to Tuskegee); institutionalization and medicalization (from Pinel to Foucault); and pain, suffering and death (from preanesthetic mas­ tectomy to AIDS). Each reading is introduced with a paragraph es­ tablishing its background. There are a few minor errors in these introductions (Augustine as the Bishop of “Hatto” rather than Hippo, Marie “Zakrezewska” rather than Zakrzewska, for example), but I noted no substantial ones. Many fine black-and-white illustra­ tions (mainly from the iconographical collections of the Wellcome Institute) give the book further impact. One might ask whether this selection of readings shows the inter­ actions between medicine and culture in quite the way the authors’ introduction sets out; one might even ask if there is not a problem in essentializing the undefined categories of medicine and culture in the first place (perhaps one could ask for the plural forms, at least). The use of “civilization” in the title also harkens back to the earlier 20th century, with connotations of culture somewhat differ­ ent than the ethnographic ones specified in the introduction. Other reviewers might have equally churlish comments. But they would be beside the point. While choosing readings for an anthology7 inevita­ bly involves matters of taste and familiarity, Rothman, Marcus, and Kiceluk have chosen from truly varied and dramatic writings. The selections are almost all intriguing and important. It should make this volume not only a most welcome aid for the classroom but a book to be kept handy for moments of reflection. In that regard, it will indeed help to foster ideas about the varied meanings associated with the body and medicine. HaroldJ. Cook Dr. Cook is chair of the Department ofthe History ofMedicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches the history of medicine and writes on early modern European medicine and society. A Social History of Truth. By Steven Shapin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp. xxxi +483; illustrations, notes, bibliogra­ phy, index. $29.95 (cloth). Most historians treat the notion of “truth” rather loosely; some philosophers treat “truth” very seriously. It is Steve Shapin’s signal achievement to engage historians, philosophers, and sociologists TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 239 with his account of the collective nature of truth-telling and knowl­ edge-making. Shapin’s aim is not conventionally “interdisciplinary,” but rather to engage a set ofphilosophical and sociological problems through detailed historical analysis. The case at hand is the gentle­ manly origins of English experimental philosophy in the 17th cen­ tury. The characters in the Royal Society’s circle range in social standing from Robert Boyle, a younger son of the vastly wealthy first earl of Cork, through Robert Hooke, the celebrated microscopist who began as a paid laboratory assistant, and down to the anony­ mous technicians responsible for building and operating the new experimental machines, including Boyle’s famous air pump. Shap­ in’s sharply etched and richly drawn collective portrait of a scientific community wrestling with how accurate knowledge about nature can be known is a rewarding read—but not a light one. The argument of this ambitious book can be stated concisely. Con­ stituting a body of reliable knowledge requires identifying trustwor­ thy agents. Working solutions to problems of credibility and trust were found in the practices of “gentlemanly culture.” These prac­ tices were the foundation of the new empirical science of 17th-cen­ tury England. Gentlemen, unlike courtiers or merchants or yeomen, were deemed truthful owing to their material independence and moral integrity. By possessing freedom of action, thanks to annual incomes of £280 or more, gentlemen literally had the freedom to tell the truth. (By contrast, persons in dependent states, including women and servants, were deemed unreliable due to their depen­ dent status.) Yet, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet...

On the Distinction between False Belief Understanding and Subscribing to an Interpretive Theory of Mind

2 groups of 5-8-year-olds were examined in an effort to explore the developing relations between false belief understanding and an awareness of the individualized nature of personal taste, on the one hand, and, on the other, a maturing grasp of the interpretive character of the knowing process. In Study 1, 20 children between 5 and 8 all behaved in accordance with hypotheses by proving to be indistinguishable in their already good grasp of the possibility of false beliefs and in their common assumption that differences of opinion concerning matters of taste are legitimate expressions of personal preferences. By contrast, only the 7- and 8-year-old children gave evidence of recognizing that ambiguous stimuli especially allow for warrantable differences of interpretation. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings with a group of 48 5-8-year-old subjects, again showing that while 5-year-olds easily pass a standard test of false belief understanding, only children of 7 or 8 ordinarily evidence an appreciation of the interpretive character of the knowing process.

R0 or r: A matter of taste?

<i>R</i>₀ or <i>r</i>: A matter of taste?

Matters of Taste: Food, Eating, and Reflections on "The Body Politic" in Tuareg Society

In this article, I am concerned with two issues: to understand how power relations are embodied in beliefs, statements, and practices about food preparation, eating, and the body; and to determine how to represent these statements and practices in nonessentialist terms. The article explores how notions of strength/fragility, activity/passivity, and purity/pollution are used to construct, represent, and contest social distinctions in contexts of ritual, sociability, and politics within a stratified, seminomadic rural community of Tuareg in Niger, West Africa. I analyze reflections about food, conversation during eating, and more general food-connected practices as these relate to concepts of body and social origin. Food habits, I argue, are reflected in both traditional and changing social categories, and these social categories are evidenced in food as well as in other contexts which symbolically refer to eating and the body: for example, color and texture tastes, use of material cultural items such as utensils in food preparation, the etiquette of commensuality, and weaponry use in animal sacrifice, meat preparation, and armed conflict.