Movable Feast Research Articles

Movable Feasts on the River Thames

The eloquent cover of this issue, reproduced opposite, was supplied by Paul Christianson to illustrate this essay on the City of London and its feasts by the River Thames. So, too, was our frontispiece of the Lord Mayor’s barge. These two illustrations are courtesy of Guildhall Library, Corporation of London; the third, a copy of the account for a dinner cooked in 1754, is courtesy of the Corporation of London Records Office.

A movable feast: Property-breaking and property-making after the Russian Revolution

The article focuses on the dispossession of movable goods as a site where the key processes of the Revolution—political violence, social transformation, and state-building—came together. Its scope is chronologically limited to the period between the summer of 1917, when forms of seizure that had been legally defined for state use during the First World War as “requisition” and “confiscation” jumped off of their wartime rails, and April 16, 1920, when the Sovnarkom returned the seizure of movable property to a clear legal footing with a decree defining “requisition” and “confiscation” for the first time since the Revolution. After a brief look at the many ways there were to lose things in the revolutionary era, the article examines the afterlife of dispossession: what happened to seized goods, and how to make erstwhile personal possessions the property of the state. This problem undergirded the state’s nationalization programs in every sphere of economic life. But it posed a special challenge in the realm of household goods, because of their qualities and because of the significance invested in their redistribution as a metric for the progress of the Revolution itself. Ultimately the state proved unable to fashion itself into an adequate proprietor of movable goods and dealt with its incapacity first by trying to eliminate the category as a whole before reintroducing legal formats of personal possession into revolutionary society.

Terroir products: a movable heritage feast?

This article seeks to de-naturalise the idea of terroir by questioning the assumption that relations between product, people and place are static and durable. It asks what perspectives might be gained by focusing on instances of movement, fluidity, and instability of these three elements and of relationships between them. Whereas terroir contests the idea that anything can be made anywhere by asserting that place and context matter, and whereas anthropologists of space and place critique the essentialisation and naturalisation of place by arguing that, in the context of a globalised world, movement matters, I argue that movement is in fact a crucial element of people’s very engagement with place in many productive traditions.

Contributors

Contributors

Mark Twain in Context

Mark Twain in Context

Fleeting Film: Using Story to Seek Archival Permanence in the Transitory and Globalized Digital Visual Effects Industry

AbstractArchiving is a long-standing vocation, founded on principles such as provenance, original order, truth, evidence, preservation and permanence. A far cry from the visual spectacle and movable feast of film visual effects (VFX)—a transitory and globalized industry of disposable firms, ever-advancing technologies and a roving workforce which craft digital animations and seamless effects for the big screen. In this paper we utilize the concept of “story” as a premise to bring together the seemingly different vocations of archival science and film VFX. Through an exploration of digital film production and archival practice under the context of storytelling, we aim to highlight the need for archivists to work with the VFX industry to ensure evidence of this culturally significant aspect of filmmaking and cinema discourse is preserved into the future. As well present the argument that archives are more than collections of historical evidence. Archives are story—and archivists are storytellers.

La "fête mobile" de la non-philosophie

The "moveable feast" of non-philosophy(Abstract) The editorial aims to unveil the attracting force of Laruelle's non-philosophy for scholars from different disciplines and artists. It shows how a new "democratic order of thinking" permits non-philosophy to enclose domains that have long been considered as opposites: philosophy, science, religion and the arts. Conceived as parameters of thought of the same right and without privileges, these variables can be superposed in a process of creative invention. The performative force of non-standard thinking, which can take different forms of philo-fiction, science fiction, art fiction, Christo-Fiction etc., dismantles the decisional gestures and the sufficiency claims of philosophy, science and religion, and thus permits a regeneration as well as a choral orchestration in a "minimalistic symphony". In this sense, non-philosophy invites us every day to the "movable feast", that it is.

The Flexibility of Fertility Preferences in a Context of Uncertainty.

The Flexibility of Fertility Preferences in a Context of Uncertainty.

Roald Hoffmann

Roald Hoffmann

PGIM Oration 2016 - Professionalism in Medicine; the transition of a movable feast and its implications for clinical and educational practices

PGIM Oration 2016 - Professionalism in Medicine; the transition of a movable feast and its implications for clinical and educational practices

Reading John Keats. Susan J. Wolfson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+179.

<i>Reading John Keats</i>. Susan J. Wolfson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+179.

Adam Criblez. Parading Patriotism: Independence Day Celebrations in the Urban Midwest, 1826–1876.

Historians have long regarded Independence Day as a valuable snapshot of national sentiment in the United States; and for good reason. Few nations offer scholars such a regular means of taking its temporal temperature, but in the United States, Independence Day provides a valuable visual and verbal staging of the emotional and social state of the Union. Yet Independence Day was, Adam Criblez reveals, metaphorically a movable feast in the nineteenth-century Midwest. In its political, social, racial, ethnic, and gendered parameters, the day bore witness both to continuity and change in a part of the United States that, he notes, has long been difficult to define both geographically and culturally. By focusing on five midwestern cities—Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Indianapolis—Criblez seeks to explore, but also explain, the sometimes uneasy “relationship between urban midwesterners and American nationalism and patriotism” in the years between the semicentennial and the centennial anniversaries of American independence. In particular, Criblez is interested in the ways in which the citizens of these cities “developed distinct notions about how their Independence Day celebrations reflected patriotic loyalty and American nationalism” (pp. xii–xiii).

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories

A Movable Architecture for Robust Spatial Computing

Foropen-endedcomputationalgrowth,wearguethat:(i)insteadofhardwiringandhidingcomponent spatial relationships, computer architecture should soften and expose them; and (2) instead of relegating reliability to hardware, robustness must climb the computational stack toward the end users.Wesuggestthateventuallyalltrulylarge-scalecomputerswillberobustspatialcomputers—even if intended neither for spatial tasks nor harsh environments. This paper is an extended introduction for the spatial computing community to the Movable Feast Machine (MFM), a computing model in the spirit of an object-oriented asynchronous cellular automata. We motivate the approach and then present the model, touching on robustness mechanisms such as redundancy, compartmentalization and homeostasis. We provide simulation data from prototype movable elements such as self-healing wire for data transport and movable ‘membrane’ rings for spatial segregation, and illustrate how some larger computations like sorting or evaluating a lambda expression can be reconceived for robustness and movability within a spatial computing architecture.

Governing Traumatic Events

Introduction From point of view of Western states and media, stuff of global politics is increasingly dominated by stories of crisis, emergency, and catastrophe. So-called traumatic events of one kind or another--terrorist attacks, natural disasters, global pandemics, and (even) financial crises--occupy news and policy discourses on an almost daily basis. Indeed, seems that is fast becoming a paradigmatic lens through which dynamics of contemporary international politics are framed, understood, and responded to. The everyday prevalence of what we might call discourse of traumatic presents a quandary for those political analysts seeking to develop critical theoretical or disciplinary insights with which to diagnose, address, or engage this emergent global milieu. On one hand, our understanding/understandings of and traumatic tend to be dominated by ascendancy of managerialist discourses of humanitarianism, psychology, and newly emergent frame of resilience planning. These (often overlapping) discourses usually address question of how to respond to traumatic events in terms of a problem-solving exercise, seeking to better manage outcomes of traumatic more efficiently without first unpicking power relations which produce and are sometimes sustained by trauma. (1) On other hand, there has been a curious naturalization of specific events as emblematic of critical concerns. For instance, while scholars of international relations have been drawn to spectacle of particular events, most notably less attention has been paid to concept, discourse, and practice of traumatic as a political problematic as such. At one end of a spectrum, is possible to identify a generalization of knowledge about traumatic events, seeking depoliticization, management, efficiency, and so on. At other end, we detect a fetish for particular: as an arresting device for rethinking political. However, both approaches fail to capture how governing traumatic events is a complex and movable feast. Refusing a choice between general and particular in this way, pressing task facing critical scholar is rather to question how they produce and sustain each other: how general concept of is read from specific events and interpellated into others, and to analyze how these practices generate differential political effects among populations. (2) Far from being exceptional, we would argue, repertoire of traumatic may be quite ordinary, a banality of established and establishing knowledge practices that render the event governable; in other words, can be understood as a normalizing discourse of power. On this view, increasing incidence of events produced as traumatic carries its own set of political narratives that can be unpicked. There are important historical markers--Chernobyl, Lockerbie, 9/11, Tsunami, Katrina--and an established (and highly emotive) accompanying vocabulary of shock, devastation, anger, and blame. The political logics entailed then become quite recognizable. Governments need to coordinate, humanitarian organizations need to mobilize resources, people on ground are portrayed as helpless victims. Political energy is drawn to a specific and limited narrative of disaster and response where human experience is portrayed in universal terms: subject to unthinkable, unimaginable, that we all need to survive. An ethics of pity is quickly marshalled, a politics of empathy constructed: something of human persists and such events remind us of that. (3) In these and other ways, traumatic events are always already governed or known. Rendered thus, question of governing traumatic events becomes an enquiry into possibility, and indeed impossibility of knowing trauma so that it might be in new and more effective ways. …

Movable Feast: A Public Art Project To Promote Food System Change

Movable Feast: A Public Art Project To Promote Food System Change

Superconductivity's Smorgasbord of Insights: A Movable Feast

Resistance-free electric currents and their eventual explanation have influenced thinking far beyond solid state physics.

Andreas Nolthius's Almanach for 1575

1 . IntroductionAccording to a little calendar, or Almanack, printed for the year 1575, August 1440 was a memorable month, as the art of printing was invented in Strasbourg, and later improved at Mainz (Figure 1). Printing had become an invention whose significance was well-acknowledged by that time, and indeed, numerous claims had been made for its origin and inventor.1 This Almanack was a form of calendar - an annual calendar - that came into its own after the advent of printing. Indeed, one of the earliest things that Gutenberg printed, apart from the Bible, was a Latin calendar for the year 1457, listing medical advice for each month.2 This was a single-sheet calendar, a format followed by many fifteenth-century printers.3 Because these calendars listed auspicious and inauspicious days for bloodletting or taking medicines for the following year on a single sheet of paper, they were called Lasbrief, Lastafel, Almanack or, from the way it was used, a wall calendar.4 From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, annual calendars were also issued as small booklets, taking up the same amount of paper as the single-sheet calendars.5 These were called, also, an Almanack, Lassbuchlein or B auernka lender.6 The Almanack for 1 575 was thus a booklet of a typical name and size of its kind (page size 10.5 x 7.3 cm, 14 pages). It was compiled by Andreas Nolthius, mathematicus, who also issued a prognostication for the same year.7 Though it would be rash to claim discontinuity with manuscript culture, the printing press enabled the development of a rich variety of formats, sizes and forms of calendars.8 Annual calendars, in particular, were cheap enough to be affordable by a large number of people and could readily be discarded after use. Given their ephemeral nature, such calendars often survive only as fragments between bindings, as shown in Figure 2. In this paper, I focus on Nolthius's booklet calendar for the year 1575, and by placing it into its context, I hope to highlight the importance of calendars as one of the most popular and widespread forms in which astronomical information was made available to a large number of people in early modern Europe.Nolthius's Almanack for 1575, a copy of which is now in Cambridge University Library, was published in Erfurt in 1574. 9 Its content may somewhat artificially be divided into four elements: calendrical, astronomical, medical and historical. After placing these elements of Nolthius's Almanack within the context of earlier and contemporary calendars, I will discuss the possible audience of this kind of annual calendar. I hope to show the importance of this genre of publications for the history of astronomy, since it was astronomy that underpinned the various pieces of information in these calendars, such as Easter and other movable feasts, chronology, planetary positions (e.g. conjunctions and eclipses), and their astrological and meteorological significance, which in turn had medical implications.2. CalendricalCalendars may be divided into perpetual or annual ones. The most typical perpetual calendar known in the late Middle Ages was that of the Book of Hours. The Book of Hours normally contained a calendar, prayers for the canonical hours of the day, together with prayers to the Virgin Mary and for the dead.10 It was compiled for the daily devotion of the laity and was based on the divine office said by priests. Annual calendars carried over several conventions from such perpetual calendars. As in the case of the Book of Hours at Trinity College Cambridge (Figure 3), in a perpetual calendar each day of the month was marked by a dominical letter (A to G), a golden number (I to XIX) and a saint's name. The dominical letters indicate the days on which Sunday falls.11 Starting with the first of January as 'a', the first seven letters of the alphabet are iteratively assigned to subsequent days (with 29 February left blank). Sundays could then be specified each year by one of these dominical letters (except for leap years when two letters were used). …

The Temple in Jerusalem: Using the Sun to date its Origins

The evaluation of the Herodian Temple complex on the basis of building analysis allowed the position and orientation of the Solomonian Temple on the Holy Rock on the Temple Mount to be reconstructed. The examination of the orientation of the temple axis on the basis of astronomy led to the discovery that the Temple of Solomon was laid out on the axis of the rising sun on Pessach 957 BCE. It also proved possible to discover the day of consecration of the First Temple, the Day of the Holy Convocation, in 951 BCE. Together, these two dates produce the biblical construction period of seven years. The date of the consecration of the Second Temple was the Day of Atonement in the year 515 BCE. As these days are all movable feasts, they are valid only for the particular years given.