Paradox Of Preservation Research Articles

John Vought and the Preservation Paradox

The War for Independence was both an intercontinental war and a civil war between Patriot rebels and Loyalists. Some colonists, “disaffected” with the war, sought to remain neutral. Especially in the middle colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, the tripartite division of the population meant Patriot rebels were often an embattled minority. About two-thirds of New Jersey’s population did not support the rebellion. This raises a preservation paradox. Today, almost all preserved sites are Patriot rebel sites, which promotes a popular, simplistic narrative. The dominant story of the American Revolution overlooks both the fact that Patriot rebels were often in the minority and that most Loyalists were people of integrity, no less than their opponents. The complexity of the revolutionary experience is swept from memory. The story of America’s first civil war can best be told where Loyalists are interpreted as protagonists and as actual people not misguided cyphers. Yet today in all of New Jersey, only two homes, Marlpit Hall in Monmouth County and the Vought House in Hunterdon, are interpreted as Loyalist sites. Tracing the experiences of the Vought family broadens our perspective and complicates our understanding of this crucial time and place. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are challenged to present a fuller, more nuanced account of those who were disaffected, remained loyal, or took up arms, often alongside British and Hessians troops as uniformed New Jersey Volunteers. A more balanced account may also increase appreciation of the hardships faced by Patriot rebels and New Jersey’s distinctive place at the crossroads of continental war and the epicenter of civil conflict.

Never forget? Memory maintenance on an aging platform

This article addresses the intersection between platforms, their sociotechnical process of aging and memory practice, by focusing on local social platform OakdaleTalk and its use in reflecting on September 11, 2001. Founded in 1997, OakdaleTalk serves the town of Oakdale in New Jersey, a place significantly affected by the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Situated in literature on digital memory work, this analysis draws on interviews with 15 OakdaleTalk members who have used the platform to reflect on September 11th. Asking how users maintain particular meanings of this date while negotiating sociotechnical changes to the site over time – including the loss of posts from 2001 – it discusses how users perpetuate hyperlocal interpretation and describes how community members grapple with lost content. The article concludes by proposing a ‘preservation paradox’, an emerging memory practice under platformized media conditions describing a contradiction in user preservation attitudes and behaviors toward posts of memory-related significance.

Archaeal lipid diversity, alteration, and preservation at the Cathedral Hill deep sea hydrothermal vent, Guaymas Basin, Gulf of California, and its implications regarding the deep time preservation paradox

Archaea are among the earliest evolved organisms. Today, they exist in nearly every habitable environment and their highly recalcitrant membrane lipids are both abundant and easily detected in modern sediments. Yet, unlike bacteria and eukaryotes, the lipid biomarker signatures of archaea are almost entirely absent in the ancient rock record (>145 Ma). We present a comprehensive study of archaeal lipids from the Cathedral Hill hydrothermal vent complex in Guaymas Basin, Gulf of California. Here, porewaters reach 155 °C by 21 cm below the sea floor (cmbsf), which enables the near-complete tracking of sedimentary organic matter (SOM) accumulation, diagenetic alteration and thermochemical transformation into petroleum-like hydrocarbons within and beyond the habitable zone of life. Identified intact polar lipids (IPLs) of living archaea included mono- and di-glycosidic archaeols (1G-AR, 2G-AR) and glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (1G- and 2G-GDGTs). The 1G- and 2G-ARs, potentially derive from methane-oxidizing archaeal groups ANME-1 and ANME-2 and anaerobic thermophilic methanogens, reach sediment depths of ∼ 135 cm and 50 °C temperatures. The 1G-and 2G-GDGT lipids reach a depth of ~180 cm where vent fluid temperatures are ~145 ± 15 °C. Core lipids (CLs) include archaeols (AR) and isoprenoidal and branched GDGTs (iGDGTs, brGDGTs). The core GDGTs (cGDGTs) closest to the vent center have high rates of lipid loss. Up to 95% of all identified archaeal biomarkers, including lipids supplied from the upper water column, are degraded or recycled in the surface sediments and do not reach conditions of late diagenesis and catagenesis. Only ∼ 0.11%, proportional to the lipid bound component in the protokerogen, marks thermochemically cracked biphytane – a prominent archaeal hydrocarbon biomarker. This extreme reduction indicates archaeal lipids do not necessarily become incorporated into kerogen thereby helping to explain the deep time archaeal lipid preservation paradox.

How Leaders with Divergent Visions Generate Novel Strategy: Navigating the Paradox of Preservation and Modernization in Swiss Watchmaking

How do leaders with divergent visions for their organization come together to create a novel strategy? This paper employs paradox as a lens to investigate how leader-dyads can integrate opposing st...

The preservation paradox and natural capital

Many ecological economists have argued that some natural capital should be preserved for posterity. Yet, among environmental philosophers, the preservation paradox entails that preserving parts of nature, including the items denoted by natural capital, is impossible. The paradox suggests that nature is a realm of phenomena independent of intentional human agency, and that preserving and restoring nature require intentional human agency. Therefore, no one can preserve or restore nature (without making it artificial). While this article argues that the preservation paradox is more difficult to resolve than ordinarily recognized, it also concludes by sketching a positive way forward to understand what it means to preserve natural capital during the Anthropocene.

The privatization of street art and the preservation paradox

Abstract Impactful online and hyped in the media, street art remains an art world enigma: It’s commercial success is celebrated but its public iterations still exist somewhere between public art and vandalism. This article presents the street artist’s practice as a two-part enterprise, comprised of commercial works created for resale and public works intended as gifts to the public. Interdependent and inextricably linked, both elements exist as two sides of the same practice in a strategy informed by the success of twentieth-century street artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Conceptually centred around authentication, a street artist’s dual practice discourages the sale of public works by declaring them inauthentic post-removal, complicating their ability to be preserved for the very public for which they are originally intended. This article examines the consequences of this dual practice, focusing specifically on the paradoxical position of removed public works and the systems which enable their legal sales without the artist’s involvement. The article concludes with an argument advocating for the preservation of public works, in order to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the street artist’s practice.

The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore. By Laura Alice Watt. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. xix + 345 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $26.95, e-book $26.95.

<i>The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore</i>. By Laura Alice Watt. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. xix + 345 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $26.95, e-book $26.95.

Glimpses through the Gates: Gentrification and the Continuing Histories of the Devon County Pauper Lunatic Asylum

This paper considers the continuing histories of the post-asylum landscape of the Devon County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, built between 1842 and 1845 and closed in 1987, with reference to its gentrification into Devington Park, a gated housing community. It begins by considering how disciplinary power has been reconfigured and revalorized by gentrification, including the deployment of “neo-disciplinary power” to control those outside the Devington Park boundary so as to maintain the positional good of security offered by the development. The paper then moves to consider the influence of gentrification on participant psychogeographies, demonstrating how the preservation paradox has engendered a shift from dormant to active participation. In terms of Tuan’s (1974) concept of topophilia Devington Park has become nostalgically haunted by “past structures of meaning and material presences from other times and lives” (Till 2005:9)

The Paradox of Preservation

Abstract This article explores historical, political, and professional paradoxes that underlie efforts to preserve cultural heritage. These paradoxes are illustrated through five case studies: the discovery of the Nag Hammadi bindings, approaches to the preservation of Auschwitz, the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the creation of a protective structure for the Hamar Cathedral ruins. Although it is not possible to preserve everything, it is suggested that the shift from the traditional custodial model of caring for collections to one with greater community input may lead to new preservation strategies—and to new ways of defining preservation. Through our attempts to preserve under highly complex circumstances and equally complex issues, our standard notions of what constitutes preservation come into question, and some aspects of preservation remain paradoxical.

The “Preservation Paradox”: Microbes as a Key to Exceptional Fossil Preservation in the Kirkpatrick Basalt (Jurassic), Antarctica

Thin sedimentary interbeds within the Kirkpatrick Basalt (Jurassic) of Antarctica harbor exquisitely preserved ‘soft-bodied’ organisms that lived in and around shallow freshwater lakes of the time, some of which were hydrothermally influenced. In the hottest pools, associated with magmatic vents, unusual carbonates were apparently precipitated by Archaea extremophiles adapted to living near active lava flows. In cooler lakes more distant to the vents, fine siliciclastic sediments record other communities of spinicaudatan (“conchostracan”) and notostracan crustaceans, larval insects, fishes, and ostracodes much of which may have been sustained by microbial mats, which are also well preserved in the deposits. Along the lake-edge, carbonized leaves, peat or coal, and silicified logs are often found in association with paleosols. Notably, evidence of carnivory, a primary taphonomic filter, is essentially lacking in these sediments. Exceptional preservation of non-biomineralized or lightly skeletonized organisms, therefore, reflects the original diversity of non-biomineralized or lightly skeletonized organisms present.

Managing Endangered Species Within the Use–Preservation Paradox: The Florida Manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris) as a Tourism Attraction

A significant challenge to wildlife managers in tourism settings is to provide visitors with opportunities to observe rare and endangered wildlife while simultaneously protecting the target species from deleterious impacts. Nearly 100,000 people annually visit Crystal River, Florida, USA to observe and swim with the Florida manatee, an endangered species. This research aimed to investigate and describe human-manatee interactions in a tourism context, to understand the salient issues related to such interactions as identified by stakeholders, and to recommend a course of action to address multiple interests in the planning and management of human-manatee interactions. Five issues were identified by all stakeholder groups: water quality, harassment, density and crowding, education, and enforcement. Currently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for manatee management, does not have mechanisms in place to manage the tourism component of the manatee encounter. Although a regulatory approach can be taken, a better approach would be to create an organization of tour operators to establish "best practices" that reflect the goal of the managing agency to enhance manatee protection (and thus ensure their livelihood) and to enhance the visitor experience.

Stressed-out Art: A Preservation Paradox

Stressed-out Art: A Preservation Paradox