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The success of Aotearoa New Zealand in preventing the spread of the Covid-19 virus was lauded internationally. Domestically, the reception was more complex, as the restrictions and guidelines introduced had considerable social and economic impacts. This profile focuses on the February 2022 occupation of the Parliament grounds in Wellington as the most visible manifestation of discontent. It examines the actors involved and how they attempted to draw on local cultural histories to justify their actions and make them recognisable to observers. The profile concludes by considering the potential legacy of the occupation and the forces it represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the period known as the ‘Phoney War,’ the comedic song ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’ became a significant cultural reference point in the UK, along with its singer, the renowned Gracie Fields. This was a notable achievement given the shifting public tastes within the country during a period of widespread uncertainty and transformation. However, despite the song’s wartime popularity, it has received little scholarly attention. This paper traces the rise and fall of ‘The Biggest Aspidistra’ in the UK during the Phoney War, exploring its impact through an analysis of the national symbols in its lyrics, its comedic delivery by Fields, and its collaborative musical approach. By bridging musicology and cultural history, this paper clarifies the importance of comprehensive song analysis to Second World War studies and underscores the role of humour in bolstering wartime morale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a safehouse project for survivors of witchcraft accusations that has been initiated by people of the Hewa‐speaking community located in the Papua New Guinea highlands. Belief in witchcraft and the killing of accused witches has a long cultural history among Hewa people, where it was formerly part of intergroup conflict and patterns of dominance and retribution. Contemporary Hewa witch killing often involves the use of torture and the targeting of children and infants, although these have no historical precedent. The safehouse has been established inside the community itself. Locating the safehouse where accusations and killing are taking place is a deliberate strategy to change the belief system that supports the identification and killing of accused witches. This model also ensures that people do not become internally displaced when they flee their accusers. The safehouse is designed to be self‐sufficient so that is does not become reliant on aid from external organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines historian Watsuji Tetsurõ's philosophical conception of climate within the context of its historical development and its critical reception by his peers in Kyoto School. Topics discussed include the contextualization of climate within cultural history, hermeneutic phenomenology and socio-historical development. It explores critical responses to each of these aspects by the peers.

This contribution explores in what ways the Kurdish experience may be called "colonial" and, by extension, what decolonizing Kurdish studies would or could amount to. Specifically, it explores whether and to what extent Kurdish vernacular learning may be qualified as "Indigenous learning" as it appears in decolonial critiques. The article suggests a genealogical approach to the epistemic dimensions of coloniality to explicate the radical historicity of knowledge and to make visible relations of domination and resistance in the field of knowledge and learning. Early modern Kurdish vernacular learning, it will be argued, was produced under the domination of Persian and Arabic, and to some extent it amounted to heresy, that is, an act of symbolic resistance. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the vernacularization of Kurdish language and learning in the seventeenth‐century Ottoman Empire and in Mollah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî's encounter with nineteenth‐century Russian imperialism and Orientalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As retrospective national bibliography, VD 16, VD 17, and VD 18 all document printed works of German-speaking countries and regions between 1500–1800, and they have developed into vital tools for research on European cultural history. More than 730,000 catalogued and almost 587,000 digitalized titles are collected in these bibliographies, which also offer a huge potential for distant-reading approaches. In the paper, we outline challenges and prospects for the further development of these VD bibliographies and their historically collected data. The way forward for VD is the future development of a central index and enhancement of data quality and participation structures to create a research-friendly national bibliography for the Early Modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dress may show the characteristics of an era, a country, a community or a person. As in other folk arts, clothing is one of the most vibrant documents of cultures. Since folk clothing, which is a cultural product, is directly related to people, it is an indicator of the people's modes of living. The colours, patterns and motifs especially used in folk clothing provide important information on such matters. This article deals with the colours and patterns of the folk clothing in the regions within Romania. For this purpose, samples of folk clothing belonging to the regions considered as the most traditional are illustrated and the elements of folk clothing examined in terms of colour and pattern features. The article lists various colours and patterns and shows how their configurations serve as identifying markers for the various regional locations of their wearers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental regulations restricting the use of a natural resource or species often have unintended consequences. One example is prohibitions on the international trade in culturally important endangered wildlife. Trade restrictions may artificially increase scarcity and, consequently, value. In China, international trade restrictions may trigger bouts of speculative investment that have the opposite effect of the restrictions' intent. We examined how China's speculative economy and cultural history have together led to unintended consequences when regulating wildlife trade. In China, wildlife markets occupy a legal gray area that can make regulations ineffectual or even counterproductive. In extreme cases, prohibiting trade can provoke market booms. Further unintended consequences include potential cultural backlash. In China and across the Global South, international trade restrictions are sometimes considered a continuation of a longstanding history of Western intervention and thus may not be enforced as strongly or may generate resentment. This pushback has contributed to rising calls to decolonialize conservation and may lead to growing alliances between China and other Global South countries when negotiating international wildlife trade restrictions in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guerriera Guerrieri is a protagonist of the Italian cultural history of the last century, remembered for the intensity of her work and for the multiplicity of initiatives and actions that characterized her professional activity as a librarian and which still allow us today to remember her as a figure of absolute importance in Italy; among these, the development of cataloging rules, the cataloging of periodicals and the diffusion of books and reading, activities which he carried out with an awareness not only about librarianship, but also about cultural and bibliographical aspects. Guerrieri's professional and personal life, however, was not simply dotted with satisfactions and successes, but the war, some family deaths, the instability of a residence, and envy and slander exacerbated by the fact that she was a capable and esteemed woman in her own environment, forced her to resist tenaciously until she was discharged from service. To the analysis and contextualization of the information already known, this essay adds the critical presentation of others documents from the numerous documents contained in his personal file preserved in Rome at the Central State Archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We combine unsupervised machine learning and econometric methods to study England's print culture in the pivotal sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Machine learning synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. Topics include the expected, such as Natural Philosophy, and the unexpected, such as Baconian Theology. Timelines suggest that religious and political discourse gradually became less antagonistic and economic topics more prominent. The epistemology associated with Bacon was present in theological debates already before Bacon's epistemological contributions. Vector autoregression estimates provide insight into the coevolution of ideas on religion, science, and institutions. Innovations in religious ideas stimulated focus on science, especially at times when Puritanism was prominent in religious discourse. Neither science nor institutional thought evidence secularization. The Glorious Revolution and the Civil War did not spur debates on institutions nor did the founding of the Royal Society markedly elevate attention to science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La Proveedora is an impressive archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert. The site has evidence of long-term human occupation and is represented by varied and extensive cultural remains, including: structures; lithics; ceramics; and shell artifacts. These date from between circa 2100 BC and up to the sixteenth century. However, the most prominent features at the site consist of thousands of petroglyphs on its hillsides. Three descriptive categories of rock art analysis will be discussed and the existence of a particular style in the creation of petroglyphs will be suggested. As will be discussed below, the combination of rock art designs and techniques allows us to propose what I call the "Caborca Style." This proposal makes sense within the framework of the regional cultural history of the Sonoran Desert, in which petroglyphs are only one cultural component involved in the development of these societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La particularité identitaire de l'enfant de migrants vient révéler une certaine vulnérabilité lors du processus identitaire à l'adolescence qui peut venir réveiller des transmissions inconscientes inter- et transgénérationnelles capables de se nicher au sein des symptômes de l'adolescent. L'objectif de l'étude présentée dans cet article est de mettre en évidence, à partir du dispositif thérapeutique des consultations transculturelles, les leviers thérapeutiques permettant une mise en récit et une transmission consciente de l'histoire familiale et culturelle et de penser à leur transposition vers d'autres dispositifs. L'étude montre le soutien qu'apporte la consultation transculturelle afin de permettre aux familles de mettre des mots sur l'histoire familiale. Même si certaines spécificités du dispositif transculturel ne sont pas exportables à d'autres, des espaces thérapeutiques groupaux ou individuels peuvent se saisir des leviers thérapeutiques mis en lumière. Many studies have highlighted the psychological impact and resulting vulnerability inherent in being second-generation immigrant (SGI) children. Some studies have also demonstrated that the symptoms of SGI adolescents can be the manifestations of traumas that have been unconsciously transmitted from one generation to another. The purpose of the research presented in this article is to investigate the different therapeutic processes and tools used by therapists during transcultural therapy to support conscious intergenerational and transgenerational transmission in their care of SGI adolescents and their participating family members. The monitoring of three patients, SGI adolescents, of different ages and origins, provided data that were analyzed using a clinical and transcultural qualitative method. The analysis of 10 sessions of transcultural psychotherapy with each SGI adolescent patient reveals, first of all, that this therapeutic device is illustrative in the care of SGI children suffering from the symptoms of inter- and transcultural transmissions of trauma. It also highlights various therapeutic levers and approaches to transcultural counseling that can enable families to consciously unveil their family and cultural histories. This research project also proposes a methodology where the inter- and transgenerational transmissions can be adapted to favor the healthy development of SGI adolescents' identity and that can also be applied in other group or individual therapeutic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the development of "grassroots cultural infrastructure"—namely, "cultural halls" and "cultural stations"—at the county level and below since the Mao Zedong era. Since their formation, the party-state has accorded cultural halls and stations a critical role in propagating policies, educating citizens, and conducting cultural activities. Based on historical gazetteers, Chinese Communist Party histories, government policies, handbooks, and statistical yearbooks, this article shows that frequently changing policy priorities meant cultural halls and stations were wedged in between the demands of the party-state and the people and were ill-equipped to fulfill their role. Mass political campaigns during the Mao era wrought havoc, and commercialization during reform and opening up undermined their relevance. In the mid-2000s, a focus on service provision resulted in higher expectations that were impossible to fulfill. As a remedy, after 2015, cultural infrastructure has been reorganized and increasingly deployed via volunteers and technology. This article therefore sheds light not only on the history of grassroots cultural infrastructure but also its future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Living I was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy" by Lyndal Roper is a collection of essays that explores Martin Luther's controversial and dominant role during his lifetime and his lasting impact on German culture. Roper examines Luther's use of polemical assaults, his reliance on dreams for personal insights, his complex relationship with secular authorities, his use of names and hate speech, his strong anti-Papalism, and his fierce anti-Semitic views. The book also discusses Luther's enduring legacy and the commemorative culture surrounding him. While the book provides new insights and data, some critics argue that it uses coarse language and presents a simplified and teleological version of history. [Extracted from the article]

The author reflects on his experience of co-editing the volume "The Routledge Companion to Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Spain: Ideas, Practices, Imaginings," which covers topics about contemporary Spanish social, political and cultural history, with Peninsular studies scholar Luisa Elena Delgado. He describes Delgado's background and her contributions to the making of the volume, including making difficult editorial decisions and selecting authors for the thematic sections.

This essay explores the shifting matrix underlying the pervasive theater that enacts the making and unmaking of human subjectivity by focusing on key historical transformations and prominent contemporary manifestations. Offering a comparative analysis of Denis Diderot's theory of the actor, and Antonin Artaud's theater of cruelty, I argue that the paradox of the human had led to human–artwork hybrids well before the digital age of the posthuman recast the body as virtuality. Drawing on a broader understanding and scope of human–artwork hybridization, I examine two different yet equally memorable and infamous responses in 2015 to the European refugee crisis: the Petra László video and Norbert Baksa's Der Migrant. The aesthetic and cultural practices revolving around the staging of the European refugee crisis constitute a key sphere in which this hybridization is tested, played out and in the context of East-Central Europe, calibrated to a ballad tradition whose generic conventions were reinvented in conjunction with a growing national identity in the 19th century. The ballad of 'The Walled-Up Wife' has enjoyed sustained popularity in East-Central Europe, ever since its anachronistic 'rediscovery' in multiple national literatures around the mid 1800s. It deserves critical attention, for its extensive cultural history as well as its rich vernacular heritage can shed new light on the ways in which the idea of material embodiment comes to bear extended meanings for a reconceptualization of the human in digital spaces of aesthetic rather than merely socio-political signification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing across multiple media platforms, Barstool Sports ("Barstool") is one of the most important sport brands in the United States. While Barstool's critics frequently assert that the company is "racist," few, if any, detail how their racial politics work. Through a brief genealogy of Barstool's cultural history and a close critical reading of "The Barstool Documentary Series," we show how Barstool's racial politics operate through gender—specifically the affective appeal of Big Man sovereignty and the homosocial bonds of White fratriarchy —to create and normalize racially exclusive and White male-dominant social worlds that dovetail remarkably with racial and gender ideas that organize what Maskovsky calls Trump's "White nationalist postracialism" and the Proud Boys' "Western chauvinism." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 21 February 2007, 15-year-old Carly Ryan’s body was found in the waters at Port Elliot in South Australia. A highly public investigation and trial followed, during which it was revealed that 48-year-old Melburnian man Garry Francis Newman had used a false online identity to seduce and lure Ryan to her death. In its coverage, the Australian media scrutinised Ryan’s online profiles and dramatised the dangers that cyberspace posed to young women. Examining these reports reveals wider anxieties over the internet blurring the boundary between public and private—a boundary historically assumed to keep young women safe. Journalists presented the online world as being both entirely public and inappropriately hidden from adult view. Cyberspace was framed as a place where young women could “act out” (self-sexualise) outside parents’ control and invite the “wrong” kind of attention. In this article, I contextualise this coverage within historic fears about stranger danger. I demonstrate how journalists drew from the contemporary debate in Australia surrounding the sexualisation of children in media—and its gendered nature. Further, I argue that the Australian media framed the internet as disrupting the idea of the family home as a safe haven and upsetting traditional parent–child relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses two works of contemporary Australian fiction—Wayne Macauley’s Caravan Story and Julie Koh’s “Inquiry Regarding the Recent Goings-On in the Woods”—and places their depictions of artists under attack in the context of Australian cultural policy history. Despite the surreal hyperviolence contained in these stories, their concerns neatly align with the academic criticisms of cultural policy in their respective eras. Caravan Story, published at the end of the John Howard era, shows how a focus on economic return in lieu of artistic merit can erode the value artists place on themselves and their work. “Inquiry”, published soon after Minister for the Arts George Brandis had significantly reduced available arts funding, represents the drastic effect the funding cuts had on artists and the passionate community response. The texts are further connected by their optimistic endings, contextualised here through an exploration of the artists’ biographies and their struggles to push back against cultural demands of economic success. This article shows how these experimental works of fiction make the case for the intrinsic value of the arts through narratives that reject the economic imperative and in their very constitution as creative works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the cultural politics of the November Uprising through the lens of popularity. It investigates both the idea of popularity that pervaded the discourse of the time and the social practice of using popular reputations to shape the politics of the Uprising. Instead of treating popularity as just another manifestation of the ideological conflicts typical of the age of revolutions, this paper posits that the discourse surrounding popularity became a crucial axis of conceptualizing public individuality during the uprising. The debates surrounding popularity, including those concerning the dangers of hasty political ambitions, the increasing importance of personality in public life and the search for alternative sources of legitimacy, fostered an evolving political landscape in which it became possible to envision a different way of being a public figure and to reconsider the tools available for shaping public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate the influence of the Blended Learning model on students' learning outcomes in the subject of Islamic Cultural History in class XI at the Private Islamic Senior High School Yasti Singkawang in the academic year 2020/2021. The research method used is an experiment with a pre-test post-test control group design. The research sample consists of class XI students at the Private Islamic Senior High School Yasti Singkawang divided into control and experimental groups. Data was collected through learning outcome tests and analyzed using statistical analysis. The results show that the Blended Learning model has a positive influence on students' learning outcomes in the subject of Islamic Cultural History at the Private Islamic Senior High School Yasti Singkawang. These findings provide an important contribution to the development of effective learning methods in an Islamic educational environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, "Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology: Belonging in the Age of Originality" by Matthew Gelbart, explores the relationship between musical genres and the Romantic ideology of originality and individuality. Gelbart argues that genres are social contracts that shape the expectations and interpretations of music. He traces the effects of Romantic ideology on genre from the 19th century to the present day, highlighting the tension between originality and genre. However, the article neglects to fully consider the role of style in relation to genre and the historical context of cultural production. Overall, Gelbart's work provides valuable insights into the social and ideological dimensions of musical genres. [Extracted from the article]

Analytic moral philosophers have generally failed to engage in any substantial way with the cultural history of morality. This is a shame, because a genealogy of morals can help us accomplish two important tasks. First, a genealogy can form the basis of an epistemological project, one that seeks to establish the epistemic status of our beliefs or values. Second, a genealogy can provide us with functional understanding, since a history of our beliefs, values or institutions can reveal some inherent dynamic or pattern which may be problematically obscured from our view. In this paper, I try to make good on these claims by offering a sketchy genealogy of emancipatory values, or values which call for the liberation of persons from systems of dominance and oppression. The real history of these values, I argue, is both epistemologically vindicatory and functionally enlightening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My essay focuses on the figure of the phantom in the work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the ethnographer Michel Leiris. I study their evocation of gestures as a site of communication and argue that within the colonial situation all communication—including the gestural—is ghosted by histories and cultural understandings that remain opaque. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tramway of Turku was closed in 1972. The last tram rides were memorable public events where the tramcars got a floral tribute and people came to say farewell. This article concentrates on the urban cultural memory of the tram after the closure and is now an integral part of the city's urban culture and identity. The Museum Centre of Turku holds many tram-related materials and has published research on the history of the tram, but it does not have premises for a continuing exhibition, so keeping the memory alive has been up to private citizens, civic activity, and political activism. The tram was photographed by professional and private photographers, which has enabled a rich visual heritage that has been used in various ways. At the present, the memories affect the planning of a possible new tram, although how the old tram relates to future plans, remains complicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional sport is a central element of our daily entertainment that contributes to shaping us individually and bonding us collectively: it provides us with shared 'historic' moments. This article is interested in these moments, and how the field of sports generates them, by asking the following questions: (1) has the frequency of 'historic moments' changed over time, and (2) is the way we make sports history consistent throughout the years? We conducted a temporal analysis of newspaper and magazine articles (n = 1062) published in France (Le Monde, l'Équipe) and in the United States (USA Today, Sports Illustrated) during three time periods in the 21st century (2003, 2010, 2019). Our results show that: (1) as time passes, 'historic' moments occur more frequently; (2) sporting history is increasingly linked to social dimensions; and (3) statistical performances continue to mark history above all else. Although performance-based achievements are consistently celebrated, sporting history cannot be separated from our collective social existence, and the currents therein. We show that the act of making sports history is also bound to the normative, social, and cultural history of a society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lebanon's rich history as a cultural crossroad spanning millennia has significantly impacted the genetic composition of its population through successive waves of migration and conquests from surrounding regions. Within modern-day Lebanon, the Koura district stands out with its unique cultural foundations, primarily characterized by a notably high concentration of Greek Orthodox Christians compared to the rest of the country. This study investigates whether the prevalence of Greek Orthodoxy in Koura can be attributed to modern Greek heritage or continuous blending resulting from the ongoing influx of refugees and trade interactions with Greece and Anatolia. We analyzed both ancient and modern DNA data from various populations in the region which could have played a role in shaping the current population of Koura using our own and published data. Our findings indicate that the genetic influence stemming directly from modern Greek immigration into the area appears to be limited. While the historical presence of Greek colonies has left its mark on the region's past, the distinctive character of Koura seems to have been primarily shaped by cultural and political factors, displaying a stronger genetic connection mostly with Anatolia, with affinity to ancient but not modern Greeks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, carried out in the field of Political History, aims to discuss American national interests, from its foreign policy, and its relationship with its neoliberal discourse. To this end, it presents a bibliographic study on the way in which the topic is treated in monographic works available in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), as well as the analysis of the concepts used to construct proven theses and dissertations. In total, one hundred (100) documents were analyzed whose content was developed as proposed by Bardin, with the objective of administering evidence, taking into account two hypotheses: 1) American national interests and its foreign policy would (not) be areas of interest within Brazilian historiography; and that 2) there would be few studies, within the field of history, that observed American national interests and its foreign policy from the perspective of present-day history. There is a concentration of work on the topic in the areas of International Relations and Political Sciences, although the topic has been approached by historians especially through Political History, Cultural History, Social History, Global History and Economic History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the philosophy of divination in the Xici, a pivotal text within the Zhouyi, highlighting its transformation from a divinatory manual to a philosophical treatise. Topics discussed include the historical context of the Xici during the Warring States period, the interconnectedness of divination and philosophy, and the authors' perspectives on fear and anxiety in relation to understanding life's uncertainties.

The manuscript of Kasgarlı Mahmud, Divanu Lugati’t Turk, is not only the first dictionary of Turkish but also important for containing many concepts within the history of Turkish culture. Due to this importance, it has been the subject of many studies from the first quarter of the 20th century when it was discovered to the present day. The work, which contains many concepts ranging from the linguistic features of Turkish tribes to the names of cities, towns, villages, rivers, lakes, and mountains in the 11th-century Turkish world, as well as personal names; from folk literature to traditions; from folk medicine to Turkish military terminology, is a bedside book that can be evaluated from a very broad perspective. It is not just a repository of words recorded with their meanings, but rather, it appears as a composite vessel that combines centuries of Turkish cultural ecology under the roof of terminological integrity, given in a cinematographic narrative style. In this context, in our study where we present many words, concepts, and examples of a comprehensive military terminology within the 11th-century Turkish military tradition, ranging from a fully-equipped army structure to military strategy and practices, using a cinematographic style; the Turkish concept of war is examined through the war scenes in the Divanu Lugati’t Türk, and the 11th-century Turkish art of war is revealed by following the chronological method of before, during, and after the war. As a result of the study, it is seen that the political and military success of the Turkish nation, which is at the forefront of the art and philosophy of war in the construction of culture and civilization in world history, is not accidental, based on the concepts related to the military organization mechanism of the 11th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that a systematic change was introduced into Icelandic society between 1096 and 1133. The main events concerning this change were the introduction of the tithe in 1096, the Icelandic Church changing allegiance from the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen to a newly constituted archbishopric of Lund in 1104, the foundation of a new see at Hólar in 1106, the codification of Icelandic laws in 1118, and finally the establishment of Christian law and the composition of The Book of Icelanders sometime between 1122 and 1133. These changes all took place within a single generation, and they were led by the same individuals. Together, they heralded a cultural revolution that changed the constitution and the status of the Church in society. Among the major components were the advent of literacy and formal education, the institutionalization of the Church, and the territorialization of ecclesiastical authority. These radical changes affected secular institutions and led to a reorganization of society on many levels. Within a few decades, the political culture of Iceland had been transformed. Because Iceland was a country without any executive authority, this transformation, enacted through the willful submission of the leading people to their ecclesiastical leaders, was remarkable. It led to the Europeanization of Icelandic society in cultural matters, and at a later stage, to the introduction of an executive government in the thirteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines the public memory of Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune. In 1938, Bethune traveled to China to serve at the communist front and to treat soldiers fighting against the invading Japanese army. Throughout China, Bethune is a household name and a communist icon. Back in Canada, however, his name does not evoke the same ubiquity. While Canadians remembered Bethune through biographies, a film, statues, and a small museum, his story in the Anglophone world is confined primarily to the telling of distant history. To explain Bethune's greater notoriety and public presence in China, this essay first turns our attention to Chinese sources that mythologized Bethune's death in 1939. The essay then revisits Chinese propaganda that established Bethune as a lasting political symbol during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. These national efforts show how a volunteer surgeon such as Bethune became such an important figure in a remote foreign country. China's Communist Party turned Bethune's death into a political event to rally support for their war of resistance against Japan. Later, during the tumultuous period of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong used Bethune to symbolize unwavering service and loyalty to leader and party. This essay utilizes primary materials in McGill's Osler Library and commentary from the field of memory studies to contextualize Bethune and to situate him within the broader narrative of political education that arose in China during the Cultural Revolution. A layered interpretation of Bethune — as doctor, martyr, and symbolic hero — slowly emerges. Political forces in China transformed his memory into legacy and carry this complicated figure into the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pakhangba is considered to be one of the foremost deities in Meitei pantheon. This deity, especially in his lairen (serpentine dragon) form, is integral to the cultural sensibilities and rituals of the Meiteis in Manipur. Taking the centrality of Pakhangba in Meitei politico-cultural space into perspective, this paper presents a reading of (Lai)ren Pakhangba lore beyond the cosmological and cultural underpinnings. Simultaneously, it examines if the lore of lairen -- ensconced in the collective ethos of the people -- and the symbolic presence of this deity in both spiritual and secular space be explained as an expression of the 'collective unconscious'. This paper establishes Pakhangba and his lore as a psychocultural connective that binds and evokes the indigeneity and identity of the people. At the same time, it foregrounds the centrality of nurturing and promoting such psychocultural connective in -- beyond evoking a shared ancestry and pasts -- imagining a more viable and tangible polity that veers away from a single-ethnicity based or territory-oriented politics and polity that undermine the centuries-old politico-cultural history of Manipur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article expands on the generally accepted hypothesis in cultural history, that numerous migrants, exiles, or expatriates were among the most prolific translators in early modern Europe. It examines Dutch and German translators of English devotional literature in the seventeenth century in terms of the following framework: the extent to which these individuals were involved in migration, and the nature of the relationship between border crossings and translation. I will compare several highly mobile translators from the Hartlib circle, with the three most prolific Dutch and German translators of devotional literature during this period. My findings suggest that it was not migration but mobility that stimulated the collection and translation of devotional literature. Mobility, however, was not the only determinant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt" by Andrew Simon is a well-researched book that explores the history and cultural significance of cassette technology in Egypt from the 1970s to the 1990s. The book argues that cassette technology played a crucial role in understanding the contestations related to nation-building during this era. Simon examines the arrival and circulation of cassette technology, public debates about its impact on cultural production, and its subversive potential. The book offers a unique perspective on Egypt's cultural landscape and provides insights into the everyday experiences of Egyptians during this time period. [Extracted from the article]

The sustainability of dry regions has become a key issue for global development. Their natural and cultural landscapes are facing threats resulting from ongoing global changes. This paper presents an overview of geomorphological, climatic-environmental, and archaeological studies in the hyper-arid eastern Tarim Basin (Lop Nur), northwest China, a world-renowned crossroad for early east-west communications, to provide a scientific foundation for sustaining its nature-culture heritage. The late Quaternary landscape changes in the Lop Nur region are characterised by cycles between oases and yardang deserts, shaping the extensive aeolian landform. Archaeological evidence suggests humans' adaptation and resilience to today what are viewed as inhospitable environments since the late Pleistocene by exploiting the diverse range of oasis resources, movement, and encouraging adjacent populations to diversify their subsistence base. Settlement- and regional-scale deterioration of available water resources, affected by environmental and climatic dynamics, caused the eventual abandonment. Periodic occupation and abandonment in the Lop Nur region accompanying oasis-desert/yardang environment cycles provide important lessons for present-day policymakers to contextualise the relationship between human communities and fragile ecosystems. The open-air sites in the Lop Nur region represent the best-preserved oasis-desert civilisation, suffering cultural history losses. We propose the urgent necessity to establish a transdisciplinary database, construct a master chronological framework of settlement, and integrate the culture-nature heritage within the network of the Silk Roads. The scientific management of river networks is also critical for protecting those riverine cultural relics. The site- and group-level management of heritage needs to be adapted to the projected changes in climate and environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major source in the research on Baltic cultural history (Latvia, Estonia), including studies dedicated to the clothing of local inhabitants, are the drawings and descriptions of Johann Christoph Brotze (1742–1823), which date back to the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. They contain references to dyes and dyeing methods used by local peasants. The information recorded by J. C. Brotze, although fragmentary, is valuable because researchers lack documentary sources about the dyeing methods used in the 18th century in the territory of present-day Latvia. Additional research yields more extensive information about the contents of the descriptions. The current article will describe the experimental method that enabled the establishment of the specific dyeing technique, which, using Bixa orellana L., was employed to obtain the particular orange color referred to in the descriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War blurred the lines between "ordinary" and "literary" writing practices. Many sources corroborate this: necrologies written about poets who died in the act of writing not a poem but rather a letter, or introductions to poetry collections where bereaved families and friends admit they had no knowledge of their loved one's writing practices until they found a journal full of poems after the author's death, which they only published as a posthumous tribute. This article uses examples of French poetry of the Great War to explore this permeability between what is considered war poetry and what is considered war ephemera. The main question it addresses is what changes when we look at the war poems that were initially ephemera or ordinary writing. Whose stories get told when poetry is studied not as literature to be judged as accomplished or failed art but as a way of writing to make sense of the world? It argues that when we choose to read poems as ephemera and from the point of view of a larger anthropology of writing practices, diverse histories emerge and communities who write poetry not only as an artistic pursuit but also as a means of organizing experience and leaving traces behind reclaim ownership over their own narratives. This can challenge the false equivalence between the cultural history of warfare and an intellectual history of the elites at war and includes poetry within paradigmatic shifts that place objects at the centre of mediations of the experience of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Turkish cultural history, there is an uninterrupted continuity in the education of the Traditional Turkish Arts (TTA), with clear links to the Ottoman past and Islam. This article discusses how TTA were preserved and incorporated into the educational curriculum in the early Republican era, despite discourses that established a direct disengagement between the Republican nationalist project and the Ottoman past. Turning then to the dissemination of TTA under the AKP's rule as a reflection of neo-Ottomanism as a multi-faceted strategy, this article reveals their overlap with neo-liberal policies that bring about their commodification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On February 24, 2022, we embarked on a war journey into the unknown, witnessing the war in Ukraine. Our contact with the war is mediated (mainly by the media), yet painful and saturated with extreme emotions. This article is an autoethnographic description of the experiences of this journey of three academics from Poland, a frontline country. The metaphor of the road is carried out by evocative autoethnography in terms of its symbolism of personal journey of each of us; nevertheless, it also unifies our experiences of war into one tender narrative. Embedded in the essence of our autoethnographic narrative of the war is a constant openness to new circumstances, the natural dynamics of action at the front and in the frontier country, and the constant search for and discovery of one's own narrative identity. Each part of this path traveled is inscribed in the baggage of personal experience, a narrative of life in a frontier country, unification by the situation of witnessing the war, and the desire to express our resistance to it. It became a form of mental resistance, analysis, empathy, and concern which were our methods of struggle and a way of taking responsibility for the reality we witness. In the description, we used the "tender narrative" proposed in the texts of Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Asian Rural Institute (ARI)—a Christian, sustainable, nonprofit farm in Tochigi, Japan—keeps a strict schedule to ensure equality in job distribution and duration. Staff, participants, and volunteers must relinquish some control over their time and be present to do this work, two conditions that illuminate the privilege that many scholars have in their daily lives. As qualitative researcher, I was aware of some privileges that I brought with me but had not considered control over my work schedule one of them, until I was volunteering and researching at ARI. Implied in scholars' work schedules are time ontologies, which are culturally and contextually specific. Time is both material and conceptual, meaning that although a day has a fixed length (a material condition), the way that we break up the day into hours and regions of the world into time zones, for example, is a product of thought and communication. With abstraction and standardization come issues of power and control. For researchers who work with communities in the field, it is worth considering time's complexities to help navigate issues, such as power, ethics, relationships, research sites, and trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study utilizes collaborative poetic autoethnography to explore the mentorship experiences of three Black women doctoral students at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Through a series of poems, the research illustrates the nuanced challenges and resilience in seeking guidance within spaces that often marginalize their voices. This writing centers intersectionality as a theoretical framework, illuminating the complex dynamics of identity as they intersect with academia. The poetic narratives serve as a way for expressing the lived realities of these students, highlighting the lack of Black women mentors and the consequent need to navigate a system not built with them in mind. The study calls for a reimagined mentorship that is acutely responsive to the multifaceted identities of Black women in academia, advocating for increased representation and intentional support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors detail the profound impact that Tami Spry has had on their lives and their work, but through her words and embodiments. The essay/performance uses Spry's own words in part to elevate their documentation of her influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This performative piece serves as a tribute to Tami L. Spry upon her retirement from academic teaching. The piece is considered a reprise because it is based on a shortened version given on a panel at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (2016) that celebrated the publication of her book, Autoethnography and the Other: Unsettling Power through Utopian Performatives. A variation of this piece was presented at the 2022 National Communication Association Convention in New Orleans on the panel: "The Place of Performance and the Performance of Tami L. Spry." The piece infuses citations in building an incomplete bibliography of her body of work. And like her body of work, this tribute text is a performance script. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the cultural history of Donald Duck and his friends in comics, highlighting their global popularity and influence in various forms of media. It explores how the Duck family comics have reflected societal changes over time, focusing on themes such as science, education, and ethnicity. The article discusses Disney's efforts to address representation of marginalized groups and gender roles, while also acknowledging the need for further diversity and inclusion. It also explores the portrayal of capitalism in the comics, noting that it offers a nuanced reflection of the economic structure. Overall, the article suggests that Disney's Duck comics are valuable artifacts that provide insights into American society. [Extracted from the article]

Insurance, and specifically life insurance, seems like an odd topic for the blues. Associated with urbanism and capitalism, the theme contests an understanding of the blues as an “authentic” expression of a rural folk culture. Focusing on a cluster of blues songs that reference life insurance reveals the consciousness of a long history of racialized exploitation and discrimination, including the everyday experiences associated with it. The representation of insurance in the blues also provides a window into polysemic modes of signifying and subtle forms of resistance.1 Recognizing the potential for insurance to function as fertile lyrical subject matter for messages of resistance or struggle requires excavating its long, racialized history extending back to the antebellum world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Theory of Constitutional History" discusses the need for a theory of constitutional history and the crisis in which the field finds itself. It seeks ways out of this crisis, considering interdisciplinarity and theory as possible solutions. The present volume contains 15 contributions from jurists and historians who deal with the theory of constitutional history. Deficiencies in historical and legal scholarship are pointed out, and suggestions for improvement are made, such as an opening to cultural history and an expansion of the horizon to the history of governance. It is emphasized that successful collaboration between disciplines is based on mutual respect, listening, and the development of common research questions. [Extracted from the article]