Who is theory for?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc-Antoine Kaeser
Keyword(s):  
Solid Body ◽  
Practice Theory ◽  
Daily Practice ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Broad Definition ◽  
Archaeological Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Is Theory ◽  
Definition Of

Theory holds a paradoxical position in archaeology: its symbolic prestige is restricted to academic circles, and contrasts with the poor influence it exerts upon the daily practice of archaeology. This problem relates to the lack of a solid body of doctrines, but also to the methodological blurredness and disciplinary unsteadiness of archaeology. Past ideological abuses of interpretative models, as well as the tangible materiality of the archaeological sources have often encouraged demagogic, positivist attitudes among researchers, where down-to-earth explanations become evidence that discredit the need for theory in archaeology. We use a very broad definition of “theory”, encompassing the epistemology and the historiographic analysis of archaeological research: theory deals with everything that is linked to the nature of archaeology, to its scientific approaches, and to its relationship to the past and present. Functioning as a guide to archaeological practice, theory can therefore not be the field of specialists only.

The ‘anthropologization’ of archaeological heritage

2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Kolen
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Archaeological Heritage ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Archaeological Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
Practice Method ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Transmission Of Values

AbstractWith the growing impact of postprocessual orientations, archaeologists have become increasingly aware that the production of values resides in all aspects of archaeological research. This awareness has also paved the way for a more encompassing concept of archaeological heritage, which of course not only includes the management of material traces but also the transmission of values through archaeological practice, method and theory. Many archaeologists and heritage managers now propagate the belief that reflecting on value production will better equip archaeology for ethical concerns or that it will improve its engagement with society, and that adopting anthropological perspectives and key notions may help to achieve this goal. This contribution explores the opposite proposition: that an anthropologically informed reflexive attitude is important to understand present-day heritage practices, but in most cases it is desirable for archaeologists to tell stories about the past, not about themselves, in order to be really engaged with public and ethical issues. Arguments for this proposition can be derived from the discipline's specific articulation of discovery, difference and time depth (including the ‘long term’), which traditionally shape archaeological research and narrative to a high degree, not only within academic discourse but also in a wider social setting.

Facing Up to Scarcity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara H. Fried
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Epistemic Uncertainty ◽  
Tort Law ◽  
Corrective Justice ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Broad Definition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Harm To Others ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Principal Strains

The essays collected in this book take stock of the nonconsequentialist project over the past fifty years, in two key areas. The first part focuses on the moral “duty not to harm” others. Under a suitably broad definition of harm, that duty encompasses most of the restrictions imposed on individual conduct in the secular, liberal state. It examines how that duty has been cashed out in ostensibly nonaggregative terms in the principal strains of nonconsequentialist thought: tragic choices (trolleyology), libertarian property rights, corrective justice in tort law, and Scanlonian contractualism. Nonconsequentialists have not only failed to articulate a viable alternative to aggregation in this domain; they are doomed to fail, because in a world of scarcity (in the broadest sense) and epistemic uncertainty, everything we do poses some risk of harm to others’ fundamental interests, a conflict that can be resolved only through aggregation. The second part examines the treatment of distributive justice in nonconsequentialist political theory over the past fifty years, focusing on Nozickian libertarianism, Rawlsianism, left-libertarianism, and social contractarianism. It argues that whatever the moral attractiveness of the various distributive schemes proposed, none is logically entailed by the normative premises from which it is ostensibly derived. Unlike the argument in the first part, this is not an argument for consequentialism by logical elimination. Societal wealth need not be, and almost never is, distributed to optimize consequences. Rather, it underscores the relatively weak justifications that have been offered for some very strong conclusions.

scholarly journals Reforming Mexico’s Anti-Trafficking in Persons Legislation

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera ◽  
Arthur Sanders Montandon
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Trafficking In Persons ◽  
Broad Definition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Weak Rule

In the past few years, Mexico has taken a number of measures to further prevention, protection, and prosecution of trafficking in persons. The country’s government has signed international anti-trafficking conventions and has taken some aspects of widely accepted international definitions of this crime as a reference when drafting its anti-trafficking legislation. However, Mexican lawmakers have interpreted human trafficking in their own terms. Mexico’s current anti-trafficking legislation is based on a quite broad definition of trafficking in persons and shows serious limitations that have led to the misidentification of victims and traffickers, as well as to re-victimization. This adds to Mexico’s weak rule of law, corruption, and the involvement of interest groups with particular agendas/ideologies that have obstructed reform. The present analysis demonstrates the imperative necessity to modify the current anti-trafficking legislation in Mexico and provides some basic suggestions for this much-needed reform.

Twenty-five Years of Archaeology in the Greater Southwest

1961 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-45
Author(s):  
Robert H. Lister
Keyword(s):  
Training Programs ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Small Areas ◽  
Field Training ◽  
The Past ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractArchaeological research in the Southwestern United States is reviewed in terms of advances in interpretation and in method and theory during the past quarter-century. Interpretative advances include the clearer understanding of the early Big Game Hunters, the filling of the gap between the early hunters and the sedentary villagers with manifestations of gatherers and collectors such as the Cochise and Desert cultures, the demonstration that the Desert culture has an antiquity comparable to that of the Big Game Hunters, the definition of the Anasazi, Hohokam, Mogollon, Sinagua, and Patayan variants of the sedentary, pottery-making agriculturalists, and the delineation of the connections between the Southwest and the northern Mexican portion of Nuclear America. Advances in method and theory have been most evident in the control over chronological problems, the development of interdisciplinary approaches, the establishment of culture classifications and pottery taxonomy, and the attempt to achieve problem-oriented archaeology in large salvage projects. The Southwest has long been characterized by long-term excavation at single sites or in small areas and by local development of academic and field training programs in archaeology.

Immunoferritin localization of intracellular antigens in positively stained frozen sections

1978 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-169
Author(s):  
K. T. Tokuyasu
Keyword(s):  
Surface Tension ◽  
Water Surface ◽  
Thin Layers ◽  
The Other ◽  
Positive Staining ◽  
Frozen Sections ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ultrathin Frozen Sections ◽  
Definition Of

During the past investigations of immunoferritin localization of intracellular antigens in ultrathin frozen sections, we found that the degree of negative staining required to delineate u1trastructural details was often too dense for the recognition of ferritin particles. The quality of positive staining of ultrathin frozen sections, on the other hand, has generally been far inferior to that attainable in conventional plastic embedded sections, particularly in the definition of membranes. As we discussed before, a main cause of this difficulty seemed to be the vulnerability of frozen sections to the damaging effects of air-water surface tension at the time of drying of the sections.Indeed, we found that the quality of positive staining is greatly improved when positively stained frozen sections are protected against the effects of surface tension by embedding them in thin layers of mechanically stable materials at the time of drying (unpublished).

High-Resolution, Low-Voltage SEM of Cell Wall Regeneration of Yeast Shizosaccharomyces Pombe Protoplasts

1988 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 208-211
Author(s):  
M. Osumi ◽  
N. Yamada ◽  
T. Nagatani
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscope ◽  
Scanning Electron Microscope ◽  
Low Voltage ◽  
Cell Wall Regeneration ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Probe Size ◽  
Beam Damage ◽  
Biological Field ◽  
Scanning Electron

Even though many early workers had suggested the use of lower voltages to increase topographic contrast and to reduce specimen charging and beam damage, we did not usually operate in the conventional scanning electron microscope at low voltage because of the poor resolution, especially of bioligical specimens. However, the development of the “in-lens” field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) has led to marked inprovement in resolution, especially in the range of 1-5 kV, within the past year. The probe size has been cumulated to be 0.7nm in diameter at 30kV and about 3nm at 1kV. We have been trying to develop techniques to use this in-lens FESEM at low voltage (LVSEM) for direct observation of totally uncoated biological specimens and have developed the LVSEM method for the biological field.

Derrida on Pornography: Putting (It) Up for Sale

Derrida Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Morris
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
English Translation ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
French Original ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Critical Discourses ◽  
Academic Debate

Over the past thirty years, academic debate over pornography in the discourses of feminism and cultural studies has foundered on questions of the performative and of the word's definition. In the polylogue of Droit de regards, pornography is defined as la mise en vente that is taking place in the act of exegesis in progress. (Wills's idiomatic English translation includes an ‘it’ that is absent in the French original). The definition in Droit de regards alludes to the word's etymology (writing by or about prostitutes) but leaves the referent of the ‘sale’ suspended. Pornography as la mise en vente boldly restates the necessary iterability of the sign and anticipates two of Derrida's late arguments: that there is no ‘the’ body and that performatives may be powerless. Deriving a definition of pornography from a truncated etymology exemplifies the prosthesis of origin and challenges other critical discourses to explain how pornography can be understood as anything more than ‘putting (it) up for sale’.

Holism, Chinese Medicine and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Scheid
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us ◽  
Shared Objective ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.

Problems in English Communicating Skills for Learners of English

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (07) ◽  
pp. 20484-20491
Author(s):  
Dr. Ishag Adam Hassan Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
English Language ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Daily Practice ◽  
Small Component ◽  
Curriculum Review ◽  
Comprehension Skills ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The University ◽  
Reading Comprehension Skills

This paper is devoted to presenting the methods in English communicating skills for Learners of English in general and the problems specific to University of Bahri. English language major’s graduates then; it discusses the notion of communicative competence, and defines strategic competence. It also briefly deals with the various definitions of communication strategies and taxonomies of conversation strategies. Also, I give brief definition of the word conversation, that is the act of talking together or exchange ideas, opinions, skills, and information. As accustomed, speaking is natural and automatic but communication is an art which must be learned and practiced. Also the aim of this paper is to present you with suitable suggestions about how you can solve problems while reading English? In order to comply with this objective: we considered two variables. The first one is that within our daily practice at the university we have students with different abilities while reading English. Therefore, we need to help them increase the ability in reading comprehension. However, we don’t have enough teachers and needed resources to supply them with the help they need. The second variable is related to the fact that at University there are different centers where the students’ skills can improve and their reading comprehension skills deficiencies could be overcome by getting help from the teachers. This study is small component of a larger curriculum review exercise. The findings of study in general suggest that both students and English language lecturers were in agreement that Sudanese students had a problem in writing and speaking English and due to that the conversational problems are raised.      Finally, the paper concludes by representing the pedagogical implications of conversation strategies.

Theodore W. Schultz. The Economics of Being Poor. Oxford: Blackwell. 1993. ix+340 pp.+ Index. Hardbound. £ 40.00.

1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-85
Author(s):  
Mir Annice Mahmood
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Logical Sequence ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
Economic Journals ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Demand For Children

Improving the material conditions of the poor has been the main focus of economic policy formulation for the past fifty years or so. Thus, in this connection, a vast body of literature has been published which deals with such issues as identifying the poor and suggesting remedies to alleviate their lot. The book by Theodore W. Schultz deals specifically with the economics of the poor. The book is primarily a collection of articles the author wrote over a fortyyear period (1950-1990), and these have been published previously in a number of leading economic journals. The articles have been grouped under three headings: "Most People Are Poor"; "Investing in Skills and Knowledge"; and "Effects of Human Capital". The articles basically deal with the concept of human capital. There is a logical sequence to the articles that make up this book; the poor are identified and steps are then suggested to improve their standing. Issues such as women's economic emancipation and the demand for children are highlighted in the collection of articles dealing with these two subjects. By investing in themselves through education, the poor raise their level of skills, and thus their level of wages/salaries, allowing them to enjoy higher standards of living.

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