scholarly journals Antiquarian attitudes. Changing responses to the past in the museum environment

1970 ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Arthur MacGregor

Of the many attributes that may deem an object worthy of inclusion in a museum, that of antiquity is one of the most potent - in a sense the most powerful of all, for other considerations such as beauty of form, originality of design, quality of workmanship or historical association may all be glossed over in the presence of extreme age. While antiquities have formed common components of museums throughout the history of collecting, striking changes have taken place in the significance attributed to them, not merely in the light of better understanding but more fundamentally in the way in which perceptions of antiquity itself have been repeatedly revised and reinterpreted within the museum context. These twin considerations of expanding understanding and changing perceptions of the past within the museum programme will form the basis of my paper. 

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard

Purpose The current “specific language impairment” and “developmental language disorder” discussion might lead to important changes in how we refer to children with language disorders of unknown origin. The field has seen other changes in terminology. This article reviews many of these changes. Method A literature review of previous clinical labels was conducted, and possible reasons for the changes in labels were identified. Results References to children with significant yet unexplained deficits in language ability have been part of the scientific literature since, at least, the early 1800s. Terms have changed from those with a neurological emphasis to those that do not imply a cause for the language disorder. Diagnostic criteria have become more explicit but have become, at certain points, too narrow to represent the wider range of children with language disorders of unknown origin. Conclusions The field was not well served by the many changes in terminology that have transpired in the past. A new label at this point must be accompanied by strong efforts to recruit its adoption by clinical speech-language pathologists and the general public.


Author(s):  
Richard Wigmans

This chapter describes some of the many pitfalls that may be encountered when developing the calorimeter system for a particle physics experiment. Several of the examples chosen for this chapter are based on the author’s own experience. Typically, the performance of a new calorimeter is tested in a particle beam provided by an accelerator. The potential pitfalls encountered in correctly assessing this performance both concern the analysis and the interpretation of the data collected in such tests. The analysis should be carried out with unbiased event samples. Several consequences of violating this principle are illustrated with practical examples. For the interpretation of the results, it is very important to realize that the conditions in a testbeam are fundamentally different than in practice. This has consequences for the meaning of the term “energy resolution”. It is shown that the way in which the results of beam tests are quoted may create a misleading impression of the quality of the tested instrument.


2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Ka-May Cheng

“What is historiography?” asked the American historian Carl Becker in 1938. Professional historians continue to argue over the meaning of the term. This book challenges the view of historiography as an esoteric subject by presenting an accessible and concise overview of the history of historical writing from the Renaissance to the present. Historiography plays an integral role in aiding undergraduate students to better understand the nature and purpose of historical analysis more generally by examining the many conflicting ways that historians have defined and approached history. By demonstrating how these historians have differed in both their interpretations of specific historical events and their definitions of history itself, this book conveys to students the interpretive character of history as a discipline and the way that the historian’s context and subjective perspective influence his or her understanding of the past.


2000 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 99-109
Author(s):  
R. A. Alani

The paper traced the history of the development of secondary education in Nigeria since its inception in J859. The paper noted the emphasis on traditional art and science subjects in the past and the innovations that have been brought into the secondary school curricula by the National Policy 011 Education published in 1977, but revised in J981 and J998. The problems of implementing the curricula were briefly mentioned. The paper finally highlighted steps that could be taken to improve the quality of secondary education, such as provision of physical and material resources, adequate financing of education, teacher training and development, improvement of the conditions of service for teachers and supervision of instruction, among others.


Kebudayaan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
I Made Sutaba

Archaeological researches in Indonesia have discovered a number of various historical and archaeological artifacts that belong to cultural heritage. As historical evidences, this cultural heritage is an important source of the plural information and messages of the past life of our society. It is remarkable that this cultural heritage has some problems for example problem of typology, function, meanings, and the other for the society. Studying the problems, it is interesting to do research on its function as a teller of the past history that contained various aspects of the life of our society that not yet studied until today. By learning the problems, this research goal is to find the answer of the problems. To reach this goal, we do this research gradually by collecting data through literature study and field observation along with interviews. The next step is analysis carried out through methods of typology analysis, contextual, functional analysis, ethno archaeological and ethno historical approach. Finally the result showed that the function of our cultural heritage is as teller of the many-sided aspects of the past history of our artifacts such as technological aspects, social, and religious aspects but it is impossible to get full completed information due to some reasons. Keywords: archaeological and historical artifacts, cultural heritages, teller of the past.  AbstrakPenyelidikan arkeologi di Indonesia sudah berhasil menemukan artefak sejarah dan arkeologi yang beraneka ragam, yang tergolong sebagai warisan budaya. Sebagai bukti-bukti sejarah, warisan budaya ini adalah sumber informasi dan pesan-pesan kehidupan masyarakat masa lalu yang bersifat pluralistik. Menarik perhatian, bahwa warisan budaya ini mempunyai permasalahan yaitu, permasalahan tipologi, fungsi dan makna dalam kehidupan masyarakat. Mempelajari masalah ini, sangat menarik untuk melakukan penelitian mengenai fungsinya sebagai penutur sejarah masa silam, yang mengandung aneka ragam, aspek kehidupan masyarakat, yang belum dikaji sampai sekarang. Dengan mencermati permasalahan ini, maka tujuan penelitian ini, adalah untuk meneliti permasalahan tadi. Untuk mencapai tujuan ini, penulis melakukan penelitian secara bertahap melalui pengumpulan data dengan metode kajian pustaka dan observasi lapangan yang disertai dengan wawancara. Langkah selanjutnya, adalah melakukan analisis dengan analisis tipologi, kontekstual, analisis fungsional, pendekatan etnoarkeologi dan etnohistori. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa cagar budaya itu berfungsi sebagai penutur kehidupan masa silam yang mengandung aspek yang bersfiat jamak, adalah aspek teknologi, sosial dan religi, tetapi tidak mungkin untuk mendapat informasi yang lengkap karena berbagai faktor.Kata kunci: peninggalan sejarah dan purbakala, warisan budaya, penutur masa silam.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Grace Campbell Russell

<p>This dissertation is concerned with the ways in which photographs are discursively deployed and used in the writing of history. More specifically, it will consider how photos, and the historical, scientific, ethnographic and romantic discourses surrounding them, are used to erase or ‘make safe’ the traces of the radical resistances of dominated groups within colonial frameworks. The case explored here concerns the tintype photograph claimed as being of the Lakota chief and warrior Crazy Horse (c.1840-1877). Exhibited by the Custer Battlefield Museum in Montana, the claim that this photograph is of Crazy Horse is controversial. It is generally thought that no visual likeness of Crazy Horse exists; and his refusal to be photographed can be read as a practice of opposition to his assimilation into colonial narratives and accounts of American frontier history. In claiming the photo to be of Crazy Horse, the history of his resistance is rewritten and repositioned. This changes the way he becomes knowable and understandable within the contexts of (neo)colonial discourses and narratives, in which Native Americans are often relegated to the past, and appear either as casualties of the policies of Manifest Destiny, or as a romantic other which has been symbolically integrated into American mythic culture. This dissertation focuses on how the claim that this photograph is of Crazy Horse is made, and how the various associated cultural fields (photography, historiography, museology) are affected by, and play into, such a claim. This involves identifying the discursive processes and disciplinary mechanisms through which meaning is produced in relation to a particular cultural object. It considers the supposed photograph of Crazy Horse as an example of how history assigns significance to objects “in terms of the possibilities they generate for producing or transforming reality” (de Certeau, 1986:202), rather than as representations or reflections of reality.</p>


1996 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Collins

The remarkable “evolution” of the reconstructions of Anomalocaris, the extraordinary predator from the 515 million year old Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia, reflects the dramatic changes in our interpretation of early animal life on Earth over the past 100 years. Beginning in 1892 with a claw identified as the abdomen and tail of a phyllocarid crustacean, parts of Anomalocaris have been described variously as a jellyfish, a sea-cucumber, a polychaete worm, a composite of a jellyfish and sponge, or have been attached to other arthropods as appendages. Charles D. Walcott collected complete specimens of Anomalocaris nathorsti between 1911 and 1917, and a Geological Survey of Canada party collected an almost complete specimen of Anomalocaris canadensis in 1966 or 1967, but neither species was adequately described until 1985. At that time they were interpreted by Whittington and Briggs to be representatives of “a hitherto unknown phylum.”Here, using recently collected specimens, the two species are newly reconstructed and described in the genera Anomalocaris and Laggania, and interpreted to be members of an extinct arthropod class, Dinocarida, and order Radiodonta, new to science. The long history of inaccurate reconstruction and mistaken identification of Anomalocaris and Laggania exemplifies our great difficulty in visualizing and classifying, from fossil remains, the many Cambrian animals with no apparent living descendants.


TERRITORIO ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 77-79
Author(s):  
Roberto Spagnolo

Urban regeneration is currently the most important issue in a period of building saturation and a severe public sector crisis. Cities no longer need to grow and the issue of critically rethinking the ‘already built' is acquiring decisive ethical and cultural value. It is therefore no longer a question of accumulation, expansion and consumption, but of rationalisation and moderation, saving, repair and integration. The regeneration of towns and cities and space already in use forms part of the now inescapable change of public perspective and is becoming an opportunity to reconsider our environment and the quality of spaces. What is needed in this context, however, is understanding and awareness of how much and how it is possible to manipulate and modify architectures that are ‘not sustainable' from an energy viewpoint, but are significant in the way they represent the architectural culture and traditions of the past.


Chapter One deals with several central issues with regard to understanding the role of religious motifs in contemporary art. Besides being a repetition of imagery from the past, religious motifs embedded in contemporary artworks become a means to problematise not only the way different periods in the history of art are delimited, but larger and seemingly more rigid distinctions as those between art and non-art images. Early religious images differ significantly from art images. The two types are regulated according to different sets of rules related to the conditions of their production, display, appreciation and the way images are invested with the status of being true or authentic instances of art or sacred images. Chapter One provides a discussion of the important motif of the image not made by an artist’s hand, or acheiropoietos, and its survival and transformation, including its traces in contemporary image-making practices. All images are the result of human making; they are fictions. The way the conditions of these fictions are negotiated, or the way the role of the maker is brought to visibility, or concealed, is a defining feature of the specific regime of representation. While the cult image concealed its maker in order to maintain its public significance, and the later art image celebrated the artist as a re-inventor of the old image, contemporary artists cite religious images in order to reflect on the very procedures that produce the public significance and status of images.


Author(s):  
Lucy C. M. M. Jackson

As well as bringing together all the relevant evidence for the quality and activity of the chorus of drama in the fourth century, this monograph has raised certain key questions about the current understanding of the nature and development of Attic drama as a whole. First, it shows that the supposed ‘civic’ quality of the chorus of drama is, in fact, an association loaned, inappropriately, from the genre of circular, ‘dithyrambic’, choral performance. Being attentive to the cultural differences between these two genres should prompt a further re-evaluation of how to read dramatic choruses more generally. Second, the way in which key fourth-century authors such as Plato and Xenophon use the image of the chorus to discuss the concept of leadership has profoundly shaped ways of construing choreia in ancient Greek drama, and the ancient Mediterranean more generally. Armed with this knowledge, it is possible to retell the story and history of the chorus in drama.


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