‘In search of lost time’, ‘friendship and archaeology’: a personal reminiscence of Ludovic Mann, Joseph Harrison Maxwell and George Applebey – my father

In this paper, I will reflect on my personal memories of Ludovic Mann, friend and mentor to my late father George Applebey, whose archaeological career is also a focus of the paper. They both worked together on Mann's most famous excavations at Knappers Farm, and the nearby painting of the Cochno Stone rock-art panel. However, these are only two examples of their long-term collaboration and friendship, and this paper will explore the broader context within which they worked. This will include consideration of other collaborators, such as J Harrison Maxwell, part of the ‘Ludovic Group’ in the first half of the twentieth century. The important role that all three men played in the development of Scottish archaeology is noted. The paper concludes with developments following Mann's death in 1955 including George Applebey's emergence as a noted amateur archaeologist in his own right, and the fate of the Mann and Applebey collections.

My Friend Johann Baptist Metz

Johann Baptist Metz died on December 2, 2019. He and Jürgen Moltmann shared a theological and personal friendship marked by affection and respect. It was an honest friendship and it lasted for over fifty years. It started when two texts met: Metz’s essay “God before Us” and Moltmann’s essay “The Category of Novum in Christian Theology.” Both were published in the volume To Honor Ernst Bloch (1965). This article is a personal reminiscence.

The Romantic Essay and the City

This chapter explores the ambivalence of the Romantic familiar essay form towards the city by looking at the two main literary tributaries that fed into it—the current of self-consciously pro-metropolitan prose writing that had been inaugurated by Steele and Addison, and the more anti-commercial tradition of retirement poetry epitomized by William Cowper and the Lake poets. It looks at the way in which Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb in particular strove to bury their continuing misgivings about the polis as a centre of commercial rapacity and unruly popular politics in celebrations of the city as being, under certain controlled conditions, a precious haven of imaginative activity, personal reminiscence, and literary tradition. Their aim, even if it was never quite articulated as such, was to turn the Romantic periodical essay into a prose medium that was as sensitive as Wordsworth’s poetry to the ravages of recent historical change, while maintaining, in the end, a more progressive and forward-looking attitude to it.

The Communicative Construction of Reality and Sequential Analysis. A Personal Reminiscence

This paper presents a historical view of the emergence of what is known as the communicative paradigm. Through a personal reminiscence of his long career, Thomas Luckmann entangles the main sources of what was a radical shift of the role of language and communication in the humanities and social sciences. In doing so, Luckmann shows that the epistemological and ontological assumptions on which the contemporary study of social interaction and communicative processes rely were practically non-existent half a century ago. While sociology and linguistics seemed to exist in separate universes during Luckmann’s student days, a dialogical approach to language and social life eventually appeared — for example, in ethnomethodology, conversational analysis and French structuralism — and laid the foundation to the (today taken for granted) idea that social realities are the result of human activities. Human social reality and the worldview that motivates and guides interaction are mainly constructed in communicative processes. If social reality is constructed in communicative interaction our most reliable knowledge of that reality comes from reconstructions of these processes. Such reconstructions have been greatly facilitated by technological innovation, such as tape— and video-recorder, which, alongside theoretical advancements, may explain the timing of the communicative turn. Finally, this paper marks the benefits of sequential analysis in enabling us to trace step-by-step the processes by which social reality is constructed and reconstructed.

Audio extras at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū re-opened in 2015 with a new type of audiotour. Out went commentary from our own curators and in came poetry, music, personal reminiscence, field trips and voices from the archives. All professionally recorded, edited and directed. This decision was made after fixing on a few basic rules, foremost of which was that looking at the ART in an ART gallery must come first and that anything that detracts from that is to be deprecated. Rule two was only to use audio when there is something to say. This presentation is a report on what we did, how visitors reacted and what we hope to do next. Our collection is small and our means limited, so our methods could be easily copied at other museums and galleries.