PLASTINATION FOR DISPLAY: A NEW WAY TO DISPOSE OF THE DEAD

Plastination provides a new method, governed by medical technique rather than religious ritual, by which human remains may be transformed from unstable/wet to stable/dry. In the Körperwelten/Body Worlds exhibition, the public pay to view plastinated bodies, and are invited to donate their bodies for plastination after death. This article addresses the question of whether Body Worlds visitors accept plastination for display as a legitimate form of disposal. Three sources of data are drawn on: the ethnographer's account of his first visit to the exhibition in Brussels; the written comments of visitors to the London exhibition; and the stated motives of some donors. Plastination as final disposal is accepted by the vast majority of visitors; they perceive the dry, odourless body interiors within the clinical, scientific framework encouraged by the exhibition, and are often fascinated by what they see. This is complicated, however, by certain surface features and modes of display which enable the problematic reinsertion of personhood. So, plastination itself is accepted, but not all forms of display.     

Ancient North American Art Surfaces in the Art World: A Review of Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand

Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand rated as a must-see for anyone with an interest in art of the ancient Americas or ancient art in general—an exhibition whose breadth and depth in terms of visual material would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate. This review takes a look beyond the immediate frame of the exhibition at some additional context related to the appreciation of these objects as ancient art, including some reflection on the original objectives of the exhibition and what appeared, at least to this anthropologist, as palpably missing or unspoken.     

Darwin: Origin and Evolution of an Exhibition

Two hundred years after his birth, Darwin, originated by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is the most important exhibition about the English scientist ever organized for the general public. This traveling exhibition has appeared in many versions worldwide, and a study of the relationships between local developers of the various editions of the exhibition underlines how a scientific exhibition and, more generally, science communication can succeed in striking a good equilibrium between universal content and cultural determinants.     

Mestizo racism in Ecuador

This paper uses semi-structured interviews with Ecuadorian “white mestizos” of the upper classes to provide insights into the nature of racism in Ecuador. Interview data illuminate the specifics of racism and discrimination suffered by some of those labelled as mestizos, demolishing anew the idea of a homogenous mestizaje. Longo and cholo emerge as specific ethnic terminology used to create a racial/class distinctions among mestizos struggling for ethnoracial capital in a newly defined plurinational and intercultural state. These findings are contrasted with recent progressive state policies that address the plight of groups historically marginalized or ignored by the Ecuadorian narrative of mestizaje, but fail to look within mestizaje to battle against the remnants of colonial constructions of power and difference.     

昆虫数字化博物馆的建设

数字化博物馆是博物馆现代化的一个重要标志。国外博物馆从20世纪90年代就开始进行数字化建设,国内的博物馆数字化建设起步较晚,同国外的先进技术相比还有一定的差距,但发展较快。目前,国内外已有的昆虫数字化博物馆各具特色,有以展示昆虫图片为主的,有以介绍昆虫知识为主的,也有以营利为目的的,但仍有不少需要改进的地方。为了满足中小学生的求知欲和探索欲,适应他们喜欢自己动手操作和活泼好动的性格,昆虫数字化博物馆网站建设在技术上应采用J2EE三层体系结构,采用动态网站内容管理与发布系统构建的后台管理系统,将昆虫数字化博物馆分成后台管理和前台展示与交互两部分,从而实现网站内容与表现形式的分离,加快网页更新的速度。在数据库建设上,应采用功能强大的数据库软件,以满足大量图片、声音、动画、视频等多种类型的数据库的有效存储和高效的检索功能。在网站的内容上应有实体展厅的数字化、昆虫学术交流与知识集锦、中小学生互动教育等板块。在网站的后期维护上应做到由全社会的昆虫爱好者共同维护和管理。     

Torres Strait Islanders Stories from an Exhibition

Preparations for a centenary exhibition to mark the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait incorporated cross-cultural collaborative work, reflecting the changing roles of museums as sites for contact and research combining curatorial expertise and indigenous knowledge. Specific objects in the collections of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology continue to be active intermediaries in the relationship between museum staff and Torres Strait Islanders and the museum itself has become an important field site. This paper provides an ethnography of the process of creating the exhibition and explores different ways that many of the objects displayed have resonance for Islanders today.     

Doubly estranged: racism,the body and reflection

This paper introduces the concept of “double estrangement”. Drawing on a large qualitative dataset it will argue that young migrant group boys in Dublin’s north inner city suffer from a break with their embodied selves as they are pushed between habitual and reflective action. The dual elements of “double estrangement” will be outlined, firstly, through the contention that visible difference and dispositions of the body mark minority boys out as not belonging within peer exchanges in three primary schools. Secondly, by arguing this has the effect of heightening a boy’s self-consciousness of their body as an object of value estranging them from their habitual embodied being.     

The Death and Rebirth of Anthropology

This paper is a study of one component of the recent and contemporary circulation of cultural objects, the exhibition of Australian Aboriginal acrylic paintings in a French museum. The author argues that the recent emphases on ‘appropriation ‘ and the primitivizing gaze ‘ are not sufficient to understand what happens when such objects circulate. To ask what does happen in circulation, at the sites of exhibition, is to ask how they are produced, inflected, and invoked in concrete institutional settings, which have distinctive histories, purposes, and structures of their own. The gazes’ (representations) which are discussed in this French example are analyzed within the specific conditions of their production to show how such exhibitions and circulations of culture are produced in relationship to the requirements internal to museums to distinguish themselves from others, to respond to claims placed upon them by their own institutional settings.     

Changing Museum Visitors’ Conceptions of Evolution

We examined whether a single visit to an evolution exhibition contributed to conceptual change in adult (n?=?30), youth, and child (n?=?34) museum visitors?? reasoning about evolution. The exhibition included seven current research projects in evolutionary science, each focused on a different organism. To frame this study, we integrated a developmental model of visitors?? understanding of evolution, which incorporates visitors?? intuitive beliefs, with a model of free-choice learning that includes personal, sociocultural, and contextual variables. Using pre- and post-measures, we assessed how visitors?? causal explanations about biological change, drawn from three reasoning patterns (evolutionary, intuitive, and creationist), were modified as a result of visiting the exhibition. Whatever their age, background beliefs, or prior intuitive reasoning patterns, visitors significantly increased their use of explanations from the evolutionary reasoning pattern across all measures and extended this reasoning across diverse organisms. Visitors also increased their use of one intuitive reasoning pattern, need-based (goal-directed) explanations, which, we argue, may be a step toward evolutionary reasoning. Nonetheless, visitors continued to use mixed reasoning (endorsing all three reasoning patterns) in explaining biological change. The personal, socio-cultural, and contextual variables were found to be related to these reasoning patterns in predictable ways. These findings are used to examine the structure of visitors?? reasoning patterns and those aspects of the exhibition that may have contributed to the gains in museum visitors?? understanding of evolution.     

Notes on theorizing racism and other things

ABSTRACT

In the spirit of ‘furthering debate and reflection’ in this response to Theories of Race and Ethnicity, we consider here the pertinence of the theme of resistance that occupies particular chapters within the collection and that has been central to key works within the wider race critical scholarship. Yet, when the larger field of contemporary race study is considered, we also note that other contiguous concerns – including capitalism, religion, nation, and war – are key factors in thinking through racism. Here, we further elaborate on how future theorizations of race and ethnicity must engage with these domains.     

高压静电场（HVEF）对大豆种子吸胀冷害的影响

高压静电场预处理可不同程度地提高大豆种子抗低温吸胀冷害的能力,处理组种子在低温吸胀时无机离子,可溶性糖和可溶性蛋白的外渗量显著低于对照组,静电场预处理还提高了种子中过氧化氢酶（简ＣＡＴ）、过氧化物酶（简ＰＯＤ）、超氧物歧化酶（简ＳＯＤ）等清除自由基的酶活性,降低了丙二醛（简ＭＤＡ）的积累,促进了种子代谢水平,即提高了种子的淀粉酶、脱氢酶的活力和可溶性蛋白含量,最终提高了发芽率。本文以膜的相变和损伤     

The Curatorial Voice: U.S. Institutions Exhibit the Ancient Andes

Two new exhibits on ancient Andean civilizations are open in the United States. Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas is a large traveling exhibition and Tiwanaku: Ancestors of the Inca is a smaller temporary exhibition that is not traveling. Both introduce North American audiences to objects and information that have never been exhibited in the United States and each includes some extraordinary artifacts. The two exhibits differ in many ways: Machu Picchu emphasizes information, archaeological science, and cultural history, whereas Tiwanaku focuses on art style and objects. The curatorial voice and point of view are strong in each exhibit, as is the institutional perspective of its originiating museum. In this respect these exhibits differ significantly from contemporary ones on ancient North America, which generally include the voices and points of view of descendant communities and others.     

Wellcome Trust DNA celebration

DNA at 50: The structure of the molecule and its implications has had a major impression on some artists, highlighted in a new exhibition, but its discovery was slow to make an impression. Nigel Williams reports.     

Scientific racism,popular racism and the discourse of the Gypsy Lore Society

Scientific racism continued to be the guiding paradigm of the oldest scholarly association for the study of Gypsies well into the 1970s. It is important to acknowledge and analyse this when considering the continuing influence of racism on policy towards Roma.     

Biological Evolution on Display: an Approach to Evolutionary Issues Through a Museum

Biological museums can promote interest in evolution and contribute to its understanding. Modern exhibitions generally emphasize the main concepts of evolutionary theory: biodiversity and adaptation. In 2009 at the Zoological Museum of Rome, to celebrate Charles Darwin, a pilot didactic project was carried out for schools and the general public in order to involve people in evolutionary issues, to stimulate interest and at constructing knowledge about evolution. An exhibition consisting of exhibits and laboratory settings was created. The thematic contexts of the exhibition and the practical experiences were aimed at facing some epistemological obstacles that influence the understanding of evolution and at constructing some “framing concepts” that, on the contrary, could facilitate it. The communicative and didactic strategies were all participative and interactive, based on the personal questioning and restructuring of preexisting knowledge. Behaviors, conversations, and comments by the participants were monitored in order to record any possible change of ideas, interests, attitudes, and learning.     

The language of everyday racism and microaggression in the workplace: Palestinian professionals in Israel

Based on interviews with Palestinian professionals in Jewish organizations in Israel, this article discloses a distinctive practice of ‘everyday racism’ and microaggression – a language of everyday racism. This ‘language of everyday racism’ refers to Hebrew words and expressions that are routinely used by Jews in their mundane conversations and that include the word ‘Arab’ when describing a deficiency or defect, some sort of unsightliness, filth, or general negativity (as in the expression ‘You're dressed like an Arab woman’). This article not only describes the language of everyday racism as a specific form of everyday racism and microaggression (national microaggression), it also illustrates how this language activates the Palestinian professionals in a reflexive manner. The discussion section describes how the internal dialectic between structure and agency is critical to understanding the language of everyday racism, which in turn acts as a mechanism of the inequality that underlies face-to-face interactions.     

Application of the disk method to cultured plant cells. II. Exhibition zones

Growth inhibition of plated cells by antimetabolites present in the culture medium was alleviated by corresponding metabolites supplied on filter paper disks placed on the surface of the medium. The metabolites diffused into the medium producing a halo of growing cells (an exhibition zone). Exhibition zones were recorded for 15 pairs of compounds and with cell cultures of Rosa, Acer pseudoplatanus, Daucus carota, Hyoscyamus muticus and Zea mays. The interaction between the compounds could be quantified by measuring exhibition zone diameters and the method was partially optimised for L-ethionine/L-methionine and p-fluorophenylalanine/L-phenylalanine. The exhibition zone method was compared to two other methods, measurement of growth yield and plating efficiency, for demonstrating reversion of growth inhibition.Abbreviations ETH L-ethionine - PFP p-fluorophenylalanine - 5MT 5-methyl-DL-tryptophan - A2C L-azetidine-2-carboxylic acid - PE Plating efficiency - Met L-methionine - Phe L-phenylalanine - Trp L-tryptophan     

Racism and the politics of signification: Israeli public discourse on racism towards Palestinian citizens

This paper explores the phenomenology of racism using the Israeli situation as a case study to examine if, when and how the concept of ‘racism’ is employed in local media discourse on policy towards Palestinian citizens.

Our central argument is that racism, as a signifier of policy, can be located in the dialectic between denial and affirmation of the category of race, while we link the scope and meanings of practices marked by the media as ‘racism’ to contingent cultural, social and historical conditions. The article proposes the periodization of the relevant discourse into three primary phases: from 1949 to the late 1970s, when the category of racism was ‘prohibited’ in Israeli discourse in the aftermath of the Holocaust; the mid-1980s, when this taboo was broken and the phenomena included in the category of racism expanded accordingly; and the 1990s to 2000, during which racism became an institutionalized, all-encompassing discursive term.     

The toxicity study of a systemic fungicide: artea 330 EC on the physiology and the respiratory metabolism of the tadpole (Rana saharica)

The intensification of the cereal cultures accompanied by the apparition of damaging illnesses for these cultures. These illnesses are Largely imputed to mushrooms micro and macroscopic chatty of important damages at wheat, the barley and of none targeted other animal species. The products used against these illnesses are called: Fungicides. In our work, we are interested in the survey of the effects of a systemic fungicide: the ARTEA 330 EC introduces newly in Algeria, on some physiological and metabolic parameters of a biologic model: the tadpole The exhibition of the populations of tadpoles to the different concentrations of the ARTEA 330 EC provokes a fall very important of the middleweights of the tadpoles treated. This one is reduced of meadows of 80% to the strongest concentration of ARTEA 330 EC. It is some in the same way for the reduction of the middle size of the tadpoles where one records a reduction of 25%. Concerning the percentage of mortality gotten, we observe that the one is here from 100% to the strongest concentration of ARTEA 330 EC. The breathing of the tadpoles treated by fungicide is disrupted strongly and to the strongest concentration, this one is inhibited completely. The gotten results show that the exhibition of the populations of tadpoles to the different concentrations of fungicide disrupts the physiological parameters strongly and inhibit the respiratory metabolism. A phenomenon of detoxication seems to intervene; it is put in evidence by a stimulation of the synthesis of the proteins.