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Marathon – 2,500 Years: Proceedings of The Marathon Conference 2010
Get PDFSome two and a half millennia ago, in the summer of 490 BC, a small army of 9,000 Athenians, supported only be a thousand troops from Plataea, faced and overcame the might of the Persian army of King Darius I on the plain of Marathon.
While this was only the beginning of the Persian Wars, and the Greeks as a while would face a far greater threat to their freedom a decade later, the victory at Marathon had untold effects on the morale, confidence, and self-esteem of the Athenians, who would commemorate their finest hour in art and literature for centuries to come.
This volume, which includes twenty-one papers originally presented at a colloquium hosted by the Faculty of Philology at the University of Peloponnese, Kalamata in 2010 to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the battle, is a celebration of Marathon and its reception from classical antiquity to the present era
Towards an ontology-based iconography
Get PDFThis article describes work undertaken at the Warburg Institute in London into the definition of machine-readable ontologies for the identification of iconographic subjects. Iconography, a descriptive discipline concerned with the identification of the content or subject of an image, is a core component of the wider discipline of iconology, the study of the meanings of images in their cultural or historical contexts. The research detailed here attempts to define the core of an ontology for the indicators of an iconographic subject that would be employed by an art historian in making an identification: these are encoded in OWL, the Web Ontology Language. The article demonstrates how such an ontology may be queried in XML format using simple XQUERY queries. Future directions for this research are discussed, including its possible integration with image recognition technologies to facilitate more automated approaches to iconographic identification
Beyond limbo, building lives: Livelihood strategies of refugees and asylum seekers in Java, Indonesia
Get PDFRefugees and asylum seekers in Indonesia face a protracted and precarious wait to secure solutions to their plights.
Indonesia is not party to the Refugee Convention and does not give refugees basic rights or the option of local
integration. Resettlement to a third country, once the main durable solution that people waited years to attain, has
become increasingly unlikely. In late 2017, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) began informing refugees that
most would never be resettled. With the volatile situations in their home countries making voluntary return untenable
for most, refugees are left with no choice but to try to build a life, without rights, in Indonesia. Without the right to work,
vulnerability, poverty and dependency are rife. Support from local organisations is limited and around 40 per cent of
the 13,800 refugees and asylum seekers are without any assistance. This research focuses on the refugees and asylum seekers who have settled independently in urban areas and looks at how they create their lives in a ‘transit’ country that lost its transience. Beyond physical deprivation, the prohibition on work creates forced immobility, a limbo that breeds feelings of being stuck in-between, waiting for life to begin. Along with understanding how people are surviving,
this paper also addresses how the inability to work interacts with individuals’ sense of purpose and agency. It looks at
livelihood activities to identify how initiatives that encourage self-reliance, skills development and empowerment help
refugees to create solutions for themselves and foster the belief that life is, once again, moving forward
How to prove the existence of God: an argument for conjoined panentheism
No full textThis article offers an argument for a form of panentheism in which the divine is conceived as both ‘God the World’ and ‘God the Good’. ‘God the World’ captures the notion that the totality of everything which exists is ‘in’ God, while acknowledging that, given evil and suffering, not everything is ‘of’ God. ‘God the Good’ encompasses the idea that God is also the universal concept of Goodness, akin to Plato’s Form of the Good as developed by Iris Murdoch, which is inextricably conjoined with God the World because it is the nature of the world which determines the nature of perfect Goodness.
This form of ‘conjoined’ panentheism yields a concept of divine personhood which includes both divine agency and human/divine engagement. God the Good is an agent of change by providing human persons with a standard of Goodness against which to measure the goodness of their own actions, while God the World provides the physical embodiment through which God acts. Human engagement with the divine may take a number of forms and may lead to moral action, the means by which the divine acts upon the world and changes it for the better
Britain in the Commonwealth: the 1997 Edinburgh Summit Witness Seminar
Get PDFThe meeting in Edinburgh in 1997 was the last occasion on which Britain hosted the Commonwealth
heads’ meeting, and the discussions covered a range of important issues for the future direction of
the association which remain relevant and highly topical: the great step forward on trade, business
and investment; the denouement of the Nigerian crisis and the willingness to impose sanctions; the
return of Fiji and the presence of President Nelson Mandela; the elevation of HM the Queen into the
summit itself; the start of a visible Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) presence; and discussion
on possible new members.
This is the third in a series of witness seminars organized by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. The first focused on the formation and work of the Eminent Persons Group of 1986 and the outcome and impact of the EPG’s visit to apartheid South Africa. The second addressed the role and functions of the Commonwealth Secretariat since 1965 and was held on June 2013.
This seminar is being organized in collaboration with King’s College, London. Since 1986, the ICBH Witness Seminar Programme has conducted nearly 100 witness seminars on a variety of subjects: most recently, the ICBH’s witness seminar series has examined the work of UK Embassies/High Commissions in Washington, Moscow, New Delhi, Pretoria and the Caribbean. These witness seminars have been well received by both practitioners, and the academic community who have increasingly come to see that it is important to examine and analyse the function of British overseas missions, as well as to capture the perspective of contemporary actors of recent events.
The significance of history and the importance of gathering and utilizing oral history interviews have also been identified in the report of the Foreign Affairs Committee, The Role of the FCO in UK Government (published 29 April 2011). In oral evidence, Foreign Secretary William Hague stated: ‘history is vitally important in knowledge and practice of foreign policy’. He further stated, ‘One of the things that I have asked to be worked up is a better approach to how we use the alumni of the Foreign Office, [and]… continue to connect them more systematically to the Foreign Office.’ He went on to say: ‘these people who are really at the peak of their knowledge of the world, with immense diplomatic experience, then walk out of the door, never to be seen again in the Foreign Office.’
In terms of the Commonwealth, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies’ extensive collection of interviews with leading Commonwealth figures in the modern Commonwealth, contains a number of important interviews of those who were involved in the 1997 Edinburgh summit. However, the role and insights of leading British figures and diplomats is absent and needs to be collected, particularly as British officials prepare again to host a Commonwealth summit, and the UK government moves into the Chair-in-Office role until the 2020 Malaysian summit.
For these reasons it is important to gather the memories of those FCO alumni who worked on the preparatory arrangements for the 1997 Edinburgh meeting, together with the recollections of senior Commonwealth diplomats, over a period in which the UK’s relationship within the Commonwealth continued to evolve
The BICS Mycenaean Seminar 2015-16
Get PDFThis annual publication contains summaries of the Mycenaean Seminar convened by the Institute of Classical Studies. The seminar series has been running since the 1950s, when it focused largely on the exciting new research enabled by the decipherment of Linear B. The series has now evolved to cover Aegean Prehistory in general, and is well known among subject specialists throughout the world. Taken together, the summaries provide a rich resource for Aegean Prehistory, and often provide the only citable instance of new research projects, until their fuller publication becomes possible.
The summaries of the seminars have been published as part of BICS since 1963. Starting with the 2015–16 series, the Mycenaean summaries will be published separately online, retaining their original character and their close connection with BICS, and becoming far more widely available as Open Access publications via the Humanities Digital Library
Piety, beeswax and the Portuguese African slave trade to Lima, Peru, in the early colonial period
Get PDFThe demand for beeswax for liturgical and medicinal purposes in the Americas vastly increased with the arrival of the Spanish. However, the absence of bees in early colonial Peru meant that this demand could not be met locally so that beeswax and candles had to be imported. While some beeswax was imported from Spain and from other American regions, an alternative source emerged with the Portuguese slave trade from Senegambia where the product was abundant. Using the account books of one of the main slave traders to Peru, Manuel Bautista Pérez, this paper follows the trajectory of the beeswax from Senegambia to Lima, via Cartagena de Indias and the Panamanian isthmus. It reveals how the trade in an everyday product might link producers and consumers in distant regions and how it was dependent on social relationships, cultural values and ecological conditions that were geographically and historically contingent. It shows how the beeswax trade was inextricably linked to the operation of the Portuguese slave trade so that when Portugal lost the monopoly contract for the introduction of slaves to Spanish America in 1640, the beeswax trade from Africa evaporated despite ongoing demand and profitability. Subsequently Lima imported most of its beeswax from Europe or other American regions, but the operation and profitability of the trade continued to be influenced by the same factors that characterised the trade from Africa. Due the centrality of bees to the story, it reveals how animals may play an important role in history even if they are not regarded as active agents and their significance is circumscribed by humans
The Commonwealth and Challenges to Media Freedom
Get PDFThe absence of the official Commonwealth from the public debates on issues around media
freedom—not least the disquieting rising number of attacks on journalists in countries
across the association1—needs to be addressed.2 Other multilateral organisations and agencies
have taken a firm and highly visible lead, coordinating a wide range of activities and
institutional frameworks to underpin the safety of journalists, government frameworks
of accountability, and issues around access to information.3 In contrast to the quiescent
Commonwealth, the Francophonie’s work on education, structures and adjudication in
this area is particularly striking.4 Yet Commonwealth civil society organisations have done
considerable work in the past on this issue, so the official Commonwealth does not have to
reinvent the wheel. The Commonwealth Expert Group publication, Freedom of Expression,
Association and Assembly, published in 2003, set out core frameworks and areas of activity,
yet this report has dropped below the horizon. The fate of this historic Commonwealth energy and activity on media freedom issues
underlines that until and unless there is ‘ownership’ by a core group of governments, ‘soft
power’ initiatives by civil society will remain largely irrelevan
Modernity and the 'Jewess': Introduction to a section of the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 2018
Get PDFThe articles collected in this section result from a symposium held at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London, on 20 October 2016. The theme, ‘Modernity and the “Jewess”’, reflects an interest in the perception and literary self-representation of Jewish women in early twentieth-century Germany and in exile, with a focus on their engagement with the rapid changes and the growing tensions, particularly in the political and social realms, that we subsume under the concept of modernity. In this introduction, I provide some context for this emphasis of enquiry by sketching the research field concerned with German-Jewish women’s writing in the early twentieth..