Chi jiu zhi ji Tang zhi wu (赤鳩之集湯之屋, “[When] Red Doves Gathered on Tang’s house”) is an excavated Chu manuscript that belongs to the Tsinghua University bamboo slips collection. The manuscript concerns several important early Chinese figures such as Tang and Yi Yin, while also featuring rich supernatural elements. Many studies have focused on “shamanism elements” depicted in the tale or defined the genre of the text as xiaoshuo. This article offers a reexamination of Chi jiu and the above assumptions by contextualizing the text within its original three-text manuscript. The article reveals how early compilers constructed a chronological sequence to frame an overarching narrative in a heterogeneous compilation, and further generates a unique narrative regarding the extraordinary status of Yi Yin the founding minister. In its conclusion, the paper draws attention to potential alternative narratives about the minister-ruler relationship in early China, and also places Chi jiu in the context of early compilation practices. Additionally, it considers possible parallels between the Chi jiu story and two of the Grimms’ Tales, viewing Chi jiu within folklore studies.

The Xuanquan postal station is to date the most well-documented example of a working postal station from the Han period. This paper presents a corpus of 115 excavated horse names recorded in Xuanquan administrative documents. Analysis of these names not only clarifies what tasks these horses were expected to perform at the station, but two unique naming conventions further articulate the complex relationships forged between humans and horses at this frontier site: giving horses human surnames and venerating aged horses. This article thus centers the act of naming individual animals as being of significant importance for future studies of human-animal interactions.

This article tells the story of Lottie Beth Hobbs, one of the most important figures of the anti-ERA movement – and therefore a founding mother of the Religious Right. Although opposition of fundamentalist women to the ERA increasingly has been recognized in the founding of the Religious Right, Hobbs’s role remains underexplored. Relying on a moral and political framework indebted to her lifelong commitment to the Churches of Christ, Hobbs spearheaded a rhetorical and ideological shift that first united disparate conservative causes under a “pro-family” banner, then focused their attention on the threat of a tentacular secular humanism. By focusing on Hobbs’s career, this article bridges two scholarly foci on modern American conservatism, one highlighting anti-ERA organizing in the 1970s and the other focused on “family values” activism during the Reagan administration.

This essay argues for considering wartime Ukrainian poetry in the broader context of Ukrainian artistic projects investigating the relationship between observation, agency, and responsibility. It highlights the profoundly democratic features of this process that explores the ways art can help one process trauma and engage in difficult but necessary conversations. It argues that Ukrainian poetic activity can be viewed as a unified corpus across multiple languages, while problematizing approaches to Russophone Ukrainian poetry that treat is as part of an allegedly unified Russophone discursive space. It also emphasizes the ethical imperative for greater scholarly engagement with Ukrainian literary texts.

This article examines the role of primary ethnographic materials – of field notes, letters and photographs – and even of the shelves and bookcases – in building accounts of the human condition. We trace the lives of incomplete and not-yet-found manuscripts, which have been treated as representative of whole archives, as well as closely held convictions and ideas in the history of anthropology. In so doing, we employ the notion of a ‘proxy’, or a set of signs and images which point the audience in particular directions, without determining their overall destination. Our research is based on a few episodes from the histories of paper and digital copies of manuscripts and photographs of the anthropological couple Sergei and Elizabeth Shirokogoroff, who conducted ethnographic, linguistic and some archaeological research, first on the borderlands between China and Russia, and then later within China. We aim to show the complexity and social and intellectual vibrancy of their ethnographic field archives, which have been scattered across countries, institutions and personal collections. We conclude by suggesting that engaging anthropologically with field archives enables us to approach existing perspectives on archives in a new way, viewing them not as containers of catalogued information, but as entanglements reflecting social relations in local communities, the trajectories of ethnographers, and the aspirations of scholars asking questions today.

Peter Clinch, the former Law Librarian at Cardiff University, is a multiple award winner and prolific writer on all things to do with legal information research. Here he talks to LIM about how he initially worked as a town planner, his long career in law librarianship, and his views on the challenges now facing the profession.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, John Labatt Ltd., one of Canada’s oldest and most successful breweries, attempted to gain a share of the British beer market. This article examines the push and pull factors of why foreign brewers like Labatt decided to enter the competitive British marketplace and analyzes the strategies of the winners and losers of the “lager war.” The article pays attention to the branding efforts of marketing managers and how some used product–place associations to imbue their brands with authenticity. While positive country images often lead to a favorable assessment of the products from that country, it is also true that unfavorable perceptions often foster negative assessments of their products. By examining the entrepreneurship and structural barriers of the beer industry in the United Kingdom toward the end of the twentieth century, the article adds to our understanding of the dynamics of business failure.