Despite the fact that Burmese courts had sizeable harems and that eunuchs are typically associated with harems, little attention has been paid to the presence of eunuchs in Burmese courts. This essay provides an overview of the existing English-language literature on eunuchs in Burmese courts, focusing on the three Burmese courts for which mention of eunuchs has survived in the historical record, namely the court at Pegu of the Taungoo dynasty (1486–1599), the court of Mrauk U of the Arakan kingdom (1429–1785), and the so-called ‘Court of Ava’ of the Konbaung dynasty (1765–1885). Noting the descriptions of eunuchs as Muslim, the essay considers the evidence regarding their numbers, their functions, and their possible origins.

Lax extensions of set functors play a key role in various areas, including topology, concurrent systems, and modal logic, while predicate liftings provide a generic semantics of modal operators. We take a fresh look at the connection between lax extensions and predicate liftings from the point of view of quantale-enriched relations. Using this perspective, we show in particular that various fundamental concepts and results arise naturally and their proofs become very elementary. Ultimately, we prove that every lax extension is induced by a class of predicate liftings; we discuss several implications of this result.

In the latest in our series of articles reviewing archived issues of Legal Information Management and The Law Librarian – as the journal was once known – the LIM editors leaf through the issues of 2003.

This article argues that, despite techno-utopian narratives of digital self-directed learning (through content freely available on the internet) and its proposed opportunities for upward social mobility, digital learning is and remains a highly contextual practice, rooted in local realities and aspirational trajectories. Through learning with a community-based organization (CBO) that offers tech training to youth from low-income neighbourhoods in Kibera, Nairobi, I argue that digital learning does not replace formal education but rather is strategically incorporated into already existing learning practices. Although Nairobi has been extensively studied as a frontrunner in technology uptake and development in Africa, it is crucial to also look at technology practices and uptake away from elite design and use, to extend and deepen our knowledge of how the digital realm plays out in the lives of the majority of urban residents.

Fondé sur des archives inédites et la relecture de divers textes publiés, cet article retrace la fabrique éditoriale d’Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique, célèbre ouvrage d’Erwin Panofsky paru en français en 1967 aux éditions de Minuit, dans la collection de Pierre Bourdieu, qui l’a traduit, édité et postfacé. En examinant les conditions de possibilité de cette rencontre transatlantique et transdisciplinaire a priori improbable, survenue en 1966-1967, entre un jeune sociologue alors en début de carrière, établi à Paris, et un vieil historien mondialement connu résidant à Princeton, il vise à historiciser cette œuvre classique et à la relire de façon réflexive. Au carrefour de la sociologie historique des sciences sociales, de l’histoire de l’édition et de l’histoire des circulations intellectuelles transnationales, il invite plus largement à dénaturaliser nos pratiques de lecture en prenant pour objet nos héritages scientifiques. Pour ce faire, sont analysés successivement la formation du jeune Bourdieu et les premières réceptions de Panofsky en France dans les années 1950-1960, le contexte intellectuel et éditorial de cette importation dont les multiples enjeux sont explicités, les modalités concrètes de l’édition et de la traduction du livre, puis la genèse de la postface, où le concept bourdieusien d’habitus a été systématisé pour la première fois, au prix de malentendus que les archives permettent de documenter et de dissiper.

Marine radiocarbon (14C) ages are an important geochronology tool for the understanding of past earthquakes and tsunamis that have impacted the coastline of New Zealand. To advance this field of research, we need an improved understanding of the radiocarbon marine reservoir correction for coastal waters of New Zealand. Here we report 170 new ΔR20 (1900–1950) measurements from around New Zealand made on pre-1950 marine shells and mollusks killed by the 1931 Napier earthquake. The influence of feeding method, living depth and environmental preference on ΔR is evaluated and we find no influence from these factors except for samples living at or around the high tide mark on rocky open coastlines, which tend to have anomalously low ΔR values. We examine how ΔR varies spatially around the New Zealand coastline and identify continuous stretches of coastline with statistically similar ΔR values. We recommend subdividing the New Zealand coast into four regions with different marine reservoir corrections: A: south and western South Island, ΔR20 –113 ± 33 yr, B: Cook Strait and western North Island, ΔR20 –171 ± 29 yr, C: northeastern North Island, ΔR20 –143 ± 18 yr, D: eastern North Island and eastern South Island, ΔR20 –70 ± 39 yr.

Countering the focus on crisis and irregularity that frames dominant representations of African migration to Europe, this article explores Gambian migrant women’s journeys of return. It is argued that Gambian women returnees’ financial resources, levels of education, kinship relations and social networks have positioned them in such a way that they can benefit from the opportunities and possibilities in The Gambia, thereby influencing their decisions to return. Significantly, their positions have helped them to negotiate and, in some instances, challenge gendered expectations and relations in their experiences on return. Further, the exchange of knowledge and their transnational networks and connections place the global South and the global North as co-constitutive elements in the development of their work and their gendered subjectivities. As such, I focus on the analytical purchase that the concept of return affords, as well as its political possibilities. The article contributes to existing scholarship on migration by highlighting the importance of returnees’ multiple subjectivities in both their decisions to return and their experiences on return. In addition, I foreground the contributions that returnees make to the places to which they have migrated, thereby challenging representations of African migrants as deficient and of Africa as a place of absence.

There are now 101 radiocarbon dates from the long Paleolithic and post-Paleolithic culture-stratigraphic sequence in El Mirón Cave, Cantabrian Spain. Here we report on two dates on bone from two different humans whose remains were found in disturbed surface sediments in the cave vestibule rear and that confirm the existence of burials in addition to previously reported residential occupations in the vestibule front pertaining to the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age periods (ca. 5500–3500 cal BP). In another attempt to resolve problems of stratigraphic incoherence of dates from the early Magdalenian periods in the vestibule rear, six new assays on faunal remains from Levels 119, 117, 114, 108, and 106 were run at Queen’s University in Belfast. There continue to be date inversions in the Lower Magdalenian range of levels that may be explained by a combination of intensive anthropic and rodent activity, major rock fall, slope wash and gravity-caused object movements, as well as possible problems in following some thin levels during excavations over a large area and across many years of work in the cave vestibule interior, particularly in the absence of any layers that are culturally sterile or even poor. Nonetheless, the coherent age of the Initial Magdalenian is fully confirmed by a new date from Level 21 in the vestibule front at ca. 22,000–20,500 cal BP), as is the general age range of the Lower Magdalenian (ca. 20,500–18,000 cal BP).

Feedback and outflows associated with a quasar phase are expected to be critical in quenching the most massive galaxies at high-z. Observations targeting the cool molecular and atomic phases, which dominate the mass and momentum budget of massive galaxy outflows and remove the direct fuel for star formation are, however, severely limited in high-z QSO hosts. We discuss two recent ALMA programs: one targeting molecular outflows in 3 z ∼ 6 QSO hosts using the OH 119 μm absorption line and another targeting the diffuse, predominantly atomic gas in the halos surrounding 5 QSO host between z ∼ 2 – 4 using the OH+(11 – 10) absorption line. Outflows are successfully detected in both samples and compared with outflows driven by high-z star-forming galaxies observed in the same lines. Both studies indicate that observing QSOs during the blow-out phase is crucial for studying the impact of the active nucleus on the ejection of gas from the host galaxy.

Institutional logics are interrelated sets of cultural elements (norms, values, beliefs, and symbols) that help people and organizations make sense of their everyday activities and order those activities in time and space. In this paper, we describe the rise of a robust literature on institutional logics, which mostly focuses on Western societies. We then describe changes in Chinese society and economy over the past four decades, as it shifted from state-controlled planning and redistribution to market-mediated exchange. We detail how the institutional logics that guide Chinese firms have been transformed in the wake of the economic transition. The state logic, which developed in the Maoist era, valorizes equality, national community, and political stability. Although it is still in evidence, it has been partly supplanted by a market logic that encourages efficiency, competition, and property rights. But this market logic differs from the one that prevails in Western capitalist economies. The Chinese version of the market logic valorizes the central role that the state and the Communist Party continue to play in economic life. Therefore, in the Chinese version of the market logic, efficiency, competition, and property rights are tempered by a continued concern for political stability. We review and summarize the existing literature on institutional logics and Chinese firms, and then identify fruitful lines that future research could take.