Ginzburg in Harlem: History,Structure and the Politics of Primitivism

Abstract

The historian Carlo Ginzburg is renowned for his critique of modern, scientific reason and his articulation of an alternative form of knowledge which he labels ‘conjectural’. This form of knowledge, supposedly more attuned to the historian’s interest in the singular and specific fragment, as opposed to the abstract and universal concept, is so rooted in the practices of the prehistoric hunter that Ginzburg sometimes describes it as a ‘venatic’ form of deduction, binding ‘the human animal closely to other animal species’. In this essay, I explore the ramifications of this alternative form of knowledge, attending especially to its relationship to the modernist theme of ‘primitivism’. I do so by juxtaposing Ginzburg’s critical appraisal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous literary invention, Sherlock Holmes, and Rudolph Fisher’s own literary invention, John Archer, the physician who sometimes aids criminal investigations in African American Harlem. I argue that the differences between Archer and Holmes draw attention to some troubling implications of Ginzburg’s historiographical argument. Folding this analysis on itself, however, I also suggest that what might be at stake, when Ginzburg insists so troublingly on the importance of the singular, venatic trace, is the evocation of Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the historical ‘event’.     

The Adult Parental Acceptance–Rejection Questionnaire: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Italian and American Short Forms

Objective. The aims of this article were to test the measurement invariance of the Italian and American versions of the Adult Parental Acceptance–Rejection Questionnaire and to compare adults’ remembrances of parental acceptance–rejection across the two nations. Design. The Adult Parental Acceptance–Rejection Questionnaire was administered to 564 Italian adults (M = 23.04 years) and 509 U.S. American adults (M = 22.09 years), matched by gender and age. The measurement invariance of the Parental Acceptance–Rejection Questionnaire was first established by means of multi-group confirmatory factor analyses. Results. The Parental Acceptance–Rejection Questionnaire is fully invariant across the two cultures, and adults organize their remembrances of mothers’ and fathers’ parenting around the same four classes of behavior in both nations. Italian and American adults tend to remember their parents as having been quite loving, with Italian parents being remembered as slightly less warm and more hostile than American parents. Conclusions. The full invariance of the Parental Acceptance–Rejection Questionnaire across the two populations represents additional strong evidence for the universality of interpersonal acceptance–rejection theory. Measurement invariance also confirmed that the Adult Parental Acceptance–Rejection Questionnaire (short form) can be used to measure adult remembrances of parental acceptance–rejection across these two populations.     

Evaluating the Power of Latent Growth Curve Models to Detect Individual Differences in Change

We evaluated the statistical power of single-indicator latent growth curve models to detect individual differences in change (variances of latent slopes) as a function of sample size, number of longitudinal measurement occasions, and growth curve reliability. We recommend the 2 degree-of-freedom generalized test assessing loss of fit when both slope-related random effects, the slope variance and intercept-slope covariance, are fixed to 0. Statistical power to detect individual differences in change is low to moderate unless the residual error variance is low, sample size is large, and there are more than four measurement occasions. The generalized test has greater power than a specific test isolating the hypothesis of zero slope variance, except when the true slope variance is close to 0, and has uniformly superior power to a Wald test based on the estimated slope variance.     

Return mobility and scientific productivity of researchers working abroad: The role of home country linkages

Through an analysis of 497 foreign researchers in Italy and Portugal we verify the impact of home linkages on return mobility choices and scientific productivity. We consider the presence of several different types of linkages of the researchers working abroad with their country of origin and control for the most relevant contextual factors (age, research area, position in the host country, etc.). The probability of return to their home country and scientific productivity in the host country are both higher for researchers that maintain home linkages. We conclude that the presence of home linkages directly benefits both countries in addition to the indirect benefit of expanding the scientific networks. Policy implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.     

Petrographic and chemical characterisation of fine ware from three Archaic and Hellenistic kilns in Gela,Sicily

This work is focused on the petro-archeometric characterization of the fine pottery production of the archaeological site of Gela (Sicily). Thirty-five samples coming from three Archaic and Hellenistic kilns and five coming from an Hellenistic house, were investigated by means of optical microscopy, XRD and XRF analysis. With the exception of some ceramics which are undoubtedly imported, all the samples have similar petrographic features, but on the basis of chemical composition, we can distinguish two different groups. The presence of two local productions is confirmed by the comparison with locally outcropping sediments and with archaic and modern bricks of sure Geloan production. This result is particularly significant for the definition of reference groups of this wealthy polis that played an important trading role in the Mediterranean area.     

Participation,performance and inequality in Italian higher education in the 20th century

Using data from the five waves of the Italian Longitudinal Household Survey, this paper examines the dynamics of Italian higher education in the twentieth century. The main goals are to study changes in participation in higher education (enrolment, transition, and graduation rates), in performance (drop out and delayed graduation rates, average delay duration), and how these have changed in different social classes. The main results are as follows. Enrolment growth has not been followed by a proportional increase in graduation rates. The drop out rate, the number of delayed graduations and the average delay duration were already high before the 1969 reform, and subsequently increased over time. Delayed graduations increased among students from both upper-middle and lower-middle classes, whereas the drop out rate rose only among the latter, and stayed steady for the former. As a whole, absolute inequalities persisted over time, with any slight reduction that took place resulting from declining performance of the upper classes, and not from an improvement of the lower classes.

Weighted Word Pairs for query expansion

This paper proposes a novel query expansion method to improve accuracy of text retrieval systems. Our method makes use of a minimal relevance feedback to expand the initial query with a structured representation composed of weighted pairs of words. Such a structure is obtained from the relevance feedback through a method for pairs of words selection based on the Probabilistic Topic Model. We compared our method with other baseline query expansion schemes and methods. Evaluations performed on TREC-8 demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method with respect to the baseline.     

Transmission Line Circuit Models for Dielectric Waveguide

A general procedure is outlined for obtaining single or coupled transmission line models to represent the propagation of surface wave modes in conductively unshielded dielectric waveguides. The procedure uses a homogeneous electrically or magnetically walled waveguide having the same dimensions as the dielectric of the surface waveguide, to produce a set of orthogonal eigenfunctions. These eigenfunctions are projected upon Maxwell's equations resulting in a system of transmission lines coupled together through a wave immittance, which represents the ratio of a longitudinal and a transverse field component at the dielectric-air interface. Examples are given for various modes of the dielectric slab and the dielectric rod, in particular the HE_1n modes for the latter. The transmission line models derived for these examples consist of a single trasmission line found directly by projection or reduced from a coupled transmission line model by port elimination, or of two transmission lines coupled together. All circuit models derived preserve the basic properties of surface waves (e.g. no solution below cut-off), and any of the single line models can be solved to give explicit approximate algebraic formulae for the propagation constant as a function of frequency. Numerical results show that the dispersion curves calculated from the models versus exact values are generally excellent over the entire frequency spectrum.