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Summary This article examines the role of African chiefs in the administration of colonial medicine in rural south-western Nigeria, emphasising the adaptive ways they navigated a difficult position between colonial medical authorities and indigenous medical legitimacy. Whereas colonial authorities expected chiefs to enforce medical policies and to encourage their subjects to use medical facilities, Africans wanted chiefs to defend and promote Yoruba medical and religious practices that colonial authorities and missionaries usually undermined. By supporting established African healing systems, chiefs stood to gain political mileage and favour with traditional healers. Furthermore, we argue that although African chiefs cooperated with the government in implementing health policies, they had a difficult relationship with sanitary inspectors who enforced sanitary regulations in ways that bred resentment. In the 1940s, Yoruba chiefs advocated for more rural health services, perhaps to pacify the rising nationalist movement that would have made them irrelevant had they not cooperated.

Our interviewee is one of the most prominent personalities of Romanian academic and cultural life. Starting as one of Constantin Noica’s disciples, he begun his carrier as a philosopher, but in time he grew more and more acquainted with psychoanalysis, so that he finally came to embrace it as a full-time profession, not only as a professor, but also as analyst and director of the main psychoanalytical publishing house in Romania . His research activity spreads out on more than 30 years, during which he worked in the research institutes of the Romanian Academy (The Philosophy Institute, The Anthropology Institute) and in several faculties of psychology, philosophy and educational sciences within the University of Bucharest and “Titu Maiorescu” University. As philosopher, psychoanalyst, professor and researcher, Vasile Dem Zamfirescu is a vivid example of professional and academic excellence and also an active model for younger generations, in a cultural area profoundly marked by the inevitable side-effects of about half a century of communism.

Abstract In this study, the land use around the Churches of Moldavia, UNESCO WH (World Heritage) sites, has been analysed using photo interpretation and GIS. The cartographic analysis used historical maps and modern orthophotos to highlight the main changes that took place over the last century in the area surrounding the sites, which has been extended to 1 km buffer. Historical maps and orthophotos of the years 1917, 2005, and 2016 have been processed to identify the present and historical changes in one of the most well-known historical areas of Eastern Europe. Monuments have a significant universal, national, and local value, contributing to the touristic development of the area. The most important processes that can affect the integrity of the monuments are the deforestations and the anthropogenic environmental changes. Significant changes took place around Probota, Humor, Patrauti and Arbore churches, while Sucevita, Voronet and Moldovita churches still preserve the natural landscape specific to the Bukovina historical area; Suceava church is part of a strongly urbanised landscape.

This paper explores an unsupervised approach to learning a compositional representation function for multi-word expressions (MWEs), and evaluates it on the Tratz dataset, which associates two-word expressions with the semantic relation between the compound constituents (e.g. the label employer is associated with the noun compound government agency) (Tratz, 2011). The composition function is based on recurrent neural networks, and is trained using the Skip-Gram objective to predict the words in the context of MWEs. Thus our approach can naturally leverage large unlabeled text sources. Further, our method can make use of provided MWEs when available, but can also function as a completely unsupervised algorithm, using MWE boundaries predicted by a single, domain-agnostic part-of-speech pattern. With pre-defined MWE boundaries, our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art performance on the coarse-grained evaluation of the Tratz dataset (Tratz, 2011), with an F1 score of 50.4%. The unsupervised version of our method approaches the performance of the supervised one, and even outperforms it in some configurations.

This paper outlines major directions in the reception of Knut Hamsun in the Romanian cultural printed press. The research is based on a plethora of articles in Romanian cultural periodicals spanning the years 1902–1989. The results shall be encompassed in a doctoral thesis on the same subject. The structure of the paper follows a chronological overview of the phases of his reception. Because the interwar period has been discussed in detail in other previous papers, focus shall be put on the communist era. The first oscillations occur between the years 1940–1947. As a result of the Stalinist regime, Hamsun is only portrayed in terms of his political views. Communism thus reduces his authorship to a minimum. A renewed interest emerges in the 1980s through a new series of translations and articles. This interest is then compounded with the founding of the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literatures in Cluj in 1991 and continues to the present. Articles from all of these time periods are evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively to acquire a holistic image of how Hamsun is received by Romanian culture. 

A mastodon tooth has been found at Husnicioara coal open pit, in Mehedinţi district (southwestern Romania). It originates from the Lower Pliocene (Dacian) gravel and sand deposits lying just above the coal bed IV, mined in this quarry. The tooth exposing zygodont features undoubtedly belongs to Mammut borsoni (“Borson’s mastodont”). Although this species is very common in the Pliocene vertebrate faunas from this part of Europe, until now it was missing from the Lower Pliocene (Dacian) assemblage’s lists in our country.

The paper covers the history of 20th century Serbian fashion from the 1920s through the 1980s, focusing on the problem of its historization. Based on established readings submitting 20th century Serbian fashion to politics thus distancing it from global fashion history, I aim to structure a possible historical narrative of fashion by identifying the elements of haute couture in 20th century Serbian fashion industry. Rather than contrasting Serbian fashion figures with their Western counterparts and deepening the West / East Europe fashion divide, the paper traces similarities between them, demonstrating that 20th century Serbian fashion responded to haute couture trends simultaneously with their emergence in the West.

International audience; In mid-latitude Eurasia, loess-paleosol sequences (LPS) provide the most widespread sedimentary records of Quaternary paleoenvironmental evolution. In the Middle Danube Basin (MDB), these archives cover at least the last million years of climate history, and occasionally contain archeological findings. The studied Zemun LPS is located on the right bank of the Danube in Northern Serbia. The site was declared as a protected site, based on Paleolithic artifacts found on the riverbank and stemming from unknown stratigraphic levels of the loess cliffs exposed along the Danube. The present study aims to provide a stratigraphic, paleoenvironmental, and temporal context for the Zemun LPS by means of environmental magnetic and colorimetric methods. Our investigations result in a chronostratigraphic scheme allowing direct comparison with other well-established reference records in the MDB and elsewhere. Two potential tephra layers tentatively assigned to the so-called L2 and Bag tephras, which are both widespread in the MDB and beyond were investigated for their bulk magnetic properties. The resulting integrated age model suggests that the Zemun LPS records a detailed history of a quasi-continuous accumulation of mineral dust from Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage (MIS) 11–5a (c. 430–60 ka). The outcome of our integrative approach indicates a continuous aridification over the last four interglacial/glacial cycles and we discuss potential changes in seasonality over time.