Laurier Turgeon

Late sixteenth-century basque banded copper kettles

Copper kettles banded with iron and copper supports originated from Basque ports in southern France between 1580 and 1600. These kettles are substantially different in style of manufacture from the more common folded-over sheet lug kettles recovered from archaeological sites dating to the 17th century. The distribution of these kettles, and distinctive fragments from them, assist in reconstructing late 16th-and early 17th-century exchange networks between the Canadian Maritimes and the lower Great Lakes.

French beads in France and Northeastern North America during the sixteenth century

Although it is generally recognized that the French played an important role in the bead trade during the early contact period in Northeastern North America, there have been no serious attempts to carry out archival research and to locate reference collections of beads in France; consequently, surprisingly little is known about French beads. North American bead researchers are still asking some very basic questions about the provenience, chronology, and trade of French glass beads. This study seeks to answer these questions by drawing on a combination of written sources and archaeological collections—early French travel literature and collections of beads from First Nations contact sites. Information from these relatively well-known sources is supplemented with new data gathered from post-mortem inventories of Parisian bead-makers and from notarized contracts containing descriptions of beads purchased for the North American trade. The study also draws on a unique collection of beads dating from the second half of the 16th century, recently unearthed in the Jardins du Caroussel, near the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Documenting tangible and intangible cultural heritage using a transmedia approach: The Discover Québec mobile application

The Discover Quebec project was a collaborative effort between the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Heritage (Laval University) and Canadian cultural media corporation Ideeclic. Content development was undertaken following a new theoretical, methodological and technological approach, focused on using multimedia as a means to showcase intangible heritage. While the classical approaches to cultural heritage favour tangible objects (artifacts, buildings, etc.), this methodology uses multimedia to show both tangible and intangible cultural heritage in the same space (through a powerful mobile application). Based on the concept of transmedia storytelling, inspired by the works of Henry Jenkins, who has experimented with this concept in the areas of video games, films and comics, we present our adaptation for the field of cultural heritage.

Les vendredis de Carpentras: Faire son marche, en Provence ou ailleurs (review)

magicians. As he states, “the social sciences simply have no methods for inspecting extraordinary causal claims, which they regard as superfluous to the real purpose of magic” (p. 65). A new science is necessary, he claims, to take into serious account the musings of magicians. This has been difficult in the West because of a lingering sense of Cartesian dualism, which does not allow us to get beyond the philosophical split between mind and body. Although very few serious scholars cling to the dichotomy today, Glucklich is certainly justified in pointing out that our epistemological baggage hinders us from perceiving the magical act as one that straddles the nature/culture divide and transcends mind/body dualism. Magic has to be understood as a series of interrelationships cloaked in the cultural understandings of the people involved in the act. From this point of view, Glucklich is able to suspend judgment and present a series of examples that he either observed himself or that had been recounted by people in Banaras who participated in some specific rite. The examples lead him to posit four “conditions” of magic, which collectively add up to an essentially relational set of perceptions that create a cultural web of significance and effectiveness. This web, the author claims, is not subject to objective verification. As he concludes, “Objective verification misses the mark if it does not take into account, as its primary fact, the consciousness of a relationship. Just as pain cannot exist without awareness of pain, magic cannot exist without the awareness of a relatedness felt as osmosis” (p. 218). In short, this book deals with a distinct universal and cross-cultural phenomenon called the “magical experience,” something that is a psychological property of the mind. As such, it is less about the “history of magic in India,” as the author claims (p. 225), and more about the history of the study of magic. While Glucklich certainly provides the reader with numerous and interesting examples of magical acts from India, many do not contain the depth of cultural context to provide the reader with a more concrete sense of the “cultural terms” needed to understand the phenomenon from an indigenous perspective. As a result, the book tells us less about India and more about a universal quality of the mind. Glucklich could have written this book about any culture in the world and still have arrived at the same conclusions. Still, the author’s experiences with magicians in Banaras certainly enrich the study and condition his own interpretation of magic. The book will thus be useful not only for South Asian specialists but also for anyone who is interested in the comparative study of ritual. It will be especially attractive to historians of religions, who are more accustomed to the phenomenological approach advocated by the author. Social scientists may be less accepting of the method, but Glucklich makes it quite clear that the book is destined to be controversial because it deals with a topic that has not been successfully understood by conventional methods of investigation. For this reason, The End of Magic is surely bound to be discussed in magical circles for years to come.