New Values in Art: Japanese and Japoniste Ceramics, 1866-1904

This dissertation explores a constellation of interrelated, and under-investigated, French and Japanese ceramics spanning the period between 1866, the year that marked the production of the first ceramic set that came to be known as japoniste, and 1904, the year of the St. Louis World’s Fair, where contemporaneous Japanese and French ceramics shared a common vocabulary. The historical data I collected in France and Japan and its analysis, through qualitative and quantitative sociological tools, led me to conclude that Japonisme represented a tightly knit social network in which ceramics were used as currency to broker unprecedented links within and between the central binaries of the nineteenth-century French art world: academic/ avant-garde, art/ craft, fine art/ decorative art, painting/ other mediums, intrinsic/ instrumental, representational/ self-referential, and tradition/ innovation. Until now, most attention to Japonisme has been concentrated on the ukiyo-e woodblock prints used instrumentally by the Modernist practitioners of what Duranty called the “new painting.” My study turns our attention to a medium in which cultural power relationships were more evenly balanced, and in which, therefore, we can trace how two cultures can interact productively. Japanese ceramics taught French collectors and artists how to begin to discern between Chinese and Japanese traditions and to “read” the cultural references embedded in Japanese decoration. Also, French collectors’ antiquarian interest in Japanese ceramics was readily matched by French potters who reformed their practice and altered hierarchies of medium by drawing on the European arabesque tradition, the Rococo Revival, and the Japanese aesthetic of playfulness. In return, Meiji- and Taisho-period Japanese potters and porcelain manufacturers emulated European japoniste ceramic vocabulary in what constituted a renegotiation of the balance between tradition, on the one hand, and imported technologies and new global markets, on the other. Their ceramics reflected several rounds of exchange between the Japanese and French art worlds. These objects demonstrated just how complexly two social networks from two previously distinct cultures had been influencing each other in a medium they both valued, ceramics. I call this phenomenon “uroboric” Japonisme because it most fully illustrates the circular nature of transcultural exchanges and the central role that such exchanges play in the renewal of aesthetic and sociocultural identities

Comparing the environmental impacts of meatless and meat-containing meals in the United States

This study compares the environmental impacts of meatless and meat-containing meals in the United States according to consumption data in order to identify commercial opportunities to lower environmental impacts of meals. Average consumption of meal types (breakfast, lunch, dinner) were assessed using life cycle assessment. Retail and consumer wastes, and weight losses and gains through cooking, were used to adjust the consumption quantities to production quantities. On average, meatless meals had more than a 40% reduction in environmental impacts than meat-containing meals for any of the assessed indicators (carbon footprint, water use, resource consumption, health impacts of pollution, and ecosystem quality). At maximum and minimum for carbon footprint, meat-containing dinners were associated with 5 kgCO2e and meatless lunches 1 kg CO2e. Results indicate that, on average in the US, meatless meals lessen environmental impacts in comparison to meat-containing meals; however, animal products (i.e., dairy) in meatless meals also had a substantial impact. Findings suggest that industrial interventions focusing on low-impact meat substitutes for dinners and thereafter lunches, and low-impact dairy substitutes for breakfasts, offer large opportunities for improving the environmental performance of the average diet

Factors Associated with Atypical Moles in New Hampshire, USA

Only a few studies, conducted in Sweden, assessed factors associated with the presence of atypical moles in the general population. We conducted a population-based, case-control study in New Hampshire, USA, to identify factors associated with atypical moles. In our study, atypical moles affected 14% of the study population. The adjusted odds ratio (OR) was 0.34 (95% confidence interval (CI)=0.14-0.80) for those with the highest adulthood recreational sun exposure, relative to the lowest. The OR for any freckles, compared to none, was 2.24 (95% CI=1.18-4.25). We found a linear relationship between the number of benign moles and the presence of atypical moles (p for trend=0.0001). The OR was 7.34 (95% CI=3.03-17.80) for \u3e15 benign moles, relative to 0-4. Our data indicate that freckles and benign moles, which may reflect melanocytic inducibility, are strongly associated with atypical moles. The inverse association with sun exposure should be considered with caution