Foreign Cloth, Local Habits: Clothing, Regalia, and the Art of Conversion in the Early Modern Kingdom of Kongo

Da decisão do rei de abraçar o catolicismo na virada do século XVI até o avanço do colonialismo imperialista do final do século XIX, os homens e mulheres do reino do Congo na África central criativamente misturaram, fundiram e redefiniram formas visuais locais e estrangeiras, pensamento religioso e conceitos políticos numa visão de mundo original, coerente e em constante evolução do cristianismo congo. Práticas de vestimenta e, em especial, insígnias reais demonstram a astuciosa conversão do reino sob o ímpeto de seus monarcas e aristocratas. Através de suas vestimentas e insígnias a elite do reino combinou e remodelou o estrangeiro e o local, o velho e o novo, materiais e emblemas nos arautos de poder, riqueza e, inevitavelmente, história cristã no Congo. Proponho utilizar o conceito de espaço de correlação como elemento-chave para analisar essas elaboradas transformações religiosas, políticas e materiais, em evolução constante, de forma a estabelecer um foco minucioso em objetos culturais tais como indumentária, chapéus, espadas e imagens religiosas.From their king’s decision to embrace Catholicism at the turn of the sixteenth century to the advent of imperial colonialism in the late eighteen hundreds, the men and women of the central African kingdom of Kongo creatively mixed, merged, and redefined local and foreign visual forms, religious thought, and political concepts into the novel, coherent, but also constantly evolving worldview of Kongo Christianity. Sartorial practices and regalia in particular showcased the artful conversion of the realm under the impetus of its monarchs and aristocrats. In their clothing and insignia, the kingdom’s elite combined and recast foreign and local, old and new, material and emblems into heralds of Kongo Christian power, wealth, and, eventually history. I propose to use the concept of the space of correlation as a key to analyze these elaborate, and constantly evolving religious, political, and material transformations through an attentive focus on cultural objects such as clothing, hats, swords, and saint figures

The Life Cycle of Toxoplasma gondii in the Natural Environment

Chapitre 1International audienc

Yeast Two-Hybrid, a Powerful Tool for Systems Biology

A key property of complex biological systems is the presence of interaction networks formed by its different components, primarily proteins. These are crucial for all levels of cellular function, including architecture, metabolism and signalling, as well as the availability of cellular energy. Very stable, but also rather transient and dynamic protein-protein interactions generate new system properties at the level of multiprotein complexes, cellular compartments or the entire cell. Thus, interactomics is expected to largely contribute to emerging fields like systems biology or systems bioenergetics. The more recent technological development of high-throughput methods for interactomics research will dramatically increase our knowledge of protein interaction networks. The two most frequently used methods are yeast two-hybrid (Y2H) screening, a well established genetic in vivo approach, and affinity purification of complexes followed by mass spectrometry analysis, an emerging biochemical in vitro technique. So far, a majority of published interactions have been detected using an Y2H screen. However, with the massive application of this method, also some limitations have become apparent. This review provides an overview on available yeast two-hybrid methods, in particular focusing on more recent approaches. These allow detection of protein interactions in their native environment, as e.g. in the cytosol or bound to a membrane, by using cytosolic signalling cascades or split protein constructs. Strengths and weaknesses of these genetic methods are discussed and some guidelines for verification of detected protein-protein interactions are provided

Crosstalks between Myo-Inositol Metabolism, Programmed Cell Death and Basal Immunity in Arabidopsis

BACKGROUND: Although it is a crucial cellular process required for both normal development and to face stress conditions, the control of programmed cell death in plants is not fully understood. We previously reported the isolation of ATXR5 and ATXR6, two PCNA-binding proteins that could be involved in the regulation of cell cycle or cell death. A yeast two-hybrid screen using ATXR5 as bait captured AtIPS1, an enzyme which catalyses the committed step of myo-inositol (MI) biosynthesis. atips1 mutants form spontaneous lesions on leaves, raising the possibility that MI metabolism may play a role in the control of PCD in plants. In this work, we have characterised atips1 mutants to gain insight regarding the role of MI in PCD regulation. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: - lesion formation in atips1 mutants depends of light intensity, is due to PCD as evidenced by TUNEL labelling of nuclei, and is regulated by phytohormones such as salicylic acid - MI and galactinol are the only metabolites whose accumulation is significantly reduced in the mutant, and supplementation of the mutant with these compounds is sufficient to prevent PCD - the transcriptome profile of the mutant is extremely similar to that of lesion mimic mutants such as cpr5, or wild-type plants infected with pathogens. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Taken together, our results provide strong evidence for the role of MI or MI derivatives in the regulation of PCD. Interestingly, there are three isoforms of IPS in Arabidopsis, but AtIPS1 is the only one harbouring a nuclear localisation sequence, suggesting that nuclear pools of MI may play a specific role in PCD regulation and opening new research prospects regarding the role of MI in the prevention of tumorigenesis. Nevertheless, the significance of the interaction between AtIPS1 and ATXR5 remains to be established

From Hell to Hell: Central Africans and Catholic Visual Catechesis in the Early Modern Atlantic Slave Trade

In seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias, a portcity in today's Colombia, enslaved Africans recently disembarked from the Middle Passage faced a Jesuit-designed multisensory catechesis. The process involved listening to translations of the Christian doctrine delivered by African interpreter-catechists enslaved by the Jesuits, often in conjunction with images. Hell featured prominently in this oral and visual catechesis. This essay analyses the violent confrontation between infernal imagery and survivors of the Middle Passage from regions in and around Kongo and Angola by unfolding a strategically oblique approach to the lacunar, biased records about this critical moment. It examines the vast Atlantic linguistic, spiritual, and visual ramifications of the catechesis to highlight the affective response of enslaved men and women to their captivity and displacement as subjects in history, viewers of works of art, and actors in the dramatic events of enslavement. It brings new, documented, historically situated, and culturally elucidated insights to the study of the transatlantic slave trade

Weighted Symbols-based Edit Distance for String-Structured Image Classification

International audienceAs an alternative to vector representations, a recent trend in image classification suggests to integrate additional structural information in the description of images in order to enhance classification accuracy. Rather than being represented in a p-dimensional space, images can typically be encoded in the form of strings, trees or graphs and are usually compared either by computing suited metrics such as the (string or tree)-edit distance, or by testing subgraph isomorphism. In this paper, we propose a new way for representing images in the form of strings whose symbols are weighted according to a TF-IDF-based weighting scheme, inspired from information retrieval. To be able to handle such real-valued weights, we first introduce a new weighted string edit distance that keeps the properties of a distance. In particular, we prove that the triangle inequality is preserved which allows the computation of the edit distance in quadratic time by dynamic programming. We show on an image classification task that our new weighted edit distance not only significantly outperforms the standard edit distance but also seems very competitive in comparison with standard histogram distances-based approaches

Mise en scène de l'évolution au musée : problèmes et parti pris

International audienceDepuis leur création au XV e siècle, les musées et les expositions, depuis le XX e siècle, mettent en scène un parti pris épistémologique 1. C'est ainsi que du cabinet de curiosités à la présentation exhaustive de collections méticuleusement classées selon la nomenclature linnéenne, la mise en exposition doit être interprétée comme un témoignage scientifique engagé et dynamique. De nos jours, la grande majorité des musées d'histoire naturelle municipaux a au moins un siècle d'existence (et les plus anciens en ont deux). Les conservateurs qui se sont succédé à leurs têtes ont complété les collections avec plus ou moins de bonheur en fonction des modes du moment, de leurs spécialisations ou de leurs marottes, des opportunités d'achats ou de legs, du résultat de leurs propres collectes, de leurs relations scientifiques, de la dynamique des sociétés savantes. Au fil des années, leurs collections en sont alors devenues plus éclectiques, et surtout plus hétéroclites 2. Aujourd'hui, la capacité d'attraction des musées dépend directement de leur capacité à se distinguer des autres, à offrir un ensemble cohérent et fort qui soit, au plan national et international, remarquable, exceptionnel justifiant par là le déplacement des habitants et des touristes par ailleurs déjà extrêmement sollicités. Car la concurrence ne se joue plus au niveau local, mais crée une compétition entre des établissements engoncés dans des bâtiments séculaires peu opérationnels, encombrés par l'ampleur des collections accumulées au cours des années, avec des réalisations plus récentes et mieux adaptées à l'accueil et au goût du public, offrant tous les artifices et les artefacts de la modernité 3. Ainsi, les musées doivent jouer de leurs spécificités, en accordant davantage d'attention à leur propre histoire et à la place qu'ils occupent dans l'histoire des sciences. « Autrement dit, il nous semble que les musées auraient intérêt à miser sur ce qui les distingue les uns des autres, à rendre visible et lisible ce qui rend chacun d'eux unique, bref à dégager, à construire et à affirmer leurs identités, notamment en engageant une réflexion sur ce que l'on pourrait appeler le projet d'établissement d'un musée » 4