The paradoxes of applying ethnography at a distance: Dürer’s Rhinoceros

In 1515, Albrecht Dürer received news of an animal encased in armour: it was an Indian rhinoceros which was being transported towards Rome as a present for Pope Leo X. The description and a sketch of the animal, arrived in Dürer’s hands, he made a woodcut that Europeans came to adopt as the true depiction of the rhinoceros. Dürer would never see an actual rhinoceros in his life. Nevertheless, this legendary woodcut creature shaped the public perception of a rhinoceros for the next two centuries. Is it art’s idealisation of the natural world the answer to overcoming distance? Or are metaphors just another type of truth? Prevented by the Covid-19 circumstances from going out to the field, Dürer’s Rhinoceros has become more than a metaphor for my project. My research included the production of a documentary in-situ, which soon changed for the production of a documentary at a distance. The different narratives created by the socio-cultural context and the documentary filmmaker’s commitment to truth hang over her like a sword of Damocles. I attempted to find solutions and other ways to reproduce the same proximity at a distance resourcing to online/research. In a moment of enthusiasm, and encouraged by early investigations, I wrote: ‘To recreate the proximity that this research needs, it is necessary to devise a new methodology, incorporating a strong network of collaborators, between researchers in the field, leaders of organisations and individuals prepared to communicate at a distance in a collective and polyphonic way’. This paper will analyse the different methods of conducting an online research in times of pandemic and crisis, to determine how narratives are created. As with Dürer’s woodcut, Rhinoceros, reality is very different

Maya women contest online narratives in action: creating equality through horizontal communication

Feminist Maya women have been contesting the narrative imposed by the state, social prejudices and media-imposed perceptions in contemporary Guatemala, reclaiming their place in society. This has been documented from an indigenous perspective (Chirix, 2008; Hernández-Castillo, 2010; Tzul Tzul, 2018; Cumes, 2019). In the long thread of history the indigenous population of Guatemala has resisted colonial imposition through the use of multiple strategies of adaptation, sometimes utilising elements of the dominant culture. In this case the creation of an online/virtual place in social media to defend and fight for their rights during the Covid-19 pandemic. By studying the case of the Guatemalan National Midwives Movement from a decolonial perspective and analysing the online development of: horizontal communication theory (Beltrán, 1979), in exceptional pandemic circumstances, will allow us to uncover: how indigenous women define their identity in relation to their knowledge, world-views and philosophies in their own voices, beyond any type of discrimination social or economic. This will enable a better understanding of how their communal organisational and communication strategies differ from Western individualism. However, social media cannot be fully representative of the indigenous midwives’ culture. The process of conveying meanings by words in a language that it is not your own and in contested media, such as an online/virtual place, certainly implies a process of surrendering. As Rivera Cusicanqui (2020) argues ‘in colonialism there is a very particular function for words, they do not name, they mask.’ This paper concludes that feminist decolonisation, cannot solely be rhetoric, but needs to be put to practice in every action

Behavior of shell-model configuration moments

An important input into reaction theory is the density of states or the level density. Spectral distribution theory (also known as nuclear statistical spectroscopy) characterizes the secular behavior of the density of states through moments of the Hamiltonian. One particular approach is to partition the model space into subspaces and find the moments in those subspaces; a convenient choice of subspaces are spherical shell-model configurations. We revisit these configuration moments and find, for complete $0\hbar\omega$ many-body spaces, the following behaviors: (a) the configuration width is nearly constant for all configurations; (b) the configuration asymmetry or third moment is strongly correlated with the configuration centroid; (c) the configuration fourth moment, or excess is linearly related to the square to the configuration asymmetry. Such universal behavior may allow for more efficient modeling of the density of states in a shell-model framework.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure

Quevedo en la Nueva España: imitación y emulación en Sueño de sueños de José Mariano Acosta

El trabajo se propone dar a conocer una obra poco estudiada escrita a finales del período colonial (1820): Sueño de sueños, del casi desconocido autor queretano José Mariano Acosta, e indaga sobre las semejanzas y diferencias que esta obra establece con el texto que reconoce como fuente: los Sueños de Quevedo, expresamente El sueño de la Muerte o de la visita de los chistes, texto al que sigue de cerca pero el cual recrea y acaba adaptando a su época y su contexto en una versión aumentada y podría decirse «mexicanizada» del original

The solution of the equation XA+AXT=0 and its application to the theory of orbits

Abstractdescribe how to find the general solution of the matrix equation XA+AXT=0, with A∈Cn×n, which allows us to determine the dimension of its solution space. This result has immediate applications in the theory of congruence orbits of matrices in Cn×n, because the set {XA+AXT:X∈Cn×n} is the tangent space at A to the congruence orbit of A. Hence, the codimension of this orbit is precisely the dimension of the solution space of XA+AXT=0. As a consequence, we also determine the generic canonical structure of matrices under the action of congruence. All these results can be directly extended to palindromic pencils A+λAT