In Search of Middle Preclassic Lowland Maya Ideologies

Journal of Archaeological Research - Little is known about Middle Preclassic/Formative lowland Maya belief systems or ideologies, compared to later periods, but with increasing research at Middle...     

The Boundaries of Women's Power: Gender and the Discourse of Political Friendship in Twelfth‐Century England

The discourse of friendship was an integral part of political language and interaction in twelfth‐century England. Because the qualities that made a good political friendship – loyalty, wise counsel and generosity, among others – corresponded so closely to the criteria for successful lordship, historians often used the quality of a king's friendship as a signifier for the quality of his rule. Yet their treatment of women's political friendship was markedly different. The discourse of friendship therefore provides a window into the larger struggle over the representation of gender and rulership in twelfth‐century historical writing in England, reflecting chroniclers’ anxiety about female sovereignty. Twelfth‐century historians depicted women's participation in political friendship as acceptable only within certain circumscribed boundaries that corresponded to the sanctioned political roles for women in general. Otherwise, chroniclers attempted to efface the existence of women's political friendship, sometimes describing the same situations in different language depending on whether the main participant was male or female. Chroniclers also represented women as arbiters of friendship, showing men how better to conduct their relationships either through direct instruction or counter‐example. In both cases women reinforced male friendship, either by being excluded from it, or by demonstrating the correct way to carry it out.     

Coordinating Transport and Urban Planning: From Ideologies to Local Realities

In Europe, the idea that coordinating transportation and urban planning is a necessary condition for setting sustainable urban development into motion has spread throughout academic and professional circles. While this concern is not new, the objectives underlying transport and urban planning coordination have deeply changed over the last decades. How have local authorities translated the requirements and objectives of national laws? How have they accounted for the evolution of these global objectives? What factors explain innovation and continuity in the relationship between land use planning and transport policies? In a comparative research between Switzerland and France, we addressed the question of political change by reconstituting the “trajectories” of four urban areas: Geneva and Bern in Switzerland and Strasbourg and Bordeaux in France. We have described the policy paths of these urban areas since the end of the 1960s by focusing on the contents of master plans, the principal technical solutions and projects that have been implemented, and the means of inter-sectorial coordination used. For each case, factors of change or inertia have been identified by focusing on three main variables that are often studied alternatively in public policy analysis: ideas, institutions and interests.     

Middle-Class Ideologies and American Respectability: Archaeology and the Irish Immigrant Experience

This study illustrates the materialization of identity shifts through refined ceramic and glass forms recovered from working class Irish immigrant and Irish-American communities. The sites used in this article were chosen because of their spatio-temporal compatibility covering dynamic periods of Irish identity in the United States. Historians argue that 1880 marks the beginning of an identity shift from Irish immigrant to Irish-American. This research attempts to provide the necessary materials to begin a discourse bringing together material and historical evidence illuminating the conflict between competing ideologies of respectability and changing conceptions of Irish identity in America.     

Rural Growth Points and Rural Industries in Zimbabwe: Ideologies and Policies

A Rural Service Centre which provided all basic infrastructure, had a strong residential component and offered a wide range of services would automatically attract rural non-farm activities. This is the term applied to the whole range of activities connected with trading, manufacturing, construction, transport and government and other services. improved infrastructure is the key to more rural manufacturing. The deficiency in manufacturing may therefore be expected to right itself if given the necessary Government support through the provision of infrastructure. (Whitsun Foundation, 1980: 60–1; emphases added). Rural Service Centres ‘do not offer any major form of non-agricultural employment other than trade and certain jobs connected with the provision of services for agricultural communities’. (Hanratty and Heath, 1984:27)     

Ethnocentricity of the Nationalist Discourse

Abstract. Nationalism is a theory about the nature, purposes, boundaries and the basis of the legitimacy and the unity of the state. It maintains that the state should ideally be constituted as a nation. This means that a nation has a right to form a state of its own, as also that every state should endeavour to become a nation. The nationalist discourse rests on several assumptions, such as that nationalism is a universal phenomenon, that nationalist movements have identical structures, that all nations aim to become independent states, that non-Western nationalism is derivative in nature and that nationalism is an unmitigated evil. The author elucidates the distinctive nature of nationalism and criticises these and related assumptions.     

Mining Gender

Books reviewed in this article: Sally Zanjani, A Mine of Her Own: Women Prospectors in the American West1850‐1950 Mary Murphy, Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914‐41 Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, andPolitics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904‐1951