‘The Claims of Asia and the Far East’: India and the FAO in the Age of Ambivalent Internationalism

If any nation were poised to actualize the developmental promises that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extended to the international community, it was India. India's independence came in the wake of devastating famine in Bengal and the fears of its recurrence, and the nationalists who had midwifed India's freedom staked their legitimacy to the promise of food for all. Yet from independence, the FAO played only a marginal role in India's agricultural development, its projects reflecting a winnowing scale of ambition. From early investigations into the improved cultivation of basic food grains, the FAO's projects grew increasingly modest by the time of the Green Revolution, revolving around modest improvements to capitalist agriculture, from wool shearing to timber and fishery development. Instead, India drew more substantively upon resources made available by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the United States Technical Cooperation Mission and occasional Soviet largesse. Meanwhile, the Indian most associated with the FAO, B.R. Sen (Director-General, 1956–1967), struggled to align the Organization's capacities with India's scarcity crises, even as his own understanding of famine drew upon his experience as India's Director of Food during the Bengal Famine.     

British-Israelists and the “State of Israeli” in the Twentieth Century

British-Israelism was a significant movement in British culture in the twentieth century. At its high-point in the mid-twentieth century, card-carrying members of the British-Israel World Federation numbered in the tens of thousands. Several members of the royal family — including King George VI — publicly declared their adherence to British-Israelist doctrine. They have shared this belief with lawmakers and generals, poets and television personalities. British-Israelists believe that the descendants of the biblical polity of Israel are the Anglo-Saxon people of Britain. As such, the British occupation of Jerusalem in 1917 was seen by British Israelists as an event of incomparable prophetic significance. This article explores the ways in which British-Israelists responded to the changing status of Palestine over the course of the short twentieth century. Drawing on the insights of Zygmunt Bauman and of Andrew Crome, I contend that British-Israelism — at times philo-Semitic, at times anti-Semitic — is fundamentally allosemitic in its attitude towards Israel and the Jews. As such, to paraphrase Crome, British-Israelists can “never interact with Israel on its own terms.”     

The “Hidden” Code: Coding and Classifying in Rock Art. The Case of Northwestern Patagonia

In spite of its importance for rock art studies, rock art motifs coding and classification process is not always made explicit. In this discussion of the process of rock art classification, we consider an exploratory research employing two different criteria for the coding of a northwestern Patagonian rock art motifs database. One coding makes use of a ‘lumping’ criterion, and the other uses a ‘splitting’ criterion. Each of these criteria will be evaluated using cladistic analysis, recording how each coding criterion affects results. As a conclusion, and given our results, the use of more than one coding criterion is suggested when classifying rock art.