Good guys or bad? Middle class blacks and the black community

William Alan Muraskin. Middle Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. 318 pp. $14.95.     

The equally “bad” French and English farmers of Quebec: New TFP measures from the 1831 census

New TFP estimates drawn from the neglected census of 1831 for Lower Canada are used to test the controversial (but still dominant) traditional “poor French farmers” explanation for a prolonged economic crisis. The new evidence shows that French-speaking areas were equally as productive as English-speaking areas, something that upturns the established consensus and reinforces the minority viewpoint that culture had little to do with the crisis. Using a broad range of controls, the researchers find that this conclusion is robust and that other variables such as settlement recency, environment, and economic structure were much more significant determinants of TFP. These results warrant the abandonment of the cultural explanation and a shift toward other explanatory channels.     

Good for glaciers,bad for people? Archaeologically relevant climate models developed from reconstructions of glacier mass balance

We present a new climate and vegetation model, and discuss applications with a study of medieval land degradation and settlement abandonment in þórsmörk, Iceland. Existing meteorological data are used as the starting point for modelling glacier snowlines (equilibrium lines), and this is developed to model seasonal snowcover, potential vegetation and growing season. The current status and past fluctuations of glaciers across Iceland provide independent spatial and temporal constraints to the model. In þórsmörk, there was extensive landscape degradation and settlement abandonment in the late Medieval period, with an unclear role for climate change. Modelling of the landscape impacts of a 1 °C fall in temperatures shows that climatically induced degradation through reduced vegetation, growing season, and increased snowcover had limited effects on the once settled area, highlighting the importance of anthropogenically driven change. High resolution modelling offers a significant potential for assessing ‘what if’ questions, and identifying key empirical tests.     

‘Safe spaces’ and ‘bad’ girls: ‘child marriage victims’’ experiences from a shelter in Eastern India

This article interrogates the politics of safety that underpin rehabilitative practices in a state-funded shelter run by an anti-trafficking NGO in Eastern India. It focuses on the experiences of a group of female adolescents, categorised as ‘child marriage victims’, residing at the shelter. The analysis of in-depth life history interviews collected over a two-week period in October 2014 reveals that the adolescents contest the legislative victimhood imposed on them. For them, their marriages and pre-marital relationships are an expression of romantic and sexual agency, in contravention of familial norms. In this context, the adolescents perceive the shelter as a punitive space and interpret their enforced stay for ‘protection’ and ‘rehabilitation’ as an extension of familial control and regulation of their lives. The protectionism-as-safety discourse rewrites their agency as victimhood and transforms the shelter into a site where everyday forms of gendered power inequalities within social relations in the household are authorised and reproduced by the state and NGO. The adolescents perceive themselves as ‘bad girls’ and adopt various strategies to insist on their rehabilitation into ‘good girls’ to secure release from the shelter often by enacting the ‘victimhood’ expected of them. This allows for unique expressions of agency in an otherwise constrained context but hinders relationships of solidarity with other residents. Overall, the article highlights the need to challenge the ways in which patriarchal norms continue to spatially govern and discipline the expression of female sexuality and agency through 'safe spaces' in India.     

“The good,the bad,the weird”: Stone Age and Early Metal Period radiocarbon dates and chronology from the Karelian Isthmus,North-West Russia

In this paper all the Stone Age and Early Metal Period (ca. 8600 cal BC — 300 AD) radiocarbon dates from the Karelian Isthmus, Russia, are compiled and their archaeological usability assessed using a set of evaluation principles. The quality of radiometric dates from such a large area has rarely been methodologically examined in Finnish or North-West Russian archaeology, and is applied here for the first time on the present material. Special attention is given to the discussion on the deficiencies and limitations of the current data. Based on the 81 dates evaluated as useful, a tentative radiocarbon chronology is presented for the study area. This is generally in sequence with the chronologies of the nearby areas, but suggests some differences especially towards the end of Stone Age, as well as the presence of biases caused by taphonomic and research-related factors.