From Moscow to Curaçao: Orthodoxy,Evasion, and Competition in Jewish Life 1

Edwin Hutchins. Culture and Inference: A Trobriand Case Study. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980. x + 143 pp. Notes, references, glossary index. $14.00.     

The particular kindness of friends: ex-Fascists,clientage and the transition to democracy in Italy, 1945–1960

This article examines some of the social implications of Italy’s limited purge of the bureaucracy and Fascist political class following the Second World War. Using the postwar personal correspondence of former Fascist government ministers Giuseppe Bottai (1895–1959) and Dino Alfieri (1886–1966), the article analyses the informal networks that promoted the continued influence of these ex-Fascists with high-ranking bureaucrats and other prominent individuals (such as Pope Paul VI and Aldo Moro). Thanks to the long-standing social practice of the raccomandazione, Bottai and Alfieri maintained their Fascist-era connections well into the postwar period, often serving as intermediaries between ‘ordinary Italians’ and governmental, political and cultural elites. Although they no longer held political power, these ex-Fascists represented a class of ‘alternative elites’ unassociated with the democratic values of the new Republic.     

From Peru to Ichaboe: The dynamics of a shifting guano frontier, 1840–5

The guano frontier originated as a geographic space for a socio-cultural resource central to the identity, lifestyle and worldview of the indigenous Peruvians. Colonisation in combination with advances in understandings of plant nutrition and fertiliser science, however, shifted guano’s meaning from its original roots and turned it into a globally tradable commodity. The geographical frontier, under the influence of post-independence politics and nationalisation, firstly became an economic frontier and, secondly, a political boundary. With discoveries on Ichaboe and other neighbouring islands on the southwest coast of Africa, this frontier shifted and a race for monopoly control ensued. The dynamics of the struggle for monopoly control over the guano frontier on the Namib coast challenges some of our fundamental historiographic tenets of frontiers, their very natures, triggers and movements. This article suggests the extension of a socio-ecological model in which resource demand and depletion, coupled with changes in the extension of knowledge and legal boundaries, all played roles.