Verbal Creation: From Linguistic Feature to Literary Motif in Genesis 1-11

The book of Genesis opens with the creation of the world by means of speech. “God said: ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen 1,3). Scholars have considered this creation through speech a prototypical speech act. However, the recurrence of this motif in later chapters of the book is often overlooked. This article argues that the “speech as a means of creation” paradigm functions as a literary motif in subsequent stories of the Primeval History. The discussion will revolve around the initial appearance of the paradigm, its later manifestations, and the relationship between them, focusing in particular on the formal realization of the linguistic category of the speech act as a literary motif.     

Fashioning a Cacique Nun: From Saints’ Lives to Indian Lives in the Spanish Americas

New Spain was a land of opportunity for the missionary as well as the conquistador. The controversial proposal to found a convent for women of the indigenous elite illuminates the redefinition of notions of gender and race. Examining testimonies on this question written by priests, this article charts how they transform material that would normally have been presented as hagiography into narratives of a more general nature, and argues that this rhetorical shift contributed to a kind of writing on the Indies which not only shared the comparative and epistemological stakes of ethnography but also considered issues of gender.     

Alternative Complexities: The Archaeology of Pastoral Nomadic States

Almost a century of systematic anthropological research on pastoral nomads has produced significant data and theory for understanding these mobile societies. Substantially less attention has been devoted to complex sociopolitical organization among pastoral nomadic groups and, in particular, to the large-scale polities referred to as nomadic confederations, states, or sometimes empires. This article reviews established ideas for how and why complex organization emerged among nomadic groups and then considers these ideas in the context of recent archaeological theory on statehood and new material evidence for pastoral nomadic prehistory. Revised conceptions of both the state and the nomad suggest that pastoral nomadic polities represent alternative forms of complex organization that were different from classic Old World states but still quite complex in unexpected ways. These organizational differences resulted from the mobile and flexible politics practiced among herding peoples and gave rise to regional polities based on spatial networking, distributed authority, and innovations in transport and exchange.     

The Pastoral Neolithic of East Africa

In East Africa, as in many other regions, the initial shift from hunting and gathering to food production was a secondary process involving the introduction of species domesticated elsewhere. Specifically, the East African Neolithic, or Pastoral Neolithic, centered on herding livestock, some of which may have been domesticated in the Sahara and all of which were almost certainly imported from areas to the north. The development of the Pastoral Neolithic was lengthy and complex, having begun before 4000 B.P. and lasted until about 1300 B.P. Although detailed information on this segment of African prehistory is not abundant, data so far available reveal a succession of cultural transformations within the Pastoral Neolithic, such that it can be divided into early, evolved, and late stages, each exhibiting distinctive combinations of ceramic wares, lithic industries, and subsistence regimes. The transformations seem to have been fostered by both environmental change and population movements.     

Entrepreneurial Manchester: The Genesis of Elite Consensus

The article reviews the changing strategies of Manchester's Labour-controlled city council from 1987 and the emergence of "urban entrepreneurialism" as the hegemonic framework for local strategy. It is argued that the supply-side emphasis on "bricks and mortar" regeneration, flagship developments, and place-marketing depended on the emergence of both tacit and formal partnerships and the consolidation of an elite consensus. Such partnerships were substantially directed at securing discretionary grant funding in direct competition with other cities. The article goes on to analyse the reasons for the city's relative success in this competition, and the processes through which elite consensus was secured and consolidated.     

The Interview: From Formal to Postmodern

Standard oral history textbooks will contain a chapter on theinterview with the do's and don’ts of basic structuredand unstructured interviewing. This specialist book is intendedto give sufficient critical detail concerning the differenttypes of interview, including their uses, benefits, and shortcomings,to assist all newcomers to the subject. Oral historians arenot likely to need such comprehensive knowledge, but the textis not lengthy and is for the most part clearly written, soit does not become a burden. In fact its brevity