Game Resources, Social Interaction, and the Ecological Footprint in Southwest New Mexico

Humans have modified their environments for millennia, but the role of these impacts on economic and social strategies among communities can be difficult to assess. This is due in part to the difficulty of quantifying impacts, which hinders our evaluations of the effects of different resource acquisition strategies and impairs attempts to understand competing demands on resources and their effects on the evolution of social relations. In this paper we employ footprint analysis, a tool used in ecology, to assess the impact of prehistoric subsistence farming communities on the environment, specifically faunal resources. We use footprint analysis to quantify the impact of various strategies of game acquisition by Classic Mimbres period (AD 1000-1130) farmers in the North American Southwest. Assessments are then employed in identifying changes in social relations among communities that may have contributed to settlement changes in the region.     

Balancing Preservation and Logging: Public Lands Policy in British Columbia and the Western United States

Both the United States and Canada have made fundamental changes in their policies regarding natural resources. The province of British Columbia made major revisions to its forest policy in the earlyto-mid-1990s; in the western United States, policy efforts have been stymied by conflicts between state and federal officials and between conservationists and resource developers. The different structures of federalism in the two countries result in two different approaches to policymaking that are discussed here. However, the ultimate test of natural resource policy, I argue, should be their consistency with the goal of sustainable ecosystems and preservation of biodiversity. From the perspective of ecological science, neither country has been particularly successful in policymaking for public lands and for logging in particular. Both nations have failed to give priority to protecting old-growth forests and largely have rejected the idea that ancient forests are much more valuable than simply sources of timber     

Local Resource Use in the Pacific War with Japan: Logging in Western Melanesia

Abstract

Americans have traditionally been the most wasteful people in the world. Now, however, we are fighting enemies who beat the world at squeezing what they want out of occupied territory. We must husband what we have, not only by avoiding waste, but also by the maximum utilization of local resources.     

Property and Propriety: Jewish Landlords in Early Twentieth-Century Toronto

Drawing on literatures on the social construction of place and identity, and on the changing nature of urban property ownership, this paper examines Jewish immigrants to Toronto as housing landlords, situating their activities in the context of wider changes in the city's housing market and of their needs to raise capital, achieve status and foster group identity. Using archival and newspaper evidence to reconstruct the behaviour of individual landlords, it is argued that ownership of inner-city property fulfilled numerous functions, especially related to other aspects of business proprietorship, but that it also accentuated the geographical concentration of poorer Jews, with critical implications for their relations with non-Jews.     

The Confessions of Dolgoruki: Fiction and Masternarrative in Twentieth-Century Iran

This paper is an in-depth study of The Confessions of Dolgoruki, the purported memoirs of a nineteenth-century Russian ambassador to Iran, long adduced as a document proving the claim that the Bahā'īs of Iran are spies of foreign powers. It unearths several early versions of the text, contextualizes the creation of The Confessions, exams the zeitgeist that produced it, and tracks the changes the text went through as the dominant socio-political discourse changed over time. In discussing the range of reactions The Confessions provoked, this paper traces the intriguing path through which this text created the masternarrative of Bahā'ī espionage. Finally, a hypothesis regarding the identity of the original creator of the text is advanced.     

A New Woman and Her Warlord: Li Dequan,Feng Yuxiang,and the Politics of Intimacy in Twentieth-Century China

This article proposes a new way of viewing Republican-era warlords. Through an examination of the life of Li Dequan, the second wife of warlord Feng Yuxiang, it displaces Feng from his typical military and political context, scrutinizing instead the ways that Feng and Li interwove the private intimacies of love, marriage, and family life into their public and political lives. In the Republic, Feng and Li, like many prominent figures of the time, shared elements of their private lives with journalists and, through them, a broader reading public, posing for photographs with their children on their way to school and inviting reporters to family events. Feng and Li utilized this newfound intimacy between public and political leaders to cultivate public sympathy and support. By the early PRC, Li—following Feng’s sudden 1948 death—was named the first Minister of Health of the People’s Republic of China and her roles as wife and romantic object fell away. Instead, she focused on mothering the nation. By the late twentieth century, emphasis on the Li and Feng romance reappeared in writings about the couple, and while these narratives drew on the Republican-era stories, it was made to seem that Li’s feminism rather than Feng’s modernity had facilitated their true love. Though the warlords have often been seen as destructive, exploring Feng’s and Li’s lives demonstrates that factional militarists and their families contributed to a new political culture grounded in a gendered national narrative that intertwined family and nation.