Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 2. April 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 2 Front cover CHARLIE HEBDO SHOOTING On 11 January 2015, in the wake of the killings at Charlie Hebdo's offices and in a kosher supermarket, 4 million people took to the streets in France, including an estimated 1.5 million in Paris, many of them carrying the sign ‘Je suis Charlie’. The heart of the march in the capital was the Place de la République, where demonstrators climbed on the monument erected to Marianne, the national symbol of the Republic. In this issue, Didier Fassin discusses this unprecedented mobilization in defence of the ‘values of the Republic’: liberty, equality, fraternity – as inscribed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen – and more recently, laïcité, the French version of secularism inherited from the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State. He shows that this unanimity was, however, soon disrupted, as some, particularly those from low‐income neighbourhoods, questioned the double standard in the implementation of these principles – a contestation that was harshly repressed within the education and justice systems. To account for such dissonance, the article analyzes the discrepancy between the principles of the Republic and their applications in France. Laïcité, long implemented in a flexible and pragmatic manner, only became more strictly enforced in relation to Islam. Liberty, notably free speech, has recently been subjected to various legal and practical limitations. Equality, which exists under the law, is seriously undermined by social disparities and racial discrimination. Fraternity, which translates into solidarity and welfare, is increasingly weakened by discourses which stigmatize minorities. These discrepancies affect with particular intensity, immigrants from North and sub‐Saharan Africa and their descendants, most of them Muslims – a legacy of France's colonial past. Although they might seem untimely in such moments of unity, these meditations call for a critical reflection on the contradictions of contemporary democracies. Back cover AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL MANIFESTO Ratu Tanoa Visawaqa, the dominant ruling chief of the Fijian island of Bau 1829–1832 and 1837–1852, prior to the commencement of British colonial rule in 1874. Drawing by Alfred Thomas Agate. This is one of the earliest depictions of the rare black‐lipped pearl‐shell breast plates, civa. On Ratu Tanoa's head is the turban‐like bark cloth (masi) head scarf, i‐vauvau. It is said to have concealed the scar from a wound inflicted by a brother who was a rival for the title of Vunivalu, the war king of Bau: the active ruler in a diarchy whose counterpart was the sacerdotal king, the Roko Tui Bau. With Adi Savusavu, one of his nine wives, Ratu Tanoa was the father of Ratu Seru Cakobau, who succeeded in unifying most of Fiji into a single kingdom. In his anthropological manifesto in this issue, Marshall Sahlins argues that our main theories of ‘economic determinism’ represent a self‐consciousness of modern capitalist societies masquerading as the science of others. In the great majority of societies known to anthropology and history, power consists in the direct control of people, from which comes the ability to accumulate wealth, rather than control of their means of livelihood, of capital wealth, from which comes the control of people. Indeed in many cases the notion of ‘production’ itself would be inappropriate insofar as the ancestors or the gods are the creative agents, the fundamental sources of human subsistence – which people thus receive rather than make simply by their own labour. It follows that the principal political beneficiaries of economic prosperity are shamans, priests, garden magicians, chiefs, divine kings, and the like by virtue of their mediation of the spiritual origins of people's livelihoods. All this is not mere ‘false consciousness’ but the way these societies are organized: their own constituted anthropology, from which we must develop ours.     

Household possessions and wealth in agrarian states: Implications for archaeology

This paper deals with the problem of measuring household wealth from domestic artifactual remains. After an archaeologically useful definition and classification of wealth is presented, quantitative anthropological, sociological, and historical analyses demonstrating a strong association between household possessions and wealth are reviewed. Then, ethnographic and historical data on different functional categories of household goods are examined in order to assess their relative ability to predict wealth. Once the nature of the relationship between household possessions and wealth in the systemic context is specified, methodological problems influencing the detection of this relationship in the archaeological context are treated. It is concluded that household possessions are quite good wealth indicators in the systemic context, and that proper attention to a number of methodological issues allows archaeologists to take advantage of this relationship to measure household wealth in past societies.     

House Societies in the Ancient Mediterranean (2000–500 BC)

House societies have become popular with archaeologists in recent years, due to (among other things) their conspicuous material basis (wealth, heirlooms and the houses themselves). As yet, however, most archaeological studies have focused only on individual societies. In this article, we offer a comparative and long-term approach to the phenomenon, using as case studies the Bronze Age and Iron Age communities of the Levant, the Aegean and the central Mediterranean. We describe the elements that define them as house societies and examine their evolution through time. We follow a strictly Lévi-Straussian definition of the house that prevents the concept from losing heuristic power. Using this definition, we consider that houses are to be found in ranked societies without centralization and in complex agropastoral systems, like those of the Mediterranean, where agricultural soil is scarce and liable to be monopolized. We argue that the house emerges in these competitive contexts as an institution to control land and retain patrimony undivided. Through a combination of archaeological and written sources, we try to demonstrate that it is possible to document several strategies used by house societies to acquire and retain power and wealth, including dowry, levirate, a bilateral system of marriage alliances, ancestor cults, specific architectures and house treasures. The case studies addressed here offer good comparative material for assessing similar processes elsewhere. At the same time, we argue that the Mediterranean area developed a particular ideology, that of the shepherd ruler, that was essential to legitimate the house.     

Intergenerational Inequality? Labour,Capital, and Housing Through the Ages

This article examines the relevance of generational relations to emerging patterns of inequality in advanced capitalist societies, with a particular focus on inequalities related to housing wealth. At its heart is a critique of the increasingly prevalent argument that generational difference is a crucial axis of inequality today. It argues that while contemporary capitalist societies are certainly characterized by marked inequalities between generations and that the latter are manifested inter alia in housing ownership, understanding such inequalities principally in generational terms is problematic because they reflect deeper, more fundamental, structural inequalities and should therefore be conceptualized as such. The article suggests that the principal significance of generational relations to contemporary inequality dynamics actually concerns economic transfers rather than differences between generations. Within‐family transfers of wealth, especially housing‐related wealth, from older generations to younger ones tend to reproduce pronounced, structurally generated existing patterns of intra‐generational inequality.     

农业和文明起源

文明起源在考古学上是一个复杂的问题,牵涉到人类社会的许多方面。其中一个重要方面就是农业。本文试图强调农业对文明起源所起的推动作用,并提出一些有关农业考古的看法,希望对目前正在进行的中华文明探源工程和类似课题有所帮助。     

Population Density,Economic Growth and Societies in Transition: Boserup Reconsidered in a Kenyan Case-study

In examining the relationship between population growth and income growth, this article first looks at the Malthusian, transition and revisionist positions. The first is not borne out by historical experience, and the latter two do not explain why greater affluence generally leads to lower rates of population growth. It is argued here that the crucial population characteristic is density. Rising densities from a low base facilitate more productive agriculture and greater specialization and exchange within a society, as Boserup (1965) pointed out. This leads to increased wealth but also to higher costs for education and land. This provides a link to Caldwell's (1976) explanation of changing attitudes to family size: at low densities in simple societies benefits from children exceed costs, while at higher densities in complex societies costs exceed benefits. The changes in societies and economies are illustrated by a Kenyan case study. Kenya has experienced particularly rapid population growth this century, and high economic growth; it is now experiencing the transition to lower birth rates.     

The Production and Exchange of Marine Shell Prestige Goods

Marine shell ornaments have several characteristics that make them significant for archaeological analysis. Made from a raw material valued by cultures throughout the world and imbued with water, life, health, and fertility symbolism, shell objects have functioned as prestige goods. Shell prestige goods circulated between individuals, groups, and societies and materialized interpersonal relationships, making them valuable for archaeologists shifting focus from objects to the people in past societies. Shell ornaments had multiple roles, including ornamentation, wealth, marking status, and as ritual paraphernalia, and had varying symbolic associations even within a society. The rich ethnographic literature on shell use provides a source for archaeological model building. Marine shell artifacts often moved between societies and across long distances, offering a way for archaeologists to explore regional relationships and the interactions between ancient societies. To do this requires using several scales of analysis to investigate archaeological residues of a system that includes marine shell ornaments, the social organization of their production and exchange, and the people who made, displayed, and circulated them.     

Seeking the State: Appropriating Bureaucratic Symbolism and Wealth in the Margins of Southeast Asia

Anthropological research on Southeast Asian states has contributed to understanding how local communities engage with states in their everyday lives. Two approaches drawing out the complexities of state‐society entanglement stand out. First is Foucault's idea that states possess the art‐of‐government. Through techniques such as mapping, census data, biometrics and so on, states are believed to achieve new levels of control over people, who are thus rendered as individual citizens. Second is Scott's idea that societies possess the art‐of‐not‐being‐governed. People, particularly in peripheral areas, seek to escape state control, for instance by sheltering in the hills and forests of Asia. In this article, we seek to identify and expand upon a literature which we see as emerging from the space opened between Foucault and Scott's work, to demonstrate the many creative and diverse ways that peripheral societies seek out states. In doing this we present a synthesis of diverse forms of entanglement to provide new insights into understanding relations between societies and states.     

The empire of chance: How probability changed science and everyday life

Commerce changes the production of wealth in a society as well as its ethics. What is appropriate in a non-commercial society is not necessarily appropriate in a commercial one. Adam Smith criticizes Stoic self-command in commercial societies, rather than embracing it, as is often suggested. He argues that Stoicism, with its promotion of indifference to passions, is an ethic appropriate for savages. Savages live in hard conditions where expressing emotions is detrimental and reprehensible. In contrast, the ease of life brought about by commerce fosters the appropriate expressions and sharing of emotions. Imposing Stoicism on a commercial society is therefore imposing an ethic for savages onto a refined society – something to abhor. Smith’s rejection of Stoicism in commercial societies can thus be seen as a defence of commerce.     

Enlightened histories: civilization,war and the Scottish enlightenment

The concept of civil society continues to generate considerable interest, while the concept of civilization attracts comparatively little attention. This has led to a tendency to oversimplify the relationship between civil societies and militarily powerful sovereign states. Civil societies, it is often argued, are those societies that have emerged from a successful process of domestic pacification and effective control of state power. In this paper, it will be argued that some prominent Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed theories of civilization grounded in more complex historical narratives, in which the accomplishments of civil society were tied to the achievement of state sovereignty based on the successful monopoly of military might. The purpose of this paper is to trace the role of state sovereignty and military monopolization, and the consequent prominence given to the practice of war, in the “historical” theories of civilization articulated by David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson.     

Tourism,leisure and work in an east African pastoral society (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article investigates what happens with leisure experience between cultures when the Mursi of southwestern Ethiopia meet with international tourists. I propose that instead of regarding leisure as a fixed human condition within one society, it might fruitfully be approached as a process that evolves when different societies meet, i.e. as a constantly emerging (and disappearing) practice in cross‐cultural encounters. Tourism, studied broadly from an anthropological point of view, offers an excellent field for this investigation. The Western ideology of leisure, mobilized by tourists in non‐Western settings, is a good entry point to make tangible how societies understand leisure pursuits in intercultural encounters.     

Iraq: The state‐of‐nature effect (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In the civil strife of ancient Greek cities that was the model for Hobbes' state of nature, the intervention of the larger forces of Athens and Sparta, proclaiming unconditional causes‐to‐die‐for, transformed local social differences into lethal factional enmities. Death then raged from many quarters. The same effect of anarchic violence has followed from imperial conquer‐and‐divide policies in modern colonial and post‐colonial societies. The present paper documents the processes by which the American intervention in Iraq transformed a plural nation into a bellum omnium contra omnes. Historically, the state of nature appears as the effect of the subversion of the social contract rather than its precondition.     

Localising peace: The young men of Bougainville’s ‘Crisis generation’

Postconflict societies are often plagued by violence long after formal declarations of peace. There is a need to understand why peace often remains elusive. This article develops a theory of participation in peace and violence in postconflict societies, which it understands as being rooted in interactions between local structures and agency. Evidence to inform this theory comes from a study of young men in postconflict Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. We find that young men seek pathways to achieve positively valued and contextually relevant goals. However, difficulties with trauma, education and work, achieving social standing, and escaping from cultures of violence limit the capacity of young men to participate peacefully in society. Disenfranchised and marginalised, some young men may turn to acts and displays of violence. We argue that peace occurs when individuals choose to make and sustain it, and so, if the end of conflict does not bring with it changes in the structures which constrain the capacity of individuals to choose peaceful pathways, the risk of violence remains.     

The Piketty phenomenon: why has Capital become a publishing sensation?

Why has Piketty's Capital become a publishing sensation? Not for revolutionary findings; its message that western societies have experienced increases in inequality of income and wealth over the long term is hardly new. Of the several reasons discussed in this article, attention is paid in particular to the book's timing and its claim to reveal the laws of income and wealth distribution in western societies. Had the book been published before 2008 it would have been much less successful. Piketty's revelation of the big trends and their underlying logic helps to objectify, legitimize and offer a kind of catharsis for surging middle‐class anxieties during the Great Recession. These anxieties have been further intensified by evidence that over 90 per cent of the increase in disposable income in the United States has accrued to the top 1 per cent of the population in the past several years, and a not much lower percentage to the top 1 per cent in Britain. In the conclusion it is argued that if Piketty's forecasts are even remotely accurate, capitalism will lose its core claim to legitimacy.     

Dating and Interpreting Desert Structures: The Enclosures of The Judean Desert,Southern Levant,Re‐Evaluated

Enclosures, single large curvilinear structures, constitute ubiquitous relics of past human societies in marginal environments. Many enclosures suffer from severe scarcity of related artefactual and ecofactual remains, allowing only tentative assessments of their date and function. A case in point comes from the Judean Desert, Southern Levant, where several dozen enclosures were surveyed and described as Chalcolithic cult sites. Using new research strategies, incorporating critical evaluation of previous surveys, test excavations and optically stimulated luminescence dating, we were able to date enclosures to a much broader time span than previously suggested, and reject their proposed ritualistic function.     

Mediterranean heritage: ancient marvel,modern millstone

ABSTRACT. The wealth, variety and seaborne accessibility of Mediterranean societies since late prehistory have made the region's cultural heritage the world's most widely acclaimed. But since the fall of the Roman Empire the Mediterranean has been increasingly disadvantaged, its history compromised, its legacy beleaguered. Two millennia of invasion and rapine, religious vendetta, foreign conquest, imperial dominion and colonial subjugation have left Mediterranean peoples with fewer resources and weaker infrastructures than those of transalpine and transatlantic nation‐states. The consequences for the care and control of Mediterranean heritage are parlous. That heritage is both the region's self‐defining pride and its economic mainstay, yet a crippling burden to protect and maintain, let alone to interpret and celebrate. It is everywhere beset by natural and human attrition. Weathering and erosion, illicit excavation and pillage, tomb robbery and the international antiquities market exact tolls that legal codes and police forces are all but impotent to stem. Recent social and political trends suggest potential remedies for some of these dilemmas.     

Territoriality: The Transcendental,Primordial Feature of Modern Societies

Abstract. This article argues that one feature of all societies is territoriality and that one element of territoriality is the transcendental, primordial attachment. Consequently, the article is critical of arguments which view territoriality, including that of modem society, as primarily a post-Cartesian strategy of control or access. The phenomenon of the territoriality of modern societies and the this-worldly, transcendental referents in the collective self-consciousness which it presupposes also call into question the assumption of the putatively pervasive, contractarian individualism of modem society.     

PERISHABLES AND WORLDLY GOODS — ARTIFACT DECORATION AND CLASSIFICATION IN THE LIGHT OF WETLANDS RESEARCH

Summary. Archaeology has long operated from the premise that there was a diverse and ornate organic 'clothing' on the 'dry skeleton' of the past which evades excavation. This paper evaluates the evidence from recent wetlands excavations and considers the implications of the paucity of organic containers found, and the lack of decoration on recovered organic materials, in Britain. It is argued that this negative evidence has important ramifications for our understanding of production and the classification of 'things' in later prehistoric societies. These issues can obviously not be addressed without considering the wealth of organic artifacts recovered at Glastonbury and an extended discussion of its material culture assemblage is included. In conclusion it is stressed that by its relative invisibility 'organic archaeology' has been prone to our normative projections onto the past. The role played by organic goods cannot be understood as being constant and can only be appreciated within their broader archaeological context.     

Mutuality, De-Mutualization and Communities: The Implications of Branch Network Rationalization in the British Building Society Industry

The paper examines the withdrawal of branches from local communities by financial institutions. It assesses whether mutually owned building societies are more adept than the former societies that have converted to public limited companies (plcs), or the high street banks, in serving disadvantaged communities. The paper shows that during the mid-1990s: mutual building societies were more likely than former societies that have converted to plcs to maintain their branch network; mutual societies were less likely than banks to withdraw from socially deprived locations and more likely to open branches in such places; differences between mutual societies and convertors are less marked, but mutual institutions appear less likely than convertors to close branches in deprived communities. Among the remaining mutual building societies there are differences of perspective, with more commercially-minded societies less positive than socially-concerned mutuals about the need to maintain or even expand branches in disadvantaged areas.     

多尺度下中国人口老龄化风险集群的时空格局——Flexible空间扫描计量方法的应用

运用Flexible空间扫描计量方法,对比分析了省、市和县域尺度上的老龄化风险集群的时空格局。发现：老龄化成为全国人口结构转型的主旋律,少子化成为新常态,老龄化区域非均衡加剧,并存多种区域模式;三种尺度识别出的风险集群都集中分布于东南半壁;集群的风险程度与地域范围随时间不断扩大,但集群间的风险差异趋于缩小。总体而言,尺度越小,识别出的集群分布越分散,定位越精确,风险越高,差异越大。针对不同地区的人口-经济发展情况,提出保障生育,发展养老产业,基本公共服务均等化,就地、近城镇化等的老龄化风险应对策略。