Markets,regions, and the world system: Explorations beyond the local community

Mines, Mattison. The Warrior Merchants: Textiles, Trade, and Territory in South India. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. xiii + 178 pp. including 2 maps, references, glossary, and index. $34.50 cloth.

Plattner, Stuart, ed. Markets and Marketing (Monographs in Economic Anthropology, No. 4). Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1985. xx + 418 pp. including chapter references, 3 maps, and tables and figures throughout. $16.75 paper.

Smith, Joan, Immanual Wallerstein, and Hans‐Dieter Evers, eds. Households and the World Economy: Explorations in the World‐Economy. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1984. 296 pp. including chapter references, tables, and index. $25.00 cloth.     

A long revolution: Writing the political history of Queensland regimes

Peter Coaldrake, Working the System: Government in Queensland. University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989, pp.l85.$12.95 (paper)

Phil Dickie, The Road to Fitzgerald: Revelations of Corruption Spanning Four Decades, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1988. pp.293. $9.95 (paper); second edition, The Road to Fitzgerald ana Beyond, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989, pp.337. $12.95 (paper)

Evan Whitton, The Hillbilly Dictator: Australia's Police State, Australian Broadcasting Corporation Enterprises, Crows Nest, NSW, 1989, pp. 197. $16.99 (paper)

Ross Fitzgerald and Harold Thornton, Labor in Queensland: From the 1880s to 1988. University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989, pp.422. $34.95 (paper)

Peter Charlton, State of Mind: Why Queensland is Different, Methuen Haynes, North Ryde, second edition 1987, pp. 263. $12.95 (paper)     

Louis Muskens: a leading figure in the history of Dutch and world epileptology

In the history of Dutch neurology Muskens has a place in his own right. Elderly neurologists still attest to the special fame of Muskens. He held a strong opinion on developing the specialty of neurology independent of psychiatry. At the same time he maintained that surgery of the nervous system also should be included in the realm of neurology. These views met with considerable opposition from colleagues and led to Muskens' isolation. To the field of epileptology he contributed both clinical and experimental neurological studies. With Donath he was the co-founder of the International League Against Epilepsy in 1909. In addition he held a lifelong interest in the pathophysiology of forced movements, which he studied both in human pathology and in experimental studies throughout the vertebrate series. This resulted in his magnum opus on the supravestibular system in 1935. His scientific work was well received in scientific societies all over Europe.     

The very personal history of Nithard: family and honour in the Carolingian world

Nithard's Histories of the civil wars fought between Louis the Pious's sons reveal much about mid‐ninth‐century nobility, political values, and the author's changing social position. This article considers how Nithard's immediate familial history affected the text's composition. We argue that his incorporation of authorial voice and detail, crafting of the royal lineage, and emphasis on fraternitas suggest that Nithard employed the text to fight for legitimacy and honour, both familial and individual. We propose that the Histories should be read as a social commemoration of Nithard's familial memories, thus complicating the assumption that family histories were the purview of women.     

Dreams at the edge of the world and other evocations of o'odham history

Las personas O'odham, los Tohono O'odham y los Alkimel O'odham tienen una larga historia en los desiertos solitarios del suroeste de América del Norte. Este trabajo es un esfuerzo etnográfico en conjunto que incluye a las personas mayores de los O'odham y los consejeros culturales. Presenta un estudio sobre los motivos por los cuales los lugares ancestrales y antiguos son una parte fundamental de la experiencia O'odham en la actualidad. Al concentrar el estudio en el valle de San Pedro, un área tradicional, que no está bajo el control de los descendientes de los O'odham, podríamos comenzar a entender la compleja relación que une a los indígenas norteamericanos con el entorno que sus antepasados crearon. Las denuncias de la herencia indígena y la necesidad creciente de hacer un balance sobre los valores de los múltiples interesados en el manejo de los recursos culturales son aspectos que toman una importancia inmediata. Yo argumento que los estudiosos necesitan entender mejor los sitions qrqueológicos y sus objetos no sólo por lo que estos puedan cecir sobre el pasado sino también sobre el mundo actual. (O'odham, etnohistoria, herencia, terreno arqueológico, valle de San Pedro).

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Résumé Les peuples O'odhams, Tohono O'odham et Akimel O'odham, ont une longue histoire dans l'austère désert du grand sud-ouest nord américain. issue de la collaboration d'un projet ethnohistorique avec les a?nés O'odham et les conseillers culturels, ce travail présente une étude sur les fa?ons selon lesquelles les endroits anciens et ancestraux font partie intégrante de l'expérience actuelle des O'odham. En se concentrant sur la vallée de San Pedro, une région traditionnelle qui n'est plus sous le contr?le des descendants des O'odham, nous pouvons commencer à révéler la complexité des relations qui lient les autochtones américains aux paysages matériels que leurs ancêtres ont créés. Dans le contexte des revendications du patrimoine autochtone et la demande croissante d'ajuster la valeur des enjeux multiples dans la gestion des ressources culturelles, ces questions prennent de l'importance et de l'urgence additionnelles. Je soutiens que les universitaires ont besoin de mieux comprendre les sites archéologiques et les objets, non seulement pour ce qu'ils nous apprennent sur le passé, mais aussi sur ce que ces endroits et ces objets nous apprennent sur notre monde d'aujourd'hui. (mots clés: O'odham, ethnohistoire, patrimoine, archéologie du paysage, la vallée de San Pedro).

     

Environmental history in the Mediterranean world: cross-disciplinary investigation of cause-and-effect for degradation and soil erosion

Environmental history is a multidisciplinary enterprise united by shared interests in ecological change and the complex interactions between people and the environment. Its practitioners include expertise in the natural sciences, in history or archaeology, or in political ecology and related social sciences; but there is no agreement on a common agenda and limited success in bridging methodological and epistemological divisions that impede integrative and interdisciplinary research. World-systems history and environmental history also have overlapping interests in long-term change and matters of sustainability. The Mediterranean world sustained agricultural lifeways across some 8000 years, yet its environment has repeatedly been described as degraded, suggesting conceptual confusion between transformation and destruction. This paper is didactic in purpose and uses landscape histories for the Peloponnese and eastern Spain to show that the impact of recurrent, excessive precipitation events and of reduced quality of land cover are difficult to unravel, because they commonly appear to work in tandem. As a result (a) environmental change cannot be assumed or “predicted”, but must be studied inductively by experts with science skills, and (b) cause-and-effect relationships demand an understanding of ecological behavior, for which humanistic insights are indispensable. Social science models highlight systemic relationships from socioeconomic and structural perspectives, but are less suited to deal with the complexity of environmental change or the contingencies exemplified by human resilience. Near Eastern, Greek and Roman agronomic writings offer elite “voices” that speak to cumulative technological change, scientific understanding, and the context of intensification. Rural voices can be heard through ethnography, and in eastern Spain are extended into the past by archaeology and archival research. In the absence of structural constraints, they reveal collective decision-making with respect to a shifting repertoire of agricultural strategies that take into account market opportunities, demographic growth, finite resources and environmental problems. Such adaptability spells resilience, and “good farming” is culturally embedded as a civic responsibility, both in the ethnographic present and in the older, elite agronomic writings. But if the “moral economy” erodes in the wake of food stress, tax extortion, instability, insecurity, or ideological oppression, there is little incentive to pursue long-term strategies, so that behavior focuses on short-term survival. The context for this dialectic of poor versus good ecological management may be structural, but cause-and-effect in the traditional Mediterranean world ultimately depended on ecological and human resilience. Long-term sustainability is similarly non-predictive. It depends on people, rather than social theory.     

Lessons in the rubble: The world trade center and the history of disaster investigations in the United States

The World Trade Center collapse stands as a singular event in American history. As such, it might also stand to reason that the technical investigation into the circumstances of the collapse also stands alone. Clashes over authority among powerful institutions both public and private, competition among rival experts for influence, inquiry into a disaster elevated to the status of a memorial for the dead: these are the base elements of the World Trade Center investigation. These elements, however, are not unique. This article illustrates--drawing on case studies including the burning of the United States Capitol Building (1814), the Hague Street boiler explosion and building collapse in New York (1850), and the Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago (1903)--that conflicts over authority, expertise, memory, and ultimately the attribution of responsibility suffuse the history of disaster in the United States. The "disaster investigation," far from proving itself the dispassionate, scientific verdict on causality and blame, actually emerges as a hard-fought contest to define the moment in politics and society, in technology and culture.     

Staff selection: the interview and beyond

Abstract

The Teaching Assistant (TA) system operating in the United States has both advantages and disadvantages to graduate students employed as TAs and undergraduates taught by these TAs. The system develops teaching and communication skills and broadens TA capability, understanding and marketability. Discussion and lab sections taught by TAs provide an arena where undergraduates are exposed to everything from simple ideas to difficult ideas that need hands‐on help. However, few quality control procedures are employed to determine prospective TAs. Moreover, TA training is of limited extent and use. TAs either sink or swim; none the less the vast majority do survive and do an excellent job. A number of measures that any university, college or department might employ if they intend to begin employing TAs are recommended: all TAs should attend TA orientation sessions that discuss university‐wide TA issues; departments should also create sessions that specially train TAs in how to teach their respective courses; and departments should develop TA evaluation schemes that quickly identify TA problems.     

Australian political studies and the production of disciplinary innocence

ABSTRACT

While Australian political studies often appears to have neglected engagements with Indigenous peoples and politics, we argue this is not a simple question of omission. In fact, the discipline is deeply implicated in imperial knowledge production and the authorisation of racialised colonial governance. As non-Indigenous scholars working within Australian political studies, in this paper we reflect on our own discipline in light of several decades of critical scholarship, identifying the production of disciplinary innocence through a theoretical and institutional analysis of Australian political studies knowledge practices. We explore this production via canonical knowledges, institutional processes that contain Indigenous people and knowledge to subjects of policy, and the operation of disciplinary divisions which neutralise scholarship on policy and political institutions.