The assumption of equilibrium in the analysis of migration and interregional differences: a review of some recent research

"This paper questions the plausibility of the assumption of interregional equilibrium in recent research into migration and the valuation of amenities in the United States. It is shown that it is difficult to develop a satisfactory explanation for continuing net migration which is compatible with the equilibrium assumption, and that recent relevant research generally fails to support the idea that the U.S. economy is in equilibrium. The association of higher rent levels with in-migration is explained as a short-run phenomenon. If the spatial economy is in disequilibrium, then the valuations of amenities assuming equilibrium will be biased, being probably too low in areas of net in-migration and too high in areas of net out-migration."     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

Archaeometric analysis of ceramic production in Tiwanaku state (c.500–1000 ce): An exploratory study

The chemical and mineralogical characterization of seven ceramic fragments produced within Tiwanaku state (c.500–1000 ce ) is reported. The instrumental techniques used included X‐ray elemental and mineralogical chemical analysis, Raman spectroscopy, and scanning and light microscopy. The results indicate there are several clay types, although they show similarities, such as the use of a plant‐based temper. The red colour of the decoration is hematite, and manganese oxides such as jacobsite are present in the black. The white colour is a mixture of gypsum and clay, and the orange is a mixture of hematite and clay. The use of colours, the quality of the clays and the temperatures reached during pottery firing point to expertise in ceramic production and to complex decision‐making processes. The multi‐elemental archaeometric approach documented here could become an important tool to shed a light on ancient ceramic technology and the internal variance of Tiwanaku pottery.     

Early Balkan Metallurgy: Origins,Evolution and Society, 6200–3700 BC

Journal of World Prehistory - This paper analyses and re-evaluates current explanations and interpretations of the origins, development and societal context of metallurgy in the Balkans (c....     

Financial Inclusion or Subordination? The Monetary Politics of Debt in Cambodia

Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although critical geographers have analysed this debt through the lens of financialisation, few have examined it in terms of monetary politics. This is a salient issue, because poorer nations often have limited control over their monetary policy due to their dependence on foreign currencies, which can adversely affect the structure of their financial markets. Building on the concept of monetary dependency from scholarship on financial subordination, I analyse the monetary politics of debt in Cambodia. Drawing on elite interviews and ethnographic research, I argue that Cambodia's extreme monetary dependence on the US dollar has shaped monetary and fiscal policies that compel poorer households to take on private debt to pay for their basic needs. This paper advances critical geographies of debt and development by studying financial subordination and its impact on financial inclusion in the global South.     

PIECING TOGETHER THE STORY OF A PAIR OF MAKRON’S FRAGMENTED CUPS

In 2022, an Athenian red-figured cup attributed to Makron was returned to Italy by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The cup had been acquired in fragments, through purchase and gift, from multiple sources over several years, starting with two fragments from the restorer Fritz Bürki in 1978. A second cup, also attributed to Makron, was acquired in a parallel way. The sources for the fragments from both cups point to galleries collectors and donors – Summa Galleries, Frieda Tchachos, Elizabeth Hecht, and Dietrich von Bothmer – who have been associated with other material that has been repatriated to Italy in recent years. It is suggested that some of the incised ‘signatures’ by Hieron that are found on cups attributed to Makron may have been applied since antiquity.     

Anthropology of mutualism

What might anthropology offer to our understanding of mutualistic relations? In making sense of these interspecies interactions, which, despite some costs, are ultimately beneficial to each partner species, zoological approaches operate at the level of populations on an adaptive scale. Anthropologists bring focus on individual actors and their subjective experiences within far more condensed temporospatial ethnographic timescales. This guest editorial brings a multispecies anthropological approach into dialogue with zoological understandings of mutualism. It examines the practical and theoretical potential of mutuality to make sense of relations of domestication. Materialistic profit and market-oriented forms of engagement in the domestic sphere are often detrimental to more-than-human communities. The persistence of different kinds of mutual co-existences, as shown in different forms of care of orphaned animals in Mongolia, Pakistan and Australia, offers an alternative and perhaps more hopeful model of more-than-human engagement in the Anthropocene.     

REVIEW

The Empty Place: Poetry, Space and Being Among the Foi of Papua New Guinea. By James F. Weiner. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1991. Pp. 218. Price $US14.95.