Review

Anders Hagen, Bergkunst. Jegerfolkets helleristninger og malninger i norsk steinalder. (Rock Art. The rock carvings and paintings of hunters in the Norwegian Stone Age.) J. W. Cappelens Forlag A.s. Oslo 1976.     

'Creating a Place to Belong': Girls' and Boys' Hut-building as a Site for Understanding Discourses on Childhood and Generational Relations in a Norwegian Community

The empirical focus of this article is children's huts as a particular place for constructions of identities and peer relations among children in a Norwegian local community. Building huts can be seen as children's construction of special places during childhood. Often these places are seen as secret places, reflecting a separate 'children's culture' developed within a particular microcosm. I argue that the social practices developed among girls and boys are related in complex ways to local cultural practices and the construction of gendered generational relations in the community. The title 'Creating a place to belong' refers not only to children's attachment to particular physical places, but also to children's place within a field of age-related as well as inter-generational relations.     

3. MENTALITY AS A SOCIAL EMERGENT: CAN THE ZEITGEIST HAVE EXPLANATORY POWER?1

This paper probes the explanatory value of mentality as a social emergent in general and of the Zeitgeist in particular. Durkheim's contention that social facts have emergent properties is open to the charge that it implies logically inconsistent “downward causation.” on the basis of an analogy with the brain‐mind dilemma and mental emergentism, the first part of the essay discusses and dismisses the notion of social emergent properties that cannot be reduced to the properties of their component parts—individuals—and their internal relations. However, ontological individualism need not compel us to methodological individualism. The second part introduces two challenges to methodological individualism. The most radical is Rajeev Bhargava's assertion that the meaning of a belief is determined not by the individual holding the belief but by the entire linguistic community. Bhargava's “contextualism” is closely related to the (post)structural demand that we focus on discourse as a communal entity instead of continuing a delusive quest for the intentions of individual speakers. a more modest alternative is Margaret Gilbert's plea for using “plural subjects”—social groups in which “participant agents” act jointly or have a jointly accepted view—in the practical syllogisms that are central to rationalizing action explanation. The notion of plural subjects lends credence to, and is reinforced by, “situationist” social psychology, which shows how people conform to peer groups, authorities, and roles. building on Wesley Salmon's and Peter Railton's ecumenical accounts of explanation, the essay argues that both individual rationalizing action explanations and explanations based on plural agents can give explanatory information: we need not choose one or the other. The third part discusses how the Zeitgeist can provide added explanatory value in an analysis of the New left. This is possible if the “spirit of the sixties” is seen as representing the values and worldviews of the “sixties generation” as a social group in Gilbert's terms. Radical youth would suspend judgment and pool their wills to conform to what they perceived were the views of the imagined “sixties community” or—rendering more explanatory force—to smaller parts of it in the guise of peer groups and organizations.     

Nationalism,ethnic conflict,and job competition: non‐Russian collective action in the USSR under perestroika†

ABSTRACT. The article examines the effects of job competition on ethnic relations within a multinational state. It argues that demographic increase leads to competition for blue‐collar jobs while an increase in the number of graduates from higher education leads to competition over elite jobs. In the first case, people risk unemployment, in the second, blocked career opportunities. Mass‐level unemployment may lead to anger‐driven mass riots, while an intelligentsia will formulate more rational strategies to eliminate threatening competitors from the labour market. One such strategy is to insist that the state ought to be a national state, in which the national elites will be in control. While questions of identity no doubt also may have an enormously mobilising power in times of national resurgence, identity issues are normally intimately intertwined with interest politics. These mechanisms are traced in the history of ethnic mobilisation in the Soviet Union and the post‐Soviet states during and after perestroika.     

LOCAL CHANGES IN LINGUISTIC BALANCE IN THE BILINGUAL ZONE: FRANCOPHONES DE L'ONTARIO ET ANGLOPHONES DU QUÉBEC

The issue of minority populations and linguistic change for anglophone and francophone groups in Quebec and Ontario is very important, affecting relationships between the groups and individual perceptions of social power. This paper begins an analysis of linguistic change in the transition or contact zone of bilingualism along the Quebec-Ontario border in the period 1961-86. Written in both languages, it describes changes in absolute numbers and percentage share of the total population of the minority group, anglophones in Quebec and francophones in Ontario. It defines regions of change, and, combining the two measures in a series of graphs, shows levels of change at the local level.
La géographie des populations anglophone et francophone àľintérieur de la zone de transition que constituent ľEst ontarien et le Sud du Québec a sensiblement changé au cours des derniers trente ans. Cet article, rédigé dans les deux langues, décrit ces changements àľéchelle locale sur la base de la comparaison des donnees sur la langue maternelle des recensements del 961 et de 1986. Ľétude identifie les municipalités où les changements dans les nombres au sein des populations minoritaires ont été les plus significatifs ainsi que celles ù ces changements ont le plus affecté le rapport minorité-majorité. Elle met en lumière certains profils de changement et décrit les caractères ethno-linguistiques et géographiques des localités qui en sont représentatives. Elle permet, enfin, de comparer ľévolution des populations franco-ontarienne et anglo-québécoise & ľéchelle locale.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews in this Article: Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper, Raphael Samuel, eds, Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. Susan Mosher Stuard, ed, Women in Medieval History and Historiography. Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, transl. Jean Birrell. Sara Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies. Alice Browne, The Eighteenth Century Feminist Mind. Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria. Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji 1835-1930: The Ruin of Empire?…. Marilyn Lake, The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915-38. Susan M. Reverby, Ordered to Care: the Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850-1945. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence. Helena Whitbread, ed, I Know My Own Heart. The Diaries of Anne Lister 1791-1840 Zuzanna Shonfield, The Precariously Privileged. A Professional Family in Victorian London. Tierl Thompson, ed, Dear Girl. The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women 1897-1917. Yamila Azize, La Mujer en la Lucha (The Woman in Struggle) (2nd revised ed.).     

REGIONAL POLICY ANALYSIS IN A SIMPLE GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODEL WITH VERTICAL LINKAGES*

ABSTRACT The paper presents a simple three‐region, two‐sector general equilibrium model that is used for analyzing the effect of regional tax policies aimed at combat depopulation. The model includes exogenous asymmetry in terms of transport costs as well as a vertical industry structure that can account for endogenous location development in order to distinguish between the effects of “first nature” and “second nature” on the required subsidy for meeting the population policy target.     

Emprise et déprise de l'agriculture sur le territoire de l'est de l'Ontario de 1826 à 2006: la dimension environnementale

Agricultural land‐cover changes in Eastern Ontario from 1826 to 2006: environmental effects. Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry (SDG) counties, Eastern Ontario, are among the first areas in Ontario to welcome settlers. In 1784, they established themselves in a forested land where wetlands are very important. Today, a large part of the wetlands has disappeared, but the landscape is wooded, masking the radical changes that took place over the course of the last two centuries. Analysis of census data from 1826 to 2006 allows the reconstruction of the history of land‐cover changes. It reveals the nature and rates of change for which a first analysis is presented. Four periods are identified. First, agriculture conquers the land and establishes its dominance. A plateau is reached in 1891 as agriculture maintains its supremacy until 1941. Then, as fast as agriculture invaded land, it fades away until 1986 when agricultural land‐cover stops shrinking. The opening of forest for cultivation was relatively slow in SDG because of biophysical and socio‐economical conditions associated with an absence of growth of agricultural population. Deforestation and wetland drainage led to a degradation of agricultural life but resulted in consideration of the environment in agriculture. Today, wooded and agricultural land covers are more balanced and environmental effects less acute.