An iconographic exploration of the “rattlesnake” gorgets of eastern Tennessee

ABSTRACT

Compared to other gorget styles and themes made during the Mississippian period, the so-called rattlesnake gorgets of eastern Tennessee have been found in fairly large numbers. Stylistically, Muller assigned these gorgets to the temporally related Lick Creek and Citico styles, while Crawford’s recent work has argued for substyles within. While their style has been studied extensively, the idea that these gorgets depict rattlesnakes generally has been accepted without further consideration. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic iconographic study of rattlesnake gorgets. Ultimately, we conclude that the image’s original referent is not just a snake but instead is intended to be a model of the cosmos at night.     

Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”

This introduction to the translation of Henri Lefebvre's 1956 essay “The theory of ground rent and rural Sociology” moves through three stages. First, it suggests that Anglophone appropriations of Lefebvre have tended to focus too much on his urban writings, at the expense of understanding his early work on rural sociology, and failing to recognise how his urban focus emerged as a result of his interest in rural–urban transformation. Second, it provides a summary of his wider work on rural questions, including his unfinished work on a major treatise of rural sociology; and outlines the key themes of the present essay in relation to these other projects. Third, it connects Lefebvre's issues to wider debates in political economy and geography about aspects of the rural, land and ground rent, not least including the work of Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui.     

Welshness in ‘British Wales’: negotiating national identity at the margins

Popular interpretations of national identity often focus on the unifying qualities of nationhood. However, societies frequently draw hierarchical distinctions between the people and places who are ‘most national’, and those who are ‘least national’. Little attention is paid to these marginal places within the nation and the experiences of their inhabitants. This article helps to address this by analysing the ‘less Welsh’ British Wales region of Wales, a country that has traditionally possessed a hierarchical, regionally constituted nationhood. The article studies the British Wales region both ‘from above’ – considering how some areas develop as ‘less national’ – and ‘from below’, introducing empirical ethnographic work into ‘everyday Welshness’ in this area. Whilst previous work on hierarchical nationhood focuses on how hierarchies are institutionalized by the state, this article demonstrates how people at the margins of the nation actively negotiate their place in the nation. Whilst people in this area expressed a strong Welshness, they also struggled to place themselves in the nation because they had internalized their lowly place within the national hierarchy. The article demonstrates the importance of place and social class for national identity construction and draws attention to the role of power in the discursive construction of hierarchical nationhood.     

Local and nonlocal knowledge typologies: technological complexity in the Irish knowledge space

This paper advances a measure of knowledge complexity to analyse for Ireland whether more complex knowledge is generated by local or foreign firms. Information on assignees, technological structure and global ownership contained within a recently developed Irish patent database forms the basis for distinguishing between technologies developed by local and nonlocal firms. Thereafter, our knowledge complexity index uses a modified bipartite network to link these technologies to their country of origin, i.e. local or nonlocal. Our results indicate that the most complex technologies tend to be produced in a few diverse regions. Furthermore, the majority of complex knowledge is generated in technology classes where the share of foreign activity is greater than local firms.     

Labour Control and Developmental State Theory: A New Perspective on Import‐substitution Industrialization in Latin America

Drawing on historical research into the period of import‐substitution industrialization (ISI) in Chile and Argentina between the 1930s and 1960s, this article claims that developmental state theory (DST) obfuscates a crucial feature of state intervention in Latin America. Specifically, despite a long‐standing interest in state–society relations, DST has been unable to incorporate adequately into its analytical framework labour–state relations and labour control in the workplace. This is because DST, in its various guises, privileges state–society relations mediated by institutions from which labour is implicitly or explicitly excluded. Extending the analytical lens of DST, the article combines critical labour‐relations and labour‐process theories to identify the purposive establishment of ‘regimes of labour control’ via changes in institutional and workplace relations. Using this expanded framework, it shows how the often vacillating strategies pursued by the state under ISI in Chile and Argentina, and the inefficient outcomes of ISI in these countries, can be better understood by considering efforts designed to exert control over labour.     

The Pluralities of Black Geographies

This paper seeks to spur conversations around the inherent pluralities found within Black Geographies. While analyses of Black Geographies have provided important reflections on the spatial imaginaries and practices of Black populations, less attention has been paid to the differences found among Black geographical expressions. This piece therefore seeks to draw out the ways in which Black people uniquely conceive of space by highlighting the distinctions present within different Black social movements. The authors explore the spatial politics of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Black Panther Party for Self‐Defense, and the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika to argue that while these three movements all attempted to create spaces of Black self‐determination, they did so with distinct spatial aspirations and concrete politics. The authors argue that recognising and accounting for the pluralities of Black spatial creation is necessary for realising more just geographies.