Absent Regions: Spaces of Financialisation in the Arab World

This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specifically, those capital groups based in the Gulf Cooperation Council—in circuits of capital operating at all scales. This has important implications for processes of class and state formation. Approaching financialisation in this manner—moving away from methodologically nationalist assumptions and the literature's largely singular focus on the advanced capitalist core—brings into focus the significance of cross‐scalar accumulation patterns, their spatial hierarchies, and geographic unevenness. The paper thus reaffirms the need for a more spatially sensitive approach to financialisation.     

Uranium and Vanadium Concentrations as a Trace Element Method for Identifying Diagenetically Altered Bone in the Inorganic Phase

Archaeologists have generally avoided analyzing inorganic isotopes in bone because of its high porosity, large crystalline lattice spacing, and small crystallite size, making it particularly susceptible to diagenetic alteration. Because the inorganic isotopes are left unstudied, we lose a significant portion of information pertaining to an individual’s life history, such as migration, health, and ranging behavior. Tooth enamel, which does not have the same susceptibility to diagenesis as bone, can be used to extract this information but this means that taxa lacking teeth, such as birds, some species of fish, and some reptiles, are excluded. Here, we present a method that can be used to identify diagenetic alternation in bone. This is done by focusing on abnormal concentrations of vanadium and uranium. Neither element is readily bio-precipitated into hydroxyapatite due to ionic radius, vibrational frequency, atomic mass, and ionic charge. This makes them an ideal marker for diagenetically altered bone. Vanadium occurs in very low concentrations in modern bone, while archaeological bone shows clear evidence of normal, non-diagenetically altered values alongside high concentrations of vanadium in diagenetically altered bone. Uranium also is a measure of diagenetic alteration, as modern bone has concentrations below detectable limits (0.017 ppb), while some archaeological bone contains uranium above detectable limits. The biogeochemistry of these elements in soil and bone are discussed with implications for enamel studies.     

Book reviews

Small Firms, Technical Services and Inter‐firm Cooperation. Frank Pyke, Geneva, International Institute for Labor Studies, 1994, 126 pp, 20 Swiss francs, ISBN 92 9014 527 7

Uneven Regional Change in Britain. Alan Townsend, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, £9.95 ($19.95) pb, ISBN 0 521 40870 9.

European Fort Cities in Transition. B. S. Hoyle and D. A. Pinder (Eds), London, Belhaven Press, 1992, 207 pp, £35.00 hb, ISBN 1 85293 170 1.

Introducing Town Planning. Clara Greed, Harlow, Longman, 1993, 283 pp, £12.99 pb, ISBN 0 582 09107 1.

Contemporary Transport Trends. Michael Asteris and Peter Green (Eds), Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 290 pp, £35.00 hb, ISBN 1 85628 2848.

The Rise of Regional Europe. Christopher Harvie, London, Routledge, 1994, 92 pp, £6.99 pb, ISBN 0 4150 9523 9.     

Skeletal element abundances in archaeofaunal assemblages: economic utility,sample size,and assessment of carcass transport strategies

Economic utility indices provide a means of interpreting butchery and transport decisions reflected in the relative abundance of skeletal elements. Because of destructive taphonomic processes, interpreting skeletal element abundances in terms of carcass transport strategies requires that faunal analysts consider only those elements which accurately reflect their original abundances following human discard. In this study we use resampling techniques to examine the impact of sample size on correlations between high-survival skeletal element frequencies and economic utility in four simulated population assemblages reflecting distinct carcass transport strategies. Correlations alone do not accurately reflect the true relationship between bone abundance and economic utility as particular transport strategies have a tendency to generate high frequencies of Type II errors as sample size decreases. We show that the Shannon evenness index can be used as a quantitative means of distinguishing between bone assemblages characterized by subtle variations in skeletal element abundances. The evenness index can also be used to evaluate whether observed correlations reflect sampling error. Results from our simulations are applied to three published faunal assemblages to evaluate likely carcass transport strategies.     

Christianising a Country: A Genuine Act of Faith or an Exercise in Political Opportunism? On (Questioning) the Authenticity of Medieval Political Conversions — the Case of Poland

The most peculiar feature of the majority of historical publications accompanying the anniversary (966–1016) of the adoption of Christianity by Poland’s first historical ruler was a specific treatment of the (possible) motivation behind Mieszko's consequential decision. The so‐called. “baptism of Poland” is generally thought to have been a strategically brilliant move, guaranteeing the country’s long‐lasting political success. The reluctance of Polish researchers to consider some spiritual motives of Mieszko is especially puzzling in the context of a significant (even if slightly provocative) contribution to the debate by American historian Philip E. Steele (2005). Following in the footsteps of Charles Odahl (2004), Steele claims that the conversion of Mieszko — similarly to that of Constantine the Great — must have been principally caused by the prince’s undergoing some sort of religious experience. While endorsing a serious treatment of the religious‐experience‐based motivation of political conversions, I suggest revisiting critically the concept of “empirical religion” underlying this approach.     

THE CRISIS OF HUMANITY: OR,WHAT IF WE HAVE NEVER BEEN HUMAN?

This collection of nine essays brings together a variety of responses to the question of the “nonhuman turn” within the humanities and the social sciences, understood broadly as a developing concern with overcoming anthropocentrism in its diverse manifestations. Emerging from The Nonhuman Turn conference held at the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee in 2012, which was hosted by the Center for 21st Century Studies, it represents the first attempt to account for and consolidate the many intellectual approaches and developments that may now be regarded as constituting the nonhuman turn. The nonhuman turn is contextualized as both “yet another” turn but also a necessary one, and as something critically distinct from “the posthuman turn”—whereas the posthuman turn is concerned with what comes after the human (ways of being, ways of thinking), the nonhuman turn insists (according to editor Richard Grusin) that “we have never been human.” My reading of this volume suggests that this claim is not borne out across the chapters it contains, and that the notion that we have never been human, though a noble gesture to Bruno Latour's widely lauded claim that “we have never been modern,” does not enable a new philosophy, nor does it advance the two primary streams of philosophical thought featured here: object‐oriented ontology (OOO) and new materialism.     

A Ground Motion Record Selection Approach Based on Multiobjective Optimization

The evaluation of the seismic safety and reliability of buildings and building contents within a probabilistic framework often requires response history analyses using site-specific ground motion records. The ground motion selection method proposed in this paper addresses this issue by a stochastic search procedure in which record sets are selected such that first- and second-order statistics (median and dispersion) satisfy predefined ground motion spectrum targets over a wide period range. Once a ground motion record set is selected, it can be used for seismic assessment of a broad class of buildings within the target period range at the given location.