Controlling for Doubt and Uncertainty Through Multiple Lines of Evidence: A New Look at the Mesoamerican Nahua Migrations

Nahuatl represents a relatively recent extension of the Uto-Aztecan language family into Mesoamerica. Ethnohistorians have linked Nahuatl's arrival to the historically attested migrations of nomadic people into central Mexico in the last centuries before the Spanish Conquest. Archaeologists have tended to treat migration as an explanation for a change in material culture rather than a social question to be examined theoretically. We approach this migration through the comparison of multiple data sets and conclude that what has previously been treated as a historical event is instead part of a longer term process tying together Mesoamerica's northern periphery with its highland core. While we find that certain themes from migration theory are reflected in this preindustrial migration as well, other variables are unique and bode well for archaeology's ability to address and contribute to theoretical issues relating to migration.     

An engineering career as industrial mission: Jack Keiser in post-war Britain

ABSTRACT

British mechanical engineer Jack Keiser’s postwar career in industrial education was simultaneously a career in justice work and Christian industrial mission. This paper examines the Christian critique of industry Keiser developed early in his career, as he transitioned in 1949–1950 into his life’s work in firm-based industrial education, and asks how historians of technology might interpret a critique that characterized industry in hyperbolic terms as enslaving or demonic. Keiser’s was part of an international critique connected to three important post-war Christian institutions: Student Christian Movement, the Industrial Mission Movement, and the World Council of Churches. He engaged with justice at both an intimate and a cosmic level, intimately through face-to-face relationships with apprentices and trainees under his supervision, and cosmically by engaging with the biblical prophets through whom God called for justice.     

Talking to strangers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The language used by politicians and its social effects have been of long‐standing interest to social anthropology. Opinion‐formers on both sides of the North Atlantic have recently argued that this language can inflame tensions and reinforce divisions. In the UK, the discussion has centred on relations between a white majority and a Muslim minority, while in the US, in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of a Democratic Congresswoman in Arizona, it has focused on the risk of political language provoking violence. The antidote to inflammatory language is often assumed to be moderation, defined as a (self‐) disciplined engagement with divided publics. Drawing on the insights of Danielle Allen's Talking to strangers, here I suggest that moderation might be re‐imagined, not as a vague commitment to centrism and the ‘middle ground’, but as a powerful resource for citizens and communities to challenge the ideological excesses of politics, religion and the market in the twenty‐first century.     

Global Value Chain Participation and the Labour Share: Industry-level Evidence from Emerging Economies

Participation in global value chains (GVCs) has been proposed as a central means for emerging economies to develop and technologically upgrade. However, the effects of GVCs on income distribution in the global South remain underexplored. This article presents an econometric analysis of the determinants of the labour share in seven emerging economies for the period 1995–2014. Drawing on industry-level data from global input-output tables, the authors focus on how GVC participation — in particular offshoring of production from advanced to emerging economies — affects the labour share of different skill groups within manufacturing and service industries. They also estimate the effects of GVCs on productivity, real wages and the capital–value added ratio, to shed further light on the channels through which GVCs affect the labour share. In both industry groups, findings show that integration into GVCs with advanced economies has a negative effect on the labour share in emerging economies, particularly for medium-skilled workers. In contrast, higher union density and government consumption spending have positive effects on the labour share. Thus, labour in emerging economies loses out relative to capital as production becomes more integrated across borders.     

Tradition and Reform: Aristotle’s Response to Modern Alternatives

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to articulate an Aristotelian alternative to two prominent contemporary ways of understanding human freedom and dependence on the past, and to the implications these understandings have for political life. While a liberal tendency, following Machiavelli’s emphasis on new modes and orders, understands political life to begin with breaking from the past, the more conservative camp in modern thought, following Burke in his emphasis on tradition, understands political life to begin with laws and customs inherited from the past. Aristotle’s teaching in his Nicomachean Ethics on the freedom and responsibility that make human beginnings possible points us, I propose, to a better understanding of political founding than either modern alternative. In the Politics, he connects the city to natural beginnings in the family but also calls the first who founded a city one “responsible for the greatest of goods” (Pol. 1253a31-32). And in the Ethics, he offers his own founding of a way of inquiring about politics, which engages with his predecessors, as a model for politics itself. In this way, Aristotle offers us a deeper understanding of political founding and change, even presenting his own philosophic inquiry in the Ethics as its ground and model.     

ROAD INVESTMENTS,SPATIAL SPILLOVERS,AND DEFORESTATION IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON*

ABSTRACT Understanding the impact of road investments on deforestation is part of a complete evaluation of the expansion of infrastructure for development. We find evidence of spatial spillovers from roads in the Brazilian Amazon: deforestation rises in the census tracts that lack roads but are in the same county as and within 100 km of a tract with a new paved or unpaved road. At greater distances from the new roads the evidence is mixed, including negative coefficients of inconsistent significance between 100 and 300 km, and if anything, higher neighbor deforestation at distances over 300 km.     

Transformative landscapes: liminality and visitors’ emotional experiences at German memorial sites

Abstract

The atrocities of Nazi Germany included the radical transformation of natural landscapes. At Ravensbrück (Brandenburg), a lakeside setting became the site of the largest women’s concentration camp in Germany, processing approximately 159,000 inmates until 1945. Similarly, at Flossenbürg (Bavaria), a picturesque valley in the Oberpfälzer Wald housed a large concentration camp with approximately 100,000 inmates over seven years and a granite quarry to support Hitler’s extensive construction programme. After the war, part of Ravensbrück became a Soviet Army base, while large sections of Flossenbürg were removed to make way for a new housing and industrial development. Along with other former camps (particularly Auschwitz-Birkenau), parts of these landscapes were developed into memorial sites that aim to provide a liminal experience for visitors – a ‘rite of passage’. In attempting to regain a sense of place that evokes the trauma of the past, the landscapes of the memorial sites of Ravensbrück and Flossenbürg were recently altered to resemble their appearance in 1945. For visitors, however, the aesthetic experience of these landscapes lies in stark contrast to the narrative they encounter at both sites; they are surprised to see signs of life, objecting to modernisation at Ravensbrück or the existence of a supermarket next to the memorial site in Flossenbürg. This paper examines the transformative processes of these landscapes and explores how their liminality is constructed, experienced and challenged. Through empirical visitor research conducted at both sites, it provides a critical evaluation of the narrative given to visitors and suggests how these important sites can offer a more engaging ‘rite of passage’.     

Cities of the Sea: Maritime Trade and the Origin of Philistine Settlement in the Early Iron Age Southern Levant

The question of the origins of the Philistines, who settled in the southern Levant in the early Iron Age (12th century BC) has long been the subject of debate. Traditionally, they have been understood to lie with the 'Sea Peoples,' raiders who were thought to have wreaked havoc in the eastern Mediterranean at this time. A new conceptualization of the 'Sea Peoples,' phenomenon as the emergence of decentralized maritime trade leads to new questions regarding the settlements associated with it, namely those along the southern Levantine coastal plain and especially those considered 'Philistine.' It is the aim of this paper to reinterpret these sites in terms of their functional role within this decentralized network and it is suggested that they were established and maintained specifically for that purpose. Finally, the development of this network of interconnections is related to the parallel emergence of the Phoenicians and the Israelites in the eleventh and tenth centuries.