The Twins Stanza,Y 30.3

The Gāthic stanza Y 30.3 has always been at the center of various interpretations and controversies in Western scholarship on Zoroastrianism. Those who believe they have discovered in the Gāthās a monotheistic religion armored with an ethical dualism have made this stanza one of the pillars of their thesis. The so-called Twins stanza shows, according to this view, that the good and evil primordial spirits exist as a result of their choice between Good and Evil, which preserves not only the absolute goodness of the supreme god but also his uniqueness. More recently Kellens and others following him have given a completely different reading of the stanza. According to their account, this stanza is a speculation on the hidden processes of ritual. What the poet expresses in Y 30.3 is not a dualism, ethical or otherwise, but a psychology of the process by which man makes his choice of ritual conduct. Aside from the question of coherence, one must ask whether these accounts are borne out by the text they claim as their basis. This article addresses these two questions.     

Storage Structures of the Late Early Bronze I in the Southern Levant and the Urbanisation Process

Nearing the end of the Early Bronze (EB) I period (3350–2950 bce) the southern Levant underwent a transition from a village-oriented to an urban-centred society. An outstanding phenomenon of this period throughout the region is the proliferation of rounded circular structures, usually interpreted as storage facilities, often found in proximity to domestic buildings. These imply increased food production of individual households and a greater need for storage of food surpluses. The agricultural prosperity and resulting surpluses suggested by these storage structures reflect the changes affecting local society and may have been one of the catalysts for urbanisation and the formation of ruling elites during this period.     

Sexual Phallacies

Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab. Sexuality in Islam. Alan Sheridan, transi. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. viii + 288 pp. including notes and bibliography. $42.50 cloth.

Gregor, Thomas. Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. xii + 223 pp. including photographs, references, and index. $19.95 cloth.

La Barre, Weston. Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition about Sexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. xiii + 140 pp. including reference notes. $22.50 cloth, $10.95 paper.     

The gender dimension of business elites: Italian women directors since 1934

Abstract

Gender is an important, albeit understudied, dimension in the analysis of business elites. In this paper we analyze the importance of women in the board of directors of listed Italian companies since 1934. We show that women are less represented in boards in Italy than in other comparable OECD countries, but also that listed companies are less open to women than other centres of powers, such as the public administration and liberal professions. In addition, in a country where board interlocking is a key device to ensure separation between ownership and control, very few women hold multiple directorships. We then present the results of a prosopographical study on women directors in seven benchmark years: 1962, 1970, 1978, 1986, 1994, 2002, and 2007. We conclude with a discussion of various policy options to enhance gender diversification on the boards of Italian listed companies.     

The Unstable People of a Tumultuous Land: Persia Through the Eyes and Feet of Hajji Baba of Isfahan

For the English interested in Persia in the nineteenth century, James Morier's Adventures of Hajji Baba of Isfahan was a crucial text, as it also was for Iranians who read its groundbreaking Persian translation almost half a century later. The text provided a persuasive understanding of Persia that has endured in the western imagination. This paper begins with the framing narrative and shows how the frame story sets the stage for a convincing literary portrait of Persia and Persians. Then it analyzes the image of Persia constructed in this book through the characterization of Hajji Baba as representative of Persians, and the geopolitical portrayal of the country that emerges from the account of his travels.     

The Elmenteitan Obsidian Quarry (GsJj50): New Perspectives on Obsidian Access and Exchange During the Pastoral Neolithic in Southern Kenya

Early pastoralists in southern Kenya exploited obsidian sources to supply large regional exchange networks that persisted from c. 3200 to 1400 years ago. Obsidian exchange networks have been a source for speculation on the social and political nature of early pastoralism in eastern Africa. Herders who produced a discrete set of material culture called “Elmenteitan” mainly relied on a particular obsidian quarry site on the upper slopes of Ol Doinyo Opuru (Mt. Eburru), in the Central Rift Valley. These implications of the Elmenteitan pattern for herder social organization have not been systematically investigated. This paper reports on recent surveys and initial excavations at the Elmenteitan Obsidian Quarry (GsJj50) on Mt. Eburru as the central node of a prehistoric herder exchange network. Research revealed a series of stratified extraction and workshopping loci concentrated across a roughly 200-m² extent. Spatial, faunal, ceramic, and lithic datasets support communal resource access by small groups, rather than centralized control. This research has implications for interpreting the role of centralized quarries and resource nodes in the formation of mobile herder exchange and alliance. Networks were an important risk-reduction strategy in unpredictable environments and helped facilitate the spread of African pastoralism.     

HOW WE LIVE WITH THE PAST NOW

Michael Roth's new collection of essays, written over the last two decades, is held together by its author's pervasive concern with human temporality: our individual and collective passages through time, recorded by the faculty of memory, which pose some of our most intractable problems. The essays treat, and indeed provide a map to, several adjacent areas of inquiry: the history of the psychopathology of memory in the long nineteenth century; the vicissitudes of the trauma‐concept from its relatively modest medical origins to its postmodern apotheosis; and photography as a medium and art form embroiled in our relationship with the past. Roth's major interventions are threefold. First, while persuaded of the value of the psychoanalytic version of the trauma‐concept, he critiques the so‐called traumatophilia of postmodern theorists who, usually with reference to the Holocaust, seek to invest trauma with ethical valences and powers of legitimation or even, as in the case of Agamben, raise it to ontological status. Second, through his fine‐grained account of Freud's convergence with and divergence from his French colleagues, especially Charcot and Janet, Roth argues that the stunning breakthrough of psychoanalysis was to take the past seriously, to recognize the inevitable penetration of the past into the present in the human psyche as well our affective investment in and need to narrativize the past. For Roth, Freud's continued relevance today resides in what he has taught us about living with the past. Finally, Roth begins to develop the concept of “piety” as an attitude toward the past that fuels the writing of history. He leaves the concept in rudimentary form, but his evocative remarks suggest the fruitfulness of developing it further.     

Investigation of the Optimum Height of Railway Embankments during Earthquake Based on Their Stability in Liquefaction

One of the most reported problems in the railway embankments is loss of their overall stability and major settlements due to liquefaction. Although several studies have been made on the stabilization of embankments, the effects of the influencing parameters on the stability of embankments during liquefaction have not been sufficiently investigated. The series of two dimensional plane strain finite element (FE) models were developed using multi yield surface plasticity model namely Prevost. The results were represented and discussed in terms of foundation excess pore pressure, embankment settlements and their failure modes. By analyzing the results, the optimum height of embankment which minimizes the settlement and failure cracks was derived.