Rethinking Power and Authority: Symbolic Violence and Subjectivity in Nepal's Terai Forests

Recent work on authority, power and the state has opened up important avenues of inquiry into the practices and contexts through which power is exercised. Why certain forms of authority emerge as more durable and legitimate than others remains a challenge, however. In this article we bring together two bodies of thought to engage this issue, feminist theories of power and subjectivity and Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic violence, in order to explore how power and authority are reproduced and entrenched. Our purpose is to advance theorizing on power and authority in the context of contentious political situations and institutional emergence. This unusual theoretical synergy allows us to illustrate how power is exercised in relation to natural resource management and the ways in which the conflict/post‐conflict context creates institutional forms and spaces which simultaneously challenge and reinforce antecedent forms of authority. To animate our theoretical concerns, we draw on work in community‐based forestry in Nepal, with a focus on some of the conflicts that have arisen in relation to the valuable Sal forests of the Terai, or lowland plains.     

The influence of temperature on rehydroxylation [RHX] kinetics in archaeological pottery

Almost all archaeological ceramics undergo slow, progressive rehydroxylation by chemical combination with environmental water. The reaction is accompanied by an expansion, and also by the small but measurable mass gain that provides the basis of the RHX dating method. The rate of the RHX reaction increases with increasing temperature. Here we describe comprehensively the effects of temperature on the RHX process in relation to the dating methodology. We deal in turn with the kinetic model of the RHX reaction, the temperature dependence of the RHX rate, and the influence of varying environmental temperature on the RHX mass gain. We define an effective lifetime temperature and show how this is calculated from an estimated lifetime temperature history. Historical meteorological temperature data are used to estimate the lifetime temperature history, and this can be adjusted for long-term climate variation. We show also how to allow for the effects of burial in archaeological sites on the temperature history. Finally we describe how the uncertainties in estimates of RHX age depend on the estimates of temperature history and effective lifetime temperature.     

‘Hidden from view’?: an analysis of the integration of women’s history and women’s voices into Australia’s social history exhibitions

ABSTRACT

‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big picture history to intimate and deeply personal stories that recast our understanding of the past in ways that are inclusive of gendered experiences. We investigate the use of the curatorial voice as reflected in Willis’ work, aligning it with the notion of curatorial activism, before exploring the changing curatorial practices that expanded the potential for an interpretive approach that incorporated the voice of the subjects themselves as a central component in the telling of history. We then analyse the impact of these strategies on traditional understandings of the past through three exhibitions developed by Melbourne Museum over 30 years: The Story of Victoria, a successor exhibition The Melbourne Story, and their Great War centenary exhibition, WWI: Love & Sorrow.     

Land reform in the 1950s in Italy and the United States: the thinking of Mario Einaudi

The article discusses the thinking of Mario Einaudi in relation to the ambitious measures with which the Italian government sought to move towards land reform in the immediate post–war period. Einaudi, an intellectual and academic, was by birth Italian but moved to the United States during the Fascist period. Like his father Luigi, the noted economist, he was convinced of the need to stimulate the free market in land in order to increase productivity and modernise cultivation methods; in his writings he repeatedly sought to develop a plan of action that would facilitate collaboration between Rome and Washington in this field, identifying the Tennessee Valley Authority approach as especially suited to the Italian case. However, while his ideas achieved a good public airing, they had a limited impact: on the political front, Cold War priorities pushed Italian and US Marshall Plan experts more towards the redistribution of landownership than towards stimulating the productivity of agricultural businesses, in the attempt to rapidly build a consensus behind the government; and on the cultural front, at the end of the 1950s the issue of backwardness in the rural South started to be interpreted in terms of cultural and social anthropology, an approach which did not directly relate to the development of political programmes.     

Recent works on Italian capitalism: A review essay

Abstract

Italy's capitalism has traditionally differed from that of its major trading partners: state‐owned enterprises have played a larger role, securities markets have been relatively less developed, while corporate power in the private sector has been concentrated to an unusual extent in the hands of a few family‐controlled business groups. Since the 1970s, Italian big business has seemed unable to steer a new course in an increasingly global economy. When belatedly and under tight budget constraints Italy finally started privatizations in 1992, many hoped that this would bring about a long‐delayed modernization of financial markets, an increase in competitive market pressues, and some ‘democratization’ of corporate power. This article reviews a book edited by Fabrizio Barca which puts these recent experiences into a much‐needed longer historical perspective, and other books offering non‐scholarly views on the present state of Italian capitalism.

Fabrizio Barca (ed.) (1997) Storia del capitalismo italiano (Rome: Donzelli), pp. 1‐634, 60,000 lire, ISBN 88‐7989‐252‐5 hardback.

Filippo Cavazzuti (1996) Privatizzazioni, imprenditori e mercati (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1‐83, 10,000 lire, ISBN 88‐15‐05562‐2 paperback.

Alfredo Macchiati (1996) Privatizzazioni tra economia e politica (Rome: Donzelli), pp. 1‐160, 18,000 lire, ISBN 88‐7989‐254‐1 paperback.

Giuseppe Turani (1996) Isogni del grande nord (Bologna: II Mulino), pp. 1‐138, 15,000 lire, ISBN 88‐15‐05721‐8 paperback.