‘On a nos mots à dire’: Kanak Women's Experience of Bridewealth in Lifou

Bridewealth in Lifou cannot be discussed on its own; rather it should be considered within the plurality of ceremonial acts which are needed to legitimize a marriage as customary. What do these transactions mean? Where does women's agency lie? Through a longitudinal analysis of ethnographic materials from my fieldwork in Lifou, Loyalty Islands, I consider how Kanak women are engaged in and perceive these ceremonial and cultural processes through a declared women's perspective that highlights their ability to make autonomous choices in an open ended historical context. I argue that it is a case of ‘positive agency’. I emphasize that local categories (june hmala and wenehleng) which define specific moments in this process can be subsumed under the anthropological term ‘bridewealth’. Further, I examine the meaning of money in bridewealth and the fact that the monetary contribution keeps increasing, raising local concerns about the need to regulate the amount circulating in marriage exchanges and its dispersion. Furthermore in Lifou there is no indication that the assembling of the bridewealth by the grooms implies a commoditization and (later) exploitation of women.     

Carnivore competition, bone destruction, and bone density

In carnivore-modified archaeofaunal assemblages it is important to evaluate the degree to which carnivores have overprinted hominin behavioral signals. To examine the signals of increased competition for discarded bone, we present controlled experimental data on 33 simulated archaeological sites subjected to secondary consumption by spotted hyenas. We examine the relationship between competition, as measured by controlled numbers of hyenas and limb bones, and resultant levels of destruction and correlations between long-bone portion survivorship and bone density. Our results indicate that levels of destruction are equivalent regardless of the numbers of hyenas or long-bones included in the experimental assemblages. Correlations between long-bone epiphyseal and near-epiphyseal portions and bone density, however, do provide an indication of the level of competition. Results from the experimental study are used to highlight divergent levels of carnivore competition for hominin-discarded bone at the Plio-Pleistocene localities FLKN-Zinjanthropus and FLKN levels 1–2 from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.     

Skill,Migration and Gender in Australia and Canada: The Case of Gender-based Analysis

The shift away from family immigration and towards skilled immigration is one of the most important changes over the past decade in Australian immigration policy. Yet the implications of this shift for female applicants have remained largely unexplored. Skilled immigration has slipped by as a genderless story in which the androgynous skilled migrant is the central character and economists do most of the storytelling. This paper discusses the gender equality concerns raised by the policy shift towards skilled immigration. It argues that Australia's skilled immigration scheme disadvantages female applicants through its construction both of economic independence and ‘skill.’ A comparison with Canada's skilled migration law and regulations, which are audited by gender mainstreaming tools, is considered to ascertain what role, if any, gender-based analysis plays in identifying and rectifying the potential gender inequalities produced by skilled immigration selection.     

‘The Kite is Tied to You’: Custom,Christianity, and Organization among Kanak Women of Drueulu,Lifou, New Caledonia

This paper explores Drueulu women's engagement in an organized collectivity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. I focus particularly on the Drueulu Women's Group, a group affiliated to the umbrella Catholic organization, mouvement féminin vers un Souriant Village Mélanésien (mfSVM), to illustrate how these women mobilized cultural elements, including customary bonds, religious affiliation, and maternal relations, to assert their agency and empowerment. To move beyond a given and unchanging representation of Lifouan men and women means bringing to the fore multiple changing identities which are negotiated in different times and places. This does not mean privileging localism over national commonalities. By examining a 1990 protest march against alcohol abuse by men, I attest to the various articulations of women's concerns, customary linkages, and denominational affiliation which informed women's agenda at the village level. I then consider how these configurations were articulated in the 1992 annual general assembly of the mfSVM when 200 women gathered in Drueulu from all over the country for the twentieth anniversary of the movement. In the wider social settings here examined, the ubiquitous metaphorical use of maternal tropes gained strategic efficacy.     

Cultural cumulative effects: Communicating energy extraction's true costs

Residents of northeastern British Columbia's Peace River region concurrently confront intensifying oil/gas drilling, reinvigorated coal mining and the construction of a third massive hydroelectric dam. After years of approaching industrial impacts as temporally and spatially isolatable, calls to acknowledge cumulative ecological effects are finally being heard. Yet the sociocultural disruptions that accompany biophysical alterations are equally essential components of a comprehensive cumulative effects agenda. This article considers how frameworks for comprehending the consequences of landscape‐altering, life‐changing projects could be expanded to address both the complex realities of ecological degradation and the entangled cultural and political transformations that contour local communities and lives. Ultimately, the resource extraction experiences at the forefront of regional residents’ minds must be recognized as key determinants of forthcoming socio‐natural worlds, as they arise and aggregate out of countless culturally constituted and politically mediated decisions to embrace, accept or oppose extractive schemes.     

Heat treatment of Polish flints

In Poland three types of flint (chocolate, spotted and banded) were intensively mined from the Terminal Palaeolithic to the Early Bronze Age. Although heating of flint to improve its flaking properties was practised across the world from ∼110,000 years ago to the recent, particularly in southwestern Europe, heat treatment of flint in Poland is known from only two sites.     

Virile Turks and Maiden Ireland: Gender and National Identity in Early Modern English Travel Literature

This article examines the role of gender in depictions of national identity in early modern English travel literature. I show that human sexual relationships were believed to be echoed in relations between territories, which were often represented as masculine or feminine. Travellers used metaphors representing marriage, seduction and rape to describe geopolitical relationships, including colonialism, tribute payments and rebellion. Representations of Ireland and the Irish, and the Ottoman Empire and the Turks are among the most revealing. I argue that such metaphors were especially favoured by travel writers because gender was believed to be inherently mutable, thus providing a variety of easily understood and mutually accepted narratives to describe international political relationships.     

Italian Industrial Districts on the Move: Where Are They Going?

Since the second half of the 1990s the Italian economy has experienced a significant slowdown in the rate of economic growth. The “dwarfism” of its manufacturing firms, their specialization in traditional sectors and their organization in industrial districts have been identified by many scholars as major structural weaknesses in the Italian industrial system. Nevertheless, there is a vast and flourishing empirical literature showing that many industrial districts are actually changing in terms of sector specialization, international and innovation strategies and emergence of new forms of enterprise organization. In this paper, we provide a critical survey of the new and different patterns of industrial organization emerging in industrial districts.     

位于尼姆鲁德遗址的亚述那西尔帕二世的卡拉克西北宫殿中的新亚述浅浮雕彩绘．慕尼黑的研究成果

路德维格一世在1825—1848年间任巴伐利亚的国王,1863年他从尼姆鲁德遗址获得了7个浅浮雕艺术品。最近进行的对这些浮雕作品的修复使得其上残留的原始彩绘重新被人们发现,本文讨论了对这些原始彩绘面貌进行重现的可能性及存在的相关问题。