Law as an anti‐value: Justice,violence and suffering in the logic of becoming (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Anthropologists are chronologically only the latest to have adopted justice (and injustice) as an object of (critical) inquiry. Even among anthropologists, however, the radical critical cry that law is the instrument par excellence of control and repression, has today fallen out of fashion. Starting from the Afghan case, in this paper I reflect on law as a potential source of violence and as an anti‐value – in the sense of being in antithesis with accepted social values – in the contemporary global scenario. My focus here is neither on the uses that can be made of law nor on the outcomes of its interpretation and application. Rather, I am interested in what law can generate when it betrays social values and sentiments of justice.     

Radiometric dates and micromorphological evidence for synchronous domestic activity and sheep penning in a Neolithic cave: Cueva de El Toro (Málaga,Antequera, Spain)

We present radiocarbon dates and preliminary micromorphological information from the Neolithic cave site of Cueva del Toro (Antequera, Málaga, Spain). This site has yielded a rich early and late Neolithic archaeological record. The late Neolithic assemblage reflects specialized handcraft activity including in situ ceramic manufacture, textile production, and food processing along with sheep and goat penning, suggesting that the cave occupants and their domestic animals shared the same living space. Until now, dating of the stratigraphic sequence was incomplete, and the function of the combustion activities carried out at the cave remained unclear. New absolute dates from the main late Neolithic domestic activity area, corresponding to the most intense Neolithic occupation of the cave, allow us to place the entire sequence between 5320 and 5170 BP (or 4250–3950 to 2σ Cal BC). Micromorphological results show that many combustion features from this site represent recurrently burnt episodes on sheep/goat stabling deposits all along the sequence, corroborating human-goat/sheep cohabitation. This practice had not been previously documented in southern Spain for such early dates. Our results exemplify the importance of characterizing archaeological deposits at a microstratigraphic scale of observation.     

The persistence of the rural idyll: peasant imagery,social change and nationalism in Spain 1939–1978

In this article the authors propose a historical analysis of the role of romantic rural imagery in the Spanish (state and peripheral) re-nationalization processes during the Franco dictatorship through the scope of the political and identity meanings assigned to it. Their goal is to better comprehend twentieth-century Spain by examining the use (and abuse) of the rural imaginary by Spanish, Basque and Galician nationalisms, particularly during the time of the totalitarian regime of General Franco, giving special attention to the cultural loans between the ideological (and national) blocs traditionally interpreted as monolithic and irreconcilable: Francoism (1936–1975) and its political opposition.     

Chile 1997-1998: The Revenge of Incomplete Democratization

The author seeks to analyse the repercussions and consequences of the Pinochet affair for Chilean domestic politics. He explains how the legacy of seventeen years of authoritarian rule has shaped the deep divisions within Chilean society regarding the prosecution of the Chilean former dictator in the London courts. Chile is an incomplete democracy and Pinochetism is very much alive in Chile today.
The author is very critical of the role played by the current Chilean government and political class, for their behaviour during the affair. In granting a special mission to the General which gave him immunity and later supported his legal case after initial hesitation, the government has shown confusion that has not advanced the case for full democratization and justice in Chile. The ambiguous behaviour of the political class during the episode has discredited its prestige in the eyes of public opinion. Chilean society, according to the author, has missed an opportunity to advance justice and the dignity of the country.     

Commercial reform against the tide: Reapproaching the eighteenth-century decline of the republics of Venice and the United Provinces

The emergence of ‘civilized monarchies’, reformed European territorial states that had turned commercial, created major challenges to the old trade republics of Venice and the United Provinces. Would they perish and cease to exist, which seemed a logical corollary to the recent history of their decline, or might they be reconstituted and integrated into a new interstate system? Rather than to approach this question from the perspective of the history of political thought, which offers a range of rival outlooks on this issue, the present article treats the issue more from the inside and thus connects theories about decline to their concrete manifestations and experiences; from the spheres of diplomatic tensions over unpaid debts, publishing networks and the oscillation of consular and maritime law reform between Venice and the Dutch Republic.     

An Empirical Enquiry into the Impact of Urban Planning Policy on Urban Growth

Recent research has stressed the need to evaluate the economic implications of urban planning policy. In this article, we present empirical evidence on the impact of this policy on the population growth of towns and cities. A simple theoretical model serves to highlight the mechanisms whereby this policy may affect urban growth. The model yields a reduced-form equation which we estimate for the towns and cities of Andalusia (Spain). The empirical model strongly supports the claim that urban planning policy considerably affects urban growth and thus, the distribution of population across space. Our results suggest that urban planning policy is contributing to the reduction of diseconomies of agglomeration in larger cities. On the negative side, we find that urban plans are subject to obsolescence, which slows down growth.     

An Index of Social and Economic Development in the Community's Objective-1 Regions of Countries in Southern Europe

In this article we calculate an indicator of social and economic development using the DP₂ distance method to measure the disparities in Objective-1 regions of southern European countries for 2006. In addition to per capita income, socio-economic components such as health, education, employment, scientific and technological development and infrastructure provision have been incorporated into the index. We examine the issue of whether the Europe Union regions included in the Convergence Objective achieved a lower level of development than the regions no longer covered in this objective for the 2007–2013 programming period by establishing a territorial classification based on the value yielded by the variables of the DP₂. Our indicator constitutes a novel contribution insofar as it was constructed using a large number of variables. In essence, we show that not all the regions of the Convergence Objective presented a lower level of economic and social development than those that lost this consideration between 2007 and 2013 and the opposite.     

Who cares in Nicaragua? A care regime in an exclusionary social policy context

In Latin American countries with historically strong social policy regimes (such as those in the Southern Cone), neoliberal policies are usually blamed for the increased burden of female unpaid work. However, studying the Nicaraguan care regime in two clearly defined periods — the Sandinista and the neoliberal eras — suggests that this argument may not hold in the case of countries with highly familialist social policy regimes. Despite major economic, political and policy shifts, the role of female unpaid work, both within the family and in the community, remains persistent and pivotal, and was significant long before the onset of neoliberal policies. Nicaragua's care regime has been highly dependent on the ‘community’ or ‘voluntary’ work of mostly women. This has also been, and continues to be, vital for the viability of many public social programmes.     

State policy,institutional framework and technical monopoly in early modern Spain: invention patents in the Crown of Aragon during the seventeenth century

This paper examines invention patents in the Crown of Aragon during the seventeenth century. Patents were granted by the Council of Aragon, the Royal Council responsible for political and legal issues arising in the Spanish territories belonging to the Crown of Aragon. The Council's functions in the area of patents arose out of the monarchy's interest in extending the validity of royal patents from Castile to Aragon in order to enhance its control over technical discoveries and developments, and to raise fresh revenues for the treasury. Both foreign and Castilian inventors applied for patents, which were immediately applicable, but the privileges they entailed were accepted only with difficulty by the Aragonese institutions. This reluctance severely curtailed the number of applications. Meanwhile, the Council's desire to cooperate with the monarchy led it eventually to define criteria for the grant of patents. However, the legal and institutional structure of the Crown of Aragon made it difficult for inventors to enforce and defend their rights. The lack of new patent applications to the Council in the later seventeenth century illustrates how the existence of a separate jurisdiction obstructed the consolidation of a patents system in the Crown of Aragon, hindering the spread of technical progress in Spain.