The Abeng’s Call: The Articulation of Place and the International in Black Power Print Production

This article engages with radical Black Power print production in order to examine the articulation of Black practices of place-making and Black internationalist spatial politics. These spatial politics and practices are developed through engagement with the Jamaican Black Power newspaper Abeng which was produced at the height of Black Power activity on the island in 1969. The paper draws on Black Geographies scholarship to demonstrate that Abeng represented a material and discursive means through which subaltern practices and places of resistance in Jamaica were enacted in opposition to and excess of plantation spatialities and regimes on the island. The carving out of such subaltern places allowed for the articulation of transnational imaginaries and translocal solidarities with similarly aligned communities and struggles across the diasporic world. The Abeng newspaper was again central in crafting these imagined Black internationalist geographies and coeval praxes of transnational solidarity.     

Entitlement Failure?

In this article, the literature around the entitlement approach to famine is assessed against the background of recent developments in economics which are perceived to have increasingly encroached upon the previously neglected subject matter of the other social sciences. In this light, emphasis is given to the tension that exists in the entitlement approach between its micro-foundations and macro-consequences and causes. This, in turn, is related to the broader problem in social theory of the relations between structures and agency. Whilst it is found that the entitlement approach does embody an implicit causal content in the filtering of socioeconomic mechanisms through the distribution of individual entitlements, it is ultimately argued that the approach is primarily suited to investigative rather than causal analysis.     

Land in Kwara'ae and development in Solomon Islands

This paper documents land tenure and the effects of economic development in Kwara'ae on the island of Malaita. It uses local histories to confirm the essential flexibility of a system of cognatic inheritance, based on social and economic values which contradict the more exclusive unilineal emphasis preferred and promoted by government land and development policy in Solomon Islands. In considering the resulting problem of land disputes, the paper questions the value of reforms which undermine the tradition of communal control of natural resources.     

The Social and Economic Complexity of Ancient Jerusalem as Seen Through Choices in Lighting Oils

This paper presents and discusses the results of residue analysis conducted on 78 ceramic lamps found in archaeological excavations in ancient Jerusalem, in an attempt to identify the types of oils used and the reasons for their preferential choice. The oil lamps chosen for the study were taken from a variety of contexts, which represent the different periods during which Jerusalem was settled and the different sectors of the city. The results of the study show that even the most mundane activity of lighting using oil held within it social and economic choices, as mirrored in the different excavation areas.     

The spatial economy of North American trade fairs

Through a study of trade fairs, this article illustrates that relational approaches to economic geography are not limited to the sphere of economic and social relationships. These relationships are influenced by and, in turn, shape material realities, such as specific infrastructure and the labour market, in a reflexive manner. Trade fairs are “relational events” that bring together regional, national, and often international producers, users, suppliers, and other agents of a value chain or technology field for the purpose of exchanging knowledge about technological and market developments, building partnerships, and maintaining existing networks through learning by interaction and observation. However, these events are also situated in space and time, grounded in the contexts of particular industries, trade patterns, public and private investments, as well as the economic geographies of places. Focusing on North America, this article presents and analyzes data on the economic geography of trade fairs and their regional economic impact (number of events, exhibitors, attendees, exhibition space). It explores regional trade fair patterns and dynamic changes in major trade fair cities by emphasizing the role of history and industry context.     

Political economic reorganization among non-state societies: A case study using Middle Holocene mortuary data from the Cis-Baikal,Russia

The extraordinary record of prehistoric funeral activities in Russia’s Cis-Baikal region provides an opportunity to study changes in political strategies that boreal forest hunter–gatherers employed at these events in the Middle Holocene. I use published data on burial treatments (quantities of grave goods, presence of exotic materials, burial layouts) from 10 Late Neolithic (henceforth referred to as “LN,” 4000–3000 BC) and 11 Early Bronze Age (“EBA,” 3000–2000 BC) cemeteries to explore important and previously undetected shifts in the ways that funerals during these periods articulated with political life. LN groups used funerals to emphasize affiliation with corporate institutions, while EBA funeral participants employed political strategies focused on displaying wealth. Current evidence indicates that groups on the western peripheries of the Cis-Baikal started employing semi-nomadic pastoral subsistence practices at the time of the LN-EBA transition, and I suggest that these groups presented new opportunities for Cis-Baikal inhabitants. Interactions with mobile, food-producing groups may have indirectly stimulated indigenous populations to redefine funeral gatherings as venues appropriate for cultivating long-distance economic and political support through competitive displays of wealth.