DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION: HANS KELSEN'S FUTILE EXCHANGE WITH ERIC VOEGELIN

This article reviews Hans Kelsen's mysterious and recently published last book, contextualizing it with reference to the little known dialogue between Kelsen and Eric Voegelin. The confrontation between Kelsen and Voegelin, two of the most illustrious émigré scholars who found a new home in America, is important to revisit because it touches upon several axes of debate of crucial importance to postwar intellectual history: the religion–secularity debate, the positivist–antipositivist debates, and the controversy that also led to the famous Voegelin–Arendt debate: how to read the horrors of totalitarianism into a historical trajectory of modernity. Although the Kelsen–Voegelin exchange ended in failure and bitterness, its substance goes to the heart of modern intellectual history.     

For Richer,for Poorer: Marriage and Casualized Sex in East African Artisanal Mining Settlements

Migrants to Tanzania's artisanal gold mining sites seek mineral wealth, which is accompanied by high risks of occupational hazards, economic failure, AIDS and social censure from their home communities. Male miners in these settlements compete to attract newly arrived young women who are perceived to be diverting male material support from older women and children's economic survival. This article explores the dynamics of monogamy, polygamy and promiscuity in the context of rapid occupational change. It shows how a wide spectrum of productive and welfare outcomes is generated through sexual experimentation, which calls into question conventional concepts of prostitution, marriage and gender power relations.     

Beyond the Transfer of Capital? Second-Home Owners as Competence Brokers for Rural Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Abstract

The current paper addresses the possible role of second-home owners as competence brokers in terms of rural entrepreneurship and innovation. Empirically, the paper draws on a case study of second-home owners from two municipalities in Telemark, one of the regions with the highest densities of second homes in Norway. Data were collected using a semi-structured questionnaire on 2200 second-home owners and with a response rate of 43% and 47%, respectively. The study results show that the second-home owners demonstrate in different ways a genuine interest in their second-home community, and also a willingness to use their knowledge and competence to contribute to the development of the local economy. Furthermore, we have also seen that an impressive number of second-home owners are educated to a higher level, within a variety of industrial fields and sectors, and have extensive managerial and hands-on experience from establishing and developing companies: in other words, they have both the interest and willingness and the required skills and experiences to become important competence brokers for local entrepreneurship and innovation.     

Labor agency and the importance of the national scale: Emergent aquaculture unionism in Chile

In this article we argue for the continuing relevance of the national scale in understanding the geographies that shape and constrain labor agency. Recent contributions to labor geography have held that some of the central concepts used to understand the transformative capacities of labor, such as agency and scale, are under-theorized. On the basis of our study of the emergent labor movement in the Chilean aquaculture industry, we suggest that this field suffers from what we term “glocalocentrism”, which overshadows the fundamental importance of structures and processes that are primarily scaled nationally. With the labor repression of the Pinochet regime imprinted in current national institutions and organizational traditions, the aquaculture sector was able to develop in southern Chile from the early 1980s onwards, without a significant union movement to press workers’ claims, and it benefited from exploitative practices and low wages. The first company level unions did not appear until the late 1980s, and a national confederation of aquaculture unions was formed as late as 2006. After the outbreak of the ISA virus in 2007, thousands of workers were left unemployed, and the young union movement struggled for state intervention and programs, with some success. International networks brought attention to the issue, but structures and processes at the national level conditioned the possibilities for the emergent labor movement to press its claims successfully.     

Sailing Rock Art Boats

Amongst the thousands of Bronze Age rock art images that are found along the paleogeographic coast lines of southern Scandinavia the most ubiquitous is the boat. A few are furnished with what look like a mast or sail. These attributes have largely been ignored or explained away as features or objects other than rig because it is widely accepted that the sail was not used in Scandinavia until the 8th century AD. But what if after all they really are depictions of rig? Might this suggest that the sail was not only known but perhaps used here over a 1,000 years earlier than previously accepted? Starting from the bases of the images and the environment in which they are found, this paper asks whether vessels of the types we believe belonged to the Scandinavian Bronze Age could have been sailed? These evaluations led to a series of sail trials in a canoe undertaken in the archipelago of the Swedish west coast in the late summer and autumn of 2005. The successful results of these trials were later transferred to the Tilia, a full-scale reconstruction of the Hjortspring boat, a vessel dated to 350 BC but believed to belong to a long-established boatbuilding tradition stretching back into the Bronze Age. This is the report of the hypothesis behind these trials as well as their planning, execution and immediate results.