The first record of a Maastrichtian ammonite from the Perth Basin,Western Australia,and its biostratigraphical significance

The first known ammonite from the Maastrichtian of the Perth Basin, a single, incomplete specimen of Grossouvrites gemmatus (Huppé, 1854), is described from core material from the Lancelin No. 1 borehole. Foraminiferal and nannoplankton evidence date the ammonite as middle Maastrichtian; its age is also assessed on the basis of dinoflagellate assemblages from this section, but these give a less precise dating. The position of the ammonite with respect to a mid-Maastrichtian disconformity, which probably extended along much of the Western Australian margin is discussed.     

Administration and archives

Robert Hyslop, Australian Naval Administration 1900–1939, The Hawthorn Press, Melbourne, 1973, pp. 254, $6.95.     

From ethnic outbidding to ethnic conflict: the institutional bases for Sri Lanka's separatist war1

Abstract. Beginning in the mid‐1950s Sri Lanka's politicians from the majority Sinhalese community resorted to ethnic outbidding as a means to attain power and in doing so systematically marginalised the country's minority Tamils. This article consequently argues that institutional decay, which was produced by the dialectic between majority rule and ethnic outbidding, was what led to Tamil mobilisation and an ethnic conflict that has killed nearly 70,000 people over the past twenty years. It also analyses the influence informal societal pressures exerted on formal state institutions and how this contributed to institutional decay. Evaluating the relations that ensued between social organisations and the Sri Lankan state shows how institutions can prescribe actions and fashion motives even as it will make clear how the island's varied institutions generated a deadly political dynamic that eventually unleashed the ongoing civil war.     

Fenced In: Intimacy and Mobility in Highlands Papua New Guinea

This paper is organised around the analysis of an ‘event’; a truck trip from Kwima, a Maring speaking settlement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, to Banz in the Wahgi Valley and an evening spent on the road. The event forms a standpoint from which to assess the impact of the decline of civic space, and faltering legacy of colonial governmentality, in the Jimi since 1980. I describe the emergence of new forms of mobility based around the nexus between local forms of business and trucks. In particular I focus on new and anxious forms of masculine inside relationships, understood as a transformation of a habitus of intimacy, round which such mobility is built. I argue that this transformation should be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive profit oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. At the same time the event provides a vantage point to reflect on the nature of long‐term fieldwork, the methodological significance of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, and the nature of ethnographic error.     

Proto-Israelite Mythopoeics. A Perspective from Neuroscience on the Book of Joshua

This article contends that the Deuteronomic‐1 legend of the book of Joshua was formed into its mythical cyclical form through a process of oral transmission. As the oral stories told about an original source event were transformed into a community story it began to take on a liturgical form. This article explains the neuropsychological aspects of this natural process and also highlights how the cultural shift in the 12th century B.C.E. preserved the form of the Deuteronomic‐1 legend.     

Champagne socialism: Luxury in Fourier's utopia

Fourier's vision of material gratification in works such as Le Nouveau Monde amoureux comprehensively overturns a suspicion of the destabilising effects of luxury inherent to classical European political theory. This article explores the basis upon which Fourier was able to achieve this revolution. It focuses on his theories of human psychology, his insistence on the positive effects of material inequality in a harmoniously regulated society, and his abolition of the social division between mental and physical labour on which earlier critiques of luxury had been based. Set against an investigation of attitudes towards luxury in early modern and Enlightenment political thought, it argues that Fourier's utopia is ultimately framed by the all-encompassing gaze of a thinker who eliminates potential tensions between individual gratification and social harmony through blunt assertion rather than theoretical engagement with his antecedents.