Fitting in: the embodied politics of race in Seattle's desegregated schools

By considering the performative dimensions of racial identity construction, this paper joins recent calls to more fully incorporate the materiality of the body into geographical treatments of race (McKittrick 2000; Nash 2003; Saldanha 2006). Through an analysis of school desegregation in Seattle, Washington, this analysis investigates the ways in which students of different racial backgrounds negotiated the multiracial environments at their schools. Specifically, I examine how students' racial identities are worked through embodied practices as both conscious and unconscious attempts to fit into particular social realms. Drawing on performativity theory, I show how students actively mobilized their bodies to negotiate belongings that were ostensibly foreclosed by the primacy of phenotype. This paper suggests that by focusing on the active work that the body does in the social construction of race we can better theorize the ways in which racial categories are both reproduced and destabilized through everyday life.     

Dendrochronological Dating and Provenancing of Timbers from the Arade 1 Shipwreck,Portugal

As part of a larger project promoting the development of historical dendrochronology in the Iberian Peninsula, ship‐timbers from the Arade 1 wreck (mostly planking and framing elements), stored at the DANS/IGESPAR in Lisbon, were examined. Of these, 52 samples were identified as deciduous oak (Quercus subg. quercus) and two as chestnut (Castanea sativa). Of 24 timbers selected for dendrochronological research, 23 could be dated, placing the origin of the wood in western France and the felling of trees between AD 1579 and 1583. Their homogeneity suggests they are part of the original construction, which probably took place shortly after AD 1583. © 2012 The Authors     

Tempi of Change: When Soloists don’t play Together. Arrhythmia in ‘Continuous’ Change

This contribution is centered on the question of tempi of change and the possibility of defining ternary scales of changes in a long archaeological sequence, which could match F. Braudel’s interpretative framework. Although I had recently considered a ternary scale of change to be a satisfactory framework even for a single category of artifacts, further analyses for this volume, on a longer time scale, revealed it as an intellectual construct that entirely depends on the choice of criteria. In addition, observed arrhythmia in change between two sets of data from the Franchthi Cave (Greece), chipped stone assemblages and ornaments, demonstrate the difficulty of defining global phases of change within a continuous sequence. In turn, this raises the fundamental problem of the choice of proxies used to define the prehistoric cultural entities whose transformations we seek to understand.     

The Order of Sima Chengzhen and Wang Ziqiao: An Inquiry into the History of Shangqing Daoism in the Tiantai Mountains

Though small,this work is important for the study of Taoist history.It throws a better light on one of its major representatives,Sima Chengzhen 司马承祯(647-735),12th patriarch of the Shangqing 上清 tradition,a blooming Taoist school under the Tang (618-907).Ute Engelhardt had certainly already studied him notably with her translation of one of his principal texts on the breath technics;Livia Kohn too has worked on one of his short texts on meditation and Paul Kroll has written several articles on his poetry.But Thomas Jülch brings a new vision of this Taoist and his essential role on the legitimation of imperial power with the moving of the Shangqing tradition center to the Tiantai Mountains 天台山.     

Ieme van der Poel. Une Révolution de la pensée: maoïsme et féminisme á travers ‘Tel Quel,’ ‘Les Temps modemes,’ et ‘Esprit.’

Abstract

Claire Addison. Where Flaubert Lies: Chronology, mythology and history. Cambridge University Press, 1996. xv + 393 pp.

Dennis Porter. Rousseau's Legacy. Emergence and Eclipse of the Writer in France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 306 pp. $39.95.     

Social Policy and Gender Divisions of Domestic and Care Work in France

A number of cross-national comparisons of gender divisions of paid and unpaid labour have highlighted the mismatch which exists in France between on the one hand a narrow gender employment gap due to the full-time and continuous nature of women's employment, supported by extensive state-provided or subsidised childcare, and on the other hand, the persistence of an unexpectedly traditional gender division of domestic and care work. This results in high levels of work–life conflict for French women, and particularly for mothers. In much social policy analysis, the question of how policy might influence the extent to which domestic and care work is shared within the couple has been largely overlooked in favour of discussions of how the state facilitates and encourages the employment of mothers of dependent children. This article therefore focuses on why and how state policy in France, whilst being successful in bringing women and particularly mothers into the labour market, has not brought about a fairer gender division of unpaid domestic and care work in the home.     

Rally politics and political organisation: An institutionalist perspective on the French far Right

The study of the French far Right has often overlooked the relationship between parties and institutions. Here the presidentialisation of French politics under the Fifth Republic is taken to signal the institutionalisation of a form of rally politics within the French party system. Using a neo-institutionalist definition of institutions, rallies in the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republic are examined in turn. The conclusion is that the relative success of the Front national (FN) should be understood in light of the opportunities provided by the institutional framework in place in France from 1958 onwards.