Book Reviews and Short Notices

De Villiers, P., La Chienne qui miaule (Albin Michel, 1990), 219 pp., 85F., ISBN 2 226 04131 1

De Villiers, P., Notre Europe sans Maastricht (Albin Michel, 1992), 156 pp., 80F., ISBN 2 226 06135 5

De Villiers, P., Avant qu'il ne soit trop tard (Albin Michel, 1993), 244pp., 89F., ISBN 2 226 06159 2

De Villiers, P., La Société de connivence ou comment faire avaler des serpents à sonnette (Albin Michel, 1994), 181 pp., 89F., ISBN 2 226 06918 6

De Villiers, P., Dictionnaire du politiquement correct à la française (Albin Michel, 1996), 201 pp., 89F., ISBN 2 226 08555 6     

The Nature of Things: Dead Labor, Nonhuman Actors, and the Persistence of Marxism

This article is about the question of social agency in the animation of things , and about how this problematic has been conceptualized in Marxist and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approaches to human–nature–technology relations. Notwithstanding many obvious differences, we note that each tradition was founded on a radical shift to a relational ontology, a world of relations and processes and not things-in-themselves, and that each has developed, partly as a consequence of this move, analytically useful ways of investigating and talking about the work that things do, or appear to do, in the world. By relating the ANT category of non-human actors to the Marxist concept of dead labor, and by revisiting Marx's own dialectics of technology as embodied in his figure of the "living machine" in Capital , we explore the different implications of these approaches for our understandings of the nature, materiality, and the efficacy of social agents. We argue that ANT's reconfiguration of agency as a collective social and technical process—a process wherein the "nonhuman" can have very real social effects—can be deepened and given some political efficacy only if we take seriously the ontological problems of causality, accountability, and the directedness of social relations (and things) which ANT, and its wider, still evolving ethos among the social sciences and cultural studies, would have us forestall.     

Possible causes and significance of cranial robusticity among Pleistocene–Early Holocene Australians

An analysis of possible developmental-functional causes of cranial form suggests that the morphology of ‘robust’ Pleistocene/Early Holocene Australians such as Willandra Lakes Human 50 might best be explained by four underlying factors: possession of a (1) large neurocranium, (2) narrow cranial base, (3) viscerocranium with considerable midfacial projection, and (4) large dentition, especially the cheek teeth, with their associated large jaws and high volume masticatory muscles. Some of these features are likely to be highly heritable, while others are caused/exaggerated by influences from ageing processes, diet, and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in an arid environment. These underlying ‘causes’ are either apomorphies of Homo sapiens (1 and 2) and thus absent from pre-modern specimens such as from Ngandong, or represent plesiomorphic features of latter Homo (3 and 4). It is concluded that combining current knowledge of cranial development-function with genetic studies of the population history of Aboriginal Australians provides the most parsimonious solution to understanding their origins.     

Crown corporations and co-operatives as coping mechanisms in regional economic development

This paper focuses attention on two types of businesses, Crown corporations and co-operatives, that have long been associated with attempted solutions to regional economic developmental problems in Canada. The paper argues that co-operatives and Crown corporations can be viewed as coping mechanisms that attempt to make up for shortcomings in Canada's market-based economic system. Consistent with this perspective, the case study of co-operatives and Crown corporations finds that, taken as a single group, these firms are more spatially dispersed than their privately held and publicly traded counterparts at both the Canadian national level and the regional level in Saskatchewan. The study also shows that, taken separately, Crown corporations are highly concentrated within Saskatchewan, while co-operatives are dispersed across the province. A possible explanation for this behaviour, warranting further research, is that Crown corporations in Saskatchewan encourage development provincially by linking with global and national business networks in their respective industries, while co-operatives in Saskatchewan largely focus on facilitating economic development opportunities at a local level across the many smaller town- and city-centred regions of the province. The paper discusses the meaning of these and other findings for regional economic development efforts in Saskatchewan and Canada.