The Sunland Park/Camino Real Partnership

The location and management of landfills is among the many controversial issues confronting many American communities. Greatly increasing the controversy is the issue of interest group politics in the local landfill siting and international waste trading policies. Exploring the historical and political controversies, this study examines landfill politics in a public-private partnership. The analysis reveals the vulnerability of local public authority and citizen participation in this kind of partnership.     

Book reviews

C. Skinner (ed. and tr.) Ahmad Rijaluddin's Hikayat perinteh negeri Benggala. vi, 198 pp. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982. (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde. Bibliotheca Indonesica, 22.)

J. A. de Moor (camp.). Indisch Militair Tijdschrift (1870–1942) a selective and annotated bibliography. [i], xiv, 236 pp. The Hague: Sectie Militaire Geschiedenis van de Landmachtstaf; Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1983. (Bijdragen van de Sectie Militaire Geschiedenis No. 15; Intercontinenta, No. 4). Guilders 24.

A. Teeuw and S. O. Robson (ed. and tr.). Kuñjarakarna dharmakathana, Liberation through the law of the Buddha: an Old Javanese poem by Mpu Dusun. With a contribution on the reliefs of Candi Jago by A. J. Bernet Kempers. ix, 230 pp., 24 plates. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde. Bibliotheca Indonesica, 21.) Guilders 90.

W. van der Molen. Javaanse tekstkritiek: een overzicht en een nieuwe benadering geillustreerd aan de Kunjarakarna. ix, 316 pp. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1983. (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde, 102.) Guilders 30.

Jan B. Avé and others. West Kalimantan: a bibliography. By Jan B. Avé, Victor T. King, and Joke G. W. de Wit. x, 260 pp. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1983. (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volken‐kunde. Bibliographical Series, 13.) Guilders 30.     

Stumbling Towards Union: Policymaking in the EU

Desmond Dinan (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the European Union .
Pierre-Henri Lament and Marc Maresceau (Eds.), The State of the European Union
John McCormick, The European Union: Politics and Policies .
Stelios Stavridis, Elias Mossialos, Roger Morgan, and Howard Machin (Eds.), New Challenges to the European Union: Policies and Policy-Making .
Helen Wallace and William Wallace (Eds.), Policy-Making in the European Union .     

Entrenched Disbelief: Complex Hunter-Gatherers and the Case for Inclusive Cultural Evolutionary Thinking

Advocates of traditional, agriculture-based models of sociopolitical evolution argue that the adoption of domesticates is requisite for developments such as sedentism, village life, ascribed status, hereditary leadership, and other features that underpin institutionalized political complexity. We counter in this essay with a well-documented suite of politically complex hunter-gatherer (CHG) societies that exhibit these same features, thereby demonstrating that reliance on agriculture per se—or any other specific food regime such as fishing—should be excised from explanations of emergent political complexity. Despite the failure of the agricentric model to account for a significant number of cases of institutionalized complexity, some of its architects remain entrenched in their disbelief and rigidly ignore the implications of CHG studies. By continuing to situate farming as foundational to everything complex, they perpetuate not only a story of human cultural evolution over the last 10,000 years that is incomplete but also a narrative that is incorrect. We reject subsistence (domesticates) as the central organizing principle and introduce here a new forum for thinking about how societies operate and evolve. We propose a model consisting of integrated platforms of societal dynamics that are inclusive (encourage discourse of all societies), nonprogressive, and serve as an organizational structure to discuss cultural evolution in any comparative or singular ethnographic context. The platforms are nonhierarchical and not fixed in order or importance. They are (1) agency and authority, (2) social differentiation, (3) participation in communal events, (4) organization of production, (5) labor obligations, (6) articulation of ecology and subsistence, and (7) territoriality and ownership. All sociopolitical cases and all topics can be productively discussed on these platforms, from bands to the largest empires, comparatively or diachronically. In the present article, we use the platforms to examine political evolution. We assemble considerable evidence that a variety of dietary regimes are associated with the emergence of institutionalized political complexity. Rather than diet, it is the ways people integrate and use labor that demands our attention.     

Belts vs. Blades: the Binary Bind in Iron Age Mortuary Contexts in Southwest Germany

The complex interplay between dress and identity has long been a subject of analysis in several fields of study, but until recently, the approach to gender in archaeological mortuary contexts has tended to default to a reductionist binary structure. The concept of intercategorical intersectionality (McCall Signs, 30(3), 1771–1800, 2005) as applied to dress and its material correlates both confounds and challenges this problematic and restricted view of gender in prehistoric societies. Data from an area of Europe in which Iron Age populations marked an interconnected set of social roles through the medium of personal adornment in mortuary contexts reveal significant ambiguities, including two related and apparently significant patterns: the relative under-representation of adult males as compared to females (with a correspondingly large “indeterminate” gender category) and what appears to be an exclusively (and improbably) “female” subadult elite group buried in tumuli. The complex interdigitization of gender with other social roles in mortuary contexts suggests that our interpretations of the early Iron Age burial program must be correspondingly flexible to do justice to this intersectional complexity.