The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court

In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'     

New evidence for jute (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Corchorus capsularis</Emphasis> L.) in the Indus civilization

In this paper, we report the results of an analysis of a preserved structure of jute on a ceramic artifact from the site of Harappa that is dated to 2200–1900 (cal.) BC (Fig. 1). Jute cloth has not previously been identified at this early date in the Indus civilization. Since fiber remains are rare in prehistoric South Asia, we briefly review the evidence for seed and fiber remains used in textile production in this region.     

The Invisible Hand that Rocks the Cradle: On the Limits of Time Use Surveys

Almost every intervention in the field of international agricultural development — from microcredit finance to fertilizer subsidies to trade policy — has come to recognize gender, and relationships within households, as important. Yet most interventions continue to treat the household as a ‘black box’, with changes within the household measured by the effects on income, anthropometry, health, or other secondary metrics within bargaining models. In this context, there has been increasing interest in time use studies as a way to peer inside this black box. This article offers a review of methods and identifies some of the difficulties facing time use studies in capturing intrahousehold dynamics, and presents the results of a two‐season simultaneous activity time use study in Malawi which aimed to address these difficulties. The results suggest significant limitations to time use surveys. The kinds of reproductive labour that often interest researchers may be invisible to the women responding to time use surveys, with the result that care work is dramatically under‐reported. The authors discuss the implications of the divergence between researchers’ concerns and the women's reports of their lives for time use surveys, and for feminist development research methods more broadly.     

Does working long hours cause marital dissolution? Evidence from the reduction in South Korea's workweek standard

Despite its important implications, little is known about the possible impact on marital dissolution of workweek standards, which set the maximum working hours for full-time workers and may, therefore, reduce their likelihood of working long hours. Moreover, evidence on the effect of working hours on marital dissolution comes predominantly from non-causal studies on Western women's work status. The Korean government reduced its workweek standard from 44 to 40 hours between 2004 and 2011. A discrete-time event history analysis of longitudinal data from the 2000 to 2015 Korea Labor and Income Panel Study shows that this reduction lowered male workers’ risk of divorce. The estimated effect is large in absolute size, and we speculate about possible explanations. We cautiously call for further attention to be paid to the plausible causal link between men's overwork and marital dissolution in the work-oriented and gender-divided East Asian societies.     

A seventeenth-century trade gun and associated collection from Pine Island,Alabama

A set of artifacts, apparently associated with human remains (one tooth), from Pine Island, Alabama, was donated to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in 1915. In preparation for repatriation, this collection was investigated extensively by a volunteer team. This paper reports the results of this analysis, focusing especially on a new type of trade gun and the glass beads. The goal of the research is to provide an accurate date for the collection to assist in identifying the Native American group represented.     

Transforming the landscape: Cistercian nuns and the environment in the medieval Low Countries

This article investigates the extent to which women’s monastic communities intervened in the natural landscape of the southern Low Countries in the Middle Ages, irrevocably transforming the environment in their efforts to support their communities. Focusing on the county of Flanders in particular, it contributes to an expanding historiography that traces the impact of human intervention on the natural world in the pre-modern period. Simultaneously, it offers a glimpse into a world where religious women worked alongside their male counterparts, challenging past notions about how gender shaped monasticism in the Middle Ages. While scholars have often noted the role of monastic communities in reclamation activities, this article makes a unique contribution by inserting Cistercian nuns into the narrative, ultimately producing a more inclusive and more accurate understanding of monastic experience in the Middle Ages.     

Understanding the Vancouver Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Cluster: A Case Study of Public Laboratories and Private Research‡

Conventional analyses of conventional industrial clusters look at the local, regional,1 In this paper “regional” refers to a sub-national entity, such as a state, province, state or collectivity of a few provinces or states. View all notes national and global factors affecting their ability to compete and grow. However, it is beginning to become apparent that in at least a few cutting-edge, high-technology areas, firms compete directly on a global basis for talent and markets. A case study of the fuel cell cluster in Vancouver, Canada appears to confirm this proposition. Policy makers have realized that this cluster must compete on the world market if it is to succeed. The cluster is endowed with several favourable factors including a high quality of life for its human capital and strong support for demonstration projects.     

Illuminating the Path to Grand Pari(s): Architecture and Urban Transformation in an Era of Neoliberalization

This article examines the architectural exhibition associated with the large‐scale Grand Paris urban development project initiated in 2007 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Through a close examination of the exhibition, I argue that imaginative representation is crucial to urban transformation, here acting to justify and naturalize neoliberal reforms. While the ten international teams of architects tasked with imagining twenty‐first century Paris presented sometimes radical scenarios, the architectural proposals are also used by the state to secure a sense of regional coherence, to reaffirm the imperative of economic growth, and to deny broad sociospatial conflict. The futural aspect of speculative regional development is redoubled in the prospective architectural visions, thus solidifying the dominance of a marketized mode of urbanization. While this cooption of architectural designs emerges from the unique circumstances of contemporary Paris, it also speaks to the broader promise and limits of imaginative urbanism and large‐scale architectural intervention.