The urban paradox of a stranger

Rubén E. Reina. Paraná: Social Boundaries in an Argentine City. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1974. xxiv + 390 pp. Figures, tables, illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $10.00.     

Pluralising Political Forests: Unpacking “the State” by Tracing Virunga's Charcoal Chain

Peering through the lens of illegal charcoal production in the forested areas of Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, this paper makes a case for disaggregating the notion of “the state” to better capture “the political” in contemporary political forests. It argues that to identify the fluctuating importance of different dimensions of “stateness”, it is crucial to acknowledge the polymorphous socio-spatial relations that produce political forests. Thus, we draw on the notions of territory, place, scale and network (TPSN) to examine how “stateness” in Virunga has transformed under the particularisation, transnationalisation, and regionalisation of authority. This approach allows us to show how these processes do not only stem from neoliberalisation, but are also driven by, inter alia, regional warfare and non-state militarisation. The resulting complexity of the regulatory landscape turns Virunga into a space marked by a plurality of partly overlapping and partly conflicting political forests.     

The Puzzle of Group Ranch Subdivision in Kenya's Maasailand

This article explores the motivations underlying Maasai pastoralists' support for the subdivision and parcellization of their collectively held group ranches, an outcome that is inconsistent with theoretical expectation. Examining four group ranches that formed part of the wave of subdivisions that occurred in the 1980s, it finds that Maasai herders were inclined to support subdivision in order to capture gains in a new property assignment or to reduce distributional disadvantages within the status quo. Importantly, however, subdivision also emerged as a critical defensive strategy against internal and external threats to Maasai land claims. Incorporating this defensive strategy (aimed at securing individual claims) within the individual's calculus for seeking exclusive rights provides insights into why a theoretically unexpected property rights transformation took place.     

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.     

Towards Situated Analyses of Uneven Peri-Urbanisation: An (Urban) Political Ecology Perspective

In this article we develop a novel analytical framework for situated studies of uneven peri-urbanisation that resist further dividing Marxist and Situated (Urban) Political Ecology. We conceptualise uneven peri-urbanisation as a process in which access to the resources mobilised for peri-urban developments, such as water or land, is rendered uneven. In a three-step approach we suggest, first, describing how peri-urbanisation unfolds in the case being studied and distinguish it from other processes, such as suburbanisation. Second, we propose analysing the transformations of nature on which the peri-urbanisation process is based; and third, examining the uneven power relations infusing inequalities into these transformations and consequently into the peri-urbanisation process described. To allow for a situated analysis this approach regards the study of practices as crucial, but they have to be embedded in wider socio-economic, political, and historical processes, since both contribute to transformations of nature and thus shape uneven peri-urbanisation.     

Lithic refitting and movement connections: the NW area of level TD10-1 at the Gran Dolina site (Sierra de Atapuerca,Burgos, Spain)

The first lithic refit studies were carried out at the end of 19th century, but the method was not considered an area of real interest to archaeology until quite recently. Today, lithic refitting is applied in a multitude of areas of enquiry including lithic technology, intra-site and inter-site spatial distribution, archaeostratigraphy and formation processes. In this paper, we present a refit study of the lithic materials recovered in the base of the NW sector of level TD10 at the site of Gran Dolina (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain). We aim to provide information about spatial distribution through identifying activity areas and the internal connections between those areas. Our work resulted in various refits whose connections reveal the movements of the pieces and/or knappers that once occupied the site. Our results also show the importance of studying the set of materials as a whole and the bias involved in analyzing only a small sample. The refits, connections and directions of movement allow us to infer areas in which an activity took place, but these results must be confirmed in future works covering the entire lithic assemblage of TD10.     

Patterns of Vulnerability to AIDS Impacts in Zambian Households

Using household data from Northern Zambia, this article looks at HIV/AIDS impacts on different aspects of people's access to food. The findings draw particular attention to the variances in vulnerability among households burdened by illness and orphans that are headed by men, women and the elderly. It is argued that vulnerability levels to HIV/AIDS impact differ substantially among households and implicitly expose the underlying causal conditions that enable or disable people in their responsiveness. Households affected by HIV/AIDS cannot be treated as a homogeneous group and understanding the differences in vulnerability can play an important policy role in designing targeted support.