LIFE CYCLE AND MIGRATION TO URBAN AND RURAL AREAS: ESTIMATION OF A MIXED LOGIT MODEL ON FRENCH DATA*

ABSTRACT This paper examines which types of individuals are attracted to or repelled from rural and urban areas in France. Migration decisions among urban centers, suburbs, and rural areas are examined for three age groups. Differences between locations are assumed to be driven by agglomeration economies and externalities resulting from densities. We therefore stress the role of labor‐market size, land markets, and commuting time in migration decisions. The results from multinomial mixed logits show that large labor markets attract the youngest and in particular educated individuals. Larger family size favors migration from city centers to suburbs, whereas divorce and widowhood increase the probability of moving to an urban center.     

Copper supply during the Final Neolithic at the Saint-Blaise/Bains des Dames site (Neuchâtel, Switzerland)

The Saint-Blaise/Bains des Dames stratified site in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, contains several occupations that span the Late through Final Neolithic, including the Horgen, Lüscherz, and Auvernier-Cordé periods. As part of a study on prehistoric metallurgy in western Switzerland, we compare the lead isotope ratios (multicollector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer) and elemental compositions (instrumental neutron activation analysis) of the site’s numerous copper finds to a database of corresponding measurements for copper ores throughout Europe. The results show a considerable variation in copper compositions present at the site, suggesting complex economic relationships and multiple chaînes opératoires during the time in question. Specifically, during the Final Neolithic, we distinguished ten coherent clusters, confirmed by both the elemental compositions and lead isotope ratios. When compared to the Europe-wide database of copper ores, we observed significant changes in the provenance of the copper through time that reflect equally significant changes in social, cultural, and economic interactions.     

Using the concept of genre de vie: French geographers and colonial Algeria, c.1880-1949

By the mid-twentieth century, French geographers had produced substantial works of research aiming to classify genres de vie. They had broken with the idea that nomadic and sedentary genres de vie were the successive stages of a universal history of human societies, and argued instead that they were the result of human adaptations to specific natural environments. Within this new conceptual framework, nomadism was thus understood as a form of highly evolved genre de vie responding to the particular characteristics of the steppe. But if pastoral nomadism was the best possible adaptation to the dry steppe zone, on what natural basis could the extension of European sedentary agriculture be justified? Scientific answers to this question were of strategic importance in Algeria which was the most important colony of settlement in the French empire and in fact often considered as a part of France. Through the analysis of a corpus of works published by institutionally recognized geographers concerning Algeria and Algeria’s indigenous genres de vie (including doctoral theses, articles in the Annales de Géographie and literary reviews), the paper attempts to show how the concept of the ‘adaptation of mankind’ to the natural environment, when applied to Algeria, generated a series of intractable divides and deep contradictions. This in turn requires us to reconsider the idea that in French geography, the neo-Lamarckian concept of natural determinism systematically supported a distinction between so-called ‘European’ and ‘Native’ populations. By examining precisely the scientific usages of the concept of genre de vie in the colonial and imperial situation, the paper will attempt to reveal how the academic debates of the time were shaped by competing views of the civilizing mission of French colonialism in Algeria.     

La DéontoLogie Ethnographique À l’Épreuve du Documentaire

This article offers a comparison of the legal suits filed by the interviewees against the director of the documentary être et avoir (to have and to be) with the rights of interviewees in ethnographic investigations, focusing particularly on image copyrights and labor law. To say that interviewees contribute to such investigations in anonymity does not solve the main problem - they are crucial to the investigation, marginal to the analysis, and then are assigned no publication credits. While information about the interviewees should remain confidential, this article argues, that contribution and role in the making of a publication should not be ignored.