Defusing Land Disputes? The Politics of Land Certification and Dispute Resolution in Burundi

There is a growing interest in localized land registration, in which user rights are acknowledged and recorded through a community-based procedure, as an alternative to centralized titling to promote secure tenure in sub-Saharan Africa. Localized land registration is expected to reduce land disputes, yet it remains unclear how it impacts disputes in practice. This is an urgent question for war-affected settings that experience sensitive land disputes. This article discusses findings from ethnographic fieldwork in Burundi on pilot projects for land certification. It identifies three ways in which certification feeds into land conflicts rather than preventing or resolving them. First, land certification represents a chance for local people to enter a new round of claim making, as those ignored or disenfranchised in earlier rounds see new opportunities. Second, it offers an avenue for institutional competition between different land-governing institutions. Third, certification provides politicians with openings to interfere in tenure relations and to expand their support base. The authors conclude that these problems are not simply a matter of inadequate policy design. Rather, there are crucial political dimensions to land conflicts and land tenure in Burundi, which means that land registration programmes run the risk of inflaming conflictive property relations in rural communities.     

Talk,technologies and teenagers: understanding the school journey using a mixed-methods approach

This paper focuses on the methods used in a project which set out to capture the movements and to consider the wellbeing of 30 teenagers on their journeys to and from school. A mobile phone linked to a GPS receiver was used to automatically log travel patterns whilst the respondents added ‘blog’ images and text about how they felt on the journey. Follow up interviews further explored the data. The paper shows that by using a range of methods the young people became involved in the project in different ways providing a rich picture of contingent and complex school journeys.     

Radiocarbon Wiggle-Match Dating in the Intertidal Zone

Radiocarbon wiggle-match dating is a technique that can combine the versatility of radiocarbon dating with chronological information from tree-rings. This makes it useful in contexts where timbers are preserved, but dendrochronological dating is impossible. As intertidal and marine timbers are waterlogged, this can favor their preservation and hence allow wiggle-match ¹⁴C dating, which can be of significant help in deriving relatively precise chronologies for a range of coastal structures. As the technique depends on making multiple radiocarbon measurements towards a single date, efficiency in application is the key and hence a number of practical considerations need to be taken into account in advance of conducting a dating program. This paper discusses some of these practical concerns and reviews them in the context of the intertidal crannogs in the Firth of Clyde on the west coast of Scotland.     

Small and slow is beautiful: well-being, ‘socially connective retail’ and the independent bookshop

Despite the loss of much-loved bricks and mortar retailers, little has been said about how shopping contributes to well-being. Yet notions of social connectivity and cultural participation figure increasingly in attempts to define social well-being. Using ethnography at a cooperative, independent bookshop, observations at bookshop events and 30 bookseller interviews, and analysis of the diversity and geographies of UK-wide independent bookshops, this paper finds that independent booksellers must now be ‘skilled capitalists’, requiring an increasing array of skills and resources and a commercial disposition in order to survive in a highly competitive market that favours fast, high volume selling. Analysis of bookshop locations shows that high-street book shopping choice is restricting as numbers and variety of bookshops decrease, with a troubling rise in ‘independent bookshop deserts’. The paper argues that compared to other book retailers, independent bookshops are unparalleled in their ability to produce well-being: providing a socially valuable ‘socially connective retail’ that is present, participatory and particular.     

Book Reviews

EVELINE CRUICKSHANKS, ed. Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759. New Jersey: Humanities Press, Inc., 1982. Pp. 231. $31.50 (US). Reviewed by Charles L. Hamilton

STUART A. COHEN. English Zionists and British Jews. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Pp. 349. $32.50 (US). Reviewed by Alfred Gollin

DAVID BATES. Normandy Before 1066. London: Longmans, 1982. Pp. xxx, 287. $13.95 (US). Reviewed by T.A. Sandquist

RICHARD C. FRUCHT. Dunarea Noastra: Romania, the Great Powers and the Danube Question. 1914–1921. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Pp. ix, 216. $22.50 (US). Reviewed by R.J. Crampton

MONIKA RICHARZ. Judisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte, 1918–1945. New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1982. Pp. 495. Reviewed by John S. Conway

ALAN EDELSTEIN. An Unacknowledged Harmony: Philo-Semitism and the Survival of European Jewry. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. Pp. xii, 235. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Joseph Shatzmiller

LOUIS L. SNYDER. Louis L. Snyder's Historical Guide to World War II. Westport, Conn., and London, England: Greenwood Press, 1982. Pp. xii, 838. $39.95 (US). Reviewed by Martin Kitchen

GEORGE ALEXANDER LENSEN. Balance of Intrigue: International Rivalry in Korea and Manchuria, 1884–1889. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1982. 2 vols. Pp. xvii, 476; and vi, 508. $62.50 (US). Reviewed by Hilary Conroy

T.H. LLOYD. Alien Merchants in England in the High Middle Ages. Brighton and New York: Harvester Press and St. Martin's Press, 1982. Pp. 253. $28.00 (US). Reviewed by G.D. Ramsay

JOHN L. BULLION. A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act, 1763–1765. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1982. Pp. xiv, 317. $24.00 (US). Reviewed by Ian Mugridge

WILLIAM WOODRUFF. Impact of Western Man: A Study of Europe's Role in the World Economy, 1750–1060. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. Pp. xvii, 430. $25.50 (US) cloth; $14.95 (US) paper. Reviewed by Glen R. McDougall

JACK STOKES BALLARD. The Shock of Peace: Military and Economic Demobilization after World War II. Washington, D.G.: University Press of America, Inc., 1983. Pp. x, 259. $23.50 (US), paper $11.75 (US). Reviewed by Lawrence Aronsen

PATRICK BEESLEY. Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–18. London: Hamish Hamilton, Ltd., 1983. Pp. 315. £9.95. Reviewed by Ewen Montagu

ERNST BREISACH. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Pp. xii, 487. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Arthur Marwick

LIANG HENG AND JUDITH SHAPIRO. Son of the Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. Pp. xii, 301. $19.50 (US). Reviewed by David P. Barrett

LOUIS A. PEREZ, JR. Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. 32.95 (US). Reviewed by David Healy

SYLVIA LEITH-ROSS. Stepping Stones: Memoirs of Colonial Nigeria 1907–1960. New Jersey: Humanities Press, Inc., 1983. Pp. 189. $21.00 (US). Reviewed by John Flint

MICHAEL JABARA CARLEY. Revolution and Intervention: The French Government and the Russian Civil War, 1917–1919. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1983. Pp. xiii, 265. $30.00 (Can.). Reviewed by Ioannis Sinanoglou

KARL ERICH BORN. International Banking in the 19th and 20th Centuries, translated by Volker R. Berghahn. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. Pp. 353. $30.00 (US). Reviewed by Ronald A. Shearer

ROSAMOND MCKITTERICK. The Frankish Kingdom under the Carolingians, 751–978. London and New York: Longman, 1983. Pp. 414. $19.95 (US). Reviewed by Donald E. Queller

CLIVE H. CHURCH. Europe in 1830. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983. Pp. xiii, 210. $28.50 (US). Reviewed by Agatha Ramm