New approaches to economic development in peripheral rural regions

This paper explores new approaches to economic development in peripheral regions in the context of constraints on public expenditure, declining employment in traditional natural resource based industries, and globalisation of the economy. Three conceptual pairs ‐resource mobility and immobility; tangible and intangible factors; and global‐local interrelations — underpin three ideas about these new approaches, and their impact on differential economic performance observed in otherwise similar localities and regions. A case study is given to illustrate the role played by less mobile cultural, social and environmental assets in these strategies. However, a key feature of the cases is the importance of both local and extra‐local linkages, often at international level, whether this has to do with market or non‐market activity. The conclusions raise questions for research about the root causes of differences in economic performance between rural localities, whether local initiatives will suffice to counter further likely declines in public subventions and natural resource based employment and also about the focus of policy in such regions.     

The Queen and the City: Royal Female Intervention and Patronage in Hellenistic Civic Communities

In 196 bce , Queen Laodike III issued a decree (I.Iasos 4, I) to Iasos in Caria, Asia Minor, announcing that she was giving the Iasians a ten‐year supply of grain to alleviate their penury after her husband's conquest of their city, and she specified that the grain ought to be sold and the income used to provide dowries for the daughters of poor citizens. This and other donations were part of rebuilding efforts in the wake of military violence by Laodike's husband Antiochos III. For her beneficence, Laodike was honoured by cities with foundations of festivals, priestesses and sacred areas dedicated to preserving her cult. This reciprocity of goodwill was gendered, not only in the establishment of priestesses, but in the nature of the honours given; for example Iasos celebrated Laodike III's birthday with a procession of a maiden priestess and couples who were about to wed (I.Iasos 4, II), and the people of Teos dedicated a fountain in their city centre to Laodike and required that all brides should draw from it the water for their baths (SEG 41, 1003). Laodike's patronage and the cities’ responses to her bring to light the role of female citizens within the structures, perpetuation and ceremonial of the civic body. At the heart of honours given Laodike and her own self‐promotion was the identity of sister and mother, roles shaping her own queenship and the civic participation and power of the women she assisted.     

The nature of the times deceas'd

The essay reflects on the nature of time as a cultural function, especially in the light of the ‘heritage industry’ of the 1980s. In trying to identify the nature of some changes in relationships between pasts and present in the 1990s, the author suggests the concept of ‘post‐heritage’, defines it, and glances at its applicability to 1994.     

11 September 2001: the Italian writers’ response

One month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the Corriere della Sera published an article on the possible future consequences for literature of this horrific event. Some novelists boldly declared their work would not be affected at all, while others observed that their literary visions and perspectives were already responses to life's tragic aspects. Several writers confessed to wondering, at least initially, whether literature henceforth could continue to have any real sense. A decade later, this essay examines the nature of the Italian response. It looks first at the views of those writers who expressed opinions directly to the press or in essay form, and then at a small number of novels (by Tullio Avoledo, Marisa Bulgheroni and Tiziana Rinaldi Castro) and short stories (by Andrea Piva, Andrej Longo and Andrea Canobbio) which have embraced the theme, and which have done so in ways that reinforce the sense of an underlying political and/or cultural aesthetic. Connections between twenty-first-century reactions to 9/11 and the Italian experience or memory of political terrorism and war will be explored, as well as the question of inspiration for novelists, in the particular context of catastrophe or trauma.     

Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism

Critical ethnographies and methods of relational comparison provide tools for reconfiguring area studies to challenge imperial visions of the world; for illuminating power‐laden processes of constitution, connection, and disconnection; and for identifying slippages, openings, contradictions, and possibilities for alliances. Crucial to this project are Lefebvrian conceptions of the production of space. In developing these arguments, this essay also intervenes in recent discussions of so‐called “primitive accumulation” as an ongoing process. It does so by drawing on research into connections between South Africa and East Asia, and using these relational comparisons to highlight the significance of specifically racialized forms of dispossession and their salience to struggles currently underway in South Africa. These examples underscore how critical ethnography and relational comparison provide a crucial means for “advancing to the concrete”—in the sense of concrete concepts that are adequate to the complexity with which they are seeking to grapple.     

Anglo-Irish and Gaelic marriage laws and traditions in late medieval Ireland

This paper is intended to draw attention to the very different rights and restrictions accorded to Anglo-Irish and Gaelic women in late medieval Ireland. These differing traditions concerning marriage and women's rights within it led to conflicting marital experiences for Anglo-Irish and Gaelic women during this period. Fundamentally the Anglo-Irish idea of marriage was opposed to the Gaelic one which led to clashes especially where intermarriage between the two cultures took place.     

Family photographs and domestic spacings: a case study

This paper elaborates the argument that domestic space should be considered as the product of relations that extend beyond the home. It examines one common domestic object – family photographs – and explores how the particularity of this photography and the specificity of its display by white middle-class mothers with young children in South-east England produce just such an extended domestic space. The stretched space co-produced by these mothers and photographs is also a form of stretched time, and it is integrative in complex ways; it contains different kinds of absences which disturb but do not break its cohesion. The paper also discusses why the display of family photographs is done almost exclusively by women.