Structural Adjustment,Democratization and Rising Ethnic Tensions in Africa

Structural adjustment, democratization and rising ethnic tensions characterize the current situation in much of Africa today. This article examines how these tendencies interact causally. It begins by describing Africa's growing debt (combined with defence) burden, the nature of the structural adjustment programme (SAP), particularly its pressures and contradictions, and the increasingly authoritarian responses generated by these. After illustrating the linkage between SAP and rising ethnic tensions, it is suggested that the issue of the distribution of power, wealth and ethnicity, especially under conditions of increasing scarcity, needs to be reconsidered. There are a number of reasons why ethnic and regional tensions are exacerbated by debts, economic crisis and adjustment in Africa; a core argument of this article is that the current ethnic tensions, like the ongoing democratic struggles, are arising as part of the general resistance against both SAP, because of its pauperizing impact, and against the state, which is seen as increasingly coercive and as negligent of its basic welfare responsibilities towards its citizens. The article ends by considering the implications of the coincidence of these two foci of resistance not only for the democratization project, but also for the survival of the state in Africa.     

Reflections on North American Pacific Coast prehistory

The Pacific Coast of North America was occupied by many distinctive groups of coastal hunter-gatherers at the times of early contacts with Europeans. Despite significant cultural diversity, Pacific Coast peoples shared lifeways oriented toward generally similar marine, nearshore, littoral, and estuarine habitats. In this paper, we examine some major issues that guide much of the archaeology done along the Pacific Coast, then discuss some of the theoretical and methodological problems that limit the efficacy of archaeological reconstructions. Most archaeological research conducted on North America's Pacific Coast has been oriented toward the search for the origins and development of a variety of cultural patterns. A comparative review of California and Northwest Coast sequences provides interesting parallels and discrepancies in the approaches taken in studying some of the major issues in Pacific Coast prehistory.     

Anatomy,behavior, and modern human origins

The fossil record suggests that modern human morphology evolved in Africa between 150,000 and 50,000 years ago, when the sole inhabitants of Eurasia were the Neanderthals and other equally nonmodern people. However, the earliest modern or near-modern Africans were behaviorally (archaeologically) indistinguishable from their nonmodern, Eurasian contemporaries, and it was only around 50,000-40,000 years ago that a major behavioral difference developed. Archaeological indications of this difference include the oldest indisputable ornaments (or art broadly understood); the oldest evidence for routine use of bone, ivory, and shell to produce formal (standardized) artifacts; greatly accelerated variation in stone artifact assemblages through time and space; and hunting-gathering innovations that promoted significantly larger populations. As a complex, the novel traits imply fully modern cognitive and communicative abilities, or more succinctly, the fully modern capacity for Culture. The competitive advantage of this capacity is obvious, and preliminary dates suggest that it appeared in Africa about 50,000 years ago and then successively in western Asia, eastern Europe, and western Europe, in keeping with an African origin. Arguably, the development of modern behavior depended on a neural change broadly like those that accompanied yet earlier archaeologically detectable behavioral advances. This explanation is problematic, however, because the putative change was in brain organization, not size, and fossil skulls provide little or no secure evidence for brain structure. Other potential objections to a neural advance in Africa 50,000-40,000 years ago or to the wider Out-of-Africa hypothesis, include archaeological evidence (1) that some Neanderthals were actually capable of fully modern behavior and (2) that some Africans were behaviorally modern more than 90,000 years ago.