Living above the shop: home, business, and family in the English "Industrial Revolution"

This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the "household family" into the nineteenth century (rather than its more modern, "nuclear" variant) and the existence of keenly felt gradations of status within households making it likely that the constitution of "the family" differed according to one's place in the domestic hierarchy.     

‘Rock-art’, ‘Animism’ and Two-way Thinking: Towards a Complementary Epistemology in the Understanding of Material Culture and ‘Rock-art’ of Hunting and Gathering People

In recent years, the concept of ‘animism’ has gained considerable popularity among archaeologists in exploring non-Western expressions of material culture. This development has also influenced recent academic approaches towards the study of ‘rock-art’ of people living as hunter and gatherers or in a hunting and gathering tradition. We argue here that attempts in this direction so far are generally compromised, because they fail to take Indigenous philosophies and intellectual contributions seriously. Any concern with Indigenous material expressions, including so-called rock-art, has to involve a critical re-assessment of academic discourse itself and a challenge to the primacy of Western scientific and literary, academic methodologies. With reference to the ‘rock-art’ and the world-view of the Ngarinyin (Kimberley, Northwest Australia), we present some preliminary thoughts for the development of an alternative interpretative framework, while offering a (much needed) legitimacy to another more balanced epistemology.     

Migration fields in a traditional Highland community, 1350–1850

Using information on marriages from a clan genealogy composed in 1705 and from parish registers after 1775, a network of social relations within the Clann Mhuirich has been constructed over a three-and-a-half century period. An examination of marriage records and records of the residences of baptizing families throws light on the means whereby social relationships are formed and maintained over space through time in a Scottish highland community before the mid-nineteenth century. A basic characteristic of a Highland clan was its agnatic structure, binding men and women related to each other by patrilineal descent, often bearing the same surname. The territory occupied by a clan became segmented by a process of agnatic migration as clansmen acquired land through marriage. Another characteristic of clan organization was a tendency towards high levels of clan endogamy. Endogamous marriages reinforced the agnatic structure and maintained continuity of possession of a clan's territory.     

Defending harmful tax practices: mining companies’ responses to the Australian Senate Inquiry into tax avoidance

This article examines the Australian Senate’s 2015–2017 inquiry into corporate tax avoidance to illuminate the tax strategies used by the multinational corporations (MNCs) most targeted by tax justice campaigners, versus those of particular relevance in an Australian context: mining companies. Using documentary analysis, we examine how these companies discursively defended their tax avoidance strategies. Despite differences in the context in which the issue of tax minimisation has risen to prominence, we show that in Australia, MNCs’ legitimacy in paying lower levels of tax has been challenged in a similar manner to that of MNCs in other industry sectors that were held responsible for post-global financial crisis austerity measures in states like the US and UK. This suggests that history and context matter not in and of themselves, but for the impact they have on the discursive power of the actors involved, depending on the visibility and salience of the issue associated with them.     

“The music never stopped”: naming businesses as a method for remembering the Grateful Dead

ABSTRACT

Memorialization on the cultural landscape is a common method of celebrating the legacy of an event or person significant to the history of geographical location. The Grateful Dead is a band that continues to define the ideals of the late-1960s San Francisco Sound through their music’s creative freedom and inclination toward experimentation. Although the original lineup of the Grateful Dead is no longer intact, the spirit of the music they created and their psychedelic appeal has been preserved on the cultural landscape. Despite differing reasons for naming their business after the band, hundreds of business owners in the United States have collectively preserved the Grateful Dead’s presence on the cultural landscape. In this paper we explore the distribution of businesses in the United States with Grateful Dead-related names, and how the presence of these business names enriches the cultural landscape with the memory of the band’s music as a product of the iconic San Francisco Sound.