Kingdoms of the Cameroon Grassfields

The three volumes considered here offer significant contributions to studies of African kingship and contribute to an emergent political anthropology of the Grassfields. Each adopts an approach on a sliding scale of emphasis on evidence and interpretation. Fardon takes a strongly evidence-based approach, reflecting recent methodological concerns in anthropology, which invites challenge and dialogue. Warnier presents an innovative methodological paradigm which emphasizes interpretation through observation of human action in engagement with material culture. Argenti takes the view that slave raiding underpins state formation and masquerades, and presents his own interpretations in that light. His approach resonates strongly with contemporary moral concerns about the Atlantic slave trade but lacks historical evidence.     

The Right that failed ? The ambiguities of conservative thought and the dilemmas of conservative practice in international affairs

This article seeks to assess the dilemmas and ambiguities of contemporary Anglo-American conservative thought and practice in international affairs. It bases its discussion in an understanding of conservative thought as a philosophy of imperfection but points out that there is a dominant way in which this has been understood in the last two hundred years but a rather different sensibility as well. It then argues that the dominant sensibility has become mired in crisis in the latter part of the twentieth century and as a result movements have arisen, allegedly within conservative thought, but in fact largely alien to it, and which now dominate the scene, especially in the United States. It seeks to trace the differences between the US and UK in this respect and offers an interpretation of the relative paucity of conservative thought-and oscillations and ambiguity of conservative practice-in the UK in the 1990s. Finally, the article offers some thoughts, drawn from that secondary sensibility in political conservatism, about what might be done.     

Generations,Mobility and Community: Geographies of Three Generations of Greek and Italian Ancestry in Sydney

Geographies of three generations of Greek and Italian ancestry in Sydney totalling 245 000 people in 2001 are identified. A model of community sequences is developed within a conceptual framework of intergenerational spatial, occupational and social absorption. Considerable intra‐ and inter‐generational occupational mobility took place and the third generations showed higher proportions as managers, professionals and associate professionals than persons of Australian ancestry. Second and third generations had occupational profiles which were much closer to the host society than the first generations. Despite occupational mobility, employment, residential and social trends associated with the first generations affected the adult second generations and to an extent the third. Several thousand members of three generations re‐grouped into successive local communities, patronised facilities in core communities, and maintained place identities.     

ACCESSING PAST BELIEFS AND PRACTICES: THE CASE OF LEMNIAN EARTH*

Lemnian Earth, a medicine in the shape of a stamped clay tablet (sphragis) from Lemnos, northeastern Greece, was much valued in antiquity and in the post‐medieval period as an antidote to poison and a treatment for other ailments. Although it was among the first archaeological materials to be subjected to chemical analysis (in 1807), there is still no clear understanding as to what made Lemnian Earth an effective medicine. We argue that Lemnian Earth, the artefact, was not the same as Lemnian Earth, the raw material. We suggest a composition for the artefact by scrutinizing the documentary evidence for its properties and by considering the geochemical processes that led to the formation of the raw material and the ritual relating to its extraction. The study of the latter highlights the need for archaeological materials scientists to recognize ritual as a possible manifestation of physical and chemical processes carried out within the framework of past beliefs and practices.     

Differences in hi‐tech immigrant earnings and wages across Canadian cities

This paper examines the relative earnings and wages of immigrants working in the hi‐tech sector in Canada's cities. Between 1990 and 2000, a sizeable earnings advantage of immigrants over nonimmigrants employed in the hi‐tech sector evaporated, and this change was most noticeable in the largest cities. We use population census microdata to examine the geographical dimensions of this shift. After controlling for individual characteristics, we show that immigrants in the largest and tech‐intensive cities earn significantly less relative to nonimmigrants than those in midsized and smaller cities. We also present results comparing the hi‐tech immigrant wage and earnings gap for the five largest Canadian cities. The findings are consistent with the notion that geographic differences are an important component of the overall earnings gap between immigrants and nonimmigrants.     

DIAGNOSING FROUDE'S DISEASE: BOUNDARY WORK AND THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY IN LATE‐VICTORIAN BRITAIN

Historians looking to make history a professional discipline of study in Victorian Britain believed they had to establish firm boundaries demarcating history from other literary disciplines. James Anthony Froude ignored such boundaries. The popularity of his historical narratives was a constant reminder of the continued existence of a supposedly overturned phase of historiography in which the historian was also a man of letters, transcending the boundary separating fact from fiction and literature from history. Just as professionalizing historians were constructing a methodology that called on historians to be inductive empirical workers, Froude refused to accept the new science of history, and suggested instead that history was an individual enterprise, one more concerned with drama and art than with science. E. A. Freeman warned the historical community that they “cannot welcome [Froude] as a partner in their labors, as a fellow‐worker in the cause of historic truth.” This article examines the boundary work of a professionalizing history by considering the attempt to exclude Froude from the historian's discourse, an attempt that involved a communal campaign that sought to represent Froude as “constitutionally inaccurate.” Froude suffered from “an inborn and incurable twist,” argued Freeman, thereby diagnosing “Froude's disease” as the inability to “make an accurate statement about any matter.” By unpacking the construction of “Froude's disease,” the article exposes the disciplinary techniques at work in the professionalization of history, techniques that sought to exclude non‐scientific modes of thought such as that offered by Froude.