Toward an anthropology of women's liberation

Ruby Rohrlich‐Leavitt, ed. Women Cross‐Culturally: Change and Challenge. The Hague and London: Mouton Publishers. A volume in the World Anthropology Series, Sol Tax, general editor. Distributed in North America by Aldine Publishing Co., 1975. xiv + 669 pp. Tables, figures, biographical notes, and indexes. $27.50.     

“And There Renew the Kingship”: The Double Coronation of Saul (1 Samuel 10-11)

This article deals with the two accounts of Saul's coronation that appear in I Sam 10-11. As opposed to the traditional critical approach, I propose a literary perspective, positing that both coronation episodes belong to a single story that is developed by means of concentric parallelism. The concentric structure of the accounts (which indicates a reversal in the conception of monarchy), the strange and unique literary formulations, and the other well-known literary devices such as analogies and leitwort all flesh-out the ideal character of the king of Israel. This is done while establishing Saul's character as the perfect king, who is worthy to lead. The purpose of the story is to teach the proper approach to understanding the status of the king of Israel, and to show that at this stage of the story Saul recognizes his limitations as a flesh-and-blood king who is aware of God's role as the leader and savior of the Nation of Israel.     

From Urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and the City: One Path Through the History of Australian Cultural Geography

This paper charts one idiosyncratic and rather personalised path through the emergence of cultural geography in the Australian context. It takes as its example the transition from research which examines a category group identified as ‘urban Aborigines’ to more recent research of our own which looks at the theme of how Aboriginality is articulated in and through the space of the city. This transition provides a way of registering some broader changes within the sub-disciplinary field of cultural geography. The paper also reflects on recent criticism that a cultural emphasis detracts from the political edge of geographical research. The influential work of Fay Gale suggests that this claim is somewhat misplaced in the context of the development of the sub-discipline in Australia.     

Book reviews

ESSAYS ON SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: By Karl Mannheim—Edited by Paul Kecskemeti, Routledge and Kegan Paid, 1953. 319 pages.

ISRAEL BETWEEN EAST AND WEST—A study in human relations: By Raphael Patai. The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 5713–1953. 24 pages, illustrated.

THE NEMESIS OF POWER—The German Army in Politics, 1918–1945, by John W. Wheeler‐Bennett. London, Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 829 pp.

CENTRAL EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY AND ITS BACKGROUND—Economic and political group organisation. By Rudolph Schlesinger. (Routledge and Kegan Paul) London, 1953. pp. 402. Price, 30s. (stg.)

MOTURIKI—A pilot project in community development, By Howard Hoyden. Published under the auspices of the South Pacific Commission. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1954. 42s.

THE HISTORIAN'S CRAFT: Marc Bloch. Manchester University Press, 1954. Pp. xxi Plus 197. 12/6.     

Equivalent dose distributions from single grains of quartz at Sibudu,South Africa: context,causes and consequences for optical dating of archaeological deposits

Optical ages for 14 sediment samples collected from the post-Howiesons Poort, late Middle Stone Age (MSA) and final MSA deposits at Sibudu, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa were reported in a companion paper (Jacobs, Z., Wintle, A.G., Duller, G.A.T., Roberts, R.G., Wadley, L. New ages for the post-Howiesons Poort, late and final Middle Stone Age at Sibudu, South Africa. Journal of Archaeological Science, 2008). These ages were based on equivalent dose (D_e) distributions that were overdispersed. In this paper, we investigate factors both internal and external to the grains that may contribute to such higher than expected overdispersion in single grain D_e values. Intrinsic factors accounted for some, but not all, of the observed scatter, and application of a set of rejection criteria filtered grains for which erroneous D_e values would otherwise be calculated. We investigated sediment mixing and differences in the beta dose received by individual grains in their burial environment as two likely reasons for the observed overdispersion. The scatter in D_e distributions for all the samples is best explained by grains that were deposited at the same time and which were well bleached, but that subsequently received a range of beta doses. A procedure is presented for adjusting the measured beta dose rate, and its associated error. We show that using a combination of single grain OSL measurements of D_e, the finite mixture model and adjustment of the beta dose rate, result in stratigraphically consistent ages. These ages are more consistent than the ages obtained from multiple grain aliquot D_e values and the average dose rates for each sample; the multiple grain ages are about 10% older, partly because of the variable dose rate and partly because these aliquots contained grains with undesirable OSL characteristics.