Corsairs and Constitutions

This article is concerned with the impact of the activities of so-called Barbary states on the political discourse on a separate Norwegian civil ensign in the union of Norway and Sweden, 1814–1821. In this parliamentary discourse, the argument was made that the Barbary states’ practice of selling treaties of safe passage in order for Christian states to avoid their ships being captured and crews enslaved could endanger the internal political stability of the union. Political measures were taken to avoid such a situation occurring. This case is an indication of how established modes of coexistence between Europe and North Africa could become problematic with the advent of modern constitutions.     

Firing up craft capital: the renaissance of craft and craft policy in the United Kingdom

Crafts have recently been experiencing a renaissance. This revitalization sees craft increasingly recognised as a growing industrial sector with benefits linked to educational, cultural and economic development policy agendas. This paper engages with policy debates around the place of craft in the United Kingdom from 2010. Drawing on craft sector perspectives and UK government policy initiatives it situates the disciplines and practices of craft within their institutional support networks, organizational contexts and draws attention to the role of individuals in driving agendas. The paper focuses on the national facing crafts development organizations, the UK Crafts Council and the UK Heritage Crafts Association, alongside recent policy discussion emerging from the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Recognizing that the legacies of past practice often inform contemporary agendas, the paper explores how the advocacy of craft in the recent past has shaped the place and positioning of craft in contemporary UK politics.     

Trump: Transacting trickster

Donald Trump's recent election victory has been greeted with horror and disbelief by many. In particular, the glaring inconsistencies and open self‐contradictions that marked his campaign should have rendered him unelectable by the standards of conventional reasonable political practice. But rather than being a problem to be explained away, it is Trump's open embrace of contradiction that explains much of his appeal. By holding contradictory trends and opinions simultaneously, he presents himself as being capable of embodying seemingly mutually exclusive social trends, such as an intensification of economic competition on the one hand and a radical denunciation of that competition's effects on some of the losers from that process on the other. By doing so, he presents himself as a powerful figure with charismatic abilities to contain such contradictions within himself – abilities that are not available to ordinary career politicians, but that are strikingly reminiscent of the powers attributed to so‐called ‘trickster’ figures in anthropological literature.     

Expectations of scatter in equivalent-dose distributions when using multi-grain aliquots for OSL dating

In the OSL dating of sediment, the scatter in equivalent dose (D _e) between grains is almost always larger than would be expected due to counting statistics alone. Some scatter may be caused by insufficient (partial) bleaching of some of the grains prior to deposition. In order to date partially bleached sediment, it is essential to estimate the amount of scatter caused by other processes (e.g. grain-to-grain variability in the natural dose rate). Measurements of such scatter are performed at the single-grain level; by contrast, most OSL dating is performed on multi-grain subsamples, for which grain-to-grain scatter is reduced through averaging.     

The Norwegian 9/11: In the Church Without a Bible

The article identifies roles and conditions for the Bible within modern politics in the West. By comparing the official Norwegian response to the terror attack in Oslo July 22, 2011, with the similar response in the US on September 11, 2001, it is explained why the Bible is nearly absent in the official discourse of Norwegian Prime Ministers. While religion resurfaced in the process of national recuperation with the Cathedral of Oslo as a center for mass ritualization and national grief, the biblical legacy played no part in the Prime Minister's speech. The primary political leader of the Norwegian state has rarely bolstered his argument with the Bible, although this state has officially adhered to a Protestant confession from its Constitution in 1814. The Liberal Bible that appears to be operative in US presidential discourse is not playing a major role on a comparable political level in Norway.