Asymmetric Encounters in Native Canada

Occasionally in recent decades, relations between the Canadian state and particular Native communities have spiralled into open confrontation and violence. While such instances reflect the failure of conciliatory or decolonizing politics within a liberal–democratic milieu, scholarship has barely begun to analyze these events in a systematic fashion. This article applies to long-standing questions about political behaviour to the study of Native-state relations in Canada. By this, the authors particularly mean the dynamics of Native peoples' mobilization and institutional engagement. Examining several recent cases of open confrontation, this article looks for the basic circumstances in which violence arises, and how confrontation alters internal political dynamics in Native communities.     

Soil formation in archaeological pits and adjacent loess soils in Southern Germany

The soil formation in a number of pits on a neolithic excavation was compared with that in adjacent loess soils (Hapludalfs) under forest and arable and in Bavaria, Southern Germany. The differences between the soils under consideration were mainly characterized by micromorphological quantification of the illuviated fine clay. In the archaeological pits the amount of illuviated fine clay proved to be nearly twice as much as that in the undisturbed soils. The amount of illuviated coarser matrix components (fine and coarse clay and fine silt) in the neolithic pits did not differ significantly from that in the natural soils. The large amount of illuviated fine clay in the pits was ascribed to the presence of potash during the period of their formation. The formation of coarse grained illuviation cutans was related to deforestation, after which illuviation of the fine clay decreased in intensity and came to a stop.     

‘Access to Women’: Securing Mormon Whiteness in the US Army's Regulation of Commercial Sex in Chihuahua, 1916

This article argues that Mormon colonists – once refugees who had sought freedom from persecution for their sexual practices – asserted a white middle-class respectability as they cooperated with the US Army and corresponded with officers on the management of the soldiers’ sexual conduct. Their success depended heavily on shared understandings of the race and gender of the people involved. That is, they leveraged prevailing assumptions about Black soldiers’ bodies as aggressive and in need of sex, about white Mormon women's bodies as vulnerable and about Mexican women's bodies as racially in-between and thus suitable for the sexual service-work of enlisted men, pliable and ready to be made ‘accessible’ to soldiers. John Pershing, when asked to explain his decision to build the brothel, justified his choice by saying he had all Black troops at the camp and that nearby Mormon colonists had complained of these Black men meeting women outside for sex. This article explains how, why, for whom and to what end Pershing's explanation worked.     

Hydraulically fractured: Unconventional gas and anthropology (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The predicted increase in unconventional gas production is set to change global energy and concomitant geopolitical relations. The scale and required infrastructure of unconventional gas extraction result in profound changes in the landscape where extraction and processing take place. Widespread public concerns about the impacts of this industry have emerged, particularly with regard to fracking, surface and subterranean water contamination, air pollution and a host of other environmental issues, as well as social impacts and health risks. This article sets out some of the emerging anthropological engagements with unconventional gas and fracking, including analyses of materiality, politics, discourses, rights, risk and knowledge.