Scaling up Civil Society: Donor Money,NGOs and the Pastoralist Land Rights Movement in Tanzania

Tanzania's pastoralist land rights movement began with local resistance to the alienation of traditional grazing lands in Maasai and Barabaig communities. While these community–based social movements were conducted through institutions and relationships that local people knew and understood, they were not co–ordinated in a comprehensive fashion and their initial effectiveness was limited. With the advent of liberalization in the mid–1980s, they began to gain institutional legitimacy through the registration of pastoralist Non–Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Registered NGOs provided community leaders with a formal mechanism for co–ordinating local land movements and for advocating for land rights at the international level. The connections of pastoralist NGOs to disenfranchised communities, and their incorporation of traditional cultural institutions into modern institutional structures, resonated with the desires of international donors to support civil society and to create an effective public sphere in Tanzania, making these NGOs an attractive focus for donor funding. In spite of their good intentions, however, donors frequently overlooked the institutional impacts of their assistance on the pastoralist land rights movement and the formation of civil society in pastoralist communities. NGO leaders have become less accountable to their constituent communities, and the movement itself has lost momentum as its energies have been diverted into activities that can be justified in donor funding reports. A political movement geared towards specific outcomes has been transformed into group of apolitical institutions geared toward the process of donor funding cycles.     

Rethinking Overdetermination, Structural Power, and Social Change: A Critique of Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff

Working in the wake of theoretical tendencies that became prominent within geography during the 1980s, many studies of resistance have either bracketed or ignored structural power, with some versions of poststructuralism simply denying that structural power is a useful concept in a world where power is putatively highly fluid and dispersed. These sorts of approaches, exemplified by the recent works of J K Gibson-Graham, Stephen A Resnick, and Richard D Wolff (GGRW), limit the ability of studies of resistance to articulate the conditions under which political and social struggles might transcend resistance and succeed in liberating groups of humans from the oppressive conditions against which they struggle. In this paper, I discuss issues surrounding analysis of structural power in the wake of poststructuralist critiques of "structural Marxism," presenting an alternative to GGRW's interpretation of Louis Althusser's concept of "overdetermination." Overdetermination is a crucial concept, because it is rightly seen as the key to a noneconomistic Marxism and has been championed as such by GGRW. I re-examine the roots of Althusser's concept in the writings of Lenin and Mao, arguing for a way of reading overdetermination that is both noneconomistic and compatible with a notion of structural power.     

The fractal geometry of ancient Maya settlement

Ancient Maya settlement patterns exhibit fractal geometry both within communities and across regions. Fractals are self-similar sets of fractional dimension. In this paper, we show how Maya settlement patterns are logically and statistically self-similar. We demonstrate how to measure the fractal dimensions (or Hausdorff–Besicovitch dimensions) of several data sets. We describe nonlinear dynamical processes, such as chaotic and self-organized critical systems, that generate fractal patterns. As an illustration, we show that the fractal dimensions calculated for some Maya settlement patterns are similar to those produced by warfare, supporting recent claims that warfare is a significant factor in Maya settlement patterning.     

Critical Masses: Augmented Virtual Experiences and the Xenoplastic at Australia’s Cold War and Nuclear Heritage Sites

Critical Masses is a multidisciplinary pilot project that aims to graphically represent and mediate the histories, spaces and narratives concerning former nuclear installations within central Australia. These include the abandoned British atomic test sites at Emu Field and Maralinga, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM)/Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) rocket launchers at Woomera, and the decommissioned US National Security Agency early warning satellite base at Nurrungar. Significantly, each of these Cold War sites are situated in either hazardous, remote, secure and/or culturally sensitive areas and require sophisticated analysis and negotiation in order to best render their complexity for both online access and on-site tourism. In association with the Maralinga-Pilling Trust and traditional indigenous landowners a multi-tiered approach (re)creating these locations is being modelled across platforms for diverse audiences. Digital materials are being authored and designed for stand-alone DVD, online interactive sites and archives, an immersive/simulated space for interpretation centres, and augmented/enhanced reality interfaces via GPS and mobile/handheld devices used in situ at key sites.     

New experimental data on the distance of sling projectiles

The range of stones cast by slings used in the past is debated. In the Central Andes, slings are asserted to be important weapons of prehispanic war, and have been recovered archaeologically. Rolled river cobbles and stones presumed to be slingstones found at fortified hilltop archaeological sites are presented as evidence that slings were used at these fortifications. Yet sling use has not been adequately tested at hillforts. Experiments conducted in Europe by a novice slinger have attempted to illuminate the range of sling cast stones at ancient hillforts. Data acquired from native slingers is necessary to more accurately assess distances achieved by projectiles launched by slings. We present data from sling experiments carried out in Puno, Perú among Quechua-speaking herders who are experienced slingers. The results demonstrate that a prior model of the maximum theoretical distance of sling cast stones underestimates their range. Results also show significant differences in the use of slings by men and women, and by different age groups. These new data permit a better approximation of warfare that has bearing on our interpretation of fortified sites.     

Possible isotopic fractionation of argon in source obsidians and archeological artifacts from Kulkuletti, Ethiopia

Despite uniform geochemistry ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar ages of 0.6, 1.25, and 1.3 Ma on obsidians from a source flow (Worja) and from archeological artifacts at the sites of Kulkuletti (near Gademotta, Ethiopia) have been interpreted to suggest that they derive from different source flows of different ages. A further suggestion is that the magmatic source of the obsidian flows was chemically homogeneous between 1.3 Ma and 0.6 Ma. Chemical analysis of these obsidians indeed suggests that they derive from a single flow. Reexamination of the argon isotopic data reveals that argon isotopes may have been fractionated within the flow, so that the assumption of an atmospheric ⁴⁰Ar/³⁶Ar ratio of 295.5 is inappropriate to use for computing ages. Three groups of data are apparent, and internally all yield ages near 1.3 Ma if the intercept value for ⁴⁰Ar/³⁶Ar from an isotope correlation plot is used for computation instead of using the atmospheric ratio. The Soret thermal diffusion effect provides a possible mechanism of fractionation of argon within the obsidian flow that is of approximately the right magnitude to explain the observations by in-diffusion of already fractionated atmospheric argon.     

Phylogeographic analysis of barley DNA as evidence for the spread of Neolithic agriculture through Europe

Results of analyses of the photoperiod response gene (PPD-H1) and simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in modern landraces of cultivated barley were used as evidence for the mechanism of agricultural spread in Neolithic Europe. In particular, we explored the usefulness of considering adaptive genes as indicators of past selective pressures acting on crops, during their spread through Europe. In some areas, such as the Alpine region, Britain and Scandinavia, we have evidence to suggest that the adaptation of crops to certain climatic conditions may have contributed to the timing of agricultural spread. At the northern fringes of Europe, and in higher altitude locations in central Europe, the introduction of more suitably adapted cereals may have facilitated successful agriculture to trigger agricultural expansion. This research opens up the possibility of investigating other genetic adaptations to climate, which would permit a fuller evaluation of the relative contributions of climate/crop and forager/farmer interactions in the process of agricultural spread.     

Ancient DNA typing shows that a Bronze Age mummy is a composite of different skeletons

Excavations at Cladh Hallan, a Bronze Age-Iron Age settlement on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, revealed the skeletons of two adults, a sub-adult and a child buried beneath the foundations of three roundhouses. Osteological and isotopic evidence has shown that the male adult skeleton is a composite made up of parts of at least three different individuals. To test the hypothesis that the female skeleton was also a composite we examined ancient DNA from four of its components: the skull, mandible, right humerus and right femur. Seven polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) were attempted, these covering positions 15,996–16,420, 16–132 and 232–368 of the mitochondrial DNA hypervariable I and II regions. Three PCRs were successful for each sample and a total of 55 sequences were obtained from the cloned products. After exclusion of possible contaminating sequences, the remaining 34 were compared. It was concluded that the mandible, humerus and femur come from different individuals. Insufficient data were obtained to draw conclusions regarding the origin of the skull. The presence of two composite skeletons at Cladh Hallan indicates that the merging of identities may have been a deliberate act, perhaps designed to amalgamate different ancestries into a single lineage.     

Queering bathrooms: sexing bathrooms

This article is part of a review symposium of Sheila Cavanagh's book Queering bathrooms: gender, sexuality and the hygienic imagination, 2010, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 295 pp., £19.94 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4426-10736