Reconceptualizing Resistance: Residuals of the State and Democratic Radical Pluralism

Abstract: Arguing that resistance to the state is too narrow a conceptualization of a political project that challenges neoliberalism, we posit that there are latent, residual apparatuses of the state which can be activated as part of a systematic progressive politics. We examine Massachusetts’“Dover amendment”, a legal framework which governs group home siting throughout the state. Dover offers a powerful tool with which to resist a neoliberal socio‐spatial agenda, though it has been underutilized toward enabling an alternative landscape. We analyze how and why Dover has often remained latent as a tool for socio‐spatial resistance, and consider a provocative case in Framingham, Massachusetts that suggests how residual state apparatuses may be leveraged in support of an explicitly resistive, progressive agenda.     

Why the Movies Chose Hollywood

In the early 1900s Hollywood became acknowledged as the world capital of the commercial movie industry. Several factors clearly explain why film makers came to prefer this district of Los Angeles. Compared to other communities of the period. Hollywood possessed a superior geographic situation, affording film directors an ideal climate and ready access to outstanding scenery, talent and ancillary businesses. Once established, the district rapidly realized incomparable economies of scale. Finally, World War I eliminated European competition and solidified Hollywood's preeminent position.     

Italian-American Yard Shrines

Yard shrines are a fairly common landscape feature for people of Roman Catholic background. This study focuses on the yard shrines of Italian-Americans in Kansas City, Missouri and Archbald, Pennsylvania, and the meaning behind such shrines. The yard shrines may vary in appearance, however, the leading icon is the Blessed Virgin. Data indicate the shrines belong to home owners of southern Italian descent and were erected as a display of faith/and in payment for prayers answered. There is, as well, a strong correlation between the existence of the yard shrines and the adjacency of older family members. Yard shrines may be a fast fading landscape feature.     

Material and cultural consumption in Cuba: new reference groups in the new millennium

Reference groups serve as markers for citizen-consumers to determine tastes and preferences about work and material and cultural consumption. These groups have evolved slowly in socialist Cuba, mostly during the post-Soviet era. This paper examines the symbolism, roles, and meanings of three such groups: the Cuban Diaspora, Cuban Gen-Yers or Millennials (survivors), and entrepreneurs. A combination of these groups is changing values about a new consumption taking hold across the island and offers insight into material and cultural consumption.     

Imagined productive communities: Industrial rationalisation and cultural crisis in 1930s France

This article discusses the French interwar movement in favour of the rationalisation of work and its ideas for a new industrial order. It argues that these ideas were shaped by anxieties about the social consequences of mass production and that a preoccupation with the (re-)creation of productive communities was central to the rationalisation project in France. Rather than embracing American-style mass production as the only model for modernisation, the French modernisers discussed here sought to map out a distinctive route: they sought ways in which goods could be produced on a mass scale, while workers were organised on a human scale, or even returned to the land. Such ambitions gesture just as much towards the passéisme of the Révolution nationale as to the model of Fordist America or the postwar transformation of France.     

On Ancient Chinese Vases

Abstract

Historic and place-name evidence suggests that a Roman road ran along the south-west flank of the Pennines from North Staffordshire to the Tame valley on the Lancashire–Yorkshire border. Place-names also suggest a series of camps or fort sites along the route. The hypothesis is supported by the context of a find of a coin of Augustus and by the probable remains of a camp rampart on Werneth Low at the entrance to Longdendale. It is proposed that the road was constructed for the pacification of Brigantia and afterwards was of little importance other than as a boundary which gave rise to the ‘lyme’ place-name elements found along the south-west Pennine edge.     

The Potential Relationship Between Archaeological Artifact Exposure and Surface Geomorphic Processes: Northeastern Peloponnese,Greece

Complex interactions between topography, near-surface geology, active tectonics, climate, and human activity shape a landscape, conditioning archaeological deposits and making sediment deposits from surface erosion important archives. There is a potential relationship between the intensity of geomorphic processes and surface artifact distribution. This study assesses the potential relationship between soil erosion by water and the spatial distribution of archaeological surface artifacts in the Inachos River watershed, Greece. The mountainous, semi-arid Mediterranean region is particularly vulnerable to soil loss. Soil erosion is quantified by applying the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation in a GIS framework. Estimates of soil loss vary spatially compared to surface artifact finds of the pedestrian survey of the Western Argolid Regional Project. A statistically significant relationship is identified between surface erosion rates and artifact density. Preferential topography for occupation suggests this is an associative rather than causative relationship. Knowledgeable interpretation of artifact distribution enables accurate reconstruction of human settlement history.