Characterization of Glass,Shell, and Fishbone Beads on Ibo Island (Northern Mozambique) in the Context of the Indian Ocean Trade

African Archaeological Review - A set of beads made of glass, gastropod mollusk shell, and fishbone from a Swahili occupation level on Ibo Island (northern Mozambique) is dated to the eleventh and...     

Exploring the context and elements of local environmental stewardship: An embedded case study of the Niagara Region,Canada

Environmental stewardship—a concept that describes the relationships between humans and the environment—is gaining increased attention as an approach that can address planetary sustainability issues. In-depth empirical investigations of local environmental stewardship are needed to understand how social-ecological context influences stewardship, as well as the arrangement of conceptual elements in applied settings. This study addresses these needs by conducting an in-depth exploration of environmental stewardship in the Niagara Region of Canada. A single embedded case study design is employed, with environmental stewardship initiatives constituting the individual units of analysis with the case. Analysis of the spatial arrangement of a total of 89 initiatives indicated that initiatives tended to cluster closer to the Niagara River and in more populous municipalities. The significance of collaboration, tensions between the environment and economic development, and concerns about political impacts emerged as themes across contextual factors. The configuration of stewardship elements reveals interesting discrepancies between initiatives and previous stewardship research focused on larger scales, individuals, and organizations. Further analysis is encouraged to illuminate environmental stewardship in other settings as well as advance relational understanding of conceptual elements.     

Regulatory Alchemy: How the Water Cycle Becomes Capital in the California Desert

A proposed project will take water from an aquifer in the California desert to the coast. Lacking final approvals more than 30 years after it started, the project remains a plan despite sizeable opposition. What is its secret? In this paper, I examine the imaginaries of the underground aquifer underneath the lands of Cadiz Inc, the project proponent. While local theories insist the company is at the centre of a Chinatown conspiracy, I argue that the company stays alive through regulatory alchemy, a term that reveals the magic at the heart of scientific and regulatory approval processes. I examine narratives of the aquifer in environmental compliance and financial reporting in order to reveal how regulatory processes become the conditions of profit-making, building on debates in critical legal geography and political ecology.     

The Essential Body: Mesopotamian Conceptions of the Gendered Body

Linguistic, art historical, hermeneutic, gender and intercultural analyses clarify body and gender concepts in Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, literature and visual arts. The body was a fundamental point of reference in ancient Mesopotamia, metaphor for the total self, royal ideology, cities, humanity and deities. Humanity was created without gender; sex, gender and social status were subsequently inscribed on the body. Gender taxonomy tolerated ambiguity beyond the ‘normative’ masculine/feminine. Body and mind were an inseparable unity and denoted by the same Sumerian word. Mind/body and male/female dichotomy were unknown.     

THE WELFARE ASPECTS OF SPATIAL PRICING POLICIES RECONSIDERED FOR A MONOPOLY CASE*

ABSTRACT. We reexamine the price structures and their welfare implications in three pricing regimes (mill, uniform and discriminatory) for a monopoly. We show that spatial price discrimination could provide the highest social welfare and, when consumers tastes are heterogeneous enough, also the highest consumer surplus. The superiority of spatial price discrimination is partially due to the larger output produced and partially due to differential treatment for consumers with heterogeneous tastes.