Confrontation and conciliation: the sami,the crown and the court in seventeenth-century swedish lapland1

This article aims to discover in what kind of legal cases conflicts may be traced between the Sami and representatives of the Crown, and in which situations conciliation is apparent; and it also answers the questions of how and why this happened. It is evident, from the court rolls from the court district of Jukkasjärvi (one of the two northernmost lappmarker in Sweden at this time), that the Crown prosecuted the Sami for sexual offences and crimes against religion. This was due to the prevailing ideology of the seventeenth century, in which Lutheran Christianity prevailed, and because the court was the arena for a power discourse: there was a “right” way to live and behave. This came into conflict with Sami tradition. The Sami themselves pursued a desire and need for conciliation, which becomes apparent in cases of crimes such as murder, manslaughter and grand theft, but also in civil cases, e.g. inheritance. This was due to the fact that the population was quite small, bound together in different relations, and because large-scale conflicts were not beneficial to Sami communities. Even though the Crown Court was an arena of power, it was also used by the Sami for their own ends, and thus we can see an interactive Sami society, independent of the prevailing political Lutheran Christian ideology and its discourse.     

‘We are the new Jews!’ and ‘The Jewish Lobby’ – antisemitism and the construction of a national identity by the Austrian Freedom Party

In this article I will analyse the role of antisemitism for the construction of a national identity and an exclusive national in‐group in the discourse of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). The analysis will show that this discourse of the FPÖ, one of the most successful extreme right‐wing parties in Europe, utilises various forms of Holocaust inversion and victim perpetrator reversal in order to delegitimise political opponents. The analysis of these incidents and of the legitimising strategies used by the FPÖ when criticised involves discussing the increasing abstraction of the codes characteristic of latent antisemitism and forms of post‐Nazi antisemitism. I will focus on how the FPÖ's use of the term Holocaust and other terms referring to Nazi atrocities against the Jews corresponds to a universalisation of the term Holocaust in social constellations that are permeated by the culture industry.     

Evaluating socio-economic change in the Andes using oribatid mite abundances as indicators of domestic animal densities

Tracking social and economic change in Andean societies prior to the invasion of the Spanish has always been a difficult task, especially given that these cultures failed to develop any form of written record. Here we present a new method of reconstructing socio-economic shifts in a rural setting from the analysis of the frequency of oribatid mite remains present in a sedimentary lake sequence. Oribatid mites are soil-dwelling microarthropod detritivores, some of which inhabit areas of grassland pasture. One of the primary controls governing their abundance in such habitats is the level of animal dung present. We propose that past fluctuations in mite remains can be related to the density of domestic animals using the area of pasture and, by extension, may provide a proxy for broad-scale social and economic change through time. To test this hypothesis, we analysed a high-resolution (∼6 years) mite record from a sequence of well-dated sediments from Marcacocha, a climatically sensitive lake site located close to an important Inca trading route across the Andes. The timing and magnitude of mite fluctuations at Marcacocha since the 1530s show remarkable correspondence with a series of major, well-documented socio-economic shifts in the region relating to political and climatic pressures. This provided the confidence to extend the record back a further 700 years and reconstruct changes in domestic herbivore densities for a period of time that lacks historical documentation and thereby infer changes in human occupation of the basin. In particular, high mite abundances appear to correspond clearly with the rapid rise and fall of the Inca Empire (c. AD 1400–1532). We argue that small lake basins such as Marcacocha may be particularly suitable for obtaining continuous oribatid mite records and providing the possibility of reconstructing large herbivore abundances in the Andes and elsewhere.     

Harinarayana Bhatt (ed.), The Commentary of Vistubhatta on the Anargharāaghava of Murāri. Critical edition. Volume I: The Commentary of Visnubhatta. Volume II: The Anargharāghava of Murāri as Read by Visnubhatta,Notes, Appendices

Indo-Iranian Journal -