The New Anthropology of Children,Play, and Games

Ray C. Rist. The Invisible Children: School Integration in American Society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978. 278 pp.     

Legal Liberalism,Statutory Despotism and State Power in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

This article is about the attempts by pre- and post-Union (1910) South African governments to create effective sedition laws, partly directly to curb specific political opponents, but also to license and focus state intelligence-gathering activities. Supreme Court judges' adherence to a rule-of-law formalism in a succession of court cases both hindered and encouraged these attempts. I am particularly interested in how the courts' imposition of more rigorous standards of performance in the production of evidence eventually exceeded the state's bureaucratic capability and undermined officials' confidence in the instrumental value of the rule of law, leading administrators to enact legislation to suppress their political adversaries without reference to the courts. The judges' stance in this history was not one of progressive or sudden capitulation to the lawmakers' and executive's will, as is sometimes argued, but notably consistent throughout.     

The Vernacular Gasoline Station: Examples from Illinois and Wisconsin

Vernacular gasoline stations, those designed jointly by contractor and owner, have not shared in the recent attention directed to gasoline stations as landscape features. Instead, that growing attention has been directed largely to stations designed by architects. This study, based on extensive field survey and intensive interviews, demonstrates that the remaining vernacular gasoline stations in Illinois and Wisconsin are manifestations of special places and time, rural and small town settings between 1925 and 1940. Vernacular designing was conditioned by an uncritical reference to an archetypal gasoline station form rather than to a profit-minded manipulation of imagery. As a result, the vernacular stations were integral parts of their environments and they remain prominent landscape features clearly communicating their origins. The vernacular emphasis on form recommends the future study of the gasoline station as an architectural ensemble.