A technological crossroads: Exploring diversity in the pressure blade technology of Mesolithic Latvia

A long‐standing debate in archaeology concerns the sources of technological diversification among prehistoric hunter‐gatherers. This includes the study of the emergence and spread of pressure blade technology in Northern Europe during the Early Holocene. Until now, there has been little technological study of lithic collections from the East Baltic region, and our knowledge of the development and spread of this technology in the area is inadequate. This article presents for the first time a technological analysis of lithic assemblages from seven Early and Middle Mesolithic sites in the territory of present‐day Latvia, offering new possibilities for discussing pressure blade technology and research objectives connected with it. Furthermore, variation in elements of this technology is explored in relation to raw‐material characteristics through experimental flint knapping. Finally, the factors influencing diversity in craft traditions, as well as large‐scale communication and shifting spheres of interaction within Northern Europe during the Mesolithic, are discussed.     

Policy Analysis Postmodernized

This paper examines the implications of postmodern deconstructive insights for the practice and teaching of policy analysis. A review of recent literature highlights the clashes between rational/positivist and rhetorical/postpositivist perspectives, and concludes that elitist technocratic complexity too often excludes the public from meaningful policy deliberation. The paper closes with concrete recommendations for the academic preparation of more democratic, more rhetorically sophisticated “postmodern” policy analysts.     

Sexual relationships and working lives of free Afro-Caribbean women

The article explores how the sexual relationships and working lives of free Afro-Caribbean women in the town of Christiansted, St. Croix, the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, were affected by discourses of race and gender during the period c. 1780–1820. To further the understanding of the conditions of the free Afro-Caribbean women in Christiansted, the article relates to the situation in other Caribbean colonies, especially the British West Indies, based on the assumption that it was the same discourses of race and gender that swept through all the Caribbean slave societies. I n its approach, the article is inspired by concepts of race and gender in postcolonial studies.

The investigation shows the prevalence in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies of discourses of Afro-Caribbean women as, on the one hand, unwomanly and physically strong and, on the other hand, promiscuous and of easy virtue. On this basis, the article argues that the interplay between these gendered racial discourses and the social practices of the free Afro-Caribbean women were in fact far more complex than previous international research has suggested. In the sexual and work relations of daily life, discourses were interpreted more fluently, and a number of competing conditions and ideas challenged or worked against the idea of Afro-Caribbean racial inferiority. Among these were, for instance, the women’s social position and European ideas of work appropriate for women.     

Language as apparatus: entanglements of language,culture and territory and the invention of nation and ethnicity

Postcolonial linguistics has shown that African languages emerged from a complex figuration of missionary, scientific and colonial practices. The article interprets this emergence as the result of an existential onto-epistemological dislocation stabilised through the hegemonic project of colonialism. It rests on an apparatus of modernity that separated nature and culture/society and stabilised this new order with a particular notion of language as an autonomous object. In the nineteenth century, language enters a conjunction of territory and culture, which played out in Europe in the terms of a nationalist, hegemonic trajectory and in Africa as the fractionation of ethnic/linguistic groups and the pervasive linguo-ethnification of contemporary societies. Thus, language can be understood to be an apparatus productive of nationalism as well as ethnicity. In an attempt to demonstrate the plausibility of this conceptualisation, I show how today these trajectories have effects in that Afrikaans in South Africa as ethnified language loses and Swahili in Tanzania as national language gains ground at the respective universities. Both languages compete with global academic English, which despite its colonial heritage appears as a deterritorialised, culturally neutral language.     

Notas sobre el quinto centenario en Francia

1492. Un monde nouveau? Por BARTOLOME Y LUCILE BENNASSAR. Paris: Perrin, 1991. Pp. 276.

1492. “L'année admirable”. Por BERNARD VINCENT. Paris: Aubier, 1991. Pp. 228.

L'Amérique de la conquête peinte par les Indiens du Mexique. Por SERGE GRUZINSKI. Paris: UNESCO/Flammarion, 1991. Pp. 240     

AGA,AMIO AND LOTO: PERSPECTIVES ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE SELF IN SAMOA

The article concerns the Shore/Freeman controversy about the terms aga and amio. Shore sees aga as the Samoan category for ‘culture’ and amio as the category for ‘nature’ in the Hobbesian sense. Freeman says that Shore has his terms backwards. I argue that Freeman is correct in his assertion that aga cannot be equated with ‘culture‘. However, Freeman wrongly defines aga as innate essence. In fact aga is the term for identity, which in Samoa is external and social. Amio is best understood as a derivative of that part of the self which Samoans call the loto and which we call subjectivity.     

The campaigns and elections of congresswomen Edith Green and Julia Butler Hansen

The Third Congressional Districts of Oregon and Washington face each other across the Columbia River. It is not surprising that for more than a decade each district had been represented in Congress by the same representative or that they were both Democrats. Though Oregon's Third District is much more urban and compact than Washington's, they share some of the demographic and economic characteristics which are usually associated with Democratic constituencies outside of the South, namely, a relatively high proportion of persons employed in manufacturing or other heavily unionized occupations, who are relatively mobile, or of fairly recent ethnic stock. What is not so expected is that both incumbent Congressmen were Congresswomen — Edith Green of Oregon and Julia Butler Hansen of Washington. Mrs Green and Mrs Hansen were chosen as the specific subjects of this study because they had both demonstrated political longevity in retaining Congressional office throughout see‐sawing political changes in party domination in both their states and the national administration. They were both longstanding members of the Democratic Party. They were both from the Pacific Northwest, giving them common regional interests, and indeed, while from different states, their districts are continuous with the Columbia River as a common boundary adding specific common district interests. Each had attained what are generally recognized as powerful positions within the structure of the Congress as chairpersons of important subcommittees: Mrs Green as Chairman of the Special Subcommittee on Education of the House Committee on Education and Labor; Mrs Hansen as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Appropriations for the Interior and Related Agencies of the House Appropriations Committee. And finally, both women were in their early sixties.     

Political Cleaners: Women as the New Anti‐Corruption Force?

There is currently a myth in the making: that women are less corrupt than men. Recently some aid donors have cited statistical evidence that countries with larger numbers of women in politics and in the workforce have lower levels of corruption. That this finding can be explained by the fact that there are more women in politics and the workforce in liberal democracies that are anyway less corrupt than poorer less liberal regimes does not detract from the eagerness with which some development actors are seizing upon the potential role women might play in fighting corruption. The myth of women's incorruptibility is not, of course, new. It is grounded in essentialist notions of women's higher moral nature and an assumed propensity to bring this to bear on public life, and particularly on the conduct of politics. After demonstrating that some of the recent studies about gender and corruption record perceptions about propensities to engage in corrupt behaviour, this contribution suggests rather that the gendered nature of access to politics and public life shapes opportunities for corruption. In addition, corruption can be experienced differently by women and men, which has implications for anti‐corruption strategies. A gendered analysis of corruption is in fact a useful entry‐point to the examination of the gendered nature of accountability failures, and of gender‐specific gaps in current attempts to promote good governance.