Obtaining Black Carbon—A Simple Method for the Safe Removal of Mineral Components from Soils and Archaeological Layers

In this study, we present a novel, safe method for how to remove inorganic components from soil samples studied for archaeological purposes, in order to improve studies of the distribution of black carbon in the sedimentary record. As the depositional history of this material depends on the interaction between humans and the natural environment, this method can be widely used in archaeology, landscape archaeology, palaeoecology, environmental geology and sedimentology. Our method does not require the use of dangerous hydrofluoric acid, which is commonly used for the removal of silicon oxide from such samples; therefore, this procedure allows even less chemically trained scientists to analyse soil samples with an increased level of work safety.     

Different repetitions: Anthropological engagements with figures of return,recurrence and redundancy

ABSTRACT

It is a central contention of this special issue that an anthropological engagement with repetition has the capacity to open up fertile fields of comparative ethnographic and historical work. In this introduction, we link our approach to past anthropological and philosophical works, connecting for instance to discussions of historiography, rhythm, scale, and the characterization of experience. We move on to consider the present and future uses of the concept of repetition, providing five ‘dimensions’ that we consider helpful in exploring its nuances as well as its potentialities. These dimensions we designate as matters of production, medium, anticipation, consequence and scale. Each might be recognized within the discourse of informants or ethnographers or both. What they are intended to do is to provide an operational framework through which to anatomize processes of repetition as observable in whichever ‘field’ we are investigating.     

Surviving the Holocaust: Emil Utitz’s ‘As-If Technique’

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to present the work of Emil Utitz, the Czech-German Jewish philosopher and psychologist, who was also a survivor of Theresienstadt. The power of the imagination and its intensification by the daily reality of the concentration camp was central to Utitz’s conception of life, which reveals the influence of the then popular ideas of Hans Vaihinger, and especially his theory of the importance of the human ability to act as though something was true. More specifically, the article reconstructs and contextualizes Utitz’s thought along two axes: the Kantian philosophical tradition, and Viktor Frankl’s and Hans Günther Adler’s conceptions of the Holocaust experience.     

Immigration Geopolitics Beyond the Mexico–US Border

Despite the centrality of Mexico–US border policing to pre‐ and post‐9/11 US immigration geopolitics, perhaps the most significant yet largely ignored immigration‐related fallout of the so‐called war on terrorism has been the extension of interior immigration policing practices away from the southwest border. As I outline in this paper, these interior spaces of immigration geopolitics—nominally said to be about fighting terrorism, but in practice concerned with undocumented labor migration across the Mexico–US border—have not emerged accidentally. Rather, the recent criminalization of immigration law, the sequestering of immigration enforcement from court oversight and the enrollment of proxy immigration officers at sub‐state scales have been actively pursued so as to make interior enforcement newly central to US immigration geopolitics. I argue here that these embryonic spaces of localized immigration geopolitics shed new light on the spatiality of US immigration governance, which has typically been thought of by geographers as active predominantly at the territorial margins of the state. I conclude the paper with some thoughts as to how geographers might rethink the what and where of contemporary US immigration geopolitics.     

From excess to encompassment: Repetition,recantation, and the trashing of time in Swedish Christianities

ABSTRACT

I explore the conversion of a Swedish Pentecostal Prosperity preacher to the Roman Catholic Church in order to examine questions of analytical perspective, temporal scale, and ethical discernment in the operation of religiously charged forms of repetition. The paper juxtaposes neo-Pentecostal with Roman Catholic understandings of temporality through tracing the ideological movements of Pastor Ulf Ekman over the past three decades, summarizing these understandings as based around tropes of ‘excess’ and ‘encompassment’ respectively. In exploring repetition as both theoretical category and ethnographic object of observation, I distinguish between actively marked repetition and the merely repetitious, while also drawing distinctions between continuity and the iterative, oscillatory character of repetitive actions.     

Ammonoids and the correlation of the Lower Carboniferous rocks of eastern Australia

The occurrence of ammonoids in the Lower Carboniferous rocks of eastern Australia is reviewed within a biostratigraphic framework provided by the brachiopod zones that have been summarized most recently by Jones & Roberts (1976). Ammonoid abundance is low at all stratigraphic levels. Nowhere are more than 20 specimens known at a locality, and usually there are only one or two. The group is too sparse to be used for local or regional correlation, and its main value is for the intercontinental correlation of a number of well separated horizons. The rocks dated range in age from middle Tournaisian (Tn_2a) to late Visean V_3c). Some relatively minor differences between ammonoid and conodont ages remain to be resolved. The biogeography is briefly discussed.

The type specimens of all available previously described species have been examined and where necessary they are re-illustrated. New species described are Irinoceras tuba, Muensteroceras jenkinsi, M. delepinei, M. merlewoodense, Beyrichoceras mackellari, B. bootibootiense, Nomismoceras pseudocyclus, Goniatites mundubberensis, G. cuniculus, Protocanites careyi, and Cantabricanites jelli. Several species that are probably new are described under open nomenclature.