Grassroot responses to the Tohoku earthquake of 11 March 2011: Overcoming the dichotomy between victim and helper (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article examines the response of a large Buddhist organization, Soka Gakkai, to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. While this response was significant, it has not been reported in Japanese national news. An important question that is emerging for development agencies and academics as they look back over the response to the crisis, is how people possibly survived for the first few days and months, given that government aid did not reach some people for up to two months. This article highlights one significant early response and points to the problem of how to overcome the victim/helper dualism which is rooted in much failing NGO aid and development projects.     

Claus Bjørn and Carsten Due-Nielsen. Fra Helstat Til Nationalstat 1814-1914. Edited by C. Due-Nielsen,O. Feldbæk and N. Petersen. Vol. 3, Dansk Udenrigspolitiks Historie. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal Leksikon, 2003). 536 pp. ISBN 87-7789-091-4

This article focuses on the bishops in the Church of Sweden as an elite group in society. Using the conceptual apparatus of Pierre Bourdieu, including field, capital and habitus, the article gives a brief background to and describes the social characteristics of this elite group during the first half of the 20th century. It describes the double position of the Bishops as officials both of the state and the Church. In the 20th century, the church lost influence in society and as a consequence so did the Bishops. A discussion is held in the article how the Bishops acted to maintain and legitimate their position as an elite, for example by forming an informal network.     

Defending the Concept of Time in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

Due to the scarcity of reflection on time as an independent subject in the Hebrew Bible, there has been a scholarly tendency to consider biblical time conception more limited than our own_perhaps even nonexistent. This article confronts the scholarly skepticism regarding the ability of the biblical authors to think about time, defending the presence of time conceptualization in the Hebrew Bible. In the article I discuss central research contributions to the subject of biblical time, in particular Sacha Stern’s thesis that the concept of time is entirely absent from the Hebrew Bible and from ancient Judaism more widely. I explore linguistic and anthropological assumptions which underpin large parts of the discussion on time within biblical studies, arguing that one cannot assume on the basis of either that the biblical authors lacked a concept of time. Finally, I suggest that the ability of the biblical writers to coordinate unrelated processes according to a temporal axis is a strong argument in favour of their awareness of time.     

GEOGRAPHICAL MOBILITY OF DANISH DUAL‐EARNER COUPLES—THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHANGE OF JOB AND CHANGE OF RESIDENCE*

ABSTRACT We analyze the relationship between geographical residence and job mobility for Danish dual‐earner couples. We estimate the probability of moving residence and changing job, taking the interdependence between the events into account. The results point to the importance of addressing the interrelationship between residence and jobs. Furthermore, the change of residence matter more than change of job and women respond relatively more to changes in their husbands’ job region. The findings imply that mobility promoting initiatives must focus on families rather than individuals and recognize that for most families the choice of residence location dominates the choice of job location.     

Ship Finds and Their Management as Actor Network

Ship finds in Norwegian waters that are more than 100?years old came under the jurisdiction of the Cultural Heritage Management (CHM) in 1963, when section?12a of the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Act was implemented. As a consequence, a functional division between land and sea was created where management objects receive different values depending on whether or not they belong to a ship. The objective of this paper is to review Norwegian CHM underwater policy, and discuss the creation of a new management object and its borders with the introduction of a section on ship finds specifically focusing on Actor Network Theory. It is argued that the understanding of the ship find and its belongings can not be understood as something based on inherent qualities to the management object. Instead this paper proposes to comprehend the ship find as a phenomenon held together within a heterogeneous network.