Molding maize: the shaping of a crop diversity landscape in the western highlands of Guatemala

Today's domesticated plants not only embody past human–nature interactions, but also reflect social history. Human seed exchange, replacement and loss are important forces in shaping crop diversity. This essay explores regional history in relation to the shaping of maize diversity in the western highlands of Guatemala. This is an area of exceptional maize heterogeneity and a peripheral part of the region where maize was domesticated. Maize diversity seems to have developed through geographic isolation in networks of seed exchange that were generally very local in scope. However, recent studies on Mexican maize suggest otherwise. However, few studies have examined crop diversity or seed exchange from a historical perspective. A closer examination of regional history suggests which processes might be important for shaping the present geographical distribution of maize diversity. Seeds were occasionally transported over longer distances. As a consequence, maize diversity is geographically not characterised by sharp differences between farming communities; the main differences are to be found in regional occurrences. This challenges antimodern ideas of closed, local native ecologies. Consequently, the conservation of maize genetic resources is a challenge, but not entirely contradictory with its transforming socio-economic context.     

Children's involvement in policy formation

Involving children in policy is now popular, a recent UK example being the consultation on Every Child Matters. This can be viewed as progress in increasing children's status as stakeholders in policy formation. However, questions remain about the reality of children's engagement and the validity of the methods used to gather, analyse and present their views. We need to protect children from exploitative or tokenistic processes and differentiate between gathering children's views and involving them as partners in policy formation. The former requires greater rigour of methodology. The latter requires moving from short term policy development to a longer term shared engagement enabling powerful adults and children to think collaboratively.     

Levinas's beginnings: ethics,politics, and origins

It is commonplace in philosophy, political theory, and theology to speak of the other and the problem of the identity of the West. No one has done as much to foreground the language of the other in recent years as Emmanuel Levinas, whose works have sparked a renewed interest in ethics across the humanities. Moreover, few have advanced as forceful a critique of European otherness, not only its exclusivity (whereby the other is marginalized) but also its hegemony (whereby the other is absorbed). I explore Levinas's critique of Western ethical thought in order to try to pinpoint what exactly he offers to post‐Hegelian reflection on the other, focusing on his insistence that equality must be grounded in the asymmetry of ethics. The question is: does this take one further than Europe, modernity, the West? If so, where is one thereby going? If not, what is novel or important in these claims?     

The rise and demise of the Irish and Scottish computer hardware industry

This paper examines the dynamics of the computer hardware industry in Ireland and Scotland in a global context, from its inception in the late 1950s to the present. It provides a detailed account of plant openings and closures in both the system assembly and the component manufacturing segment. It describes the development of the computer hardware industry from mainframe assembly, through minicomputer assembly to microcomputer assembly and the shift of system assembly and component production activity to the Far East and Eastern Europe since the mid-1990s. The developments are analysed in terms of Schoenberger's (1997) model of concentrated deconcentration in the context of time-based-competition. It is shown that the model, with substantial qualification, fits the developments since the 1980s.     

Is there a Rosenberg school?

Since his first book The Cholera Years appeared in 1962, Charles Rosenberg has had an enormous influence on the history of medicine. Not the least of that influence has been exercised through his role as a graduate teacher, advisor, and mentor. This article compares Rosenberg's work with that of his students, to see if there is such a historiographic identity as the "Rosenberg School." The authors, two Rosenberg students from different generations, conclude that there is not such a school, at least in the classic sense of the term. Yet they argue that certain common assumptions, or "Rosenberg Rules," have been passed on from Rosenberg to the other scholars he has influenced. They also discuss the challenges they have encountered in applying Charles's conceptual framework, worked out primarily in pre-1920 terms, to the late twentieth-century history of American medicine.     

How God Disappeared from Europe: Visions of a United Europe from Erasmus to Kant

This article traces the development of European ideas of peace and unity from the time of Desiderius Erasmus to Immanuel Kant. The argument will be made that these ideas, which were initially strongly determined by Christian religious thinking, gradually changed, and from the seventeenth century onwards were put forward in more political and legal terms. Erasmus's way of reasoning about peace and war was still strongly influenced by his firm orientation on the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Emeric Crucé, a French writer, was of the opinion that all human beings in the end had God in common, and so had to live peacefully together. Duc de Sully was one of the first not to argue as a religious man but as a politician: a system of balance of power could bring international stability. According to the English Quaker William Penn and the French Abbé de Saint-Pierre only the acceptance of international rules of justice could produce everlasting peace. Immanuel Kant finally directed attention to the form of government and to the founding of a federation of free republics. So God seems to have disappeared from Europe?…?but with what consequences for today?     

‘Model Tribes’ and Iconic Conservationists? The Makuleke Restitution Case in Kruger National Park

This article investigates how the Makuleke community in Limpopo Province achieved iconic status in relation to land reform and community‐based conservation discourses in South Africa and beyond. It argues that the situation may be more complex than it first appears, and the ways in which the Makuleke story has been deployed by NGOs, activists, academics, conservationists, the state and business may be too simplistic. The authors discuss historical representations of the Makuleke ‘tribe’ against the backdrop of their experiences of living in the borderland Pafuri region of the Kruger National Park prior to their forced removal. After investigating the ways in which the chieftaincy, and its relation to communal land, has been strengthened by local mobilizations against threats from the neighbouring Mhinga Tribal Authority, the authors suggest that a central tension in the Makuleke area is the conflict between democratic principles governing the legal entity in control of the land (i.e., the Communal Property Association), and traditionalist patriarchal principles of the Tribal Authority. The article shows how these restitution‐linked processes became implicated in the establishment in 2002 of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. The authors also argue that the image of the Makuleke as a ‘model tribe’ is both a product of changing historical circumstances and a contributor to contemporary discourses on land restitution and conservation.