Archaeometallurgical Investigations in Nakhchivan,Azerbaijan: What Does the Evidence from Late Chalcolithic Ovçular Tepesi Tell Us about the Beginning of Extractive Metallurgy?

The Late Chalcolithic (4400–3950 b.c.) occupation levels from Ovçular Tepesi have yielded a significant assemblage of copper objects and remains of copper production. Together with ore finds, two fragments of nozzle, crucible remains, and a number of small metal artifacts, this assemblage includes the unexpected discovery of three copper axes in an infant burial jar. These axes are the earliest examples of large copper tools known to date in southwestern Asia, whether it is in the Caucasus, Iran, or the Anatolian highlands. More importantly, the fact that these objects were locally produced suggests that significant metallurgical activities were being carried out at Ovçular as early as the second half of the 5th millennium b.c. After presenting the evidence from Ovçular Tepesi, this paper will proceed to a reassessment of the available archaeological and geochemical data concerning the emergence of extractive metallurgy in the southern Caucasus.     

Contentious Realities: Politics of Creating an Image Archive with the Negev Bedouin in Southern Israel

This paper discusses the politics of creating an image archive amidst local Bedouin historicity in Southern Israel. To do so, it summarizes an archival initiative conducted during my fieldwork in Rāha?, Israel between 2011 and 2013, which broadly examined the presence and values of images in their society. I suggest that members compete over historical resources in attempts to augment limited cultural capital in the Negev, making efforts to collect and exhibit ‘shared’ histories contentious. This is particularly the case when local societies consider archival images rare artefacts and thus objects to be owned and protected. This paper concludes that control over archives and image objects, and the past, present, and future ideals to which they are used, is far from uniform amongst peripheral peoples in the Middle East. Visual evidence and the histories and presents it serves are indelibly localized within the prevailing status negotiations and current spatial divisions between Bedouin members in the Negev.     

Déni,connaissance, responsabilité: le régime stalinien et la grande famine ukrainienne de 1932–3

The great 1932–3 famine in Ukraine and Kuban, considered a major disaster in twentieth-century European history, is starting to be recognised as the opening act of a terrible cycle of violence against the populations of a vast area in the heart of Europe, perpetrated by the two great totalitarian regimes that were Nazism and Stalinism. As James Mace, the pioneer in studying this famine, has written, the Ukrainian famine was a ‘man-made famine’. It was the consequence of an extreme political violence – the forced collectivisation of rural areas. The Stalinist regime exhibited a total indifference to human suffering. Famine was just ‘collateral damage’ of modernisation introduced by collectivisation. Beyond the total denial of famine by Stalinist authorities, this article raises the double question of its knowledge and its responsibility, using new sources. How far can the chain of decision-making that led to the famine and its aggravation be reconstructed? What did the executives of the Party know about what was happening in starving rural areas? Which argumentation and which explanatory strategy were they developing in their correspondence to deal with the reality they were denying?     

State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin

Kopytoff's model of the African frontier has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, politics, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre‐colonial Africa. This interpretative framework applies well to central Benin (Ouessè). Over the long term, mobility has been a structural feature of the regional social history, from pre‐colonial times onwards. Movements of people, resources, norms and values have been crucial in the production and reproduction of the social and political order. The colonial intrusion and its post‐colonial avatars gave way to renewed relations between mobility and locality, in particular in the form of a complex articulation between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out‐ and in‐migrations. This article argues that the political frontier metaphor provides a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making, as the changing outcome of organizing practices taking place inside and outside state and non‐state organizations and arenas. Governmentality in post‐colonial central Benin thus results from the complex interplay of mobility, control over resources and state‐led forms of ‘villagization’.     

The making of a mushroom people: Toward a moral anthropology of psychedelics beyond hype and anti-hype

As regulatory agencies have put psychedelics on an expedited path to market approval, North Americans and Europeans might turn away from their repression and join the subset of cultures that have institutionalized the use of hallucinogenic drugs. What is the place of anthropology in this psychedelic renaissance? More specifically, how should anthropology relate to the cycles of hype and anti-hype, which have been identified as a recurrent pattern in the careers of new drugs as psychedelics have entered a second round of cultural enthusiasm and critique? This article suggests extending ethnographic studies of the psychedelic renaissance from medical to moral anthropology. The case of psychedelics is especially interesting for moral anthropology because these drugs frequently induce mystical-type experiences, which can play an ethically irritating role as mysticism challenges a strict moral order enforced through disciplinary practices. What cultural consequences would the spread of mystical experiences have for contemporary European and North American societies?     

试析萧梁官班制度下的诸县分等

分析萧梁一代县官选任和调动案例可知,“县制七班”“大县六班”是当时客观存在的制度。但在制度的实际运行过程中,许多县官都会出现超班用人,即任职者官资超过县官对应内职班次的现象。正史所见高班大县全部位于扬、南徐二州境内,且主要隶属南朝国家腹心地区的丹阳、吴、吴兴、会稽等郡,这与史书记事的偏向性不无关系,但同时也是上述地区政治地理条件的直观反映。影响县官班次的最主要因素是人口,结合其他制度推测,等第最高的六班大县有可能是以领民满五千户为定等标准。探索县官班次,也可增进对当时人口地理的认知。     

Les lois de la nature à l'âge classique la question terminologique

Four propositions relative to the laws of nature in the classical period must be noted. 1. Certain regularities in phenomena had been discovered. 2. A concept of law had emerged. 3. Classical science is characterized by the introduction of the notion of the legality of nature. 4. New uses of the word «law» had appeared in scientific texts. This article is devoted to the analysis of only this last proposition, that is to say to a terminological problem. First we will describe the semantic uses of the word «law» that may have contributed to the constitution of its classical meaning: its specific usage, disciplinary usage, usage in physics, in mathematics, in metaphysics. Second we will analyze the various moments of the diffusion of the word in the sciences in the xvii^th century. The general thesis defended in the end is that if the term «law» had indeed been used in science with no reference to a law-giving God prior to the xvii^th century, only this reference, that is, the coming together of its physical and its metaphysical usage, allowed its generalization in the period between the xvii^th and xviii^th centuries.     

An Evaluation of Endogenous Sustainable Development Planning for the Rural–Urban Environment in Gran Canaria

Urban developments can transform adjacent rural areas by degrading their natural resource base and environmental values. In this paper we provide evidence on the implementation of an endogenous sustainable development plan for the rural–urban environment in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The objective was the generation of endogenous development in the rural areas by implicating the local population in developing activities in line with natural values and the recuperation of traditional cultures. At the same time, urban societies were expected to benefit from the preservation and availability of these rural environments. The plan was implemented in a large rural valley located between adjacent urban areas. The valley represents an opportunity for urban dwellers to benefit from a large rural park in the urban environment for leisure and cultural activities. The overall accomplishment of the plan was evaluated and contrasted with the benefits to the urban population, which were also measured with a discrete choice experiment. The results highlight that the principal objectives failed because of the lack of political determination to promote the participatory channels that would lead to the preservation of natural resources in a dynamic process of social change.