Being Toured While Digging Tourism: Excavating the Familiar at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition

Chicago’s Jackson Park witnessed intense and sustained tourism during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Recent archaeological survey and excavation produced information about the tourist experience of the Fair in a somewhat familiar artifactural form. The dig drew local tourists whose appetites for the Exposition were whetted by a bestselling book. At the heart of these multiple touristic consumptions in, and of, Jackson Park lies the central issue—the way that tourists create themselves as modern subjects through the practice of tourism and how this process can be both helped and hindered by the presence of familiar objects.     

The Poverty Trap: Or,Why Poverty is Not About the Individual

Poverty is often thought of as an inevitable social condition, and the blame for any shortcomings in governmental welfare policies is frequently placed upon the failings of individuals, markets, and demography. By exploring the influence of neoliberal politics on archaeologies of slum-life this article makes the case that less emphasis should be placed upon the perceived failings of individuals and more effort should be placed on recovering the complex social networks which sustained community-life within Hungate and other so-called urban slums.     

Pragmatisme Logique et Probabilisme Radical dans la Philosophie Italienne du XXe Siècle

This article sketches the principal characteristics of a philosophical trend which has met with some resistance despite the recognized importance of its representatives. This text illustrates the ideas at the foundation of the logical and methodological pragmatism of Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni. These are ideas which should have surfaced in the international debate about the principle of verification and the concept of analyticity. In addition, the links between these ideas and the development of the subjective conception of probability in the work of Bruno de Finetti are explored.     

Modeling the Impact of Technological Innovation on Environmental Efficiency: A Spatial Panel Data Approach

Technological progress has widely been acknowledged as a key driver in the achievement of environmental sustainability, and a new concern has recently arisen for assessing the role of differences in regional innovation performances with respect to the pursuit of pollution targets. We investigate the impact of innovative activities on environmental efficiency at the regional level, adopting a spatial panel data approach to account for dependence between geographical observations and to get deeper insights into spatial knowledge spillovers arising from agglomeration economies. The spatial panel analysis covers 103 Italian provinces (equivalent to NUTS3 regions) on four major air pollutants (i.e., CO₂, CH₄, NMVOC, CO) over the 1995–2010 period. Our findings show that the state of local technology development, proxied by patents, has a positive impact on GDP emission efficiency and that its magnitude is higher for more localized pollutants as a result of larger spillover effects. Finally, to analyze the Italian North-South dualism of emission levels of pollutants, we offer a spillover effect study to emphasize the remarkable difference among effects in the territory. This calls for closer attention to the local relevance of the pollution damage when environmental impact of innovation strategies is to be evaluated.     

Design Space and Cultural Transmission: Case Studies from Paleoindian Eastern North America

Tool design is a cultural trait—a term long used in anthropology as a unit of transmittable information that encodes particular behavioral characteristics of individuals or groups. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of a cultural repertoire through processes such as recombination, loss, or partial alteration. Artifacts and other components of the archaeological record serve as proxies for studying the transmission (and modification) of cultural traits, provided there is analytical clarity in defining and measuring whatever it is that is being transmitted. Our interest here is in tool design, and we illustrate how to create analytical units that allow us to map tool-design space and to begin to understand how that space was used at different points in time. We first introduce the concept of fitness landscape and impose a model of cultural learning over it, then turn to four methods that are useful for the analysis of design space: paradigmatic classification, phylogenetic analysis, distance graphs, and geometric morphometrics. Each method builds on the others in logical fashion, which allows creation of testable hypotheses concerning cultural transmission and the evolutionary processes that shape it, including invention (mutation), selection, and drift. For examples, we turn to several case studies that focus on Early Paleoindian–period projectile points from eastern North America, the earliest widespread and currently recognizable remains of hunter–gatherers in late Pleistocene North America.     

Agonisme et antagonisme

This essay considers dissensus as the starting point for the construction of a common epistemic space rather than as the acknowledgement of an irreducible disagreement. In the argumentative confrontation and disagreements, we do not want to identify a process which might lead to agreement through rational debate. The aim of this essay is rather to understand how dissensus leads to the constitution of plural communities. It discusses a certain number of texts of political philosophy (Habermas, Mouffe, etc.), where the notion of agreement is crucial to an analysis of argumentative confrontations. This essay uses the hypothesis to analyse the circulation of Leibniz’s dynamics in his correspondence with De Volder. This perspective shows eventually that dissensus is not an obstacle but the basis on which multiple circulations of theories are possible.