Sustainable development and climate change

In 1987, the authors of Our common future argued that unless the world embraced and operationalized sustainable development, it would risk being overwhelmed by a series of interlocking crises related to population growth, urbanization, poverty and environmental degradation. Since then, many authors have argued that the world is on a worst case scenario trajectory. Post‐Rio assessments of progress towards sustainable development have been largely negative. Since 1987, climate change has added a new stressor to the mix while shortening the time frame for transformation. In the context of accelerating change and converging stresses is the concept of sustainable development as compelling today as it was twenty years ago? Is it reasonable to believe there are means by which to reduce poverty and simultaneously protect the environment? This article briefly reviews the global challenges that first stimulated the concept of sustainable development and asks how contemporary processes of global change are affecting both these challenges and this approach to addressing them. While there are some grounds for optimism, several variables are identified that make sustainable development increasingly difficult to design and implement. The article concludes with an evaluation of how these difficulties might be overcome, and why it is essential that we try.     

Social conflict and the global Cold War

This article offers a critical assessment of Fred Halliday's theorization of the Cold War and, in particular, his attempt to offer a more global perspective on it through a greater focus on the role of developments emanating from the Third World as constitutive of the Cold War. The author argues that although Halliday's theorization of the Cold War as ‘inter‐systemic conflict’ is a major advance in our understanding of the Cold War—through the attention it pays to the causal linkages between capitalist development and imperialism, revolutionary transformations and superpower geopolitical confrontations—it fails, ultimately, to fulfil its potential as a theory of global Cold War. Halliday's temporalization of the Cold War and his insistence on the autonomy of the superpower arms race and strategic competition end up detaching developments in the Third World from the axis of superpower conflict and, consequently, suggests a residual Eurocentrism within his theory. The article begins by contextualizing the wider theorization of the Cold War and the (absence) place of the Third World in it. It then proceeds to assess critically Halliday's conceptualization of the Third World in the Cold War. The final section outlines an alternative theoretical framework for a theory of global Cold War that builds on elements of inter‐systemic conflict focused on how geopolitical confrontations involving the superpowers derived from the revolutionary consequences of uneven capitalist development.     

Rethinking the Anthropology of Religious Change: New Perspectives on Revitalization and Conversion Movements

This article reviews the history of anthropological engagements with religious change. Anthony Wallace made one of the most important contributions to this work by developing the first comprehensive model of revitalization movements. In recent years, contributions to the field have burgeoned in response to a renewed anthropological interest in globalization and transnational religious and social forms. Wallace's work has an ongoing relevance for much of this contemporary writing, in that many of the “new” theorists share many of the concerns that he first explored. However, they differ in their conceptualization of the processes and political contexts of change.     

The Politics of Knowledge: Julian Steward,Leslie White,Melville Herskovits,and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Biographies of four important figures in the history of anthropology—Julian Steward, Leslie White, Melville Herskovits, and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza—illustrate that current “public anthropology” has deep historic roots and that anthropology, even subfields that involve the basic sciences, like genetics, are shaped by personal and political experience as much as by intellect. All the biographical subjects discussed here had first-hand experience with racism, fascism, and bigotry, whether in their home or public lives, and resisted those forms of hegemony by fashioning anthropological theories to explain and appreciate human diversity.     

“Tooting One's Horn” and Lauding One's Fellow in the Construction of a History of Anthropological Theory

The notion of lobbying for a place in the history of anthropological theory is used to frame the importance of the autobiography, collected works, Festschrift essays, and biography reviewed here. Ranging from bottom-up historicism, behavioral paleoanthropology, and French structural Marxism to historical particularism, the books by or about Stocking, Freeman, Godelier, and Mead emphasize the contributions of each while staking out a new or extended intellectual territory or status in the fluid (re)writing of the theoretical history of the discipline.     

THE CULTURAL BIOGRAPHY OF A PHOENICIAN MUSHROOM-LIPPED JUG

Summary.   This paper is the biography of a single piece of pottery found in a tomb in Sardinia. The form is one that is common in Levantine sites in the Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age, but this single vessel, its history, context, and form, allows a greater story to be told: it points to a second wave of Levantine exploration and colonization – probably Tyrian – that built upon a Euboean–northern Phoenician initial phase in the eighth century BC.