ICBMs and the Environment: Assessments at a Base in Kazakhstan

A paper by two U.S. scientists explores the environmental/health hazard posed by abandoned missile launch sites and control facilities (dismantled by 1998 as part of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program) at an ICBM base in north-central Kazakhstan. It summarizes the findings of Environmental Site Assessment Reports based on a program of water and soil sampling at the sites, with a particular focus on testing for the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls, various toxic metals, and radiation. The study is important in that it documents levels of contamination (and describes abatement measures) at a former Soviet missile base. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H50, 110, Q20, 7 figures, 10 references.     

Business and British Decolonisation: Sir Ronald Prain,the Mining Industry and the Central African Federation

One of the most intractable challenges to emerge during British decolonisation was the need to reconcile the competing political aspirations of settler and African populations in Central Africa. During the 1950s Britain sought to construct a ‘multiracial’ Central African Federation, financed largely by Northern Rhodesia's copper industry. Of the two major mining groups involved, the Rhodesian Selection Trust, under the chairmanship of Sir Ronald Prain, arguably played an important and unusual role in the Federation's politics and eventual demise. Having supported the Federation at its inception, Prain quickly reassessed the Federal project and concluded that its expected benefits had failed to materialise, and that a new political orientation was necessary for Northern Rhodesia, his companies' host country. Whereas expatriate business interests were often ‘weak’ political actors during decolonisation, Prain, through pragmatic readjustment, evolved a forward-thinking strategy of accommodation to the rise of African nationalism, and to the corresponding eclipse of settler power. Adapting with unusual success to political change, he became actively involved in the political developments which led to Zambian independence in 1964.     

The Courtesan Tale: Female Musicians and Dancers in Mughal Historical Chronicles,c.1556–1748

There are many problems in trying to construct a history of female musicians and dancers in Mughal North India. Such women appear frequently in Mughal writings and apparently played an important role in elite society; there is clearly much we can learn from such sources about gender and class in the empire generally, as well as female performers more specifically. However, what evidence we have is written from the perspective of their male patrons and cast according to long‐standing rhetorical and cultural conventions concerning the fateful roles of music and love in historical events. In this article I examine how Mughal historical chronicles transform named female performers into stereotyped agents of the downfall of noblemen. Using the stories of several historical courtesans, I demonstrate how stock topoi of desire, enslavement, longing, rebellion, danger, fate and above all musical and erotic power, were used to shape all stories of courtesans into tragic cautionary tales. I aim to show that the ‘fictive’ elements of Mughal courtesan tales furthermore reveal important cultural truths about the role and meanings of music in Mughal male society.     

Books Received

This article is an analysis of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges's short text “Kafka and His Precursors.” Although appearing to be an example of literary criticism, Borges's essay is in fact the exploration of a certain logical paradox. It is a paradox that is to be found throughout Borges's work, with the result that “Kafka and His Precursors” can be read as a disguised literary manifesto on the part of Borges. I also explore the consequences of Borges's essay for thinking about questions of cultural transmission. I argue that Borges’ work lives on—like those literary, religious and philosophical traditions he admires—because its most profound subject is the relationship it has with the person who reads it.     

Fair Isle: half a century of change

ABSTRACT

Fair Isle is one of the best known of the Scottish islands having given its name to a shipping forecast region and to an internationally known style of knitting patterns and also because it has a world renowned bird observatory, and is the most remote of the inhabited British islands. Over the last five decades it has experienced major changes in its economic and social fabric, reflecting the influences of both endogenous and exogenous forces. This paper reviews and interprets those changes, utilising two surveys made fifty years apart using the same survey instrument and the same methodology in order to provide a basis for a consistent comparison. The paper discusses the changes that have taken place in agricultural practices, in infrastructure, in the economic base and the successful stabilisation of population numbers, and in tourism to the island, which reflect changes in ownership of the island and the impacts of North Sea development and local government re-organisation.     

Introduction to Zooarchaeological Method and Theory: a Special Issue Honoring R. Lee Lyman

The Society for American Archaeology presented R. Lee Lyman with the Fryxell award for Interdisciplinary Excellence in Zooarchaeology in 2011. Lyman has produced over 120 journal articles or book chapters, and four single-authored books on the topic, and this issue honors his contributions to zooarchaeological method and theory with six original pieces by his peers. Arguably, his greatest impact has been in the field of vertebrate taphonomy and the development of a means to measure density-mediated bone attrition, but of equal importance was emphasis in the discipline that unit selection, or what one measures, should be linked to a particular research question. Lyman's work has also stressed the importance of making zooarchaeology relevant to modern issues of conservation biology.