A Carved Romanesque Springer with Voussoirs in Church House,Gloucester Cathedral

A Romanesque double-springer and five voussoirs, decorated with foliate carving and pellet, have been reused as a door-head in the ground floor of Church House, Gloucester Cathedral. The carved stones are illustrated, together with a reconstruction of the original double arch, which may have come from an early 12th- century pulpitum screen or the arcade of the first Norman cloister.     

The Ryan White Act in Dallas

Virtually every locality affected by the AIDS epidemic has had to confront changes in the demographics of the disease, shifts in federal priorities, and medical advances in AIDS treatment. Creating a consistent federal policy has proven difficult because the epidemic manifests itself differently in virtually every locality it invades. As a result, some local caseloads increasingly are dominated by intravenous drug users and others by gay men. In recognition of this reality, the primary federal program to fund AIDS services relies on local decisionmakers to make allocation decisions for serving the needs of their caseload. Under the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act of 1990, local Health Services Planning Councils were assigned the task of creating an effective continuum of care for persons with HIV I AIDS and were empowered with the task of allocating federal funds to accomplish that objective. In some cases creating and fostering an effective continuum of care proved to be an essentially noncontroversial managerial task, while in other localities political turmoil and rampant self-interest served as barriers to program effectiveness. This article explores the relationship between local political culture and the development of AIDS programs in Dallas County, Texas. Specifically, we compare the provision of AIDS services in Dallas before passage of the Ryan White Act in 1990, how these services were affected by the Ryan White program, and the experiences since the reauthorization of the Ryan White Act in 1996.     

Regional Exchange Rate Indexes for the United States

In this paper we construct exchange rate indexes for the nine U.S. Bureau of the Census regions. The results indicate there are nontrivial differences between them and an identically created overall U.S. exchange rate index. The national index is cointegrated with only two of these regional indexes, and in a Granger sense, it is causing one regional index. In addition, our results indicate that two of the regional exchange rate indexes are interchangeable with the national index. These results show that researchers investigating how exchange rate changes affect regional exports or regional economic growth should be cautious in making inferences based upon a national exchange rate index.     

True GRIT

Book reviewed in this article:
Deborah Welch Larson, Anatomy of Mistrust: U.S.-Soviet Relations during the Cold War     

The Impact of Property Taxes and Property Tax Classification on Business Activity in the Chicago Metropolitan Area

The City of Chicago and the inner suburbs grew much more slowly than the outer suburbs in recent decades. In the central county of the metropolitan area, commercial and industrial property is "classified," in that it is assessed at a higher ratio of market value than residential property. Classification is not used in the surrounding suburban counties. The empirical analysis finds evidence consistent with the notion that property tax classification contributes to differential rates of economic growth. High property tax rates lead to significantly slower growth rates for employment, commercial property, and industrial property.     

Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry

A model of culture as a partially coherent system of signs comprised the most widely employed instrument for analyzing cultural meaning among the new cultural historians. However, the model failed to account for meanings that agents produce by executing social practices rather than by only "reading" contrasts among signs. It also encouraged some analysts to conceive the difference between sign system and concrete practice as that between what is graspable as an intellectual form and what remains inaccessibly material or corporeal. This essay introduces three exemplars of the ties between signs and practices to show how the pragmatics of using signs comprises a structure and a generator of meaning in its own right. In the three exemplars, which are based on the tropes of metonymy, metaphor, and irony, I employ the analytic tools of linguistics to appreciate the non-discursive organization of practice. Analysis of the diverse logics for organizing practice offers promising means for investigating how signs come to seem experientially real for their users. Finally, this view of culture in practice suggests new hypotheses about the possible interdependencies as well as the lack of connection among the elements of a cultural setting.     

Waiting for the Day: Globalisation and Apocalypticism in Central New Ireland,Papua New Guinea

Through an exploration of some of the negotiations occurring in the cultural sphere of religion, I problematise the term globalisation, challenge some of the assumptions that have been made about it, and argue that, in a particular sense, it has become a two‐way process. Taking the case of the experience of the 1997–98 drought on the Lelet Plateau in central New Ireland, I examine the manner in which the concepts and beliefs of premillennialist Pentecostal Christianity engage with the local. What is new is that these discourses about the end of the world have brought the global horizon into prominence in a way that the previous more orthodox Christianity did not, so that local events take on signficances they did not have in the past. This is not a simple matter of the new powerful framework irresistibly overwhelming local knowledge, but involves careful scrutiny of both, and negotiation between them. The result is not that the local is swamped, but that the globe becomes an horizon which frames local experiences in particular ways.