TREES AS TOOLS,TREES AS TEXT: STRUGGLES OVER RESOURCES IN ZAMBRANA-CHACUEY,DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

The people of the Rural Federation of Zambrana-Chacuey, in the Dominican Republic, are engaged in complex and multivalent struggles over resources in a forest and farm landscape subject to rapid land use change. Acacia mangium, a fast growing tree recently introduced as a timber cash crop, has become an object, a site and a tool of struggle in conflicts between local and state interests, and between women and men. Until recently, tree cutting has been illegal, so the government-approved acacia has reversed the role of trees from liabilities to assets in land tenure. The acacia has also begun to alter the pattern of land use, land cover, and the species composition of the region's forests, gardens, and fields, and could replace women's diverse gardens with single species blocks of timber.     

Experimental Boat and Ship Archaeology: Principles and Methods

The need for experiments to study physical aspects of craft of the past is stated, as well as the necessity for them to have clear aims and to follow the established principles of scientific enquiry. These principles are discussed in this joint paper by ten maritime archaeologists and others, together with methods and some points of management critical to their application in this field.     

Book reviews

THE MIND OF EAST ASIA, Lily Abegg. (338 pp. with Index). Translated from the German. Thames and Hudson; London, New York.

BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES: Problems in Co‐operation. A joint report prepared by Henry L. Roberts and Paul A. Wilson. London. Royal Institute of International Affairs. Pp. 224. Price 8/6 sterling. 1953.

D?R LAUTLOSE AUFSTAND. BERICHT VEBER DIE WIDER‐STANDSBEWEGUNG DES DEUTSCHEN VOLKES 1933–1945. Herausgegeben von Guenther Weissenborn. Rowohlt Verlag Hamburg. Pp. 348.

“EASTERN AND WESTERN WORLD”: Selected Readings with a foreword by S. Hofstra. Issued under the auspices of the Netherlands Foundation for International Co‐operation and published by W. Van Hoeve Ltd., The Hague, Bandung. 1953. Pp. 181.

NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL COMMUNICATION. By Karl W. Deutsch. John Wiley & Sons, N. Y. viii and 292.

BURMA UNDER THE JAPANESE: By Thakin Nu. Pictures and Portraits, Edited and translated with Introduction by J. S. Furnivall. Macmillan, London. 1954. Pp. xxviii and 132. Price 12s 6d.

COMMODITY TRADE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT—Report of a Committee appointed by the Secretary‐General, United Nations, Published by the United Nations, 1953.     

High justice in fifteenth-century Normandy: the prosecution of Sandrin Bourel

By the fifteenth century the seigneurial exercise of high justice had become less common because of the growth of royal jurisdiction. The ancient and wealthy Benedictine nunnery of Montivilliers retained the right to high justice only during the octave of the Holy Cross. In 1493 Sandrin Bourel, a young man who had twice before been imprisoned for theft, was apprehended in the act of stealing from a bourgeois of Montivilliers. As the crime occurred during the octave of the Holy Cross the abbey claimed jurisdiction. A special tribunal was created to prosecute him. After having been tortured, Bourel was found guilty and hanged. The documents generated by this event provide the basis for a case study of the application of criminal procedure at the close of the middle ages. The condemned man's confession, rich in biographical detail, gives us a profile of a petty thief and vagabond on the margin of society. The financial account of the abbey's receiver-general documents in detail the total cost of the prosecution of a single medieval criminal.     

The $15 Wage Movement Moves South: Politics of Region in Labor Union Campaigns

The North American labor movement continues to wrestle with the challenges of organizing workers in the US South. This article explores the contradictory position of the South in the contemporary labor movement, using the circulation of the $15 minimum wage to ground the analysis. By problematizing the place of the South in US labor, this article contributes to efforts to complicate the geographic imaginaries of the South and to our understanding of the contemporary labor movement's expansionary projects. Drawing on qualitative interviews and participant observation in Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, I trace the abstract circulation of organizational resources, strategies, and tactics of the $15 wage movement into, throughout, and back out of the South.