Biodiversity and Business: Coming to Terms with the 'Grand Bargain'

The Convention on Biological Diversity incorporates an exchange that has been described as a 'grand bargain' which balances the needs of both technologically and biologically endowed countries. The role of genetic resources in R&D and sales varies by industry sector, however, so it is difficult to generalize on company demand for genetic resources and fair and equitable benefit-sharing. It is important, therefore, to examine the particular features of industry R&D programmes, providers of genetic resources, and trends in benefit-sharing partnerships in specific industry sectors. This article examines markets for genetic resources, costs and duration of R&D, types of genetic resources accessed, providers of genetic resources and benefit-sharing partnerships in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, crop protection, seed, botanical medicine, horticulture, and personal care and cosmetic industries. The article concludes that experience and 'best practice' in benefit-sharing have progressed quite significantly on a number of fronts in the past decade, including the development of corporate policies in response to the CBD. The most effective form of benefit-sharing, and realization of the ' grand bargain' envisaged by the CBD, is found through partnerships between private-sector and source-country institutions that link commercial use with sustainable development and biodiversity conservation.     

Historical Archaeology and the Post-Columbian World of North America

Historical archaeology, with its interest in material culture and its use of the broader perspectives of anthropology and anthropological archaeology, has contributed to a distinctive understanding of the North American experience. Historical archaeologists have, to varying degrees, investigated the material traces of class, race, gender, and state formation. These studies provide an understanding of the origin of many of the social practices that undergird modern culture, a necessary, though neglected, case in a unified anthropological archaeology's goal of writing innovative world histories.     

The State of the Union: Sexuality in American History

Books reviewed in this article: Merril D. Smith (ed.), Sex and Sexuality in Early America Beryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920 Sharon R. Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America M. E. Melody and Linda M. Peterson, Teaching America about Sex: Marriage Guides and Sex Manuals from the Late Victorians to Dr Ruth     

Gendered frontiers of land control: indigenous territory,women and contests over land in Ecuador

Agricultural and rural land has become the site of considerable policy, governmental and scholarly concern worldwide because of violence and dispossession, food insecurity and contests over private property regimes. Such issues are highly gendered in territories with majorities of indigenous populations where overlapping legal regimes (statutory, multicultural, customary) and histories of dispossession have created complex spatialities and access patterns. States' formalization of indigenous rights, neoliberal restructuring and land appropriation are the backdrop to Ecuadorian women's struggles to access, retain and pass on land. Despite a burgeoning literature on Latin American indigenous territories, women are often invisible. Using collaborative research among two indigenous nationalities, the article analyses the political–economic, legal and de facto regimes shaping women's claims to land and indigenous territory. Focusing on Kichwa women in the rural Andes and Tsáchila women in a tropical export-oriented agricultural frontier area, the article examines the criteria and exclusionary practices that operate at multiple scales to shape women's (in)security in tenure. Women's struggles over claims to land and territory are also discussed. The article argues that Latin America's fraught land politics requires a gendered account of indigenous land–territoriality to unpack the cultural bias of western feminist accounts of multiculturalism and to document the racialized gender bias across socio-institutional relations.     

Feeling and the production of lesbian space in The L Word

This article seeks to understand the production of lesbian space in the TV series The L Word (TLW) (Showtime 2004–2009). To do so, it departs from theories of the lesbian gaze to discuss the visibility of feeling. Specifically, I consider how TLW represents the visibility of feeling as constitutive of lesbian bodies, communities and spaces. In TLW, real spaces (actual locations) fold into virtual ones (on screen) in a deliberate construction of televisual lesbian space. TLW implicitly reflects and is embedded within real-life configurations of lesbian space. I identify four excerpts from the series – ‘gay LA’, ‘the pool’, ‘Olivia cruise’ and ‘High Art’ – that problematise lesbian visibility by foregrounding the relationship between feeling and place. Permission to feel, represented as permission to look, reproduces community as the threshold of lesbian identity. Critical to understanding this production of lesbian space is the way in which TLW associates feeling with social relationships as vividly depicted by ‘the chart’, a representational motif that maps lesbian sexual relations and the intelligibility of lesbian feeling. Finally, I develop my account of lesbian visibility through the example of the facial expression of feeling, at once a demonstration of the visible embodiment of lesbian feeling, and the intelligibility of lesbian space.     

Building an Historical Landscape,Commemorating W. E. B. Du Bois

The history of the W.E.B. Du Bois Homesite in Great Barrington Massachusetts is traced from the present to its earliest inhabitation after the arrival of Europeans and African captives. Social processes of class and race operating at different time scales have constrained the ways the members of Du Bois’s maternal relatives, and more recently private foundations and the public institution of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, have made use of the property. The Homesite figures in Du Bois’s memories of his childhood and was a source of pride during his 26 years of ownership. Telling its story backwards provides insights into how larger social and ideological forces affected individual actions, observations that provide guidance for future commemoration efforts at this National Historic Landmark site honoring the accomplishments of W.E.B. Du Bois.