Constructing Sustainable Rural Landscapes: Oil Mallees and the Western Australian Wheatbelt

This paper considers the landscapes of the Western Australian wheatbelt and the possibilities for sustainability signified by the Oil Mallee Project. The Oil Mallee Project aims to develop commercially viable tree crops for the low rainfall wheatbelt region as a means of profitably managing dryland salinity. Interviews with farmers and other stakeholders in the Oil Mallee Project and agriculture are analysed to reveal important elements of landscape construction in the wheatbelt and stages in the emergence of the Project. These elements include historical land clearing, international chemical and machinery companies and the technologies they supply, land of marginal economic productivity, global food markets and alley farming systems. The paper uses material semiotics and actor‐network theory in describing the networks of relationships that shape wheatbelt landscapes. Breakdowns in the dominant networks of industrial agriculture provide spaces for the Oil Mallee Project to build relationships that reconnect industrial systems to the specific ecology of the wheatbelt landscape. However, the networks of industrial agriculture remain powerful and the Project has worked strategically to become integrated with existing agricultural systems, rather than aiming to directly resist or entirely displace dominant patterns of production in the wheatbelt.     

Negotiating Remote Borderland Access: Small‐Scale Trade on the Vietnam–China Border

This article explores the cross‐border trading networks and practices of highland residents in north‐west Vietnam. It reveals how such individuals, of highland minority and majority Kinh ethnicities, negotiate the political reality of an international border in highly pragmatic ways as they augment their livelihoods by trading commodities with inhabitants in south‐west China. We follow four particular commodities, traded across different political tiers of border crossing (each with specific rules, regulations and negotiations), by a diverse range of traders. In doing so we argue that border access is mediated by a complex and multifaceted set of social and structural components including not only state policy, but ethnically‐embedded social relations and specific geographic variables that, in turn, are engendering disparate economic opportunities.     

Extraordinary Satisfactions: Lesbian Visibility in Seventeenth–Century Pornography in England

This article analyses seventeenth–century pornographic literature and popular ballads to explore alternative representations, and hence interpretations, of female same–sex desire than those presented by either early modern legal, medical and religious discourse in which the image of the tribade predominates, or the homoerotic prose and poetry of female writers. It argues that early modern culture was not limited to interpreting sexual acts between women as the result of either a physical abnormality (clitoral hypertrophy) or the desire to live as a man, and thence to take on his sexual as well as social role.     

Excavating Utopia: Why Archaeologists Should Study “Ideal” Communities of the Nineteenth Century

The study of utopias is riddled with contradictions: we admire and fear them; they are a radical critique of the modernist societies that surround them, and yet they are in some ways the archetypal product of modernity. This paper suggests that studying Utopia could be of value in analyzing some of the complexities and contradictions of Western society and ideology in the nineteenth century, as well as causing us to question some of the preconceptions we regularly bring to the study of the archaeological past. Finally I will suggest that a different kind of nineteenth century, one which includes the radical dissent and resistance of utopian thinkers and experimenters, provides a strong basis for a critique of the social values of modern capitalism.     

Managing flood risk in the UK: towards an integration of social and technical perspectives

In recent years, an apparent increase in the frequency and severity of floods in the UK has led to growing concerns about societal exposure and vulnerability to flooding, particularly in the context of climate change, floodplain development and changing insurance practices. Despite the important link between assessments of exposure to flooding (hazard assessments) and issues of societal vulnerability, this link has rarely been explored in detail and has often been reflected in policy terms by a highly technocratic approach to flood risk management. Indeed, more comprehensive studies have usually favoured rigid and deterministic definitions of vulnerability, in keeping with the wider technocratic paradigm pervading management institutions. In an attempt to redress the balance, this paper considers the role of hazard assessment and issues of societal vulnerability as mutually informative debates and advocates a movement away from the technocratic ideals currently favoured in the UK.     

Rethinking the history of female circumcision and clitoridectomy: American medicine and female sexuality in the late nineteenth century

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was one kind of female orgasm and it was clitoral; there was also only one kind of healthy sexual instinct for a woman and it was for penetrative sex with her husband. When a woman behaved outside of this normality-by masturbating or by not responding to her husband's affections-her sexual instinct was seen as disordered. If healthy women, then, were believed only to be sexual within the marital embrace, what better way to explain these errant behaviors than by blaming the clitoris, an organ seen as key to female sexual instinct? Doctors corrected a clitoris in an unhealthy state using one of four surgeries-removing smegma or adhesions between the clitoris and its hood, removing the hood (circumcision), or removing the clitoris (clitoridectomy)-in order to correct a woman's sexual instinct in an unhealthy state. Their approach to clitoral surgery, at least as revealed in published medical works, was a cautious one that respected the importance of clitoral stimulation for healthy sexuality while simultaneously recognizing its role as cause and symptom in cases of insanity that were tied to masturbation.     

Resource Intensification and Resource Depression in the Pacific Northwest of North America: A Zooarchaeological Review

In the Pacific Northwest of North America, researchers routinely suggest changes in human use of animals explain hunter-gatherer organizational changes and development of cultural complexity. For example, most models developed to explain developing cultural complexity invoke salmon in some fashion. Yet until recently, fish remains were not carefully studied and more generally, zooarchaeological evidence has not been systematically used to test models of culture change. This study reviews the 10,000-year-old faunal record in the Pacific Northwest to test predictions drawn from models of resource intensification, resource depression and hunter-gatherer organizational strategies. The records from two subareas, the South-Central Northwest Coast (Puget Sound/Gulf of Georgia) and the Northern Columbia Plateau, are examined in detail, representing 63 archaeological sites. While minor changes in animal use are evident, the overall record is characterized by stability rather than change.