Mesolithic shellfish exploitation in SW Italy: seasonal evidence from the oxygen isotopic composition of Osilinus turbinatus shells

Oxygen isotope analyses were carried out on the topshell Osilinus turbinatus from archaeological sites with the aim to investigate the temporal exploitation patterns by Mesolithic groups inhabiting coastal caves in SW Italy. In order to assess the present day O. turbinatus intra-annual δ¹⁸O variability, living specimens were collected monthly at Marina di Camerota (SW Italian peninsula). Their shell-edges were analysed and the seasonal results were compared with archaeozoological material. Our findings show that Mesolithic O. turbinatus exploitation was carried out almost exclusively during the colder and intermediary seasons (e.g. autumn, winter, spring), with very sporadic harvesting during the warmer seasons. Results suggest a possible regional exploitation pattern of O. turbinatus by Mesolithic groups inhabiting this region.     

Geographies of mediation: Market development and the rural broker in Maharashtra, India

This paper explicates the role of community-level intermediaries in post-liberalized economic sectors. Focusing on nascent commercial markets for improved, smokeless cookstoves in southwestern Maharashtra, I describe how development is encountered by three analytic groups – artisans, female stove users and NGO field officers. This study highlights patterns of strategic intermediary action, or forms of brokering, used to negotiate the commercialization process for individuals involved in the fabrication, distribution and use of improved cookstoves. A close analysis of the mediating agent can strengthen theories on how individuals and communities encounter sector privatization and state retrenchment. This study reveals a diverse set of brokering activities and actors, and shows how intermediaries combine tasks associated with traditional conceptions of the political fixer and market broker by working within and between groups of market, village and state operatives to transform market supply chains. Mediating agents coordinate counter regulating activities within civil society in the absence of heavy state intervention and play a crucial role in activating and connecting community interests to latent neoliberal state resources.     

Japheth's World: The Rise of Secularism and the Revival of Religion Today

This essay explores what it means to say that we live today in “a secular age.” A distinction between two kinds of secularism is introduced and the proposal is made that the secularity that characterises our age belongs to a distinctively Graeco-Christian heritage. This proposal is elaborated and developed in the context of the Nietzschean pronouncement of the death of God and against the background of the decline in theodicial conceptions of history. However, rather than see these issues as connected to a growing nihilism in European society or in terms of a movement towards a widespread atheism, they are interpreted, in many respects optimistically, in terms of the awakening and ongoing movement of a distinctively democratic desire.     

Trading Spaces: Imagining and Positioning the 'New' South Africa within the Regional and Global Economies

The end of apartheid has precipitated rapid rethinking of South Africa's position in relation to the rest of Africa and the global arena. Whereas a substantial literature already exists on the country's evolving post-apartheid foreign policy, this article offers one of the first critical analyses of its emerging external economic relations. Although clearly the economic giant of the Southern African Development Community, South Africa does not perform as well on all economic and social indicators as many people, especially South Africans, believe. South African businesses' perception of, and experiences in, the rest of Africa are assessed in relation to emerging patterns of trade and investment there. Selected advertisements and associated imagery deployed by firms in support of their strategies are analysed in the context of domestic transformation and the opening of new horizons abroad. South African foreign direct invest-ment (FDI) is increasingly diversified, both sectorally and geographically, although large firms dominate the profile. South African-based transnational corporations are also becoming increasingly influential global players. FDI and development aid inflows to South Africa, and in relation to the rest of Africa, are analysed and their implications explored. Far Eastern investment rose fast as part of a growing global inflow until 1997/8; more recent figures are disappointing. This reflects political and security concerns, as well as vulnerability to rapid flow reversal in the increasingly important portfolio investment market.