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.     

SPATIAL COMPETITION,PRICING, AND MARKET POWER IN TRANSPORTATION: A DOMINANT FIRM MODEL*

ABSTRACT Transport firms compete over space. We develop a dominant firm model of transport services wherein one firm (the railroad) has market power, but competes in space with a competitive alternative (truck‐barge). When constrained, the dominant firm prices to “beat the competition”, which impedes efficiency when demand has some elasticity. We extend the basic model in a number of directions that include the relationship between monopoly prices and the generalized concavity of the shipper demand functions, the effects of multiple terminal markets, the role of joint production (fronthaul–backhaul markets), and the effects of capacity constraints.     

Reevaluating the Age of the Iberomaurusian in Morocco

Chronological evidence for the Iberomaurusian is currently very limited and there are problems with some of the published radiocarbon dates. In this paper we present new AMS dating results from well-stratified cave sequences at Ghar Cahal, Kehf el Hammar and Taforalt in northern and eastern Morocco. The longest of these sequences, from Taforalt, shows an intermittent occupation history spanning the period ca. 18,000–11,000 bp (radiocarbon determinations presented in this paper are expressed as ka bp or bp, whilst approximate calendar ages are expressed as Cal bp) with a marked intensification of cave use soon after ca. 13,000 bp. Using calibrated AMS ages in comparison to sea surface temperature evidence from the Alboran Sea core MD95-2043 and more generally to Greenland ice δ¹⁸O core records, we suggest that there may have been a relationship, albeit a complex one, between climatic events and cave activity on the part of Iberomaurusian populations.     

Approximating the Length of Vehicle Routing Problem Solutions Using Complementary Spatial Information

Accurately estimating the length of Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) distances can inform transportation planning in a wide variety of delivery and service provision contexts. This study extends the work of previous research where multiple linear regression models were used to estimate the average distance of VRP solutions with various customer demands and capacity constraints. This research expands on that approach in two ways: first, the point patterns used in estimation have a wider range of customer clustering or dispersion values as measured by the Average Nearest Neighbor Index (ANNI) as opposed to just using a Poisson or random point process; second, the tour coefficient adjusted by this complementary spatial information is shown to exhibit statistically more accurate estimations. To generate a full range of ANNI values, point patterns were simulated using a Poisson process, a Matern clustering process, and a simple sequential inhibition process to obtain random, clustered, and dispersed point patterns, respectively. The coefficients of independent variables in the models were used to explain how the spatial distributions of customers influence the VRP distances. These results demonstrate that complementary spatial data can be used to improve operational results, a concept that could be applied more broadly.     

Cora Du Bois,Henrietta Schmerler,and the Role of Women in Mid-Twentieth Century American Anthropology

Cora Du Bois (1903–1991) achieved distinction in anthropology and the U.S. government—including leadership roles in the Office of Strategic Services and the State Department, a professorship at Harvard, and the presidency of the American Anthropological Association. Her contemporary, Henrietta Schmerler (1908–1931), suffered rape and murder while conducting her first summer of ethnographic fieldwork. Despite these stark differences, when taken together, Schmerler’s and Du Bois’s careers and reputations shed light on sexism and homophobia in and around the discipline, changing approaches to fieldwork and cultural analysis, and the political and public contexts of American anthropology in the mid-20th century.     

Living the cruel futures of industrial change

Industrial change is related to and experienced by those affected by such changes through particular sets of relations with futures. However, engagements with industrial change have in large part included futures only in the role of the temporal, and often teleological, background of industrial change rather than addressing futures in their own right. Through an engagement with the closure and later reopening of a steelworks within Teesside, UK, this paper argues that attending to futures allows the complex relationships through which industrial change comes to be rendered present, related to and lived to be brought into accounts of the experience of industrial change. Through diverse modalities such as phone calls, tones of voice, news reports, rumour and soundscapes a future of works closure was rendered present by and for the steelworkers of Teesside. In addition to this, the paper also goes on to exemplify how such relationships with futures of industrial change can be theorized through the example of engaging with pension entitlements through the concept of ‘cruel optimism’ after the work of Lauren Berlant.     

Unlock the Volume: Towards a Politics of Capacity

In recent years “volume” has become a key analytic idea, and tool, for re‐imagining and making sense of historical and contemporary socio‐cultural and geopolitical phenomena. This paper argues that this important work could be pushed in new directions by thinking seriously of how volume might otherwise be interpreted spatially, as capacity. Accordingly, in this paper, we address what we call a “politics of capacity”. To do so, we draw specifically on debates in carceral geography and, in particular, the pressures on the prison system to illustrate our argument. Drawing on notions of “operational capacities” and “capacity building” in the prison setting, we outline a manifesto for volumetric thinking that moves beyond expressions of power that cut through height, depth and angles, to an understanding of how power is conveyed through maximum and minimum capacities; density and mass; and capacity‐building techniques.