The Role of the Industrial Workplace in Working-class Community, 1945–1980

Historiography of the post-war working classes has tended to underplay the role of industrial workplaces in the community life of many localities. This article uses an oral history case-study of Beverley, East Yorkshire, to show how industrial workplaces could still be central to the construction of social networks and local identity across the three post-war decades. I suggest that the decline of British manufacturing, which gathered pace in the 1970s and 1980s, may have been more detrimental to working-class community life than the supposed post-war shift towards consumerism and individualism.     

Spatializing Technoscience: The Anthropology of Science and Technology and the Making of National,Colonial, and Postcolonial Space and Place

Joseph G. Jorgensen and Marcello Truzzi, eds. Anthropology and American Life. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974. xi + 522 pp. Tables and bibliography. $6.95 (paper).     

Holocene land-use evolution and associated soil erosion in the French Prealps inferred from Lake Paladru sediments and archaeological evidences

A source-to-sink multi-proxy approach has been performed within Lake Paladru (492 m a.s.l., French Prealps) catchment and a 6-m long sediment sequence retrieved from the central lacustrine basin. The combination of minerogenic signal, specific organic markers of autochthonous and allochthonous supply and archaeological data allows the reconstruction of a continuous record of past human disturbances. Over the last 10,000 years, the lacustrine sedimentation was dominated by autochthonous carbonates and the watershed was mostly forest-covered. However, seven phases of higher accumulation rate, soil erosion, algal productivity and landscape disturbances have been identified and dated from 8400 to 7900, 6000 to 4800, 4500 to 3200, 2700 to 2050 cal BP as well as AD 350–850, AD 1250–1850 and after AD 1970. Before 5200 cal BP, soil erosion is interpreted as resulting from climatic deterioration phases towards cooler and wetter conditions. During the Mid-Late Holocene period, erosion fluxes and landscape disturbances are always associated with prehistorical and historical human activities and amplified by climatic oscillations. Such changes in human land-used led to increasing minerogenic supply and nutrients loading that affected lacustrine trophic levels, especially during the last 1600 years. In addition, organic and molecular markers document previously unknown human settlements around Lake Paladru during the Bronze and the Iron Ages.     

Protestantism,nation and diaspora in Imperial Germany

This article examines the close connection between Protestantism and nationalism in Imperial Germany within a transnational context. In the years before 1914, the Prussian State Church in particular strengthened the legal and organisational framework for an increasing number of diaspora congregations to become attached. These acted as an important vehicle to embed the nationalist rhetoric produced within the Reich into emigrants' notions of belonging. Whilst previous scholarship has noted this connection in general, the article sheds more detailed light on the mechanics and structure, but also on the limits, of this process. Feedback processes from periphery to centre, in turn, had an impact on German national identity construction as that of a nation that was not confined to state borders. Applying a constructionist theoretical framework, the contested question of whether the heterogeneity of Germans abroad allows for the application of the diaspora concept is answered affirmatively.     

Conceptualizing the Survival Sector in Madagascar

Abstract: This article calls for the recognition of a subsector of the informal economy, which is conceptualized as the “survival sector”. Based on empirical evidence from Antananarivo, Madagascar it is suggested that beggars, street children and other marginalized people constitute a separate, non‐productive subsector of the economy, which is also distinguishable from formal and informal economies because of other aspects, such as the character of its social and economic networks, survival strategies, patterns of social and physical mobility, and the social and public spaces occupied. Given the vast number of marginalized people in the world, it seems useful to consider a survival sector of its own that is, despite interlinkages, fundamentally different from other components of the informal economy.     

Third Carthage: Struggles and Contestations Over Archaeological Space

This paper investigates how the archaeological site of modern Carthage was (re)produced and (re)appropriated by various interest groups from the early 19th century to the present. It traces the struggle of archaeologists and conservationists to protect Carthage’s ancient ruins within a changing urban environment invariably dominated by Tunisia’s most powerful and influential elites. The paper highlights some controversial issues that have affected the unity of an envisaged archaeological park in the area. In doing so, it brings to the fore the ongoing conflict between the different statuses of Carthage: symbolic capital of Tunisia, historic site, living city and tourist destination.     

Book reviews

Ian McLean, White Aborigines. Identity Politics in Australian Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. x + 204 pp., 9 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–521–58416–7. £40.00.

Ákos Moravánszky, Competing Visions. Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867–1918, Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT Press, 1998. xvi + 508 pp., 32 col. and 312 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–262–13334–2. £29.95.

Andrew Piersenné, Explaining Our World, London and New York: E. & F. N. Spon, 1999. xii + 252 pp., 50 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–419–21940–4. £45–00.

Simone Abram, Jacqueline Waldren and Donald V. L. Macleod (eds.), Tourists and Tourism: Identifying with People and Places, Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997. xii + 245 pp., 4 figs. ISBN 1–85973–905–9. £14.99.

Martin Cooper (ed.), Laser Cleaning in Conservation: An Introduction, Oxford: Butterworth‐Heinemann, 1998. xii + 98 pp, 43 col. and 11 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–7506–3117–1. £40.00.

Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai, Architecture and Independence. The Search for Identity—India 1880 to 1980, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. xxii + 347 pp., c. 750 b. & w. illus. and figs. ISBN 0–19–563900–6. £20.00.