The Maudsley Hospital and the Rockefeller Foundation: the impact of philanthropy on research and training

Opened in February 1923 to raise the status of academic psychiatry in the UK, the Maudsley Hospital struggled to secure grant income. Without a track record of published research and lacking internationally recognized clinicians, it failed to impress the British Medical Research Council. To challenge leading U.S. and German departments of neuropsychiatry, Edward Mapother, the medical superintendent, looked overseas for investment in an "institute of psychiatry." Intense lobbying and a modified strategy for research and training designed to meet the Rockefeller Foundation's prioritization of psychiatry and medical specialization ultimately led to a significant endowment. Alan Gregg and Daniel O'Brien at the Foundation played a pivotal role in re-defining the Maudsley's programs of research and teaching. Pressure on Mapother to attract funding was matched by that on administrators required to show that their philanthropy had yielded tangible gains in public health. While wealthy charities, like the Rockefeller, often had a vision of the direction that they wished to pull medical science, and they provided much needed income, the impact of their policy agenda was not without drawbacks. Institutions unwilling to embrace a charity's philosophy were unlikely to secure grants, while those that did might find themselves drawn into less optimal areas.     

Diversity in hunter–gatherer technological traditions: Mapping trajectories of cultural ‘descent with modification’ in northeast California

Recent work has demonstrated that technological traditions can be considered as systems of information transmission that operate on the principle of ‘descent with modification’. In this paper we present an ethno-historical case-study of northeast Californian hunter–fisher–gatherers. Our goal is to understand the factors generating long-term diversity in local material culture, and we begin by investigating the extent to which branching and reticulation explain variation in four distinct technological traditions – basketry, cradles, ceremonial dress and earth-lodges. We then examine whether these four traditions have been transmitted in tandem, or are characterized by entirely different descent histories. The results for this particular case-study suggest that the first three traditions have been closely associated during branching descent, while the earth-lodges appear to have entirely distinct transmission histories. The general analytical framework presented in this paper is readily exportable to other world regions, where local case-studies may generate contrasting insights into historically-contingent patterns of cultural inheritance. Further studies examining potential co-transmission of technological traditions are strongly encouraged as a welcome addition to the cultural transmission literature.     

Vengeance, justice and the reactions in the Revolutionary Midi

This article explores the nature of political conflict, violenceand justice in the Midi provençal during the French Revolution.It emphasizes the continuity of conflict between rival factionsdividing most communes in the region throughout the Revolutionarydecade, conflict that frequently issued in individual and collectiveviolence, most notoriously the prison massacres of the WhiteTerror (or the Reaction, as it was known among contemporaries)at Aix, Tarascon and Marseille in the spring of 1795. Thesemassacres, among the most spectacular expressions of collectivevengeance and popular justice in the Revolution, presented thenascent judicial system of the Revolution with some of its greatestchallenges in the pursuit and punishment of these crimes, notleast because of the political partiality of the judicial authorities.This article further illustrates how the phenomenon of multipleReactions between warring factions, representing fundamentalsocio-economic differences and competing visions of the Republic,provides an understanding of the whole Revolutionary processin the region.     

Hot, banal and everyday nationalism: Bilingual road signs in Wales

The paper focuses on Billig's (Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage) notion of banal nationalism. While Billig's work is to be commended for demonstrating the way in which nationalism is an endemic political ideology in all states – and not merely an extreme or hot political ideology that is based upon “blood and belonging” (Ignatieff, M. (1993). Blood and belonging: Journeys into the new nationalism. London: BBC Books) – we suggest that his work tends, perhaps unwittingly, to reinforce an unwarranted separation of the banal and hot processes that reproduce nationalism. Some empirical work has implicitly and explicitly begun to question the distinction between banal and hotter forms of nationalism. We argue that one way in which such an agenda can be furthered is through a promotion of the idea of everyday nationalism, which combines banal and hot elements in more complex and contingent ways. We elaborate on the benefits of adopting such an approach through an empirical discussion of the campaign in favour of bilingual road signs in Wales between 1967 and 1975. We focus, first, on how monolingual English road signs were constructed by Welsh nationalists as part of an everyday landscape of oppression and, second, on the everyday politics of road signs within the spaces of government. We conclude the paper by reaffirming the need to move beyond notions of banal and hot nationalism and to focus on the everyday contexts within which nationalism is reproduced.     

Creativity gaps and gender gaps: women,men and place in the United States

This article situates Florida's (2002) work on creative regions in the United States in the context of a critical discussion of place and gender and investigates the gender–class structure of his most and least creative regions. It analyzes the distribution of creative class, working class and service class occupations by gender within those 21 regions as well as earnings, household income, poverty and educational attainment using data from the US Census 2000. Women and men are compared within and across the two categories of most and least creative regions. The major finding is that the gender gap in earnings within categories of regions is larger than the creativity gap, i.e. the earnings gap within genders across regions. As new technology industries have been layered over old industries, altering spatial divisions of labor, gendered labor remains integrated in largely traditional ways.