‘Milking The Elephant’: Financial Markets as Real Markets in Kenya

Financial liberalization policies in the 1990s were intended to raise formal sector interest rates, enhance competition and expand access for users. This article investigates patterns of provision and use in a local financial market in Karatina, Kenya, at the end of the 1990s after a period of financial and economic liberalization. It takes a holistic approach, examining both formal and informal financial arrangements and microfinance interventions. This is because the role of the informal financial sector is particularly important for poor people and has received relatively little attention in the discussion of the consequences of reform. The author does this using a ‘real’ markets approach that sees markets as socially regulated and structured. Significant provision by the mutual sector (formal and informal), and poor lending performance by the banking sector is explained through an examination of the characteristics of the services on offer and their embeddedness in social relations, culture and politics.     

An Empirical Assessment of Devolution's Policy Impact

This article evaluates the influence of devolution on perceived and actual policy outcomes at the local level in the United States. Proponents of devolution often argue that the transfer of policymaking authority to a lower level of government allows subnational officials to more effectively address problems on the government's agenda. We provide one of the first empirical evaluations of this implicit assumption of devolution. We utilize data from 100 counties in one state, North Carolina, that were the recipients of additional welfare policymaking authority in 1997 to provide a preliminary assessment of devolution's consequences and policy impact. We then investigate the recipient governments' ability to bring about positive change using three prominent indicators associated with welfare policy. Our findings provide evidence that devolution matters quite significantly to the perception of policymaking effectiveness; however, devolution's actual impact on policy outcomes is mixed.     

Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making

Architecture embodies human agency in all of its dimensions and effective scales. Specifically, the wooden posts of Mississippian peoples in the American mid-continent were simultaneously spatial, material, and corporeal dimensions of the process of cultural construction and contestation. Our reconsideration of the lowly postmold is based on the principle of physicality that, in turn, alters the ways in which we pose research questions and interpret archaeological data. A historical-processual methodology involves three procedural fundamentals: identifying practical variability, comparing genealogies of practices, and tacking between lines of evidence at multiple scales of analysis.     

Book reviews

CHINA

JUSTIN JON RUDELSON. Oasis Identities, Uyghur Nationalism along China's Silk Road. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xv, 209 pp. Acknowledgments, maps, illustrations, bibliography, index. US$42.50, hardcover; US$16.50, paper.

ROSS TERRILL. Mao: a Biography. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1995. 524 pp. Bibliographic note, reference notes, index. A$24.95, paper.

ROSS TERRILL. Madame Mao: the White‐Boned Demon. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1995. 466 pp. Bibliographic note, reference notes, index. A$24.95, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

EIJI OGUMA. Tan'itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen [The origins of the myth of the homogeneous nation]. Tokyo: Shinyosha, 1995, 1997. 450 pp. ¥3800, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

H. Th. CHABOT. Kinship, Status and Gender in South Celebes. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996. 291 pp. Author's biography, author's bibliography, appendix, bibliography, three indexes, photographic illustrations. No price given, paper.

GREG POULGRAIN. The Genesis of Konfrontasi: Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia 1945–1965. Bathurst: Crawford House Publishing; London: C. Hurst and Co Ltd, 1998. xxvi, 322 pp. Foreword by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, introduction, map, photographs, index. A$29.95, paper.

M. J. C. SCHOUTEN. Leadership and Social Mobility in a Southeast Asian Society: Minahasa, 1677–1983. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998. xiv, 334 pp. Index. No price given, paperback.

GENERAL ASIA

KERRIE L. MACPHERSON (ed). Asian Department Stores. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998. x, 309 pp. Preface, introduction, notes, references, index. £40.00, hardcover.

PETER P. ROGERS, KAZI F. JALAL, BINDU N. LOHANI, GENE M. OWENS, CHANG‐CHANG YU, CHRISTIAN M. DUFOURNAUD and JUN BI. Measuring Environmental Quality in Asia. Cambridge: Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Asian Development Bank's Office of Environment and Social Development, distributed by Harvard University Press, 1997. vii, 368 pp. Foreword, preface, acknowledgments, notes on contributors, abbreviations and acronyms, appendices. US$30.00, paper.     

Quotidian and Transgressive Practices in Nazi Forced Labor Camps: The Role of Objects

We argue that archaeological investigations of Nazi-period Lager should include two elements. The first is excavation. Research confined to non-invasive methods documenting visible remains, archival research, and oral history leads to small gains in existing knowledge. Archaeology’s full potential is realized when excavations are conducted allowing reconstruction of actual practices. Secondly, it is essential to evaluate spatially and quantitatively even the most inconspicuous objects. They are a fundamental means to understand conditions of suffering as well as transgressive actions by camp inhabitants. Excavations of a forced labor camp of Weser Flugzeugbau GmbH at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin serves as a case study.     

Financialization and Global Commodity Chains: Distributional Implications for Cotton in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Restructuring of global and local markets has led to an increased influence of commodity derivatives markets on commodity price setting. This has critical implications for price risks experienced by actors along commodity chains. Commodity derivatives markets have undergone significant changes that have been referred to as the ‘financialization of commodities’, which we define as an increase in trading activity by financial investors and the reorientation of business strategies by commodity trading houses towards risk management and financial activities. This article assesses how these global financialization processes affect commodity producers in low‐income countries via the operational dynamics of global commodity chains and national market structures. It investigates how prices are set and transmitted and how risks are distributed and managed in the cotton sectors in Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Tanzania. It concludes that uneven exposure to price instability and access to price risk management have important distributional implications. Whilst international traders have the capacity to deal with price risks through hedging, in addition to expanding their profit possibilities through financial activities on derivatives markets, local actors in producing countries face the challenge of increased short‐termism — albeit to different extents depending on national market structures — with limited access to risk management.     

A multi-proxy study of anthropogenic sedimentation and human occupation of Gledswood Shelter 1: exploring an interior sandstone rockshelter in Northern Australia

Rockshelters contain some of the most important archives of human activity in Australia but most research has focused on artifacts and cultural context. This study explores geomorphological and geoarchaeological approaches for understanding a sandstone rockshelter in interior northern Australia: Gledswood Shelter 1. At this site, magnetic susceptibility and micromorphology techniques were integrated with bulk sedimentology, soil chemistry and geochronology to better understand the record of human impact and site formation processes. The micromorphology studies indicate that primary depositional fabrics, such as graded bedding or laminations, are absent, and sediment structural development is low throughout the entire sequence, with most samples exhibiting a high degree of post-depositional mixing. The sediment magnetic susceptibility analysis reveals magnetic changes coinciding with human occupation, a result of anthropogenic burning. Specifically we highlight that combustion features are prevalent in this sandstone shelter and provide critical insights into the human usage of the shelter.