Intervention methods in land disputes

Archival data, survey and interviews were used to investigate mediation activities among judges in the Norwegian Land Consolidation Court. The court handles land issue disputes among farmers in rural Norway. Despite having both planning skill and court power the judges spend a considerable amount of time mediating the disputes. In fairly integrative planning disputes they increase their mediation efforts with conflict level, case size and complexity. Mediation helped to reduce objections to the plan implemented. In more distributive boundary disputes they mediated less, and to a lesser degree varied efforts with case characteristics. However, settlements were achieved in the less conflictive, smaller and less complex cases. Considerable variations in mediation styles were found among the judges. Those with settlement oriented behaviour achieved more settlements than those that focused on facilitating communication. Implications are discussed.     

Participatory Governance in Urban Management and the Shifting Geometry of Power in Mumbai

This article questions the participatory dimension of urban governance in Mumbai. Based on surveys of a number of participatory projects for urban services, it compares the differentiated impacts of participation in middle‐class colonies with those in slums. Results demonstrate that changing citizen–government relationships have led to the empowerment of the middle and upper middle class who harness the potential of new ‘invited space’ to expand their claims on the city and political space. In contrast, the poor end up on the losing side as NGOs function more as contracted agents of the State than as representatives of the poor. Direct community participation empowers influential community members, small private entrepreneurs and middlemen, and contributes to labour informalization. Ultimately, these processes consolidate a form of ‘governing beyond the State’ that promotes a managerial vision of participation and leads to double standards of citizenship.     

L’Invention du Spectateur au XVIIIe Siècle L’Art Est Usage

18^th century philosophers analyzed art through the aesthetic experience of the audience. By contrast, Adam Smith was interested in the moral judgment that an impartial audience may formulate. How can art and morality, the beautiful and the good, be combined into one analytical framework? Art and morality convey non-transcendental values that are intrinsic to human experience. With the aesthetic experience of the audience, art is used, and ultimately depends on the ways that humans relate to works or art and to the beautiful.     

A Socially Engaged Archaeology: Spatiality and Governance of Asylum Seekers in Ireland

This paper draws on Wobst’s concerns ideas of material culture, style and the implications of contemporary archaeology. In a socially engaged “archaeology of now”, I examine the spatiality and material culture of asylum seekers in Irish society as the Irish State governs and thus engineers their social and physical space. Housed in State-operated accommodation centers around the country, the spatial governance of asylum seekers in Ireland creates a structured, exclusionary transnational landscape of difference. The State thereby controls the movement, social borders, place, identity and social relations of asylum seekers in a newly global Ireland.     

Investigating the role of food processing in human evolution: a niche construction approach

While it is generally agreed that food processing has had a role in human evolution, the specific ways that is has affected our evolution are not well understood. Using a Niche Construction Theory (NCT) perspective, coupled with methodologies borrowed from “post-harvest” research in the plant sciences, this paper investigates the means and mechanism by which food processing is of evolutionary consequence. The central tenet of NCT is that organisms have an active role in their own evolution through reciprocal interactions with their environments; niche construction is understood to occur when organisms initiate long-term changes to their environments that modify the selection pressures on themselves and their descendants (and on other organisms in the environment). Humans and our hominin ancestors are considered to be the ultimate niche constructors due to our ability to modify selection pressures through diverse culturally generated and transmitted cultural means, i.e. cultural niche construction. In this paper, post-harvest methods are used to identify how food processing could feasibly have permitted hominins to modify their evolutionary selection pressures. Food processing is shown to facilitate access to increasing amounts of digestible nutrients and energy (kilocalories/kilojoules) as well as promoting increased dietary breadth and making possible the production of safer and more stable foods. It is argued that these advancements catalysed related technological and ecological skills and knowledge, which together with the nutritional benefits, further triggered changes in hominin brain and body and locomotory adaptations and increased longevity, disease prevention and juvenile survival rates.     

Catholic-Confucian Mortuary Practices in a Rural Manchurian Cemetery

Historical Archaeology - Catholic missionaries were active among rural populations in Manchuria, in northeast China, around the turn of the 20th century. Their presence influenced everything from...