MIT architecture and values: Gehry’s Stata and Holl’s Simmons

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 initiated a billion dollar building program featuring buildings by world‐renowned architects, including Frank Gehry and Steven Holl. Gehry’s Stata Center, which houses computer scientists, and Holl’s Simmons Hall dormitory raise questions about the relationship of architecture to MIT’s values. Many MIT faculty, students, and administrators celebrate Gehry’s Stata and Holl’s Simmons as expressing the inventiveness, energy, and excellence of the people within them and as moving the campus into the twenty‐first century. Others ask if MIT has lost its way by choosing elite, costly buildings at an institution historically characterized by utilitarian and functional values.     

Interest Group Competition and Cooperation at Legislative Hearings

Legislative committee hearings have attracted little attention from scholars, yet Schlozman and Tierney (1986) found that testifying is the advocacy tactic most frequently used by interest group lobbyists. I argue that opportunities to testify are valuable enough to lobbyists that they may be willing to put aside competitive differences with rival groups to jointly support committee agendas. I test this argument using data on lobbyist testimony before 20 committees on six issues from 1999 to 2002. The results suggest that whether legislators actually desire competing lobbyists to present a united front behind the committee may depend on the committee's own ideological relationship with the parent chamber. I also find that the attractiveness of the incentive to testify is less enticing to lobbyists when it requires them to compromise their organization's position on issues of importance to their members, or when competition between interest groups is especially great.     

“Horned cattle and pack horses”: zooarchaeological legacy collections from the unauthorized (and unscreened) Spanish Fort

ABSTRACT

In 1689, the governor of La Florida ordered the construction of a fort near the Muscogee (Creek) ancestral community of Apalachicola, supplying it with a caravan of “horned cattle and pack horses.” The fort, referred to as “Spanish Fort,” was abandoned a year later. Archaeological investigations of the fort were carried out in 1960 without sieving, and a large collection of faunal remains was minimally studied. Despite the limitations of the recovery methods, a recent analysis of these zooarchaeological legacy collections provides insight into the provisioning strategies of the Spanish military 150 years after initial colonialism began. Spanish Fort was better provisioned than its predecessors, such as Fort San Juan, but with a limited range of domesticated livestock—only cattle and horses. The presidio may have traded with the Apalachicola community in order to diversify their diet, but butchering marks indicate that the presidio’s soldiers processed their own meat at the fort. Having learned hard lessons from earlier colonial expeditions, Spanish military colonialists minimized the outpost’s vulnerability by not relying heavily on the local Native American population, while building a transactional relationship with Apalachicola to ensure the community’s cooperation. The zooarchaeological materials from Spanish Fort also indicate that the fort was intentionally destroyed by fire, providing a glimpse of Spanish adaptive strategies as the mission of securing the inland Southeast from rival colonialism abruptly ended.     

The Role of Faith in Historical Research

The implied strategy and the history projected in the new book of Jens Bruun Kofoed, Text and History, fails to measure up to the critical principles of both theology and science established by Thomas Acquinas' centuries' old distinction between faith and reason. An apologetic intention in Kofoed's book attempts to demonstrate that the biblical history of his evangelical faith is not unreasonable. Thomas Thompson, on the other hand, thinks it is necessary to hold the line between faith and science, which St. Thomas drew some seven centuries ago. What Kofoed argues in an effort to project a history of Israel, which would be an alternative to that of the “Copenhagen school” is not science. Nor are his rules of evidence those that the world of secular history requires. Led by an apologetic rhetoric and understanding of historical argument, Kofoed's revised Århus dissertation is dominated by a critique of the “Copenhagen school,” which attempts to show that an alternative answer is not impossible. Although emphasizing the historical methods of Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche in his critique, Kofoed neglects to include in his discussion their discussions of method or, in Lemche's case, anything he has written before 1991. His understanding of their dependency on the Annales school is clearly mistaken as is his understanding of the debates about the relationship between historicity, genre and composition. Finally, his discussion of the comparative method is misleading and ill informed.     

More on the Kula: Ethnography,history, and theory

Leach, Jerry W., and Edmund Leach, eds. The Kula, New Perspectives on Massim Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. xii + 577 pp. including plates, bibliography, index. $79.50 cloth.

Macintyre, Martha. The Kula, A Bibliography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. vi + 90 pp. including author index, appendix. $19.95 cloth.     

Aggregation and aggression: The state of war in anthropological thought

Foster, Mary Lecron, and Robert A. Rubinstein, eds. Peace and War: Cross‐Cultural Perspectives. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1986. vii + 369 pp. including chapter references and index. $29.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power: Volume I: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. v + 549 pp. including chapter bibliographies and index. $59.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Shamgar‐Handelman, Lea. Israeli War Widows: Beyond the Glory of Heroism. South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1986. vii + 219 pp. including index, appendices, chapter notes, and references. $29.95 cloth.