The economic impact of the Australia–US free trade agreement

The Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) came into effect in 2005. It was the second preferential trade agreement that Australia signed, after its agreement with Singapore, and marked a departure from the primacy of Australia's previous trade policy of unilateral and multilateral trade liberalisation toward preferential liberalisation. This paper assesses the economic effects of AUSFTA by applying the Productivity Commission's gravity model of trade from its Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements review. The evidence reveals AUSFTA resulted in a fall in Australian and US trade with the rest of the world—that the agreement led to trade diversion. Estimates also show that AUSFTA is associated with a reduction in trade between Australia and the United States.     

Middle Bronze Age Arsenical Copper Alloys in Southern Portugal

In the Iberian Peninsula, the copper metallurgy from the Chalcolithic to the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) was mostly characterized by low arsenic contents. A collection of 53 MBA artefacts from southern Portugal was analysed by micro‐EDXRF, optical microscopy, SEM–EDS and Vickers to investigate the metal composition and manufacture. No technological distinction was found between artefacts from domestic and funerary contexts, which were radiocarbon‐dated to 2000–1500 cal bc . The arsenic contents of almost 100 MBA artefacts from this region, including the above‐mentioned set, have a Gaussian distribution with a high average (3.9 wt% As). Possible explanations are discussed for this distinctive metallurgy at the south‐western end of the Iberian Peninsula.     

Women in prison: Ethnographic reflections on gender and the carceral state

The criminal justice system is increasingly becoming the subject of national dialogue throughout the United States due to the sheer number of people it impacts: according to the Department of Justice, nearly 7 million, or 1 in 35, U.S. residents are under some form of correctional control. The four books reviewed in this essay derive their findings from ethnographic methods that offer deep insights into the carceral state’s everyday operations in individual women’s lives, while raising profound theoretical and practical questions about gender and governance. We engage with these texts from unique situated standpoints as insider-outsiders with intimate knowledge of the U.S. criminal justice system gleaned from our respective lived experiences, services provision work, and research with currently and formerly incarcerated Wyoming women.     

Contemporary Irish theatre,the new Playboy controversy,and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the economic crisis on contemporary Irish theatre. More specifically, I contend that the legal controversy surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s second production of Playboy of the Western World: A New Version in 2008 provides a case study of how professional theatre productions that dramatised stories of immigrant empowerment during the Irish economic boom were profoundly inhibited by the bust that followed. Their collaborative version of the new Playboy was widely regarded as Ireland’s most successful intercultural play and a commercial success when it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2007. The subsequent breakdown in their relationship and ensuing legal dispute is more symptomatic of Celtic Tiger Ireland in economic collapse, I suggest, than the content of the play itself, or most other productions mounted in the period. I argue that this dispute did not simply reflect but also reinforced the social effects of the economic crisis, through its prolonged litigation, enormous expense, and especially the missed opportunity that it represented to position the multicultural and migrant themed Playboy within the Irish theatrical mainstream. More broadly, I suggest that the economic crisis has been marked by the disappearance of immigrants from the professional Irish stage, a void which was only partially filled by community theatre productions. A case in point is Adigun and Arambe’s most recent adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), a play which I positively appraise as an example of successful “intercultural re-appropriation”.     

维新之艰难兮，公缔其始--纪念李端棻上《请推广学校折》一百二十周年

1896年,李端棻上《推广学校折》,面对当时我国“时事多艰,需才孔亟”的现状,通观全局,统筹兼顾,进行了切中时弊的分析,主张“自京师以及各省府州县皆设学堂”;提出了一整套富有革新意义而又切实可行的发展新教育的方案,而且为光绪帝采纳,成为戊戌维新的主要内容之一,并较快地付诸实行,推动了我国教育走向近代化。     

江苏邳州梁王城遗址西周墓地出土人骨研究

江苏邳州梁王城遗址西周墓地出土了67例西周人骨,对其性别、年龄、人口寿命、体质类型、身高情况的分析特别是对颅骨形态特征的研究表明,梁王城西周组居民属于蒙古人种,具有中颅型结合高颅、狭颅的特点,同时具有狭额、高眶、阔鼻、正颌的面部特征,并且具有长狭的下颌。梁王城西周组居民的颅型与现代亚洲蒙古人种的东亚类型最为接近;面部特征与东亚类型、北亚类型比较接近;体质形态与河南、陕西、甘肃、青海出土的同时代人骨存在一定差异,但这种差异小于梁王城西周组与梁王城大汶口组、殷墟中小墓III组、滕州前掌大B组之间的差异。     

江苏淮安王庄村汉墓群发掘简报

2013年淮安市博物馆发掘淮安王庄村汉墓群,共清理汉墓97座。墓葬形制多样,排列有序,共同位于一大型土墩之下,与淮安地区传统族葬墓有明显的区别。墓葬随葬器物丰富多样,器物组合时代特征明确。从出土器物和墓葬形制及排列情况分析,墓葬时代在西汉早期至东汉时期,墓葬之间在年代上有明显的承继关系,是一处大型汉代土墩墓。该墓地的发掘为研究淮安乃至苏北地区汉代墓葬特别是汉代土墩墓类型提供了极其重要的新材料。     

Sugar Consumption,Dental Health and Foodways in Late Medieval Iin Hamina and Early Modern Oulu,Northern Finland

This article examines the modernization of northern Finnish food culture, especially in 17th- and 18th-century urban Oulu, by applying the methods of archaeology and history research. During the 17th century, the food culture was still quite conservative. Coffee, sugar, wheat flour, and fruit began entering the diet of affluent northern Finnish people from the 18th century onwards. The food culture of Oulu inhabitants is studied by comparing dental material retrieved from Oulu Cathedral graveyard to data obtained from historical document sources. A comparison point to the early modern bone material of Oulu is provided by late Middle Ages material from Ii, which lies north of Oulu on the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia. Carbohydrate consumption is related to many dental conditions, such as caries and calculus, which can be traced in archaeological human skeletal remains. The diets of males and females, as well as the diets of adults and children, are compared, in order to retrieve information on the emerging consumption of sugar in different groups, such as gender and age groups. The relationship between carbohydrate consumption and class identity in northern Finland is discussed.     

How clothing design and cultural industries refashioned frontier masculinities: a historical geography of Western wear

Gendered subjectivities emerge historically and geographically, not only in situ, within an ‘authentic’ origin period or site, but through later retrospective commodifications and fantastical popular culture depictions. This article traces the masculine identity of the cowboy as commodified and performed through clothing. The cowboy emerged from colonial origins as a model and myth of frontier masculinity: the ‘rugged outdoor type’. But it was then formularized and stylized when subject to popular culture diffusion, and as accompanying clothing design evolved. Through clothing – advertised by metropolitan manufacturers and consumed across America and beyond – an archetypal, sexualized cowboy ‘look’ thus emerged. The author traces a historical geography of cowboy masculinities in clothing design, from early ‘frontier garments for the outdoor man’ to later Western-wear ‘for that long, lean look’. Related constructions of femininity are also considered, after women's Western-wear clothing lines were produced in the 1950s. To illustrate, I draw on archival brochures, catalogs, and advertising materials from the 1920s to 1970s, as well as discuss the material design of the clothes themselves. I focus especially on the Western snap shirt – an apparel item never actually worn on the nineteenth-century colonial frontier, but that became an ‘essential’ element of the cowboy look, and a vehicle for masculine appearance. Western-wear epitomizes how gendered subject positions are visually constituted in relational fashion via bodies, materials, media, and imagined geographies.     

Government,Business and Lobbyists: The Politics of Palm Oil in US–Malaysia Relations

This paper reviews how information was utilised by the disputing parties made up of producers and consumer interests in seeking and opposing the imposition of tariff and non-tariff barriers relating to the entry of palm oil into the US market. Information was used in a variety of ways to mould public opinion and influence official US trade policy. Producers, with the support of the Government of Malaysia, countered US efforts by mounting an information-based counter-campaign. This study examines how US-based opponents to the importation of oil palm used information to influence consumer opinion and governmental decision-makers. It goes on to describe countermeasures taken by Malaysian producers. These latter measures included counter-arguments challenging spurious claims made by US-based groups. The paper also reviews the role played, and the positions taken by the US and Malaysian governments. Malaysia, as one of the world's leading exporter of palm oil, reacted to preserve and protect the interests of various stakeholders in the palm oil industry. Measures taken included greater R&D effort, stronger trade promotion and countering spurious information. This study demonstrates how information was used by disputing parties to shape consumer opinion and develop a case for policy intervention by the respective governments.