“In Dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav'n”: The Politics of Possession in Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre

Debates about the “divisibility” or “sharing” of religious sites continue to engage historians, political scientists and anthropologists. This paper assesses the issue of agency in two of the more salient critiques of religious coexistence before approaching the Holy Sepulchre, or Anastasis, as a site for investigating the way various constituencies, most significantly visiting pilgrims and resident monks, have dealt with issues of “sharing”. It contends that inter-communal antagonisms there originate with elite struggles over the possessions of places—struggles which tend to engage political actors far from the site of the conflicts rather than local communities—and concludes that, rather than accept an “identitarian politics” which assumes a profound “civilisational” attachment of cultures to religious identities, we must carefully assess the “politics of possession” which variously play out in sites of inter-communal engagement.     

Burst of the property bubble and Hong Kong’s changing land and housing policies post-1997

Momentous events have characterized the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region since its founding in 1997. Among these were drastic and repeated changes in housing and policies, shifting from one emphasizing the role of the state to one purportedly relying primarily on market forces, and then back to a more proactive stance of the state. Associated with these changes were roller-coaster movements in residential prices and housing completions. These developments took place in the context of phenomenal upheavals within and beyond Hong Kong: the Asian financial crisis and the burst of Hong Kong’s property bubble; the contestation of Hong Kong’s autonomy under “one country, two systems”; and the flooding of “hot money” consequent upon repeated rounds of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve of the United States to counteract the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the Great Recession that followed.     

Archaeological Collections, Government Warehouses, and Anxious Moderns: The Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory

This paper focuses on archaeological curation repositories and their role as more than mere storage facilities. Archaeological collections are increasingly marshaled to confront anxieties about a seemingly ‘vanishing past’ and to arrest its disappearance. In Maryland, the state has invested heavily in a ‘state-of-the-art’ facility to protect and study archaeological collections in its custody. The facility has become the proxy for the collections and a form of cultural property itself, becoming part of the ongoing process that serves to recast this portion of the state as a place rooted in the past.     

DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON CHANGES IN RURAL AREAS

The author advances an interesting and somewhat controversial argument for the dismal state of affairs in central Russia's countryside. Programs addressing problems in the countryside should focus not on reversing the tide of outmigration and agricultural employment loss, but on reducing labor intensity in agriculture and recognizing social and other realities working to the disadvantage of remote rural areas. What is needed is not expensive and unfeasible “revitalization” of the countryside, but the regulated decline of its agricultural workforce and the selective introduction of new labor-saving technologies and alternative land uses. Translated by H. L. Haslett, Leamington Spa, UK from: Evolyutsiya rasseleniya v SSSR, Chast' I (Evolution of Settlement in the USSR, Part I), G. M. Lappo, Zh. A. Zayonchkovskaya, and P. M. Polyan, eds. Moscow: Akademiya Nauk SSSR and Pol'skaya Akademiya Nauk, 1989, pp. 43-59.     

Forging Environmentalism: Justice,Livelihood and Contested Environments. Joanne Bauer,ed.

A senior Japanese authority on the Russian economy and its energy sector addresses the country's exposure to the so-called Dutch disease, suggesting that Russia did suffer from the potentially ruinous overdependence on oil and gas exports. The author argues, however, that the symptoms of the disease were actually not severe, attributing his interpretation to: (1) drastic decline of noncompetitive domestic manufacturing industries in the 1990s, which prompted a huge inflow of imports in the 2000s, but left competitive manufacturing enterprises in a position to survive; (2) extraordinary oil price increases in the 2000s, which significantly raised household and business incomes, creating augmented demand for products of domestic origin; (3) large differences between Russian and world prices of oil and gas, which functioned as subsidies for domestic manufacturing; and (4) massive intervention in foreign exchange markets by the Central Bank of Russia, which restricted the growth of imports and thus strengthened the surviving domestic manufacturing enterprises.     

Quantitative Studies of National Socialism: A Quantum: Conference Report

The authors present and compare new time series for calculating the real value of Swiss prices over the past five centuries. They analyze three different modes of price deflation using wages, consumer price indices (CPIs), and the gross domestic product (GDP), and assess the merits and limitations of each approach. The authors then examine how time series that cover long periods of time are made using Switzerland as a case study and introduce an original CPI for the years 1501-2006. The authors conclude by contrasting the different time series and proposing rough guidelines about their use.     

住宅优势度的理论与评价方法

在总结已有城市住宅价格空间分异相关理论体系的基础上,提出了住宅优势度的概念和理论,认为在城市内部,某住宅相对于其他住宅所具有的优势及其量化程度称为住宅优势度,是住宅相对优势的度量。住宅优势度决定住宅价格,住宅价格是住宅优势度的货币体现。构建了住宅优势度研究的基本框架,阐述了其假设前提,提出了其基本构成要素和综合评价体系。将该视角应用于扬州市的案例研究,结果表明其住宅优势度与住宅价格存在显著的正相关关系。证明本文构建的住宅优势度理论及其评价体系具有合理性和可行性,为城市住宅价格的构成要素与影响机理分析提供一个可供选择的新视角。