Fugela Feđerum in Archaeological Perspective – Eider Down as a Trade Commodity in Prehistoric Northern Europe

Abstract

Eider duck down is a raw material used in northern coastal areas. In Norway the resource has been of special importance in the archipelago of Helgeland, where there is a specialized production developed and managed by women. There, the eider duck is seen as part of the livestock. The local people build houses for them, tend their nests and look after them during brooding. The down left in the nests by the birds is gathered, dried and cleaned in a very demanding, labour-intensive process. The eiderdown is then used in down quilts and pillows. Down is known from written sources as an important trade item, particularly from the end of the Middle Ages. The increasing bourgeoisie wanted the light and warm down quilts for their beds. Already around AD 890 Othere from Hålogaland (North Norway) told King Alfred in England that the Saami paid him fugela fe?erum (feathers or/and down) in tax. However, the use of down as a raw commodity used in trade must have started earlier, something the archaeological record might reveal. In any case, pillows and quilts of feathers or down are known from high-rank burials from Late Iron Age Scandinavia and Western Europe.     

Reply to Flesher–Rick Rylance

Walter Moxon, MD, FRCP lived, practiced medicine, taught and wrote in the mid- to late- nineteenth-century Victorian England, mostly at Guy's Hospital, London. He was widely informed in the “Art of Physic,” writing on a range of issues from cerebral lateralization of articulate speech to angina pectoris. The present paper will trace briefly his contributions to the newly discovered asymmetry of articulate speech in the left frontal lobe (1866) and will in more detail trace and analyze his 1881 Croonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians on a medical shibboleth referred to as “congestion of the brain.” In a series of ingenious and rhetorically creative arguments with imaginative tropes, demonstrations, evolutionary accounts of cognition and blood metabolism for human/biped cognition, and cogent citations from the medical literature of the day, Moxon skillfully instructs his medical audience against the misleading notion of cerebral “congestion” as an underlying pathology for cognitive, motor, and sensory deficits seen in the clinic. In so doing, he provides the medical community with an in-depth glimpse at the circulatory system, its flow dynamics, and how they serve to meet the cognitive, motor, and sensory demands of upright bipedal man.     

近代民信局的寄递网络研究

近代民信局经历了由盛转衰的演变过程.通过对民信局寄递地点和范围的分析,表明其寄递网络主要呈中心城市、中等城市和城镇三个层级展开;各区域中心城市民信局的寄递网络展开的特点不同;民信局的寄递网络说明在区域内部经济联系密切的基础上,区域间的经济联系已经突破了内部束缚,呈现出日益加强的表征;民信局的寄递网络以沿海沿江一线为主干,体现出了该地区经济一体化的发展趋势.     

Lost in the Supermarket: The Corporate-Organic Foodscape and the Struggle for Food Democracy

Abstract:  The corporatization of organics has been critiqued for the concentration of ownership, as well as the ecological consequences of the long distances commodities travel between field and table. These critiques suggest a competing vision of food democracy which strives to organize the production and consumption of food at a proximate geographic scale while increasing opportunities for democratically managed cooperation between producers and consumers. This paper examines how the corporate-organic foodscape has interacted and evolved alongside competing counter movements of food democracy. Using discourse and content analysis, we examine how corporate organics incorporate messages of locally scaled food production, humble origins, and a commitment to family farms and employees, and explore some of the complexity of the corporate-organic foodscape. This paper contributes to the understanding of commodity fetishism in the corporate-organic foodscape, and speaks more generally to the need for sophisticated understandings of the complex relationship between social movement innovation and market adaptation.     

毛泽东商品经济与社会主义关系思想探微

毛泽东在商品经济与社会主义关系问题上提出了许多闪光的思想观点:商品生产的命运,最终和社会生产力的水平有密切关系;要有计划地大大发展社会主义商品生产;生产资料在我们还有一部分是商品;改革计划经济体制,扩大地方和企业的权限;区分社会主义商品生产和资本主义商品生产;价值法则是一个伟大的学校;所有企业都要利用价值规律作为经济核算的工具,等等。这些弥足珍贵的思想观点,超越了斯大林,为邓小平理论在社会主义市场经济方面的创新积累了丰富的经验。     

从北京,上海,广州等大城市形态转变的模式和过程中看中国的城市转变

新的城市和经济的发展正在改变着中国城市基本的自然形态和结构。在城市发展的过程当中,能折射出国家动态的经济,社会和政策条件的新的模式正逐渐取代了由浓厚的意识形态所形成的带有鉴别性的模式。论文提供了北京,上海和广州等大城市形态转变的模式和过程的分析。重点谈到了土地使用的专业化,交通循环和建筑的高度,规划的过程,城市的更新及房地产市场的私有化等问题。20世纪见证了,中国大城市外形和构造的戏剧性改变。中国城市国际化的趋势日趋明朗化。中国文化的独特性以及中国社会主义制度的独特性,表明了中国城市的将来仍然与众不同。     

拨子商与近代东蒙的商业圈和物流

本文以拨子商的活动为中心分析近代东蒙的商业圈和物流。拨子商出现于清中叶,拨子商的基地城市位于农牧交错带上。由于清中叶以后农业的北扩,这批基地城市也步步北移。从南到北,货流从边缘城市到牧区,甚至到外蒙。主要的运输动力是骆驼和牛,赶骆驼需要很高的技术。从北到南的主要物流是畜群,特别是羊群。羊群的行走可达8000里。拨子商兴起使得蒙古和内地的社会经济都发生了改变。     

明清时期潮州粮食供给地区及路线考

明清时期, 潮州地区由于商品经济的发展, 粮食日益不能自给, 不得不到本地区之外购买粮食。随着粮食需求的不断增大, 江西赣州, 广东雷州、琼州、高州, 福建厦门、台湾, 东南亚暹罗、越南等国先后成为潮州粮食的供给地。粮食供给地的变化, 引起贸易路线的变迁。潮州粮食贸易亦与潮州华侨出国有很大关系, 潮州的粮食贸易形成自己独特的原因和规律。     

我国农产品物流模式演进分析

从农产品流通体制由统购统销向市场化改革演变历程的考察看,中国农产品物流模式的历史性演变经过了计划经济时期农产品物流发展的起步阶段、转型期农产品物流市场化初步发展阶段以及宏观调控下以市场为主的自由流通等阶段,其发展脉络与我国经济体制改革的实践和各个时期经济发展的某些特殊条件是一致的,模式的每一次演变也都带着中国经济改革的烙印。     

Working the Waste Commodity Frontier: Metabolic Value and Informal Waste Work

Ambitions for a European “circular economy” imply waste is becoming an important “commodity frontier”. Increased recycling in Europe has been accompanied by a proliferation of informal waste work. “Southern” geographies of informal recyclers provide resources for interpreting this phenomenon but studies of a commodity frontier in urban waste have tended to focus on moments when informal waste workers are displaced by capital intensive waste management systems. I draw on concepts in world-ecology and materialist ecofeminism to explore the proliferation of informal waste workers in Barcelona and the way their (re)production produces “Metabolic Value”. Informal waste work is shown to emerge and persist as part of a commodity frontier process—where the appropriation of unpaid work from non-commodified spaces is the hallmark of how capitalism secures “Cheap Nature”. The study suggests that, rather than internalising ecological costs, recycling often rests on the appropriation of value from uncommodified spaces.