Modesty and Excellence: Gender and Sports Culture in Dutch Catholic Schooling, 1900–40

This article focuses on the construction of gendered identities in Dutch schools run by religious orders during the process of Catholic emancipation. It discusses the fragility of identity, the simultaneity of tradition and modernity, and the role that gender plays in all these interactions. Two schools in the city of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, are compared during the first half of the twentieth century: the Jesuit institution for boys, Canisius College, and the Ursuline college for girls next door, Mater Dei. At both, sport played an important role in the transmission of notions of Catholicism and gender.     

North Africa between Christians and Arabs

Vandals, Romans and Berbers. New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa. Edited by Andy H. Merrills (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), xv + 347 pp. £55.00 cloth.     

Bastard Spice or Champagne of Cinnamon? Conflicting Value Creations along Cinnamon Commodity Chains in Northern Vietnam

In upland northern Vietnam ethnic minority farmers are cultivating what some global retailers refer to as the ‘champagne of cinnamon’. However, a closer examination reveals that this spice is not ‘true cinnamon’ but cassia, with the exact species remaining uncertain. Drawing on commodity chain literature and debates over the creation of value and quality, the aims of this article are twofold. First, it investigates the making of ‘Vietnamese cinnamon’ as it moves from the hills of northern Vietnam to supermarket shelves in the global North, and the actors and livelihoods involved. Second, it explores how different actors define ‘Vietnamese cinnamon’ and infuse it with often-contradictory values. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork over a four-year period, the study finds that the state and cooperating non-government organizations tend to ignore ongoing taxonomic confusion while creating a geographical indicator to highlight the uniqueness of this commodity. Yet, concurrently, exporters and retailers in the global North focus on other distinctions as key marketing tools including remoteness, ethnicity, taste and health benefits. The article thus calls for an expanded analytical focus on competing value creation for agro-food products and on the impacts for commodity producers, in this case ethnic minority farmers in the global South.     

"The Ancient Economy": The Problem and the Fraud

Periodically since about 1860 the debate about "The Ancient Economy" has raged vehemently as oikos controversy , Bücher-Meyer debate , primitivists versus modernists or simply as the Moses Finley debate . Therefore, Hopkins rightly remarked: "The ancient economy is an academic battleground. The contestants campaign under various colours--apologists, Marxists, modernizers, primitivists Even within schools, there are sects." This still seems to be the case, although the author of this article does not belong to any school or sect but is looking for an anti-ideological controllable scientific truth. Whatever that may be it is, certainly, a critical venture where "fraud" is at stake. In 1986, by symbolic accident the year of Finley's death, he dared to start a new period in the debate and at present the controversy with all its usual tricks seems at its zenith again. Did the bell toll for the last round in this beloved controversy? After 150 years of debate, one can never be sure about that, but we will try again. The subject matter is no less important than the question "to whom belongs antiquity?" or "for what purposes does one study its history or culture?" The following article wants to introduce the debate in a few sentences, question its present relevancy as the Moses Finley debate and provoke readers into another one.