DIRECTIONS FOR DIVERSIFICATION WITH AN APPLICATION TO SASKATCHEWAN*

ABSTRACT. Traditional models of regional diversification do not capture the trade-off between stability and living standards. In this paper, we characterize regions as open activity models subjected to both productivity and price shocks. We then partially rank small diversification policies by the direction in which they point away from the current industrial structure in mean-variance space. Some general patterns emerge. In particular, diversification for regional self-sufficiency and away from regional comparative advantage may be undesirable.     

Anthropology of mutualism

What might anthropology offer to our understanding of mutualistic relations? In making sense of these interspecies interactions, which, despite some costs, are ultimately beneficial to each partner species, zoological approaches operate at the level of populations on an adaptive scale. Anthropologists bring focus on individual actors and their subjective experiences within far more condensed temporospatial ethnographic timescales. This guest editorial brings a multispecies anthropological approach into dialogue with zoological understandings of mutualism. It examines the practical and theoretical potential of mutuality to make sense of relations of domestication. Materialistic profit and market-oriented forms of engagement in the domestic sphere are often detrimental to more-than-human communities. The persistence of different kinds of mutual co-existences, as shown in different forms of care of orphaned animals in Mongolia, Pakistan and Australia, offers an alternative and perhaps more hopeful model of more-than-human engagement in the Anthropocene.     

Mutualism on Australian heritage breed farms

For millennia, humans and domesticated animals have lived interdependently. In return for shelter, feed and care, animals have provided people with diverse material and symbolic resources within high-stakes mutualistic relationships. However, mutualisms are always susceptible to ‘cheaters’, where one partner enjoys the benefits without providing adequate reciprocation. When considering mutualisms on an ethnographic scale, industrial agriculture's reduction of animals to unidimensional commodities can be seen to constitute such cheating. By analyzing the practices of nourishment, procreation and protection on Australian heritage breed farms, where breed diversity and convivial interspecies reciprocity are valued above profit, this essay offers a case study of a more nuanced mutualism within the domestication nexus. Since partners in a mutualistic relationship tend to face a shared fate, protecting the integrity of these relationships is critical in an era where climate change and ecosystem decline are both hastened by and detrimental to agriculture.     

Religious Transformations in the Middle Ages: Towards a New Archaeological Agenda

UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS CHANGE between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Reformation forms one of the cornerstones of medieval archaeology, but has been riven by period, denominational, and geographical divisions. This paper lays the groundwork for a fundamental rethink of archaeological approaches to medieval religions, by adopting an holistic framework that places Christian, pagan, Islamic and Jewish case studies of religious transformation in a long-term, cross-cultural perspective. Focused around the analytical themes of ‘hybridity and resilience’ and ‘tempo and trajectories’, our approach shifts attention away from the singularities of national narratives of religious conversion, towards a deeper understanding of how religious beliefs, practices and identity were renegotiated by medieval people in their daily lives.     

A Reappraisal of Dinas Powys: Local Exchange and Specialized Livestock Production in 5th- to 7th-century Wales

RESULTS OF THE analysis of a previously unstudied group of animal bone from Dinas Powys are tested against the original report and subsequent interpretations. Assumptions inherent in the initial sampling policy and analysis are discussed. The present interpretation explores the concept of social production in early medieval Wales.     

The Colonial History of the 1905 Aliens Act

The passing of the Aliens Act of 1905 was a defining moment in British immigration law and history. This article investigates the influence of settler-colonial immigration restriction laws on the passing of the Act, and questions the current historiographical inclination to focus solely on the influence of American immigration restriction laws. By analysing the trajectory of contemporary public debates, the evidence given to the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration (1902–03) and the political discussion on various bills, the article shows that the existence of colonial immigration restriction laws played an important role in the formulation and passing of the 1905 Aliens Act. Putting the Act in this larger context highlights its colonial derivation, but also its uniqueness: the British Act's defence of asylum, the exception extended to those landing as political and religious refugees, has no parallel in either early US law or any of the settler-colonial laws.