Modernity and Matrifocality: The Feminization of Kinship?

The extensive analytical focus on how gender relations in working lives, employment, education, political engagement and public life change under modernity needs extension into a consideration of the ways in which kinship and relatedness have also been changing. This article argues that relatedness under modernity tends towards matrifocality. This is explored through looking at broad patterns of social change in kinship practices across a range of societies experiencing transitions towards modernities over the past fifty years, and at how state and NGO development and social protection programmes contribute to this matrifocal turn.     

Mineralogical and Chemical Constraints on the Provenance of Copper Age Polished Stone Axes of ‘Ljubljana Type’ from Caput Adriae

In this paper we show the results of a study concerning 42 axes, mainly discovered in the Copper Age pile dwellings of Ljubljansko barje (central Slovenia) and in the neighbouring areas of Caput Adriae. The studied shaft‐hole axes, characterized by homogeneous typology but slightly different raw materials, have been called ‘Ljubljana‐type’ axes (Lt). The raw materials show a common OIB‐like signature and metamorphic and spilitization features that recall oceanic conditions. The typological and geochemical characteristics and the very high percentage of Lt axes among the polished stone axe assemblages of Ljubljansko barje suggest that the raw material was probably gathered from one or more relatively small outcrops close to Ljubljansko barje. Similar igneous rock types outcrop in the presumably Palaeozoic diabase/shale complex (Eisenkappler Diabaszug), intruded by the northern Karawanken plutonic belt. A probable provenance from this area, particularly rich in copper ore deposit, would confirm the important role of Ljubljansko barje as a metallurgical district, as well as a strong relation between lithic raw materials and Cu cultivation districts during the Copper age.     

Nuclear Economies and Local Supply Chains in Peripheral Areas: The Case of West Cumbria

The aim of this paper is to fill the gap in data relating to local supply chains in the proximity of nuclear sites by investigating the site of Sellafield in West Cumbria, UK. Using information obtained from invoice data provided by Sellafield Ltd, the site-licenced company, and from primary research, the authors explore the relevance of nuclear procurement within the area, by evaluating levels of economic leakage and seepage resulting from suppliers’ subcontracting and work carried out locally. The study shows that the presence of a nuclear site has a crucial role for the surrounding area and for its economy. The results indicate a significant level of financial retention in the area with regard to work carried out in-house and local subcontracting at a first tier. In particular, the results identify cash flows related to second-tier suppliers located in West Cumbria, demonstrating that about a third of the total work carried out or subcontracted at the nuclear site stays in the area. These findings underline the significant impact of Sellafield on the West Cumbria economy and, more generally, provide an overview of the importance of nuclear sites for local supply chains in peripheral and remote areas.     

Speech,Gender and Power: Beyond Testimony

This article aims to unsettle some taken‐for‐granted ideas about speech and power, to argue against taking testimony ‘at face value’ without reflecting also on silence, on the forms and techniques of talk, on embodied communication, and on the complex ways in which interests are expressed and animated. It argues that treating direct testimony in public political institutions as a metric of gender inequality may be another example of the distortions that follow from an uncritical adoption of an unmarked male template of speech as universal standard. The article aims thereby to improve the way development researchers ‘hear’, and how practitioners think about ‘participation’.     

Napoleon's France: History and heritage

In 1992 a group of activists initiated a new project of citizenship aiming to give gay and lesbian couples in France the status and rights they had been denied. This project was a form of social contract also designed for heterosexual couples, whether or not they had a sexual relationship. The final version of this contract, the Pacte civil de solidarité, is now called the PACS. This article argues that the PACS activists were unable to formulate their project outside the principles of universal citizenship inherent in French republicanism. They also came to rely on the Left in power for support. The Senate rejected the PACS bill in March 1999 and again in May 1999. A final decision on the PACS bill is to be made by the National Assembly before the end of 1999.     

Migration and Changing Employment Status: A Hazard Function Analysis

The effects of different employment-status transitions on migration choices are considered from a search-theoretic perspective. A discrete-time hazard function for migration decisions is estimated on data for young males of rural origin in France. Employment-status transitions are handled as endogenous time-varying covariates. The model is estimated by distance of move. The results show that the long-distance migration hazard is significantly related to labor market variables, and, ceteris paribus, is highest among job-gainers compared to the other transition groups. The probability of contracted (long-distance) migration is found to be higher than that of speculative migration for unemployed workers, especially those who are low-educated. Evidence consistent with cumulative inertia is found for long-distance moves. Short-distance migration hazards are found to be unrelated to labor market variables (including employment-status transitions) and to display no systematic pattern of duration dependence.     

Frank Cass THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Much environment and development discourse assumes that women are the ‘natural’ constituency for conservation interventions. This article attempts to illuminate this assumption with the lens of a gendered critique of environmentalisms (technocentric, ecocentric and non-western). How do the intellectual roots of Western environmentalisms influence the positions, or non-positions, of contemporary environmentalism with regard to gender? What does research on environmental perceptions in non-Western societies imply about gender differentiation in environmental relations? The article concludes that there are no grounds for assuming an affinity between women's gender interests and those of environments and that such a view is symptomatic of the gender blind, ethnocentric and populist character of western environmentalisms. By contrast the application of gender analysis to environmental relations involves seeing women in relation to men, the disaggregation of the category of ‘women’, and an understanding of gender roles as socially and historically constructed, materially grounded and continually reformulated. The issue of how far women's gender interests and environmental interests go hand in hand leads us to pose a broader question of the degree to which environmental conservation is premissed upon social inequality.     

Feminism Spoken Here: Epistemologies for Interdisciplinary Development Research

Development studies is a field characterized by an unusual degree of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, and therefore is constantly subject both to pressures for the reproduction of disciplines as autonomous and self‐sufficient, and to an increasing steer from public funders of research for interdisciplinary work which is valued for its problem‐solving character and more apparent relevance, in an era greatly exercised by accountability. At a moment when the need to renew disciplinary interchange has intensified it is therefore instructive to consider the social relations which facilitate interdisciplinarity. This article does this through an argument that feminist cross‐disciplinary research shows how important shared values are to motivate and sustain these kinds of learning, and that an explicit focus on social justice as the core of development research can be the basis of such a renewal. If feminist interactions and solidarity provide the motivation, feminist epistemologies provide arguments for why socially engaged research is not ‘biased’, but stronger than research with narrower ideas of objectivity; why reflexivities and subjectivities are crucial to the conduct of research; and how these, and the convergence of concepts of individuals and persons favoured within different disciplines, might build the common ground required for greater disciplinary interchange.