APPALACHIAN POLICY, THE CORPORATE STATE, AND AMERICAN VALUES: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE

This paper explores the historical interplay of Appalachia and America over the past hundred years. The focus is on questions of culture and ideology, policy and values as these have been constituted in the development of our “corporate state” and its penetration and integration of the region. A careful examination of Henry Shapiro's Appalachia on our Mind brings to the surface many of the assumptions and values generally underlying the social and public policies binding the nation and the region. Ideological aspects in the genesis of the region as a social problem receive considerable attention. It becomes apparent that understanding Appalachia hinges on critical, historical perspectives on modern America: the liberal tradition, the technological world-view, and the politicized economy of the corporate state. The notion that “time stood still” in Appalachia (the static image) has developed in ways that deflect or obscure comprehension of the region's particular form of modernization.     

‘WAC-y’ Reflections: Perspectives from the 2007 Stanford General Code of Ethics Meeting

Long-time WAC member Jill Reid sat in on days two and three of the meetings at Stanford. For her, the greatest value of the meeting came in the exposure to many different perspectives and the opportunity to reflect on the way archaeology is done in her own work situation. Jill cautions the committee not to replace familiar or widely used terms with others that may create confusion or require explanation. Based on her experiences in Australia, she discusses a situation where deference to cultural heritage laws creates ethical dilemmas and promotes injustice and hopes that whatever process is outlined will be able to take such complexities into account.     

Border crossings: new approaches to the Irish border

This paper explores and extends recent work on the Irish border that has sought to redress the relative lack of attention to the social, economic and cultural dimensions of the border in contrast to its intense political symbolism. In particular it addresses the theme of border crossing as a way to consider the border in terms of its everyday dimensions and in terms of questions of conventional and reconfigured categories of identity shaped by borderland life. The first section of the paper outlines recent approaches to the Irish border and their relationships to the field of border studies. The second section uses new research material to explore the ways in which the border was experienced on the ground in the lives of those most directly subject to its changing nature over the course of the twentieth century. The final part of the paper addresses recent suggestions that those experiences may form the basis of new cross-border and cross-community ‘border identities’. The term ‘border crossing’ in the paper's title thus stands both for the issue of physically crossing the border whose difficulties and effects have been central to the lives of those who have lived near the border, and for recent arguments that shared experiences of the impact of the border may be the basis for new senses of identity and commonality that imaginatively cross the borders of old categories of religion, culture and political affiliation. Recent efforts to reconceptualise border identities are emerging within a context still dominated by more polarised perspectives on identity and history, but they represent one significant strand of engagement with the Irish border. They suggest possibilities for forms of border identities that co-exist with, run counter to or cross cut old categories of division and difference.     

Possible isotopic fractionation of argon in source obsidians and archeological artifacts from Kulkuletti, Ethiopia

Despite uniform geochemistry ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar ages of 0.6, 1.25, and 1.3 Ma on obsidians from a source flow (Worja) and from archeological artifacts at the sites of Kulkuletti (near Gademotta, Ethiopia) have been interpreted to suggest that they derive from different source flows of different ages. A further suggestion is that the magmatic source of the obsidian flows was chemically homogeneous between 1.3 Ma and 0.6 Ma. Chemical analysis of these obsidians indeed suggests that they derive from a single flow. Reexamination of the argon isotopic data reveals that argon isotopes may have been fractionated within the flow, so that the assumption of an atmospheric ⁴⁰Ar/³⁶Ar ratio of 295.5 is inappropriate to use for computing ages. Three groups of data are apparent, and internally all yield ages near 1.3 Ma if the intercept value for ⁴⁰Ar/³⁶Ar from an isotope correlation plot is used for computation instead of using the atmospheric ratio. The Soret thermal diffusion effect provides a possible mechanism of fractionation of argon within the obsidian flow that is of approximately the right magnitude to explain the observations by in-diffusion of already fractionated atmospheric argon.