Patterns of exchange and the social production of pigs in highland new guinea: Their relevance to questions about the origins and evolution of agriculture

In recent years, cultural anthropologists have made notable progress in understanding the bewildering variety of material exchange transactions found among the aboriginal populations of highland New Guinea. One of the major findings of this work is that competitive exchange behavior may bring in its wake alterations in agronomic practices involving an intensification of production. That intensification is primarily a product of social behavior, rather than an adaptation to climate change or population pressure, is a significant conclusion that should influence the thinking of archaeologists as they investigate past episodes of agronomic change, including the origins of agriculture.     

Constitutional Design of the Executive: Vice Presidencies in Comparative Perspective

Given the history of the institution in the U.S., it is perhaps not surprising that few democracies have adopted a vice presidency. But, why do any countries have vice presidencies? What, if any, functions do they fulfill? In this paper we examine constitutional provisions for vice presidencies in 29 presidential democracies throughout the world. Specifically, we examine the extent to which the office of the vice presidency fulfills three possible institutional purposes: succession, legislative, or executive functions. Almost all vice presidencies included in our analysis fulfill the role of successor in the event of a presidential vacancy. Of those that have additional duties, most are assigned executive functions, while a few are assigned legislative functions. On the whole, the paper provides empirical evidence that vice presidencies seem to be marginal institutions.     

Extracting sovereignty: Capital, territory, and gold mining in Tanzania

In contemporary discussions of “resource nationalism,” sovereignty is often imagined as the exclusive control of national states over internal resources in opposition to external foreign capital. In this paper, we seek to draw attention to the specifically national territorial forms of sovereignty that - rather than hindering the flow of capital - become constitutive to the accumulation of resource wealth by states and capital alike. Drawing from political geographical theorizations of sovereignty, we argue that resource sovereignty cannot be territorially circumscribed within national space and institutionally circumscribed within the state apparatus. Rather, sovereignty must be understood in relational terms to take into account the global geography of non-state actors that shape access to and control over natural resources. Specifically, we engage national-scale state sovereignty over subterranean mineral resources in the form of legal property regimes and examine the mutually constitutive set of interdependencies between mining capital and landlord states in the accumulation of resource wealth. Using Tanzania as a case study, we argue that national-scale ownership of subterranean mineral resources has been critical to attracting global flows of mining capital from colonial to contemporary times. We first examine the history of the colonial state in Tanganyika to illustrate how land and mineral rights were adjudicated through the power of the colonial state with the hopes of attracting foreign capital investment in the mining sector. We then examine contemporary efforts on the part of the independent United Republic of Tanzania to again enact legislation meant to attract foreign mining companies - and the consequences for local populations living near sites of extraction.