Vehicle Writings in an Iranian Context: The Interplay of Habitus and Field

The main objective of this paper is to problematize writings on vehicles in an Iranian context. Previous studies have indicated that vehicle stickers can be employed to express emotions and social status, political views, ideology and identity, and religious beliefs. However, very little has been done on this discursive practice in Iran. This study is the result of the content analysis of 122 vehicle writings collected from April 2011 to March 2012. This paper will draw on six of the most frequent themes: religion, humor, playing pessimism, didactic expressions, ethnic-geographic identification, and love. Employing Bourdieu's conceptual frameworks of “habitus,” “field,” and “doxa,” and Heath and Street's social practice perspective on literacy, it will be argued that vehicle writings in this study can be regarded as situated literacy practices reflecting the dominant undisputed discourses in the context, but at the same time displaying the dynamic interplay of power relations, the relationship of cultural structures and individual customized versions of those structures in vehicle writings.     

A combined visual-geochemical approach to establishing provenance for pegmatite quartz artifacts

A technique for establishing source provenance for pegmatite quartz artifacts was developed using a quarry sample from the Churchill River basin of northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) was used to quantify Ti, Ge, Th, and U trace element concentrations and Pb isotope ratios, coupled with qualitative visual characteristics to distinguish between pegmatite quartz from different archaeologically exploited sources in the Churchill River basin region. The technique was also applied to a small sample of quartz artifacts recovered from sites in and around the study area in a preliminary attempt to assign or rule out raw material provenance to characterized sources.     

The Iranian Economy in the Twentieth Century: A Global Perspective

This paper examines the transformation of the Iranian economy through the twentieth century within a global context. At the start of that century, the Iranian economy had long remained stagnant, poor, and largely agrarian, with a marginal role in the world economy. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Iran had transformed into a complex and relatively large economy with important consequences for the economies of the Middle East and other parts of the world. While the initial conditions and the evolution of domestic institutions and resources played major roles in the pace and nature of that transformation, relations with the rest of the world had crucial influences as well. This paper focuses on the latter forces, while taking account of their interactions with domestic factors in shaping the particular form of economic development in Iran. We study the ways in which the development of the Iranian economy has been affected by international price movements and by the ebbs and flows of trade, investment, and economic growth in the rest of the world. In considering these effects, we also analyze the role of domestic political economy factors and policies in enhancing or hindering the ability of domestic producers to respond to external challenges and opportunities.     

Integrating the Internet into the Arabic Curriculum

The increasing scope of the Internet into all spheres of life has become an added burden for educators, requiring that they incorporate Internet use into the school curriculum. Exploiting the Internet to support the educational process presents an opportunity as well as a challenge. A plan to support the Arabic curriculum has been presented at the Al‐Bayan Bilingual School. Its potential success and adoption by other schools represents an opportunity for improving the educational process in Kuwait.     

Provenance of prehistoric obsidian artefacts from Kul Tepe,northwestern Iran using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis

Analysis by X-ray fluorescence of 53 obsidian artifacts the main source of obsidian for the workshops in Kul Tepe was Syunik but obsidian sources as far as west as the Lake Van region (Nemrut Da? and Meydan Da?) and as far north as Gutansar were also utilized. These new results indicate a broad network of trade and exchange.     

The Effects of a Campaign on Awareness and Participation Among Local Youth at the Lenggong Valley World Heritage Site,Malaysia

The capacity of a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site (WHS) to sustain its designated criteria into the future is a function of how valuable local residents perceive the WHS to be, and how motivated they are to contribute toward efforts to maintain its status. In June 2012, Malaysia’s Lenggong Valley became a WHS. We investigate the effectiveness of a campaign targeting young local residents to increase their awareness of the importance of preserving the heritage of Lenggong. We undertook a questionnaire — designed to assess participants’ awareness of the value of the WHS and their willingness to participate in efforts to maintain the WHS — aimed at students from all three secondary schools in Lenggong before and after the campaign. In all, 175 completed questionnaires were analysed: the data revealed that the campaign had a significant effect on improving participants’ awareness of the value of the WHS and on improving their willingness to participate in WHS conservation activities.     

In Search of a Kurdish Novel that Tells Us Who the Kurds Are

Despite the fact that during the 1930s some Kurdish novels were published in the former Soviet Union, it was only towards the end of the twentieth century that this literary genre became an established literary tradition among the Kurds. Due to various political factors, the Kurdish novel has not been identified with any nation-state. In fact, the concept of the Kurdish novel refers to all such literature written in Kurdish, regardless of different orthographies and dialects. Alongside the published novels in Kurdish, there have been some Kurdish writers who have written their novels in other languages. This article aims to look for a novel that contributes to the representation of the Kurds and their identity and political condition.     

The World of Kurdish Women's Novels

The Kurdish novel emerged in 1935 and, towards the end of the twentieth century, established itself as a literary genre with a significant quantity and quality. However, until the last decade of the previous century the Kurdish novel was entirely dominated by Kurdish men and there is no single novel written by a Kurdish woman. During recent years, however, Kurdish women novelists have contributed to the development of this genre. This article aims to assess Kurdish women's novel-writing and, through analyzing and discussing their style and themes, tries to find out their main characteristic generic features. An attempt is made to see if there are thematic and stylistic differences between Kurdish novels written by the women and their male counterparts.     

A human-centered GIS approach to modeling mobility on southern Baffin Island,Nunavut, Canada

Southern Baffin Island has been occupied for several millennia, but its enormous size, coupled with scarcity of identified inland archaeological sites that can be confidently linked to coastal occupations, makes modeling ancient seasonal mobility across the region through traditional cost-surface least-cost pathway approaches impractical. We present a method that combines weighted multi-criteria cost surface analysis with a watershed function to create a “mobility-shed” of non-winter travel pathways covering the study area. We evaluate the predictive utility of the resulting pathways for future archaeological survey by assessing their spatial relationships to known archaeological sites. The results of this comparison suggest that elevation and land cover criteria should be augmented with ethnographic and resource availability data to model mobility in this region.