The Line,the Void and the Current: Iron Age Art from a Design Theory Perspective

Objects from the European Iron Age decorated with swirls and scrolls, faces and figures, and generally referred to as Early Celtic Art, can offer deep insight into later prehistoric notions of creativity. By drawing on archaeology and social anthropology, art and architectural design, this theoretical discourse investigates the design processes involved in the creation of Early Celtic Art. Rather than attempting to decipher a meaning behind decoration, this enquiry uses architectural ‘Design Theory’ to explore the implications of certain design choices. It starts with the premise that these designs are integral to the objects in order to identify different layers of complexity, innovation and emulation, and ends with wider reflections on who was creative and how. This approach, borrowed from architectural analysis, aims to open a new line of enquiry into the fascinating world of Iron Age creativity.     

„Was für Grün in der Stadt?“

Urban green space is a key subject of actual urban negotiation processes on how the city shall develop. Visions of the ideal city are reflected in the meanings currently ascribed to urban gardening. Thereby the relation between human and nature as well as between build and natural environment in the city plays a central role. Results from different Swiss cities show that allotment gardens as well as newer forms of urban gardening are oscillating between a compensatory and a complementary understanding of nature, and they equally combine the desire for pristine nature with the demand for functional green space in the city.     

Books: Notes & reviews

Australian

T. Brennan, New Community, Problems and Policies, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1973, pp. 353, $3.95.

J. E. Richardson, Patterns of Australian Federalism, Centre for Research on Federal Financial Relations, Research Monograph No. 1, ANU, Canberra, 1973, pp. 142 + x, $4.00.

Australian Women in Governments Past and Present, revised as of July, 1973, pp. 15. Survey of Women in Local Government in Australia, 3rd edn, September, 1973, pp. 60. Both compiled by A. Viola Smith, 6 Baden Road, Neutral Bay, NSW 2089.

The Government Law Newsletter (the Newsletter of the Government Law Interest Group of the Australasian Universities Law Schools Association), No. 1, August, 1970; from No. 2, March, 1972, issued twice a year. Editor: Stan Hotop, University of Sydney Law School, 173–5 Phillip St, Sydney, NSW 2000. Free.

Australian Law Librarians’ Group Newsletter, No. 1, December, 1973. Six times a year. Editor: Robert Watt, Law Reform Commission, Box 6, GPO, Sydney, NSW 2001. Free.

Non‐Australian

Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron B. Wildavsky, Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland; or, Why It's Amazing that Federal Programs Work at all, This Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Build Morals on a Foundation of Ruined Hopes. University of California Press, 1973, pp. 182 + xviii.

Dusan Sidjanski, ed., Political Decision Making Processes: studies in national, comparative and international politics, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1973, pp. 237, Dfl 27.50.

P. R. Kaim‐Caudle, Comparative Social Policy and Social Security: A Ten Country Study, Martin Robertson, 1973, pp. viii + 357, £2.25.

Prasanta K. Pattanaik, Voting and Collective Choice. Some Aspects of the Theory of Group Decision‐Making, Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. viii + 184, $9.50.

Government Publications Review: an international journal, 1 (1), Fall, 1973, quarterly, $US35 p.a. Published by SEBD Publications Inc., 380 Saw Mill River Road, Elmsford, New York 10523.

Bertell Oilman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Cambridge University Press, 1971. pp. 325 + xvi, paperback, £1.80.

L. G. Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia: An essay on the social structure and roles of Soviet intellectuals during the 1960s, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. 1973, pp. xiii + 204, $9.85.

Nancy Whittier Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, 1971, pp. xi + 319, $12.50.

Leslie R. Marchant, The Phoenix Seat: An Introductory Study of Maoism and the Chinese Communist Quest for a Paradise on Earth, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1973, pp. 276, $7.95.

F. C. Langdon, Japan's Foreign Policy, University of British Columbia Press, 1973, pp. 231 + xiv, $9.00.

Donald F. Miller, Pervasive Politics: a study of the Indian district, Melbourne Politics Monograph, 1972.

Brian Edwards, ed., Right Out—>The Labour Victory 1972, A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1973, pp. 262, $6.50.

Mahdi Elmandjra, The United Nations System: An Analysis, Faber and Faber, London, 1973, pp. 329 + annexes, $16.50.

Gerhard Mally, The European Community in Perspective, the New Europe, the United States and the World, D. C. Heath and Co., Lexington, Massachusetts, 1973, pp. xvi + 349, $11.50.     

Education for Social Change: Girls’ Secondary Schooling in Eritrea

One central pillar of the Eritrean revolution is the modernization of gender roles within Eritrean society, through education. This article, based on ethnographic style research, looks at the personal experiences of young women in Eritrean secondary schools. These girls’ journeys are discussed in terms of gender resistance, exemplifying modernity, and gender accommodation, exemplifying tradition. It is argued that these categories are not as dichotomous as claimed by the education policy agenda: in contrast, many young women strive to find a balance between the two. Ultimately, the success of the Eritrean model of the modernization of gender roles should be measured in terms of having created an environment in which women are able to strive to fulfil their aspirations.     

What is ‘needed’ to keep remembering? War‐specific communication,parental exemplar behaviour and participation in national commemorations

Given the abundance of literature on collective memory practices, there is relatively little empirical research on the socialization processes explaining the transmission of such practices. This article examines to what extent war‐specific communication and parental exemplar behaviour function as a link between the collected memories of individuals and society's collective memory. Utilizing data from an online survey conducted in 2014, we focus on participation in the activities organized on Remembrance Day and Liberation Day in the Netherlands in remembrance of the Second World War. We distinguish between public and private practices. Our findings highlight that different forms of socialization substitute for one another. Whereas communication with non‐relatives is particularly relevant for those communicating less frequently with parents about past war experiences, parental exemplar behaviour, such as participating in the two‐minute silence on Remembrance Day, plays a bigger role amongst those with lower levels of communication with either relatives or non‐relatives.     

Land,Stone, Trees,Identity, Ambition: the Building Blocks of Brochs

Brochs are impressive stone roundhouses unique to Iron Age Scotland. This paper introduces a new perspective developed from architectural analysis and drawing on new survey, fieldwork and analogies from anthropology and social history. The study of architectural design and constructional detail exposes fewer competitive elements than previously anticipated. Instead, attempts to emulate, share and communicate identities can be detected. The architectural language of the broch allows complex layers of individual preferences, local and regional traditions, and supra-regional communications to be expressed in a single house design. The proposed ‘productive households’ model moves beyond ideas of competing elites at times of stress, and invites a new debate by expanding a more complex broch concept beyond the Atlantic core.     

‘I am going,with or without you’: autonomy in Bolivian transnational migrations

Autonomy has often been seen as a precondition for achieving gender equality, yet feminist scholarship has been rather ambivalent towards it. In this article, I explore this ambivalence by drawing on the experiences of migrant women, particularly mothers, focusing on the ways in which they negotiated their mobility with their partners. By analysing women's experiences of migration within a context of multi-sited and longitudinal, itinerant ethnography, I historicise their life accounts and place them within a broader framework of social and economic structural changes. On this basis I explore the concept of autonomy, particularly in relation to the exercise of women's agency within a context of market-oriented neoliberal reforms. I also question the potential of women's autonomy for gender equality and argue that there are at least two reasons for feminist scholars to continue being ambivalent towards autonomy.     

Breaking bored – negotiating spatial boredom and masculinity in the Volvo greaser culture

In this article I discuss how the experience of boredom becomes a vital part of the narratives and practices of a group of young greasers in a peri-urban community in Sweden. The ethnographic material originates from fieldwork carried out among the local ‘Volvo greasers’, aged between 15 and 19 years, at the local youth centre and the car park in a peri-urban community in Sweden in 2010. The aim of the article is to understand how place, personhood and social relations are intertwined in the greaser culture by introducing the concept of spatial boredom, which strives to illuminate the greasers' active engagement and negotiation with the experience of boredom. In light of this, the semantics of spatial boredom – the community's geographical placement as boring, reactive rather than active, static rather than dynamic – a symbolic link to femininity, domesticity, safety, routine and hence immanence is established. The orientation towards a ‘dangerous’, masculine-coded public space is reinforcing a split between both the feminine and the masculine and the public and the private.