Communal Forest Management: The Honduran Resin Tappers

Natural resource tenure and economic feasibility of resource-based activities are two of the most important issues in the current debate around environmental degradation and rural poverty. While many analyses have blamed the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and government mismanagement for environmental destruction, this paper provides a case study of resin tapping in Honduras which formulates the hypotheses that common property regimes can be successful and that economic liberalization policies may be detrimental to community-level resource schemes. Over half of the 6000 farmer-resin tappers in Honduras are organized into forty-six co-operatives that market the tree sap, wood and other forest products. These activities combine the twin goals of community-based forest preservation and income generation. Established legally in 1974, the tapping groups have expanded to include a variety of organizational and technical arrangements. The two co-operatives of Villa Santa and San Juan de Ojojona demonstrate contrasting histories, ecological endowments and economic outcomes. Currently the Honduran resin tappers are facing problems over their access to forest resources, the fluctuating profitability of extractive activities and the stability of the co-operative organization. These three issues are relevant to a variety of community-based environmental activities, and the lessons of the Honduran experience can be applied to analyse the processes of environmental degradation and community response elsewhere in the Third World.     

David Hartley's psychobiological associationism and the legacy of Aristotle

The idea that there are certain "laws" of learning (similarity, contrast, contiguity) can be traced to Aristotle. He maintained that external stimuli cause small movements in the vessels to the dominant heart, the vestiges of which can be linked to one another. Aristotle's laws of learning were incorporated into the writings of Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley, men who said nothing about the physiological correlates of mental associations. This left the door open for David Hartley to combine mental associationism with the Newtonian idea that sensations can cause minute particle vibrations in the nerves. Hartley's amalgam of psychology, philosophy, and neurology was first presented in 1746, as a "trial balloon" at the end a little-known monograph on a treatment for kidney stones. It was repeated three years later in his better-known Observations on Man. In many ways, modern psychobiological connectionism can be traced back to Hartley's Conjectures of 1746, in which Aristotle's original thoughts were modified with then current ideas about functions of the mind and the nervous system.     

Godot’s Shakespeare

While the connection between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and King Lear has become something of a critical commonplace, references to other Shakespeare plays can also be found throughout. This essay traces Godot’s debt to two plays in particular. First it argues how Godot not only draws on Hamlet’s graveyard scene for macabre imagery, but how it also construes an extended meta-theatrical parody of Hamlet’s soliloquies about the contrast between acting and talking/thinking. The second half of the essay proposes a number of connections with The Tempest, and specifically with its “salvage and deformed slave” Caliban. It argues how the figure of Caliban not merely functions as a model for a colonial power-dynamic that can be seen to operate here and elsewhere in Beckett, but how Caliban is equally significant as a lyrical figure whose great speech about sleeping, waking, and dreaming informs Beckett’s play in a number of ways.     

Margaret Kennard on sparing and recovery of function: a tribute on the 100th anniversary of her birth

Margaret Kennard was an American pioneer in the experimental study of sparing and recovery of function. Her most famous experiments were performed on monkeys and apes at Yale University during the late 1930s and early 1940s. By describing the behavioral effects of brain damage on infantile, juvenile, and older primates, she drew new attention to just how important developmental status can be at the time of neural insult. Kennard also conducted experiments which showed that even adult primates can exhibit significant sparing and recovery of function, especially if brain lesions are made in stages rather than all at once. In many respects, Kennard helped launch the modern era of research on sparing and recovery of function by demonstrating that several factors in addition to lesion locus can affect post-injury performance and by recognizing that, if neural reorganization does occur, it probably takes place in spared parts of the damaged system.     

A perplexing document in the early history of Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome: Melotti's rendition of a "Lecture of Charcot" (including a complete translation from the Italian with commentary)

In 1885, Dr. Guilio Melotti published an Italian translation of a lecture on "Convulsive Tics with Coprolalia and Echolalia" given by Jean-Martin Charcot. Although this lecture often has been cited as an authoritative statement of Charcot's view, until now it has not been translated into English. The lecture presents a number of statements that appear nowhere else in Charcot's published corpus, including some that seem to contradict Charcot's other pronouncements on maladie des tics. Although the Melotti-Charcot lecture may portray Charcot's position accurately in many passages, the article most likely is a compilation from a variety of sources.