JUST WAIT UNTIL THERE'S A DROUGHT: MEDIATING ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES FOR URBAN GROWTH

Pro-development water managers from a southern Californian jurisdiction secured voter approval for importing water supplies by mediating a six year drought. Through reorganized water management structures, unsustainable technological practices, and “crisis” discourses, water managers overcame residents' historic resistance to imported water by defining it as insurance against a “natural” emergency, not a social mechanism for growth. The research suggests how the environmental crisis can advance development-oriented state agencies' hegemony. Given the otherwise general advocacy of environmentalism and “slow-growth in the empirical setting, water managers” success in overturning sustainable water development regimes reveals potential contradictions within the “environmentalist” landscape.     

Ancestral pueblo population aggregation and abandonment in the North American Southwest

After over a century of archaeological research in the American Southwest, questions focusing on population aggregation and abandonment continue to preoccupy much of Pueblo archaeology. This article presents a historical overview of the present range of explanatory approaches to these two processes, with a primary focus on population aggregation in those regions occupied by historic and prehistoric Pueblo peoples. We stress the necessarily complementary nature of most of these explanations of residential abandonment and aggregation. Case studies from the northern Southwest illustrate the continuous nature of these processes across time and space. We suggest that additional explanatory potential will be gained by the use of well-defined theoretical units to frame our current approaches. We extend the use of the local community concept as a theoretical unit of organization that, along with explicit archaeological correlates, should help advance our research into population aggregation and abandonment in this and other regions of the world.     

Traditions and transitions: teenagers' perceptions of parading in Belfast

The purpose of this article is to explore and illuminate teenagers' experiences of, and attitudes to, parades in Belfast. The research draws on responses from 125 teenagers located in interface areas (areas where Catholics and Protestants live side by side but apart) to government supported attempts to rebrand Orangefest (traditional parade associated with Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist community) and St Patrick's Day (traditional parade associated with Catholic/Nationalist/Republican community) as all-inclusive community events. For the most part, young people access these parades in pre-existing, single identity peer groups and view these parades as either inclusive or exclusive calling into question the extent to which Belfast's city centre can be viewed as shared space.     

Lorenz Heister and the challenge of trepanation: a neurosurgical case study from the 18th century

In the 18th century, medical practice was essentially based on communication. Cranial trepanation, however, was usually performed on an unconscious person. Here the dialogue ceased. It was the only operation which had to be attempted without the positive consent of the patient. Thus trepanation challenged the surgeon's skill not only with its intricate surgical practice, but also with its unusual social setting. The present paper illustrates possible ways out of the "trap of trepanation" by interweaving two points of view. On the one hand, a general account is given on the basis of surgical publications written by Lorenz Heister and his contemporaries. On the other, the unpublished sources of the Heister correspondence serve to reconstruct the case of Heinrich Wilhelm Bachmann, a German merchant who fell victim to a traffic accident and underwent trepanation in 1753. The case study shows how the physician in charge counterbalanced the patient's inability to communicate by strengthening the remaining network of professionals, and ultimately confirming his decisions by use of the post-mortem.