Gender,households and reintegration: everyday lives of returned migrant women in rural northern Ghana

Since the late 1990s, migration of single women from the rural north to the urban south in Ghana has been making up a growing share of migrant streams. While the livelihood strategies of these migrant women in their southern destinations have been recently examined, the experience of reintegration for those who return to their place of origin has rarely been studied. Drawing on qualitative research with migrant women, returned migrant women (RMW) and their family members, this study examines everyday reintegration experiences of RMW within their households in a rural Dagomba community in Northern Region, Ghana. We conceptualise the household as an arena of everyday life wherein RMW exercise agency to learn to generate livelihoods that support their own as well as household members’ joint well-being. We combine this conceptualisation of household with feminist scholars’ recognition of gender as situated process. Our conceptualisation makes it possible to illuminate gender dynamics around the everyday repetitive decision-making acts that constitute livelihood generation as performed by RMW within specific intra-household dynamics in the context of reintegration in the situated community. Through the examination of the diverse and contradictory ways in which RMW exercise agency in making decisions about livelihood strategies within their households in the studied community, we show how the everyday repetitive acts of RMW contribute to micro-transformations of a situated gender ideology.     

A Reconsideration of the Construction Period of the Cruciform Terraces and the Elevated Causeways in the Angkor Monuments,Based on the Magnetic Susceptibility of the Sandstone Blocks*

In this paper, the construction period of the cruciform terraces with columns and the elevated causeways in the Angkor monuments of Cambodia is reconsidered, based on the results of our investigation of magnetic susceptibility and other characteristics of sandstone blocks. From an art‐historical point of view, they are generally considered as modifications in the post‐Bayon style period—the period during the reign of Jayavarman VIII (1243–95 ce ) or later. However, from a lithological point of view, the average magnetic susceptibilities of the sandstone blocks in the cruciform terraces with columns and the elevated causeways are consistent with the rest of the monument. In addition, the characteristics of the sandstone blocks in the cruciform terraces, such as their shape, the orientation of the bedding plane and the stacking method, suggest that they were constructed in the same period as the rest of the monument.     

Near-surface imaging of a buried foundation in the Western Desert,Egypt, using space-borne and ground penetrating radar

ALOS/PALSAR L-band full polarimetric data have been used to detect and characterize a well-defined geometric target hidden under sand deposits in the Western Desert of Egypt. This buried object is rectangular in shape with very straight boundaries and encloses an area of 500 m². Inside the rectangular area there is a perfectly circular feature of approximately 53 m² area. High and medium resolution optical satellite images (WorldView-2, ALOS/AVNIR-2) and field investigation confirm that the topography of the study area is relatively flat and completely covered by dry sand. The electromagnetic wave scattering behavior of the detected buried object was measured by decomposing the scattering matrix of ALOS/PALSAR full polarimetric data into Entropy-Alpha (H/α) and Freeman and Durden decompositions. Furthermore, a combination of unsupervised classification algorithms and Constant False-Alarm Rate (CFAR) edge detection was performed on the polarimetric data which revealed a well-defined geometric shape with straight borders. These borders have high α angles with low entropy, which physically means double bounce scattering mechanism with low randomness and is very similar to that of an urban scatterer, indicating that the detected target might be a buried wall-like foundation of a man-made structure. Moreover, 28 ground penetrating radar (GPR) profiles were acquired using a 270 MHz shielded antenna to validate the satellite radar remote sensing results. The GPR profiles reveal very clear hyperbolic shapes at 1.5 m depth with one of them showing a large hyperbolic shape-like structure, which might indicate the presence of a buried foundation. Thus the site might have significance to archaeological studies of the Western Desert, particularly previous human occupation and the sources of water for such habitation.     

Implications of Thrown-Out Boulders for Earthquake Shaking

In the source areas of some large shallow earthquakes, we have found many dislodged boulders struck by severe ground shaking. Some boulders were located at quite distances from the former sockets, which remained undisturbed with surrounding clear edges. This fact indicates the possibility that vertically upward seismic acceleration exceeded the earth's gravity (1g). This phenomenon of upthrown boulders is investigated herein by examining the effects of waves, which emanate deep in the ground due to an earthquake, propagate through the ground and boulder, and reflect back to the ground, involving a variety of their interaction. An elastic dynamic analysis is carried out on the basis of a one-dimensional continuum model consisting of the ground and boulder. It is subjected to the input of the Ricker wave, which is intended to simulate an earthquake-generated wave, emanating from the bottom of the model ground. The upthrow of a boulder is taken to occur when the dynamic response at the bottom of the boulder satisfies certain conditions. It turns out that the possibility of upthrow occurrence is high when the period of the Ricker wave coincides with the fundamental period of the ground vibration. It leads to the conclusion that the upthrow takes place due to resonance in the response of the system of the ground and boulder to the external wave input. The upthrow possibility increases as the input acceleration increases. Trial is made of predicting the maximum acceleration and velocity of an earthquake, based on this consideration of the up throw phenomenon.     

Migration,Frictional Unemployment,and Welfare‐Improving Labor Policies*

Abstract. Studies have suggested that there exists job search and recruiting friction in urban areas. This paper constructs a two‐sector (rural and urban) model involving this factor and investigates how it affects migration and what the optimal policies should be. An analysis shows that frictional urban unemployment brings about intersector wage differentials and that an economy almost always has distortion in the absence of government intervention. Tax and subsidy policies that remove the distortion are explored. Setting urban wages appropriately is also shown to attain the optimum. Finally, we explore the criterion to judge whether changing urban wages as a policy, such as the minimum wage law, enhances social welfare.     

日本高等教育的现状和课题

我今天报告的题目是《日本高等教育的现状和课题》,我想从两个方面来谈。     

Archaeogenetic study of prehistoric rice remains from Thailand and India: evidence of early <Emphasis Type="Italic">japonica</Emphasis> in South and Southeast Asia

We report a successful extraction and sequencing of ancient DNA from carbonized rice grains (Oryza sativa) from six archaeological sites, including two from India and four from Thailand, ranging in age from ca. 2500 to 1500 BP. In total, 221 archaeological grains were processed by PCR amplification and primary-targeted fragments were sequenced for comparison with modern sequences generated from 112 modern rice populations, including crop and wild varieties. Our results include the genetic sequences from both the chloroplast and the nuclear genomes, based on four markers from the chloroplast and six from the nuclear genome. These markers allow differentiation of indica rice from japonica rice, the two major subspecies of Asian rice (O. sativa) considered to have separate geographical origins. One nuclear marker differentiates tropical and temperate forms of subspecies japonica. Other markers relate to phenotypic variation selected for under domestication, such as non-shattering, grain stickiness (waxy starch) and pericarp colour. Recovery and identification of sequences from nuclear markers was generally poor, whereas recovery of chloroplast sequences was successful, with at least one of four markers recovered in 61 % of archaeological grains. This allowed for successful differentiation of indica or japonica subspecies variety, with japonica identified in all the Thai material and a mixture of indica and japonica chloroplasts in the two Indian assemblages. Rice subspecies was also assessed through conventional archaeobotanical methods relying on grain metrics, based on measurements from 13 modern populations and 499 archaeological grains. Grain metrics also suggest a predominance of japonica-type grains in the Southeast Asian sites and a mixture of japonica and indica in the Indian sites with indica in the minority. The similar results of grain metrics and ancient DNA (aDNA) affirm that grain measurements have some degree of reliability in rice subspecies identification. The study also highlights the great potential of ancient DNA recovery from archaeological rice. The data generated in the present study adds support to the model of rice evolution that includes hybridization between japonica and proto-indica.     

Consilience of genetics and archaeobotany in the entangled history of rice

Major leaps forward in understanding rice both in genetics and archaeology have taken place in the past decade or so—with the publication of full draft genomes for indica and japonica rice, on the one hand, and with the spread of systematic flotation and increased recovery of archaeological spikelet bases and other rice remains on early sites in China, India and Southeast Asia. This paper will sketch a framework that coherently integrates the evidence from these burgeoning fields. This framework implies a reticulate framework in the phylogeny of early cultivated rice, with multiple starts of cultivation (two is perhaps not enough) but with the key consolidations of adaptations that must have been spread through hybridisation and therefore long-distance cultural contacts. Archaeobotanical evidence allows us to document the gradual evolutionary process of domestication through rice spikelet bases and grain size change. Separate trends in grain size change can be identified in India and China. The earliest centre of rice domestication was in the Yangtze basin of China, but a largely separate trajectory into rice cultivation can be traced in the Ganges plains of India. Intriguingly, contact-induced hybridisation is indicated for the early development of indica in northern India, ca. 2000 BC. An updated synthesis of the interwoven patterns of the spread of various rice varieties throughout Asia and to Madagascar can be suggested in which rice reached most of its historical range of important cultivation by the Iron Age.