Tales of the Unexpected: Exploring Car Boot Sales as Marginal Spaces of Contemporary Consumption

Marginal and/or resistant consumption practices have been neglected in current geographical debates on consumption and retailing. This has resulted in partial and skewed theorizations of exchange within contemporary consumption. Consumption spaces such as car boot sales represent sites in which the conventions of the marketplace are suspended or abandoned, and replaced by forms of sourcing, commodity circulation, transaction codes, pricing mechanisms and value quite different from those which typify more conventional retail malls and department stores. Drawing on the anthropological literature on traditional and peasant markets, we argue that exchange within the car boot sale is socially, culturally and geographically embedded and we emphasize the intrinsic importance of fun and sociality to such activities. Marginal spaces such as the car boot sale offer both some important clues into the potential for rethinking marketplace dynamics, notably with respect to our understandings of value, and some intriguing possibilities for consumer politics.     

农村土地流转的空间差异及成因分析——以陕西关中三县为例

以西安市长安区、渭南市澄城县、宝鸡市岐山县为考察点,采用问卷调查法和SPSS软件对三县土地流转现状进行实证分析,以查明不同区域土地流转差异情况和造成土地流转差异的影响因素。结果表明,由于经济发展水平不同,三县区土地流转达成比例相差较大,流转规模、流转方式有很大不同,流转价格更是有较大差别,经济发达地区有较强的土地"非粮化"现象,土地流转更接近市场行为。非农收入水平、农户的受教育程度、各类土地流转中介和管理机构的完善程度、农户的社会保障程度等对土地流转有显著影响,且影响方式均为正向,并且对流出率的影响超过对流入率的影响。     

Reply to Flesher–Rick Rylance

Walter Moxon, MD, FRCP lived, practiced medicine, taught and wrote in the mid- to late- nineteenth-century Victorian England, mostly at Guy's Hospital, London. He was widely informed in the “Art of Physic,” writing on a range of issues from cerebral lateralization of articulate speech to angina pectoris. The present paper will trace briefly his contributions to the newly discovered asymmetry of articulate speech in the left frontal lobe (1866) and will in more detail trace and analyze his 1881 Croonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians on a medical shibboleth referred to as “congestion of the brain.” In a series of ingenious and rhetorically creative arguments with imaginative tropes, demonstrations, evolutionary accounts of cognition and blood metabolism for human/biped cognition, and cogent citations from the medical literature of the day, Moxon skillfully instructs his medical audience against the misleading notion of cerebral “congestion” as an underlying pathology for cognitive, motor, and sensory deficits seen in the clinic. In so doing, he provides the medical community with an in-depth glimpse at the circulatory system, its flow dynamics, and how they serve to meet the cognitive, motor, and sensory demands of upright bipedal man.     

咸丰年间货币流通的民间形态——徽商志成号商业账簿研究

本文依据咸丰年间徽商志成号经营账簿中的有关货币资料,研究了银钱流通的民间形态、民间用币的类型和种类,以及货币的比价变化,从中揭示出行会组织、民间约定惯例对银钱民间流通的影响;洋钱等民间货币的流通,显示出民间用币多样性,以及货币制度的紊乱;货币比价的变动,既是地方金融市场货币流通规律的反映,也与战争的影响密切相关。     

近代民信局的寄递网络研究

近代民信局经历了由盛转衰的演变过程.通过对民信局寄递地点和范围的分析,表明其寄递网络主要呈中心城市、中等城市和城镇三个层级展开;各区域中心城市民信局的寄递网络展开的特点不同;民信局的寄递网络说明在区域内部经济联系密切的基础上,区域间的经济联系已经突破了内部束缚,呈现出日益加强的表征;民信局的寄递网络以沿海沿江一线为主干,体现出了该地区经济一体化的发展趋势.     

On sampling the upper crustal reservoir of the NE Pacific Ocean

The oceanic upper crustal reservoir is a 600‐m thick layer of porous and permeable basaltic rock that forms the uppermost igneous basement underlying the global ocean. Pore spaces within this fluid aquifer contain a significant fraction of the global seawater, and active circulation through this reservoir has profound influence on the chemical composition of the ocean, strongly impacting the biological environment near the sea surface. Because of the relative inaccessibility of the deep seafloor, where hydrothermal fluid discharges and seawater re‐charges the oceanic crustal aquifer, our understanding of the dynamic physical, chemical and biological processes is strongly dependent on our ability to obtain uncontaminated samples from this challenging environment. Recent technological advances have addressed some, but certainly not all of these sampling problems, providing new data and samples that test our current hypotheses about the crustal fluid reservoir. Current scientific interest in the sub‐seafloor biosphere has focused on the uppermost igneous oceanic crust as likely to be one of the most habitable environments, because of its porosity and locus of hydrothermal circulation of chemical nutrients. Recent observations indicate that sub‐seafloor crustal environments harbor novel CO₂‐utilizing bacteria (primary producers) that could be a significant source of carbon‐fixation in the ocean, thus broadening possible habitable zones both on Earth and elsewhere where microbial life could exist independent of nutrient input from photosynthesis.     

Sovereignty,mobility, and political cartographies in Late Bronze Age southern Caucasia

This article draws on archaeological data from Late Bronze Age (LBA, ca. 1550–1150 BC) fortress, shrine, cemetery, and residential sites in Armenia to challenge long-held assumptions about the potential for mobile-pastoral groups to develop and sustain complex polities. The past two decades of research by Project ArAGATS (the Armenian–American collaboration for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies) has demonstrated that LBA sovereignty emerged not through the sociopolitical coalescence of settled farming villages, but through the actions of hierarchically organized, mobile pastoralists. Post-processual archaeology helped focus discussions of ancient political life on the contingent nature of authority and the processes through which competing factions and stakeholders achieve political association. However, centuries of interpretive marginalization of nomadic peoples combined with deterministic notions regarding subsistence and settlement practices of mobile pastoralists have, until recently, hindered a broader anthropological consideration of the potential pathways to sovereignty available to more mobile societies. Drawing on a range of datasets from LBA fortresses, shrines, cemeteries, and ephemeral residential complexes, our study examines the essential factors contributing to the emergence and maintenance of complex polities among mobile pastoralists in the southern Caucasus, societies that were intimately associated—politically, economically, and ritually—with hill-top fortresses. This study of political association in LBA Armenia sheds light on the internal politics of nomadic communities and offers a unique opportunity to bring the South Caucasus into the comparitive study of ancient complex polities.     

Thermal springs and heat flow in North America

Thermal springs are commonly thought to be an indicator of geothermal resource potential. However, there have been few analyses of the relationship between thermal springs and the underlying thermal regime. An examination of temperature and discharge rates for a large database of thermal springs in North America demonstrates that there is not a simple relationship between these measurements made at the surface and subsurface heat flow. Hydrogeological factors appear to exert strong controls on the temperature and discharge at these springs and should be carefully considered in geothermal resource assessments.