I looked for­ward to read­ing this book, which had been rec­om­mended to me. But it proved a dis­ap­point­ment. Occa­sion­ally, it laps­es into com­mon sense for a page or two, but for the most part it’s an exer­cise in regur­gi­tat­ing the tedious ortho­dox­ies of our time. Plen­ty of Fou­cault. Plen­ty of neb­u­lous and de-human­ized pas­sages like “Polit­i­cal vio­lence may have lacked sys­tem­atic­ity because juris­dic­tions con­flicted, but it retained an over­all coher­ence through its tech­niques. These tech­niques involved the inscrip­tion of signs, and it is there­fore not sur­pris­ing that the vio­lence about penal rit­u­als involved the mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of signs….The brig­and in this instance used pun­ish­ments as a tech­nique or rep­re­sen­ta­tion. He did not oblit­er­ate the sys­tem of rep­re­sen­ta­tions; he mere­ly play­fully changed what the signs meant.” That is how the author choos­es to describe some­body hav­ing nails ham­mered into his feet. We learn that “the encar­cer­ated become sub­ject to a hermeneu­tics of sus­pi­cion”, and so on. Read more »

I strong­ly rec­om­mend this book to any­one who is begin­ning to look at the Neolith­ic peri­od in Eng­land, or to any­one who is intrigued by Stone­henge, Ave­bury, or the mar­velous Orkney sites. Cas­tle­don does a fine job of pulling togeth­er the cur­rent evi­dence and weav­ing it into a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of life in the U.K. in 3000 BC. Much of this involves inter­pre­ta­tion, guess­es, and imag­i­na­tive recon­struc­tion, but the author usu­ally makes it clear when he is doing this, and care­fully dis­tin­guishes between what the archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence can prove or not prove, and when analo­gies from anthro­pol­ogy are appro­pri­ate. Occa­sion­ally the text drifts into fash­ion­able pat­ter about the psy­chol­ogy of spaces and the rela­tion of mind to land­scape, but not enough to be annoy­ing. There is only one embar­rass­ing pas­sage, where he talks about the “emer­gence” in the fourth mil­le­nium BC, of “lit­er­ally self-con­scious peo­ple, peo­ple like us, self-con­tained and self-aware”. The notion that human beings in some peri­od or cul­ture were not self-con­scious or self-aware, and sud­denly became so because of some sud­den trans­for­ma­tion, is, as far as I can tell, non­sense. Yet it con­stantly pops up in his­tor­i­cal and anthro­po­log­i­cal writ­ing, based on the flim­si­est rea­son­ing. One might as well claim that peo­ple became “self-aware” in 1950, because then they began to make indi­vid­ual pur­chases with cred­it cards. But this is only one blem­ish in an oth­er­wise excel­lent and use­ful work. The book abounds in well-cho­sen maps, illus­tra­tions and pho­tographs, the mate­r­ial is pre­sented in an order­ly fash­ion, and the prose style is pleasant.

15469. [2] (Philip Pull­man) The Gold­en Com­pass [His Dark Mate­ri­als, Book 1] 
15470. (Philip Pull­man) The Sub­tle Knife [His Dark Mate­ri­als, Book 2] 
15471. (Philip Pull­man) The Amber Spy­glass [His Dark Mate­ri­als, Book 3]
15472. (Christo­pher Boehm) Seg­men­tary “War­fare” and the Man­age­ment of Conflict: 
. . . . . Com­par­i­son of East African Chim­panzees and Patri­lin­eal-Patrilo­cal Humans [arti­cle]
15473. (Jacob M. Rab­bie) The Effects of Intra­group Coop­er­a­tion and Inter­group Competition 
. . . . . on In-group Cohe­sion and Out-group Hos­til­i­ty [arti­cle] Read more »

Rotat­ing cred­it asso­ci­a­tions are pro­foundly impor­tant insti­tu­tions. They illus­trate the abil­ity of peo­ple to orga­nize them­selves demo­c­ra­t­i­cally on a grass-roots lev­el, and show that this impulse is cross-cul­tur­al. This is the clear­est and most detailed descrip­tion of how rotat­ing cred­it asso­ci­a­tions work. The author’s best knowl­edge is of Indone­sia, but he draws on well-researched com­par­isons with oth­er regions, espe­cially Africa. The analy­sis of struc­ture, motives, and effects is very sharp. Basic read­ing in this area.

This cogent­ly argued book deals with the prob­lem of how peo­ple man­age com­monly held prop­erty where dis­crete sub­di­vi­sion into indi­vid­ual own­er­ship or man­age­ment is not prac­ti­cal, or not desired. Exam­ples of such sit­u­a­tions are fish­ing grounds, joint pas­turage, rota­tional usufruct, and pro­duc­tive forests, but there are numer­ous oth­ers. Much non­sense has been writ­ten on this sub­ject, and Ostrom clears the air with a dis­ci­plined analy­sis. Unlike most of the peo­ple who have pon­tif­i­cated on the top­ic, she has stud­ied spe­cific, real-life instances in great detail. She begins by describ­ing how var­i­ous dubi­ous and unproven notions, such as Gar­rett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Com­mons” [see above], have been used to advance a vari­ety of ide­o­log­i­cal agen­das, almost always end­ing up jus­ti­fy­ing mas­sive inter­fer­ence and expro­pri­a­tion by the big and pow­er­ful. For exam­ple, the “Tragedy of the Com­mons” gim­mick was used by bureau­cratic cen­tral­ists to jus­tify state con­trol of all resources, and by Neo­con­ser­v­a­tives to jus­tify “pri­va­ti­za­tion” (the seizure and hand­ing over of local­ly owned resources to vast, baro­nial cor­po­rate bod­ies). I live in a coun­try that was pop­u­lated, in great num­bers, by immi­grant Scot­tish high­landers who had been dri­ven off their own lands by Enclo­sure, an ear­ly incar­na­tion of this kind of clap­trap, so it’s easy for me to appre­ci­ate her insights. Ostrom points out that there is no evi­dence that there is any nec­es­sary “tragedy of the com­mons”, that the world abounds with exam­ples of effec­tive col­lab­o­ra­tive con­trol of resources on the local lev­el, and that the argu­ments pre­sented have lit­tle basis in expe­ri­ence, are full of self-con­tra­dic­tion and over­look fun­da­men­tal eco­nomic facts. The book is an impor­tant intel­lec­tual resource for all of us involved in the bat­tle against Big Power.

It’s hard to account for the wide­spread influ­ence of this arti­cle, pub­lished in Sci­ence in 1968. It’s a poor­ly argued jum­ble of unques­tioned clichés and slip­shod rea­son­ing. Few, now, seem to be aware of the orig­i­nal intent of the arti­cle, which was to jus­tify coer­cive state con­trol of child­birth. With such spe­cious premis­es as “the moral­ity of an act is a func­tion of the state of the sys­tem at the time it is per­formed’ [p.1245 — he took it from Joseph Fletcher’s Sit­u­a­tion Ethics, then mis­ap­plied it], Hardin urged over­whelm­ing state pow­er to reg­u­late breed­ing, cit­ing the threat of “the fam­ily, the reli­gion, the race, or the class… that adopts over­breed­ing as a pol­icy to secure its own aggran­dize­ment”. This is just the old “yel­low per­il” and ter­ror of the low­er class­es of the Vic­to­rian age, dust­ed off and restat­ed in 1960’s pseu­do­sci­en­tific guise. Hardin assert­ed that the pres­ence of “the wel­fare state” and devel­oped economies would ensure an unstop­pable fecun­dity among such unde­sir­ables. Yet, in 1968, it was already evi­dent to all pro­fes­sional demog­ra­phers that that devel­oped economies with infra­struc­tures of social ser­vices invari­ably lev­eled off their birthrates (this is why Europe and Amer­ica now can­not replace their pop­u­la­tions with­out immi­gra­tion). Read more »

A few years ago, while stay­ing in Prague, my friend Fil­ip Marek hand­ed me a copy of Philip Pullman’s North­ern Lights (the orig­i­nal British title, which was changed to The Gold­en Com­pass in North Amer­ica). He asked if it was good enough to trans­late into Czech. I was delight­ed with it. It was fresh in its approach and imagery, ele­gantly writ­ten, and would fas­ci­nate both chil­dren and adults. How­ever, I fool­ishly put off read­ing the two oth­er books in the tril­ogy until see­ing the recent film remind­ed me to. Read more »