Ancient Rights Research Articles

Conflicto y resistencia en la gestión del agua: El caso de la corriente Coxcacuaco y las comunidades nahuas de Texcoco

This text examines the federalization of the Coxcacoaco River in the municipality of Texcoco (State of Mexico, Mexico) since the publication of its regulations in 1926. The policy of controlling access, management and distribution of water for irrigated agriculture was rejected by the populations of La Purificación Tepetitla and San Jerónimo Amanalco, who defended their ancient rights over water and springs that they considered communal. Analysis of this struggle sheds new light on the impact of the diverse and changing norms concerning water use during the twentieth century. It also improves understanding of the origin of the water conflicts in the Texcoco region and why the communities fought to maintain their irrigation systems and traditions. The primary sources for this article were the Archivo Histórico y Biblioteca Central del Agua, and field work involving visits to the springs of San Jerónimo Amanalco and two tours of the Coxcacuaco channel in the company of three local residents.

The Budapest Imam: An Attempt to Integrate the Bosnian Muslims (1909–1911)

In the early years of the 20th century, Bosnia assumed an increasingly important place in Hungary’s plans for great-power status. The aim of the Hungar- ian government was to connect the province to the Austro-Hungarian Empire by virtue of the ancient right of the Hungarian crown, thereby bringing Bosnia into the Hungarian economic sphere of interest and gradually under the control of the Hun- garian state. As part of this strategy, the authorities in Hungary decided to convert the dilapidated tomb of Gül Baba into a mosque and a place of pilgrimage and to set up an associated Muslim congregation for Turkish and Bosnian Muslims living in or visiting the city. A trained hodja, that is, an imam, from Turkey and a müez- zin from Bosnia would then lead this congregation. By purchasing and renovating the buildings around the proposed mosque and place of pilgrimage, the Hungar- ian government would set up a residential school to enable, through scholarships provided by itself, the city of Budapest and the Turkish government, at least thirty Turkish and Bosnian students to study there, and they would be the seeds from which Hungarian–Bosnian–Turkish intellectual, economic and cultural relations would grow. However, the imam brought from Istanbul, Abdullatif, did not live up to expectations, and the government was unable to provide the necessary infrastruc- ture, frustrating the plans for setting up a Muslim congregation in Hungary. The original vision of Bosnia’s religious and intellectual integration into the Hungarian sphere thus failed to materialize. The only substantial outcome was the Hungarian Parliament’s decision of January 1916 to designate Islam as one of the recognized religions in Hungary.

Legal Knowledge Related to Land Registration and Electronic Certification of Land Ownership

The dynamics of land in Indonesia have led to various conflicts, one of which is proof of land rights in the form of land rights certificates. The existing conditions, until 2021, it turns out that many rights subjects do not have land rights certificates; they only rely on evidence in the form of old rights, including girik, pipil, kekitir. The proof of the ancient rights proved to be less able to guarantee legal certainty and legal protection than the certificate of land rights stated in the UUPA. In addition, there is Regulation Number 1 of 2021 concerning Electronic Certificates that must be applied. This situation will be a problem that will be discussed related to land registration which is done manually turning into electronic, which is later expected to make it easier for the community to obtain proof of ownership of their land rights. This activity is part of implementing the Tri Dharma of Higher Education, one of which is community service in the form of legal counseling. Through this activity, it is hoped that the community can play an active role in registering proof of land rights for certification and encourage the achievement of "no land ownership without certificates" that the Government can carry out.

Power, Prerogative, and the Politics of Sir Thomas Wentworth in Early Stuart England and Ireland

AbstractInvestigations into the career of Sir Thomas Wentworth, first earl of Strafford, essentially consider three core aspects. First, his parliamentary career and whether his concern for upholding the ancient rights of the subject conflicted with his alleged apostacy when the prospect of office seemed achievable. Second, his deputyship in Ireland, specifically the manner in which he governed the kingdom and the wider implications that this entailed. Finally, his trial and execution, and the validity (or otherwise) of the charges laid against him. As a consequence, these assessments are generally limited to, or confined within, national perspectives, resulting in an assessment of Wentworth's career being too compartmentalized and lacking in overview. This article examines the merits of comparing his political style as the king's representative in northern England and Ireland. It demonstrates how Wentworth's presidency of the north was crucial in establishing prerogative rule, which he later applied with notable effect in Ireland. The parallels are important. In the course of governing two distinct jurisdictions he both encountered and confronted similar obstacles impeding what he called ‘good government’. Viewed from this perspective, Wentworth's accomplishments in the early years of his deputyship were drawn from past experiences where he successfully consolidated royal authority.

Bishopsgate und die Hansischen Rechte in London

Bishopsgate and the Rights of the Hansards in LondonEvery Hanseatic scholar is well acquainted with the agreement reached in 1282 between the City of London and the North German merchants resident there, since it is the first known document which refers to those traders as the ’merchants of the German Hanse’. While the road leading to the agreement has been analyzed by Fryde, scholars have paid no attention at all to the role the document played in subsequent centuries, although they occasionally mention that the agreement required the Hanseatic Kontor to repair and maintain Bishopsgate, one of the seven gates of the medieval City of London. This scholarly indifference is unwarranted. In fact, the Hanseatic Kontor explicitly described the agreement of 1282 as 'the foundation of our Privileges in the City of London’ (1462) and was scrupulous in maintaining Bishopsgate. The City itself was, in retrospect, less happy with the agreement, and tried again and again to exact local excises from the Hansards, notably scavage (a tax on merchandise entering and leaving the City whose proceeds were earmarked for paving and cleaning the streets), only to be rebuffed with the argument that the 1282 agreement’s blanket guarantee of ’all their liberties hitherto enjoyed reasonably’ applied to scavage. However, the tables turned in 1418, when the City and its Sheriffs, under the tutelage of John Carpenter, from 1417 common clerk of London and the Compiler of the Liber Albus (1419), employed historical and legal arguments of considerable sophistication to dispute the Hansards’ contentions. After seven years of inconclusive argument before King’s Council (and increasing pressure from the City), the Hansards caved in and agreed (1427) to pay a lump sum annually to the Mayor and Sheriffs to enjoy their ancient rights in the City of London. Nonetheless, they continued to disburse substantial funds for the upkeep and. indeed, for a splendid renovation of Bishopsgate (1479/80) which excitecl the admiration of John Stow, author of a famous description of London, in the late 16th Century.

Musical diplomacy in a divided city: the Lassus-Mayrhofer manuscripts

Abstract Gifts of music manuscripts continued to serve an important diplomatic function well into the 16th century. This article investigates the production, content and function of two choirbooks prepared by the Benedictine monk Ambrosius Mayrhofer of St Emmeram in Regensburg, which mainly contain sacred music by Orlande de Lassus. They were dedicated to Abbot Jakob Köplin of St Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg (1568) and the city council of Regensburg (1567) respectively. The programmatic opening motet and accompanying illuminations of the Regensburg choirbook suggest that it functioned as a politically motivated gift that helped to ‘harmonize’ the frictions within a city divided by ancient rights and new religious allegiances: Regensburg was a free imperial city with a predominantly Protestant population and council, but also harboured an episcopal see and several nunneries and monasteries (among them St Emmeram), with the Catholic Dukes of Bavaria as close and powerful neighbours. Mayrhofer’s music manuscript projects a conciliatory message that was particularly timely in the late 1560s, when the permission of Eucharistic communion under both kinds (with consecrated bread and wine) offered a short-lived hope of religious compromise.

Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India by Tobias Wolffhardt

Reviewed by: Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India by Tobias Wolffhardt Thomas Simpson Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India By Tobias Wolffhardt, trans. Jane Rafferty. New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2018. The expansive collections, writings, and images that Colin Mackenzie (1754—1821) produced during his four-decade imperial career present historians of early colonial India with opportunities and challenges. Many recent scholars use Mackenzie’s sprawling archive as a privileged vantage point from which to take in the expansion of British rule in southern India, yet the Scotsman eludes easy categorisation. According to Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks, Mackenzie’s sympathetic approach to the people and places of Madras’s hinterlands rendered his work relatively useless for administrative purposes.1 For Peter Robb and Phillip Wagoner, by contrast, Mackenzie adapted local structures to instantiate influential modes of colonial power and knowledge.2 Unearthing the Past befits its subject in being founded on admirably deep and fastidious research. Drawing on wide-ranging material that covers Mackenzie’s whole life, Tobias Wolffhardt mediates between the competing versions of Mackenzie in the extant historiography and develops some important new insights. The opening chapter of the main body of the book contains innovative material, demonstrating how Mackenzie’s first twenty-nine years in the Western Isles of Scotland mattered to his later work in India. His time as Comptroller of Customs at Stornoway instilled a commitment to scrupulous writing and archiving practices, while his experience of the brutal imposition of economic and social change in the Highlands underpinned a preference for more culturally sensitive and incremental forms of “improvement.” The following two chapters consider Mackenzie’s development during his sixteen years in southern India prior to starting the decade-long survey of Mysore, for which he was primarily renowned, in 1799. Wolffhardt convincingly positions Mackenzie not as someone driven by idiosyncratic and fixed intellectual passions, but a man of his time, place and interactions in South Asia. He had to build a long-term career as the East India Company’s rule became more formal and opportunities to make a quick fortune through private trade diminished. His learned interests, meanwhile, were shaped by a tight circle of administrator-scholars in Madras and, increasingly, by the Indians on whom he relied in conducting survey fieldwork. Wolffhardt’s examination in Chapters Four, Five and Six of Mackenzie’s work in Mysore is thorough and deserves to become the standard account of the survey, even if his focus on Mackenzie’s personal and institutional wranglings leaves space for further work on practices in the field. The analysis of the vital issue of the dynamics between Mackenzie and his interlocutors is comprehensive. Although drawing conclusions similar to Wagoner’s and Robb’s about the essential role of Indian intellectual elites, Wolffhardt goes further in focusing on how Mackenzie rooted the Mysore survey in the extant spatial structure of parganas (sub-districts). By privileging a form of territorial organisation he understood to have been established long before the Mughals, Mackenzie attempted to order his data into what Wolffhardt terms a “comprehensive research aim… based not on a mathematized observation of the globe, but on the historical geography of a cultural region” (158). This is among the most compelling and original claims of Unearthing the Past, not only deepening our understanding of Mackenzie but also highlighting that survey sciences in early colonial India were oriented to matters of human history as much as to spatial abstraction and fiscal extraction. The book’s final two chapters deal, respectively, with Mackenzie’s vast collection of objects, manuscripts and archaeological inscriptions, and his tenure during the final decade of his life as Surveyor General of Madras and, finally, of India. Wolffhardt persuasively shows that Mackenzie’s collection was of a piece with his “historicist orientation” (236), which grounded colonial administration in ancient rights and laws while acknowledging that India’s past was socially and politically dynamic. Mackenzie’s time as Surveyor General is dealt with somewhat hastily: more details on key projects from this era, especially the Atlas...

Ancient Vedic Literature and Human Rights: Resonances and Dissonances

Ancient Vedic Literature and Human Rights: Resonances and Dissonances

ACQUA E IRRIGAZIONE PER NUTRIRE IL PIANETA. LA REALTÀ DELLA PIANURA PADANA LOMBARDA

The plain areas of Lombardy are part of a territorial context, such as that of the Po Valley, which is the main in Italy and among the most important in Europe for quantity and quality of agricultural and food production. What further contributes to the exceptional nature of these areas is the historical legacy linked to the development of agricultural activities, which finds one of its clearest and most important evidences in the extraordinary development of canals and irrigation artifacts since the Middle Ages. The diversions from the main rivers, with the extensive network of canals that they originate, have contributed to modeling the territory and shaping the Lombard landscape. The current arrangement of irrigation systems has, therefore, unique features and many positive aspects. On the other hand, one must recognize that the presence of many obsolete infrastructures, the sedimentation of ancient rights and the excessive fragmentation of management bodies are negative elements, particularly in some areas. Investments in the innovation of both the infrastructures and of their management are therefore needed, but it is equally indispensable to deploy an incisive planning action at the regional level, which addresses them clearly towards precise objectives, on which some proposals are put forward in this paper.

Indian Sovereignty, General Federal Laws, and the Canons of Construction: An Overview and Update

This article focuses on the application within Indian country of federal regulatory typically dealing with labor relations, employment, health, the environment, and other social and economic issues (i.e., general federal laws or GFLs), and their impact on Indian Nation governments and tribal enterprises. This article takes the position that a GFL, just like specialized Indian legislation and all potentially affecting the ancient rights and sovereignty of Indian Nations, should be subjected to the rules of interpretation known as the Indian law of construction. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Donovan v. Coeur d'Alene Tribal Farm (1985) (Coeur d'Alene) adopted a troubling and contrary rule of interpretation. The article also touches on a range of deeper issues concerning the relative power of Congress as compared to administrative agencies and the U.S. Supreme Court as compared to lower federal courts (including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit). These issues raise concerns going well beyond the field of American Indian law. They touch on constitutional law, the separation of powers, administrative law, and labor law. The article updates the author's 2007 Oregon Law Review and 2008 Michigan State Law Review articles, which criticized various aspects of the Coeur d'Alene doctrine. It reviews some key points about the Ninth Circuit's remarkable three-judge panel opinion in Coeur d'Alene, which (for more than thirty years now) has frustrated Indian country lawyers and out-muscled the Supreme Court itself in influencing other lower-court rulings on how to interpret GFLs in relation to Indian country. Coeur d'Alene has effectively overruled (in many federal circuits and for many GFLs) the weight of more than a century of Supreme Court jurisprudence on the Indian law canons of construction. The article also reviews some aspects of the notorious San Manuel cases. In that litigation, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or Board), in 2004, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in 2007, deployed the Coeur d'Alene doctrine to extend the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to on-reservation employment by tribal government-owned gaming enterprises, even though that has never been authorized or intended by Congress. That specific issue of federal labor law, and the broader dispute over Coeur d'Alene, emerged again in 2015 with appeals to the Sixth and Tenth Circuits over application of the NLRA to tribal casinos. Those appeals were resolved by three important decisions discussed in Part V of this article: one by the NLRB (effectively mooting the Tenth Circuit appeal) and two by the Sixth Circuit. Following the Introduction (Part I), Part II of the article discusses the classical canons of construction governing Indian law, and contrasts them with the Coeur d'Alene doctrine which has flourished in the lower federal courts. Part III highlights the stunning degree of irony (not to mention outright defiance of the Supreme Court) in the lower courts' treatment of the Supreme Court's 1960 decision in Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation. Part IV discusses continuing struggles over the Coeur d'Alene doctrine in the lower federal courts. Part V discusses the 2015 decisions, and where things have gone from there. Part VI concludes the article.

Nascita e morte delle rappresentanze pontificie e dei loro archivi nell’Europa centro-orientale. Dalla “grande guerra” alla “guerra fredda” (1918–1952)

Birth and death of pontifical representatives and their archives in Central Eastern Europe. From the “great war” to the “cold war” At the end of World War I in the Central Eastern Europe new national states replaced the multinational empires. The international policy of the Holy See aimed at the recognition of the new nation-states, which had numerous non-native minorities on its territory. The Holy See, despite the difference in approaching to the Eastern issues between Benedict XV and his successor Pius XI, opened new apostolic nunciatures (and where it was not possible new apostolic delegations) whose main purpose was to sign concordats to define the generality of relations between State and Church, mainly by ensuring the freedom of ecclesiastical appointments (against the ancient rights of patronage) and dissolving the conflict between local hierarchy and the Holy See in favor of the latter, thanks to the new role assigned to the papal nuncios. The article traces the vicissitudes that had to face during the interwar period the pontifical representatives in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, often in situations where national identity was identified with the religious one. With the outbreak of World War II and the advent of the new pope Pius XII, the Holy See had to face the sad period of the war, trying to maintain a benevolent neutrality towards someone and a critical one towards others. At the end of the conflict, with the birth of the “Iron Curtain”, the strong action against the danger of an “impassive omnipotence of a materialistic state, without a celestial ideal, no religion and no God” assumed, in the eyes of the pope, the perspective of an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, which led in a few years to close all the pontifical representatives.

Magna Carta's Tainted Legacy: Historic Justifications for a British Bill of Rights and the Case Against the Human Rights Act

Close scrutiny rarely flatters the foundation myths of political orders, but this has not stopped such myths being co-opted for political ends. The near-mythical place of Magna Carta within the UK’s constitutional history allowed the Conservative Government to hitch its proposals for repeal of the Human Rights Act to celebrations of its 800-year anniversary. Celebrating a Charter which supposedly embodies the genesis of legal limitations on previously absolute power would seemingly sit uneasily with the Conservative Party’s commitment to parliamentary sovereignty in the face of the constraints imposed by the European Convention on Human Rights. Moreover, even if the attribution of trial by jury, freedom of expression and habeas corpus to Magna Carta’s overburdened Clauses 39 and 40 is anachronistic, a celebration of the Charter’s place in the popular conscience as a bulwark protecting “ancient rights” and liberties is difficult to reconcile with the Government’s commitment to scrapping the Human Rights Act. The terms of the 2015 celebrations were, however, closely managed by Conservative ministers to emphasise the indigenous character of Magna Carta within the UK’s “ancient constitution” as a counterpoint to European elements within the UK’s governance arrangements. As such, Magna Carta has proven as useful to the Conservatives as a means of legitimating their policy of repealing the Human Rights Act as it is as a rallying point for opposing abuses of power.

Shooting up illicit drugs with God and the State: the legal–spatial constitution of Sydney's Medically Supervised Injecting Centre as a sanctuary

AbstractIn 1999, the Uniting Church opened a Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) at the Wayside Chapel in the inner Sydney suburb of Kings Cross. The Uniting Church justified this overt act of civil disobedience against the State's prohibitionist model of drug usage by invoking the ancient right of sanctuary. This invocation sought to produce a specific sort of spatialisation wherein the meaning of the line constituting sanctuary effects a protected ‘inside’ governed by God's word – civitas dei – ‘outside’ the jurisdiction of state power in civitas terrena. Sanctuary claims a territory exempt from other jurisdictions. The modern assertion of sanctuary enacts in physical space the relationship between state and religious authorities and the integration and intersections of civitas terrena and civitas dei. This article draws upon conceptions of sanctuary at the intersection of the Catholic Christianity tradition and the State since medieval times to analyse the contemporary space of sanctuary in the MSIC, exploring the shifting and ambiguous boundaries in material, legislative, and symbolic spaces. We argue that even though the MSIC has now been incorporated into civitas terrena, it remains and enacts a space of sanctuary.

On enclosure Norwegian style

More than 200 years after the King sold one of the “King’s commons” to urban timber merchants, local people in some ways still behave as if the area is a kind of commons. The paper outlines the history of the transformation of the area from an 18th century King’s commons to a 21st century battleground for ideas about ancient access and use rights of community members facing rights claimed by a commercial forest owner within local consequences of national legislation. The discussion is focused on the right of common to hunt small game without dog in Follafoss private commons. The right was confirmed in a judgement of the Supreme Court in 1937 and in legislation on hunting in 1951. The Government’s proposal for new legislation on hunting in 1981 removed the right without saying a word about it, and it was never commented on in parliament during the legislative process. To explain what we observe it is suggested that a new layer of legislation on rights of common from 1857 and 1863 created a structural amnesia about private commons making it easy to remove them from legislation.

Dublin and Irish politics in the age of Charles Lucas.

In addition to his contributions to medicine, Charles Lucas had a long career in politics, starting in the 1740s as a guild representative on the lower house of Dublin corporation, and culminating in his election to the Irish House of Commons in 1761. By examining the background in Dublin and Irish politics, this paper explores Lucas' impact on the electorate, and how it was that he was able to win a parliamentary seat in Dublin and retain it for a decade while he campaigned in support of a range of important Patriot issues. Lucas had none of the qualifications that would normally be required for a successful politician. His father held some land, but as a younger son who had to make a living, Charles was apprenticed to a Dublin apothecary. Nor did he have the political connections that might have compensated for a lack of land, wealth, or status. But Lucas possessed other advantages, notably an education that enabled him to read the city's medieval charters, identifying areas where the Dublin freemen had lost 'ancient rights', and some experience of publishing, so that he could appeal to the electorate. Lucas' remarkable political success stemmed from both local circumstances and his own personal qualities.

Counterculture, Property, Place, and Time: Nimbin, 1973

Counterculture, Property, Place, and Time: Nimbin, 1973

Some Remarks on the Origins of the Term ‘Glorious Revolution’

IThe 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688-89 has always been a subject of intense debate. Obviously, the understanding of it has continually been challenged by varying circumstances and discourses. Therefore, it is not surprising that important studies on the structure of political debates and legitimation strategies have already been published, for example, by John R Kenyon, Mark Goldie and Tony Claydon. These works focus particularly on the context of the of 1688 and its aftermath.1 According to these historians, the use of a certain vocabulary was instrumental in generating acceptance of the Revolution. They neglect, however, to question how and when the term 'Glorious Revolution' was invented, although the label that had been given to the event must be considered as an essential part of the way of talking about it. The terms employed helped to influence the imagination of the public and to create an idea of what had happened. The terminology surrounding the was therefore of vital importance for contemporaries as it is for historians attempting to understand how the image of it had been framed.2 It is well known that contemporaries already spoke of a 'revolution' when they referred to the events of 1688-89.3 Originally borrowed from astronomy, where it described a full circulation of celestial bodies, in the seventeenth century the term 'revolution' when applied to political events still had a restorative meaning.4 Thus, by its use, the event could be distinguished from the tumultuous years of the Civil War in the mid-century. Whereas the latter was depicted as unlawful rebellion, the (at least in the mainstream of political thought) was interpreted as a conservative and moderate measure to restore the ancient rights and liberties of England.5 In this sense, the word 'revolution' was used by contemporaries and carried positive connotations. But at what point did the become 'glorious'?Little research has been done on the first appearance of the term 'Glorious Revolution'. According to Gerald Straka, it had been coined immediately after the Revolution, or in his own words: Tt was called the Revolution from its onset'. But he provides no evidence for that assumption.6 Only one short article attempts to clarify the problem systematically. In that study, James R. Hertzler rejects Straka's claim and stresses that no historian in the eighteenth century ever spoke of a 'Glorious Revolution'.7 Moreover, Hertzler argues that the term 'Glorious Revolution' had not been in use at all until 1706.8 In his view, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury and formerly one of the chief propagandists of William III, is the person most likely to have coined the term. Hertzler mentions a thanksgiving sermon by Burnet from 1706 in support of his claim.9 In fact, Burnet speaks of the events of 1688 as 'a Second Glorious and Happy 88' after the victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588.10 In the same year, however, Samuel Rosewell did use the term on the title page of his printed sermon on the Fifth of November.11 At the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century, according to Hertzler, the term was fully established.12 Eveline Cruickshanks, however, gives evidence that the term had already been used in 1689, albeit not in a published form.13 Lois Schwoerer reconciles this notion with Hertzler's argument by assuming that the term was used once at that time and then 'appeared again' in 1706.14 Thus the dating of the term 'Glorious Revolution' as provided by Hertzler can be seen as the established date in present research.15Following this assumption, the term had not been part of the propaganda during William's reign, but appeared during the intense debates of the reign of Anne. The so-called 'rage of party' was opened by the dispute between Benjamin Hoadly, Francis Atterbury and Offspring Blackall after 1705 about the issue of resistance in the and continued during the Sacheverell affair in 1709/10. …

Die spanische Illusion: Tradition als Argument der Herrschaftslegitimation Karls VI. in den südlichen Niederlanden 1702–1725

The article describes the importance of tradition in the political discourse between Emperor Charles VI., who gained sovereignty over the Southern Netherlands in 1716, his rivals, who fought him for it in the War of Spanish Succession, and his new subjects. Charles VI. and his counsellors created in certain ways the illusion of a continued spanish-habsburg rule over the Netherlands in order to legitimize his contested new position against his enemies and to stabilize the provinces after more than ten years of war. The Estates supported his claim to the Spanish tradition, but instead of just bolstering his authority they used his argument for their own interests and demanded affirmation of all their ancient rights and privileges. When Charles – formally accepted as souvereign – started a new policy of centralized reforms his and his subjects’ interpretations of the Spanish tradition collided. Both sides had to negotiate a new mutual basis for a political order.

Women and Sport

Women have historically taken part in sports for many centuries. The first recorded female game competitions were the Herean Games in approximately 1,000 BC, named after the Goddess Hera. Held at Olympia in Greece, these games were for women alone and were thought to have originated as part of ancient fertility rights. Historically there is evidence of sporting activities involving women, but nothing of significance until after the 1948 summer Olympic Games, when 385 female athletes participated. Over the last six decades there has been a noted rise in the number of female athletes, reaching its maximum with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where over 42% of the 11,028 athletes were women. Similarly in 2006, at the Turin Winter Olympics in Italy, 40% of the 2,500 athletes were females. In the 2012 Olympics, the Olympic Committee anticipates that approximately 44% of all athletes participating will be female. Despite there being a significant rise in the number of elite athletes in the UK, there appears to be an overall decrease in the amount and intensity of physical exercise undertaken by teenage girls. This is considered to be due to the fact that physical education is no longer an integral part of the school curriculum in the UK. There is, however, a small but significant group of elite athletes who start to train at a very early age (9-10 years old) especially in gymnastics, skating, swimming and athletics.

War, judgment, and memory in the Basque borderlands, 1914-1945

The diverse ways in which Basques responded to war and displacement during the most tumultuous period in contemporary history War and occupation anywhere test the resilience of local values and institutions and often undermine accepted standards of human conduct. The Basque communities in the Pyrenees were no exception. Between 1914 and 1945, two world wars and the turbulent interwar years had a profound impact on Basque society, affecting even remote villages and rural farmers.In this book, anthropologist Sandra Ott examines the impact of war and occupation on four Basque communities in the French commune of Xiberoa. These communities were long accustomed to the exercise of ancient rights of self-determination and to unique forms of familial and vicinal interdependence. They had their own interpretations of what constituted legitimate private and public behavior, and they were normally reliant on their own forms of judgment, justice, and reconciliation to maintain social order.Using archival documents, many of them classified, and interviews with numerous Basque witnesses, Ott recounts how these tightly knit communities reacted to war, occupation, resistance, and denunciations, as well as to the upheavals of liberation. Finally, she reveals how Basque traditional culture allowed these communities to cope with the violence and tumult of war and how ancient traditions helped restore intracommunity harmony following the divisiveness of occupation and liberation, as well as shape communal memories of these events.War, Judgment, and Memory in the Basque Borderlands, 1914-1945 is an important contribution to our understanding of the ways a traditional community responds to crisis and change, and the way historical memory is shaped by popular local culture.