Flaveria Research Articles

The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890. By Rani-Henrik Andersson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. xxiv, 437 pp. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-1073-8.)

On the morning of December 29, 1890, soldiers from the Seventh Cavalry opened fire on several hundred Mnikowoju Lakota Sioux men, women, and children. The troops had rounded up the tribe members the previous day and escorted them to a makeshift prison camp near Wounded Knee Creek in southwest South Dakota, where they would await transfer to Omaha, Nebraska. Confused pandemonium ensued when the soldiers began to disarm the Native Americans; shots rang out from both sides. Many of the Lakotas were gunned down before they could run. Others did run along the dried creek bottom in an attempt to find refuge, but they were pursued by mounted soldiers and shot. Several hours later, when the gunshots had finally ceased, over two-hundred Mnikowoju and their chief, Big Foot, had been killed. Most of the thirty American soldiers who died during the onslaught were the victims of friendly fire. The massacre at Wounded Knee marked the tragic climax of the history of the Ghost Dance of 1890, a revitalization movement that originated from a visionary experience of the Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka (Jack Wilson). In this vision, the spirits revealed to Wovoka a regenerated world, free of whites, where the Native Americans would rejoin their deceased ancestors to reclaim their lost homelands and practice their customary lifeways in peace. According to the prophet, this regeneration would result from a dance performed for four successive nights; it could not be created by the spilling of blood. However, as more and more western tribes—including the Lakotas—adopted and performed the dance, settlers and federal officials feared that the ceremony might be a prelude to an Indian war. Chief Big Foot and his band unfortunately crossed paths with the Seventh Cavalry at the height of white anxiety about the dancers' intentions.

What Americans really believe: new findings from the Baylor surveys of religion

List of Tables Introduction The Stability and Diversity of American Faith Part I Congregations 1 Church-going Labels Matter 2 Church Growth Competing for Members 3 Strict Churches The Reasons for their Popularity 4 The Scattered Church Traditional Congregations are not Going Away 5 Megachurches Supersizing the Faith Part II Beliefs and Practices 6 Religious Experiences God Told Me to Go to Church 7 Gender Women Believe More, Pray More 8 Heaven We are All Going There 9 God Love Makes a Difference 10 Evil Did Sin Cause the Hurricane? 11 Spirituality Religion and Spirituality Are Not Mutually Exclusive 12 Giving The Rich, the Poor, and the Widow's Mite 13 Personality Are We Hard-Wired for God? Part III Atheism and Irreligion 14 Atheism Godless Revolution Never Happened 15 Credulity New Age Believers in Big Foot 16 New Age Adherents Well-Educated, Formerly Irreligious Elites 17 The Irreligious Simply Unchurched--not Atheists Part IV The Public Square 18 Faith and Politics Is There a Secret Plot of Evangelicals to Take over the American Government? 19 Merry Christmas, Jesus It's Okay to Put Sacred Symbols in the Public Square 20 Incivility Talking about Faith in Public 21 Religious Media Consumption The DaVinci Code Effect 22 Civic Participation Faith as Social Capital 23 Going to College, Getting a Job What Happens when Mom and Dad Take Their Kids to Church Epilogue The Institute for the Study of Religion Contributors Notes

Myth, Theory and Area Studies

Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 1–6, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00130.x [Please note: the three articles referred to in this editorial (Segal, Shuxian and van Binsbergen) are published in Volume 3, Issue 2]. Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK RECO eligion Compass 1749-8171 © 200 The Aut or Journal Compil tion © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 30 0.111 /j. 749-8171.20 8.00130.x D cember 2008 0??? 6 rigi l A ticle EDIT RI L aniela Merolla and Mineke Schipper

Big clumsy feet stomping all over: shame, caution and fear in performance for peace building

This article examines some of the tensions implicit in performing in peace contexts. Drawing on the community-based performance form playback theatre, the article interrogates the (citizen) artist/performer within the demands of improvised performance. The article investigates the demands on the actor in a practice context that features refugee and asylum-seeker audience members/participants: the way in which performative risk, the risk of intimacy, the risk of getting it wrong and the risk of shaming self and other are considered in light of the challenges associated with the specificity of the ethnicity, cultural context/s, values and protocols of these audiences.

North Carolina's Locus of Innovation: Creating Networks of Social Capital in the RTP Community of Small Manufacturers

As a small manufacturing entrepreneur trying to develop and sell a radical innovation in vacuum cleaners, James Dyson had to overcome major technical, strategic, financial and legal hurdles to compete with the global corporations (MNCs). Competing with the global corporations meant that Dyson had to come up with resources that were not readily available to the MNCs.This article begins by using the example of James Dyson's success to explain why social business networks are essential to the new field of innovation economics.We review A New Social Network Built on the Ashes of the Old Social Network, where Gabbay & Leenders (1999) identify the most important resource that small manufacturers have in competing with the large corporations, which they called corporate social capital.We explain that business social networks are like Sasquatch and Big Foot. Every one talks about them, but no one has actually seen one.We conclude that the pathway of future economic growth in North Carolina depends on the creation of new business social networks that promote innovation economics.

Comparative Study of TPep-Like Immunoreactive Neurons in the Central Nervous System of Nudibranch Molluscs

In the sea slug Tritonia diomedea, mucociliary crawling is controlled partly by two pairs of bilaterally symmetrical neurons located in the pedal ganglia. These neurons, known as the Pedal 5 and Pedal 6 cells, produce a class of neuropeptides called TPeps. Using immunohistochemistry we identified TPep-like immunoreactive (TPep-LIR) neurons in diverse nudibranch species. All species examined had 2–7 large, TPep-LIR cells located in each pedal ganglion. The absolute size of the largest TPep-LIR neuron was correlated with foot size. Species with a bigger foot size tended to have larger TPep-LIR cells. However, the number of cells in a given species was not correlated with the size of the adult foot. The presence of large, TPep-LIR cells across the nudibranchs suggests that part of the neural circuitry controlling mucociliary locomotion has been conserved, although the size and number of cells is variable across species. We conclude that the motor circuit underlying crawling might adapt to changes in foot size by changing the size of motor neurons in the circuit, but that changes in cell number are not directly related to foot size.

Effect of Trap Color on Captures of Grape Root Borer (Lepidoptera: Sesiidae) Males and Non-Target Insects

Abstract The effect of bucket trap color on grape root borer (GRB), Vitacea polistiformis Harris, captures was evaluated in 2005 and 2006. Traps were deployed in a commercial vineyard consisting of muscadine (Vitis rotundifolia Michx) grapes in North-Central Florida. Experimental designs were randomized complete block with four tratments including green, yellow, white and blue traps in 2005. In 2006, five treatments (green, yellow, green top, yellow top, and multicolor) and four replicates were evaluated. All traps were baited with GRB female sex pheromone. Trap color had a significant effect on the number of GRB males captured. In 2005, green and yellow traps caught more GRB males than other trap colors. In addition, first GRB male captures were in yellow and green traps. In 2006, the multicolor trap caught more GRB males than any other trap and had the first GRB capture. Grape root borer males prefer green and yellow pheromone-baited traps, but do not appear to distinguish between these two colors, whic...

Proof of Life: Memoir, Truth, and Documentary Evidence

Proof of Life:Memoir, Truth, and Documentary Evidence Carolyn Kraus (bio) "Does it matter if it's true?" a young woman in the audience raised her hand to ask. I hesitated. I was in Los Angeles, speaking at an academic conference on literary nonfiction. The subject had veered from the general case of nonfiction to memoir, the nonfiction subgenre in which I'd been working. My current project was the resurrection of a long-neglected book-length manuscript initially based on the life of my father, whom I'd scarcely known—though ultimately the book would encompass as well the fate of my grandmother, who had died before I was born in an obscure Holocaust death camp in a shrouded corner of the world. The story was peculiar, contradictory, and based more on impressions than on concrete information, observation, or even memory. In its early stages, I'd lacked even the reassurance of legal documents—like birth or death or marriage records—that might have lent my story credibility and anchored it in the physical world. Yet at the memoir's core was an illegitimate child's heartfelt yearning to establish material connections to her past, "true" connections that could not be repudiated, dreamed up, or eradicated. To me, it mattered immensely that my story be true. Just a week before the conference I had hauled out a fragment of my neglected memoir and re-read my reconstruction of an encounter with my father, whom I'd met only twice since I was a toddler. He was "a slight, bent man wearing enormous purple-striped running shoes and walking through an alley in the rain," I'd written. "With one hand he pushed a grocery cart heaped high with old clothes. In his other hand, he held a copy of Tolstoy's On the Meaning of Life, and he studied it, his head bent low." The big feet are clear in my memory, but I can't swear it was raining, or that my father wore running shoes, or that the book was Tolstoy, though I know he was fond of Tolstoy. It had been depressing to discover my eighty-six-year-old father scavenging among the dumpsters of Los Angeles. Maybe that's why the sky is overcast in [End Page 245] my memory, and it might as well have been raining. My manuscript included memory-filtered accounts of long-vanished events. It was crammed with recollected and invented dialogue. Many details were based on impressions. For all that, the memoir was decidedly not fiction. This point mattered to me. I glanced around the conference room. Most of my audience was older than the earnest young woman who'd asked me whether truth mattered. Perhaps her question could only be answered definitively by those who'd never slogged through the muddy realities of memoir writing. Some of my listeners must have considered this question and arrived at answers of their own, which made it still harder to answer. I might have cited the realities that qualify memoir's truth: the spotty, evolutionary nature of memory, the near-impossibility of retrieving more than scraps of dialogue, and the failure of most lives to serve up a narrative line. I might have mentioned the inevitable refining and coloring in of the line drawings that memory provides. But now wasn't the moment to step into the confessional. The conference was taking place in 2006, mere months after documents posted on an Internet website had exposed James Frey's fraudulent memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and amidst the subsequent flurry of public indignation and defensive posturing by nonfiction writers and journalists, some of whom, undoubtedly, were now sitting in my audience. Despite the seemingly obvious dissimilarity between Frey's fabrications and the kind of difficulties that arise from faulty memory, at that awkward moment I was certain that a definitive "yes" answer to the young woman's question was called for. By passing off deliberate lies as nonfiction, Mr. Frey had poisoned the air for all memoir writers. If I answered the question frankly, I might be misinterpreted as defending Frey, who in writers' circles was now tagged "the F word." So...

Big foot: Eco‐footprints of rich dwarf poor nations' debt

Big foot: Eco‐footprints of rich dwarf poor nations' debt

The Phenomenology of Bigfoot

The world is filled with monsters. The Yeti, Sasquatch, Mono Grande, Big Foot. It is filled, at least, with accounts of such monsters; for although we have witnesses and photographs and documented accounts, few believe that such creatures are more than constructs of the imagination. This strong denial is interesting from a sociological perspective, but it also says much about our concepts of human and animal as well. If such creatures exist or are even imagined to exist, the boundary between the human and the animal is eroded. It is not important—at least not for the particular task of this investigation—whether or not they do exist. Like most, I imagine that there are better explanations for the reported sightings than maintaining the existence of reclusive monsters. I, too, am a slave to the scientific paradigm of the world. But I see no reason not to allow for the possibility of such creatures. Regardless, this is not the crucial matter, for it is merely our experience of the possibility of such Others that I want to investigate. How do we make sense of our given humanity in a world where such creatures might exist? How do we know what is human and what is animal if we admit the possibility of a creature described as neither or as both? How might the comfortable, constructed moral boundaries of our community be called into question? And what do the stories of encounters—stories that are reported as truth—say

Constructing, Visualizing, and Analyzing A Digital Footprint

Herein, we discuss the desire for new technology, the need for security, and the right to privacy; in doing so, we argue that each of these concerns comprises an important, tripartite debate. To highlight the complexities in this problem, we define our notion of a “digital footprint” and introduce Big Foot—specialized software created for the research described here to facilitate visualization and exploration of the data that comprise Stephen Weaver's personal digital footprint. Using Big Foot we demonstrate how multiple digital personae can be created from the data that constitute one unique digital footprint and provide a methodology for understanding the good and bad impacts that new technologies may have on future societies. One of the primary arguments of this work is that the debate—though not formally recognized—is currently before contemporary society and must receive sufficient attention.

Elephant impact on dragonflies

African elephants and other indigenous megaherbivores have a major impact on local vegetation structure, including aquatic communities, as their big feet and large mass pound the fringes of water bodies. This disturbance is likely to have a profound influence on the structure and composition of insect assemblages in these habitats. We investigated which dragonfly (Odonata) species were tolerant of trampling by elephants and other game. Assemblage composition differed according to extremely high, very high or high disturbance levels. Dragonfly abundance was greatest where impact was high, and decreasing when disturbance became very high or extremely high. Several odonate species are well-adapted to fairly high levels of disturbance, although too much is impoverishing. Medium and low impact sites were geographically separated, and this, combined with much lower disturbance levels, had a considerable influence on promoting regional dragonfly diversity. Several regional specialist species only occurred in the geographically separated, low-impact sites. The full complement of dragonflies is present only when there is a combination of various disturbance levels combined with spatial variation. Elephant impact is similar to that of humans, with too much of either or both, leading to a species-poor, habitat-generalist dragonfly assemblage.

The Baseball Dreams of Eberhard "Zip" Fuhr and the Reality of Internment Baseball, 1942-1947

He had more nicknames than he could remember. At home his mother called him Abie, the German contraction for his given name Eberhard. Because he had coal black hair and a dark complexion, a few of his friends called him Dago, as if he were a thin Italian swain instead of a husky German who couldn't even dance. He blamed it on his big feet, which his friends said were the size of suitcases and earned him the nickname Satchel. But the tag he liked the best, Zip, was hung on him by his baseball teammates at Woodward High School in Cincinnati, who couldn't believe how fleet and agile their talented but satchel-footed catcher was. (1) On the afternoon of March 23, 1943, seventeen-year-old Eberhard Fuhr sat in his fifth period class, distributive education, on the third floor of Woodward High. (2) Distributive education was a fancy title for a dull course in simple salesmanship, and most of the students were on the edge of sleep or deep in spring daydreams. For Zip Fuhr that meant enjoying the dream he had harbored for years of one day being good enough to play professional baseball. He had begun harboring the dream when he was still in elementary school and on Saturdays rode the streetcar to violin lessons that his mother insisted on. But each time the streetcar passed Deer Creek Common, with an endless dirt field of Knothole League games in progress, he had to resist the urge to jump off the streetcar and join the games. After he finally gave in to the urge, his violin teacher called his mother and wanted to know, Whatever happened to Eberhard? (3) Crosley Field was just blocks away from the Fuhr household, which was located on the corner of York and Baymiller streets. (4) Zip Fuhr's dedication to baseball, rather than the violin, entitled him and his teammates, as members of the Knothole League, to free admission to Redlegs games periodically. They sat in what they called the nosebleed section of Crosley Field and studied their favorite players. For Zip that was Ernie Lombardi, the Redlegs' strapping catcher who could hit line drives with such velocity they broke fielders' hands. Lombardi's secret, they said, was an overlapping grip that permitted his bat to whip like a golf club. (5) Zip didn't fail to notice that his hero also had satchel feet and was so slow they could throw him out at first base after one of his rocket line-drive singles. Still, Lombardi's hitting and temperament were so fiery that he became Zip's idol, and when he graduated from Knothole League baseball to the greater glories of the Woodward High Bulldogs, Zip adopted Lombardi's overlapping bat grip in an effort to develop some of the same power that Lombardi had been able to incorporate into his compact swing. (6) Practice for the 1942-43 Bulldog season had begun two weeks earlier when the Redlegs traded Lombardi to the Boston Braves. Despite this move, he remained Zip Fuhr's idol. Using Lombardi's peculiar grip, Zip was learning to hit with power to the opposite field. He still had good speed and a strong arm. It all meant that, as he sat daydreaming in his distributive education class, the life of a slick salesman was the last thing on his mind. Nor did he have thoughts of college. He'd be in the trades he was certain--a warehouseman, or perhaps a baker like his father--but only until he could realize his dream of some day playing professional baseball. (7) SUDDENLY At 1:30, halfway through Zip Fuhr's class on distributive education, the door to the hallway opened suddenly. It was L. D. Peasley, Woodward High's principal. The school had nearly four thousand students and a staff of hundreds. It was, in fact, a small city, and it was rare for students to even catch a glimpse of the man who ran the school like some distant god. The sight of him abruptly entering the classroom now snapped everyone wide awake. Peasley went straight to the teacher's desk and whispered to her. …

Mourning Dove's Textual Frontier

Mourning Dove’s Textual Frontier Laura G. Godfrey (bio) On May 27, 1916, Mourning Dove, one of the first female Native American authors, wrote to J.P. MacLean, a friend of her editor Lucullus McWhorter, whose opinion of her novel draft she was soliciting. Mourning Dove wrote MacLean during a visit to her own family in Jennings, Montana; in describing her experiences in working with McWhorter, she complained about the difficulties of editorial collaboration: I suppose you have the manuscript now. Big Foot [one of many names given to McWhorter by his friends in local tribes] wrote me a few days ago that he had sent it to you. He is anxious as well as myself to know what you think of it. We both worked hard on it and we sometimes almost went on the war path, but we always patched up a peace and continued friends. He helped me with Cogeawea, but the next time I am going to let him make the plot and I will help him. He wanted me to have this story with a sad ending. He seems to have something sad in his life, but I wanted Cogewea to have a happy time after so much trouble. (445-4-392)1 Much has been written about the collaboration between Mourning Dove, an Okanogan woman, and McWhorter, her mentor and editor in creating the 1927 western romance novel Cogewea: The Half Blood. Cogewea is in some sense a text with two authors, for Mourning Dove received more from McWhorter than literary advice and help in finding a publisher. As her letters make clear, McWhorter is responsible for significant parts of the text, including critical elements of plot and character as well as much of its politics. Dexter Fisher writes in the [End Page 65] introduction to the 1981 edition of Cogewea that "it is in the language of the novel that McWhorter's impact is most obvious because some of the passages are totally unlike Mourning Dove's own direct and simple style as reflected in her original drafts of Coyote Stories [a series of translations of Okanogan tales]" (xvi). An often quoted letter written on June 4, 1928 from Mourning Dove to McWhorter, commonly used to anchor discussions of the collaboration in Cogewea, is worth repeating here. Mourning Dove writes: I have just got through going over the book Cogeawea and am surprised at the changes that you made. . . . I felt like it was someone elses [sic] book and not mine at all. In fact the finishing touches are put there by you, and I have never seen it. . . . Oh my Big Foot, you surely roasted the Shoapees [whites] strong. I think a little too strong to get their sympathy. I wish we had not gone too strong now. That is the only thing I am afraid of. (444-95-401) Some critics suggest that McWhorter intruded unfairly—even oppressively—on Mourning Dove's text. Yet McWhorter himself openly protested claims that he had "written" the novel for Mourning Dove, and in his early attempts to interest potential readers and publishers he often de-emphasized his role as collaborator. In April of 1916, for example, he writes in a letter to Walter Woehlke (a potential buyer) that, "besides a few notes written by myself," the narrative is solely Mourning Dove's (Box 27, folder 241). Still, evidence of his textual insertions is so great that some authors do not even refer to Mourning Dove as the author of Cogewea; Peter Beidler notes, in his article on Cogewea's reading of western romance The Brand, that he "[uses] the terms author and Mourning Dove to refer to the writing team consisting of an Indian woman and her white male collaborator" (48). Others, like Alanna Brown, argue that without the help of an influential and knowledgeable advisor such as McWhorter, Mourning Dove's novel would likely not have been published at all ("Mourning Dove's Voice" 3). Criticism of late has expanded to study the text's transcultural qualities, in particular its depiction of mixed-blood and Anglo-American lovers and its inclusion of traditional Native American storytelling within the strictures of the western romance...

Big feet in Polynesia: a somatometric study of the Tongans

Somatometric research was conducted in Tonga, Polynesia, with a focus on foot and hand size and proportions. Data were taken on 140 adults (90 females and 50 males) and compared with those of other population groups. In addition to their heavy body-build, Tongans were found to have significantly longer and wider feet and hands than the Japanese, French, Australian Aborigines, or Bamanann-Fulbe West Africans. The significance of these physical characteristics of Polynesians is discussed from a micro-evolutionary viewpoint.

Wounded Knee through the Lens of Colonialism

It was the last of the Indian wars. At Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, troops of the U.S. Army rounded up a group of Miniconjou Sioux led by Big Foot. The Indians had fled from their Cheyenne River reservation in the midst of Ghost Dance troubles and were seeking to join the Oglala Sioux at Pine Ridge. When the soldiers attempted to disarm the Indians on December 29, 1890, someone fired a gun, and the nervous soldiers and fearful Indians began a savage battle. Hotchkiss guns from an overlooking height swept the camp, mowing down many Indians, including women and children who attempted to flee. When the shooting ended, more than 250 of Big Foot's band were dead or wounded. Of the soldiers, 25 died and 39 were wounded. As a winter blizzard roared down from the north, the dead were frozen where they had fallen, some like Big Foot himself in grotesque postures; many of the bodies were dumped into a common grave. Gruesome pictures of these events have been a staple of history books for a long time.

The Last American Shoe Manufacturers: Decreasing Productivity and Increasing Profits in the Shift from Piece Rates to Continuous Flow Production*

This study examines the economic effects of changes in a group of managerial policies, a key element of which was the switch from piece rate to time rate modes of compensation, in one of the last remaining firms in the U.S. shoe industry in the 1990s. The firm, which we call “Big Foot” (BF), entered the 1990s using a set of human resource policies that included piece rates to motivate workers, which induced relatively high productivity. But, faced with severe foreign competition, it switched to time rates and associated managerial policies, which produced higher profits despite lowering productivity. The reason profits increased is that time rate‐related labor management policies reduced labor and other costs by enough to offset a fall in productivity. Data for shoe manufacturing from the Longitudinal Research Data (LRD) files of the U.S. Census show, more generally, that establishments with high labor costs and relatively many nonproduction workers, both of which are associated with management policies that often include piece rates, had lower rates of survival in this period than other establishments. Our finding that labor management policies associated with piece rate compensation can raise productivity but lower profitability is consistent with the broad decline of piece rate pay in advanced economies.

"Remember Wounded Knee": AIM's Use of Metonymy in 21st Century Protest

'Remember Wounded Knee': AIM's Use of Metonymy in 21st Century Protest" examines the American Indian Movement's call to remember the 1890 Big Foot massacre as a rhetorical move that produces a complex, multilayered palimpsest, as various incarnations of the words Wounded Knee function to define the course of protest for the American Indian Movement. Homi Bhabha's theory of metonymy playing an important role in "the social articulation of difference from the minority perspective" is especially useful for exploring how chance and contingency work in understanding American Indian history. Using as its primary source a collection of AIM's early 1970 documents, which are now available on the World Wide Web, along with the contemporary articulation of the American Indian Movement's purpose, this article traces the meaning of Wounded Knee as a pan-tribal generation of American Indian people attempt to recover an indigenous past while putting that past to work, defining the future.

The Abstracts of the 1st New South Wales APS State Conference

The first New South Wales APS State conference was held on May 23–25 2003 in Newcastle. The conference was sponsored by the APS, together with the University of Newcastle's School of Behavioural Sciences and School of Education, and was attended by over 125 delegates. The theme of the conference was Psychology at the Coalface. This theme was chosen to emphasise that the conference would have a practical focus. The conference aimed to promote quality psychological practice and to foster learning and growth by bringing together members who work in a diverse range of employment settings and specialisations. The conference was held at the Newcastle City Hall. The first day of the conference was devoted to optional full-day and half-day pre-conference workshops. The conference proper began on Friday evening with a keynote address by Professor Matt Sanders, University of Queensland. Over the following two days, keynote addresses were presented by Professor Beryl Hesketh, University of Sydney and Professor Mike Startup, University of Newcastle. The program included presentation of oral papers, symposia and posters. The Saturday night conference dinner featured ‘Tim the Yowie Man’ the world's only Cryptonaturalist, speaking on unusual phenomena in the natural world from Big Foot to the Loch Ness monster. The conference was an opportunity for delegates to present up to the minute research on relevant community topics. Speakers provided an exciting and informative program covering a wide range of issues from personality disorders and autism, to schizophrenia and problem gambling.

The C4 specific properties of Flaveria trinervia phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase is divided in two regions that synergetically interact

The evolution of the C4 photosynthetic pathway was facilitated by the reqruitment of genes already present in ancestral C3 plants. In order to function in the C4 cycle not only the level and pattern of expression of these genes had to be changed, but also the enzymatic properties had to be optimised. The C4 phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase gene (ppcA) of the C4 species F. trinervia and its orthologous counterpart of the C3 plant F. pringlei were chosen to identify the C4-specific property determinants in the enzyme sequence. By constructing a series of C3/C4 chimerical enzymes it was shown that the serine residue at position 774 is crucial for the C4 enzyme. The results also suggested that region 2 (amino acids 296 to 437) contains additional determinant(s) for C4 properties in Flaveria phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylases. In the present work we investigated the influence of region 2 alone and in combination with site-directed C3/C4 mutagenesis of position 774. The results show that region 2 contains determinants for C4 properties. However, in order to transform a C3 enzyme into C4 type both region 2 and position 774 must be of C4 sequences. In addition, we will present results that show that a synergistic interaction exists between the two C4 specific determinants.