Market Town Research Articles

Gerencia pública y gestión ambiental en las actividades económicas de los mercados municipales colombo-venezolanos

El propósito de esta investigación fue determinar la relación entre la gerencia pública y la gestión ambiental en las actividades económicas de los mercados municipales colombo-venezolanos. El tipo de investigación fue descriptiva, el diseño de la misma fue no experimental, transeccional, de campo. Entre los principales hallazgos se encuentran la prevalencia del desarrollo de capacidades para el manejo de recursos económicos y el manejo de la evaluación. El control de gestión y el desarrollo territorial resultan de menor grado de aplicabilidad en el mercado en cuestión. Los participantes del mercado actúan de forma individual sin relacionarlo directamente con valores y actividades ecológicas, que poco favorece el sentido de cooperación y participación. Se encontró poco manejo de las auditorías de control fiscal, donde los participantes expresaron la necesidad de mejorar sus capacidades de participar en la toma de decisiones y resolver los problemas ambientales comunitarios de las áreas comerciales de La Guajira y Maicao, para el beneficio colectivo.

Mortality in Town and Countryside in Early Modern England

In this paper we test two hypotheses about mortality in early modern England: (1) that market towns had more frequent and more severe mortality crises than rural parishes; and (2) that the underlying level of mortality in market towns was higher than that in rural parishes. The data consist of annual burial totals for ten pairs of parishes, each consisting of one market town and a nearby rural parish, drawn from counties in all parts of England between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Mortality crises are identified and their severity measured using a Poisson model, which has the advantage that it can be applied both to small and large parishes without the need for ad hoc adjustments or rules. The results show clearly that mortality crises were more frequent and severe in market towns than in rural parishes, a pattern which would be predicted by epidemiological theory. The evidence that underlying mortality in market towns was higher than that in rural parishes is not as clear cut, though there is a tendency for market towns to record higher levels.

Leading Communities: Community-led Development in England’s Small Towns: the Market Towns Initiative

The Market Towns Initiative (MTI), a UK community-led development programme, operated throughout rural England from 2000 until 2005/6. It was designed to help local people, with professional support, identify – and then capitalize on – the economic, environmental and social strengths and weaknesses of small country towns. This paper explains the origins and ways of working of the MTI. Examples of the topics explored and participants’ views are given, and conclusions drawn. The opportunity is also taken to explain how interest in the roles of England’s small country towns grew in the years following the Second World War, and how this led to the development of the MTI. Evidence suggests that the programme worked well. It demonstrated that local people have the enthusiasm, skills and knowledge to take a lead in the development of the places in which they live; something which, until local government reforms changed roles and structures, was largely taken for granted.

New Labour, Street Homelessness and Social Exclusion: A Defaulted Promissory Note?

This article offers a critical appraisal of the ‘New Labour' governments’ (1997–2010) much vaunted commitment to confronting and combating the spectre of visible rough sleeping and its associated street culture. It reviews the trajectory of policy initiatives and welfare practices concerned with engendering the social inclusion of homeless people. It subsequently interrogates attempts to shape the behaviour of people experiencing homelessness through the imposition of greater conditionality and invocation of an ethic of self-responsibility. It stresses the importance of considering the role of actively engaged local communities in governing homeless people and regulating homeless service providers. It does this using an ethnographic case study of homelessness and housing need in a small market town in the south-west of England.

The accidental city: improvising New Orleans

This is the story of a city that shouldn't exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America's most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world. Lawrence N. Powell, a decades-long resident and observer of New Orleans, gives us the full sweep of the city's history from its founding through Louisiana statehood in 1812. We see the Crescent evolve from a French village, to an African market town, to a Spanish fortress, and finally to an Anglo-American center of trade and commerce. We hear and feel the mix of people, religions, and languages from four continents that make the place electric--and always on the verge of unraveling. The Accidental City is the story of land-jobbing schemes, stock market crashes, and nonstop squabbles over status, power, and position, with enough rogues, smugglers, and self-fashioners to fill a picaresque novel. Powell's tale underscores the fluidity and contingency of the past, revealing a place where people made their own history. This is a city, and a history, marked by challenges and perpetual shifts in shape and direction, like the sinuous river on which it is perched.

Paternalistic Consumer Co-operatives in Rural England, 1870–1930

AbstractThe British co-operative movement is associated mainly with industrial areas. Where consumer co-operatives existed in the countryside they were located in market towns and formed by rural trade unions, especially railwaymen, occasionally quarrymen or farmworkers. Yet the Co-operative Union membership encompassed a significant number of small single village societies founded by paternalistic gentry.This paper draws on examples in Shropshire, East Yorkshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, to offer an account and explanation of the never before studied, paternalistic co-operatives. Recruiting estate workers and farm labourers, individual country squires showed themselves capable of using a co-operative ideology and framework, usually associated with the labour movement, to achieve very different and paternalistic goals. The relationship between these paternalistic village societies and the wider co-operative movement, both locally and nationally, is discussed, including the company paternalism of the Co-operative Wholesale Society's own farming operations. A comparison with the ‘Blue co-ops’ of the Lancashire Conservative dominated cotton spinners’ union is also made. The paper concludes that the failure of paternalistic co-operatives was part of the post Great War revival of rural cultural conservatism, linked to the effects of agricultural depression.

The Canary Keeper

The Canary Keeper Dinah Cox (bio) In a neat house on the outskirts of Market Town lived a small-time actor, a man whose legendary ability to cry on cue had deserted him. Newspaper reviews from long ago called him “The Fountain.” Nowadays he was dried up, his tear ducts clogged with despair. If the footlights grew dim in the presence of greatness, Charlie admitted with some reluctance his own star burned like a dying ember, a white dwarf, less like Gielgud and Olivier and more like Bozo the Clown. Maybe, on a good day, he reminded people vaguely of Gene Kelly or, when he was really cooking, Chaplin. Still, he wanted people to feel moved, maybe not moved to tears, as he had once been able to pretend, but moved to more than boredom or fatigue or—that terrible sound—folding their programs in their laps. It was 1987, the year Paul Newman directed Joanne Woodward and John Malkovich in the fourth film version of The Glass Menagerie. Unfortunately, it was also the year of the Teen Wolf sequel and another unremarkable installment in the Jaws series. Fred Astaire died that year, as did Bob Fosse. Charlie hadn’t met either one of them, but he’d grieved—without crying, of course—as if he had. One day in winter, during that bleak, quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s, Charlie left behind his customary morning load of laundry and decided instead to walk downtown for an audition. He put on his best shoes—a pair of loafers given to him by the local stage manager—and rummaged through his dresser drawers until he found a comb. These days, his hair seemed stiff, like the bristles on a paintbrush. At the bottom of an old trunk he found a rusty can of hairspray and made himself stiffer still. The weather forecast called for temperatures below freezing, but he did not have a car, and the bus routes ran only as far as the movie house on the edge of town. On the long walk to the concert hall, he passed a dying business establishment called Market [End Page 53] Town Morning Coffee. Waiting at a crosswalk, he recognized the scent of biscuits baking and decided to stop in. On his way through the mirrored archway, he bumped into a group of departing customers. A cowbell attached to the top edge of the door would not stop ringing. “Charlie,” a man said. Gripped between his fingers, the man held a dog leash without a dog attached. The man opened his mouth and revealed a row of teeth so straight and white they seemed to hover, to hang in the air like the Chinese lanterns in Charlie’s front yard. The man grabbed Charlie by the shoulders. “Hey, everybody, do you remember Charlie? ‘Super serious discounts that will scare you to death! Never in the history of haunted houses were prices this Low-low-low!’ Come on, Charlie, do a little Lionel Lightbulb for us, would ya?” “I don’t know,” Charlie said, and here he made a point of breathing through his nose—better to avoid wandering germs. He took a step back from the pastry-filled crowd. Approaching Charlie with a wild stare, the man twirled and swung his dog leash, the metal end meeting Charlie’s kneecap with a thunk. “Aw, come on,” the man said, his voice overtaking the bakery’s cavernous warmth. “ ‘When things go bump in the night, light up YOUR living room with fantastic fixtures from the South of France!’” Charlie laughed and shook the man’s hand. “Those were the good old days, weren’t they?” Charlie did not like to lie—the truth was, his tenure as television spokesman for Remarkable Lamps had been the lowest point in his professional career—but he believed in making at least tentative stabs toward polite public behavior. The man tugged on Charlie’s overcoat and invited him to sit down at the front counter. Charlie agreed. When a waitress brought out a steaming tray from the kitchen, the man finally loosened his grip on the dog leash, took the largest biscuit, and shoved several...

Humphrey Ridley (1653–1708): 17th century evolution in neuroanatomy and selective cerebrovascular injections for cadaver dissection

Humphrey Ridley, M.D. (1653-1708), is a relatively unknown historical figure, belonging to the postmedieval era of neuroanatomical discovery. He was born in the market town of Mansfield, 14 miles from the county of Nottinghamshire, England. After studying at Merton College, Oxford, he pursued medicine at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In 1688, he was incorporated as an M.D. at Cambridge. Ridley authored the first original treatise in English language on neuroanatomy, The Anatomy of the Brain Containing its Mechanisms and Physiology: Together with Some New Discoveries and Corrections of Ancient and Modern Authors upon that Subject. Ridley described the venous anatomy of the eponymous circular sinus in connection with the parasellar compartment. His methods were novel, unique, and effective. To appreciate the venous anatomy, he preferred to perform his anatomical dissections on recently executed criminals who had been hanged. These cadavers had considerable venous engorgement, which made the skull base venous anatomy clearer. To enhance the appearance of the cerebral vasculature further, he used tinged wax and quicksilver in the injections. He set up experimental models to answer questions definitively, in proving that the arachnoid mater is a separate meningeal layer. The first description of the subarachnoid cisterns, blood-brain barrier, and the fifth cranial nerve ganglion with its branches are also attributed to Ridley. This historical vignette revisits Ridley's life and academic work that influenced neuroscience and neurosurgical understanding in its infancy. It is unfortunate that most of his novel contributions have gone unnoticed and uncited. The authors hope that this article will inform the neurosurgical community of Ridley's contributions to the field of neurosurgery.

Paternal authority and patrilineal power: stem family arrangements in peasant communities and eighteenth-century Tyrolean marriage contracts

In historical research, stem family arrangements are regarded as a classic context for the exertion of paternal power and authority. Inheritance practice has hitherto been considered a crucial basis for stem family households, but this paper emphasizes the significance of marital property law, as an instrument for further reinforcing paternal authority by means of patrilineal logics and the vertical orientation derived from these. Stem family arrangements imply that, despite their status as married men, sons or sons-in-law were subject to the father's management and decision-making power in the household. Working with marriage contracts from two Tyrolean courts, the article highlights forms of paternal authority over the couple marrying into the house. It notes that in the region studied, stem family arrangements are documented primarily for the peasant communities of the Welsberg court, and almost never in the market town of Innichen with its artisan and trade-based structure; and that stem families, as one generation arrangement among others, were not dominant locally but do appear to have been more frequent than has generally been presumed up to now. Finally, the article addresses the changes and the continuities that occurred during the transition from the ancien régime to the modern period.

RECONSTRUCTION OF BUILDING OUTLINES IN DENSE URBAN AREAS BASED ON LIDAR DATA AND ADDRESS POINTS

Abstract. The paper presents a comprehensive method for automated extraction and delineation of building outlines in densely built-up areas. A novel approach to outline reconstruction is the use of geocoded building address points. They give information about building location thus highly reduce task complexity. Reconstruction process is executed on 3D point clouds acquired by airborne laser scanner. The method consists of three steps: building detection, delineation and contours refinement. The algorithm is tested against a data set that presents the old market town and its surroundings. The results are discussed and evaluated by comparison to reference cadastral data.

CYTOMETRY 2012—What would Ehrlich do?

CYTO 2012, the 27th Congress of the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC), finds us in Leipzig, a city with deep roots in science, industry, and the arts. Leipzig was an artistic home to Bach, Mendelsohn, and Goethe and sites featured in their lives and work can be found throughout the city center. Leipzig is also an historic center for trade, founded at the crossing of two ancient trade routes, Via Regia and Via Imperii, and has served as a major market town for nearly 1,000 years. Trade activities shaped the architecture of the courtyards and passageways of the city center and, in more recent times, the Congress Centre Leipzig, the venue of CYTO 2012. Finally, Leipzig holds a special distinction as a home to the very roots of cytometry. Paul Ehrlich received his medical degree from the University of Leipzig in 1878, after writing a dissertation on ‘‘Contributions to the Theory and Practice of Histological Staining.’’ His supervisor Julius Friedrich Cohnheim was the inventor of intra-vital microscopy. Strongly influenced by his cousin Karl Weigert, a great microscopist in his own right and an assistant to the preeminent pathologist Rudolf Virchow, Ehrlich made use of aniline dyes to identify different cell types in blood by the staining patterns of their organelles after treatment with mixtures of acidic and basic dyes, discovering the Mast cells. The dye industry itself was then driven primarily by the needs of fashion, having originated in the 1850s with the serendipitous synthesis of mauve in London by William Perkin in a failed attempt to produce quinine, an expensive natural product then the only available treatment for malaria. The stains used in hematologic microscopy and malaria diagnosis today are but a few steps removed from Ehrlich’s eosin–methylene blue mixtures [recently used for in vivo flow cytometry (1)]; his ‘‘acid-fast’’ staining procedure for Mycobacterium tuberculosis and related bacterial species is similarly close to today’s venerable Ziehl–Neelsen and auramine O stains for TB, and Ehrlich’s work inspired Hans Christian Gram to develop his own well-known stain for bacteria.

Negotiating heritage and tradition: identity and cultural tourism in Ærø, Denmark

Ronström's tradition/heritage dichotomy is used to explore issues of cultural inheritance in the Danish island of Ærø. The 2006 publication of Carsten Jensen's best-selling historical novel We, the Drowned turned the Baltic Sea village of Marstal into Denmark's best-known maritime community. Locally, however, there had long been a tradition of Marstallers contrasting their community's seafaring past to the reputedly agrarian identity of the island's other main village, the former market town of Ærøskøbing. The community rivalry between industrial Marstal and tourist-friendly, half-timbered Ærøskøbing finds expression in the two villages’ various tourist attractions. Jensen's novel has been embraced by both Marstallers and Danes in general, renewing interest in local traditions and the encouraging Marstal's development as a heritage town. Although We, the Drowned has become a tool for constructing community solidarity, it has also introduced a mode of heritage tourism that may clash with elements of the local identity.

How I Learned Batak: Studying the Angkola Batak Language in 1970s New Order Indonesia

How I Learned Batak: Studying the Angkola Batak Language in 1970s New Order Indonesia Susan Rodgers1 (bio) How were “local languages” and “local cultures” constituted during the New Order? How was the visiting anthropologist construed during the Soeharto regime? How were anthropology and “culture” itself imagined in New Order times by diverse parties engaged in these profoundly politicized (if veiled) narrative discourses? John Pemberton’s findings about New Order cultural imaginaries set out in his On the Subject of “Java”2 provide macro-level insight and excellent historical grounding for beginning to answer these questions, as Pemberton focuses on constructions of so-called traditions revolving around the royal court of Surakarta. This present essay offers an autobiographical, experiential parallel to Pemberton’s work by setting out my memories of working with a seventy-six-year-old retired schoolteacher who taught me the Angkola Batak language in 1974 as part of my first term of fieldwork in Sipirok, South Tapanuli, North Sumatra. My teacher’s pedagogies and language ideology were shaped by Dutch colonial visions of language and learning; his way of presenting his home language to me as a brilliant, civilizing gift was also animated by his discomfort and skepticism with the New Order government’s negative stereotypes about so-called [End Page 1] minority languages and minority peoples. This experimental memoir of language learning suggests that New Order “control” of places like South Tapanuli was ragged and superficial. Learning to speak a language means learning a world, anthropologists and ethnolinguists sometimes claim. This was also the conviction of several forthrightly opinionated retired schoolteachers from Sumatra’s rural South Tapanuli district in the mid-1970s—a group of no-nonsense Angkola Batak older men and women in the market town of Sipirok who took firm charge of my language-learning education there when I was a young (read: callow) visiting American anthropology PhD student from 1974 to 1977. They were teaching me to speak and read the Angkola Batak language. As our lingua franca we used Indonesian, the national language. I had already studied this in an intensive way in American universities before coming to Sumatra. This period of my fieldwork in Sipirok took place about a decade into the installation of the new national Indonesian government, the New Order. In power from 1965 to May 1998, the New Order was a thinly veiled military regime that stressed headlong economic development and centralized control of the ethnically and linguistically diverse country under the guidance of generals.3 In 1974, the county district (kecamatan) and town of Sipirok were caught up in fits of New Order-sponsored pembangunan, economic development. In the 1970s, some in South Tapanuli felt that the New Order was a scandal, an insult to actual Indonesian patriotism and national hopes for a true republic. For these commentators (many rather elderly then, like my Batak language teachers), the Indonesian national project seemed to have been placed on hold while the New Order state sucked the island of Sumatra dry of its once-abundant resources. Some even said that New Order hegemony in Sumatra was a contemporary form of colonialism, one that was repeating some of the worst aspects of Dutch control of the Indies, if with more irony this time. Other Sipirok residents just kept quiet and tried to endure New Order times. This political climate shaped the way I was taught the Angkola Batak language by my elderly mentors, who were leery of New Order plans and platitudes. This setting also influenced Sipirok residents’ comments to me about languages in general, about language ways in the remembered colonial Indies, and about language matters under the New Order. Talk about language issues was a favorite topic in Sipirok, I found. Language ideologies were shaped and expressed through much deliberate popular commentary on speech ways in the colonial Indies era; at issue, also, were relationships between languages and the relative prestige of different [End Page 2] languages on the national Indonesian stage.4 My Batak language teachers were among the most voluble on these subjects in informal talks with me. South Tapanuli was and is a sub-province of Indonesia located far from the centers of national power...

Cashing In Across the Golden Triangle: Thailand's Northern Border Trade with China, Laos, and Myanmar.

DOI: 10.1355/ae29-2fCashing In Across the Golden Triangle: Thailand's Northern Border Trade with China, Laos, and Myanmar. By Thein Swe and Paul Chambers. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Mekong Press, 2011. Pp.xx, 212.The book tells the story of how an emerging fourcountry, cross-border natural economic territory transformed the Golden Triangle, once no more than a lawless drug trafficking frontier into an example of flourishing regional economic cooperation. Natural refers to the mosaic of vertically and horizontally integrated markets that cross national borders within the territory. The volume that analyses this transformation is the result of a confluence involving a first-rate publisher and two quality co-authors. Mekong Press was initiated in 2005 by Silkworm Books with financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Silkworm is a publisher of note when it comes to socioeconomic, political and cultural issues centring on the northern regions of Thailand and the crossborders to which they connect. Co-authors Thein Swe and Paul Chambers occupy faculty positions at the South East Asian Institute of Global Studies at Chiang Mai's Payap University.From the outset the co-authors write with the realization that many of their readers have a limited understanding of the region's geography, economic and political structures well the production, finance, trade and human migration patterns and linkages that continue to form. They write both to this audience and to other readers who are well informed about the enormous regional changes that are taking place - including the costs and benefits to which they give rise.The book's early chapters focus on the substantive nature of the transformation, particularly in Northern Thailand which plays a major role in the development of new patterns of production, distribution, labour migration, tourism, border trade and finance. They point out that tourism is in the process of becoming an ever more prominent economic sector. In support of these activities new and rejuvenated infrastructure facilities are being put into place in transportation (including roads, bridges and rail transportation), communication (namely land-based and wireless phones) and energy availability including from fourteen Chinese hydropower dams constructed and operating along the Upper Mekong.As patterns of cross-border trade in goods and services continue to evolve they lead to transport corridors that in turn facilitate the growth of retail and wholesale establishments located along the way; that is, transport corridors both facilitate and generate economic activity. This helps cities to grow, and the Northern Thailand town of Mae Sai is a good example of this aspect of the region's dynamism. It is a town of 60,000 that now boasts an array of retailers and wholesalers, a nearby casino complex to attract visitors and it is a strategic border crossing point into Myanmar. The Asian Highway Network works its way through Mae Sai on its way to other market towns within the economic territory.It is a burgeoning and exciting place and Swe and Chambers capture this phenomenon vividly. Not only do they analyse the positive aspects of the territories' economic expansion (for example, in terms of productivity, production, employment and income generation) but they also analyse some of the problems that have arisen. For example, there are strategic and reliability issues due to distances between facilities leading to transportation constraints. Equitable water access and energy sharing remain a political challenge. The hydro power dams on the Upper Mekong as well increasingly longer dry seasons have caused a decrease in Mekong water levels, making river commerce more difficult (p. 104). In addition, growth based upon the cashing in process is uneven with some residents of the region left behind, including cross-border migrants many of whom settled in the Chiang Mai/Chiang Rai/Mae Sai part of Northern Thailand. …

The Mason-Dixon and Proclamation Lines: Land Surveying and Native Americans in Pennsylvania’s Borderlands

In January 1765, Charles Mason visited Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during winter holiday from his work on the Maryland-Pennsylvania boundary line. “What brought me here,” wrote Mason, “was my curiosity to see the place where was perpetuated last Winter the Horrid and inhuman murder of 26 Indians, Men, Women and Children, leaving none alive to tell.” The dead were Conestoga Indians who had “fled to the Gaol” in Lancaster in a vain effort to escape the Indian-hating vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys. The Paxton Boys broke into the jail and brutally executed and dismembered the Conestogas, peaceful dependents on the Pennsylvanian government and erstwhile neighbors of the Paxtons. “Strange it was that the Town though as large as most Market Towns in England, never offered to oppose them, . . . no honor to them!” The Paxtons, it seems, were not alone in their anti-Indian sentiments.

The first urban plan of Uzice from 1863.

Urban plan for Uzice from 1863. started urban reforming of settlement. Historical events in 1862. set the basis: great fire and emigration of Turks from the city which reduced number from 5700 to 2490 inhabitants. At the same time, financial capacity of population weakened and that affected to dynamics of reconstruction. Sketch of current state from 1863. represents first geodetic record of the town. It provides important information about town state during Turkish occupation. On sketch of current state after the fire are seen unequal width winding streets, blocks with irregular borders, streams flowing freely through town, and, in the town center, a large cemetery which divides the town and prevents further development. According to the sketch was made the First regulation proposal on May 1863. (eng. Emanuel Shefel) which included identical surface as area destroyed in the fire. With this plan cemetery located in center was abolished, regulation of river Djetinja and steam Uremovac was planned, formed two blocks at expense of river regulation, street routes were straightened, street axle fractures were planned only in areas of intersections, block boundaries realigned, blocks got proper geometry, and around the church and district office was formed a town market from which poured out the main street - carsija. Problems of this proposalwere that it envisaged small number of town markets, in relation to economic importance of the town and inappropriate main street solution. In order to help in rewriting the plan in the town were sent engineers Josip Klinar (from Cacak) and Joseph Veseli (from Loznica). Together with E. Sefel they have made Second plan proposal: thay have expanded plan intervention to north (Military Circle), to west (stream Kostica), on cemetary space were formed two blocks and Knez Milos Market, on west side the block where was madrassa was reduced and school building was set on the regulatory line and thereby was formed Sveti Sava Market, Old market retained all features from previous proposal, Main Street has changed its route and in the part just before the Old Market was connected with the street that leads to Lipa, two parallel roads of same rank spreading from east to west and north to south were formed, river Djetinja and steam Uremovac channels were regulated, and formed Military circle. Town graphic presentation was changed so that on the drawing all blocks have written side length, and some streets even width. This proposal was endorsed in 1871. and remained in force until 1891. The work was made based on stored archival material and written sources.

A Future in the Countryside for the Free Churches?

Much of the discussion of rural Christianity focuses on the presence and the role of the Church of England. Less attention has been devoted to the historic significance and present activity of the Free Churches, especially in English market towns. This paper analyses two areas of rural England (Leicestershire and Rutland and Oxfordshire and the Cotswold District of Gloucestershire) and demonstrates a continuing and significant Free Church presence in the countryside. It reflects on some current models of ecclesiology and considers the possibilities for new models and fresh expressions of Church which draw on the shared heritage of English Christianity both Anglican and Dissenting.

بسجل الدخول بالمتحف المصري بالقاهرة 43649 ملاحظات على لوحة پا-سر رقم (Observations on Paser Stela no. 43649 in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo)

The stela of Paser, which the Cairo Museum possesses (JdE 43649), is one of the most important religious documents ever found in Egypt. It was unearthed in Abydos, but the exact provenance is unknown. The stela is a limestone of very mediocre quality, and measures 54×35 cm. It was purchased in Balliana, the market town of the Abydos region. The inscriptions and representations are somewhat carelessly incised. It is the single document which provides the greatest information on the cult of King Nebhepetre Ahmose I at Abydos. A good photograph is reproduced of G. Legrain “Un miracle d‘Ahmes Ier a Abydos sous le regne de Ramses II.”, in ASAE 16, 1916. It describes a land dispute put before the barque oracle of the deified Nebpehtyre Ahmose I, in the Year fourteen of the King Ramses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty, some two-hundred-and-thirty- five years following the death of Nebpehtyre Ahmose I. The names and titles of the priests and priestesses serving the cult of King Nebpehtyre Ahmose I are found on a variety of objects from Abydos, spanning the period from the early Eighteenth Dynasty into the reign of King Ramses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty. The activity of an oracle cult of the deified King during the Ramesside Period implies that significant transformations to the nature and practice of Ahmose‘s worship had taken place over time at Abydos. Perhaps the oracles are the best illustrations of the interest which the deity was believed to take in human affairs. The oracles also show how the Egyptians almost forced their gods to abandon a passive attitude towards men and to reveal their will, advice or knowledge. This was through the intermediary of the statue of the god which was asked questions, though more than one case is related where the initiative was from the god himself. Strangely enough, the practice of approaching the god and consulting him appears relatively late in Egypt, the first known instances dating from the New Kingdom. It is not necessary to conclude from this, as has sometimes been done, that the practice was originally unknown to Egypt, and was introduced from abroad. On the contrary, consultation with the god is the natural outcome of man‘s reasoning, and the rather original technique which the Egyptians devised for this purpose suggests that oracles in Egypt were of native origin. The first reference to the divine being manifested is probably that made by King Tuthmosis III, who relates how, when he was still a boy, the god Amun, in the course of a procession of his statue round the temple, noticed him and halted. (Please note that this article is in Arabic)

The Effects of Health Education on Sexual Behavior and Uptake of HIV Counseling and Testing Among out of School Youths in a Nigerian Border Market

Background: This intervention study assessed the effectiveness of health education and provision of free Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) counseling and testing services on sexual behavior and uptake of HIV counseling and testing (HCT) among out of school youths (15 24yrs) in a Nigerian border town market using Seme border as the study group and IdiIroko border as the control group.Methodology: One in two systematic sampling techniques was used for selecting 120 respondents in each border town market. Data was collected using a standardized validated questionnaire.Result: Both groups had similar demographic pattern, mean age of the respondents was 19 years while mean age at sexual debut was 16 years. Condom use increased from 60% to 74%, consistency of use from 15% to 19% while multiple partners decreased from 26% to 19%. Relationship was demonstrated between sexual debut and regular attendance at religious activities, alcohol consumption, having sex and multiple sexual partners. Statistically significant increase in number of youths who had done HCT post intervention from 18%to 59% (P = 0.05) was also observed.Conclusion: Provision of accessible youth friendly voluntary counseling and testing VCT services at the border as well as health education for out of school youths will help in improving uptake of VCT services and condom use among those that are sexually active.

On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (review)

Reviewed by: On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa Bruce Hall On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa. By Ghislaine Lydon . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 496 pp. $99.00 (cloth); $76.00 (e-book). Ghislaine Lydon has written a history of trans-Saharan trade that is both comprehensive and highly sophisticated. It will serve as a principal reference for those interested in the Sahara, and it will gain a place in the larger literature on early modern commercial networks around the globe. Lydon's book is the first in-depth examination of Saharan commerce [End Page 618] in many decades. To a much greater extent than other work on the trans-Saharan slave trade, which has relied heavily on European consular and colonial sources, Lydon bases her work on written and oral sources produced within the Saharan commercial networks themselves. Because of this, she is able to trace the internal social and cultural logics of different Saharan trading networks, showing how this difficult and dangerous commerce actually functioned historically. This is no small feat. It is this aspect of the book that is most original and exciting. The book is a history of the commercial networks that crossed the western end of the Sahara (in the modern-day countries of Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali). It focuses in particular on groups of traders who originated in the northern Saharan region of Wad Nun and who organized camel caravans that moved south through Mauritania and ultimately to the market towns of the Middle Niger Valley and the Niger Bend in West Africa. There is an extensive overview of the long history of commercial crossings of the Sahara, but the focus of the analysis is on the nineteenth century. Lydon pays a lot of attention to explaining the social mechanisms that made Saharan trade possible. She provides detailed accounts of how caravans were organized, labor mobilized, and credit extended. There is no question that Lydon's ethnographic methodology allowed her to amass a tremendous amount of detailed information about a wide variety of issues connected to Saharan commerce. The most spectacular source used in this book, though, is a set of Arabic legal texts found in Tishit (Mauritania) that were written in 1852 to resolve a complex inheritance dispute between different partners in commercial transactions, debtors, and the widows of the diseased. Using these remarkably detailed documents, Lydon is able to reconstruct the competing claims made against the estate of one deceased trader who was part of the Wad Nun commercial network. It is the basis of Lydon's explanation of the behavior of particular members of this network in seeking their own material advantage against other claimants located in both Tishit and Guelemin (in Wad Nun). This inheritance case is a principal means for Lydon to intervene in the larger field of early modern commerce. She argues that scholars have underplayed the importance of religious institutions in organizing long-distance trade. In the Saharan case, both Muslim and Jewish communities relied on religiously based legal frameworks and on the services of legal scholars who were often also involved in the trade themselves to uphold contracts and agreements over long distances. This is not, on the face of it, a new argument; S. D. Goitein made [End Page 619] a similar point in his pioneering work on medieval Jewish traders in the Cairo Geniza documents. 1 But by emphasizing the importance of the role of the religious establishment—or legal scholars—in the functioning of Saharan trade, Lydon offers an important corrective to the emphasis on the cultural basis of trust found in Abner Cohen and Philip Curtin's model of the trade diaspora. 2 It also suggests that reputation-based institutions described by Avner Greif in his work on medieval Jewish traders found in the Cairo Geniza documents were not as important in the Saharan context. Greif argued that the trust and honesty of commercial agents was ensured by the flow of information between members of a trading network. Because of the damage that news of misdeeds could do...