Extractive Relations: Natural Resource Use,Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Protection in Peru

Through ethnography of Ashaninka communities' involvement in timber extraction in Peruvian Amazonia and an engagement with recent discussions around Buen Vivir the article interrogates the common association between indigenous notions of ‘living well’ and environmental protection. A key insight is that Ashaninka individuals emphasise everyday well-being and equality over the preservation of their surroundings. Older critiques of extractivism are used to show the recent advent of environmentalist discourses and highlight issues connected with emphasising ontological difference. The article concludes that Buen Vivir would be better framed as a desire, and right, to self-determination rather than being associated with specific behaviours.     

The Sex Right: A Legal History of the Marital Rape Exemption

How did the American legal elite come to reject the husband's privilege to rape his wife. What is the significance of that rejection. This essay traces theories justifying the marital rape exemption from the 17th century, focusing on the period focusing World War II. The history illustrates how the postwar legal elite's limited progressivism created inconsistent arguments that left the exemption open for attack, an attack that came from within the 1970s feminist movement. Radical feminist rhetoric about sexuality, rape, and marriage pulled away the last layer of theoretical support for the exemption and denounced the sex right it left exposed underneath. Connections in the 1970s, both literal and conceptual, between radical feminists and the legal elite allowed the feminist movement to discredit the exemption within that elite. To interpret the significance of that rejection, I consider how legal language affects people's senses of self. I argue that legal words like "rape,""marriage," and "husband" validate and inform people's, specifically husbands', identities in marriage. By changing the meanings of those legal words, legal reform can eventually change human behavior.     

Taxation data as indicators of state-society relations: Possibilities and pitfalls in cross-national research

Cross-national research on taxation is a growth industry in political science. This article discusses key conceptual and measurement issues raised by such studies. First, it highlights the ways in which taxation has been studied as a rich and varied concept, including as a component of the state-building process, as a collective action problem, and/or as a problem of distributive justice. Second, the article identifies the central tradeoffs associated with the construction of taxation indicators used to measure such ideas. It discusses considerations such as which forms of revenue should be included and which should not, whether and how to standardize taxation measures, and how no fine-tune measures through a clear specification of units, universes, and measurement calibration. These choices have important implications for the “scoring” of countries, and for making valid inferences about the relationship between states and societies. Evan S. Lieberman is a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at Yale University and will begin and appointment as assistant professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University in September 2002. His interests include comparative politics, research methods, and economic and social policy. I would like to thank Christopher Achen, David Collier, Marc Morjé Howard, Lucan Way, members of the Robert Wood Johnson Policy Scholars Seminar at Yale University, three anonymous reviewers, and the editors atStudies in Comparative International Development for their valuable comments and suggestions.     

Type and Severity of Abuse as Predictors of Psychiatric Symptoms in Adolescence

There has been little previous research about histories of child maltreatment and psychological symptoms in adolescent psychiatric patients. This study investigated whether type and characteristics of child physical and/or sexual abuse predicted individual differences in symptoms. Participants were 187 patients in day or residential treatment facilities. Abuse was assessed using structured interviews with the adolescent, the therapist, and the caseworker. Participants completed a standardized, self-report measure of internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Adolescents with histories of dual abuse (i.e., sexual and physical abuse) had elevated depression and anxiety compared with nonabused patients. Histories of any type of abuse were associated with elevated posttraumatic symptoms. Among physically abused patients, severity and duration of abuse predicted individual differences in depression and anxiety, whereas severity and concomitant sexual abuse predicted elevated posttraumatic symptoms. Among sexually abused patients, the characteristics of sexual abuse did not predict individual differences in symptoms. Thus, child abuse, particularly dual abuse and severe physical abuse, predicted elevated internalizing symptoms, even in comparison with other adolescent psychiatric patients. The need for replication is discussed.