Rural Senegalese Perceptions of Environmental Quality

Differences in environmental perspectives between advanced industrial and developing country nationals has both practical and policy implications for the transfer of environmentally sound technologies. This paper characterizes rural Senegalese environmental perspectives in the context of competing environmental paradigms and of their historical development. Methodological issues concerning the adaptation of items from the Health of the Planet Survey (HOPS) questionnaire (Dunlap, Gallup, and Gallup, 1993) to rural Senegal are discussed and qualitative survey results presented. Based on a stratified national sample of rural Senegalese men and women, a quantitative analysis addresses the priority concerns of rural Senegalese men and women and how they perceive the trade off between environmental protection and economic development. The paper concludes that attempts to draw valid conclusions concerning comparisons between the environmental perspectives of the publics of advanced industrial and low income developing countries must take local conditions, their historical dynamics and cultural expressions into account.     

Remarks on the theoretical significance of Marx's Grundrisse

In recent years much play has been made with the significance of the Grundrisse for the reinterpretation of Marx's thought. The text has been represented as a vindication of those who have treated Marx's work as a relatively direct development from the early writings of 1843 and 1844, and a rebuttal of those who have sought to establish that Marx's later works constitute a radically distinct project from that of his youth, the two projects being separated by an epistemological break. This paper examines the theoretical structure of the Grundrisse, the kind of concepts that it contains and the objects constructed by these concepts. I argue that the result of such an examination demonstrates that the latter of the two positions outlined here is the correct one. The Grundrisse is shown to be an incoherent, transitional work, and its ambiguities an index of the presence of a number of theoretical obstacles.     

On the production and structuring of scientific knowledges

Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has contained within it a series of discrepancies, which combine to render impossible the actual theorising of changes in scientific knowledges, and their foundation in a break with a previous theoretical ideology. This paper is a close textual investigation which shows the precise nature of these discrepancies, how they mutually support each other in a discourse founded in a positivist epistemology continually undermined by attempts to theorise discontinuity in knowledges. The outcome of this is that changes in scientific knowledges appear irrational, for Kuhn presents no means with which such shifts can be thought.     

Economic property and the theorisation of ground rent

The theory of capitalist ground rent that Marx develops in CapitalVol. III is customarily regarded as either unproblematic, or susceptible to technical improvements. This paper argues that there are profound difficulties in Marx's theorization of ground rent and the relation of landed property to capitalist production in agriculture, and draws attention to the concepts of 'property' and 'commodity' that Marx deploys. The persistence of a philosophical anthropology in the later works of Marx emerges clearly in the deficiencies of these concepts when used in the analysis of capitalist agricultural production.     

Role of orthopedic implants and bone morphology in the identification of human remains

When conventional methods of identification, such as visual recognition and dental comparison, cannot be used to identify a deceased person, it becomes necessary to consider alternative methods. The presence of an orthopedic implant in a body may assist identification if ante-mortem medical records are available for comparison. Another method of identification involves comparison of ante-mortem and postmortem radiographs. Eight cases are reported from Forensic Science SA where the presence of orthopedic implants and/or ante-mortem radiographs were used to try to establish identification. In six cases, positive identification was established, and in two cases with upper limb orthopedic implants, the bones remained unidentified. Manufacturers were unable to provide any information about the distribution and use of the implants that could be of use with identification, as there are no requirements in Australia for individual medical implants to be tracked. Such a system has the potential to aid postmortem identification if serial codes were etched onto implants that could then be traced to manufacturers, surgeons, and recipients of these devices.     

The Forces of Conviction: The Power and Practice of Mandatory Prosecution upon Misdemeanor Domestic Battery Suspects

This article provides an ethnographic account of the power and practice of mandatory prosecution upon misdemeanor domestic battery suspects. Integrating law and society studies, domestic violence research, and poststructuralist theories of power, it finds that mandatory prosecution engages suspected batterers in multiple power operations that shape their agency in different ways. While many of these operations are familiar from past law and society research, mandatory prosecution alters their practice. In general, the different tactics that legal authorities deploy in their interactions with domestic battery suspects coalesce in an effort to have them plead guilty. The impact of these tactics on batterers, however, is far from clear. Mandatory prosecution increases the number of persons convicted of domestic violence. But abusers' violence is repeatedly redefined and displaced, as they are processed through the court setting, thus casting doubt on the criminal court's power to affect their accountability. By detailing the court's various points of encounter with domestic battery suspects, this study offers a much-needed empirical framework for future evaluations of court interventions against domestic batterers.