This detour through art aims at demonstrating the performative function of contemporary walls and barriers, designed to impose a geopolitical vision through landscape changes. The text assesses the link between art and borders by formulating the hypothesis that a "border art" (art on the border, art born from the border, art against the border, etc.) is emerging. It tries to understand how the closing up of a border not only reactivates cultural production on an international border, but also transforms the latter's meaning. On the USA / Mexico border for instance, the building up of the security fence sin 2006 seems to have been accompanied by a strong artistic upsurge. This can be nuanced by analyzing the changes of the nature of artistic production, with more mobile works, marked by a strong presence of videos and performances, as is the fixity imposed by the line inferred a fluid creative answer.

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Walls and Border Art: The Politics of Art Display

This paper argues that the discovery of gold in California and a federal policy that gave all of the rents in minerals on federal land to private parties led to two important, and closely related, outcomes. The first outcome was the development of a private-order property rights regime in the gold mining region, key elements of which would later be adopted as federal law. This regime, often considered a canonical example of the emergence of private-order property rights, protected the rights of active users of goldbearing land. As Umbeck (1981) documented, the rights and responsibilities of miners in a particular area were memorialized in a mining district code, which defined who could hold rights, what the rights were, and procedures for transferring rights. These codes and associated norms were successful at controlling violence and so allowed miners to focus the bulk of their energies on mining.
Mining district codes also included provisions for the reallocation of rights of inactive users, through claim jumping. In Clay and Wright (2005), we argue that mining claims were not secure property rights as that concept is conventionally understood. This insecurity was in a sense built into the system, in that district codes gave considerable attention to the rights of claim jumpers, individuals who took over a claim deemed to be abandoned. Far from being a violation, ―claim jumping‖ brought productive land into use and was the most common method of acquiring a claim. Thus, codes both protected production on existing claims and regulated access to mining sites in a competitive race for high-value deposits.

Gold Rush Legacy: American Minerals and the Knowledge Economy

American manufacturing exports became increasingly resource-intensive over the very period, roughly 1880-1920, during which the U.S. ascended to the position of world leadership in manufacturing. This paper challenges the simplistic view that the resource-intensity of manufacturing reflected the country's abundant geological endowment of mineral deposits. Instead, it shows that in the century following 1850 the U.S. exploited its natural resource potentials to a far greater extent than other countries and did so across virtually the entire range of industrial minerals. It argues that atural resource abundance"" was an endogenous. ""socially constructed"" condition that was not geologically pre-ordained. It examines the complex legal, institutional, technological and organizational adaptations that shaped the U.S. supply-responses to the expanding domestic and international industrial demands for minerals and mineral-products. It suggests that the existence of strong ""positive feedbacks""--even in the exploitation of depletable resources--was responsible for the explosive growth of the American minerals economy. "

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The Origins of American Resource Abundance

Correspondence Analysis, a multivariate analytical technique, provides a valuable tool for archaeological analysis. Correspondence Analysis is here applied to data recovered from 27 seasons of extensive archaeological excavations at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, a frontier military post constructed in 1820. The artifact distributions and rich documentary record delineate patterns in the functional, social, and economic meaning assigned to different areas of the fort. Through the use of a model of military site characteristics, which served as a set of testable hypotheses, Correspondence Analysis results helped define functional distinctions within the military complex as elements of the social structure of the setting and enhance the anthropological understanding of economic and social status differentiation in 19th century military posts. The results show that Correspondence Analysis’ unique manner of display of data tables can serve as a heuristic device that can assist archaeologists to focus and refine research efforts.

Interpreting archaeological data through correspondence analysis

from current incomes, it has added to cyclical variability and &dquo;help to generate cyclical disturbances,&dquo; in ways similar to business capital formation; however, there is a difference in timing, and therefore movements in household capital formation have &dquo;tended to offset rather than reinforce movements in the enterprise sector&dquo; (p. 85) and thereby tended to keep contractions milder than they would be without such offsets. Though the author believes that the offsetting &dquo;may have been fortuitous&dquo; (p. 86) in the 1950’s, it need not be and can be the objective of monetary policy. That is to say, when savings tend to exceed the needs of business capital formation and a contraction begins, these excessive savings can be chanelled to the households through lower interest rates and down payments and longer maturities for their capital formation; thus, the kind of cumulative downward movements that Keynes had in mind in the General Theory as a consequence of excessive savings can be avoided, even before fiscal policy comes into action. On this point, Juster’s discussion of the importance of down-payment requirements and contract maturities in the cost of consumer borrowing is most interesting. It is beyond the purpose of Juster’s study to analyze the long-term economic implications of the household assuming increasingly the role of investor, but these are likely to be of greater significance than the short-term ones, not only for an advanced country like the United States but even for the urban areas of underdeveloped countries. This reviewer has briefly speculated on some of these in a paper in the Economic Journal of March 1961.

ABRAHAM J. BRILOFF. The Effectiveness of Accounting Communication. Pp. xx, 338. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967. $17.50

Drawing the Borderline: Artist-Explorers of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey Dawn Hall

Government in Science: The U.S. Geological Survey, 1867-1894 Thomas G. Manning

The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long: The Journals of 1817 and 1823 and Related Documents Stephen H. Long Lucile M. Kane Jine D. Holmquist Carolyn Gilman

William H. Goetzmann

Papers

Drawing the Borderline: Artist-Explorers of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey Dawn Hall

Government in Science: The U.S. Geological Survey, 1867-1894 Thomas G. Manning

The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long: The Journals of 1817 and 1823 and Related Documents Stephen H. Long Lucile M. Kane Jine D. Holmquist Carolyn Gilman

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West Stephen E. Ambrose