Suchergebnisse

The existence of a seismic problem in New Zealand was recognised in 1848. Limited governmental action and pioneering structural investigations followed. There were no major disasters between 1855 and 1929, and interest in earthquakes declined. Nevertheless, several papers by New Zealanders were published in the early 1920s, and the schools of engineering and architecture drew the attention of students to seismic problems. Modern building regulations have their origin in the report of a committee set up after the Hawke's Bay Earthquake in 1931, but some local authorities have still to adopt anti-seismic measures. The Hawkes Bay earthquake also stimulated observatory seismology. The earliest Civil Defence legislation was intended to deal with riots, and later with the effects of air attack, and the organisation has only recently become concerned with natural disaster. Relief measures were traditionally considered a matter for local bodies or for the police and armed forces, and these bodies are still involved. Unique insurance measures were introduced during the Second World War. Since then there has been continuous advance in engineering and seismological research, improvements in building regulations, insurance provisions, and the organisation of civil defence.

This article maintains that an unwarranted extension ofour ideas about the Western European Medieval world has led to several problems in many recent treatments of the historical emergence ofanthropological inquiry. Utilizing Byzantine sources, it suggests that the postulated Medieval break in the Western intellectual tradition is non‐existent and the result of an over‐emphasis on Western European developments at the expense of the larger socio‐cultuml milieu which constitutes the basis of that tradition. The broader anthropological position that emerges from this study involves a realization that interest in cross‐cultural behavior is basic to at least some individuals in every society and takes on added significance in state‐level systems.

Had massive migration of mexican labor to the southwest not taken place in the twentieth century, it is probable, as Ruth Tuck observed in Not with the Fist: Mexican-Americans in a Southwest City (N.Y., 1946; 29-30), that "side-eddies" of native Spanish-speaking would have been gradually swept into the mainstream of American life, as they almost were in California by 1900. Or perhaps these Spanish-speakers would have remained a picturesque folk in such isolated areas as northern New Mexico and South Texas. But massive migration from Mexico did occur at the opening of this century, adding a new chapter to Southwestern settlement and development, a chapter that differs from the old romanticized Southwest as much as a Chicano barrio or migrant camp differs from a restored Spanish mission or a New Mexico adobe. And yet this chapter—now so important to the ethnic study movement—has been almost totally neglected by Latin Americanists both in the United States and Mexico.