Ariel - Volume 10 Number 6

Executive Editors Madalyn Schaefgen David Reich Business Manager David Reich News Editors Medical College Edward Zurad CAHS John Guardiani World Mark Zwanger Features Editors Meg Trexler Jim O\u27Brien Editorials Editor Jeffrey Banyas Photography and Sports Editor Stuart Singer Commons Editor Brenda Peterso

State Highlights 6/10/1949

This is the student newspaper from Western State High School, the high school that was on the campus of Western Michigan University, then called State Highlights, in 1949

Bourdieu and Postcommunist Class Formation

This article suggests that Bourdieu's model of class, framed in terms of cultural capital and habitus, is particularly valuable in understanding the restoration of capitalism under postcommunist conditions. Following the analyses of Szel�nyi and his collaborators, it is suggested that post-communist managerialism is still strikingly more pronounced than in the West. This and the notion of habitus in particular are perhaps the main elements of Bourdieu's thinking on which we can draw in theorizing postcommunist transition.Bourdieu, Class, Postcommunism

Characterising Land Holding Size Distributions in a Forest Reserve

This paper intends to characterise the land holding distributions in a Multi-Agent Based Simulation (MABS) model inspired by the Caparo Forest Reserve, in Venezuela. This forest has been highly intervened with and seriously altered by opportunistic, nomadic, land-seeking colonists. The distribution of land holding results from a process of land encroachment, allowed by a weak state showing ambiguous behaviour and regulations, permitting the rise of a land market in the forest area. A thorough understanding of this process is achieved by, first, modelling and simulating individual landowner\'s decision-making regarding land occupation, and secondly, characterising the collective land occupation process in the simulation model. The size distribution of land holding appears to be exponential rather than power law, as was initially expected. The paper not only explores whether leptokurtic distributions emerge in this complex social environment but also tries to identify the specific mechanisms and model assumptions that lead to these sorts of distributions, instead of alternative ones. Additionally, this paper relates these mechanisms to market structures and interactions, in order to give the results a richer real-world interpretation.Land-Use Modelling, Leptokurtic Distributions, Forest Reserves, MABS Applications