The Gendered Nature of Asset Accumulation in Urban Contexts

This paper examines the gendered nature of asset accumulation between 1978 and 2004 in Indio Guayas, a low-income community on the periphery of the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. In so doing, it emphasizes both the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative intra-household data, as well as taking a longitudinal perspective rather than at a single point in time. This paper seeks to examine the relationship not only between gender and urban income poverty but also, more importantly, between gender and urban asset accumulation, illustrating how the combination of quantitative econometric measurement of assets and qualitative in-depth anthropological findings on the complex underlying gender relations both contribute to a far more comprehensive analysis of asset accumulation processes in urban contexts than can be gained from any single methodological approach.gender, assets, asset accumulation, urban

Egyptian stelae from Malta

In 1829, four Egyptian stelae of Twelfth and Eighteenth Dynasty date were found, surprisingly, on Malta. Based on their far-flung findspot, some have suggested that the stelae were locally made by Egyptian colonists who had settled on the island during the second millennium BC. This contribution argues that the stelae offer no basis for such historical reconstructions. Style, content and petrology demonstrate that all four stelae were made in Egypt and that they originally stood in the necropolis of Abydos in Upper Egypt. Microfossils show that these stelae are made of Egyptian limestones, which are of a different geological age to limestones available on Malta. The examination of polished thin sections of samples from the stelae using scanning electron microscopy suggests that the limestones employed were quarried from four geological formations of different ages in the Nile Valley.peer-reviewe

Les femmes et l’État-providence : question revue et corrigée

Ce texte propose une relecture des rapports entre les femmes et l’État, plus de dix ans après la publication d’un premier texte sur ce sujet. L’étude porte sur trois catégories sociales de femmes : initiatrices de l’action étatique, travailleuses de l’État et bénéficiaires des services étatiques. Deux principales conclusions s’en dégagent : dabord, une analyse centrée sur les rapports sociaux de sexe est toujours pertinente pour comprendre la dynamique étatique; puis, au cours des dernières années, l’État canadien a connu une évolution qui va vers une marginalisation des intérêts des femmes.This text revisits the question of the relations between women and the State more than ten years after I published an earlier article on this question. This article looks at women in their roles as initiators of state action, as workers in the public sector and, finally, as beneficiaries. The conclusions are that a feminist analysis remains highly pertinent for our understanding of the State but that the current evolution of the Canadian State is towards the marginalisation of women's interests