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What place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India's traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the economy. This article argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public-policy 'enclosure' of caste in the non-modern realm of religion and 'caste politics', while aligning modernity to the caste-erasing market economy. Village-level fieldwork in South India finds a parallel public narrative of caste either as ritual rank eroded by market relations or as identity politics deflected from everyday economic life. But, locally and nationally, the effects of caste are found to be pervasive in labour markets and the business economy. In the age of the market, caste is a resource, sometimes in the form of a network, its opportunity-hoarding advantages discriminating against others. Dalits are not discriminated by caste as a set of relations separate from economy, but by the very economic and market processes through which they often seek liberation. The caste processes, enclosures, and evasions in post-liberalization India suggest the need to rethink the modernity of caste beyond orientalist and post-colonial frameworks, and consider the presuppositions that shape understanding of an institution, the nature and experience of which are determined by the inequalities and subject positions it produces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the nature of American influence in postwar Iran, and despite the fact that Iranian studies has grown into a flourishing field in the United States, scholars have not explored the field's origins during the Cold War era. This article begins with the life of T. Cuyler Young to trace the critical genealogy within the field as it developed, in cooperation between American and Iranian scholars, during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. It proceeds to analyze two cohorts of American scholars whose political inclinations ranged from liberal reformism to revolutionary Marxism. As revolutionary momentum swelled in Iran in the late 1970s, critical scholars broke through superpower dogmas and envisioned a post-shah Iran. However, Cold War teleologies prevented them from fully grasping Iranian realities, particularly Khomeini's vision for Iran. This article argues that the modern field of Iranian studies in the United States was shaped by multiple generations of critical voices, all of which were informed by historically situated encounters with Iran and expressed through a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present article explores crucial aspects of the Asante understanding and construction of their own historical experience. Specifically, it historicizes the royal oaths of the first two Asante rulers Osei Tutu (d. 1717) and Opoku Ware (d. 1750). These have long been understood to be fundamental elements in the working of Asante society and culture, but here they are situated precisely as historical testaments and mnemonics. Attention is paid to current debates on matters of emotion, affect and performance, but the focus of the article is an empirical and exemplary investigation of history-making among the Asante. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the early twentieth century, otologists began collaborating with organizers of the New York League for the Hard of Hearing to build a bridge to “adjust the economic ratio” of deafness and create new research avenues for alleviating or curing hearing loss. This collegiality not only defined the medical discourse surrounding hearing impairment, anchoring it in hearing tests and hearing aid prescription, but, in so doing, solidified the notion that deafness was a “problem” in dire need of a “solution.” Public health campaigns thus became pivotal for spreading this message on local and national levels. This paper focuses on how, from the 1920s to 1950s, as otologists became more involved with social projects for the deaf and hard of hearing — advocating lip-reading, community work, and welfare programs — at the same time, they also mandated for greater therapeutic regulation, control of hearing aid distribution, and standardization of hearing tests. The seemingly paradoxical nature of their roles continued to reinforce the stigmatization of deafness: with widespread availability of effective help, the hearing impaired were expected to seek out therapeutic or technological measures rather than live with their affliction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changes men and women in a rural community in Nicaragua say they have implemented over the past decades differ in ways that relate to their vulnerability to drought. Short-term coping was more common among the women, especially the female heads of households, while adaptive actions were more common among the men. The Community Capitals Framework offers a tool to understand the differences. A gendered culture meant that the division of other types of capital (natural, human, social, financial, built, cultural, and political) as well as the division of labor in the case study area were also highly gendered. These gendered inequalities in access to and control over different forms of capital has led to a gender-differentiated capacity to respond to climate change, men being able to adapt and women experiencing a downward spiral in capacity and increasing vulnerability to drought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article envisions the Caracas Metro as infrastructure that forms and is formed by political subjectivity and urban space. The first section provides a brief history of the metro as conceived by modernization-minded politicians in the twentieth century. Here the Metro is seen as playing a pedagogical function in accordance with a larger tradition of Venezuelan positivism. The second section examines a shift in the social and political composition of Caracas after El Caracazo of 1989. In response to neoliberalization, social movements reshaped the terrain of politics and the city in a way that can be usefully conceptualized as demands for the right to the city--that subjects have the right to access, shape, and themselves be shaped by the urban environment. I conclude with an analysis of 2014's violent antigovernment protests. The tactics and targets of these protests--barricades and direct attacks on public infrastructure such as the Metro--illustrate the perceived threat democratized urban space poses to traditional elites in the context of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this essay is to show through just one greatly valued trade item — in this case, the bird of paradise — how even the most distant and apparently isolated areas of the world could be linked to the major metropoles through trade. Yet this trade was anything but a simple bilateral exchange. It involved a complex series of networks that extended from the collectors to various levels of intermediaries and secondary ports, and then to foreign shippers bringing the desired product to its ultimate destination in various world markets. There is, however, another aspect of this essay which focuses not on the economic but the cultural value of trade. Most studies of the bird of paradise have commented on the cultural impact of its feathers on Western fashion, yet few have examined other cultural interpretations of the feathers that are closely associated with authority, fertility, and even invulnerability. These attitudes found in eastern Indonesia and New Guinea continue a tradition that has its roots in Southeast Asia in the early centuries of the Common Era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using Poland as example, the article explores the operation of east European communist welfare states, with particular attention paid to benefits offered to working mothers. By exploring a number of diverse sources, I analyze the evolution and the meaning of institutional care and maternity leave in the life of professionally-active women. Studying a variety of factors that shaped the welfare policies of the time, including post-war industrialization, consumption, the demographic panic, and the struggling economy of the twilight years of communism, I attach particular importance to the early 1970s, when Poland saw a particular shift in gender-equality discourse. Welfare benefits played a key role in communists states, serving as a guarantee of equal opportunities or, in the case of mothers, as a tool for potentially facilitating employment. In time, however, they became chiefly tools designed to control the population and female fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1832, an imperial manifesto established a new social estate (soslovie) of “honored citizens.” The new status was granted to successful merchants, professionals, and artists, and gave them permanent (and sometimes inherited) privilege. Honored citizens have been largely forgotten or discounted, both by literary authors of the nineteenth century and by historians. They were, however, a conscious effort on the part of the imperial state to create a middle class in the context of an estate-based social structure, an effort that followed several decades of previous experimentation and discussion. Thousands of subjects of the Russian Empire took on the new status, to the point that by 1897 honored citizens outnumbered merchants. They understood themselves as having an honorable place in the social structure, and were understood as a sign of the status of Russian towns. Honored citizen status gave a certain amount of stability to the new middle class, although not every honored citizen prospered. As a social estate, honored citizens were unique, for they were not unified in opportunity, and because they did not have a collective association—they were individuals in the law. They were, as a result, present and important but paradoxical: while defined by estate law, they were closer to individual subjects or even citizens than almost anyone else in imperial society. In addition, their lack of a collective voice muted their radical potential, masking them from contemporary and historical view [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the fine art of the Soviet national republics and its discourse in the Soviet Union, which were considerably shaped under the influence of socialist realism and Soviet nationality policy. While examining the central categories of Soviet artistic discourse such as the “national form,” “national distinctness,” and “tradition,” as well as cultural and scientific institutions responsible for the image of art of non-Russian nationalities, the author reveals the existence of a number of colonial features and discursive and institutional practices that foster a cultural divide between Russian and non-Russian culture and contribute to the marginalization of art. Special attention is paid to the implications of this discursive shaping for the local artistic scene in Buryatia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a spatial approach to the recent history of conflict and confrontation between the Ethiopian Government and Ethiopian Muslim Communities in Addis Ababa. Based on original ethnographic data and inspired by existing academic studies on political-religious relationships in Addis Ababa, this study takes a closer look at the significance of the urban public landscape in power-struggles between the EPRDF and the Muslim communities. The article argues that political-religious struggle in Addis Ababa shapes the current urban landscape, as use of and control over urban public space and place forms a crucial element in the strategies of public authority of all involved actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

David Washbrook's influential early work on South India set the terms for much subsequent debate about caste, with its exploration of the key role of the colonial state in shaping caste ideologies and institutions. Over subsequent decades, historians and anthropologists have come increasingly to emphasise the 'colonial construction' of caste and its enduring legacies in post-colonial India. Yet there were also significant continuities linking the forms of colonial caste with much earlier regional histories of conflict and debate, whose legacies can be traced into the late colonial period. In particular, the juxtaposition between Brahman and non-Brahman itself was anticipated in a tradition of conservative social commentary that emerged in the Deccan Sultanate state of Ahmadnagar, and came to circulate widely through Banaras and western India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This tradition of commentary acquired new salience during the nineteenth century. It entered the colonial archive as an authoritative source of knowledge, and also provoked early 'non-Brahman' intellectuals into a fresh engagement with its conservative social vision. In their attempts to rebut this vision, these intellectuals displayed a detailed knowledge of its social history and a deep familiarity with the judicial decisions through which it had been upheld in earlier centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Civil society,” in the definition proposed in the introduction to this special issue, was not solely a product of the Enlightenment or of elite sociability. This article focuses on eighteenth-century confraternities in Paris and Milan to argue that these religious associations fostered the kinds of values and behaviors that most writers associate with the formation of civil society: cooperation, charity, a sense of responsibility, and peaceful interaction both among the members and between them and others in society. Many of them encouraged a culture of independence and a sense of rights among their members. They also offered experience of organization to a very large number of men and a smaller number of women. They thus contributed to the formation of eighteenth-century “civil society.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With this lecture by Pablo Piccato, The Americas continues its collaboration with the New School for Social Research to publish its annual Lecture in Latin American History. The series features lectures by senior historians in the field of Latin American history across an array of topics. This is the fifth in the series. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The understanding of Angkorian pre-state society has been greatly enhanced by an increase in archaeological investigation in recent years. From excavations conducted at Cambodian Iron Age sites we have evidence that attests to a transformative period characterised by increasing sociopolitical complexity, intensified inter- and trans-regional mercantile activity, differential access to resources, social conflict, technological transfer and developments in site morphology. Among the growing corpus of Iron Age sites excavated, Phum Lovea, on the periphery of Angkor, is uniquely placed to provide insight into increasing sociopolitical complexity in this area. The site is one of the few prehistoric moated settlements known in Cambodia and the only one to date to have been excavated. Excavation of the site has revealed an Iron Age agrarian settlement whose occupants engaged in trade and exchange networks, craft specialisation, metal production, and emergent water management strategies. These attributes can be seen as antecedent to the profound developments that characterise the first millennium CE polity centred on Angkor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The papyri of Roman Egypt provide some of the most important quantifiable data from a first-millennium economy. This paper builds a new dataset of wheat prices, land prices, rents, and wages over the entire period of Roman control in Egypt. Movements in both nominal and real prices over these centuries suggest periods of intensive and extensive economic growth as well as contraction. Across a timeframe that covers several severe mortality shocks, demographic changes appear to be an important, but by no means the only, force behind changes in factor prices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The opening of the nithan khun bulom genre of texts is usually regarded as a mythic account of Lao history. But the process by which Lao historians themselves began to perceive this was an important nationalist project of the elite during the Royal Lao Government (RLG) period. As early as the 1920s, Lao authors began rewriting the old folktales into a new, modern, scientific account of the past, the ‘birth of the Lao race’. By studying elite writings in the RLG period I show that Lao nationalism was more modernist and autonomous than previously recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of History in Africa: A Journal of Method is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study identifies more than fifty previously unrecorded Elizabethan, East Anglian rural midwives. Their professional lives are discussed in terms of licensing and oaths, knowledge, skills, caseload, travel, networking and years of practice. In regard to their family life, matters examined include marital status, spousal occupation, children, social standing, age at death and testacy. Finding and researching these midwives involved examination of a large number of different kinds of archive documents, including sixteenth-century parish registers and quarter session records. As data were examined a clearer picture emerged of these early midwives and their practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Like other forms of tourism, the activities of Alpine visitors in the late nineteenth century have normally been understood as created by the tourists themselves. In the narratives of both contemporaries and subsequent historians, local people tend to be marginalised, at best responding to the new demands of the emerging industry. This article focusses on relations between locals and mountaineers in the Eastern Alps to demonstrate that far from being passive recipients of tourist culture, local people were instrumental in defining the forms that tourism took. They were the early pioneers of infrastructure construction, lobbied to bring urban investment to the Alps, challenged urban Alpine organisations over intervention in the landscape, and engaged in collective bargaining to secure better pay and conditions. These roles helped to define tourism in the region, but also contributed to definitions of Alpine people amongst mountaineers that increasingly relied on race and biology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Friedrich Krauß (1791–1868) is the author of Nothschrei eines Magnetisch-Vergifteten [Cry of Distress by a Victim of Magnetic Poisoning] (1852), which has been considered one of the most comprehensive self-narratives of madness published in the German language. In this 1018-page work Krauß documents his acute fears of ‘mesmerist’ influence and persecution, his detainment in an Antwerp asylum and his encounter with various illustrious physicians across Europe. Though in many ways comparable to other prominent nineteenth-century first-person accounts (eg. John Thomas Perceval’s 1838 Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman or Daniel Paul Schreber’s 1903 Memoirs of my Nervous Illness), Krauß’s story has received comparatively little scholarly attention. This is especially the case in the English-speaking world. In this article I reconstruct Krauß’s biography by emphasising his relationship with physicians and his under-explored stay at the asylum. I then investigate the ways in which Krauß appropriated nascent theories about ‘animal magnetism’ to cope with his disturbing experiences. Finally, I address Krauß’s recently discovered calligraphic oeuvre, which bears traces of his typical fears all the while showcasing his artistic skills. By moving away from the predominantly clinical perspective that has characterised earlier studies, this article reveals how Friedrich Krauß sought to make sense of his experience by selectively appropriating both orthodox and non-orthodox forms of medical knowledge. In so doing, it highlights the mutual interaction of discourses ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ as well as the influence of broader cultural forces on conceptions of self and illness during that seminal period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT After a decade of civil war and four consecutive conservative administrations, El Salvador's leftist FMLN won its first presidential election in 2009. How has public policy changed under this New Left government, and why? This article addresses the question in the area of public health care. An alliance of health sector leaders with both technocratic and diplomatic abilities capitalized on the policy window opened by the FMLN's electoral victory and worked within the parameters set by President Mauricio Funes, the FMLN, and civil society to universalize health care. The new minister of health, a professional highly esteemed inside and outside the country, was able to engage both a large social movement protesting neoliberal policy and an energetic health diplomat sent by the Pan American Health Organization. In designing its reform, this alliance benefited from international as well as 'bottom-up' policy diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian & Latin American Economic History is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 2010, the Kenyan government annulled national census results due to concerns that Somalis in the country had been over-counted. This article traces the genesis of this recent demographic dispute, which held important implications for the distribution of political power. It shows that African leaders inherited long-standing practices laid down by the colonial state, which was unable to obtain a reliable count of the number of people in Kenya or render its Somali subjects into a countable, traceable population. In regions where expansive Somali networks had long predated British rule, colonial authorities only loosely enforced the concept of a permanent population. By yielding to this reality, colonial officials developed governance techniques that should not be mistakenly portrayed as state ‘failures’. These policies call into question the applicability of James C. Scott's concept of ‘legibility’ to Kenya. They also suggest that recent demographic controversies cannot be reductively blamed on ‘illegal’ immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of children and migration have recently turned their attention to how children mediate home and belonging, especially through contradictory or challenging circumstances. For unfree children in Africa, challenging circumstances of sale or debt-bondage pose particular difficulties. Despite what historians of slavery have noted of their adaptability for survival, questions remain about how the unfree child constructs self, home, and belonging when transferred over long distances, and when age and size precludes running away as a strategy for survival or return. This article focuses on the transcript involving the testimonies of three young, unfree girls transacted in 1930 and redeemed through a district court of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast in 1941. Though their testimonies are provided within the arena of a male, colonial district court, Atawa, Kibadu, and Abnofo reveal how their treatment, duration of bondage, and geographical and cultural distance shaped their constructions of self, home, and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even after the conflicts of the early 1990s that brought them to their de facto independence, both Abkhazia and Transnistria remained strongly multi-ethnic. In both territories, no single ethnic group is an absolute majority and Russian is the language that is mostly spoken on the streets of Sukhumi and Tiraspol. Legislators of both entities felt the need to deal with multi-ethnicity and multilingualism, including in their constitutions, in laws related to education, or more directly with specific language laws (1992 law “On languages” in Transnistria; 2007 law “On the state language in Abkhazia”). The protection of linguistic rights that is formally part of the legislation of both territories finds limitations in practice. The language of education has proved to be particularly contentious, in particular for Moldovan/Romanian language schools in Transnistria and Georgian language schools in Abkhazia. Why are language laws in Abkhazia and Transnistria so different, in spite of the fact that they are both post-Soviet, multi-ethnic territories that became de facto independent in the early 1990s? The different approaches found in Abkhazia and Transnistria represent remarkable examples of language legislation as a tool for nation-building in ethnically heterogeneous territories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The laborante was a revolutionary identity of the Ten Years' War that represented those who worked clandestinely in favor of Cuban independence. The repeated invocation of the term did not emerge from a single print source, nor was its usage evolutionary such that each reference responded to a previous one. Instead, writers appropriated the term to represent anticolonial advocates from diverse sectors of Cuba's socioeconomic strata and to grapple with shifting identities. A Latinate term for "worker," laborante intimates the changing dynamic between elites, the working class, and slaves. This article examines the uses o/laborante to show how Cuban identity was negotiated in different but related moments. It also explores why elites may have cultivated the worker, a figure of limited economic power, to represent their aspirations for increased political freedom, and what this implies about the agents of the revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1360 and 1460 the Venetian government established a system of legalized prostitution under the supervision of government officials and confined, in theory, to a limited area of the city. The authorities also attempted to concentrate the management of licit brothels in the hands of women, who thereby emerged as the effective entrepreneurs of the sex trade. This article describes the organization of Venetian prostitution in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and the relations among government officials, brothel-keepers, and prostitutes. It illustrates the mechanisms of debt and credit used in the sex trade, which often kept the prostitutes subservient to the brothel-keepers and to their other creditors. An effort is made to assess the degree to which sex workers might become integrated into local society and to suggest the general trends in Venetian policy toward prostitution into the sixteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the social implications of the recent mass conversions to Protestantism by one-third of the one million Hmong in Vietnam. The conversions have been condemned by the Vietnamese state, while being understood by international human rights activists as acts of conscience on the part of the Hmong converts. This article focuses on the internal debate and divisions surrounding conversion among the Hmong themselves. The converts believe that Protestantism is the only way to alter the ethnic group's marginal status in Vietnam while the unconverted Hmong see conversion as a betrayal of Hmong ethnicity. Such conflicting views have been causing deep fractures in Hmong society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The history of independent Brazil may be divided into three major state-society cycles, and, after 1930, five political pacts or class coalitions can be identified. These pacts were nationalist; only in the 1990s did the Brazilian elites surrender to neoliberal hegemony. Yet since early in the twenty-first century they have been rediscovering the idea of the nation. The main claim of this essay is that Brazilian elites and Brazilian society are "national-dependent," that is, they are ambivalent and contradictory, requiring an oxymoron to define them. They are dependent because they often consider themselves "Europeans" and the mass of the people as inferior. But Brazil is big enough, and there are many common interests around its domestic market, to make the Brazilian nation less ambivalent. Today the country is seeking a synthesis between the last two political cycles--between social justice and economic development in the framework of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature of late Ottoman provincial intercommunal interactions and affiliations as they appear in the memoir of Hovhannes Cherishian (1886–1967), a shoemaker from late Ottoman Marash (present-day Kahramanmaraş, in southeastern Turkey). The paper is situated within the larger discourse of “untold histories” that historians have begun to address in revising the deeply ingrained post-Ottoman nationalist historiographies that dominate both academic and popular discourses. Conventional historiographies have represented former late Ottoman subject communities (e.g., Greek, Jewish, Armenian) as insulated and homogenous proto-nation-states. In the revisionist historiography, the late Ottoman Armenian voice, especially the provincial one, has been noticeably absent. Here I utilize Cherishian's memoir to examine the life and thoughts of one late Ottoman Armenian provincial subject. I focus especially on his treatment of intercommunal interactions in Anatolia and present-day Syria between 1897 and 1922. His accounts of these often extended intercommunal interactions, affiliations, and networks are characterized by intercommunal and interpersonal openness, sympathy, intimacy, and pleasure, even as he presents them side-by-side with descriptions of deportation and death at the hands of the late Ottoman state. I develop the idea of what I call “provincial cosmopolitanism” to conceptualize and represent the disposition, affinity, and process of identity formation that enabled Cherishian to create and operate these interpersonal relationships and networks that propelled his life, a historical condition to which we are not currently privy in most historiographical accounts of the late Ottoman period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a dialogue drafted soon after the Sack of Rome (1527), Paolo Giovio details historical views of female dignity and assesses the beauty and talents of over 100 women in contemporary Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, and Rome. Unlike most such catalogues, Giovio's seasons praise with explicit acknowledgment of physical, intellectual, and personal shortcomings. Yet it also celebrates Vittoria Colonna, who commissioned the work, as the ideal noblewoman. Giovio is unconventional in applying to this living woman a pattern of graphic physical description that Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bembo, and many others had followed in delineating fictional characters. This strategy exemplifies the latitude of representational possibilities that characterized Italian literature and art of the 1520s and 1530s. The dialogue also eloquently documents a crucial time in Colonna's life when her verse commemoration of her husband coalesced with religious devotion, and when physical beauty could be seen to harmonize with other virtues to form a desirable and inspirational whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a historiography that paints relations between chiefs and women as antagonistic, the history of the Nazaretha Church in Mtunzini, South Africa in the early twentieth century sheds light on conditions that allowed chiefs and women to find common ground. During the era of segregation, Mtunzini was, on one hand, subject to relatively less interference from white government officials, but, on the other, ravaged by social and economic change. In this context, the Nazaretha Church flourished thanks to the support of many chiefs and women. The religious community not only proposed new answers to related questions about health, healing, and morality, but it also afforded chiefs and women important social options amid rural decline and challenges to traditional authority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT Over the last decades, indigenous movements have propelled the political empowerment of historically marginalized groups in Latin America. The Maya struggle for ethnic equality in Guatemala, however, since its reawakening during the peace process, has reached an impasse. Based on field research consisting of dozens of elite interviews, this article analyzes the patterns of and obstacles to present-day Maya mobilization. It combines movement-internal and -external factors in an overarching theoretical argument about indigenous movements' capacity to construct strong collective voices. In the Guatemalan case, organizational sectorization, the lack of elite consensus on key substantive issues, and unclear alliance strategies compromise the effectiveness of horizontal voice among Maya organizations. These problems are exacerbated by the lasting effects of the country's unique history of violence and state strategies of divide and rule, preventing the emergence of a strong vertical voice capable of challenging the Guatemalan state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates beliefs concerning the legitimacy of the traditional customary practice of payback in the New Guinea Islands; a practice that has been illegal for more than a century. The practice of payback is described and contextualized and a conceptual framework of norm internalization in a legal transplant society is developed. The empirical results highlight a stark urban-rural divide in attitudes. Yet, against expectations, those in urban environments (and in closer proximity to the state criminal law) are more likely to agree with the use of payback. An expected relationship is found between the ability to speak English and not agreeing with the use of payback. The empirical results suggest that the criminal law may be a weak force and that non-legal channels may be more effective in transforming society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aymara herders in the highland regions of southern Peru and Bolivia express highly ambivalent attitudes towards archaeological patrimony. In this post-colonial setting, they follow strong avoidance behaviours towards archaeological sites directly associated with gentiles — the mummified remains of prehistoric, pagan individuals. Conversely, certain archaeological features are incorporated into modern discourses. This selective embracing of archaeological landscapes inscribes socially relevant features within contemporary identities, while repudiating others. Aymara use perceived spatial and temporal distance, reinforced with linguistic and mytho-historic constructs, to map social difference onto archaeological landscapes. Perceived distance separates Aymara from undesirable gentiles, whose threatening characteristics are embedded in historic experience. They relegate these dangerous social others to the past and envelop them in notions of remoteness. Simultaneously, Aymara use perceived proximity with favourable sites to draw inclusive social and geographic boundaries around their communities and to establish strategic priority for themselves, often in the context of conflicts. These divergent responses are highly sensitive to economic aspirations, political environments and resource-rights disputes, indicating that instrumental motivations factor significantly in Aymara attitudes towards archaeological heritage. Such opposing interactions underscore the contingency of attitudes towards the archaeological past. Both, however, can be understood as part of a coherent worldview that uses space, time and distance to construct social landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Nanjing Incident of late March 1976 was a precursor of, and according to some analysts a trigger for, the more famous Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 4–5 April. The two protests have widely been interpreted as spontaneous outpourings of dissent from Cultural Revolution radicalism, expressed through mourning for the recently deceased premier, Zhou Enlai. A closer look at the background to these demonstrations in Nanjing reveals that the protests there occurred in the midst of, and in response to, a vigorous public offensive by former leaders of rebel factions to overthrow civilian cadres for reversing Cultural Revolution policies. The outpouring of respect for Zhou – and criticism of Politburo radicals – mobilized enormous numbers of ordinary citizens onto the city streets, far larger numbers than the rebel leaders were able to muster. This demonstrated the disappearance of the popular support rebel leaders had briefly enjoyed a decade before. While the Nanjing protests were unanticipated by either the rebel leaders or the Party officials they sought to overthrow, they were only the latest in a series of local political confrontations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theories of the demographic transition often center on the rising price of children. A model of fertility derived from household production in the antebellum United States contains both own children and slaves as inputs. Changes in slaveholdings beget changes in the marginal product of the slaveowners’ own children and, hence, their price. I use panel data on slaveowning households between 1850 and 1870 to measure the slaveowners’ own fertility responses to exogenous changes in slaveholdings. Results indicate a strong, negative correlation between own child prices and fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the social, cultural, and political history of backstreet abortion in post-war Britain, focusing on the murders of Beryl Evans and her daughter Geraldine, at Ten Rillington Place in 1949. It shows how the commonplace connection of John Christie to abortion and Beryl Evan's death was not a given in the wider public, legal, political, and forensic imagination of the time, reflecting the multi-layered and shifting meanings of abortion from the date of the original trials in the late 1940s and 1950s, through the subsequent judicial and literary reinvestigations of the case in the 1960s, to its cinematic interpretation in the 1970s. Exploring the language of abortion used in these different contexts, the article reveals changes in the gendering of abortionists, the increasing power and presence of abortion activists and other social reformers, the changing representation of working-class women and men, and the increasing critique of the practice of backstreet abortion. The case is also made for a kind of societal blind spot on abortion at the time of both the Evans and Christie trials; in particular, a reluctance to come to terms with the concept of the male abortionist, which distorted the criminal investigations and the trials themselves. Only when public acceptance for legalizing abortion grew in the more liberal climate of the 1960s and beyond did a revisionist understanding of the murder of Beryl Evans, in which abortion came to be positioned as a central element, gain a sustained hearing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Seventeenth-century Wilno, capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and thus the second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was home to five Christian confessions (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Greek Orthodox, and Uniate) and three religions (Christians, Jews, and Muslims [Tatars]). Against the general question of how they "made it work" arises the issue of witchcraft practice in local perceptions and in prosecution in the courts. Witchcraft trials are treated here as an integral part of "constant litigation" and the "use of justice" in restoring communal peace. My conclusions and propositions include the following: that religion and confession played no role in witchcraft litigation; that although there is no doubt that beliefs in the existence of witchcraft persisted, there was nothing like a "witchcraft scare," and allegations of sorcery were treated on a level with that of petty theft and general misbehavior between neighbors; and that the goal of recourse to the courts was here, and in other types of cases, the restoration of a status quo ante. My final proposition, which invites testing, is that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania represented in this question, as well as perhaps in others, a transitional zone between the European west and east. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay examines the Responsible Procreation campaign of Acción Cultural Popular (ACPO) within the context of "zones of crisis" characterized not only by the legacy of long-standing violence but by tensions experienced within the Catholic Church and Colombian society at large during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s. ACPO centered its Responsible Procreation campaign on a radical critique of authoritarian and exclusionary gender relations that could only be remedied by guaranteeing women's access to education and their participation as equals in household and community decision making. As a Catholic-affiliated organization, ACPO enjoyed legitimacy many secular organizations did not, enabling it to provide spaces where rural Colombians, especially women, could experiment with voice and agency and explore alternative visions of citizenship and community development without fear of reprisal or social ostracism. Christian social activism, the essay concludes, often laid the basis for the proliferation today of social movements spearheaded by rural women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an empirical description and analytical interpretation of the borsa—the largest black market for rock music in Bulgaria in the 1980s. The text illuminates the distinct characteristics of the urban locale that became the focal point of rock fans' desires and ambitions, examines how the interactions between the entrepreneurs who supplied the music and their adolescent clients were embedded in enduring networks of trust, and explores the peculiarities of the borsa as a site where western works of art were mechanically reproduced. It also demonstrates that the place where admirers of rock music met was enlivened by political energies and deliberately demarcated as a space in which ideological differences could manifest themselves, thus contesting Alexei Yurchak's argument that in late socialism it was possible to be loyal to and love "both Lenin and Led Zeppelin". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German Home Towns is a very forward-looking book. I say that not because it proved so influential—although it certainly had a profound impact on my generation of historians. My point is more prosaic, namely that German Home Towns occupies a set point in time and social milieu, the inaugural moment of an attenuated phase of stability for a peculiar type of human community in central Europe. That moment, of course, is 1648; the milieu is that of walled and privileged towns—large and differentiated enough for self-sufficiency in most economic functions, but not so large or so differentiated as to generate the degrees of stratification and anonymity that characterized larger commercial or manufacturing cities. In contrast to metropolitan centers, “home towns” embraced all inhabitants in a web of face-to-face relations, at once integrating, enabling, and controlling all inhabitants through guilds and the political systems built around them. Usually, almost all hometown inhabitants were citizens, too—again in contrast to larger cities, with their substrates of noncitizen residents. From the vantage of 1648, and within the stream of early modern German history, German Home Towns peers into a future of confrontation with “movers and doers”—those vanguards of the “general estate,” as Walker called them, who trampled idiosyncrasy, leveled difference, and, with some help from Napoleon, replaced both local corporatism and the imperial “incubator” with provincial and national systems of general, liberal delegation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we adjudicate between competing claims of persisting segregation and rapid integration by analyzing trends in residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians living in 287 consistently defined metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2010. On average, Black segregation and isolation have fallen steadily but still remain very high in many areas, particularly those areas historically characterized by hypersegregation. In contrast, Hispanic segregation has increased slightly but Hispanic isolation has risen substantially owing to rapid population growth. Asian segregation has changed little and remains moderate, and although Asian isolation has increased it remains at low levels compared with other groups. Whites remain quite isolated from all three minority groups in metropolitan America, despite rising diversity and some shifts toward integration from the minority viewpoint.Multivariate analyses reveal that minority segregation and spatial isolation are actively produced in some areas by restrictive density zoning regimes, large and/or rising minority percentages, lagging minority socioeconomic status, and active expressions of anti-Black and anti-Latino sentiment, especially in large metropolitan areas. Areas displaying these characteristics are either integrating very slowly (in the case of Blacks) or becoming more segregated (in the case of Hispanics), whereas those lacking these attributes are clearly moving toward integration, often quite rapidly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to explore the conditions and roles of Gypsies in the economy of Turkey through a focus on street flower sellers in two central districts of İstanbul, Şişli and Taksim. It proposes a multidimensional analysis that demonstrates different dynamics of social exclusion, socio-economic and political relations, and agency positions. After first reviewing several approaches to Gypsies' roles in non-Gypsy economies, Gypsies' conditions in Turkey are then examined in relation to their roles in the economy. Finally, their positions in the flower-selling sector in the two districts, Şişli and Taksim, are analyzed through working conditions, socioeconomic dynamics, social exclusion, and perceptions of Gypsyness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]