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Religious rituals that are painful or highly stressful are hypothesized to be costly signs of commitment essential for the evolution of complex society. Yet few studies have investigated how such extreme ritual practices were culturally transmitted in past societies. Here, we report the first study to analyze temporal and spatial variation in bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya (ca. 250-900 CE) hieroglyphic texts. We also identify the sociopolitical contexts most closely associated with these ancient recorded rituals. Sampling an extensive record of 2,480 hieroglyphic texts, this study identifies every recorded instance of the logographic sign for the word ch'ahb' that is associated with ritual bloodletting. We show that documented rituals exhibit low frequency whose occurrence cannot be predicted by spatial location. Conversely, network ties better capture the distribution of bloodletting rituals across the southern Maya region. Our results indicate that bloodletting rituals by Maya nobles were not uniformly recorded, but were typically documented in association with antagonistic statements and may have signaled royal commitments among connected polities.

This article explores how Victorian notions of charity translated to evangelical mission projects in the Near East. Focusing on Quaker philanthropist Ann Mary Burgess, it traces the trade networks that she established to serve the Armenian community living in the Ottoman Empire. Burgess's vast network of supporters throughout Britain, Europe, and the Near East enabled her to fund relief projects using profits from goods produced by the orphans and widows served by the Friends' Constantinople Mission. The mapping of these networks reveals the evolving relationship between evangelicalism, the humanitarian movement, and the marketplace in imperial Britain.

For over twenty years, West African Muslims from the Murid Sufi Brotherhood have organized the annual Cheikh Amadou Bamba Day parade in New York City. It is a major site where they redefine the boundaries of their African identities, cope with the stigma of blackness, and counteract an anti-Muslim backlash. Rather than viewing religion as a subset of ethnicity, this study shows how African Murids interrogate the meanings of religion, race and ethnicity as intersecting constructs. National flags from Senegal, Islamic chants, and banners advocating Black solidarity all indicate a negotiation of terms. Clothes worn during the parade act as symbols and afford them another opportunity to work out these borderlands, especially in contradistinction to African American converts who follow a slightly different course. This article examines how their religious procession creates a Murid cosmopolitanism, allowing them a space in which to reconcile multiple belongings.

This paper focuses on the lived experiences of young people growing up Greek Canadian and Jewish Canadian in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is based on data collected in a pilot study conducted with second-generation Greek and second-, third-, and fourth-generation Jewish youth in Halifax in 2004-05. Most of the existing research on the second generation and beyond lumps together the experiences of different ethnocultural groups. Perhaps even more importantly, the existing research tends to focus almost exclusively on the second- (or third- or fourth-) generation's experiences in major urban centres. In this paper we forge new paths by exploring the experiences of ethnic youth in a smaller Canadian urban centre within a region with low concentrations of immigrant populations and ethnic groups. We thus argue for the importance and effects of the specific place of settlement on ethno-cultural identity. Family and community expectations, relations, and practices, and negotiating family and community norms within the context of the institutional norms and practices in the areas of education, employment, gender, and family relations within the broader frame of Canadian society are highlighted. A comparative analysis between the two groups is adopted throughout.

This article explores rabbinic constructions of gender and ethnicity by reading two apparently disparate biblical characters together: Mordechai and Zipporah. Zipporah and Mordechai transgress gender boundaries both in the biblical text and subsequent rabbinic traditions. In the book of Exodus (4:25), Zipporah circumcises her son, and in rabbinic literature (Gen. Rab. 30:8) Mordechai nurses Esther—his adopted daughter. Yet in rabbinic literature, a father is obligated to circumcise his son, and a mother is obligated to nurse a child. I examine rabbinic traditions concerned not only with these gender transgressions but also with Mordechai and Zipporah’s ethnic ambiguities in order to ask what might these traditions teach us about the fluidity and/or fixedness of gender and ethnicity in rabbinic literature. Finally, I explore the ways in which their gender and ethnicity are connected. In other words, I ask what are some of the "interarticulations" of gender and ethnicity played out in rabbinic literature, specifically in the textual traditions surrounding Mordechai and Zipporah.

The lives of black communities in Britain in the inter-war period, the racial hostility faced by them, the discriminatory Coloured Alien Seamen's Order (1925), have all been documented by historians of black history. The lives of the black communities of the East End of London, and the work of organizations, notably, Harold Moody's League of Coloured Peoples, among them has also been touched on by historians. The work of other individuals and organizations among the black communities in the East End are less well known. This piece rescues and documents the work of one such individual, Pastor Kamal A Chunchie, and his organization, the Coloured Men's Institute. Kamal A. Chunchie, arriving in Britain from the trenches of the First World War, struggled for upwards of 30 years to improve the lives of the black communities in London's docklands, through social welfare and Christian fellowship, working first with the Methodists, and later as a freelance. It also examines the relationship between Chunchie and Methodism.

The social and cultural origins of the Hutterian Brethren, the most inbred population in North America, are described along with the characteristics that make the group useful for genetic studies. The Hutterites represent a closed population, with high levels of fertility and consanguinity. The group maintains a stable residence pattern and keeps extensive genealogic records. The uniform pattern of communal living, the existence of endogamous subgroups within the population, and an orderly design for colony fission facilitates comparisons rarely found in other accessible populations. This inbred population is useful for detecting new recessively inherited diseases, for advancing our knowledge of the effect of inbreeding, and for analyzing human chromosomal variation. Selected demographic and genetic studies are cited.