Struggling with the Past

Many postprocessual archaeologists have argued that active individuals make history. The apotheosis of the individual has been achieved under the rubric identity, the most pervasive theoretical term of the last few years. This focus obscures the fundamental idea that individuals do not exist in isolation. The relational concept of struggle will help us past this theoretical impasse. This concept has many components including real struggles in the past, our struggles to know the past, and using the past to struggle in the present. Our goal is to struggle past identity politics and the individual by focusing on peoples' real struggles in real cases.     

Struggling Pasts: A Commentary

This commentary is organized into three parts. The first discusses the papers presented in this volume, notably divided into two themes: those that looked at past struggles and those that look at struggling in the present. The second part deals more critically with the unifying analytical theme of the papers: a dialectical approach to historical archaeology and how it can be implemented through the theory of internal relations. The final section of this commentary takes this idea and applies it to the archaeology of landscape and the production of social space.     

New Directions in Classic Maya Household Archaeology

Over the past two decades, household studies have coalesced into a recognized subfield within archaeology. Despite this relatively short history, household archaeologists are now taking a leading role in epistemological shifts that are placing people and their practices and differences at the center of archaeological interpretations of the past, rather than subsuming these into the noise of passive and depersonalized depictions of ancient social systems. As Maya archaeologists have played a critical role in the development of household archaeology, examining recent trends in Maya household research provides a perspective on the directions of both Maya studies and household archaeology more generally. This article explores three interrelated trends: (1) understanding ordinary people; (2) understanding social diversity among households; (3) understanding households in articulation with the broder social universe. Through a discussion of these three trends, this review uses Classic Maya household archaeology as a case study to illustrate how household research has led to the development of theoretically rich and empirically substantive understandings of an ancient society, which repeople the past and foreground the active roles of and structural constraints on ancient people.     

Newlyweds,Young Families,and Spinsters: A Consideration of Developmental Cycle in Historical Archaeologies of Gender

The social relations of class, gender, and ethnicity affected individuals and families in the nineteenth century and shaped (as well as were shaped by) uses of the material world. Changes in demographic composition of the household, successions in land ownership, and other events that altered the developmental course of the family unit, however, were also significant. Variations in the material and spatial expressions of gender ideologies, for example, were more than simply deviations from middle-class cultural norms. They represented the active negotiation of dominant ideologies and the construction of alternate meaningful gender relations and forms of domesticity.     

Emulation and Empowerment: Material, Social, and Economic Dynamics in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Virginia

The influence of emulative behavior on the material and socioeconomic transformations of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American world is widely debated. A study of historical archaeological sites and probate inventories in Virginia implicates emulation as one ethic operative in rural communities but also identifies a second dynamic: a tendency for many planters of divergent means to act in step with one another, responding in similar ways to new circumstances. Here termed a cultural accord, this affinity enabled some individuals who occupied middling social positions to use emulation advantageously in ways that less privileged members of the population could not.     

Household economy and gendered labor in the 17th centurya.d. on Guam

Abstract

The gendered division of labor in household economies is well known in documentary accounts of many societies, although archaeological evidence for it is often elusive. Our study compares ethnohistorical accounts of household organization with archaeological patterns at a 17th-century village on the island of Guam in the Marianas archipelago to determine if these different sources of evidence provide similar insights. We investigated archaeological assemblages from two latte (megalithic) buildings to document their economic activities. Unexpected differences in their assemblages revealed that economic activities varied between the two latte buildings. They were domiciles of a single economically integrated household, but their disparate functions likely signaled a gendered division of labor. This study reveals aspects of gendered labor that documentary accounts do not fully describe. Our findings suggest that the assumption that domestic buildings were functionally redundant in traditional societies must be tested on a case-by-case basis.     

Household Archaeology, Lifecycles and Status in a Nineteenth-Century Australian Coastal Community

The analysis of a ceramic assemblage from a late nineteenth-century site in a coastal town near Melbourne, Australia, is used to explore issues relating to household cycles and comparative status. Acquisition of household goods closely matches the stages of growth and decline in family size and the nature of the assemblage has directed further research into the relative status of the family.     

The Only Girl in Amoy: Gender and American Patriotism in a Nineteenth-Century Treaty Port

In 1861, twenty-year-old Ruth Bradford accompanied her father to the Chinese treaty port of Amoy where he was to serve as American consul. Bradford recorded this trip in a diary kept from her departure from New York until her 1863 return. Drawing upon her diary, this paper explores how Bradford, as the only American woman in Amoy, refined her sense-of-self through interracial and cross-cultural encounters with the settlement's Chinese and British inhabitants. The paper argues that through critical comparison with these communities, Bradford, like other nineteenth-century American women in China, consolidated and articulated her gendered, racial and burgeoning patriotic national identity.     

Gender morality and emotion work in Taiwanese immigrant in-law relations

This study examines major social, economic, and cultural factors that sustain in-law inequality in Taiwanese transnational families. Data are based on life-history interviews with 16 Taiwanese immigrant women and ethnographic observations in a Midwest urban area. Findings suggest that middle-class immigrants’ abilities to host in-laws for lengthy periods and parents-in-law’s financial support for immigrant couples lead to the living arrangement of three-generation households in many immigrant families. Daughters-in-law in these households experience enormous stress because their mothers-in-law demand obedience. Traditional gender norms become moralized when the women’s husbands, mothers, and fellow immigrants reinforce Confucian cultural values of filial piety and respect for the elderly. Considering the importance of securing a stable family and children’s well-being, the women hesitate to challenge the power imbalance in their in-law relations. In a single ethnic household and a private domestic space, no competing gender ideology is available to contest Confucian culture. As a result, the women are compelled to fulfil their gender role expectations as submissive daughters-in-law. To cope with this home environment, they conduct varying degrees of emotion work and silence their voices, which results in the persistence of in-law patriarchy in these transnational households.     

The Ethics of Gender and Globalization: Military Madness and Ecological Stress

Abstract

Globalization has an impact on gender relations in complex and contradictory ways. The consequences are neither solely detrimental nor the same everywhere. Globalization may offer new opportunities to women, but overall globalization from above has exacerbated gender inequality. Globalization disperses local and national decision-making powers. Flexible labor laws weaken worker protections and job security. All of these threaten advancement in women's interests. The oft-accompanying environmental degradation directly affects women responsible for domestic necessities and caring labor, which is the situation of most women within the Pacific Rim. Military activities around the Pacific Rim continually erode women's rights. This paper discusses the ethics of globalization, adopting micro, macro and global categories.     

Gender,migration, mobility and transnationalism

In reviewing the expanding body of work on the linkages between gender, mobility, migration and transnationalism in Gender, Place and Culture over the last decade, this article highlights three significant contributions. First, through critical engagement with transnationalism studies, the journal has produced a sophisticated and variegated strand of work on gender politics and multiple forms of migration and mobility. In this article, we focus primarily on mobility in terms of human movement across national borders, rural–urban migration, as well as the ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ that inform the embodied experiences of being here and there simultaneously as iterated in transnationalism studies [L. Basch, N.G. Schiller, and C.S. Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. London: Routledge, 1994]. A second area of strength lies in the coalescence of work providing insights into the connections between social reproduction in a globalising world and intimate forms of global mobility and migration. A third highlight relates to the mutually constitutive relationship between the construction of masculinities and masculinist ideologies, on the one hand, and migration, mobility and transnationalism, on the other. The article concludes with a discussion of two more embryonic areas which merit further development in the journal: the first concerns the social and geographical (im)mobilities implied in cross-border reproductive care1^1. CBRC is what Payne (2013 Payne, J.2013. “Reproduction in Transition: Cross-Border Egg Donation, Biodesirability and New Reproductive Subjectivities on the European Fertility Market.” Gender, Place and Culture, doi:10.1080/0966369X.2013.832656. [Google Scholar]) attributes to the rapid development and spread of assisted reproductive technologies that have given rise to a global market for human eggs, sperm and surrogates. and the global mobility and assemblage of body parts, while the second relates to the distinctive role that feminist geographers interested in migrations and mobilities can play in working collaboratively and transnationally across different worlds.     

Fidelity and Sacrifice: The Gender Discourse of Traders in Pre- and Post-Opium War Canton

This article examines the discourse of two American couples in the China trade regarding fidelity and sacrifice during the period in which the spatial confines of the Canton system gave way to the intensified interactions of the Treaty Port era. Before the Opium War, when the Qing court had mandated that Western husbands conducting business in Canton live apart from their wives, marital tension was accentuated by the separation from absentee husbands. In the subsequent Treaty Port era, enhanced spatial mobility of the couples did not assuage their concerns. Instead, intensified cross-cultural encounters allowed them to project their feelings and expectations on the “foreign other” as racial categories developed and their imperial proclivities began to escalate. Bringing the Western women in contact with elite Chinese and other Western women only aggravated their agitation as they faced their Chinese counterparts, whom they readily construed as competitors. The socio-political and spatial reconfigurations provided new dimensions to the discourse of fidelity and sacrifice. The voices of the American couples recorded here are those of individuals, but the underlying anxiety they articulated represented the growing pains of more intimate Sino-Western encounters.     

Engendering Gramsci: Gender,the Philosophy of Praxis,and Spaces of Encounter in the Climate Caravan,Bangladesh

This paper examines the gendered politics of national and international networking amongst peasant farmers' movements in South Asia. In particular the paper provides an ethnographic account, based upon the author's critical engagement with the Bangladesh Krishok (farmer) Federation and the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (Women Farmers' Association), of the Climate Change, Gender and Food Sovereignty Caravan that was organised in Bangladesh in 2011. The paper draws upon Antonio Gramsci's theory of the philosophy of praxis and feminist research on social reproduction, dispossession and materiality to interrogate the spaces of encounter and solidarity‐building practices of the Caravan between different communities in the country and between different social movement actors. The paper examines how processes of political organisation and consciousness‐raising within and between social movements are problematised by gendered power relations. The paper concludes with suggestions concerning how the philosophy of praxis in Bangladesh might be “engendered” to incorporate a politics of social reproduction.     

Wrinkles in Time: Old Age,Gender and Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article explores one of the classic questions in the history of old age: what happened to the status of the elderly in the nineteenth century? How do we explain the emergence of the modern notion of an old age defined by ‘declines’ of every sort (cognitive, physical, financial)? The article focuses on Germany, then and now a global leader on this issue, and it focuses on women, whose ageing was more widely discussed than that of men. It shows that the great nineteenth-century debate about the elderly was not about industrialisation, labour, health or social policy. It was a debate about time. The cultural understanding of the elderly changed because the culture of temporality did. The focus on futurity and the youth around 1900 is well known, as modern Germany became convulsed with imperial fantasies and electric urban life. This had, it turns out, negative repercussions for older Germans. No longer the accretions of a long past of wisdom and experience, they were identified instead with their short future of corporeal decline and death. The social attitude towards older people is therefore related to the broader social attitude towards time, history and change: a finding that might apply in other times and places, including our own.     

Views and Commentaries: Struggling with the Past: Some Views of African-American Identity

Identity has been, and remains, central to African-American struggles with inequalities in the United States. In this paper I address various portrayals of African-American identity, and consider how these views of the past articulated with contemporary struggles. These portrayals range both in time and authorship, and include the views of former slaves, black intellectuals, and archaeologists. Taken together, they reflect the dynamic nature of identity, as well as the shifting importance of Africa as a root of identity and source of strength in struggles, past and present.     

Gender differences in children's pathways to independent mobility

This paper presents some empirical findings relating to the independent mobility of children in two parts of south-east England – one a south London borough, the other a suburban county north of London. In both locations boys appear to enjoy greater mobility than girls, and become independent much earlier. But closer analysis suggests that girls manage to attain similar levels of independence from adults by travelling more in groups. This collective independence achieved through peers is often overlooked, and may compensate modern children to some extent for their loss of individual freedom.     

Gendered orphan kits,authority, power and the role of rumor in the woodlands of Mozambique

Recipient communities often distribute humanitarian aid in unexpected ways that reveal critical power dynamics and relationships. This article examines a case involving ‘orphan kits’ distributed by the staff of an international non-governmental organization in Mozambican woodland communities. The kits contained food and school supplies allocated according to a strict gender distribution mandate, which was of secondary importance compared with local obligations tied to enduring matrilineal social relations. Families divided the kits among kin and allocated a portion of the kits to local leaders as tribute. The seemingly simple act of leaders placing orphans on a list can signify the future arrival of much-needed support while also sparking fears of disciplinary powers governing family structures, labor and culturally and politically oppositional lives. Rumors narrate the effects of particular list-making procedures, allowing families to observe, interpret and express ideas about coercive and productive power relations. Rumors took up kit contents such as sardine tins to catalyze debates about proper leadership and comportment of orphans and their families. The article illustrates how feminist geographers can treat rumor and liminal interventions seriously as constitutive of contested power relations rooted in eco-social spaces.