Intergenerational comparison of education attainment and implications for empowerment of women in rural Kenya

An intergenerational comparison of education attainment and empowerment across two generations of Kenyan rural women population was undertaken. The study employed a longitudinal analysis of quantitative data derived from the Demographic and Health Survey databases. The survey captures relevant demographic background on the two generations of women. The study undertakes to compare the education attainment and empowerment outcome measures of socioeconomic status, household size, and fertility rates between the two cohorts of women. It also contrasts the experience of the women who accessed education in the era characterized by the welfare state (1989 cohort) with those who came of age in the austerity years of neoliberalism (2008/2009 cohort). The research established that the majority of women in both cohorts had limited access to education. However, women who accessed more education were more likely to show characteristics of empowered individuals – they had smaller households, fewer children, and were relatively wealthier. The results demonstrate that meaningful empowerment through education can only be realized if more women access levels of education beyond the basic education focus that is dominant in international development discourse.     

The End of Ayawiri: Abandonment at an Andean Hillfort Town of the Late Intermediate Period

As the south-central Andes came under Inca control, many hillfort towns and villages were abandoned in favor of low-lying, non-defensive settlements. Recent investigation at Ayawiri (Machu Llaqta), a fortified hilltop town in the Titicaca Basin of southern Peru, sheds light on how such sites met their end. Ayawiri was abandoned in the 15th century a.d. with no reoccupation and little to no scavenging afterwards. Excavated house structures have whole or reconstructible artifacts left in situ on floors, including bronze adornments and other valuables. Expediently-prepared throwing stones or slingstones were stockpiled and used near the outermost wall, suggesting that the abandonment may have been precipitated by enemy attack. While the evidence indicates rapid abandonment overall, there were distinct and varied micro-processes of abandonment that took place among different family groups at Ayawiri, who engaged differently in rituals, abandonment caching, and departure.     

Warrior Women,the Holy Spirit and HIV/AIDS in Rural Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This article analyses a group of Gogodala Christian women in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea who are referred to as ‘Warrior women’ and who pray, sing and call upon the Holy Spirit to cleanse their own bodies and ‘turn their eyes’, so that they are able to see those who threaten the health and well‐being of the wider community. These women have focused primarily on bringing male practitioners of magic — iwai dala — shadowy and powerful men who operate covertly and away from the gaze of others, out into the open. Whilst this has been happening for many years, the spread of HIV and AIDS into the area, fuelled by what many in the area believe is the rise of unrestrained female and male sexuality and the waning of Christian practice and principles, has meant that those perceived to bring harm to the community through their sexual behaviour have become recent targets for Warrior women. HIV/AIDS, referred to in Gogodala as melesene bininapa gite tila gi — the ‘sickness without medicine’ — is understood as a hidden sickness, one that makes its way through the community without trace until people become visibly ill. Warrior women seek to make both AIDS and those who, through their behaviour, encourage or enable its spread more visible. In the process, however, a small number of them are overcome by the Holy Spirit, so much so that they become daeledaelenapa — mad ‐ their behaviour increasingly characterised by childishness and uncontrolled sexuality.     

Social Welfare Provision at the Imperial Edge: Single Mothers and Abandoned Children in the Late Russian Empire

This article looks to the societal and imperial margins to examine attitudes towards social welfare provision in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Drawing on archival material from the Empire's Estliand province (now northern Estonia), the article focuses on the self-representation of single mothers and official discussions of abandoned children. Society was in flux in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as rapid industrialisation, urbanisation and rural-to-urban migration served to undermine traditional social structures, mentalities and identities. These changes were accompanied by the disruption of the traditional patriarchal gender order, as well shifting ideas about who ought to be responsible for taking care of vulnerable groups. In rural Estliand, Estonian-speaking unmarried women sought engagement with Russian imperial judicial structures to secure child maintenance. In the early 1900s, anxieties about the social impacts of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation and the development of new currents in philanthropy, meant that care for foundlings and abandoned children became a burning issue in the minds of Estliand's provincial officials. Examining single mothers and child abandonment in Estliand illuminates tensions between empire-wide and local mechanisms for dealing with social issues, as well as shifting attitudes to gender, the family and charity in light of urbanisation and modernisation.     

The changing World : A review

Abandoned farmsteads are a characteristic feature of Scotland's marginal uplands. Yet little is known of the quantity or location of these early settlements or indeed, of the date of their abandonment. This paper outlines a method of mapping and dating deserted settlement sites and exemplifies the method by reference to abandonment in the Lammermuir Hills in South East Scotland. In this area alone it appears that more than 230 settlements were abandoned before 1860, and a further 104 over 1860‐1970. The scale of this abandonment is greater than has been generally supposed and must lead to speculation about the extent of former settlement elsewhere in upland Scotland.     

Evidence from Escalera al Cielo: Abandonment of a Terminal Classic Puuc Maya hill complex in Yucatán,Mexico

Abstract

Excavations at the hilltop site of Escalera al Cielo, located in the Puuc Maya region of Yucatán, Mexico, have uncovered evidence of a planned abandonment at the end of the Terminal Classic period (a.d. 800–950). Six buildings investigated among three residential groups contain rich floor assemblages similar to those known from only a few rapidly abandoned sites in the Maya area. Through an analysis of de facto refuse—most of which was recovered in locations of storage and provisional discard—and midden refuse, this paper illustrates how the assemblages represent an example of household-level abandonment with anticipated return. We also consider Escalera al Cielo in light of our present understanding of the political and environmental history of the Puuc region during the late 9th century a.d.     

Remembering and Forgetting: The Relationship Between Memory and the Abandonment of Graves in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Greek Cemeteries

This paper examines the concept of commemoration as an expression of social memory and its relationship to time and space as manifested through the mortuary evidence from Modern Greek cemeteries. Of particular interest is the act of commemoration itself: who remembers whom and the length of time that this type of memory endures. Based on evidence collected from a number of different cemeteries in northern Kythera and the eastern Corinthia, I argue that memory at the nuclear family level determines the length of time a grave is remembered as a physical location. Once this memory ceases to exist, the grave gradually enters a process of neglect, which ultimately leads to its abandonment. Some abandoned graves are recycled for use by other families who, in the absence of any recollection or memory of the grave, remove and destroy the old monuments (if they exist) and the remains of the previous occupants. Particular burial spaces are, thus, reclaimed by new groups.     

Poor,ill, and sometimes abandoned: tubercular children in Buenos Aires, 1880-1920

Ill children with chronic diseases, such as tuberculosis, have faced difficult lives. Poverty proved a factor in their susceptibility to disease, their abandonment, and their treatment. When public health policies in Buenos Aires shifted from ignoring children to viewing them as victims who needed protection, government agencies, charitable organizations, public schools, and hospitals developed special programs that emphasized both prevention and cure of childhood tuberculosis. Argentine physicians and hygienists supported programs that were similar to those in Europe and the United States. Despite efforts, from 1880 to 1920, diagnosis of tuberculosis remained problematic, health professionals failed to prevent tuberculosis in children, and physicians were unable to cure the disease.     

Accepting Jewish roots for a pair of shoes: identity dilemmas of Jewish children in Poland during the Second World War and in the early post-war years

Jewish children who managed to survive Nazi attempts to exterminate them are a clear, yet still under-examined, example of a group who managed to resist the path to genocide. It was only by changing their individual social identity that they were able to survive. By more or less consciously breaking their ties with Judaism and converting to Catholicism, they abandoned membership of the group destined for extermination and strove to become unidentifiable as Jews. This article focuses on the issue of the identity of the Jewish children raised or born in Poland during the Nazi persecution and who survived the Shoah under an assumed non-Jewish identity. It will examine the war's impact on these Polish ‘hidden children’ and its consequences for their ethnic and religious identity. Many children were intentionally deprived of their Jewish identity by their parents or saviours since such a renunciation was the only way to survive. Therefore the role of non-Jewish rescuers and the attitude of the Jewish authorities towards these children's fate during and after the war is also discussed. The survival of these children hinged upon questions of identity and how successfully they were able to conceal their life-threatening origins and adopt the much safer disguise.     

Swahili Cosmopolitanism in Africa and the Indian Ocean World, A.D. 600–1500

Coastal peoples who lived along the Eastern African seaboard in the first millennium A.D. onwards began converting to Islam in the mid-eighth century. Clearly rooted in and linked throughout to an indigenous regional Iron Age tradition, they created a marked difference between themselves and their regional neighbors through their active engagement with Islam and the expanding Indian Ocean world system. In this paper I explore three ways in which interrelated cultural norms—an aesthetic featuring imported ceramics, foods, and other items, Islamic practice, and a favoring of urban living—created and maintained this difference over many centuries. These qualities of their identity helped anchor those who became Swahili peoples as participants in the Indian Ocean system. Such characteristics also can be seen to have contributed to Swahili attractiveness as a place for ongoing small-scale settlement of Indian Ocean peoples on the African coast, and eventually, as a target for nineteenth-century Arab colonizers from the Persian Gulf. This paper examines the archaeology of these aspects of Swahili culture from its early centuries through ca. A.D. 1500.     

Toward an understanding of site abandonment behavior: Evidence from historic mining camps in the southwest Yukon

Our present understanding of discard and abandonment behaviors as well as other cultural activities structuring the archaeological record is inadequate. Although some research is progressing toward such an understanding, much of what is known about these processes still tends to be grounded on weak assumptions and untested propositions. However, a number of historically documented gold rush sites in the Kluane region, Yukon Territory, appear to provide a unique opportunity for formulating and testing hypotheses relevant to a better understanding of site abandonment behavior. Abandonment processes for these and other sites are reviewed and their effects are discussed in an effort to determine how two major variables of abandonment behavior, the manner under which sites are abandoned and whether or not return is planned, contribute to the formation of the archaeological record.     

Editorial

Abstract

The history and cult of the tomb of Habakkuk are discussed from the earliest references to the sacred site in Jewish sources of the 13th century to the present. The tomb is located near the biblical and Mishnaic-Talmudic village of Hukkok and the Arab village of Yaquq. After a survey of the site's early history, the sources that mention the venerated tomb are analyzed in detail. Since the 13th century, the place has been part of an itinerary of sacred sites visited by Jewish pilgrims, who performed prescribed rites at set times of the year, or paid homage as individuals. Side by side with these pilgrims was the local Muslim community, which participated both in the cult and in the upkeep of the sacred place — a participation that is not mentioned in the sources and may be deduced only from very late sources. In 1948, the village of Yaquq was abandoned, and the outcome of its abandonment and the history of the sacred site from the founding of the State of Israel to the present day are discussed in detail.     

The role of the Toronto Girls' Home, 1863-1910

It has been suggested that the role of Ontario children's homes, who had for half a century been helping disadvantaged children, changed significantly and immediately under the 'Children's Protection Act of 1893'. However, the records of the girls admitted to Toronto Girls' Home from 1863 to 1910 suggest that this was not the case, for this home at least. For most of their history, their core clientele was the children of poor respectable parents dealing with a crisis or who could not both work and care for their children. Thus, although prior to 1893 they did also care for a significant number of neglected children, and after 1893 fewer such children were admitted, the Home continued for more than 20 years to help families as they always had, providing a form of family support for which the child protection system was not designed.     

Offspring sex preference in frontier America

Analysis of the fertility histories of women born between 1850 and 1900, as given in the Utah Population Database (UPDB), reveals the effect of the number, as well as the sex composition, of previous children on birth-stopping and birth-spacing decisions. Specifically, agricultural and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) households—two sub-populations that might have placed different values on male and female children for economic, social, and/or cultural reasons—showed a distinct preference for male children, as expressed by birth stopping after the birth of a male child and shorter birth intervals in higher-parity births when most previous children were female. Remarkably, women in both the early "natural fertility" and the later contraceptive eras used spacing behavior to achieve a desired sex mix. Although the LDS population had relatively high fertility rates, it had the same preferences for male children as the non-LDS population did. Farmers, who presumably had a need for family labor, were more interested in the quantity than in the sex mix of their children.     

New Meanings in the Archive: Privacy,Technological Change and the Status of Sources**

This essay reflects on how technological changes in biomedicine can affect what archival sources are available for historical research. Historians and anthropologists have examined the ways in which old biomedical samples can be made to serve novel scientific purposes, such as when decades-old frozen tissue specimens are analyzed using new genomic techniques. Those uses are also affected by shifting ethical regimes, which affect who can do what with old samples, or whether anything can be done with them at all. Archival collections are subject to similar dynamics, as institutional change and shifts in ethical guidelines and privacy laws affect which sources can be accessed and which are closed. I witnessed just such a change during my research into human genetics using archives in the Wellcome Collection. A few years into my project, those archives had their privacy conditions reassessed, and I saw how some sources previously seen as neutral were now understood to contain personal sensitive information. This paper describes the conditions of this shift—including the effects of technological change, new ethical considerations, and changing laws around privacy. I reflect on how these affected my understanding of the history of human genetics, and how I and others might narrate it.     

Queer Global Displacement: Social Reproduction,Refugee Survival,and Organised Abandonment in Nairobi,Cape Town,and Paris

Queer refugees are misfits in the global political economy of migration. While international human rights law has provided some room for queer acceptance, queer refugees face organised abandonment—marginality, erasure, and invisibility—as they attempt to survive in the face of ongoing displacement. This paper explores queer refugee survival in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Paris, and examines the netted practices of the state, non-state actors, and civil society embedded in a landscape of heteronormativity and anti-migrant sentiment. In so doing, this paper emphasises queerness as a form of precarity inseparable from the overarching violence of race, class, and capital. With this critique in mind, queer refugee survival is constrained by the lack of access to shelter, community, and work-related social reproduction. In short, queer refugees face deeper marginality than their cis-gendered and heterosexual counterparts as they attempt to survive in the city.     

Multiple multiculturalisms: insights from the Edinburgh Mela

This paper contributes to debates about the future of multiculturalism in Britain by exploring how it is conceptualized, constructed and experienced in contemporary Scotland. The work is grounded in Hall's (2000) important but commonly overlooked distinction between a ‘multicultural society’, which designates a condition of cultural diversity, and ‘multiculturalism’, which refers to processes and policies that attempt to fix the meaning of such diversity. As these definitions suggest, the abandonment of multiculturalism as a ‘policy failure’ cannot be a solution to problems arising from the complex composition of contemporary societies. The fact that all societies must make decisions about the significance of cultural diversity and its management—they must all practise some form of multiculturalism—is established through a review of how multiculturalism has been conceptualized and pursued to date. The paper then draws on the example of Edinburgh's South Asian Festival—the Mela—to explore the empirical complexities of these different applications in a Scottish context. An analysis of the Mela's changing organization and artistic programme over time reveals the coexistence of multiple conceptions of multiculturalism—in time, space and experience. This progressive reinterpretation of multiculturalism—as multiple—advances the goals of both cultural diversity and societal cohesiveness.     

Feeding the Community: Women’s Participation in Communal Celebrations,Western Sicily (Eighth–Sixth Centuries BC)

In the study of the Sicilian Iron Age, most of the works devoted to their main communal ritual spaces—the so-called “acropolis”—have stuck mainly to describe both their architectures and those artifacts registered in them. However, in the realization of this practice, those objects traditionally considered as imported or exceptional have been emphasized. The return of this selective practice is that other artifacts could not be considered as extraordinary, but being also present in these spaces and, therefore, with a certain role in these celebrations, they have long been dismissed and undervalued. This is the case of all those objects that are directly related to the domestic sphere and, particularly, with those activities usually associated with the women’s world, such as cooking pots or loom weights. The invisibility of these objects relative to the domestic sphere and, above all, to the feminine sphere has led to validate and perpetuate a biased glaze over these ceremonies where only male elite actors could participate. In response to these androcentric and classist discourses, the main aim of this paper is to recover the agency of certain women in the development of these communal celebrations and to show their importance in the construction and representation of a sense of community that was created constantly through these ceremonies through the study of these long-forgotten household objects.     

Preservation and Rescue: Challenges and Controversies in the Protection of Archaeological Resources

Abstract

Data from 44 pit-structures excavated as a part of the Dolores Archaeological Program are used to test two hypotheses about the relationship between the ritual use of a structure and the manner in which that structure was abandoned. The pit structures all date to 860–900 A.C. and are associated with large Pueblo villages located along the Dolores River in what is now SW Colorado. Three basic levels of ritual use have been defined for these structures based on the number and type of features associated with the structures. Those structures with evidence of the most important ritual usage are significantly associated with a mode of abandonment in which the structure was purposefully burned down. Those having ritual features that appear to be of secondary importance are significantly associated with an abandonment mode in which the roof of the pit-structure was intentionally collapsed to bury human individuals on the structure's floor. It is more difficult to characterize the abandonment mode of structures which represent the simplest level of ritual use, though it is most common to have a simple abandonment in which the roof simply deteriorated and collapsed with time. The recognition of a probable hierarchy of ritual usage in early Pueblo pit-structures and the association of special abandonment modes with each type of ritual pit-structure specifically allow a better glimpse of ritual activities in early Pueblo societies. In a more general sense these data show that it is possible to archaeologically detect patterned associations between a structure's use and its mode of abandonment.