Estancias of Buenos Aires Province,Argentina: Rural Heritage,Sustainable Development and Tourism

Rural settlements growing crops and rearing animals are known as estancias in several South American countries. They played a prevailing role in the political and economic history of Argentina, particularly during the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. At present, many estancias are developing alternative activities, as recreation and tourism, in order to be able to subsist. The main problem lies in the fact that a non‐sustainable activity, frequently focused on the greatest economic yield, leads to the destruction of the heritage, instead of achieving its long‐term conservation. The purpose of this paper is to develop and verify a suitable model for the planning, execution and management of recreational and tourist activities in these rural settlements. As regards the scope of the concept of sustainable development, this methodology aims at achieving a balance between the recreational and tourist operation and the conservation of the rich heritage concerned.     

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.     

Against the Grid: The Cultural Emergence of Villas Miseria in Buenos Aires

This article traces how poverty emerged culturally in mid-century Buenos Aires. It does so by examining two contrasting models: (1) the state’s, revealed in the plans it prepared for the eradication of villas miseria (the local term for slums), (2) that of a corpus of cultural objects depicting slums between 1957 and 1963. My basic claim is that the politically motivated conceptual erasure of the slum informed its aesthetic representation. In particular, I look at Bernardo Verbitsky’s novel Villa Miseria también es América (1957), and Antonio Berni’s series of multimedia collages focused on the fictional character of Juanito Laguna (1958–1978). As my essay shows, each of these works responds to the state plans to eradicate slums. Each takes up the state’s idea of the slum as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, but inserts into this plane an excess of materiality. By looking at the shared forms of these objects, I describe how culture came to place the slum within the city’s regular grid, interrupting the linearity imagined by the state. Such a gesture will ultimately have the consequence of turning poverty into something absolutely consumable.     

Zooarchaeology for the City: An Urban Case, La Boca, Buenos Aires City, circa 1860

Zooarchaeological works in the city lack of a specific theoretical and methodological framework to understand its faunal assemblages. The different analyses were done in most cases following procedures that had been developed for hunter-gatherer contexts. In this paper, we evaluate some questions related to this issue, encompassed in the acquisition mode and the characteristics of the archaeological record. Finally, an example from two sites in La Boca, Buenos Aires city, Argentina is given in order to understand some of these questions.     

Public Health and Private Charity in Northeast China, 1905-1945

Medical charity in northeast China evolved through the confluence of three processes： the foundation of state medicine, the legal and political transformation of private charities, and the militarized competition for influence between China and Japan. Following the plague of 1910, a series of Chinese regimes began building medical infrastructure in areas under their control, but their ultimate inability to establish a comprehensive public health program left private charities to fill the gaps. In contrast, the Japanese administered concessions in Kant6 and along the South Manchuria Railway instituted a farsighted and multivaleneed medical policy. The Japanese model did not merely tolerate medical charities, it reserved for them a very specific role in the larger strategic framework of healthcare provision. Under the client state of ＂Manzhouguo,＂ the Japanese model further evolved to channel medical voluntarism into a hybrid state-charitable sector.     

Erotic Attachment,Identity Formation and the Body Politic: The Woman‐as‐nation in Canadian Graphic Satire, 1867–1914

Using depictions of ‘Miss Canada’ in editorial cartoons and political campaign posters published in English Canada between 1867 and 1914 as a case study, this article argues that the repetitive deployment of feminised and eroticised images of the nation summoned particular gender, sexual and political identities into being and entangled viewers’ psychic investments in masculine, heterosexual and nationalist subjectivities. It also considers how Miss Canada's normative representation as white conflated racial whiteness and Canadian‐ness, and how images hailed viewers into racial subjectivities that were leashed to national identity. Rather than querying how or why the woman‐as‐nation trope elicited nationalist sentiment in an already‐constituted subject, this analysis examines how imagery provoked viewers’ identification with subject positions that were co‐constituted with nationalism. Impassioned and even violent nationalism becomes more comprehensible when we consider that the woman‐as‐nation was capable of producing attachments to national identity that, for some, were inseparable from and tantamount to psychic investments in gender, sexual and racial identities. While Canadian scholars have recognised that Miss Canada was a significant popular culture icon during the long nineteenth century and acknowledged this icon's embeddedness in gender, sexual and national discourses, studies have tended to describe Miss Canada's role in consolidating hegemonic ideologies and power relations and underestimate visual culture's constitutive capacities. The extent of Miss Canada's hetero‐erotic coding has also largely escaped historians’ notice. Although a few scholars have explored visual culture's role in Canadian national identity formation during this era, this study makes a unique contribution by foregrounding the productive work of popular imagery in co‐constituting and entwining national and sexual subjectivities.     

Self,Health, and Gender: Complementary and alternative medicine in the British mass media

The growth of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the West entails complex geographies of health, identity and knowledge. Debates about why people are attracted to CAM highlight the importance of consumer agency and increasing access to health care information. The article explores a key space within which information on CAM is produced and negotiated: health and lifestyle magazines. Drawing upon interviews with the editors of eight British titles, the article outlines three ways in which CAM is discursively framed: as a pragmatic medical tool kit brought to bear on the diseased body; as a means of achieving 'total well-being' in everyday metropolitan space; and as a central pillar of an alternative lifestyle. The final section of the article considers how editors understand and address their predominantly female readerships, with an emphasis on how CAM is articulated within an ostensibly emancipatory project of self-responsibility and personal empowerment against the ambivalent backdrop of consumer culture.