The "cradle of glass": incubators for infants in late nineteenth-century France

This article examines the development of the incubator for premature infants in fin-de-siècle France. During a period of widespread anxiety in France regarding infant mortality and its implications for population growth, physicians in Paris developed and widely promoted the lifesaving technology. This article explores the ways in which the incubator reflected new scientific and symbolic approaches to creating hygienic spaces as well as how it reflected new scientific and symbolic approaches to the traditionally feminine project of infant care. By creating such an isolating and protective milieu around premature infants—an entirely new population of patients—the incubator, I argue, heralded a renegotiation of the boundary between motherhood and medical authority.     

Balanced Bilingualism: Patterns of Contact Influence in L1 and L2 Turkic and Bakhtiari Speech in Juneqan,Iran

Most studies on language contact in Iran have focused on the effects of Persian on the country’s minority languages. There are also many cases where large regional languages such as Azeri, Kurdish, Balochi, Lori and Bakhtiari exert an influence on smaller regional languages, and a few studies have appeared on this topic. This paper examines the effects of language contact in the city of Juneqan in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province, Iran, where the position of two minority languages—Bakhtiari and Qashqai Turkic—appears to be evenly balanced. The analysis is based on a comparison of L1 and L2 speech from two bilingual individuals with a different L1, as found in responses to the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) questionnaire. Drawing on examples from lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax, the article argues that the equivalent influence of each language on the first- and second-language speech of members of the other language community is likely achieved not by simple equal status, but through the counterbalancing of regional Bakhtiari dominance with majority mother-tongue Turkic population in this city.     

Scale,Factor Analyses,and Neighborhood Effects

Studies of potential neighborhood effects have been constrained in most situations by the absence of small‐area data generated to characterize the local contexts within which individuals operate. Using small‐area data from the U.K. Census, this paper Illustrates the creation of bespoke neighborhoods—local areas defined separately for each individual in a sample survey—at a variety of scales, and their characterization using factor analysis techniques. Theories of neighborhood effects are uncertain as to the spatial scale at which the relevant processes operate, hence the value of exploring patterns consistent with those processes at a range of spatial scales. One problem with such comparative study is the incommensurability of regression coefficients derived from analyses using factor scores as the independent variables. The work reported here adapts a procedure introduced for reconstituting partial regression coefficients to circumvent that problem, and illustrates that patterns of voting at a recent British general election showed neighborhood‐effect‐like patterns at two separate scales simultaneously—with individual voter characteristics held constant.     

Births,Infants and Children: An Econometric Portrait of Women and Children in India

This article undertakes an econometric analysis of the constellation of factors that serve to determine some outcomes with respect to demography and to schooling in India. These are: the numbers of pregnancies, live births and infant survivals to women, the chances of children being enrolled at school and, if enrolled, of continuing in school. The econometric estimates are based on unit record data from a survey — carried out by the National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi — of 33,000 rural households in sixteen states of India. The study concludes that a broad spectrum of factors affects these outcomes. The literacy of women is important but so is the literacy of men. Infrastructure, in the form of safe drinking water and easy access to medical facilities, is important for infant survivals and, in the shape of easy access to schools, is important for school enrolment. Parental occupation matters for both infant survivals and schooling: children born to women who work as labourers are disadvantaged, relative to other children, in terms of their chances of surviving infancy and, if they do survive, of receiving schooling. The number of siblings that a child has affects his/her schooling outcomes, and gender, religion and region play an important role.     

Investigating foetal and perinatal mortality in prehistoric skeletal samples: a case study from a 3000-year-old Pacific Island cemetery site

The Teouma skeletal sample from Vanuatu represents one of the few truly colonising populations in the Pacific Islands. Therefore, investigating the factors that may have affected foetal/infant mortality in this population is potentially important for understanding the success of settlement in this region of the world. We investigate whether stable isotope analyses of carbon and nitrogen in conjunction with skeletal ageing techniques, can aid in identifying whether the subadults from Teouma died before or after birth in an attempt to understand the potential threats to foetal and infant survival. Multiple skeletal ageing methods using diaphyseal lengths were used to age the young subadults (n = 7). Using regression-based skeletal ageing methods, four of the individuals were aged at around full-term gestation (37–42 weeks gestation), while the remaining three individuals died preterm. The isotope analyses did not assist in identifying the individuals that survived post-birth because none of the subadults displayed the 2–3‰ trophic increase in δ¹⁵N values expected for a breastfed infant, probably as a result of their young age. However, all of the foetal/perinatal individuals exhibited higher δ¹⁵N values in their bone collagen compared with the adult females of the sample, with two of the individuals demonstrating unusually high δ¹⁵N values. The δ¹³C values of the foetuses/perinates did not exhibit the same variation. We explore a number of possible explanations for this elevation of perinatal/foetal δ¹⁵N values and tentatively suggest that this is a result of in utero stress as a consequence of chronic maternal ill-health. The osteological and palaeodemographic evidence supports the assertion that females, foetuses and perinates were susceptible to environmental stress within this colonising population, resulting in early death of the perinatal individuals in addition to early terminations of pregnancy or premature birth possibly caused by infectious and/or metabolic diseases.     

Where does all the talent flow? Migration of young graduates and nongraduates,Canada 1996–2001

It has recently been suggested that cities and regions should focus upon attracting talented individuals as a means to develop. Such a suggestion implies two things: first that it is possible to meaningfully alter migration flows by way of local policy, and second that these flows have an effect on local growth (and not the reverse as has generally been admitted). In this paper, we begin to investigate the empirical foundations of such assertions by examining some structural determinants of graduate migration flows by comparing them, in a gravity model context, to flows of nongraduates. Our contention is that, if migration flows are structured by such factors, then policies aimed at modifying flows—and any research purporting to give such policy advice—must first take them into account. We show that migration flows are strongly dependent on basic gravity variables such as size and distance, but that these and other variables (such as income differences, presence of graduates and border effects) do not affect all flows equally. Furthermore, we show that certain factors that are assumed to be local (such as wage levels) in fact only operate at a provincial level. Thus policies implemented locally may have little or no effect if they are manipulating factors that operate at a different scale.     

Rethinking the Concept of Membership in Nature Advocacy Organizations

The political science literature on interest groups, particularly since Olson (1965), normally focuses on individual motivations to join groups or the incentives offered by groups to entice prospective members to join and, more important, to stay on as members over time. But what happens to our understanding about “members”—a term freighted with overtones of democratic participation—when these individuals are more likely to be passive “supporters” or “donors”? Is there a conceptual and practical distinction between the two? This article ponders this question by examining the advocacy organizations that comprise the national environmental community.     

Paul Broca’s search for Basque skulls: The full story

Paul Broca surmised that the short and broad—brachycephalic—skulls of the earliest European settlers had become longer and narrower—dolichocephalic—in modern populations due to the blending of different races. Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius had two brachycephalic skulls said to be from contemporary Basque individuals, a claim suited to test Broca’s hypothesis. Broca worked with fellow anatomist and surgeon Pedro González Velasco, the founding father of Spanish anthropology, to gather a large number of Basque skulls. In its time, this was the most fascinating collection owned by the Anthropological Society of Paris. This article explains how Broca and Velasco were able to gather such a sizeable array of specimens, which they had collected at a location known at first by the code name of “Z.” Although Broca finally concluded that the origin of the Retzius skulls could not be determined, his research was to spark anthropologists’ interest in the language and origins of the Basque people.     

A Community-Based Sample of the Older Population from the 1880 and 1900 United States Manuscript Census

Abstract

Sources of nineteenth-century body mass index variation have received increased attention in economic and historical studies. Although modern body mass indexes increased during the twentieth century, nineteenth-century black and white body mass indexes were distributed symmetrically. Blacks in the Great Lakes and whites from the Southeast were more likely to be underweight, and blacks in Kentucky and whites in the Upper South and Far West were more likely to be overweight and obese. Farmers had greater body mass index values than workers in other occupations. Factors individuals did not control—such as age, race, and height—were the primary sources of nineteenth-century body mass index variation; choice characteristics—such as residence and occupations—had little to do with body mass index variation during U.S. economic development.     

Contiguity and Similarity as Poetic Modes in Some Poems of Gongora

This article explores how different authors who suffered the violence of the 1970s and 1980s revolutionary movements and military dictatorships in the Southern Cone countries of Latin America look back from a post-dictatorship present to write the history of their recent past. Nostalgia and critical reflection join forces to recreate the feelings of loss of individuals whose identities crashed due to the failure of political projects that once were conceived as messianic, as well as to critically reclaim the past in order to construct alternative futures for themselves as individuals and for the community. The article focuses mainly on the Chilean Diamela Eltit's novel Jamás el fuego nunca (2007), in which an old couple of former revolutionary militants of the Left imprisoned in a claustrophobic space—an old bed—explore their past as militants and as a couple to understand and question notions of individual and collective identity in the aftermath of traumatic and tumultuous experiences. The novel is read in the context of other narratives such as Chilean Luz Arce's testimonial, El infierno (1993) and Argentine political scientist Pilar Calveiro's essays, Poder y desaparición (1998) and Política y/o violencia (2005), among others. This article's theoretical contribution lies in its emphasis on the ethical consideration of listening to all of the narratives that speak to us about that era cognizant of their differing motivations, desires, tonalities, and subjective trajectories. Only by paying close attention to the polyphony of voices and documents about the past—especially those that speak to us from a time of subjective crisis and trauma—can we achieve a true sense of historicity.     

State‐of–the–art imaging in palaeopathology: the value of multislice computed tomography in visualizing doubtful cranial lesions

Non‐invasive imaging techniques are of great value in palaeopathology. Computed tomography (CT) is widely established to visualize changes in human remains that occurred both pre and post mortem. Since 1999 an advanced form of helical CT—so called Multislice‐CT (MSCT)—has become available for clinical purposes. We now present for the first time three historic cranial lesions of doubtful aetiology visualized by MSCT. Both original images and virtual reconstructions of the specimens are of high quality. In combination with peri‐lesional bone density measurements these images allow an improved assessment of aetiology. The cases presented are diagnosed by MSCT as being of intra vitam nature in two individuals and of post mortem character in one case. Time consuming post‐processing analysis and the still small number of scanners presently available may limit application of this new technique. Nevertheless, based on our preliminary results, we strongly recommend non‐invasive evaluation by MSCT to be used for non‐clinical purposes such as palaeopathological research. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

BETWEEN GENOCIDE AND “GENOCIDE”

The two books discussed here join a current pushback against the concept (thus also against claims for the historical occurrence) of genocide. Nichanian focuses on the Armenian “Aghed” (“Catastrophe”), inferring from his view of that event's undeniability that “genocide is not a fact” (since all facts are deniable). May's critique assumes that groups don't really—“objectively”—exist, as (by contrast) individuals do; thus, genocide—group murder—also has an “as if” quality so far as concerns the group victimized. On the one hand, then, uniqueness and sacralization; on the other hand, reductionism and diffusion. Alas, the historical and moral claims in “defense” of both genocide and “genocide” survive.     

Technologies of Appearance: Hair Behaviour in Early Medieval Europe

Personal appearance in general—and the grooming of hair in particular—has long held a position of interest in historical, art-historical, and literary scholarship. The same cannot be said of archaeology, and the material aspects of personal grooming in the construction and communication of identity have not been fully synthesized. As a result, little attempt has been made to understand the social role of hair in less well documented societies, such as those of early medieval northern and western Europe. This paper considers archaeological, iconographic and documentary evidence for the significance of, and physical engagement with hair in early medieval northern and western Europe, and offers a model for the interpretation of grooming as a social phenomenon. It is argued that grooming was a socially meaningful practice, and that it played a key role in the construction of early medieval identities, as well as in the maintenance and manipulation of boundaries and distinctions between individuals and groups.     

＂莲花＂与＂妈姑＂：清代最大矿厂名实考辨

黔铅的采炼是清代矿业兴盛的主要表征之一,其在开采时间、规模、作用与影响方面堪比滇铜,但其研究却显得极其滞后。当前学术界对清代黔铅最大矿厂的认识仍然不清,大多数学者将威宁州属莲花、妈姑并列为两大铅厂。笔者经过对名称、厂址、产量的考证和两者之间关系的考察,发现二者实为一厂,而“一厂二名”现象表现出不同类型文献记载上的差异,这对于研究黔铅的产量与规模至关重要。     

Enamel hypoplasia in Danish and Lithuanian Late Medieval/Early Modern samples: a possible reflection of child morbidity and mortality patterns

Numerous studies and various interpretations of the prevalence of linear enamel hypoplasias (LEH) based on populations living in different cultural and economic conditions are causing some confusion and raising doubts about whether or not such LEH are reliable indicators of life conditions. An analysis of LEH prevalence patterns was performed on the adults of three populations: Tirup—a Danish Medieval rural population of the 12–14th centuries (131 individuals), Subačiaus str. in Vilnius—a Lithuanian Late Medieval urban population of the 16–17th centuries (88 individuals), and the aristocracy—a Lithuanian pooled sample population from several churches of the 15–18th centuries (66 individuals). Statistical testing of the influence of population affinity, sex and age at death was also performed. Since the same investigator scored all the samples, possible inter‐observer error bias was minimized. In all the populations, LEH formation ages were similar. Statistically significant sex differences were found only in the aristocratic sample (with higher male frequency). It was found that the town population was characterized by the highest frequency of affected individuals, with the highest severity and highest number of stress episodes per individual. A reliable relationship with age at death was found only in the town sample: individuals with more numerous and more marked LEH had shorter life expectancies in adulthood. Different “most vulnerable years” for subsequent life expectancies were noted for different populations. A tentative explanation of these differences could be the pooled effect of differential morbidity and mortality. It seems that the rural population experienced the highest morbidity and nutrition deficiency as well as the highest child mortality whereas, in the urban sample, high morbidity was accompanied by a lower child mortality. Both lower morbidity and mortality seem to be characteristic for the aristocracy. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Polydactyly in the prehistoric American Southwest

General surveys of skeletal collections from Arizona for evidence of trauma and pathology led to the identification of polydactyly in two subadults. Polydactyly is a congenital condition characterised by the presence of extra digits on the hands or feet. Both affected subadults exhibit a sixth digit in the form of a branching fifth metatarsal. One of the affected individuals is an infant from the Tapia del Cerrito site exhibiting Y‐shaped fifth metatarsals indicative of postaxial type A polydactyly. The second individual is a juvenile from the Nuvakwewtaqa (Chavez Pass Ruin) site exhibiting a left fifth metatarsal with a lateral branch, also diagnosed as postaxial type A polydactyly. These two cases appear to be the first examples of polydactyly from archaeological contexts identified among subadults, and bring the total number of known cases from the American Southwest to six. Discovery of so many examples of this relatively rare condition amongst the Puebloan people of the Southwest adds to the evidence that, rather than simply being an artistic motif, rock art depictions featuring hands and feet with six digits were probably inspired by observation of the condition amongst living people. Furthermore, burial treatment of the Tapia del Cerrito infant suggests that polydactyly may have conferred a special status on the bearer. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Subaltern technologies and early modernity in the Atlantic World

Colonial Latin American and Atlantic-world scholarship that does not explicitly concern indigenous, black, and other subaltern individuals and groups continues to marginalize, if not completely ignore, them. This lingering, if often inadvertent, Eurocentrism endures, according to this essay, for several reasons, including a preoccupation with modernization, notions of ‘nature’ that make it easy to ignore ‘culture,’ and models of culture that presume fixed boundaries rather than permeability. This essay suggests that a focus on ‘technology’—capaciously defined to include phenomena such as hammocks and chocolate, as well as mining and storm management—is one way out of this predicament. Investigating the myriad technologies that dominated colonial Latin America reveals the centrality of subaltern actors throughout the region and the Atlantic world more broadly. It also affords a fruitful way to explore the relationships between material and symbolic culture in the context of an ‘entangled’ early modern world.     

Healing is as healing does: Pragmatic resolution of misfortune among the Senufo (Ivory Coast)

Using the example of the representations and practices relative to the resolution of misfortune among the Senufo Fodonon, this article aims to show the non‐autonomy and irrelevance of categories such as ‘therapeutic,’ ‘illness,’ ‘medicine,’ usually taken for granted by anthropology.

These activities and representations refer to — and depend on for their coherence — heterogeneous domains of social organization extrinsic to ‘illness,’ in biomedicine's isolation of this concept. These domains consist of the matrilineage structure, the form of initiation institutions, the logic of secrecy, and the unobservable ‘religious’ entities which are fluctuating and transformable (ancestors, spirits, twins, etc.) amongst which the possible causalities of the misfortune are selected.

Following the stages of the “therapeutic processes,”; the first part describes one of two aspects — the procedures and institutions concerning the resolution of illness — and shows that they form a sub‐set of the local ways of treating the ‘event’ in general.

The second part describes the other aspect: the logic of possible causalities and the modalities of connection with the “therapeutic”; register. Far from being homogeneous, totalizable, mutually informative, these two domains, composite and paradoxical, are actualized and unified in concrete therapeutic procedures whose particular form and content are determined by constraints which are primarily pragmatic, issuing from historical situations peculiar to these individuals and groups.     

Death in Flames: Human Remains from a Domestic House Fire from Early Iron Age,Denmark

This paper presents osteoarchaeological analyses of the human skeletal material from a burnt down house in Jutland, Denmark, dated to the first century bc . We describe how the osteological analyses of this complex site were approached and illustrate how we reconstructed the death of the human victims. Besides basic osteological analyses, we also tried to reconstruct the posture of the deceased humans using 12‐in. posable wooden mannequins. Along with bones from several domestic animals, skeletal elements from six human individuals were recovered. All individuals were located in the eastern end of the house—the byre end. The demographic structure indicates a small family household. Our posture reconstruction further proposes that they did not die of asphyxiation while sleeping: At least two of the individuals were lying face down, trying to protect themselves. Two other individuals were lying on their side in crouching positions, which cannot be ruled out as examples of pugilistic attitude. However, we suggest this is rather unlikely. The humans could have died as they failed to rescue their invaluable animals from the fire. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Uncovering the “Invisible” Minority: Irish Communities,Economic Inactivity and Welfare Policy in the United Kingdom

Economic inactivity and worklessness have been identified by the UK Government as two of the most important causes of social exclusion at a national level. Following advice presented by the Social Exclusion Unit's (Report of the Policy Action Team 18—Better Information (London: The Stationary Office, 2000)) report, it was recognized that some groups in society—including ethnic minorities—who are vulnerable to economic inactivity, worklessness and social exclusion, are forgotten simply because not enough is known about their particular circumstances. Within this context this briefing analyses economic inactivity within Irish communities—often referred to as the “invisible ethnic minority”. Through case study analysis (Greater Merseyside, UK), the key “drivers” of inactivity are explored in more detail, as well as the barriers that appear to prevent participation in the labour market, particularly in relation to (older) Irish individuals. The implications for current UK Government programmes aimed at reducing inactivity and benefit dependency, particularly for those aged 50 + and for Black and ethnic minority communities, is subsequently discussed.