Nationalism studies between methodological nationalism and orientalism: an alternative approach illustrated with the case of El Greco in Toledo,Spain

Methodological nationalism is still dominant in nationalism studies. When studying the construction of national identities, scholars generally limit their study to the borders of one nation‐state, while only paying attention to members of that particular nation. Implicitly, foreign actors and influences are left out of the picture. I will challenge this methodological nationalism with a case study, which demonstrates that the place of Toledo within the Spanish national imagination, and more particularly that of El Greco, the most important representative of the city's artistic heritage, was largely determined by foreigners. During the nineteenth century, El Greco was rediscovered primarily by foreign scholars and artists. Moreover, it would be the rise of international tourism in the early twentieth century that convinced Toledans to adopt El Greco as the city's main artistic icon. This case, thus, clearly shows that in nationalism studies methodological nationalism can be avoided by also including foreign actors.     

On stone-boiling technology in the Upper Paleolithic: behavioral implications from an Early Magdalenian hearth in El Mirón Cave,Cantabria, Spain

Stone boiling is one of the principal cooking methods used by hunter-gatherer societies. The present paper proposes behavioral and organizational inferences as to how stone boiling was incorporated into hunter-gatherer subsistence practices through an examination of a shallow-basin hearth in an Early Magdalenian level (c. 15,500 ¹⁴C B.P.) of El Mirón Cave, Cantabria (northern Spain). Exploratory analysis of spatial patterns of archaeological remains (bones, lithic artifacts, and fire-cracked rocks) and use-life analysis of fire-cracked rocks demonstrate that the hearth was used and maintained during visits of humans who preyed mainly on ibex and red deer near the site. The relative accessibility of these ungulates and cost-induced technology of stone boiling suggest the implication that stone boiling was employed to maximize the energy and nutrition obtained from carcasses of these game taxa under the circumstance of resource intensification.     

Portuguese Immigrant History in Twentieth Century South Africa: A Preliminary Overview

Abstract

South Africans of Portuguese descent probably constitute ten to fifteen per cent of the white South African population. Yet it is a remarkably under-researched population. This article attempts to lay out a research agenda to address this large historiographical gap. It begins with an overview of the sparse literature on Portuguese immigrants and then provides a basic narrative of three discernible waves of migration from the late nineteenth century until the late 1970s. The first and longest wave involved impoverished citizens of the island of Madeira. The second involved more skilled mainlanders from about 1940–1980, most coming in the 1960s and 1970s. The final wave involved Mozambican and Angolan ex-colonial refugees. The paper suggest several areas of possible historical research on Portuguese-South Africans: the degree of their coherence as a “community”; their generational continuity and discontinuity; and in general, the nature of transnational hybridised identity in its racial, religious and political dimensions.     

Archaeological implications of human-derived manganese coatings: a study of blackened bones in El Mirón Cave,Cantabrian Spain

The main interest in the study of taphonomic processes lies, from the archaeological point of view, in being able to draw conclusions about human behaviour from them. This paper analyzes the causes of a specific taphonomic alteration: the differential appearance across levels and among site areas of a black stain on bones from the Magdalenian levels in El Mirón Cave. From an understanding of these taphonomic agents, we aim to achieve a better comprehension of aspects of human use of the cave toward the end of the Late Glacial period. By determining the processes that stained many of the bones with manganese in the rear part of the cave vestibule, we are able to suggest some characteristics of the human occupation of the cave and its possible seasonal use.     

El Castell de Falgars (Beuda,la Garrotxa): a Roman Republican watchtower in north-east Hispania Citerior

Abstract

El Castell de Falgars (Beuda, la Garrotxa) is a circular watchtower built in the late Republic, during the Romanization of Hispania, which controls a wide territory of the current Province of Girona (Catalonia). The present paper analyses the causes that led to its construction, as well as the reasons for its rapid abandonment before the end of the first century BC. It also describes the phases of reoccupation of the building during the second half of the third century AD and in the Middle Ages, detected through archaeological excavations carried out at the site between 2010 and 2012.     

The Garden and Beyond: the Dry Season,the Ok Tedi Shutdown,and the Footprint of the 2015 El Niño Drought

This paper offers a snapshot of the 2015 El Niño drought among Min people in Papua New Guinea's West Sepik and Western Provinces. Local assessments of food, water, and health show variation between locations, but with an overall tendency for the drought's effects to spread from lower to higher elevations as the drought progresses. This zone is in the hinterland of the Ok Tedi Mine, and the drought's regional impact was intensified by Ok Tedi's abrupt closure when low water in the Fly River stopped shipments of concentrate and cut off fuel and food supplies. The decision to close the mine was accompanied by the mandatory ‘repatriation’ of workers and their families to ‘home’ communities in the drought‐stricken hinterland. This, combined with deteriorating regional links, has eroded the capacity of Min communities to weather the drought, suggesting that we must look beyond the garden when calculating El Niño's costs.     

Unity from disunity: law,rhetoric and power in the Visigothic kingdom

This paper explores the relationship between the ‘Church’ and the ‘State’ in the Visigothic kingdom of sixth- and seventh-century Spain. The authors examine the copious legal material from this period – both church council records and royal legislation – to see what it reveals about the significant degree of interpenetration of the two spheres. For example, the royal laws gave bishops an important role in the supervision of judges, while a church council could not be called without the permission of the king, who often attended along with his officials and set the agenda for the meetings. There has been significant debate on this issue over the past two centuries, and the authors' analysis will be situated accordingly. The extent to which the Visigothic evidence emerges out of late Roman practices and precedents or is independent of it will also be addressed.     

The reconstruction of past environments through small mammals: from the Mousterian to the Bronze Age in El Mirón Cave (Cantabria,Spain)

El Mirón is a large cave in the Cantabrian Cordillera of northern Spain that presents a long archaeostratigraphic sequence radiocarbon-dated by over 60 assays to between 41,000 and 2000 BP. The sediments, collected from four areas within the cave and sieved-washed with fine wire meshes, contain microvertebrate remains of fish, frogs, lizards, birds and mammals, of which the latter are most abundant. Preliminary taphonomic analysis suggests that the microvertebrates were naturally collected by owls and (less) small carnivores. Small mammal assemblages are useful for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction because they are linked to particular habitats and are sensitive to environmental changes. The small mammals from El Mirón are ideal for this because sample sizes are large, bone preservation is good, and the stratigraphic sequence is long. In this paper we reconstruct the late Quaternary environments in the Cantabrian region of Spain using small-mammal assemblages from El Mirón Cave. On the basis of the ecologic adaptations of this suite of fauna, the majority still extant, we have identified seven habitat types, which are plotted through time. The evolution of the small mammal assemblages at El Mirón reveals seven major climatic shifts that correspond closely to the climatic changes recognized in the Iberian Peninsula during the last 41 kyr.     

Houses,Objects, and the Politics of Inheritance in Josep Maria de Sagarra's Vida privada

Josep Maria de Sagarra's novel Vida privada (1932) portrays an upper-class Catalan family, the Lloberolas, as unable to adapt to the new economic and political situation taking place in the city of Barcelona at the end of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and at the beginning of the Second Republic in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Through a close reading of this family's houses, furniture, and personal belongings, I argue that material elements in this novel are central to the narrator's ethical critique and moral judgment of Barcelona's elite. The Lloberolas treat humans as objects and objects as humans, and I contend that, in an ironic emulation, the narrator also objectifies the Lloberolas and equates them with their objects. This comparison elucidates the family's superficiality and corrupted morals. Objects are also essential in destabilizing public and private boundaries because they often transcend the private domain and expose—to the readers and to the other inhabitants of Barcelona—the protagonists’ personality. Moreover, in Vida privada, houses, furniture, and surnames are understood as an inheritance that transfers very specific ideals of social status from parents to children. By presenting this material heritage with the exemplifying case of the Lloberola family, Sagarra offers a sharp critique of the Catalan upper classes and their superficial values. Their necessity to cling to an inherited world centered on material possessions finally results in their loss of power and evidences their economic and moral decline.     

One Model Does Not Fit All: The Varied Politics of State Immigrant Policies, 2005–16

This article addresses conceptual and measurement challenges that complicate the study of state immigrant policies. First, given the multiple facets of immigrant‐related policy, policy‐specific effects may be obscured by highly aggregated outcomes variables. Second, variables of interest often capture both time‐varying and time‐invariant effects, potentially producing coefficients that are uninterpretable averages of both processes. This article presents a research design that addresses both of these obstacles and applies it to an original dataset of both integrative and punitive policies adopted over the period 2005–16. The findings suggest that the causal roles of growing immigrant populations, partisanship, and wealth vary across different clusters of immigrant policies and that average, cross‐state effects often differ from within‐state effects. Future research would do well to clearly link theoretical expectations to specific types of policy outcomes and test hypotheses over both integrative and restrictive outcomes.     

Metals,microanalysis and meaning: a study of metal objects excavated from the indigenous cemetery of El Chorro de Maíta,Cuba

This is the first publication reporting systematic analytical research conducted on archaeological metals from Cuba. The main focus of the study consists of beads and small metal objects excavated at the cemetery of El Chorro de Maíta, which comprises some of the richest funerary deposits so far recovered on the island. Some comparative samples from the nearby site of Alcalá were also investigated, with an emphasis made on the manufacture, composition and origins of the different alloys. The resulting picture is that members of the social elite of the indigenous Taíno peoples were buried with beads made of placer gold exploited locally, gold–copper–silver pendants brought from continental South America and, above all, brass lacetags from European clothing that were perceived as sacred metals. The archaeometallurgical approach offers fresh insight into the relationships between Europeans and Taínos, and the impact of colonization on the indigenous customs, values and social structures.     

Chemical and mineralogical characterization of historic mortars from the Santa Eulalia de Bóveda temple,NW Spain

Bulk samples of mortars from the Santa Eulalia de Bóveda temple (NW Spain) have been characterized from a chemical and mineralogical point of view, with the aims of contributing technological and provenance inferences, and evaluating possible correlations with the various identified stages along historical periods of construction.     

Interrupting Augustine: Hermeneutics,Allegory, and Irony in El perro del hortelano

Whatever else El perro del hortelano might be, it is a deeply ironic text about the difficulties of reading. The play not only stages acts of reading and writing where irony disrupts understanding, it is itself an ironic reading of Augustine's moment of conversion that shows the difficulty of allegorical and programmatic readings.     

Black limestones used in antiquity: the petrographic,isotopic and EPR database for provenance determination

We compiled a database of some of the most important black limestone quarries used in Roman times to be able to determine the provenance of ancient artifacts. For this purpose, we adopted a multimethod approach using the techniques commonly applied to study the provenance of white marbles: petrographic observations, carbon and oxygen isotope composition, electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectra characteristics. Few black limestones were quarried and traded in ancient times; indeed, the importance of most of these quarries was restricted to the areas in which they were located. In this work, we selected a limited number of quarries that produced material believed to have been exported and used throughout the Mediterranean area; most of the quarries selected are found in northern Tunisia, i.e. the Roman proconsular Africa: Djebel Oust, Djebel Azeiz, Ain al Ksir and (presumably) Thala. The “Nero Chiota” limestone quarried on the Aegean island of Chios (Greece) was also included in the database.     

Merchants' attitudes to work in the Barcelona of the later Middle Ages: organisation of working space,distribution of time and scope of investments

The debate concerning the attitude to work of medieval and renaissance merchants has been one of the most intense in twentieth-century historiography. Arising from the publication of the classic works of the sociologist Max Weber, the debate entered the field of historiography proper after the appearance of articles by Werner Sombart and Henri Pirenne. In the 1950s and 1960s, the works of Yves Renouard and Armando Sapori centred discussion on the development of a specifically mercantile culture in the Italy of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In this historiographic context, the article below is an attempt to approach, through original sources, the figure of the merchant in late medieval Barcelona. These sources are inventories, wills, and marriage contracts, through which is offered a three-dimensional analysis of the professional culture of such a merchant; the concept of professional space; the organisation of time; and the bearings of his commercial and patrimonial investments. The result of this analysis is an attempt to reinterpret the decadence of Barcelona at the end of the fifteenth century through the notion of work entertained by those involved in commerce, attempting by this means to merge the consideration of economic and cultural matters. It is also a proposal for a model of analysis of professional categories, which on so many occasions have been left to one side because of the preponderance of more traditional questions such as those concerning society, economics or politics.     

The politics of ‘forgetting’ as poetics of belonging: between Greek self‐narration and reappraisal (Michaniona, 2000/3)

ABSTRACT. The repressive mechanisms of collective memory have received due attention in the social sciences, with scholars examining the ethics of remembering and forgetting and their political implications. This study focuses on episodes that took place in a Northern Greek town in 2000 and 2003, when an Albanian student was twice denied the right to hold the Greek flag during a commemorative national parade. It is argued that this line of action against the student, representative of Greek attitudes towards immigrants in Greece, asserted the locality's participation in the Greek ‘imagined community’. This was made possible through a process of ‘forgetting’ the locality's history and the analogies this presents with the experience of contemporary immigration. Questioning the ethical implications of this collective decision, the article links regional micro‐politics to nationalist discourses that originate in the European project itself.     

Challenging Hegemonies through Connecting Places,People and Ideas: Jan Monk's contribution to international gender geography (with particular reference to Spain)

The main goal of the paper is to study Jan Monk's contribution to the development of international gender geography, in particular in Spain. Our aim is also to explain the experiences and numerous connections among places, people and ideas that she has been weaving to foster international scholarship and, in this way, how she has challenged hegemonic approaches in feminist geography. Jan Monk comes originally from the Southern hemisphere and therefore she is well aware of the extent to which ‘Northern’ (or Anglo-American) ways of seeing the world define concepts, theories and ideas in geography (and also in feminist geography). Being an ‘insider’ and an ‘outsider’ as well as her sensibility to the important of place has permeated Jan's contribution to international gender geography.     

The Spatial Dynamics of Epidemic Diseases in War and Peace: Cuba and the Insurrection against Spain, 1895–98

This paper examines the spatial transmission and rate of propagation of three infectious diseases (enteric fever, smallpox and yellow fever) in times of war and peace in Cuba between 1895 and 1898. For the three diseases studied, the analysis will demonstrate that, compared with peacetime, the Cuban Insurrection caused increased epidemiological integration of the settlement system of Cuba, acceleration of the spatial processes of disease transmission and a marked change in the geographical drift of infectious disease activity. While the first two findings may be attributed to the heightened levels of population mixing that accompanied the insurrection, the third implies that hostilities fundamentally altered the spatial courses of diseases. These changes transcended stark biases in the predisposition to infection among Spanish soldiers (to yellow fever) and Cuban civilians (to smallpox). Finally, it is shown that the military were the prime agents causing contrasts in the epidemiological experience of Cuba between war and peace.