Craniometric evidence for South African Later Stone Age herders and hunter–gatherers being a single biological population

Later Stone Age (LSA) hunter–gatherers and herders co-existed in South Africa during the last 2000 years. In spite of being the focus of intensive research over the years, the biological status and origins of the herders are still unclear. Did they represent a genetically distinct immigrant population who remained separate from the indigenous hunter–gatherers, or where they indigenous hunter–gatherers who took up herding after contact with herders, probably in northern Botswana? Here, this issue is investigated using craniometric data collected on a large sample of individually dated human crania from coastal LSA context. Mahalanobis distances (D), calculated from the raw metric data, show that there was a small increase in inter-individual craniofacial variation after the introduction of herding at ca. 2000 BP. Here it is argued that this small increase in variation is neither consistent with a large-scale immigration of genetically distinct herders into South Africa, or the long-term co-existence of two genetically distinct populations. Two alternative explanations fit the data better: (1) herding entered South Africa via the small-scale immigration of genetically distinct herders; and (2) local hunter–gatherer populations adopted herding after coming in contact with herders in northern Botswana. While small-scale immigration would not have had a major influence on the local gene pool, it would have increased variation to some extent as immigrants mixed with local populations. If small-scale external gene flow was not a factor in the introduction of herding, secular issues related to the introduction of herding could explain the increased variation in post-2000 BP populations.     

Knives for the Slaughter – Notes on the Reform and Governance of Indigenous Reindeer Slaughter in Norway

Abstract

Drawing on historical records and ethnographic fieldwork, the present article examines the history of the so-called curved knife, or krumkniv, as a window on the governance and regulation of indigenous Sámi reindeer slaughter in Norway. Originally developed by scientific activists in the 1920s, in the context of a series of experimental field trials held at a farmstead in Røros, the knives were designed to combine efficiency and ease of use with the elimination of visible animal pain, thus bringing indigenous slaughter in line with the shifting aesthetic and moral concerns of the time. The innovation was highly successful, and the knives rapidly adopted as essential tools of the herding trade – to the point where today, most users disregard their origins. Moving forward to the early 21st century, the situation had shifted almost entirely: animal welfare activists now decried the same knives as a barbaric anachronism, while herders defended them as part of their cultural heritage. Historical narratives of moral progress articulated with other discourses to produce a homogeneous present moment of the state, a moment that threatened to exclude herders from participation in the ongoing nation-building project – constituting them instead as objects of intervention and reform, targeting the successes of previous reform. Herders, meanwhile, challenged such negative constructions by defining the knife as an indigenous tradition, invoking the international commitments of the state to preserve their cultural heritage. Comparing these two historical moments, the article draws out how the technical minutiae of slaughtering practice could operate both as an instrument of social engineering, and as an arena within which complex, large-scale issues – to do with matters such as social inclusion and participation, the value of history, the function and obligations of the state – could be settled, contested and redrawn.     

The ‘bullets to water’ belief complex: a pan-southern African cognate epistemology for protective medicines and the control of projectiles

Remarkable similarities across colonial encounters where Africans believed projectiles could be influenced by ritual practices (medicines, behaviours, observances) demand enquiry into their conception and trajectory. Although suggestion of pan-subcontinental phenomena may elicit suspicion of a generalisation, here evidence is examined from the late-independent and colonial periods that shows that a general belief, held cognate between groups, may indeed have existed. The focus is on precolonial¹ southern African beliefs in the manipulation of projectiles and how these may have affected ritual responses to firearms during colonisation. At least a millennium of interactions between hunters, herders and farmers appear to have resulted in commonly held beliefs, albeit with differential emphases. From first contact, and into sustained colonisation, it became necessary for Africans to highlight and/or adapt indigenous beliefs as mechanisms by which to cope with firearms and settler aggressive expansion.     

Law and Disorder: Local Implementation of Mongolia's Land Law

With the dismantling of herding collectives in Mongolia in 1992, formal regulatory institutions for allocating pasture vanished, and weakened customary institutions were unable effectively to fill the void. Increasing poverty and wealth differentiation in the herding sector, a wave of urban–rural migration, and the lack of formal or strong informal regulation led to a downward spiral of unsustainable grazing practices. In 1994, Mongolia's parliament passed the Land Law, which authorized land possession contracts (leases) over pastoral resources such as campsites and pastures. Implementation of leasing provisions began in 1998. This article examines the implications of the Law's implementation at the local level, based on interviews with herders and officials in all levels of government, and a resurvey of herding households. Amongst many findings, the research shows that poorer herders were largely overlooked in the allocation of campsite leases; that the poor had become more mobile and the wealthy more sedentary; that there had been a sharp decline in trespassing following lease implementation, but that many herders and officials expected pasture leasing to lead to increased conflict over pastures. The Land Law provides broad regulatory latitude and flexibility to local authorities, but the Law's lack of clarity and poor understanding of its provisions by herders and local officials limit its utility. The existing legal framework and local attitudes stand in clear opposition to the implied goal of land registration and titling — an all‐embracing land market and the supremacy of private property rights.     

Pastoralism and conservation: The politics and notions of environmental justice under the grazing ban policy in Inner Mongolia,China

Environmental justice is a key concept for understanding the contested relationship between pastoralism and conservation. Our study adopted a political approach to examine conservation, pastoralism, and justice in the context of the grazing ban policy in China. Employing a qualitative, in-depth case study, we investigated the local political actors and processes that lead to environmental (in)justice. The evidence shows how injustice is perpetuated by both centralized and decentralized political processes and how herders use their knowledge and strategies in resistance to the injustice. In addition, the study contributed to a pluralistic understanding of justice by examining the different notions of justice held by the herders. We found that herders perceive injustices through different lenses, namely economic, ecological, and cultural aspects. Further, the similarities and differences between Han and Mongolian herders are discussed in terms of their notions of environmental justice and counteractions.     

Geographies of Indigenous Identity: Spatial Imaginaries and Racialised Power Struggles in Bolivia

This article examines racial power struggles in Bolivia through a spatial lens. It analyses the process of resistance to the oligarchic elites mounted by indigenous‐popular sectors in Bolivia in the first decade of the 21^st century as well as the subsequent eruption of conflicts between different indigenous sectors, and argues that political conflicts in Bolivia in the 21^st century are, among other things, also conflicts over spatial imaginaries and the different territorialising and (re)territorialising projects corresponding to them. Social movements against racial neoliberalism challenged the colonial spatial imaginary. The partial success of those struggles brought into relief two distinct indigenous spatial imaginaries, one rooted in the defence of ancestral territory and indigenous autonomy, and the other based on a redefinition of territoriality as centrality within the state and society at large. The article reads contemporary inter‐indigenous conflicts as manifestations of the differences between these two spatial imaginaries.     

Cloth and Community: The Local Trade in Resist-Dyed and Block-Printed Textiles in Kachchh District,Gujarat

Abstract

The Khatris are an hereditary caste of dyers and block-printers in Kachchh district, Gujarat. This article reviews the traditional market for the Khatris' textiles, discussing in detail items made for specific client castes, chiefly the farmers and herders of Kachchh. It analyzes factors that have affected this traditional market in the post-colonial period, such as the wholesale industrialization of manufacture and changing patterns of agriculture. It goes on to identify the emergence of new, globalized markets and how the Khatris are developing new products in response to those markets.     

Pre‐Soviet pasts of reindeer‐herding collectives: Ethnographies of transition in Murmansk region

This article summarizes observations from field studies with reindeer herders in northwest Russia (Murmansk Region) carried out between 1994 and 1999. The work has been done by living with reindeer‐herding crews at their seasonal tundra camps.

For a large majority of the herders and their families, the concept and practices of the Soviet State Farm (.sovkhoz) tend to represent not only the most desirable form of livelihood, but indeed the only conceivable, although now seriously shattered, reality. In the face of a grim present, new reinterpretations of the sovkhoz are constantly being tried out. The pool of options is found in pre‐Soviet traditions and tends to reveal links between the Sami pogost (siji) social organisation and practices and those of the Soviet and post‐Soviet reindeer‐herding crew (brigadd).The article pursues these connections and discusses the sovkhoz not as destroying all previous tradition, but as drawing from and incorporating pre‐Soviet pasts. The underlying continuity with such pasts may explain the tenacity of the sovkhoz concept in this particular Arctic setting and, possibly, in a variety of others.     

一战华工的归国境遇及其影响——基于对山东华工后裔（或知情者）口述资料的分析

山东淄博周村是当年英法招募华工的重要站点。论文根据对＂周村华工＂后裔或知情者采访整理出来的65份口述资料,从华工归国所带物品、节余工薪的使用状况、归国后从事的行业、思想观念与自身素质的转变等方面进行了考察研究。比照当时知识界和政界对于归国华工影响力的乐观预期,得出结论：华工归国后的总体境遇不够理想,归国华工对中国社会所能发挥的积极影响极为有限,甚至其中不乏悲剧性的一面。     

The political contexts of calendars

Abstract

Calendrical systems and concepts of the measurement and passing of time vary from one society to the next, reflecting differences in technology, cultural preconceptions, and political processes. This paper illustrates this variation with reference to societies ranging from small groups of transhumant herders and agriculturalists in Ethiopia to those modern nation states which collaborate in maintaining the most advanced atomic clock.     

一战华工历史论述的语境变迁与意义重建

论文探讨了在中国参战语境、社会革命语境以及当代改革开放语境下一战华工历史论述的形成过程及特定意义。百年来,中国围绕一战华工形成的论述分为两类:一类着眼于国家视角,着重从中国作为参战国与战胜国的角度展现中国在华工招募过程中发挥的主导性作用与华工扮演的参战角色;另一类立足于华工视角,最典型的是在社会革命语境下从华工作为帝国主义、军阀主义对立面的角度揭示英、日、法帝国主义与北洋军阀势力的压迫本质与华工的革命精神。当代改革开放语境下的华工论述似乎接续了中国参战语境下的华工论述。虽然同是立足于国家视角,但在当代改革开放语境下的论述更侧重展现华工在中国走向世界的历史进程中所发挥的作用以及中西文明交流的历史进程。尽管社会革命语境下的华工论述逐渐瓦解,但个体视角的论述依然不失为国家视角论述之外的另一个重要视角,二者之间的矛盾突显,是当前中国一战华工论述重建的困境所在。     

Late Holocene Fauna from Kuidas Spring in Namibia

We present the results of faunal analyses from the recently excavated site of Kuidas Spring in north-western Namibia. The site includes rock shelters, stone circles and stone cairns. Stone circles, which were built during the last 1500 years, are widely distributed over much of Namibia and parts of the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. Current interpretations suggest that after the introduction of livestock 2300 years ago, hunter-gatherers who became herders built stone circle settlements. However, our results based on the faunal remains indicate that Kuidas Spring was exploited as a hunting resource, and whether or not herders with (or without their) livestock occupied or visited the site remains unconfirmed. We also found that gemsbok made use of stone circles at Kuidas Spring when these features were not inhabited and show how such activity might impact the interpretation of archaeological material.     

Commoditizing the safari and making space for conflict: Place,identity and parks in East Africa

Increased resource scarcity, the social construction of nature, the disintegration of moral economy and associated policy shifts are often cited as the main drivers of resource conflicts in East Africa. Research in geography, anthropology and rural sociology has unveiled how common explanations of resource conflicts overlook multi-scalar political, economic, social, cultural and environmental tensions. The purpose of this study is to provide more nuanced explanations of resource conflicts by incorporating three disparate but related threads of literature. Using literatures on the commodification of nature, multi-stranded notions of identity and geographical conceptualizations of ‘place’, I demonstrate how three transformational moments structure and propagate conflicts between herders and protected area managers around a national park in Kenya. I argue that the rise of a commoditized form of nature tourism coupled with idealized notions of ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ have altered the micro-geography of interaction between herders and protected area managers. These altered geographies of interaction have diluted the shared history and traditional relations of reciprocity, created new social milieux, and lead to the creation of binary identities among herders and protected area managers. The enforcement of these binary identities culminates in conflict.     

Lucrecia Martel’s Nueva Argirópolis: Rivers,Rumours and Resistance

This article analyses Lucrecia Martel’s 2010 short film Nueva Argirópolis, which was commissioned by the Argentine Ministry of Culture as part of the Bicentennial celebrations. It explains how the film both inhabits yet contests the discourses of the modern nation state underpinning those celebrations, in particular through its representation of conflict between the state and indigenous groups. Its representation draws on images proposed by an earlier work, Sarmiento’s utopian tract of 1850, Argirópolis, images including the river and the island which in Martel’s film undergo a resignification, which overturns Sarmiento’s understanding of relationships between geography, capital, nation and ethnicity. Political and cultural debates of particular relevance to indigenous communities, such as access to land, as well as the way the indigenous are represented in state discourses, surface obliquely in this short film, which both represents diegetically the circulation and relay of rumours of indigenous resistance, as well as suggesting these formally through a soundtrack suffused with murmurs and barely audible sounds. The unsubtitled words of indigenous actors, as well as the authorities’ attempts at investigation of indigenous political activity through staging encounters of (failed) interpretation, and the subversive mimicry by indigenous activists of hegemonic ideas of national foundation are themselves muted, rumoured suggestions of a resistance which always lies just outside this short film’s visual grasp.     

近代江南农村的工价及其影响——兼论小农与经营式农场衰败的关系

近代江南农村的工价持续上涨。虽然对雇主而言工价持续偏高 ,但比照实际购买和扣除通货膨胀的因素 ,雇工收入仍然偏低 ,从而导致雇工短缺。而农业经营的普遍亏损 ,使得以往作为雇主的小农只能减少包括雇工在内的所有农业投入。因此 ,致使该区经营式农场未能发展起来的原因 ,不在于小农转向更为便宜的家庭劳动力 ,而在于这时发生了单纯依靠农业已无法维持生存 ,不得不重新配置资源的近代转型     

城市外来人口的就业稳定性及影响因素——基于我国4个典型区域12个城市调查的分析

就业稳定性是影响城市外来人口工作生活状况和市民化意愿的重要因素之一。本文利用大样本调查数据,分析了城市外来务工人员就业稳定性的基本特征和影响因素。研究发现:外来务工者工作变更频繁、首份工作持续时间短,劳动合同签订率普遍不高且期限短;外来务工人员中非农户籍群体稳定性略强;年龄、婚姻、受教育情况、社会阅历、老家关系、工资差异、劳动合同等因素对务工人员就业稳定性有显著影响;1978-2009年不同时期进城的务工人员工作稳定性具有波动性,但近年来稳定性有提高的趋势;就业稳定性的地域特征有一定差异性。2006年以来,个人阅历、职业培训、社会网络、劳动合同等因素的影响作用有所增强。     

Beyond convention: reimagining indigenous tourism

As a knowledge domain, contemporary indigenous tourism is framed in reference to cultures conventionally recognized as ‘indigenous,’ and engages this almost exclusively from a supply-side perspective. This paper reimagines indigeneity and indigenous tourism as embracing also the other 94% of global population. From a utilitarian perspective, this inclusion of ‘nonconventional indigenous people’ harbors opportunities to advance the sustainability agenda by reconnecting modern mainstream cultures, through personal exposure in dispersed settings, with ancestral roots and associated sustainable livelihoods. Such reconnections are framed as a form of re-indigenization that may be especially attractive to ‘travel promiscuous’ diasporic populations such as those found in the ‘settler’ countries of Canada, United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Articulation of this concept could be facilitated by existing knowledge domains and products in heritage tourism, rural tourism, and urban tourism, as well as sustainable tourism. Rather than usurping conventional indigenous efforts to re-indigenize and re-empower, it is contended that the nonconventional dimension can coexist with and even reinforce the latter, while enriching the dimensions of indigenous tourism as a dynamic knowledge domain.     

A mutual ecological approach to health in Mongolia

Herders spend much time and energy seeking pasture and nurturing their herd animals in Mongolia. In turn, herd animals are the primary food source for herders in the form of meat and dairy products, feeding and nurturing the herding family. The overall herding principle strives towards a mutual balance across different scales within the body and the ecological food chain, resulting in reciprocal health and well-being. The powerful medicinal qualities of the blue and yellow pasque flower (yargui, Pulsatilla spp.) are valued in Mongolia, sought out in early spring by multiple species, including herders, goats and wild deer. Herding knowledge of goats and deer seeking out the pasque flower for medicinal purposes to expel gut parasites is an excellent example of Mongolian herding families’ awareness of their interdependent interconnections with other species as part of a larger surrounding ecology. However, this level of integration may not last, as herding families increasingly rely on introduced medicines, such as anthelmintics, bought from local pharmacies and wholesalers within rural townships.     

Pastoralism and Protected Area Management in Mongolia's Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park

The Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park was established in south central Mongolia in 1993 and is used by over 1100 families with pastoralism as their main means of livelihood. Research conducted in 1998–2000 to analyse grazing management problems identified a number of issues and concerns, including a significant increase in the number of herders and the size of the herd; variations in herd size reflecting differences in wealth; problems with marketing of livestock or livestock products; declining stock movements because of transportation costs and loss of water sources; and significant competition and conflicts for grazing areas. The socio‐economic problems associated with Mongolia's transition to a market system, coupled with the expansion of protected areas, mean that herders have to adapt to both the current economic system and changes in land use. Although some aspects of the development of the park can be seen as a positive influence on maintaining pastoral livelihoods in this area, the national goal of protecting 30 per cent of the country, doubling the area of Mongolia currently under protected area status, could have negative effects on pastoral livelihoods, unless ministry officials, protected area administrators and pastoralists can work effectively to solve resource problems.     

Mo birget soadis (how to cope with war)

The article studies the Sámi experiences during the ‘German era’ in Norway and Finland, 1940–1944, before the Lapland War. The Germans ruled as occupiers in Norway, but had no jurisdiction over the civilians in Finland, their brothers-in-arms. In general, however, encounters between the local people and the Germans appear to have been cordial in both countries. Concerning the role of racial ideology, it seems that the Norwegian Nazis had more negative opinions of the Sámi than the occupiers, while in Finland the racial issues were not discussed. The German forces demonstrated respect for the reindeer herders as communicators of important knowledge concerning survival in the Arctic. The herders also possessed valuable meat reserves. Contrary to this, other Sámi groups, such as the Sea Sámi in Norway, were ignored by the Germans, resulting in a forceful exploitation of sea fishing. Through the North Sámi concept birget (coping with), we analyse how the Sámi both resisted and adapted to the situation. The cross-border area of Norway and Sweden is described in the article as an exceptional arena for transnational reindeer herding, but also for the resistance movement between an occupied and a neutral state.