Gender Ideology in Historical Reconstruction: A Case Study from the 1930s

You are probably aware of the fact that homes are being wrecked daily due to the fact that married women are permitted to work in factories and offices in this land of ours. You and we all know that the place for a wife and mother is at home, her palace. The excuse is often brought up that the husband cannot find employment. It is the writers’ belief that if the women were expelled from places of business,…these very men would find employment. These same womens’ husbands would naturally be paid a higher salary, inasmuch as male employees demand a higher salary than females.¹     

Gender and the Silences of Social Capital: Lessons from Latin America

Social capital has entered development policy thinking and practice in Latin America where it converges with the premises of a new development agenda that emerged in the 1990s. Women are often central to the forms of social capital that development agencies are keen to mobilize in poverty relief programmes, but the terms of women’s insertion into these programmes is rarely problematized. This article critically examines the gendered assumptions that govern efforts to build social capital, and explores some of the tensions that have arisen in post‐transition Latin America between women’s rights and social capital agendas.     

Ancient Maya wood selection and forest exploitation: a view from the Paynes Creek salt works,Belize

Ancient building construction wood preserved in a peat bog below the seafloor in a shallow mangrove lagoon in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize, provides an exceptional record of Classic Maya wood use. Identifications of construction wood at Early Classic Chan B'i, and Late Classic Atz'aam Na, are reported and discussed to assess forest exploitation and species selection over time. Black mangrove (Avicennia germinans) dominates the Early Classic assemblage. The Late Classic assemblage is characterized by greater variability and an absence of mangrove species. When considered in the environmental context, identified species conform to principles of optimal foraging. The change in the wood assemblage over time suggests overexploitation of forest resources, resulting in deforestation of the local landscape and subsequent adaptation of foraging behavior. Deforestation is linked to the wider social context in which growing inland populations created demand for salt, putting greater pressure on the forest resources exploited by the Paynes Creek salt works for fuel and timber.     

Caracol,Belize, and Changing Perceptions of Ancient Maya Society

Archaeological research at Caracol, an ancient Maya site that was rediscovered in 1937, has become a major resource in the interpretation and understanding of the ancient Maya. Caracol, in west-central Belize, is situated in a subtropical region once characterized as being unsuitable for the development or maintenance of complex societies, yet it is one of the largest, if not the largest Classic period Maya site in the southern Maya Lowlands, home to over 100,000 people at its height between AD 600 and 700. The investigations at Caracol underscore the utility of long-term archaeological projects incorporating large-scale settlement study that combine excavation with varied research designs and the use of a contextual approach. By employing Maya epigraphic history, traditional archaeology, and modern technology like LiDAR, research at Caracol details the rise, maintenance, and fall of an ancient Maya city, affording a large window into ancient Maya lifeways. Archaeological work provides evidence of sustainable agriculture, a market economy, city planning that included a road system, the impact of warfare on the site’s inhabitants, the sociopolitical status of women, the role that archaeology can play in refining written history, and the significance of commemorating the cyclical passage of time to the ancient Maya. This article summarizes archaeological research efforts at the site by the Caracol Archaeological Project over the last three decades.     

Ancient Maya Agricultural Installations and the Development of Intensive Agriculture in NW Belize

Abstract

Archaeological study of the spatial arrangement of agricultural features such as terraces and berms yields insight into the scale, mode, and tempo of farm production and the social organization of farming communities. Data from five regions of the Maya lowlands where such features have been extensively documented demonstrate the range of strategies employed by the ancient Maya to organize agricultural production. In some previously studied regions of the lowlands, spatial patterns suggest centralized management of farmland by state institutions, while in others a smallholder strategy seems evident. In the Río Bravo region of NW Belize, the organization of agricultural labor centered neither on the state nor on the individual farm family, but on the farm community. Moreover, the incremental conversion of open lands to terraced agricultural fields was part of a long-term interactive sequence of environmental change and human response over centuries of occupation. This sequence demonstrates that the ancient Maya not only adapted to a degraded environment but used it to their advantage, developing new technologies that were successful for several centuries prior to their ultimate failure. The agricultural history of the lowland Maya demonstrates that indigenous systems of resource management in fragile environments such as the tropics were not always deleterious. The innovations and successful adaptations of ancient farmers should also be recognized.     

Mycenaean Beads: Gender and Social Contexts

Although Mycenaean burial customs and the absence of written sources make many questions about beads unanswerable, nonetheless there is some evidence, or room for speculation, about who wore beads, how they were worn, uses other than as jewellery, relations to seals and amulets and spindle whorls and textiles, their materials and sources and their part in long-distance and other cultural contacts,colours and the possible significance of them, manufacturing processes and craft organization, symbolic values of relief-bead motifs, beads as rank- or status-markers. Gender roles and differences are sometimes hinted at in the archaeological record. Written sources from Egypt and Mesopotamia and archaeological and ethnographic studies in India can sometimes help to fill gaps by suggesting questions or answers.     

Divided Government and the Rise of Social Regulation

Political scientists have debated the causes of divided government since the Reagan administration. In addition, a handful of scholars have also pondered the possible consequences of divided party rule for politics and policy. Still, one serious oversight in the divided'government literature is the potential consequences of divided party rule for the types of policy pursued during divided and unified party regimes. Divided government may create incentives for conflicting institutions to use social regulation debates, often considered the most divisive public policy debates, as "wedges" in order to damage the opposing party in future elections. Each party also has an incentive to embrace social regulation in order to reaffirm its allegiance to its core constituency. This article tests the hypothesis that divided government produces more important social regulation votes than unified government. I define the population of important votes as all Key Votes in the House of Representatives from 1953 to 1998. The data analysis reveals that important social regulation votes are in fact more prominent during eras of divided government than during unified party control. This finding has potential implications for the tenor of our national politics as well as the public trust.     

Using Actor-Network Theory to Characterize the Production of Ancient Maya Caching Events at Cerro Maya (Cerros,Belize)

Inspired by actor-network theory, this research uses an operationalized archaeological actor-network approach to characterize and examine human-object relationships associated with ritual caching deposits (votive bundles of objects) at the site of Cerro Maya (formerly Cerros), Belize. Designed to be broadly applicable for archaeological studies, our archaeological actor-network approach made it possible to inductively examine, characterize, and diachronically compare the complex arrays of human and nonhuman relationships. In contrast to previous studies that characterized caches mainly in symbolic terms, we treated caches as traces of the small-scale actor-networks that emerged during the production of ancient Maya caching events. More specifically, our actor-network methodology made it possible to characterize caches and caching events in terms of the relationships between materials, temporality, objects, places, and groups of people, their intentions, and actions. The inductive and diachronic focus of approach also allowed us to compare arrays of caching actor-networks over time while considering the social affect that caching events had on subsequent caching events and the site’s social development. This approach demonstrates that even simple artifact clusters can be viewed as proxies for highly complex networks of interlinked social relations that play roles in shaping important historical interactions and social orders over time.

     

Bodymaps: Sexing Space and Zoning Gender in Ancient Athens

In classical Athenian discourse, there are many examples that can usefully be summarised in terms of an opposition between the private, domestic, interior space of women and the public, civic, exterior space of men. Recently there have been a number of attempts to critique this discourse on several grounds. Some of these arguments are persuasive, but the net effect has been to allow the discourse itself to be neglected as a banal cliché or even as the product of a Liars School of Elite Male Authors. In this paper, I wish to re‐examine the discourse, hoping to demonstrate that, far from being banal, it is complex, resonant and consequential, and worthy of study in itself. The first part examines the gender terms andrōn/gynaikōnitis to refer to parts of houses and the evidence for men's and women's bodies as differently coloured by the spaces in which they spend time. The second part examines space and sexuality, the peculiar ‘spatial subjectivity’ linked to experiences of fear and desire. The third part suggests ways in which the discourse connects with other elements of the dispositif: images, architecture, urban topography and habitual practices.     

Wife Seclusion and the Spatial Praxis of Gender Ideology in Nigerian Hausaland

In much of Nigerian Hausaland the prevailing religio-cultural ideology of female seclusion (if not always the practice) impinges on married Muslim Hausa women to a greater, or lesser, degree. This article examines the intimate relationships between space, gender and ideology in contemporary rural Hausa society, showing the social construction (and connectedness) of gender identities and associated spatial identities, thus illustrating how spatial praxis is based on hegemonic patriarchal gender ideology. Observations and interview material gathered from a village case study in Kano State demonstrate how gender divisions correspond with the ideology and contemporary practice of wife seclusion. Intersecting patterns of gender, space and time are revealed by detailed analyses of time- and space-use data, which scrutinise men's and women's daily activities and mobility patterns. The cross-cutting of gender with class, age and marital status is shown to be highly significant in determining everyday experiences of spatial praxis, especially for women. A materialist feminist theoretical framework is used to explain this gendered geography of Nigerian Hausaland in which men's and women's worlds are spatially segregated, yet complexly interlocked and interdependent beyond simple public‐private divisions of ‘female’ household compounds (private space) and ‘male’ public space. For this peasant society, aspects of the rural economy and ideology emerge as powerful factors in determining the nature of seclusion as part of gender praxis. It is argued that due to various cultural and religious factors socio-economic development in Northern Nigeria has not been translated into improved autonomy for Hausa women.     

Survey,Settlement, and Population History at the Ancient Maya Site of Pacbitun,Belize

Abstract

Survey and excavations of mounds on the outskirts of the site of Pacbitun in western Belize provide insights into the ancient Maya settlement pattern at this medium-sized regional center. This research employed two methods: analysis of structural remains from four separate 1000 m transect surveys,and a subsequent complete (100%) survey of intervening and adjacent quadrant areas. The overlap of quadrant zones with portions of the transect units permits an examination of the accuracy of transect surveys. Excavation of a 22% sample of all identified mounds provides chronological and functional information. An estimate of 200 persons for the resident elite population of the Epicenter of Pacbit un is offered. Initial settlement occurred in the Epicenter of the site during the Middle Preclassic period (900–300 B.C.), with a population rise through time until the final phase of the Late Classic period (A.D. 700–900), when density reached 550 persons (periphery Zone) to 950 persons (Core Zone) per sq km. The impact on settlement size and distribution of topography, soils,water resources,and intensive agriculture (hillside terracing) is assessed and found to be significant. At the time of florescence,the population of the 9 sq km site is estimated to have been about 5000–6000 persons. This population estimate is compared with several coeval lowland Maya centers,and found to be reasonable for a medium-sized, Late Classic Maya center.     

Reconceptualizing Senses of Place: Social Relations, Ideology and Ecology

The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize sense of place through the examination, re-analysis and theorization of two case studies, one of an ex-urban community in England, the other a Himalayan farming and herding community. The paper begins by examining the traditional locus of sense of place research in humanistic geography with extensions to political geography and interpretive anthropology. Identifying three core components—social, ideological and ecological—of senses of place, the paper goes on to reconceptualize these elements using Habermas's theory of communicative action and Ingold's work on environmental psychology. It then applies this reconceptualization to the case studies of Towcester and Shimshal. The paper concludes by emphasizing the ways these cases enrich our understanding of sense of place, by stressing the theoretical contributions of conceiving sense of place as rooted in theories of social organization and society, and as being variably and contingently ecologically emplaced.     

The Gender of the Church: Conflicts and Social Wholes on Ambrym

There is a strong connection between historical village migration and present day church belonging on Ambrym Island in North‐Central Vanuatu. Church adherence has become an expression of where one comes from and an idiom for the social wholes founded on such belonging. The churches also make manifest the conflict lines between such wholes. The dynamics of such social wholes is tightly related to historical transformations in gendered practice that the traditional focus on male leadership in the church has not sufficiently explored. Through different kinds of fundraising and Christian ceremonies women create new arenas for sharing and community, and women have come to dominate the church movement.     

Reconceptualizing the Policy Subsystem: Integration with Complexity Theory and Social Network Analysis

The concept of the policy subsystem is an essential building block for several of the basic frameworks of policy process studies. Over time issues have become more complex, crossing subsystem boundaries, and so subsystems have escalated in their complexity as well. It is increasingly insufficient to study just one policy subsystem and so scholars have turned to studying boundary‐spanning regimes or policy networks. In this essay, we review the major contributions to developing the concept of a policy subsystem and trace its evolution into broader conceptualizations like issue and policy networks. We argue that the future for theories of the policy process is in more explicit integration of complexity theory and more effective modeling of subsystems with the utilization of social network analysis. In closing, we discuss the enduring nature of the concept of policy subsystems and highlight studies that continue using it in innovative ways.