Stories behind the fortress: Stable isotope analysis and 14C dating of soldiers' remains from the Bayanbulag site,Mongolia

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of 15 individuals buried closed to Bayanbulag site or the Shouxiangcheng fortress in southern Mongolia revealed complex dietary features. Only one individual had a diet similar to that of the pastoral population in northern China, while the others, who had varying carbon isotope values and low nitrogen values, might have been from different agricultural areas. ¹⁴C dating results suggest that the earliest interment could be much earlier than the building of Shouxiangcheng fortress recorded in Han texts. Analysis of the burial arrangement further confirmed that these deceased were not buried at the same time.     

Voices from the Margins: Street Children's Subcultures in Indonesia

Indonesia has a proliferation of children living on the streets of its larger cities. To the state and dominant society, they are perceived as committing a social violation. In response to their marginalisation and subordination, street children in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia, have developed a 'repertoire of strategies' in order to survive. These include the appropriation of urban niches within the city, in which they create collective solutions for the dilemmas they confront in their everyday lives. This paper discusses a street boy community that exists within these marginal spaces: the Tikyan subculture of Yogyakarta. It presents the Tikyan subculture as a technique for street children to resist the negative stereotypes which are given to them by mainstream society. As they get older and become increasingly alienated by society, the Tikyan actively reject their 'deviant' label, and decorate street life so that it becomes agreeable in their eyes. This is achieved by deviating from dominant styles of dress and conventional behaviour, and through the development of a specific symbolic identity. These symbolic challenges to the dominant culture are communicated and dispersed within the social group and conveyed to the world via the subculture's 'specialised semiotic': their style of dress; their acts of bodily subversion or dissent (in the form of tattoos, body piercing and sexual practices); the music they play and listen to; and their use of drugs and alcohol. I describe these practices as the Tikyan 's obligatory performances, and the expected ways of behaving in order to remain accepted by the group.     

Voices from the sea ice: the reception of climate impact narratives

This paper argues that indigenous peoples' responses to climate change are better understood in relation to emerging notions of citizenship than to climate change crisis narratives. The latter, like development narratives, are often used to license the intervention of experts in debates about resource management and conservation. Dominant climate change narratives about the Arctic emphasise the power of global climate systems to threaten northern communities by situating them as being intrinsically ‘at risk’. These narratives envisage Arctic citizenship within very narrow parameters which have largely masked the voices of northern citizens. Definitions of ecosystem resilience, while providing a framework for comparing disparate cultural and ecological contexts, are predicated on avoiding systemic collapse. It is argued that such definitions heighten the sense of risk implicit in climate change impacts. This may ultimately impede the development of different aspects of civic participation by northern citizens with climate change policy opportunities. Policy responses across a range of diverse geographical contexts require new narratives that put communities back into the calculus of risk and decision-making. One way to be more critical about the language of climate change narratives is to evaluate the extent to which they can account for, and mitigate, growing inequalities of power and wealth. Studies in the historical reception of science narratives are proposed as a better approach for making grounded comparisons of the discursive strategies with which climate change narratives are made to work. This also helps to bridge discussions of climate change across regions like the Arctic and Africa, which share much in common, but are too often studied in isolation.     

Voices from the Kibbutz: Four Mothers,New Profile,and Women in Black

If there is any social organization that has provided a powerful illustration of the permeable boundaries between social politics—defined by Stephen M. Buechler as “forms of collective action that challenge power relations without an explicit focus on the state”—and social movements, and the role of collective identity in transforming either, as defined for women by Betty Friedan—it would be the Israeli kibbutz movement. The research presented here on grassroots Israeli women activists, a significant proportion of whom had grown up or had lived in a kibbutz, suggests that the social politics of everyday life on a kibbutz facilitated women's participation in larger social movements for peace, but also placed constraints on their activism. Many of these women had left or were in the process of leaving the kibbutz between 1989 and 1999, when this research was conducted. Those who had already left, and anchor women who organized urban demonstrations, saw the kibbutz as a conservative anti-woman force. Nonetheless, evidence gathered from qualitative interviewing with them suggests that the kibbutzim supported women who were politically active on national issues. Several women-led social protest movements illustrate how the kibbutz geared its members to think about the interplay of the moral and social orders in the small spaces of everyday life.     

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the ground

The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI as a relational, contested process - a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments “from the ground”. Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful approach for grounding China's role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.     

Voices from the Top of the Pile: Elite Perceptions of Poverty and the Poor in the Philippines

How do elites perceive poverty and the poor? In this article, we present the results of interviews with eighty members of the Filipino elite, undertaken as part of a larger six‐country study of elite perceptions of poverty and the poor. Poverty, we argue, is a highly subjective phenomenon. People's perceptions of poverty, of who is and who is not poor, of how poverty affects them and others, and of how poverty can be effectively tackled, vary enormously between different types of people (defined in terms of class, status, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, gender or a myriad of other social identities). Wherever people cohere as groups, classes or other social constructs, perceptions of poverty are aggregated and refined and then embedded in social dynamics. The study of elite perceptions of poverty and the poor, we conclude, can both add to our understanding of the social dynamics of poverty and inequality and inform pro‐poor public policy.     

Views and Commentaries: Struggling with the Past: Some Views of African-American Identity

Identity has been, and remains, central to African-American struggles with inequalities in the United States. In this paper I address various portrayals of African-American identity, and consider how these views of the past articulated with contemporary struggles. These portrayals range both in time and authorship, and include the views of former slaves, black intellectuals, and archaeologists. Taken together, they reflect the dynamic nature of identity, as well as the shifting importance of Africa as a root of identity and source of strength in struggles, past and present.