The comfort of the river: understanding the affective geographies of angling waterscapes in young people’s coping practices

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on ethnographic research with angling intervention programmes working with ‘disaffected’ young people in the UK to demonstrate how young people use the affective geographies of waterscapes to regulate their feelings and escape stressful lives. But rather than interpret the restorative or therapeutic quality of waterscapes as the consequence of (passive) immersion into green/blue spaces, we argue that ‘comfort’ is derived from an ongoing, active engagement with(in) the world. Drawing on works influenced by phenomenological theories and relational understandings of the more-than-human world, we illustrate how the affectual qualities of waterscapes are continually ‘woven’ into being through the material and embodied practices of young anglers. However, understanding why waterscapes ‘matter’ to young people also requires accounting for those assemblages originating in the past that shape these co-experienced worlds.     

Dietary patterns in human populations from northwest Patagonia during Holocene: an approach using Binford’s frames of reference and Bayesian isotope mixing models

The goal of this paper is to assess the variation in the proportional contribution of diverse resources to the diet of human populations from northwest Patagonia (Argentina) throughout the Middle-Late Holocene. Particularly, we assessed the variation among three geographic areas and two periods. We first estimated the expected proportions of terrestrial animals and plants and aquatic resources for each area according to the Binford’s frames of references approach. A Bayesian mixing method was then applied to calculate the proportion of plants and animals in the diets from stable isotopes (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) of human bone collagen. The isotope values suggest that the composition of diets differed spatially and temporally. Diets of South Mendoza were mainly composed of terrestrial animals (Rhea-Lama and rodents) with a greater incorporation of C₃ plants towards the later Late Holocene; in North Neuquén, Rhea and Lama represent a proportion of 0.84 of the diet consumed; and finally, the sample of Center Neuquén is the only one with high values of Araucaria in the diet. The isotopic values obtained for the three studied areas did not fit to the expectations of Binford’s model, North Neuquén being the area that departs most from the predicted proportions of terrestrial animals and plants and aquatic organisms in the diet. These findings open up new questions about the local conditions that influenced regional variation in the diet of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.     

Is Morality Policy Different? Testing Sectoral and Institutional Explanations of Policy Change

We analyze morality policy change from the perspective of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) to test whether reform dynamics in this policy sector follow a distinct pattern. First, we propose a new measurement scheme capturing changes in the intensity of morality policy output. Second, we demonstrate that morality policy change is strongly punctuated. Finally, and most importantly, we show that the degree of policy punctuations varies between different domains of morality policy, but not according to institutional features operating on the country level, supporting existing PET research, which has discovered similar domain‐specific dynamics in changes of public spending. Specifically, punctuations are particularly pronounced in areas of manifest morality policy, that is, policies characterized by strong value conflicts, whereas punctuations are less pronounced for latent morality policies, that is, policies in which other dimensions of conflict are present next to the value dimension. Significant differences in reform dynamics are neither discerned for countries belonging to the religious or the secular world, nor for countries with majoritarian or consensual democracies. The analysis relies on an original dataset capturing legislative changes in five manifest (abortion, euthanasia, prostitution, pornography, and homosexuality), and three latent morality policies (drugs, gambling, and handguns) in 19 European countries (1960–2010).     

Moving Words: Christian Language and the Modern World

Within the anthropology of Christianity, much attention has been paid to the convergence of Christianity with modern understandings of language. In this essay, I review scholarship that traces the historical connections between modern and Christian views of language, particularly in British colonial attacks on Hindu language practices, and I examine two recent ethnographies that offer different vantage points on the variety of ways in which contemporary Christians use language in a self-consciously modern way.