Crowded kitchens: the ‘democratisation’ of domesticity?

Building on previous work concerning the gendered nature of domestic space, this article focuses on the kitchen as a key site in which gendered roles and responsibilities are experienced and contested. As men have begun to engage more frequently in cooking and other domestic practices (albeit selectively and often on their own terms), this article argues that kitchens have become ‘crowded’ spaces for women. Drawing on evidence from focus groups, interviews and ethnographic observation of kitchen practices in South Yorkshire (UK), we suggest that men's entry into the kitchen has facilitated the expression of a more diverse range of masculine subjectivities, while also creating new anxieties for women. Specifically, our evidence suggests that family meals may be experienced as a site of domestic conflict as well as a celebration of family life; that convenience and shortcuts can be embraced by women without incurring feelings of guilt and imperfection; that cooking is being embraced as a lifestyle choice by an increasing numbers of men who use it as an opportunity to demonstrate competence and skill, while women are more pragmatic; and that kitchens may be experienced as ‘uncanny’ spaces by women as men increasingly assert their presence in this domain. Our analysis confirms that while the relationship between domestic practices and gendered subjectivities is changing, this does not amount to a fundamental ‘democratisation’ of domesticity with significantly greater equality between men and women.     

Reconstructing Movement in Prehistory

Movement is a universal part of human life. However, it normally leaves no material trace, so movements made in the past are difficult to investigate. Refitting artifacts across unusually long distances provides a robust method of reconstructing individual acts of movement. When there are multiple individual movements, it is possible to reconstruct patterns of movement, and to differentiate between different types of movement made for different purposes, even in prehistory.     

“Who can play this game?” The lived experiences of doctoral candidates and early career women in the neoliberal university

Work intensification is a characteristic of the current neoliberal trend in academia. Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers (PhD candidates and ECRs) in geography are no strangers to this development but are rarely the focus of publications or dialogue on the (gendered) outcomes of the academy’s neoliberal agenda. Encouraged by the recent emotional turn in the social sciences and humanities, this article seeks to unveil some of the everyday particulars of life in academia for PhD candidates and ECRs under the tide of financial cuts and increased competition for funding. We explore the question: “Who can – and indeed wants to – play this game?” As three early and one mid-career academic women in four different institutions in the Global North, we make use of reflexivity, autobiographical writing, and reflection, to analyze increasingly stressful and demanding working conditions. Through the depiction of our lived experiences, we contend that the push for ever increasing outputs attends most of our time and represents a distinctly different form of scholarship than has been traditionally considered as the pathway into academia, not seldom jeopardizing well-being of young academics, one that needs to be interrogated by geographers.     

Testing hypotheses of independence on symmetrical artifacts

Independence between attributes on artifacts with two equivalent loci has ordinarily been tested only when the loci can be differentiated from each other, say as left or right side or as distal or proximal end. If such an identification does not exist, is uncertain or is irrelevant, then a test of independence requires a special statistical procedure. Such a procedure is given here. Applications are illustrated for coreplatforms, geometric microliths and arrow-head typology, and an extension to artifacts with several equivalent loci is determined.     

Embodying the Colonial Encounter: Explaining New Zealand's ‘Grace Darling’, Huria Matenga

Focusing on the heroine of an 1863 New Zealand sea rescue, this article is concerned with gender, race and the colonial encounter. The rescue became an example of harmonious race relations, advocating Maori service as part of settler society governance. The article analyses Huria Matenga's place in the rescue as white settlers endorsed, rewarded and constructed her in relation to the imperial reference point of British heroine Grace Darling. It is argued that the gendered imperial narrative of Grace Darling combined with transcultural representations of women and the sea to accord Huria Matenga a central place in the rescue. While in the early twentieth century Grace Darling's memory was more entrenched in mainstream New Zealand society than Huria Matenga's, by the beginning of the twenty‐first century, Grace Darling as imperial signifier had disappeared, and the legend of Huria Matenga existed alone in a state of postcolonial irony. The article demonstrates that mythologies of and commemoration for heroines are constantly recast and operate across a complex network of local, national and transnational levels.     

Diet and the aetiology of dental calculus

The aetiology of dental calculus formation is not fully understood, but it is known that a number of factors play a role. Generally, anthropologists have overlooked the role of other causative factors in the formation of dental calculus, attributing it almost exclusively to diet, particularly protein consumption. Anthropologists have also oversimplified the role of diet in the formation of dental calculus. This may be due to a general paucity on research on dietary effects on calculus formation, as well as a lack of integration between anthropological and non‐anthropological data. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.