Historical Archaeo-Geographies of Scaled Statehood: American Federalism and Material Practices of National Prohibition in California, 1917–1933

This paper discusses the ways that a more explicit engagement with the discipline of historical geography could contribute to archaeologies of the recent and contemporary past. Scholars working in this time period must consider multiple scales of connectivity between people and places through time and would benefit from political geography’s recent theorizing on scale and the state. We present a preliminary case study of what we term a historical archeo-geography drawing upon archaeological materials from late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century sites to demonstrate how state and federal legislation is enacted at the household level.     

Changing Welfare Cultures in Region and State

The article takes a regional case study of three northern counties—Durham,Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire—to examinehow the hardships of communities, devastated by long-term structuralunemployment, exposed the inadequacy of a locally based welfaresystem, where poverty was itself expected to relieve destitution.Local welfare administrators put up a sustained challenge tomany of the preconceptions and practices of central governmentin their administration of a hierarchy of relief, assistanceand benefits in public welfare. In doing so, these northernadministrators precipitated draconian central action in an exemplarytakeover of administration in three out of the five local administrationsthat suffered this strategic intervention nationally, whileseveral others were threatened. This crucible of confrontationprovided a regional catalyst for the traditional concept ofconditional benefits, and a stigmatized welfare dependency tobegin to be superseded by a more egalitarian, democratic viewof entitlements as a citizen's right within a mixed economyof welfare. The article ends with a brief reflection on thewider and longer-term significance of this changing culture.     

Professional advantage and public health: British veterinarians and State Veterinary Services, 1865-1939

At the beginning of the twentieth century, municipal authorities in England and Wales, and in Scotland, began to develop systems of veterinary public health which encompassed both the welfare of animals and the safety of meat and milk intended for human consumption. This paper examines the motives behind veterinary attempts to extend the integration of human and animal health considerations within the public health framework in the inter-war period. In 1938 the Ministry of Agriculture implemented a national administrative structure for the management of animal diseases which absorbed the veterinary personnel of the municipal authorities, whose own veterinary public health activities largely fell into abeyance. As a result, the ideal of veterinary public health disappeared from British public health practice after 1939, and lost its force as a professional political cause. The mid-century disappearance of animal health from consideration in British public health programmes was one of a complex of historical strands which contributed to the late-twentieth-century emergence of public health crises over such animal-borne diseases as salmonellosis, Escherichia coli infection, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy.     

New life in Japan's ‘endingness’ business

The Japanese deathcare and Buddhist goods industry is a growing field, emerging out of radical shifts in the socio-economic conditions of everyday life: smaller households, an ageing population and more irregular employment/lifestyle patterns. Based on fieldwork, this article reports tectonic ruptures within Japan’s household-based mortuary system and Buddhist practice. It takes readers to ENDEX, the premier convention for Japan’s ‘ending industry’, where new ‘life’ emerges from the falling away of older death rites that get remixed and remade into newer experimental practices, businesses and business subjectivities. Examples range from high-tech gravestones and drones to competitions for the ‘Hottest Priest’ and best encoffiner. This article engages with these new necro-technologies and asks why the old deathcare system is falling apart. What are the socio-material effects of its unravelling? And what does the futurity of necro-praxis look like in Japan (and elsewhere) when the existential fabric of mortality may be torn apart?