‘Eyes on where children play’: a retrospective study of active free play

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that influenced childhood active free play. Participants were 13 young adults who resided in one western Canadian city. They took part in semi-structured and walk-along interviews during which they were asked about their memories and experiences of play. Analysis showed that, whereas parental restrictions and safety concerns were limiting factors, a sense of community and safety in numbers facilitated their involvement in active free play. However, the young adults thought these factors had since become eroded from modern society. We concluded a reduced sense of perceived safety exists because there are fewer eyes on where children play.     

The Impact of AIDS on Rural Households in Africa: A Shock Like Any Other?

In areas where HIV prevalence is high, household production can be significantly affected and the integrity of households compromised. Yet policy responses to the impact of HIV/AIDS have been muted in comparison to outcomes of other shocks, such as drought or complex political emergencies. This article looks at the reasons for the apparent under–reaction to AIDS, using data from Zambia, and examines recent calls to mitigate the effects of AIDS at household level. Critical consideration is directed at proposals relating to community safety nets, micro–finance and the mainstreaming of AIDS within larger poverty alleviation programmes. It is argued that effective initiatives must attend to the specific features of AIDS, incorporating both an assault on those inequalities which drive the epidemic and sensitivity to the staging of AIDS both across and within households. A multi–pronged approach is advocated which is addressed not just at mitigation or prevention, but also at emergency relief, rehabilitation and development.     

Cosmopolitan Catterick? Isotopic evidence for population mobility on Rome’s Northern frontier

In order to investigate how the population diversity at major Romano-British urban centres compared to small towns and military outposts, we conducted multi-isotope (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and strontium) analyses of bones (42 individuals) and teeth (26 individuals) of human skeletons from Cataractonium/Roman Catterick in North Yorkshire (U.K.). The results suggest a markedly less diverse population at Catterick than at the larger towns. Significant differences are observed between burials from the town and fort area and the suburb of Bainesse to the south, and it is suggested that these reflect a shift to more localised recruitment for the Roman army in the Late Roman period. Isotope data for the ‘Bainesse Eunuch’, an unusual 4th century burial that has been interpreted as the remains of a ‘transvestite’ priest of Cybele, are not ultimately conclusive but consistent with origins in Southern Britain or areas with a similar climate abroad.     

Religion and Realpolitik

Abstract

Enduring groups that seek to preserve themselves, as sacred communities do, face a structural contradiction between the interests of individual group members and the survival interests of the group. In addressing existential threats, sacred communities rely on a spectrum of coercive and violent actions that resolve this contradiction in favor of solidarity. Despite different histories, this article argues, nationalism and religiosity are most powerfully organized as sacred communities in which sacred violence is extracted as sacrifice from community members. The exception is enduring groups that are able to rely on the protection of other violence practicing groups. The argument rejects functionalist claims that sacrifice guarantees solidarity or survival, since sacrificing groups regularly fail. In a rereading of Durkheim's totem taboo, it is argued that sacred communities cannot survive a permanent loss of sacrificial assent on the part of members. Producing this assent is the work of ritual socialization. The deployment of sacrificial violence on behalf of group survival, though deeply sobering, is best constrained by recognizing how violence holds sacred communities in thrall rather than by denying the links between them.     

A strontium and oxygen isotope assessment of a possible fourth century immigrant population in a Hampshire cemetery,southern England

The aim of the project was to test the hypothesis, using oxygen and strontium isotopes, that a group of burials in the Late Roman cemetery of Lankhills, Winchester, southern England, were migrants from the Danube region of central Europe. The method assumes that the oxygen isotope composition of immigrants from this locale would be significantly more depleted that any one British origin and that the restricted range in Sr isotope compositions produced by chalk in the overlying biosphere of southern England would discriminate between the local population and settlers from elsewhere. As a control for the immigrant group a sample of Romano-British individuals were examined to provide a comparative data set. The results showed that the majority of the individuals used to define the “local” control group plotted in a restricted field of strontium and oxygen isotope composition that was consistent with the values expected for the Hampshire area of southern England. By contrast, the “exotic”, putatively immigrant population generated a much more dispersed field including four with δ¹⁸O drinking water values of −10‰ or less, which supports a non-British origin for these individuals. The study shows that the archaeological data suggesting that there is an exotic population buried at the Lankhills cemetery is generally supported by the isotope work, although the “exotic” group appears to a rather dispersed set of individuals rather than a single population from a restricted overseas location.     

Exemplary Cities in China: The Capitalist Aesthetic and the Loss of Space

ABSTRACT

Since the late twentieth century, the subject of China becoming urban has appeared in the scholarship across the disciplines while spectacular images of China’s cities, and narratives about their developmental achievements, have proliferated in global media. Simultaneously, the parallel “spatial turn” in social thought invigorated geographical approaches to cities and urban change. Yet at this promising meeting ground, between contemporary geographical thought and urban-industrial transformation in China, research has tended to demonstrate a “loss of space” through patterns of dependence on analog circulation of exemplar paradigms that derive from the history of the capitalist city and liberal political economy. What drives this condition and what do we know about its practices and proliferation? This inquiry challenges research design and the politics of theory to consider how routine adoption of capital-centric concepts for research on cities in China arguably reflects the priority of paradigms in the disciplines and their conjunctures with exemplarity in Chinese society and political philosophy. These interstices facilitate application of analog models, and selective adoption of empirical information to suit them, with the paradoxical result of portraying cities in China through multiple capitalist aesthetics including a relatively narrow range of empirics framed by market-based social thought.