Responsible girls: the spatialized politics of feminine success and aspiration in a divided Silicon Valley,USA

This article offers a comparative ethnographic examination of working-class Latina and middle-class white girls' narratives of aspiration and expressions of self-cultivation in early twenty-first-century Silicon Valley, USA. I argue that such girls' subject-making statements of aspiration and gendered practices of self-cultivation reflect their emotively charged negotiations of race and class differentiated ideals of feminine success, their experience of school and community spaces inscribed by hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and shifting political-economic circumstances. Moreover, I maintain that such statements and practices reveal girls' engagements with an open-ended gendered dynamic of responsibilization.     

Biofilm growth in human skeletal material from ancient Mesopotamia

Investigators have long recognised the effects of microbial activity on archaeological bone. These investigators, however, have focused on single or groups of microbes rather than on complex microbial aggregates such as biofilms, a focus that has affected our understanding of archaeological bone biodeterioration. In this paper, we report on the investigation of a biofilm in archaeological human bone from the site of Tell Leilan, Syria (2900–1900 BCE). Scanning electron microscopy indicated that the biofilm is characterised by single cells and microcolonies of bacteria and fungi, as well as calcite crystals that were all embedded within extracellular polymeric substances. Using culture techniques and DNA sequencing, we isolated and identified several microbes from the biofilm including Amycolatopsis sp., Penicillium chrysogenum, Aspergillus sp., Chaetomium sp., and Cladosporium sp. Having characterised the Leilan biofilm, we are now closer to understanding the complex process of bone biodeterioration in archaeological bone collections.     

Tracing the ‘chemyn de Portyngale’: English service and servicemen in fourteenth-century Portugal

Three Anglo-Portuguese campaigns took English servicemen into Portugal in the 1380s. Two were largely guided by Plantagenet interests, in 1381–2 and 1386–7, respectively under the earl of Cambridge and the duke of Lancaster. The other, which began in 1384 under the regent João of Avis (later João I), involved entirely volunteer English forces. While the Lancastrian-led expeditions were largely political and military failures, servicemen recruited by the Portuguese in England achieved greater success, including victory at the Battle of Aljubarrota. This article compares these expeditions for the first time. It looks at their political, diplomatic, military, social and economic contexts, exploring motivations for English service in Portugal in particular, from that of the common soldier to that of the governments. By looking at the itineraries in Portugal of English soldiers, their presence is mapped and their continuance debated. The Anglo-Portuguese examples demonstrate how foreign military intervention and mercenary activity might be a driving force in social and economic relations between regions of Europe during the Hundred Years War.     

Chiefdoms at the threshold: The competitive origins of the primary state

The origins of the primary state are examined, paying particular attention to the interacting complex chiefdoms that precede state formation. A comparative analysis is undertaken of the evolutionary trajectories of two well-documented cases of prehistoric complex chiefdoms in North America and Mesoamerica: Cahokia and Monte Albán. Of special concern are the strategies that the rulers of these powerful, expansionist chiefdoms pursued in response to varying conditions of local competition or resistance. The crucial difference between the two developmental outcomes, the analysis concludes, derived from the varying degrees of inter-polity competition confronted by Cahokia and Monte Albán. The higher level of inter-polity competition in Monte Albán’s case required a complete administrative transformation in order for the leadership’s goal-oriented, expansionist strategies to succeed, resulting in the successful formation of a primary state.     

The veterans' movement and First World War memory in Portugal (1918–33): between the Republic and Dictatorship

The lack of consensus regarding Portugal's participation in the First World War's European front, combined with the post-war political and economic crisis, highlights the difficulty of integrating a large number of mobilised men, mainly rural workers, who now found themselves unemployed and physically and psychologically traumatised. The return, reaction and insertion of soldiers would configure the social and political milieu in which, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the first images of the conflict were built, based on interactions between veterans and the political authorities, not always on an equal footing. This study will first seek to identify the context and external elements so as to trace a concrete and immediate profile of the veterans. Secondly, it will analyse the creation and intervention of associations – their active social ‘intervention’ – amidst their internal activities and attempts to shape public opinion – actively making demands – in order to influence State policy. Finally, this text will attempt to shed light on the relationship between veterans and contemporary political dynamics, especially keeping in mind the eventual militancy of their actions.     

Over and under: children navigating terrain in the East Anglian fenlands

ABSTRACT

Drawing on fieldwork in three primary schools in East Cambridgeshire, UK, this paper explores children’s relationships with the places where they live, and the ways in which those relationships are mediated by play, exploration, and narrative imagination. Challenging assumptions of a ‘bubble-wrap generation’ which seem to discount the possibility that children today are able to experience the outdoor environment as a safe space with which they can build a living connection, we explored spaces which children deem particularly important in their lives. Through walks along routes planned by children, we look at how movement over the fens offered them an opportunity to express how and why particular places matter, what they see happening there, and what they expect to happen in the future. We reflect on the mutually constitutive relationship between kinship and experience of place, and argue that children’s sense of the stable and bounded landscape limits their sense of environmental variation in the fens. Yet, this exploration leads to the question: what lies under the surface of the land we move across? We therefore consider the relationship between presentism in children’s lives and the imagination of what lies underfoot.     

Celebrating victory on a day of defeat: commemorating the First World War in Portugal, 1918–1933

In Portugal, the development of a memorial project commemorating the First World War, from the treatment of physical bodies to their more or less symbolic (or more or less doctrinal) representations, did not achieve its intended results, in the sense that it did not succeed in consecrating Portugal as a participant of recognized standing and a victorious Allied nation. The memory of the war was clearly shaped by a dimension of tragedy and not by victory. This article will provide, via the dialectics between official and public memory, an in-depth analysis of the politics of memory as it manifests in official commemorative projects. It will examine the forms, pace of implantation and rituals carried out to renew the meaning of memory, as well as the underlying play of forces it is subject to, along with the way in which it establishes cultural and even political rupture or continuity. Through the observation of elements that constitute a war culture – images, language and practices – which emerged during and after the conflict, this study seeks to clarify the First Republic’s successes and failures in delineating and consolidating an official memory of the First World War in Portugal.     

“Rousers of the Rabble” in the New Mexico Land Grant War: La Alianza Federal De Mercedes and the Violence of the State

Abstract: This paper examines the patterns of state‐sponsored and state‐tolerated violence directed at a social movement organization in New Mexico known as La Alianza Federal de Mercedes during the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1960s, Alianza mobilized a broad‐based movement of Chicano activists and Hispano land grant communities to advocate the return of lands they claimed had been stolen following the Mexican American War of 1846–1848. As a result, its leaders and many of its members became targets of law enforcement surveillance programs and counterintelligence operations. In this paper I examine the patterns of surveillance and physical violence directed at Alianza members. Confronted by Alianza's challenge to racial inequality and economic injustice, the state construed Alianza as a generalized, and racialized, threat to social order that required in response the use of coercive control and physical violence.     

Blockchain in the EU: Transforming imaginaries and the social making of fnancial regulation

Based on local and online ethnographic research, this article explores how blockchain projects and financial supervisors navigate transforming technological dispositions and interact in constructing regulatory frameworks. While there is a straightforward replacement of revolutionary blockchain narratives with regulatory compliance ones, there is also degree of codependency between regulators and market actors in regulatory negotiation.