Rethinking Whiteness and Masculinity in Geography: Drinking Alcohol in the Field in Vietnam

This paper evaluates the spatial politics of fieldwork in Vietnam in order to think through the connections between whiteness, masculinity, and geography. In drawing attention to how the consumption of alcohol underwrites daily activities in Vietnam, as well as fieldwork activities, I show that research ethics are underpinned by unique spatial contexts that do not conform to conventional accounts of masculinity and whiteness in the global North. I make three interrelated arguments. First, I argue that debates in geography about whiteness and masculinity must be understood alongside fieldwork experiences in the global South. Second, I invite geographers to think through how research ethics are shaped by spatially contingent productions of whiteness and masculinity. Lastly, I challenge geographers to keep pace with how disruptive categories like whiteness and masculinity are produced outside of the global North.     

Agents of knowledge: Marxist identity politics in the Revisionismusstreit

To be Marxist at the turn of the twentieth century was highly contested. During this crisis of Marxism, identity politics were acute, exemplified by the private and public debate between Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. With Bernstein's celebrated turn away from the Marxist theory of his day, the grounds for being Marxist were at stake. Was it possible to criticise Marx's analysis of industrial capitalism, his account of historical change and his hard-nosed class politics, and yet still be in a position to carry his name forward? Moreover, the springing-up of another identity, Revisionist, suggested that being Marxist was ambiguous. If one accepted Bernstein's and the Revisionists' point that Marxists had become too orthodox, leaving Revisionists as the true heirs of Marx's critical socialist spirit, then the Marxist identity was so open as to be meaningless. In this article, I contend that the name-calling of this period, the Revisionismusstreit, should be seen as creative. In contrast to politico-ideological perceptions of the Streit, which construe the clash of Marxist and Revisionist as representative of foundational Social Democratic party political realities, I highlight the manner in which being Marxist—the veneration of Marx's and Friedrich Engels's word into a Marxology of sorts by Marxists and Revisionists alike—held a certain epistemic value in its own right.     

Agricultural brokers

Pigs worked as brokers of agrarian life in the early medieval west in two ways. First, they converted organisms and spaces that humans did not directly exploit into a ‘commodity’ that humans did value. And the material work that pigs did made possible a second kind of brokerage, this one conceptual: the animals facilitated (or provoked) ways of seeing local phenomena in the context of wider ecological and social systems. Pigs’ ability to make use of a range of habitats, and humans’ interest in exploiting that work despite the trouble that pigs routinely caused, demonstrated that seemingly small things could influence and illuminate early medieval economies, social status, justice, and even metaphysics.     

The evolution of human culture during the later Pleistocene: Using fauna to test models on the emergence and nature of “modern” human behavior

It has often been argued that the success and spread of modern humans ∼50,000 years ago was due to a series of key behavioral shifts that conferred particular adaptive advantages. And yet, particularly during the African Middle Stone Age (MSA), some of these “modern” behaviors see only patchy expression across time and space. Recent models have proposed a link between the emergence of modern behaviors and environmental degradation and/or demographic stress. Under these models, modern behaviors represent a form of social/economic intensification in response to stress; if this were the case, signs of subsistence intensification should be more common during periods in which these behaviors are manifested than when they are not. In order to test these models, I analyzed faunal remains from Sibudu Cave (South Africa), focusing on the Howieson’s Poort (HP), a phase in which modern behaviors are evidenced, and the post-HP MSA, when classical signatures of such behavior have disappeared. Significant variability in hunting behavior was identified. While much of this variability appears to correspond with changes in the local environment, evidence for resource stress was more common during the HP. The implications of these results to our understanding of the evolution of human culture are discussed.