Food and social complexity at Çayönü Tepesi,southeastern Anatolia: Stable isotope evidence of differentiation in diet according to burial practice and sex in the early Neolithic

The identification of early social complexity and differentiation in early village societies has been approached in the past most notably through the evaluation of rituals and architectural layouts. Such studies could be complemented by an approach that provides data about everyday behaviours of individuals. We took 540 human and animal bone samples for stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis from the Neolithic site of Çayönü Tepesi in southeastern Anatolia. The inhabitants at this site chose to bury their dead in two different ways at different times during its occupation: beneath the floors of their houses, but also inside a public mortuary building known as the Skull Building. This variation provides an opportunity using isotope methods to test whether there was evidence for structuring of daily activities (diet in this case) that might serve to reinforce this change in burial practice. We show that when the inhabitants of Çayönü Tepesi changed their architecture and operated different burial practices in conjunction, this coincided with other aspects of behaviour including socially-constituted food consumption practices, which served to reinforce social identities.     

Offspring sex preference in frontier America

Analysis of the fertility histories of women born between 1850 and 1900, as given in the Utah Population Database (UPDB), reveals the effect of the number, as well as the sex composition, of previous children on birth-stopping and birth-spacing decisions. Specifically, agricultural and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) households—two sub-populations that might have placed different values on male and female children for economic, social, and/or cultural reasons—showed a distinct preference for male children, as expressed by birth stopping after the birth of a male child and shorter birth intervals in higher-parity births when most previous children were female. Remarkably, women in both the early "natural fertility" and the later contraceptive eras used spacing behavior to achieve a desired sex mix. Although the LDS population had relatively high fertility rates, it had the same preferences for male children as the non-LDS population did. Farmers, who presumably had a need for family labor, were more interested in the quantity than in the sex mix of their children.     

The Politics of Ego: Senatorial Front Office Presentation of Self

Many scholars have studied elected officials’ presentation of self, typically through examination of behavior in their districts, speeches, and Web sites. In this article, the authors examine a little-studied but telling element of U.S. senators’ presentation of self—the images they display to constituents and others visiting their offices in Washington, DC. Drawing on original data, we analyze both the total amount of items displayed as well as the number that focus on the senators themselves, and find that having run for president, being a Republican, and representing a state closer to Washington, DC, all predict a senator having more self-centered front-office décor, while having served more years in the chamber and hailing from a state closer to the nation's capital are associated with greater sheer number of items displayed in a senator's front office. This research demonstrates that political ambition, geography, and partisan affiliation are all related to senatorial ego. Studying senators’ presentation of self via their office walls offers important insight into the ways that elected officials view themselves and present themselves to a variety of audiences, thereby offering a glimpse of the ever-elusive link between the represented and the representative.     

Surfing for Problems: Advocacy Group Strategy in U.S. Forestry Policy

John Kingdon sets out a multiple streams approach to policymaking, whereby problems, solutions, and politics develop independently of one another. Kingdon's work suggests that advocates with pet policies may continually search the problem stream, looking for prominent issues to attach to their preferred solutions. I call this process "problem surfing." This paper provides an empirical test of problem surfing through the use of a case study of environmental advocacy. The paper examines Wilderness Society and Sierra Club advocacy for sustainable forestry practices from 1971 to 1994 through an analysis of articles in member magazines and interview data. Problem surfing is revealed to be a complex strategic process. I find evidence that advocacy groups adjust the problems they associate their solutions with over time to take advantage of salient issues. However, problem surfing appears to be influenced by more than just problem salience.     

Sociopolitical network interactions: A case study of the Classic Maya

The organization of Classic Maya society emerged from diverse and overlapping social interactions which shaped a dynamic political landscape. Vying for power, elites legitimized their status by claiming ancestry from various supernaturals and engaged in conspicuous displays of competition, warfare, and ritual practice which were often recorded on stone monuments. By examining the inscribed relationships between Maya centers, we chart organizational changes in sociopolitical networks throughout the Classic period. Methods derived from social network analysis are used to examine temporal changes in the distribution and centralization of political power through different network interactions. We examine the intersection of antagonistic, diplomatic, subordinate, and kinship relationships and discuss how these overlapping networks contributed to dynamic changes in the Classic period. This case study demonstrates how current network analysis techniques can contribute to archaeological studies of the scalar dynamics and organizational changes of past social and political systems.     

Have sex will travel: romantic ‘sex tourism’ and women negotiating modernity in the Sinai

Since the 1970s, studies on western women's ethnosexual tourist–local relationships have tended to focus on the beaches of the Caribbean and have come to one of two main conclusions – either they are no different from the overtly exploitative relationships of heterosexual male sex tourists or they are different because they involve a softer, caring element of romance. This article proposes that both positions have led to constrictive, circular research that highlights the racialised and economically disparate nature of these exchanges but mostly ignores the importance of imaginative and emotional geographies caught up in such relationships. Based on fieldwork interviews with men and women in the resorts of the South Sinai, Egypt, I argue that these encounters can be seen as examples of a modern subjectivity that are defined by and take place within imagined (fixed) constructions of landscapes, native third world masculinity (in this case Arab/Bedouin), femininity (white, heterosexual, western), freedom and love (spiritual and physical): all presented in some form of opposition to a particularist idea of modernity and viewed through a filter of selective (and spatially circumscribed) histories. By adding a geographical dimension, this article aims to open up the current debate on female sex tourism to a wider range of issues and reveal more of the conflicts, tensions and imaginations that make up these encounters.