Why decorate a pot? Midwestern household pottery, 200 B.C.-A.D.600

The middle centuries (200 B.C.-A.D.600) of the Woodland period in the central riverine region of North America witnessed significant changes in the amount of decorative effort that people invested in their household pottery. Such historical phenomena raise the usually unasked question, why do people decorate their utilitarian household goods at all? More specifically, why might people in a particular historical setting decorate their utilitarian household objects at one time but not at another? This paper argues that the answer to such questions must always be different for each historical setting, and not predictable from any cross-cultural regularities. The Woodland case also illustrates a need to take into account relationships minimally among (a) construction practices, (b) decorative practices, (c) the physical uses of utilitarian objects, and (d) household-scale social relations in any social analysis of decoration on household objects.     

Spirometry, measurement, and race in the nineteenth century

Race correction is a common practice in contemporary pulmonary medicine that involves mathematical adjustment of lung capacity measurements in populations designated as "black" using standards derived largely from populations designated as "white." This article traces the history of the racialization and gendering of spirometry through an examination of the ideas and practices related to lung capacity measurements that circulated between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. Lung capacity was first conceptualized as a discrete entity of potential use in the diagnosis of pulmonary disease and monitoring of the vitality of the armed forces and other public servants in spirometric studies conducted in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The spirometer was then imported to the United States and used to measure the capacity of the lungs in a large study of black and white soldiers in the Union Army sponsored by the U.S. Sanitary Commission at the end of the Civil War. Despite contrary findings and contestation by leading black intellectuals, the notion of mean differences between racial groups in the capacity of the lungs became deeply entrenched in the popular and scientific imagination in the nineteenth century, leaving unexamined both the racial categories deployed to organize data and the conditions of life that shape lung function.     

Major Fallacies Surrounding Stone Artifacts and Assemblages

While lithic objects can potentially inform us about past adaptations and behaviors, it is important to develop a comprehensive understanding of all of the various processes that influence what we recover from the archaeological record. We argue here that many assumptions used by archaeologists to derive behavioral inferences through the definition, conceptualization, and interpretation of both individual stone artifact forms and groups of artifacts identified as assemblages do not fit squarely with what we have learned from both ethnographic sources and analyses of archaeological materials. We discuss this in terms of two fallacies. The first is the fallacy of the “desired end product” in stone artifact manufacture, which also includes our ability to recognize such end products. The second fallacy has to do with the notions that lithic assemblages represent simple accumulations of contemporary behaviors and the degree to which the composition of the depositional units we study reliably match the kinds of activities that took place. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a comprehensive set of new methodologies and theoretical perspectives to solve these problems, our goal here is to stress the importance of rethinking some of our most basic assumptions regarding the nature of lithic objects and how they become part of the archaeological record. Such a revision is needed if we want to be able to develop research questions that can be addressed with the data we have available to us.     

History,Geography and Difference in the Post‐socialist World: Or,Do We Still Need Post‐Socialism?

Abstract: This paper seeks to build on ongoing work in east central Europe and the former Soviet Union—in geography and beyond—to think through the conceptualisation of post‐socialism. The rationale for this is threefold. Firstly, we see a need to understand post‐socialist conditions as they are lived and experienced by those in the region. Secondly, we seek to challenge the persistent tendency to marginalise the experiences of the non‐western world in a discourse of globalisation and universalisation. Thirdly, we identify a need to ask how the conditions of post‐socialism reshape our theorising more widely. Centring our analysis on history, geography and difference, we review a wide range of perspectives on the socialist and post‐socialist, but argue for a strategic essentialism that recognises post‐socialist difference without eclipsing differences. In outlining how we might understand history, geography and difference in post‐socialism, we draw on key theorisations from post‐colonialism (such as the articulation of the post‐ with the pre‐, the relationship to the west, the rethinking of histories/categories, the end of the post) and outline post‐socialisms that are partial and not always explanatory but nevertheless important.