Commoner Power: A Case Study from the Classic Period Collapse on the Oaxaca Coast

This article argues that the agency of commoners has not been adequately theorized in archaeological studies of the political dynamics of complex societies. Recent developments in social theory emphasize that political relations are produced through social negotiations involving commoners as well as elites. This paper considers the role of commoners in the Classic period collapse in the lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico. Regional survey and excavation data demonstrate that the Classic-to-Postclassic transition was marked by dramatic changes in settlement patterns and sociopolitical organization, including the decline of the Late Classic regional center of Río Viejo. The research indicates that rather than passively reacting to the sociopolitical developments of the Classic-to-Postclassic transition, commoners actively rejected many of the ruling institutions and symbols that were central to the dominant ideology of the Late Classic state. Early Postclassic people reused and reinterpreted the sacred spaces and objects of the Río Viejo state such as carved stone monuments and public buildings. The evidence from the lower Verde is examined in the context of an emerging theoretical perspective in archaeology that considers commoner power. We argue that commoners contribute to the social negotiation of dominant discourses through three overlapping forms of social interaction: engagement, avoidance, and resistance.     

A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE METHODOLOGY OF ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM RESEARCH*

Research on environmental racism has emphasized positive rationality. While useful for policy and legal interventions, this is problematic from a radical political and theoretical viewpoint. By examining two key research questions–is “race” or class responsible for discriminatory patterns? which came first, the people or the hazard?–I explore the implicit assumptions concerning racism within this framework. This reveals a large, pervasive set of misconceptions, including a tendency to reduce racism to overt actions, denying racism as ideology, and insisting on a fixed, unitary idea of racism. Both scholars committed to antiracism and those who challenge environmental justice activists' claims reproduce these conceptualizations.     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WORKER PENSION FUNDS

Increasing concentration of economic power within the corporate sector, as well as the extent of corporate control by a few financial institutions such as commercial banks, have been subjects of intense scrutiny and debate in recent years. However, the role of private and public worker retirement trusts in providing power for institutional investors has not been adequately addressed. Pension fund assets, which were relatively inconsequential prior to 1960, and their investment in and share of total corporate equities minor, have grown to over $l410 billion by the end of 1977. In their analysis of and interest in public and private pension trusts, scholars, employers and even employees have tended to emphasize narrow economic issues such as investment performance. It is the central argument of this article that workers’ funds have become a major source of capital in the American economy, and as such have been used to help create and/or sustain practices that adversely impinge on workers themselves. It is argued that pension assets have contributed to: 1) the increasing power of financial institutions; 2) growth of corporate profits that only minimally benefit some pension plan participants; 3)capital shortages for 'socially useful’ investments; and 4)support of corporate enterprises that refuse basic worker demands including unionization itself. The study further suggests that the rapidly growing pension assets have the potential to serve‘the public interest’ as well as the needs of workers. Threat of withdrawal of funds from selected money managers and corporations, and utilization of share–holder voting rights to influence corporate policies can be potent weapons for organized labor. Since this is an exploratory analysis, the aim of the article is to gather, present and clarify basic information on worker pension trusts and to propose alternative avenues for future research in this critical area.     

Misaligned Social Policy? Explaining the Origins and Limitations of Cash Transfers in Sudan

This article examines whether the transitional government in the wake of the December 2018 Sudanese revolution succeeded in realigning social policy with public demands. The article focuses on the evolution of cash transfer programmes from the 2012 cash programme under the Ingaz regime to the transitional government's programme 2021. While the recent programme was popularly viewed as a ‘World Bank programme’, its originators were in fact Sudanese professionals. Similarly, the Ingaz regime experimented with cash transfers before seeking out World Bank technical support. In this sense, cash transfers cannot be seen as an external imposition, as domestic actors have favoured them across different regimes. Yet, their appeal may still reflect the ‘choicelessness’ that Thandika Mkandawire associated with structural adjustment, as in both cases cash transfers were introduced as part of broader economic reform. Sudan's case is distinct in the sense that its domestic policy makers did not begrudgingly accept cash transfers but were enthusiastic instigators of them. The article traces the origins of this enthusiasm within Sudan's recent political history and explores the way in which alignment with international mainstream policy making locks Sudan into a bind. The country urgently needs to reverse the fragmentation of social policy along geographic and racial lines, yet these programmes do little to overcome such regional and racial inequalities. Thus, even after a popular revolution displaced the prevailing political settlement and called for radical change, policy makers remain misaligned to public demands.     

Reproducible Science Is Vital for a Stronger Evidence Base During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Reproducible research becomes even more imperative as we build the evidence base on SARS-CoV-2 epidemiology, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. In his study, Paez assessed the reproducibility of COVID-19 research during the pandemic, using a case study of population density. He found that most articles that assess the relationship of population density and COVID-19 outcomes do not publicly share data and code, except for a few, including our paper, which he stated “illustrates the importance of good reproducibility practices”. Paez recreated our analysis using our code and data from the perspective of spatial analysis, and his new model came to a different conclusion. The disparity between our and Paez’s findings, as well as other existing literature on the topic, give greater impetus to the need for further research. As there has been near exponential growth of COVID-19 research across a wide range of scientific disciplines, reproducible science is a vital component to produce reliable, rigorous, and robust evidence on COVID-19, which will be essential to inform clinical practice and policy in order to effectively eliminate the pandemic.     

Not a Priority: Infertile Women and the Symbolic Politics of IVF in 1980s Britain

This article considers the early debates over state funding for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment following the birth of Louise Brown in 1978 as a lens through which to re-evaluate attitudes towards womanhood, maternity and sexuality in 1980s Britain. The state's reluctance to devote resources to IVF reflected, in no small part, the financial imperatives on an overstretched National Health Service. Beyond financial considerations, the question of IVF funding sparked deeply gendered debates over the politics and social significance of motherhood and mothering, and the state's role in family planning and maternal and child welfare. In short, debates over IVF operated as a form of symbolic politics. Stakeholders – including patients’ advocates, women's associations, feminist activists and religious leaders – drew a clear link between the female body and the body politic and sought to articulate a policy towards both IVF treatment and infertile women more broadly that reflected their understanding of women's place within modern British society. Despite holding widely divergent views about gender, sexuality and motherhood, women's and religious groups found common ground in opposing state funding of IVF. This coalition facilitated the state's decision not to prioritise funding for IVF even as neighbouring countries, including Germany and France, embraced the procedure to help combat demographic decline.     

Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions

As an historian of the American West, I find myself in the unusualposition of writing a review of a book, written by an archaeologist,for an audience of oral historians. But Ronald J. Mason's elegantlyprovocative Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North AmericanIndian Oral Traditions cries out for interdisciplinary linkagesand understandings. Mason spent his professional years as anarchaeologist among anthropologists and is the author of thehighly acclaimed Great Lakes Archaeology (1981). In InconstantCompanions, Mason "addresses a fundamental historiographicalproblem in archaeology, history, and anthropology":     

Negotiating Remote Borderland Access: Small‐Scale Trade on the Vietnam–China Border

This article explores the cross‐border trading networks and practices of highland residents in north‐west Vietnam. It reveals how such individuals, of highland minority and majority Kinh ethnicities, negotiate the political reality of an international border in highly pragmatic ways as they augment their livelihoods by trading commodities with inhabitants in south‐west China. We follow four particular commodities, traded across different political tiers of border crossing (each with specific rules, regulations and negotiations), by a diverse range of traders. In doing so we argue that border access is mediated by a complex and multifaceted set of social and structural components including not only state policy, but ethnically‐embedded social relations and specific geographic variables that, in turn, are engendering disparate economic opportunities.