Producing Victimhood: Landmines,Reparations, and Law in Colombia

This research theorizes Colombia's 2011 Victims’ and Land Restitution Law (the Victims’ Law) as a biopolitical program that intends to foster the lives of conflict‐affected populations through providing an array of reparation measures. Based on fieldwork with internally displaced landmine victims in Colombia's Magdalena Medio region, I highlight how the Victims’ Law constitutes the identity of which populations count as “victims” worthy of reparations, how such parameters are contested, and how landmine survivors’ sense of themselves as “victims” is mediated via their experiences with the Victims’ Law and the reparation programs it provides. In particular, I highlight the possibilities and limitations of reparation measures that hinge on small‐scale business incubation programs for landmine victims to show how a legally recognized victimhood category presupposes “self‐responsible” neoliberal subjects who must confront contexts of conflict and state neglect.     

Religious Emotions and Emotions in Religion: The Case of Sermons

This article examines the challenges posed by combining the categories of religion and emotion in historical studies. It analyses two major ways of framing this: religious emotion and emotions in religion. By taking sermons as a case study, both as a religious practice and a genre of historical source, an approach that retains the useful elements of each approach is developed. At the same time, the article explores the potentials of sermons as a source for the history of emotions, noting important consequences in the history of religious communication for the history of emotions and vice versa. In particular, reception history approaches are explored as a way to enrich accounts of the emotional aspects of sermons. Further, the article serves as an introduction for the collection of articles: “Preaching and Passions: Sermons and the History of Emotions.”     

Feasting at Marj Rabba,An Early Chalcolithic Site in the Galilee

Feasting is a common part of human culture in the present and past that can serve a variety of roles such as creating and maintaining social identities within and between social groups. In zooarchaeology, feasting evidence, rather than the accumulated and mixed refuse from long‐term consumption, often gives us some of the only data from individual events at a site. A cattle bone refuse pit at the site of Marj Rabba, Israel, provides evidence for feasting from the early Chalcolithic (c.4500–3600 BC) in the southern Levant. The presence of cattle feasts at Marj Rabba provides a glimpse of cultural practices in this critical transitional period that may mirror practices from earlier periods.