Painting as Agency,Style as Structure: Innovations in Mimbres Pottery Designs From Southwest New Mexico

The act of painting a design is a form of agency, and the overall style of that design in part can be conceptualized as a kind of structure. This perspective is used as a basis for analyzing chronological changes in designs on Mimbres Black-on-white pottery (ca. AD 750–1150) from Southwest New Mexico. Specific focus is on a methodology that can be used to detect innovations, that is, the introduction of novel designs that are incorporated into the design corpus and thus transform the structure. The conceptualization of a particular tradition (in this instance, pottery painting) as a form of structure analogous to general structure in Giddens' sense thus provides important insights into the recursive relationship between agency and structure.     

From Indenture to “Good Governance”: eMigrate and the Politics of Reforming Global Labour Supply Chains

Contract substitution—in which workers sign one contract but end up working under another—is a common form of fraud faced by Indian low-wage migrant workers working in the Gulf Cooperation Council states. This paper presents a study of workers’ experiences of contract substitution alongside the eMigrate system, which is a digital registration system introduced by the Indian government in 2015. While a stated aim of eMigrate is to protect workers from contract fraud, these practices persist. We explore the colonial genealogies of eMigrate to show that not only has it adapted repertoires of worker protection inherited from the British Empire’s indenture system, but that eMigrate risks facilitating conditions of unfreedom under the mantle of worker protection, much as the British imperial state did during indenture. We contend that recognising how legacies of indentured labour regulation persist through eMigrate has implications for contemporary campaigns for migrant justice.     

Calvin and the Two Bodies of Christ: Fiction and Power in Dogmatic Theology

This article re-examines the slow rhetorical quality of Jean Calvin’s political theology by drawing attention to the literary dimensions of Calvin’s theological writing. In conversation with recent work on political theology and Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), I show how Calvin relies on a participatory grammar and a fictive rendering of the incarnation to theorize the relationship between the concrete body of Christ and the corporate “body” of the church. I argue that this recovers theological resources for maintaining a critical distance between words and things that resists absolutist incarnations of political theology. Foregrounding the role of fiction in constituting dogmatic theological arguments aids in distinguishing the role of theological analogies from mythical foundations. By better attending to the literary dimensions of dogmatic theological writings, it may be possible to further complicate and recast the relationship between theological categories and modern political thought.     

Humanitarianism,genocide and liberalism

The international response to genocide and human rights violations has received increasing attention by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This article explores the history of the response to mass atrocity by assessing recent work on humanitarianism as an idea and in practice in the West. It argues that the impulse to defend the rights of others historically has been tied up with geopolitical and imperial concerns that shaped European politics. The current embrace of the responsibility to protect, or ‘R2P’, and debates over whether or not to recognize and prosecute perpetrators of past atrocities from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda remain embedded in this longer history of humanitarianism and geopolitics. As recent work on humanitarian intervention, the anti-slavery movement and humanitarianism and foreign policy demonstrates, the pressing need to understand the response to atrocity has called scholars to more fully participate in the contemporary conversation over human rights by exploring its roots in humanitarian practices of the recent and not so recent past. Understanding the history of humanitarianism as it connects both with the history of human rights and liberal ideals offers an important way of reassessing the role of the nation-state and international institutions in responding to human rights crisis. The article concludes by suggesting that scholars move away from the question of the origin of human rights as an idea to focus on historicizing the response to humanitarian crisis in order to problematize the story of the rise of western-led human rights regimes.     

Lapa das boleiras rockshelter: stratigraphy and formation processes at a paleoamerican site in Central Brazil

Lapa das Boleiras rockshelter, a Paleoamerican archaeological site in Central Brazil, was intensely occupied by humans from 10,000 ¹⁴C BP (11.8 cal kyr BP), until approximately 7500 ¹⁴C BP (8.4 cal kyr BP). In this paper we present some interpretations about the formation processes operating on the site. One of our main conclusions is that the bulk of accumulated sediments at the site is of anthropogenic origin: they are constituted by volumetrically significant quantities of plant ash remains, what is somewhat unexpectedly in view of prevailing models about the lifestyle of Paleoamerican hunter–gatherers in South America. The evidence we discuss below is also consistent with paleoenvironmental data that suggest a dry period during the mid-Holocene in the region, probably leading to a decrease in human occupation [Araujo, A.G.M., Neves, W., Piló, L.B., Atui, J.P., 2005. Holocene dryness and human occupation in Brazil during the ‘Archaic Gap’. Quaternary Research 64, 298–307]. We surmise that both factors underpin a surprising reduction in sediment accumulation at the site during the mid-Holocene.     

Cross over food: re-materializing postcolonial geographies

Recent geographical discussions of postcolonialism have highlighted its emphasis on texts and discourses, its neglect of more material aspects of (post)imperial/colonial domination and the need for detailed empirical research articulating postcolonialism and global capitalism. This paper addresses these issues by reporting on research based in a recent debate in the UK trade press over the 'failure' of Caribbean food to 'cross over' into the UK 'mainstream'. It outlines the contrasting manufacturing and marketing practices of two Jamaican food companies whose accounts of (not) attempting this 'cross-over' illustrate postcolonialism's hybrid, resistant, ambivalent, scale-jumping, boundary-crossing, material cultural politics.