Just this Once: urban Ireland in film

By focusing on the city of Dublin as both setting and character, Once, written and directed by Dublin native John Carney, portrays urban Ireland in the global context. Using a series of replacements – replacing population loss with in-migration, and replacing parochial ideals with multicultural ones – the film re-places Dublin, both representing the city it has become and providing space for continuing growth and change. For Dublin, as elsewhere, change enters as global flows of information and people become part of the city. Rather than conforming to the traditional global power of American culture, Bord Scannán na hÉireann (Irish Film Board) is striking its own global poses, producing and distributing films that construct an urban Irishness for international audiences. In my article, I examine how this award-winning Irish film constructs Irish urban identity in the face of globalism's cultural flattening.     

Urbanism and Residential Patterning in Angkor

The Khmer Empire (9th–15th centuries a.d.), centered on the Greater Angkor region, was the most extensive political entity in the history of mainland Southeast Asia. Stone temples constructed by Angkorian kings and elites were widely assumed to have been loci of ritual as well as habitation, though the latter has been poorly documented archaeologically. In this paper, we present the results of two field seasons of excavation at the temple site of Ta Prohm. Using LiDAR data to focus our excavations, we offer evidence for residential occupation within the temple enclosure from before the 11th century a.d. until the 14th century. A comparison with previous work exploring habitation areas within the Angkor Wat temple enclosure highlights similarities and differences between the two temples. We argue that temple habitation was a key component of the Angkorian urban system and that investigating this unique form of urbanism expands current comparative research on the diversity of ancient cities.     

Mapping contemporary Catholic politics in Italy

This editors’ introduction opens a special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies on the topic of ‘Mapping Contemporary Catholic Politics in Italy’. It briefly identifies the political, sociological and ideational changes that have occurred in Catholic politics since the collapse of the Democrazia Cristiana party, and introduces the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the common threads and the important divergences in their analyses.     

Increasing Behavioral Flexibility? An Integrative Macro-Scale Approach to Understanding the Middle Stone Age of Southern Africa

The Middle Stone Age (MSA) of southern Africa represents a period during which anatomically modern humans adopted a series of diverse cultural innovations. Researchers generally attribute these behavioral changes to environmental, neurological, or demographic causes, but none of these alone offers a satisfactory explanation. Even as patterns at site level come into focus, large-scale trends in cultural expansions remain poorly understood. This paper presents different ways to view diachronic datasets from localities in southern Africa and specifically tests hypotheses of environmental and cultural causality. We employ an array of analyses in an attempt to understand large-scale variability observed during the MSA. We evaluated the diversity of stone tool assemblages to model site use, examined transport distances of lithic raw materials to understand patterns of movement, assessed the cultural capacities required to manufacture and use different sets of tools, applied stochastic models to examine the geographic distribution of sites, and reconstructed biome classes and climatic constraints. Our large-scale analysis allowed the research team to integrate different types of information and examine diachronic trends during the MSA. Based on our results, the range of cultural capacity expanded during the MSA. We define cultural capacity as the behavioral potential of a group expressed through the problem-solution distance required to manufacture and use tools. Our dataset also indicates that the actual behavior exhibited by MSA people, their cultural performance as expressed in the archaeological record, is not equivalent to their cultural capacity. Instead we observe that the main signature of the southern African MSA is its overall variability, as demonstrated by changing sets of cultural performances. Finally, at the scale of resolution considered here, our results suggest that climate is not the most significant factor driving human activities during the MSA. Instead, we postulate that behavioral flexibility itself became the key adaptation.     

An Anthropological Archaeologist: The Contributions of William A. Longacre to Archaeological Theory,Method, and Practice

Of the “new archaeologists” who developed social models for prehistoric organization, William A. Longacre was a pioneer. Here, we review his contributions and the role he played in expanding archaeological method, theory, and practice. His innovative work in the American Southwest involving ceramic sociology was emulated, critiqued, and extended by several generations of archaeologists. Recognizing the concerns raised by this early work, Longacre developed one of the most successful ethnoarchaeological projects in the world among the Kalinga of northern Luzon in the Philippines. His work and that of his students and colleagues examined multiple, inter-connected aspects of ceramic variability linked to a variety of social, technological, functional, and economic processes. Kalinga data and analyses continue to inform archaeological practices and conclusions. Throughout his career, Longacre mentored archaeologists in both the USA and the Philippines, extending his influence geographically and establishing himself as one of the most important practitioners of processual archaeology.     

The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race,Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth‐Century American Medicine

Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non‐white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth‐century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico‐scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth‐century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race‐specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti‐abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.