Accessibility interrupted: the Shimshal road,Gilgit‐Baltistan,Pakistan

Geographers working in mountainous northern Pakistan note that gains in accessibility following the Karakoram Highway's official opening in 1978 significantly reshaped social organization, economic activity, and land use across the region. These valuable regional‐scale analyses provide few insights regarding the contingent and variable ways new roads are conceived and experienced at the community and household level by the people whose mobility they drastically impact. This article addresses that limitation of regional research by focusing on an individual agricultural community called Shimshal that in 2003 completed a 40‐kilometre link‐road connecting it to the highway. Drawing from qualitative information gathered before and after the Shimshal road's completion, we briefly describe the community's motivation for constructing the road, villagers’ accessibility‐related hopes and concerns as it was being built, and some of the social, cultural, and economic changes that followed the road's completion. The article concludes by summarizing the community's response so far to landslide‐induced destruction of over 20 kilometres of the Karakoram Highway which, since January 2010, has left community members without vehicular access to the rest of Pakistan just seven years after their link‐road's completion.     

Salesclerks, sexual danger, and national identity in Egypt, 1920s-1950s

This article investigates change and continuity in anxieties about shopping during the first half of the twentieth century in Egypt to argue that department stores and their salesclerks became critical sites for enacting and challenging new notions of sexuality and citizenship. Retail innovations, such as commission pay, display, free entry, and large commercial staffs, became understood as sexual and moral problems because department stores blurred the boundaries between classes and were public spaces where unrelated men and women could mix. These concerns about sexuality in the 1920s were recycled and amplified in the late 1940s and early 1950s when salesclerks again came under scrutiny during debates over citizenship and ethnicity. I argue that the particular way this latter debate was barnacled by the concerns of the 1920s helped to delineate the broader society's reaction to the challenges of defining Egyptian nationality.     

Biofilm growth in human skeletal material from ancient Mesopotamia

Investigators have long recognised the effects of microbial activity on archaeological bone. These investigators, however, have focused on single or groups of microbes rather than on complex microbial aggregates such as biofilms, a focus that has affected our understanding of archaeological bone biodeterioration. In this paper, we report on the investigation of a biofilm in archaeological human bone from the site of Tell Leilan, Syria (2900–1900 BCE). Scanning electron microscopy indicated that the biofilm is characterised by single cells and microcolonies of bacteria and fungi, as well as calcite crystals that were all embedded within extracellular polymeric substances. Using culture techniques and DNA sequencing, we isolated and identified several microbes from the biofilm including Amycolatopsis sp., Penicillium chrysogenum, Aspergillus sp., Chaetomium sp., and Cladosporium sp. Having characterised the Leilan biofilm, we are now closer to understanding the complex process of bone biodeterioration in archaeological bone collections.     

Immigrant "Illegality" as Neoliberal Governmentality in Leadville, Colorado

Abstract:  In this paper, I frame immigrant "illegality" as a local-scale technique of neoliberal governmentality. Drawing on recent work of anthropologists, I present illegality as a racialized, spatialized social condition which operates as governmentality by marginalizing and criminalizing immigrants, loosening the US border and forcing it into local spaces, and impacting immigrants' everyday lives and mobility. The paper then draws on a case study of Leadville, Colorado, to illustrate the utility of this framework. In Leadville, we see how through illegality neoliberalism seeps through scales. Illegality disciplines immigrant labor in service of the neoliberal order, turns all residents into surveillers of immigrants' subordinate sociospatial position, and masks contradictions within neoliberalism that arise particularly at the local scale. I argue that conceptualizing illegality as a governmentality technique provides a powerful tool for understanding changing state spatiality, especially ways in which neoliberalism is diffused and embedded into local economic, political, and social processes.     

Rubber Erasures,Rubber Producing Rights: Making Racialized Territories in West Kalimantan,Indonesia

This article makes connections between often‐disparate literatures on property, violence and identity, using the politics of rubber growing in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, as an example. It shows how rubber production gave rise to territorialities associated with and productive of ethnic identities, depending on both the political economies and cultural politics at play in different moments. What it meant to be Chinese and Dayak in colonial and post‐colonial Indonesia, as well as how categories of subjects and citizens were configured in the two respective periods, differentially affected both the formal property rights and the means of access to rubber and land in different parts of West Kalimantan. However, incremental changes in shifting rubber production practices were not the only means of producing territory and ethnicity. The author argues that violence ultimately played a more significant role in erasing prior identity‐based claims and establishing the controls of new actors over trees and land and their claims to legitimate access or ‘rightfulness’. Changing rubber production practices and reconfigurations of racialized territories and identity‐based property rights are all implicated in hiding the violence.