Did Women Have a Transformation of the Roman World?

Despite intense and interdisciplinary interest in the transition from antiquity to the middle ages, work on women and gender generally remains marginal to the dominant paradigms for understanding political and social change in the period from c. 300 to c. 800 ce . This article critiques these interpretations from a gendered perspective and also reviews recent work on women and gender in late antiquity, Byzantium and the early medieval Europe. By outlining similarities and contrasts between women's lives in early medieval western and Byzantine cultures, it emphasises the diversity of women's experience. Suggestions about how to envisage a fully gendered history of this period conclude with a call for radically new approaches to the study of the transformation of the Roman world.     

The Mystification of Spices in the Western Tradition

The oriental spices that so dazzlingly performed in the early modern economy were mystified in the sense that, from being rare, valuable and of as yet unspecified provenance, these objects were raised within the western phenomenological scheme beyond the commonplace and ascribed marvellous properties. This was part of the mystification of the East, a time-worn conception of western society inherited from the first expeditions of Alexander the Great, which created an enduring and formative legend of oriental luxury, abundance, and exuberance that the medieval penchant for marvels (Mirabilia) conveniently appropriated. Spices too were mystified through the medium of biblical literature and specifically through associations with the terrestrial paradise, which was a place much debated by cosmographers until the seventeenth century. This paper concentrates on the process of mystification rather than its projection, and suggests that it constituted a self-conscious aesthetic - if held within certain imaginative bounds - even when confronted by empirical knowledge. I conclude with a critical discussion of quite how marvellous the marvellous must have seemed to its audience, and posit it somewhere between the mythical and legendary horizons of that society.     

Flexibility or exploitation? Corporate social responsibility and the perils of universalization (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

As anthropologists and other critics of capitalism turn their attention to the controversial and burgeoning corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, most focus on conflicts in community relations and environmental degradation. Few scholars have examined equally pertinent questions of labor restructuring, even though these transformations emerged at about the same time as the rise of CSR. In this article, we draw on research in two Peruvian mining communities to explore the potential contradiction between the simultaneous mandate for corporations to present themselves as responsible employers, on the one hand, and the drive to rationalize labor and reduce financial responsibility for the workforce, on the other. We suggest that for both corporate officials and some scholars, this tension remains a latent one because CSR discourses and documents generalize corporate interests as the interests of mines as a whole.