Enthusiasm,craft and authenticity on the High Street: micropubs as ‘community fixers’

The retail recession has left a legacy of vacant shops on many shopping streets, with closures having significant consequences for local populations. But several new ‘pop-up’ formats are bucking this trend by bringing community-oriented forms of consumption back to the High Street. The micropub is a notable example, a small-scale venue selling real ale that has taken over a vacant shop premise, usually in smaller and struggling town centres. The rapid take-up of the micropub concept has attracted considerable attention, suggesting a model for retail regeneration based on community-mindedness and a close relationship between owner and customer. Based on ethnographic research in micropubs, alongside interviews with landlords, this paper suggests that their success is dependent upon the enthusiasm of landlords and customers alike, with such ‘cultures of enthusiasm’ encouraged via the nostalgic motifs of craft, tradition and Britishness that inform the curation of these seemingly ‘authentic’ spaces. The paper concludes that the micropub offers a form of socially-connective consumption highly valued by some, but stresses that there are clear limits to the ability of such spaces to be ‘community fixers’ given enthusiasm for real ale remains a distinctly white, male, and middle-aged pursuit.     

Mass violence,trauma, and their children

This article concerns the social construction of collective memory particularly with regard to the social remembering of mass violence and trauma. How do individual memories of mass violence which are often idiosyncratic, nonverbal, and embodied coalesce and crystallize into coherent narratives shared by a group. The books reviewed here demonstrate that there are both discursive means of remembering and non-discursive means of remembering. Social memories can take narrative and textual form or they can take performative and ritual form. How does the non-discursive interact with the discursive and do these interactions depend upon varying social, political, and cultural circumstances? An encompassing theoretical issue is addressed in this literature concerning the adequacy of sociological and anthropological models in the elucidation of trauma memory vs. psychological models which place emphasis on the individual. Subsumed within this question is an inquiry into the adequacies and inadequacies of Western clinical models, such as the PTSD model, in explaining trauma due to mass violence, and the opposition frequently noted among survivors between silence and verbalization. Numerous ethnographic examples are considered in this article but particular attention is paid to the Nazi, Cambodian, and Rwandan genocides.     

Partnership Networks for Urban Development: How Structure is Shaped by Risk

In delivering public policy, governments worldwide increasingly partner with diverse sets of stakeholders. This spreads commercial risk, but particularly where agendas diverge, introduces new risks related to trust in relationships. The “risk hypothesis” distinguishes between networks for “cooperation” problems, where partners have high individual payoffs for uncooperative behaviors, and “coordination” problems, where partners subscribe to a common goal and uncooperative behaviors are less rewarding. We used mixed‐methods to study networks of local and state government, developers, and consultants that center on joint‐venture partnerships for developing new urban, residential projects. Statistical network methods showed that within the mix of partners involved in development projects, only state governments displayed structural patterns associated with solving “cooperation” problems (rather than coordination). In other words, the patterns of state government interactions showed they are most exposed to risky relationships. In contrast to the state governments’ apparent exposure to risk, qualitative data showed they are not only well trusted but also overall the partnership networks reported very low levels of conflict. By exploring the distribution of “cooperation” and “coordination,” we identified which stakeholders perceived most risk. In our case, how the state governments’ structure interactions in response to risky relationships leads to an overall network characterized by trust.     

Investigating perceptions of antisocial behaviour and neighbourhood ethnic heterogeneity in the British Crime Survey

There is much concern in the UK about the effects on community cohesion of antisocial behaviour, but to date relatively little is known about the geography of such behaviour: for what sort of people, and in what sort of places, are high levels of antisocial behaviour a problem? What are the links, if any, between such behaviour and local socio-economic conditions, and how do such perceptions relate to local crime rates? Using data from the British Crime Survey and other secondary datasets, we develop and extend previous work that has investigated links between individual socio-economic characteristics, neighbourhood characteristics and individual perceptions of antisocial behaviour. A multilevel modelling approach is used to ensure that individual- and area-level effects are not conflated. Secondly we extend the substantive knowledge surrounding the relationship between neighbourhood ethnic heterogeneity and individual perceptions of antisocial behaviour. In so doing, we challenge recent contentions that heterogeneity is associated with declining social cohesion and trust. We conclude that at a small-area scale for England, the primary area-level determinants of high levels of antisocial behaviour lie in material circumstances, and that ethnic heterogeneity has no discernible effect on perceptions of antisocial behaviour.     

Lower Pecos and Coahuila peyote: new radiocarbon dates

Peyote, a psychoactive cactus native to the Chihuahuan Desert, has been preserved from excavations at only two archaeological sites: Shumla Caves in the Lower Pecos region of southwest Texas and shelter CM-79 near Cuatro Ciénegas in Coahuila, Mexico. We determined three indistinguishable radiocarbon ages of 5160 ± 45, 5200 ± 35, and 5210 ± 35 ¹⁴C years BP, yielding a mean age of 5195 ± 20 ¹⁴C years BP for the three specimens from Shumla Caves. For one of the Cuatro Ciénegas specimens we obtained the first direct radiocarbon date of 835 ± 35 ¹⁴C years BP. This study demonstrates the use of peyote by inhabitants of the Lower Pecos region of the Chihuahuan Desert about 6000 calendar years ago, and confirms its use by inhabitants of the Cuatro Ciénegas region of the Chihuahuan Desert in Late Prehistoric times. The Shumla Caves' specimens are composed of an aggregate of ground peyote mixed with other plant material, i.e., they appear to be manufactured peyote effigies, and are definitely not intact peyote buttons.     

Variable nucleotide tandem repeat (VNTR) typing of two palaeopathological cases of lepromatous leprosy from Mediaeval England

Using ancient DNA methods, we have examined in detail two archaeological cases of leprosy from Mediaeval England. The first was a child skeleton with rhino-maxillary changes typical of lepromatous leprosy (LL). The second case was the skeleton of a male adult who showed both typical rhino-maxillary changes and osteitis/periostitis on the leg and foot bones. Bone powder was sampled from both cases and DNA extracts were prepared. These were subjected to a series of polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) specific for regions on the Mycobacterium leprae genome. The repetitive element RLEP was used for confirmation of M. leprae DNA and then three polymorphic regions were successfully amplified and sequenced to determine the number of variable nucleotide tandem repeats (vntr) at these loci. These were the microsatellite regions ML2344 and ML2172 and the minisatellite region ML0058. Genotyping data from the strains preserved within the skeletal remains were compared with those obtained for a reference strain of M. leprae. Variation at these three loci was found between both burials and the reference strain, indicating that vntr typing of LL cases from the archaeological record is a useful way of confirming disease and an additional means of authenticating aDNA data. This demonstrates the feasibility of targeting multiple loci for phylogenetic studies of leprosy strains from archival sources.     

‘Patriotic Femininity’: Women's Morals and Men's Morale During the Second World War

The Second World War was a period which witnessed struggles for the definitions of appropriate ‘patriotic’ feminine identities and behaviours as much as it placed demands on men and their masculinities. The disruption to normality led to a heightened sense of heterosexuality. There were contests for the definition of femininity, contests which contradicted the centrality of discourses constructing domesticity and passivity. The way history has been constructed the heroic myths of the Second World War are male, thus there is a need for other kinds of critical knowledge to provide an understanding of women's lives and another, feminine, kind of heroism.