Occipital perforations in a late neolithic probable aurochs (Bos primigenius bojanus) cranium from Letchworth,Hertfordshire, UK

An example of ante‐mortem occipital perforations in the cranium of a probable aurochs (Bos primigenius) cow from a late Neolithic archaeological site at Letchworth, Hertfordshire is presented. This is the second reported occurrence thus far of cranial perforations in a wild bovid and lends support to a congenital cause of the condition in archaeological domestic cattle skulls. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The transformational festival as a subversive toolbox for a transformed tourism: lessons from Burning Man for a COVID-19 world

Abstract

Examining transformational festivals can offer conceptual resources for a transformation of tourism into a more responsible and sustainable practice. By thinking together two usually distinct scholarly treatments of “transformation”—those of transformational tourism and those of transformational festivals—the COVID-19 pandemic can itself also be treated as a spatiotemporal threshold for the transformation of the travel industry. This approach can also help deconstruct the mechanisms that sustain deleterious aspects of tourism’s guest-host divide. As borders reopen and mobility and recreation recommences, the capacity of transformational festivals—both within and beyond their highly porous time-spaces– to transform their participants offer lessons for the blurring, if not the outright obliteration of the demarcation between guests and hosts. The creative and pro-social responses of members of one such transformational festival culture—Burning Man– to this and past crises are presented as examples for how values such as participation and civic responsibility may help people overcome shared conditions of hardship, and support more sustainable tourism practices in the post-COVID-19 world. Such subversive inter-subjective inversions may bring the recognition, in-itself, and production, for-itself, of a shared humanity of co-creators and participants in not just ephemeral, but accretive transformational social and environmental projects.     

MAPPING FINANCIAL LITERACY: COGNITION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Recent research suggests that regions can be characterized according to their (more or less) financial literacy. One implication is that there may be regional ecologies of finance nested within national institutions and global markets. This article begins by situating behaviour in time and space, linking behaviour to the interaction between cognition and the environment. This is followed by a substantive account of the geographical scale of the “environment” working from the global to the local and in return from the local to the global. By implication, maps of financial literacy reflect the skills and expertise of resident populations, affecting how they sort amongst the relevant information to make effective decisions (which have a material effect on their long‐term welfare). Explaining how and why this is the case is one goal of the article. It is also acknowledged that representing the relationship between behaviour and the environment is conceptually and empirically challenging. Reference is made to new findings about the ways in which people “sample” the world around them, suggesting that cognition and the environment are intertwined in ways that may reinforce existing urban and regional inequalities. In conclusion, implications are drawn for the design and implementation of pension and retirement saving policies.     

Khat: Chewing on a bitter controversy (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

When the slender green succulent leaves of the khat tree are chewed, a mild natural amphetamine called cathinone is gradually released, and absorbed into the bloodstream through the mouth and cheek tissues. The effects, which last for several hours, include the softening of one's temper, increased gregariousness, and a piqued sexual appetite, while at the same time inhibiting hunger, anxiety, and feelings of fatigue. In the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa, where khat is autochthonous, men have been chewing it recreationally for hundreds of years. Khat chewing has recently burgeoned to a global and pointed controversy, however, featuring in academic ethnopharmacology journals, the official publications of neoliberal development organizations, and worldwide in popular news media outlets. Khat has thus received multitudinous accusations of it being: an obstacle to economic growth; a pernicious narcotic; a positive mediator of political discourse in the public sphere; a public health concern; and a barrier to national development. Of these ambiguous tensions, Klein et al. (2012: 1) say that ‘Khat provides a unique example of a herbal stimulant that is defined as an ordinary vegetable in some countries and a controlled drug in others’, fingering khat as an exemplar of a globally contested object of concern – constituting different political stakes when viewed from distinct situated perspectives – and ready prey for anthropological critique. This essay interrogates some of the divergent formulations that khat has taken across the distinct political arenas that orchestrate the ‘controversy’. Following a Latourian actor‐network approach, I argue against a universal ontology of khat, suggesting instead that khat might be more meaningfully traced and apprehended through the political work it achieves in its various contexts and situated deployments. This critical reading of khat as a ‘thing in movement’ should therefore speak to the anthropology of controversy more broadly.