'Casino capitalism' and the financial crisis

I argue that by describing the current financial crisis as the result of 'casino capitalism' commentators are reinforcing familiar and baseless assumptions about exchange and deflecting serious criticism from the true causes of the problem and how we might respond to them. I refer to recent ethnography by anthropologists working in international finance and to three features of casinos: customers, markets and regulation, in order to support the argument that neither individual casinos, nor the industry in general are good exemplars of 'casino capitalism'.     

Is sibling rivalry fatal?: siblings and mortality clustering

Evidence drawn from nineteenth-century Belgian population registers shows that the presence of similarly aged siblings competing for resources within a household increases the probability of death for children younger than five, even when controlling for the preceding birth interval and multiple births. Furthermore, in this period of Belgian history, such mortality tended to cluster in certain families. The findings suggest the importance of segmenting the mortality of siblings younger than five by age group, of considering the presence of siblings as a time-varying covariate, and of factoring mortality clustering into analyses.     

An Army of Educators: Gender,Revolution and the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961

The conventional scholarly narrative of gender in post‐revolutionary Cuba is that the revolutionary government prevented the emergence of an expressly feminist movement by addressing women's basic needs and simultaneously eliminating autonomous space for female organising. Recent scholarship has increasingly considered women's participation in revolutions in order to understand women's roles in post‐revolutionary societies. Looking beyond armed insurrection for instances of female participation in revolution, this article considers women's roles in the Cuban Literacy Campaign. An analysis of the testimonies of female former volunteer teachers and of the official rhetoric and content of the campaign suggests that the broader narrative of cooption, while certainly accurate overall, threatens to obscure instances in which women did challenge traditional gender norms in meaningful ways. This paper argues that the Cuban Literacy Campaign and the participation of women in that campaign significantly impacted Cuban patriarchal culture at a crucial moment of consolidation for the revolutionary regime. In other words, though the male‐led revolution did not give women the space to organise against patriarchy, by actively participating in the revolution, women did help change the nature of Cuban patriarchy.     

‘I'm protective of this yard’: long-term homeless persons' construction of home place and workplace in a historical public space

Though research has examined the ways homeless persons work to be in public space, less research covers tying these ways to personal and social needs associated with home place and workplace. Additionally, scholars have given less attention to how central public spaces may not only be integral to long-term homeless persons' daily paths but also how they may be employed differently from marginal public spaces. In this article, I explain how long-term homeless persons attempted to make a historical-tourist public space, the Jackson Square area in New Orleans' French Quarter, personally and socially meaningful as home place and workplace. Drawing from participant observation and observation, I examine long-term homeless persons' attachment to Jackson Square. I argue that the Square's historical and tourist attraction status actually supported long-term homeless persons' desire and ability to occupy it in significant ways. This status along with long-term homeless persons' negotiating practices and inconsistent practices of authority and policing by those with (more) power made it possible for the Jackson Square area to become long-term homeless persons' home place and workplace.     

Temporal changes in diet: a stable isotope analysis of late Iron Age and Roman Dorset,Britain

This study investigates the relationship between diet and cultural change in late Iron Age and Romano-British populations from Dorset, England (1st century BC to the early 5th century AD). Dorset was the only region in Britain to exhibit continuity in inhumation burial rites through these periods and a wide array of environmental, archaeological and material culture evidence is available there. A sample of N = 77 human adult and N = 17 faunal rib samples were utilized for carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis to test the hypothesis that Romanization of the diet would result in greater dietary variation.     

Charcoal reflectance measurements: implications for structural characterization and assessment of diagenetic alteration

Charcoal is a valuable source of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental proxy data. However growing evidence suggests that production conditions can strongly influence post-depositional alteration of charcoal. Consequently, both reconstruction of production temperature and understanding of the potential for diagenetic alteration are of great interest. Here, we use mean random reflectance (Ro_mean) in conjunction with other chemical characterization methods to address these questions. Ro_mean was obtained for a suite of modern analogue charcoal, produced under controlled conditions, and for a series of natural charcoal samples, obtained from archaeological and palaeoenvironmental deposits. Ro_mean proves to be a robust measure to assess formation temperature for samples produced at 400 °C and above, even after exposure to highly oxidizing conditions. Ro_mean is also useful for samples formed between 300 °C and 400 °C. However, if an assemblage of charcoals has been exposed to oxidizing conditions, lower temperature charcoals may be preferentially lost. It is apparent that charcoal produced at lower temperatures is more highly susceptible to chemical oxidation, and that there is a continuum in charcoal degradation potential, dependant upon fuel material and production conditions.