From the Waters to the Plate to the Latrine: Fish and Seafood from the Cardo V Sewer,Herculaneum

The excavation of an ancient sewer in the town of Herculaneum, Italy, provided the opportunity to study Roman diet in the Bay of Naples, including the marine component. The sewer served an apartment block which was buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and retained human and kitchen waste of the non-élite individuals living above. The remains showed a high degree of dietary diversity with around 70 fish, 48 marine mollusc and three marine arthropod taxa being identified. The fish were mostly small individuals which were probably netted in fairly shallow, coastal waters. The marine invertebrates included species of sandy shores, rocks and the sea bed but the majority could have been collected very close to the water’s edge. Both the fish and the shellfish would have been available locally in large quantities and probably represented cheap and nutritious dietary fare. Some of the consumed fish was probably salted (salsamenta) or fermented (as fish sauces such as garum), but it is thought that most of the fish and shellfish originated in the Bay of Naples and would have been purchased fresh. The difficulty of identifying preserved fish within the mixed sewer assemblage is discussed.     

A crisis of rights and responsibility: feminist geopolitical perspectives on Latin American refugees and migrants

With the advent of the Trump presidency we are facing the most anti-refugee and immigrant administration in recent U.S. history. This follows on the heels of the Obama era, characterized by record deportations and severe U.S. policies of deterrence towards Latin American refugees and migrants in its own backyard. This aggressive expansion of U.S. Homeland Security migration control included: outsourcing enforcement to Mexico; re-introducing migrant family detention; increasing ‘family unit’ raids; and accelerating immigration court hearings. These strategies of state deterrence and enforcement heightened vulnerability of asylum-seeking women and children from Mexico and Central America to human and legal rights abuses. I employ a feminist geopolitical approach to interrogate the intimate and embodied spaces of migration controls that ground the workings of the state in the normalized, routine, and informal practices of state officials and in the experiences of vulnerable yet resilient women and children refugees. Drawing upon examples from two research projects, informed by personal experience as a volunteer, I critically examine the everyday state practices of U.S./Mexico migration enforcement in three arenas - border security spaces, legal spaces, and carceral spaces. I contend that rather than an ‘immigrant or refugee crisis,’ these restrictive and intimate performances routinely deployed by border and legal bureaucrats reproduce and reinforce the structural and systemic crisis of rights and responsibility we are currently witnessing. Through a feminist ethic of care, social justice, and action, migrant and refugee narratives of everyday restriction may be deployed in resisting rights abuses and fostering responsibility, humanity, and hospitality towards newcomers.     

'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.