The inherent malleability of heritage: creating China’s beautiful villages

The Beautiful Villages policy is a major policy initiative to secure the socio-economic and environmental development of China. Tracking the development of this policy at a local level reveals the intricacies of policy-making, the extent of local autonomy, and the ways in which rural development is delivered. Contained within this is an examination of the evolving role of heritage within a policy framework that primarily focuses on the natural environment. This article traces the ways in which heritage became a component of this policy in one village in Zhejiang Province. It examines how the value of heritage was gradually realised by government officials and villagers, and how the concept of ecology was broadened to include built heritage, which ensures that funds can be accessed to stimulate rural development. In so doing the article investigates the concept of adaptive governance advanced by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry in the context of the inherent malleability of heritage as both a concept and a process. Focusing on the ways in which institutions recognise and then mobilise heritage to secure instrumental goals enables us to examine the inherent malleability of heritage and how this is aligned to meet specific policy goals in China, as it is around the world.     

Mapping the nation: street names and Arab‐Palestinian identity: three case studies

The naming of streets is part of the ongoing process of mapping the boundaries of the nation. This article examines three sets of Arab‐Palestinian street names – pre‐1948 Haifa and Jerusalem and post‐1948 Umm el Fahm – as locally constructed ‘texts of identity’ in the historical and political context of their official creation. The investigation aims at charting the ideological orientations represented and the political messages entailed in these three different textual manifestations of Arab‐Palestinian national identity. The analysis focuses on notions of historical and cultural heritage as expressed in the choice of street names. Finally, it offers an interpretative evaluation of this process, placing it within broader ideological and historical contexts.     

Children's Strikes, Parents' Rights: Paterson and Five Points

While Karen Calvert's book, Children in the House, deals with middle-class play, there is very little work devoted to children's toys and games in a working-class context. This paper uses the toy assemblages from two working-class sites to begin a discussion of working-class play and the struggle nineteenth-century working-class parents waged to impart their own values to their children. Because marbles were the predominant toy recovered from both sites, the nature of the game is discussed, and its relationship to working-class values is considered.     

Analysis of possible paleofecal samples from Pellejo Chico Alto,Peru: results and lessons

The analysis of four presumed paleofecal samples (coprolites) recovered from the Pellejo Chico Alto site in Peru is reported herein. The samples were processed using standard methods for paleofecal specimens but were discovered to be large pieces of intact tissue, rather than coprolites. While the results provided information regarding diet and cuisine at Pellejo Chico Alto, it also serves as an instructive lesson in the identification and analysis of paleofecal samples.     

Locating the voices of the sterilized

Scholars have been studying eugenics and sterilization for years, but only recently have some begun to examine these issues from the point of view of those sterilized. This is in large part because so few records containing the voices of the sterilized exist or are accessible to scholars. This essay examines my own effort to recover the voices of women sterilized in the post-baby boom United States from the "bottom up" and includes my own experience researching and writing Fit to Be Tied?: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1960-1984. It represents the beginning of a discussion about locating and using sources containing the voices of the sterilized and working with the limitations inherent to them.     

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.     

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.     

Can South–South Cooperation Compete? The Development Bank of Latin America and the Islamic Development Bank

Southern‐led multilateral development banks (MDBs) play a key role in harnessing global capital to finance the sectors most important to borrowers, especially infrastructure. Two prominent Southern MDBs, the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF) and the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), have become crucial drivers of regional infrastructure growth. This article explores whether their performance has lived up to their goals of establishing borrower control over bank governance without sacrificing financial dynamism. Using power‐weighted voting indices for member representation on bank boards, the authors determine that these banks offer borrowers much more representation on their boards than do their Northern‐based counterparts, the Inter‐American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The article also analyses bank operations to determine whether their governance structure impacts their internal performance, as reflected on balance sheets, and external performance — gaining relevance in development finance and particularly in infrastructure lending, including the burgeoning sector of sustainable (climate‐resilient) infrastructure. The authors find that the CAF and IsDB have become major players in development finance, including in sustainable infrastructure. However, important issues remain in relation to their continued internal capacity development, especially with regard to the environmental and social safeguards necessary to oversee lending.