Ageing well: the time–spaces of possibility for older female Latvian migrants in the UK

In this article, we explore the relationships between ageing, place and migration based on life history interviews with 37 female Latvian migrants in the UK. Reflecting an approach that sees migration as both embodied and emplaced, we conceptualise ageing and migration as entwined becomings that reconfigure the possibilities of a ‘better life’ in different time–spaces. Our approach combines time-geography with a well-being-based approach to migration constraints and outcomes. Our stress is on vitality – the ways in which migrants are able to mobilise resources and enact agency even in an environment where some aspects of life and working conditions are restrictive and exploitative. Hence, older Latvian women are able to transgress negative perceptions of ageing in their home country and achieve a measure of empowerment, both economic and psychosocial by moving to the UK.     

Household Craft Production in the Prehispanic Urban Setting of Mayapán,Yucatan, Mexico

The complexity of the organization of craft production mirrors multiple aspects of the larger political economies of premodern states. At the late Maya urban center of Mayapán, variation in the social contexts of crafting within a single settlement defies simple classificatory models that once held sway in the literature of nonWestern state societies. Most surplus crafters were independent and affluent commoners; notable exceptions include artisans working under direct elite supervision or elites who were directly engaged in crafting. Although household workshops concentrated around the city’s epicenter, others were dispersed across the site in unassuming residential neighborhoods or near outlying monumental groups. We consider the significance of pronounced household and regional economic interdependencies founded on well-developed surplus crafting practices, imported raw materials, market exchange, and tribute obligations at Mayapán. As for other premodern states, craft production also gave rise to greater opportunities for wealth differentiation within the commoner class. Producers in this urban political capital contributed in significant ways to a stable political economy by supplying goods that were required at all levels of the social hierarchy.     

Religious Colonialism in Early Modern Malta: Inquisitorial Imprisonment and Inmate Graffiti

Early modern Malta was governed by three competing Roman Catholic institutions—Order of St. John, Bishopric, and Roman Inquisition—all of which ultimately answered to the Pope. By focusing on the inquisition, the institution most directly controlled by the Vatican, this paper explores the role of imprisonment in furthering the Vatican’s cultural and political control on the island. In doing so, this paper offers an archaeological perspective on an early modern prison context. Through analyses of the prison cells and the inmates’ graffiti, I argue that the inquisition’s ability to imprison was crucial to the Vatican’s colonial position in Malta.     

New perspectives on forced migration in the history of twentieth-century neuroscience

ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, comprised of six articles and one commentary, reflects on the multifold dimensions of intellectual migration in the neurosciences and illustrates them by relevant case studies, biographies, and surveys from twentieth-century history of science and medicine perspectives. The special issue as a whole strives to emphasize the impact of forced migration in the neurosciences and psychiatry from an interdisciplinary perspective by, first, describing the general research topic, second, by showing how new models can be applied to the historiography and social studies of twentieth-century neuroscience, and, third, by providing a deeper understanding of the impact of European émigré researchers on emerging allied fields, such as neurogenetics, biological psychiatry, psychosomatics, and public mental health, etc. as resulting from this process at large.     

Gender, representation, and power in San ethnography and rock art

Interpretation of San rock art has been heavily dependent on the various San ethnographies, particularly those of the /Xam, who inhabited the northern Cape Province, South Africa, until the early 20th century. A different reading of these ethnographies enables another avenue of interpretation: the interlinked themes of gender, sexuality, and rain appear to be as important in the art as shamanistic elements (reference to which has been a key development in understanding the art). While interpretation centering on the trance dance, recorded ethnographically from recent and contemporary San groups, has been most productive, many features of the art may be related to other aspects of San culture—to the female initiation ceremony, social organization, and the complex of notions and practices surrounding feminine gender and female sexuality.     

Aby Warburg's Hamburg Comedy: Wilhelmine Culture from the Perspective of a Pioneering Cultural Historian

This article examines an unpublished play written by Aby Warburg(1866–1929), entitled Hamburg Conversations on Art: HamburgComedy, 1896. The play offers a glimpse into Warburg's viewson modern art and into his thinking on the various processesof modernization. It demonstrates how his enthusiasm for innovativeart forms emerged, in part, as an expression of his rebellionagainst the religious, social and professional conventions ofthe German–Jewish economic élite into which hewas born. As with many of his generation, Warburg claimed socialand cultural progress under the banner of artistic innovation.The play also provides a focus for a discussion of the waysin which Warburg's interest in modern art was closely alliedwith pioneering research into the role of symbolism and artin European history. To this end, the article explores Warburg'sconcern about the prospect of a culture in which symbolic andmythical thinking was replaced by a technology that destroyedhumanity's contemplative bond with the world. It also demonstratesthat Warburg's perspective on social and cultural modernizationcombined seemingly different attitudes: it blended the future-orientatedoptimism of an urban, liberal and cosmopolitan outlook withthe nostalgic pessimism of an ardent patriot whose life wasshaped by traditional values and who was uneasy about the increasinglyrationalized and materialistic society in which he lived. Inconclusion, the article suggests that this attitude was notuncommon among the Bürgertum and points to the difficultiesof conceiving of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’in Imperial Germany in terms of mutual exclusivity.