Gendered struggles over land: shifting inheritance practices among the Serer in rural Senegal

Although women’s land rights are often affirmed unequivocally in constitutions and international human rights conventions in many African countries, customary practices usually prevail on the ground and often deny women’s land inheritance. Yet land inheritance often goes unnoticed in wider policy and development initiatives to promote women’s equal access to land. This article draws on feminist ethnographic research among the Serer ethnic group in two contrasting rural communities in Senegal. Through analysis of land governance, power relations and ‘technologies of the self’, this article shows how land inheritance rights are contingent on the specific effects of intersectionality in particular places. The contradictions of legal pluralism, greater adherence to Islam and decentralisation led to greater application of patrilineal inheritance practices. Gender, religion and ethnicity intersected with individuals’ marital position, status, generation and socio-ecological change to constrain land inheritance rights for women, particularly daughters, and widows who had been in polygamous unions and who remarried. Although some women were aware that they were legally entitled to inherit a share of the land, they tended not to ‘demand their rights’. In participatory workshops, micro-scale shifts in women’s and men’s positionings reveal a recognition of the gender discriminatory nature of customary and Islamic laws and a desire to ‘change with the times’. While the effects of ‘reverse’ discourses are ambiguous and potentially reinforce prevailing patriarchal power regimes, ‘counter’ discourses, which emerged in participatory spaces, may challenge customary practices and move closer to a rights-based approach to gender equality and women’s land inheritance.     

The Intersection of Narrative Policy Analysis and Policy Change Theory

Narrative policy analysis and policy change theory rarely intersect in the literature. This research proposes an integration of these approaches through an empirical analysis of the narrative political strategies of two interest groups involved in policy debate and change over an eight‐year period in the Greater Yellowstone Area. Three research questions are explored: (i) Is it possible to reconcile these seemingly disparate approaches? (ii) Do policy narrative strategies explain how interest groups expand or contain policy issues despite divergent core policy beliefs? (3) How does this new method of analysis add to the literature? One hundred and five documents from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and the Blue Ribbon Coalition were content analyzed for policy narrative strategies: identification of winners and losers, diffusion or concentration of costs and benefits, and use of condensation symbols, policy surrogates, and science. Five of seven hypotheses were confirmed while controlling for presidential administration and technical expertise. The results indicate that interest groups do use distinctive narrative strategies in the turbulent policy environment.     

The Chaco Connection: Evaluating Bonito-Style Architecture in Outlier Communities

Because architecture shapes and is shaped by human actions and perceptions, architectural variability has the potential to provide information about relationships among prehistoric social groups. This study examines communicative and enculturative information contained in Bonito-style architecture constructed in Chaco Canyon and outlying communities during the late eleventh century A.D. Does the appearance of Bonito-style architecture at outliers constitute direct involvement on the part of a centralized, Chacoan entity or could local people have been emulating Bonito-style architecture they saw at Chaco or in neighboring communities? These questions have implications for existing models of Chacoan social organization. To investigate, a comparative architectural analysis uses data from 61 great houses in 55 outlier communities. Analysis is based on the premise that outlier similarity should reflect a unified, direct Chacoan source for Bonito-style architecture, and diversity should reflect the converse. Because highly visible, external architectural characteristics can be emulated, five internal, low-visibility great-house architectural attributes were selected for comparison. Results indicate substantial diversity is contained within the Chacoan world. A variety of relationships probably existed between outlier communities and Chaco Canyon, and a range of explanatory models is necessary. Bonito-style architecture is more likely to be associated with a struggle to legitimate social power than with spontaneous, cooperative communal activity. Competitive emulation may account for the appearance of Bonito-style architecture in outlier communities toward the local end of the outlier spectrum.     

Tracking ‘Same–Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia

This essay focuses on the anthology Same–Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Unlike many other recently published, celebratory ‘gay anthologies’, this book contributes to ongoing scholarly work on specific same–sex erotic practices and relations in historical and cultural context. We examine issues relevant to this anthology and other such projects: the use of ‘love’ and ‘same–sex’ as (stable) signifiers over centuries; the validity of interpreting social reality through literary texts from the period; the difficulties of locating ‘love’ in severely hierarchical, even slave–owning, societies; and the implications of using such anthologies in the classroom.     

Human consumption of tortoises at Level IV of Bolomor Cave (Valencia, Spain)

The acquisition and consumption of small prey in the pre-Upper Palaeolithic is a highly debated topic at present. For some authors, the systematic obtaining of these animals is only part of the subsistence strategies used by anatomically modern Humans. However, the consumption of small prey dates back to the Plio-Pleistocene chronologies in some sites. Although the utilization of leporids has been recorded in several pre-Late Pleistocene European sites, the evidence of tortoise consumption is documented not as common for these periods. However, Level IV of Bolomor Cave has clear diagnostic elements to document the acquisition and use of tortoises (Testudo hermanni) for food in the form of: (1) cutmarks on limb bones and ventral surface of the carapace and plastron; (2) presence of burning on tortoise skeleton and shell; (3) elements of anthropogenic breakage on carapace and plastron: percussion pits, percussion notches and impact flakes; and (4) human toothmarks on limb bones. This paper tries to examine the possible patterns in the tortoise consumption sequence from Level IV of Bolomor Cave and improves data on the butchery process and tortoise consumption in the Late Middle Pleistocene.     

Identification of pastoral sites using stable nitrogen and carbon isotopes from bulk sediment samples: a case study in modern and archaeological pastoral settlements in Kenya

The identification of pastoral sites in the East African archaeological record is problematic. Recently, a method for the identification of degraded livestock enclosure sediments had been developed that takes into account the geoarchaeological indicators of micromorphology, phytolith concentrations and the mineral assemblages. This suite of indicators may not always be present in degraded livestock enclosure sediments. This study presents an additional indicator by which degraded livestock enclosure sediments may be identified, namely the isotopic composition of organic nitrogen measured on bulk sediment samples. We studied a highly controlled ethnoarchaeological sequence of abandoned Maasai livestock enclosure sediments sampled in Rombo area, southern Kenya. The results were compared to archaeological sediments from the Elmenteitan Pastoral Neolithic site of Sugenya, southwestern Kenya, radiocarbon dated to ca. 2000 BP (uncalibrated). The sediments from both sites were studied using all four types of analyses, i.e., micromorphology, mineralogy, phytolith concentrations, and stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic compositions on bulk sediment samples. The results show that in abandoned livestock enclosure sediments of known ages a significant enrichment in the heavy nitrogen isotope (¹⁵N) occurs, and that carbon isotopic compositions may be useful for differentiating cattle from caprine enclosures following their dietary preferences (i.e., grazers vs. browsers). A similar pattern of ¹⁵N enrichment is observed in sediments sampled within the site of Sugenya while sediments sampled outside the site's perimeter are generally depleted in ¹⁵N. The micromorphological, mineralogical and phytolith analyses support the conclusion that the sediments from within the site of Sugenya represent degraded livestock enclosure sediments. The carbon isotopic composition from the degraded dung deposits strongly suggests that livestock kept at Sugenya were cattle. Overall, this study presents new empirical data that can be used for the identification of livestock enclosures, and shows that the isotopic signatures and geoarchaeological indicators can preserve for at least two millennia.     

A new element of trampling: an experimental application on the Level XII faunal record of Bolomor Cave (Valencia,Spain)

In Level XII of Bolomor Cave (Valencia, Spain) modifications have been observed on some of the bone fragments that make up the faunal record. These alterations consist of small notches located on the oblique fracture angles of some bones. The frequency at which these modifications appear in the assemblage has obliged to plan several experimental series to know the process that causes them. To be more exact, this study aims to verify whether these small chips are the result of trampling. For this purpose, two experimental series have been developed. The first of which has the objective of differentiating between the variables related to the original state of the bone (green, semi-dry and dry) and the second is aimed at reproducing the modifications observed in the archaeological set, taking into account the data obtained in the previous series. Following these experiments, the appearance of small notches is observed on the oblique fracture angles of some bones in semi-dry state. These resulting chips are similar to those documented in Bolomor Cave, Level XII. Therefore, it is deduced that trampling is the principle cause of these modifications in the bone record. This fact has important archaeological implications, as the spatial distribution of this modification can provide information about the intrasite movements of the human groups.