Negotiating social identities: The influence of gender,age and ethnicity on young people's ‘street careers’ in Tanzania

This paper explores the diverse ways that children and young people negotiate their social identities and construct their life course trajectories on the street, based on ethnographic research with street children in Tanzania. Drawing on the concept of a ‘street career’, I show how differences of age, gender and ethnicity intersect with the time spent on the street, to influence young people's livelihood strategies, use of public space, access to services, and adherence to cultural rites of passage. Using the notion of ‘gender performativity’, I analyse how young people actively reconfigure gender norms and the concept of ‘the family’ on the street.     

A Filtered Past: Interpreting Salt Production and Trade Models from Two Remnant Brine-Enrichment Mounds at the Ancient Maya Paynes Creek Salt Works,Belize

The mounds at Witz Naab and Killer Bee are the only known remaining aboveground evidence of a once-thriving salt industry in Punta Ycacos Lagoon, a large saltwater system in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize. Over one hundred ancient Maya salt works dated to the Classic period (a.d. 300–900) have been submerged by sea-level rise in the lagoon. We have hypothesized that mounds were once numerous features on the landscape prior to a sea-level rise that occurred in the area during the Terminal Classic period. Lacking at these underwater sites are earthen mounds formed by discarded soil from the leaching process in which the salinity of seawater was enriched by leaching brine through salty soil. Enriching the salinity of seawater by leaching or by solar evaporation is virtually universal in ethnographic case studies. Data from the excavations are evaluated to interpret the ancient activities that produced the earthen mounds, scales of production, and how the coastal Maya of southern Belize participated in the larger Classic Maya economy.     

Country Roads: Travel,Visibility, and Late Classic Settlement in the Southern Maya Mountains

Mayanist archaeology has long been concerned with creating and evaluating explanatory models for the locations of ancient sites relative to one another and to the physical geography of the Maya world. This study combines epigraphic data and spatial analyses to explore motivations for settlement location and to interrogate territorial strategies in Late Classic (a.d. 600–830) kingdoms in the southern Maya Mountains, around the modern towns of Dolores and Poptún, Guatemala. Least-cost path analyses were used to model natural travel corridors and their relationship with site location was assessed. In conjunction, viewshed analyses were applied to evaluate the importance of visual connections to likely travel routes. The results are considered in the context of the socio-politics and economics of the region, and raise questions about the character of and interconnections between travel, exchange, settlement location, and mechanisms for reinforcing territorial claims in the Late Classic Southern Maya Mountains.     

Place,identity and social conflict in post-industrial England: cases from South Lincolnshire in the 1980s

ABSTRACT

This article examines a case of social conflict in an overlooked corner of England (Lincolnshire) in the late 1980s when self-described ‘local’ people opposed private housing developments and the migration of ‘southerners’, ‘townies’ and ‘commuters’ into their towns and villages. Protestors lamented change and disliked newcomers. This was a reaction to the arrival of affluent, ‘post-industrial’ workers on the back of a booming service sector. They personified a series of complex, interconnected socioeconomic and cultural changes which disrupted patterns of life rooted in disappearing productive industries and destabilised communities amidst factory closures, agricultural mechanisation, job losses and now suburbanisation. This affected meanings ascribed to places and introduced hierarchies and conflicts structured around Britain’s transition towards a service economy. Opposition was expressed through nostalgia, conservationism, inverse snobbery, anti-metropolitanism, attachment to ‘local’ identities, and concerns about declining independence, community and power. This paper argues that these protests demonstrate the emergence of new ideas about social relations, difference and distinction in post-industrial England. The findings also highlight feelings which would slowly seep into a new, reactionary politics foreshadowing the way that many towns and rural areas (including Lincolnshire) embraced a new political right in the first decades of the next millennium.     

IDENTITIES AND URBAN SOCIAL SPACES IN LITTLE TOKYO,LOS ANGELES: JAPANESE AMERICANS IN TWO ETHNO‐SPIRITUAL COMMUNITIES

Ethnic identities are expressed and articulated in particular places. These mutable identities are crucial sources of meaning in the lives of social actors. This article seeks to elucidate just how the contexts of specific institutions in an urban enclave will impact upon patterns of conflict and cooperation among different subgroups practising two religious traditions. Historical discourses of ethnic community and ‘race’, shifts in migration patterns and the changing nature of the Little Tokyo enclave provide the formative patterns of social spaces, in which ethnic actors seek to create lives of spiritual and material meaning and security. Barth's concept of the social organization of cultural difference encourages analysis of ethnic identities as a dynamic and mutable enterprise. Because the maintenance of boundaries is crucial to identities, the manner in which a group seeks to maintain difference is intermeshed with the social terrain of particular places. Through qualitative methods of semi‐structured and informal interviews and participant observations, this project engages Japanese American identities within the context of two religious communities in an urban enclave. Fieldwork was conducted in two institutions, a Protestant church and a Buddhist temple, with the aim of exploring how Japanese American identities are expressed and (re)negotiated within different ethno‐spiritual communities. Such communities are fundamental to the expression of ethnic identities, and to the emotional lives of worshippers, particularly seniors and new immigrants.     

Artifacts that speak for themselves: Sounds underfoot in Mesoamerica

Previously overlooked in archaeological research, natural sounds emitted from the underground affect humans and culture. In this paper, it is suggested that noises generated by subterranean ground movement, water, wind, and wildlife are a reason why residents in Mesoamerica perceive caves, waterholes, limestone sinks, and mountains as sacred. Too, a mental grasp of the sounds, conceptualized as anthropomorphized voices and music, may have been employed as an ideological basis for authority in Maya society. Support is shown using examples of ethnohistory, ethnography, and archaeology. Called for is the systematic collection and study of underground sounds, as artifacts, to define the noises as possible use determinants in ritual venues and settlement sites. Their potential importance as early warning devices for destructive agents in the natural environment suggests that an understanding of the noises and their regard by residents in the region could contribute to theory-building in anthropology, particularly in issues of human-environment relations, and sociocultural development.