Race and the Making of Southeast San Francisco: Towards a Theory of Race‐Class

San Francisco is engaged in a redevelopment project that could bring millions in investment and community benefits to a starved neighborhood—and yet the project is embedded in an urban development process that is displacing residents. In trying to unsettle these contradictions, this paper achieves two aims. First, I unearth a little known history of redevelopment activism that frames debate around the current project. Second, I use this history to argue for a reframing of the language of race. To wit: although the social construction of race and racism is well established, race is still deeply understood in everyday life as natural. This paper offers a theoretical fusing of race and class, “race‐class”, to help us think race through a vital constructionist lens. Race‐class makes present the economic dynamics of racial formation, and foregrounds that race is a core process of urban political economy. Race‐class works both “top‐down” and “ground‐up.” While it is a vehicle for capital's exploitation of people and place, race‐class also emerges as a mode of power for racialized working‐class residents.     

Pavlov and Cajal: Two different pathways to a Nobel Prize

Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) and Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) were two contemporary scientists who not only had a great impact on Russian and Spanish science but also on the international stage. Both shared several common features in their life and work, yet they followed fundamentally different paths during their training as scientists. While Pavlov received his laboratory training under the guidance of Ilya Tsion (1843–1912), Cajal did not receive any formal training within a particular laboratory nor did he have a mentor in the traditional sense, rather he was mainly self-taught, although he was supported by key figures like Maestre de San Juan (1828–1890) and Luis Simarro (1851–1921). In this article, we compare the scientific training of these two Nobel Prize laureates and the influences they received during their scientific lives.     

Occlusal microwear texture analysis and the diets of historical/prehistoric hunter‐gatherers

With the exception of few studies, occlusal microwear of pre‐agricultural modern humans has not been documented. In this study, microwear fabrics of samples from seven historic/prehistoric hunter‐gatherer populations with known and diverse dietary habits, representing mostly meat‐eaters from different environments, arctic/tundra (Tigara from Point Hope), cold‐steppe (Fuegians) and Mediterranean (Chumash), and mixed‐diet hunter‐gatherers from tropical climates (Andamanese and Khoe‐San from Matjes River, Riet River, and Oakhurst Shelter), were analysed to better understand how dietary differences affect microwear in these groups and to establish a reasonable comparative database for interpreting fossil hominins microwear. Significant microwear differences, related to diet and food preparation techniques, between the meat‐eaters and mixed‐diet hunter‐gatherers were detected. Finer scale differences within each of these dietary categories were also observed. Ethnographic accounts indicate that the Tigara and Andamanese ingested hard particles attached to their food as a result of their food preparation techniques; their microwear fabrics also reflect highly abrasive diets. On the other hand, as expected, the microwear signatures of the Chumash and Fuegians indicate a diet low in abrasives, reflecting their almost exclusive reliance on marine meat for subsistence and the low amounts of extraneous particles attached to this meat. The mixed‐diet Khoe‐San occupy an intermediate position between the Tigara and Andamanese on the one hand, and the Chumash and Fuegians on the other, with regard to the level of abrasives ingested. The Khoe‐San ate large amounts of hard plants, most likely responsible for abrading their enamel surface. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.