Stigma,stereotypes and Brazilian soap operas: road-blocks to ending human trafficking in Vietnam,Ghana and Ukraine

During the last 15 years, we have witnessed a significant and increasing focus on human trafficking in the work and research of international organisations, local and international non-governmental organisations, governments, researchers and academics from a range of disciplines. However, the focus remains on presumed structural causes of trafficking, including assumptions regarding victims' levels of education and sex. Other socio-cultural factors are frequently ignored in trafficking discourse. Based on fieldwork carried out in Vietnam, Ghana and Ukraine from July 2009 to November 2010, including 50 interviews with key informants, this article directs attention to some of these oft-ignored factors that continue to act as a barrier to ending human trafficking. Attention is paid to three socio-cultural factors that act as road-blocks to efforts to counter trafficking in all three countries: first, the stigmatisation of both sex work and trafficking; second, a narrow understanding of who constitutes a victim of trafficking and third, lack of attention by researchers and activists to the role of images of successful migration abroad as an influential pull factor. These research findings indicate the importance of understanding the intersections between race, culture, gender, sexuality and class to relation to women's and men's involvement in unsafe and/or exploitative migration abroad.     

Analysis of sexual dimorphism of craniofacial traits using geometric morphometric techniques

This work deals with the assessment of cranial sexual dimorphism in human skeletal samples applying geometric morphometric techniques. The purpose of this research is to apply such techniques to quantitatively describe in craniofacial traits the degree and pattern of shape and size sexual dimorphism. Likewise, we evaluate the precision and accuracy of semilandmark‐based techniques for sex estimation. We employ a sample of 125 adult skulls of known sex from the Coimbra collection. A set of coordinate points was selected to describe glabella, mastoid, frontal and zygomatic processes. The results of intra‐class correlation coefficient (ICC) show excellent intra‐ and inter‐observer agreement (ICC > 0.96) in the location of the coordinates of points employed. The principal component analysis (PCA) performed on shape variables shows a large superposition of both sexes, suggesting a relatively low degree of dimorphism in shape. As a consequence, the average percentages of correct sex estimations based on these variables were of 60.12 and 68.90%, obtained by discriminant analysis with leave‐one‐out cross validation and k‐means clustering respectively. Conversely, when centroid size is included in PCA, females and males exhibit large separation along the first component. The highest values of correct assignment (77.86 and 72.15%) were found using shape–size variables with discriminant and k‐means clustering analysis, indicating that the traits analysed display marked sex differences related to the larger size and more robust features of males. Finally, the advantages of geometric morphometric techniques are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Examining Activity Patterns and Biological Confounding Factors: Differences between Fibrocartilaginous and Fibrous Musculoskeletal Stress Markers

The present study examines a sample of 105 hunter–gatherer California Amerinds to determine whether fibrocartilaginous musculoskeletal stress markers (MSMs) are better for activity reconstructions than fibrous MSMs. Femoral and humeral head diameters were measured as proxies to body size. All data were analysed for statistical significance using non‐parametric tests. Fibrous MSMs of the left deltoideus, left and right hip adductors, and left and right tibial soleus correlate positively with body size proxies. For fibrocartilaginous MSMs, the right humeral teres minor insertion negatively correlates with humeral head diameter. Both types of MSMs correlate positively with age. More upper limb fibrocartilaginous MSMs display asymmetry than do upper limb fibrous MSMs. Lower limb sex differences were found at the same MSM sites that correlated with body size. Upper limb sex differences at the right teres major, a fibrous site, and the right triceps brachii, a fibrocartilaginous site, seem to reflect activity patterns. Results suggest that fibrocartilaginous MSMs are more useful in reconstructing activity patterns because they display more asymmetry in upper limbs and are less affected by body size than are fibrous MSMs. Yet, correlations with age and a lack of variability at fibrocartilaginous MSM sites may hinder their utility in activity reconstructions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gender and Language in Ethnographic and Evolutionary Perspectives

Much research in the field of language and gender has been hampered by unquestioned a priori dualistic assumptions about contrasting gender roles for men and women. The works reviewed here all demonstrate that simplistic dualistic beliefs about what are typical male or female ways of speaking do not hold water. The variables that determine speech styles are complex and mutually interactive: place of residence, class, formality, age, and gender, and others. Women are just as capable of directive speech as men, and men, of hedged speech. Dualistic thinking about gender serves only to reinforce current hegemonies.     

冤哉，秋瑾女士——析时论对秋瑾案的评说

1907年的皖浙案震动全国,上海各报连续多日追踪报导,猛烈抨击地方政府和涉案官员,显示了民间舆论"天下己任"的责任感与使命感.与今日高扬秋瑾"革命女杰"、"反清志士"迥然不同的是,当时凡涉及秋瑾与浙案的新闻、论说,皆强调弱女子不会参加革命,这是官方株连无辜的冤案.其中原因既有清政府权威丧失,也与延续千年仍是当时社会主流意识的性别与社会角色观念有关.     

Intimate Consumption and New Sexual Subjects Among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea

This article examines the transformation of sexual meanings, attitudes, norms, and practices surrounding depletion and pollution across decades (1974–2010) among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. In the premodern village, all sexual intercourse, whether with boy‐initiates or women, was ritualized and ultimately controlled by the men's secret society. Intimate consumption refers traditionally to a symbolic complex of beliefs, concepts, emotions, and ritual experiences involving sexuality, bodily health, social relationships, and gendered politics. But it also covers sexual anxieties corresponding to the transfer and loss of bodily fluids via the perceived depletion and pollution of self and body. For adult men, the sense of intimate consumption requires repeated substance replenishment and purification. Intimate consumption made oral and vaginal sex highly rule‐bound, taboo laden, and intensely regulated in terms of the meaning, scope, duration, and intended goals of sexual exchange. Pacification, colonization, out‐migration, Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Christianity, and primary schooling in the Sambia Valley over a period of decades instigated social transformations that challenged and wore down this system of sexual regulation. Thus, the transition from ritual to non‐ritual practices, i.e., more individualistic sexual relationships, highlight narratives of change in the Sambia sexuality. With the demise of ritual initiation in the 1980s and 1990s, and the appearance of HIV and SikAids in the Sambia Valley, explicit ritual sexual techniques were no longer socialized. Modernity (in the sense of a set of policies, attitudes, and rules introduced through institutions such as the government community school) and SDA church sociality influenced both the pace and form of this sexual transformation. Among the greatest changes was the expansion of female agency and sexual autonomy, and personal decision‐making vis‐à‐vis especially marriage and also romance, courtship, and sex. Notably, oral sex, once universal and mandatory, largely disappeared from Sambia intimate relations. Today, spousal intimacy reveals a different set of more ‘modern’ meanings and behaviors compared to two generations ago, e.g., more mutualistic and companionate. Intimate consumption remains a worry for certain Sambia young men and women today however, influenced in part by the rise of the HIV pandemic, mobility, and the absence of normative narratives of sexuality in villages and town settlements. This creates public spaces wherein new sexual subjects have emerged in the villages and urban settlements within the Sambia Valley and in settlements throughout PNG.     

Reading for gender

This essay serves to introduce the collection of articles in the present issue on the subject of the ‘History of Early Modern Masculinities’. It addresses the place of masculinity in early-modern historiography, highlights neglected areas of research, outlines methodological challenges and suggests new directions in the study of gender.     

Making links between sex work,gender and victimisation: the politics and pedagogies of John Schools

This article will explore the links between sex work, gender and victimisation. It will draw on the literature on victims and victimology, as well as the literature on sex work, to explore the ways in which sex work, gender and victimisation are presented at John Schools. These are court diversion educational programmes that teach those arrested for soliciting for the purposes of buying sex the negative consequences of their actions and are currently operating in parts of the USA, Canada, the UK and South Korea. Focusing on a case study of a John School in England, it shows how the pedagogies of the John School are inherently political and structured by the local and extra-local contexts in which it is situated. It also demonstrates the small but significant influence of radical feminist ideas and tropes in the John School and the ways in which the John School presents victimisation relationally as male clients causing hidden harms to victims, most notably residents and female sex workers. Here, the active construction of both the victim and offender identity is critically reflected on.     

A Bioarchaeological and Biogeochemical Study of Warfare and Mobility in Andahuaylas,Peru (ca. ad 1160–1260)

Warfare impacts how people and populations can move about the landscape. Ethnographers have posited that internal warfare, conflict that takes place within a single society, is strongly associated with female abduction. In contrast, external warfare, combat between different societies, is often accompanied by the in‐migration of men for purposes of defence. To test this assertion, we evaluate human remains from one of the most violent eras in Andean prehistory, the Late Intermediate Period (ad 1000–1400). In the south‐central highlands of Andahuaylas, Peru, this era witnessed the coalescence of two formidable polities, the Chanka and the Quichua. Ethnohistoric accounts describe internal warfare among the Chanka and external warfare between the Quichua and their neighbours. In this study, bioarchaeological and biogeochemical methods are marshalled to elucidate ancient patterns of violence and mobility with greater nuance. We employ strontium isotope analysis of tooth enamel apatite to inform on residential origin, and we reconstruct patterns of violent conflict through analysis of cranial trauma. In all, 265 crania were excavated from 17 cave ossuaries at two Chanka sites and one Quichua site. Data were collected on age, sex and cranial modification—an indicator of social identity and cranial trauma. A representative subsample of molars from 34 individuals subjected to strontium isotope analysis demonstrates that among the Chanka, violence was significantly directed towards social groups within society, marked by modified crania. The presence of two nonlocal women with signs of increased morbidity and mistreatment points to possible mobility‐by‐abduction. In contrast, among the Quichua, men have significantly more trauma, and wounds are concentrated on the anterior. Trauma on women is lower, nonlethal, and concentrated on the posterior. This divergent pattern is commonly observed in external warfare (raids and community defence), where men face attackers and women escape them. The presence of two nonlocal men supports a mobility model of strategic in‐migration. In sum, osteological and isotopic data sets are shown to reveal divergent life‐course experiences not captured by the archaeological data or historic records alone. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.