Migrants,inequalities and social research in the 1920s: The story of Two Portuguese Communities in New England

In this article, I analyse the production and reception of a 1923 social monograph on migrant communities in New England and in doing so: (1) outline an archaeology of the social sciences in the U.S., by analysing aspects of their development, dynamics, institutional politics and research agendas; (2) discuss the tensions between social, racial and cultural interpretations of inequalities in the political economy of the 1920s; (3) analyse the pervasiveness of racialist thinking in science, society and politics, its impact in the hierarchization of groups for purposes of border control, and how the targeted groups responded to it.     

Children and young people living through the monsoon: watery entanglements and fluid inequalities

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on everyday watery relations; children and young people’s fluid, messy, affective encounters with the rainy season in India. We attend to the rhythms, depths, capacities and flows of water and argue that a more nuanced understanding of watery entanglements is needed in the context of fluid inequality. Through in-depth, ethnographic research with children and young people, we offer new ways of thinking about watery relations and inequality attending to the material-social-spatial–temporal complexities of living with the monsoon.     

Pretos Novos: Evidence for African Oral Hygiene Practices in Brazil, 1769–1830

Fine, polished abrasion of teeth provides evidence for use of traditional oral hygiene practices in 32 fragmentary dentitions from a cemetery for newly arrived enslaved Africans who died before leaving Valongo, the slave port and market of Rio de Janeiro. We infer that chewing sticks were used before these people were enslaved. Cosmetic dental modification and abrasion of tooth roots occur in some individuals. High caries frequency, tooth loss and hypercementosis characteristic remains of enslaved Africans with longer residence in the New World were not found in this unique collection. We review evidence that the practice of using chewing sticks persists in some regions of the Americas. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.