Discovering the invisible Puerto Rican slave family: demographic evidence from the eighteenth century

Traditional notions that family life among slaves during the pre-plantation period in the non-Hispanic Caribbean was necessarily unstable are fading in light of new research. Although marriage among this segment of the population in Caguas, Cayey, San Germán, and Yauco--rural parishes in Puerto Rico--involved only a fraction of the overall number of marriages in these communities, the marriage of slaves was much more frequent than previously assumed. Family life among the eighteenth-century Puerto Rican slave population appears to have been quite stable, as shown by the reconstruction of birth intervals for both married and unmarried mothers. Married and unmarried mothers exhibited similar reproductive behavior. These results strongly suggest that a majority of the unmarried slave mothers lived in unions that were not institutionally recognized, but that were nevertheless stable, as indicated by the high percentage of their children born at intervals comparable to those of married mothers. If unmarried mothers were living in stable consensual unions, then our understanding of these slave family units during the colonial period must be reassessed not only for Puerto Rico but possibly for the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America.     

SCALING UP,SCALING DOWN: EXPERIMENTS WITH HIGH RESOLUTION COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY SCANNING OF MICROARTEFACTS

Microartefact analysis remains an uncommon practice in archaeology due to the time‐consuming nature of sample processing and analysis and the difficulty of ensuring reliability, replicability, and consistency in material identification and quantification. Work by Huisman et al. (2014) demonstrated the viability of using micro CT (Computed Tomography) to distinguish different kinds of artifactual materials in midden samples, an approach that can help remove “human error” and to speed up the analytical process. However, micro CT samples are limited in size relative to those that can be analysed via High‐Resolution Computed Tomography (HRCT). In addition, the utility of CT techniques for microartefact analysis in different soil types currently is little explored. We present the results of on‐going experimental work using scanning of “cores” containing different sediment matrices and microartefactual materials. Our results are complementary to those of Huisman et al. (2014), showing that microartefacts, including lithic debris, are readily distinguished from enclosing matrices via density class and morphological analysis.     

Ethical dilemmas? UK immigration,Legal Aid funding reform and caseworkers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The article considers the kinds of responsibilities anthropologists might have when working on immigration and asylum matters, particularly in the light of recent ‘reforms’ to the funding of legal aid in the UK. The article focuses on a single case study in its context, exploring an interaction between an immigrant applicant and a lawyer/case worker in a not‐for‐profit Law Centre. The paper shows how case workers find themselves caught in the middle, squeezed between increasing financial pressures and their ethical obligation to their clients. In their everyday work they are faced with the contradictory imperatives of giving sympathy and advice to genuinely deserving cases on the one hand while being required to check up on opportunist and possibly deceitful clients on the other. In the context of ‘reform’, they are increasingly encouraged to prejudge the probable outcomes of cases by reference to ‘value for money’. These effects, we argue, have severe consequences given the adversarial nature of the UK's system of law. As anthropologists, our aim was to investigate the day‐to‐day realities of case worker/client interactions, to enable both ourselves and legal practitioners, in conversation, to reflect on our own and each others' interpretations of the situation, and to place these in the public domain.     

Preparing for the afterlife: death,dying, and religious practice in eighteenth-century Puerto Rico

Every society possesses deeply rooted attitudes about death, yet much of what we know about the religious practices of ordinary people in colonial Latin America overlooks the way(s) in which people prepared for death and the afterlife. Sacramental records from eighteenth-century Puerto Rican communities provide insights into both religious elements and social aspects of death. The time period selected is important because new sensibilities toward death emerged in the late eighteenth century, with a movement away from elaborate status-affirming funerals toward the embracing of interiorized piety. This article uses sacramental records to examine reception of the last rites, funerary practices, and burial customs in eighteenth-century Puerto Rico. Three questions guide my inquiry: first, did reception of the last rites (penance, Eucharist, and anointing of the sick) decline in Puerto Rico and, if so, was this related to religious factors or demographic and socioeconomic ones as well; second, how successful were religious authorities in reshaping religious practices manifesting ‘baroque piety’ with a ‘more inward looking piety’: in peripheral areas of the Americas; and third, in what ways did burial customs reflect growing concern with the fear of Hell and time spent in purgatory?     

Campaign Promises,Democratic Governance,and Environmental Policy in the U.S. Congress

One important criterion for assessing the quality of democratic governance is the extent to which the policy process effectively translates citizen preferences into collective choices. Several scholars have observed a discrepancy between citizen preferences for strong environmental protection and weak policies adopted in the United States, indicating that the United States may fall short on this criterion. We examine one possible mechanism contributing to this discrepancy—legislator defection from campaign promises. Our data indicate that legislators in the U.S. Congress routinely defect from their campaign promises in environmental protection, undermining the link between citizen preferences and policy choice. We also find that legislators are much more likely to defect from pro‐environmental campaign promises, which moves government policy toward less stringent environmental programs. Finally, the propensity of legislators to defect from their campaign promises is systematic, with defection affected by partisanship, constituency influence, the influence of the majority party, and the likely consequences of defection for policy choice. These findings contribute empirical evidence relevant to the “mandate theory” perspective on how citizen preferences are translated into collective choices through the policy process. These findings may also complement research in comparative politics concluding that legislatures selected through single member districts adopt less stringent environmental policies than do legislatures chosen via proportional representation in that the mechanism for this effect may go through legislator defection from campaign promises.     

New institutionalism,critical junctures and post-crisis policy reform

Two accounts of change dominate with new institutional literature. The first emphasises ‘punctuated equilibria’ in which change is shock-driven, sudden and radical enough to loosen path dependencies. The second emphasises a more gradual-incrementalism and a view of change that is more or less constant. This article argues that neither account is suitable for the policy scholar interested in understanding the complexity of a post-crisis reform period and that a synthesis between these two views would better serve those interested in the nuance of post-crisis change. The article provides this synthesis in the form of a reconceptualization of the critical juncture. This reconceptualization merges the punctuated equilibrium and the gradual-incremental views and, in doing so, presents a much more realistic institutional account of the fine print of policy change post-crisis. The reconceptualization is subsequently justified empirically through the analysis of a specific post-crisis reform period (the Queensland floods of 2010–11).