Fertility Politics as "Social Viagra": Reproducing Boundaries, Social Cohesion, and Modernity in Italy

In this article, we investigate the delicacy of adopting pronatalism as a public position in Italy. Mounting scientific and political knowledge about the demographic "problem" exposes a new hegemonic formation that low fertility is dangerous. Drawing on ethnographic contexts, political debates, media publications, and policy documents, we trace the "demographic emergency" and compare two policies: a monetary baby bonus and a law restricting assisted reproduction. The coexistence of incentives to counter superlow fertility with prohibitions on high-tech baby making reflect the contested governance of "social cohesion." We conclude that scholarly and popular discourses serve as a sort of "social Viagra." Ultimately, both policies sought to rejuvenate family norms. Both aimed to fortify the political terrain of a nation-state struggling to achieve and maintain modernity against a backdrop of immigration and aging. Modernity became a weapon of the state to exert control over Italian fertility practices and of its critics to deploy orientalizing representations of backwardness.     

Perspectives on Global-Change Archaeology

In this article, I explore the characteristics of global-change archaeology as an emerging field of research. Global-change archaeology seeks to document and apply historical knowledge of past human–environmental interactions to the understanding of contemporary environmental problems and management and planning for future sustainability. It takes place within an interdisciplinary research structure and is situated within the explanatory contexts of historical science and humanistic history with close links to historical and political ecology. Both history and agency play important roles in the practice of global-change archaeology. Past human decision making in the context of cultural attitudes and perceptions also has a significant role in the archaeology of global change.     

Autonomy and Leadership: Political Formations among the Ashéninka of Peruvian Amazonia

This article examines notions of hierarchy and leadership among Ashéninka people in Peruvian Amazonia. It considers the apparent disjunction between individuals' preference for a peaceful and autonomous everyday existence and the Ashéninka's renowned ability to form large-scale cooperative groups under powerful leaders. Responding to recent anthropological writings that recognise the variability of political forms both across and within Amazonian societies, the article focuses on the social and political preoccupations that can be seen to underlie both social forms among the Ashéninka. It argues that individuals believe that peaceful social reproduction is best achieved by acting independently and respecting the autonomy of others but that aggregation and differentiation remain an option in circumstances where individual action would be ineffectual. The article also examines how the Ashéninka use outsiders as effective organisers that also symbolise the problems of coercive power.     

Irreconciliation as practice: resisting impunity and closure in Argentina

In Argentina, irreconciliation is created through everyday practices of vigilance against closure and collective struggles against impunity. In this essay, I show how over several decades since the fall of the dictatorial regime (1976-83), human rights activists and laypeople have devised ways to keep the past alive while attending to injustices through embodied collective engagements with the country's history and its legacies. By examining large protests, the everyday experiences of impunity, and a filmic exploration of kinship bonds and their entanglement with civilian complicity in the repression, the essay illustrates the ways in which irreconciliation is materialized and enacted as a form of social reconstruction many years after state terrorism.     

Pre-Hispanic Beer in Coastal Peru: Technology and Social Context of Prehistoric Production

The native Andean beer , chicha, played a variety of roles in pre-Hispanic Peruvian societies. Commonly made from maize , chicha was both the everyday beverage and an essential element in ritual and social interactions. Most important, political leaders had to reward corvée labor groups with chicha and food as part of the "hospitable repayment" lords were obligated to provide their subjects. The article describes an archeological investigation of chicha production in a non-elite residential sector at Manchan, the Chimu Empire's (A.D. 900–1470) regional center in the Casma Valley of the Peruvian North Coast. Two issues are considered: the technical process and the social context of chicha- making. In both cases, ethnohistoric and ethnographic data are used to develop archeological correlates for different aspects of the technology and social context of chicha- making. The archeological data indicate that (1) the equipment for chicha- making was generally available, (2) different households episodically produced large quantities of chicha, and (3) this production took place within a self-sufficient household and without extensive state involvement by the Chimu Empire.     

Embodiment of Terror: Gendered Violence in Peacetime and Wartime in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina

Gendered violence is not a special type of torture used only in war. Its roots are well established in peacetime. This article discusses parallels between the patterns of everyday domination and aggression during times of peace and war. Further, it discusses how metaphors and acts of rape in peacetime are transformed into symbols and acts of rape for wartime purposes. During peacetime the individual body, especially its essences —sexuality and reproduction—becomes the symbol of everyday domination and aggression. Wartime transforms individual bodies into social bodies as seen, for example, in genocidal rapes or ethnic cleansing, which are thought to purify the bloodlines. Then, institutions—that is, medical, religious, and government establishments—further reinforce the wartime process by manipulating the individual/social body into the body politic by controlling and defining "human life" and using political rapes to entice military action by the West. The final transformation (at the war's conclusion) is the reformation of the social body back into the individual body, making the individual body once again the focus of dominance and aggression as the acceptable social "order." [war rapes, gender, body folklore, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina]     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Llaki</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Ñakary</Emphasis>: Idioms of Distress and Suffering Among the Highland Quechua in the Peruvian Andes

This article examines some of the long-term health outcomes of extreme adversities and the ways in which social inequalities and idioms of distress are historically and socially produced in the Peruvian context. We describe how the highland Quechua of northern Ayacucho construct and experience expressions of distress and suffering such as pinsamientuwan (worrying thoughts, worries), ñakary (suffering) and llaki (sorrow, sadness), in a context of persistent social inequalities, social exclusion and a recent history of political violence. It is concluded that the multiple expressions of distress and suffering are closely related to past and current events, shaped by beliefs, core values and cultural norms and, in this process, transformed, recreated and invested with new meanings and attributions.     

Anthropology and history: the revaluation of history in anthropological research

The main premise of this paper is that the accepted view of history based on written documents (historiography) is marked by hierarchical ordering and evaluation implicit in it. The paper examines the context of the negation of history, and the revaluation of history in anthropological research. The lack of written documents concerning particular social groups on the internal plane, but also particular nations (ethnic groups) on the global plane, earned them the name of "nations (groups) without history". This criterion of historicity--the existence of a writing system and written documents--implies the hypothesis about the inferiority of those nations and groups. The attributes of history seen in this way are modernity, linearity and cumulativeness. This system implies ethnocentrism based on a twofold negation: a) the negation history, and b) the negation of otherness. What we must not forget is that the symbolic universes are social products with a history, and in order to understand their meaning, one must understand the history of their production. It is very important to pay close attention to the historical practice of projecting our cultural practices onto others. The question of who determines the history and which views are presented to a particular audience is a matter of power and contest. contemporary history-oriented sociocultural anthropology focuses on the total reconstruction of the way of life and thinking in particular periods of history: on the everyday life. This brought together the intellectual traditions of "new history", ethnology, sociocultural anthropology and the sociology of culture. While modernism stresses the present change versus the static past, postmodernism denies the past ever being static and hypostatises fluidity and change as permanent condition. Postmodernism strives to undermine the old, Euro-centric notion that "we" have a history but "they" do not; it has also lead to social scientists' renewed interest in history.     

The Palestinian cause in Syrian nationalism

This article examines the role of the Palestinian cause in Syrian nationalism over the past century, specifically in how it served to unite political leadership and people during times of crisis. Syrian nationalism emerged from Pan-Arabism and remained closely affiliated with the political ideology of Arab unity that could not be complete without Palestine. It was closely associated with the anti-colonial struggle that included the Zionist encroachment on Palestine. However, Syrian nationalism was full of contradictions and ambiguities from the beginning as the nation was composed of groups with competing interests. I argue the Palestinian cause was important for overcoming the ambiguities of Syrian nationalism and allowed for the different groups to find a common ground through their support for the cause. While most work examines the role of the Palestinian cause as a political ideology, I demonstrate that it informed political practices and patronage as well. Support for the cause was based on the cultural system that existed in the Ottoman period and prior to the colonial division of the Arab Middle East into separate nation-states. It allowed for the political and cultural networks to emerge in the post-empire period. The political practices surrounding the cause such as demonstrations continued through Syrian history particularly during period of crises. Support for the cause was enforced through social and personal networks in which ordinary Syrians and their leaders engaged. I conclude with how the current crisis in Syria illustrates the limits of the cause in bridging social and political divisions in Syrian society.     

Left-wing politics,civil society and immigration in Italy: The case of Bologna

Immigration and multiculturalism are important and much debated questions in contemporary Europe. Whereas considerable scholarship has examined how political institutions and Right-wing organizations have responded to these questions, little research has focused on the Left. This article examines the multicultural politics of the latter by considering ethnographically the experience of Bologna, the showcase city of the Italian Left, in the second half of the 1990s. The Left is here examined in terms of ideology, party, public policy and civil society in the context of everyday governance and with special reference to the discourses and practices concerning a group of Rom refugees from the former Yugoslavia. This article argues that the mainstream Italian Left (in its civil societal as well as party and administrative components) is characterized by a politics that fails to “integrate” ethno-cultural recognition with material justice and that, partly because of such failure, contributes little to the “integration” of immigrants.     

The life and death of a street boy in East Africa: everyday violence in the time of AIDS

This article focuses on the life history of a single street boy in northwestern Tanzania, whom I name Juma. I suggest that Juma's experiences and the life trajectory of himself and of significant individuals around him (particularly his mother) were structured by everyday violence. I describe everyday violence in terms of a conjuncture between macrostructural forces in East Africa (including a history of failed development schemes and the contemporary political economy of neoliberalism) and the lived experience of individuals as they negotiate local, contextual factors (including land-tenure practices, the power dynamics between immediate and extended kin, life on the streets, and constructions of gender and sexuality). I suggest that AIDS and its many impacts on Juma's life course can only be understood in a broader context of everyday violence. From this basis, I draw several general conclusions regarding AIDS prevention and intervention strategies.     

On German-Croatian and Italian-Croatian language contact

Croatia has always been a multilingual environment. The influence of German and Italian was empowered through direct political influence. During the second part of the 18th and in the 19th century native speakers of German and Italian used Croatian as a second language carrying out their duties at work. This bilingualism can tentatively be referred to as bureaucratic bilingualism. Native Croatian speakers used Italian and German as a second language in certain social areas. Such bilingualism can tentatively be called civic bilingualism. It can be assumed that starting with the 1960s civic German and Italian bilingualism no longer existed. Language contact within the daily life results in German and Italian loan words in Croatian which are still actively present and used in daily communication.     

Let the earth forever remain! Landscape legacies and the materiality of history in the northern Basin of Mexico

This article examines the landscape as an enduring protagonist in the northern Basin of Mexico over the past 1,000 years in communities north of Mexico City. Viewing materiality as the mutual constitution between social and physical worlds, I discuss the production and inheritance of landscape legacies. The manner in which legacies are inherited is tied to changing political, economic, and social conditions. This project integrates multiple sources of information (archaeological, ethnographic, historical, and ecological) to understand transforming connections between people and the landscape in this region, from the ancient state of Xaltocan to the Aztec and Spanish empires, continuing into the struggle for a modern nation. It reveals relationships that are apparent only via a perspective in dialogue with the landscape's materiality over time. In so doing, this article asserts archaeologists' unique contribution to the study of not only long‐term change but also historical processes inherited by and relevant to the contemporary world.     

Meeting with Ancestors—Contesting Borders in Indonesian Religion and Politics

Ancestors have often played an important role in the exercise of politics in Indonesia. However, from a situation in which they were highly influential and present in ritual, as well as in the everyday lives of both commoners and kings, ancestors and traditional lifestyles have been increasingly marginalised through the impact of secular politics and Islamist movements. An era of political reformation began after the fall of Indonesia's former political regime, Orde Baru. Reform meant the decentralisation of political power, and this led to a revival of local traditions. This article takes this revival of tradition as a framework to understand meetings that took place with ancestors at local pilgrimage sites on West Java. It is concluded that meetings of this kind are not simply about fulfilling personal goals, but they also show features of resistance and subversion in relation to the dominant political and religious leadership in Indonesia.     

Metabolized‐Water Breeding Diseases in Urban India: Sociospatiality of Water Problems and Health Burden in Ahmedabad City

Studies on urban metabolism have provided important insights in the material and sociopolitical issues associated with the flow of water. However, there is a dearth of studies that reveal how infrastructure, as a hybrid of social and material construct, facilitates disease emergence. The article brings together urban metabolism, political ecology, and anthropological studies to examine the social construction and reconstruction of the material flow through everyday practices for addressing the water problem and its health burden in Ahmedabad city. The article georeferences the water problems and occurrence of diseases and, through interviews, documents Ahmedabad's sociospatial characteristics of water problems and health burden in two case study wards. Through a situated understanding of the everyday practices, the infrastructure is exposed through leakages, reveals the citizens desire for better water quality, and struggle to gain access to water using diverse ‘pressure’ tactics. It is these social‐material constructs of water that give structure and coherence to urban space, which spatially coincides with the occurrence of diseases. It reveals the sociopolitical drivers of the water problems and identifies different hypotheses of the hotspots of disease emergences. The methodology offers a way forward for researchers and development agencies to improve the surveillance and monitoring of water infrastructure and public health through an incremental approach that takes into consideration the diffuse interplay of power by diverse actors. It charts out avenues for building on the urban metabolism by emphasizing the importance of examining the sociospatiality of the everyday practices for improving resource use efficiencies in cities of rapidly growing economies.     

Society's Metabolism

In this article, we inquire into the intellectual history ofthe application of the biological concept of metabolism to social systems-not as a metaphor; but as a material and energetic process within the economy and society vis-A-vis various natural systems. The paper reviews several scientific traditions that may contribute to such a view, including biology and ecology, social theory, cultural anthropology, and social geography It assembles widely scattered approaches dating from the 1860s onward and shows how they prepare the ground for the pioneers of "industrial metabolism" in the late 1960s. In connection to varying political perspedives, metabolism gradually takes shape as a powerful interdisciplinary concept It will take another 25 years before this approach becomes one of the most important paradigms for the empirical analysis of the society-nature-interaction across various disciplines. This later period will be the subject of part II of this literature review     

Culture,Conflict, and Translocal Communication: Mobile Technology and Politics in Rural West Bengal,India

As media reports of political movements from various locations have shown, mobile technology can be a powerful political instrument. This paper examines how political activists in West Bengal, India use mobile phones for their daily political work. I seek ways to recognize the disruptive and political potential of mobile technology without ignoring its social and cultural rootedness. I illustrate how riots and protests relate to the increase in translocal communication enabled by phones. I also demonstrate how the political use of mobile technology for extra ordinary events is grounded in the social and political processes of ordinary everyday life and draws from the local understanding of politics by emphasizing certain aspects of it. My article confirms the cultural continuity amidst the increase in translocal relationships but it also pinpoints how cultures harbour conflicts and alternative discourses which translocal communication helps to amplify.