Early Late Miocene insectivores (Eulipotyphla,Mammalia) from the Cañada section (Province of Zaragoza,east Central Spain)

Vallesian (early Late Miocene) strata from the recently introduced Cañada section (province of Zaragoza, east Central Spain) have yielded fairly large insectivore assemblages. These show that, after the generally dry Aragonian, the Vallesian gave rise to more humid conditions that were favourable to insectivores, both in number of taxa, and in overall number of specimens. The assemblage of Cañada 8 (Biozone H) is dominated by shrews, whereas the assemblage of Cañada 10 (uppermost Biozone H) contains the oldest record of Desmanella in the area. This seems to signify a bioevent in which after millions of years of absence, talpids return to the area. In addition to the Vallesian assemblages, a small Turolian insectivore fauna has been recovered. On the basis of the rodents, Cañada 12 was assigned to Biozone L, and the insectivore assemblage is very similar to the assemblages from the Teruel basin of that zone. This implies that the discovery of Postpalerinaceus in Cañada 12 is the youngest published record of this large spiny hedgehog.     

Thinking Lampedusa: border construction,the spectacle of bare life and the productivity of migrants

This article interrogates the relationship between the Italian island of Lampedusa and trans-Mediterranean migration. It explores how the construction of Lampedusa as a border zone has been implicated in the rise and fall in numbers of migrants reaching the island's shores over the last two decades. It proceeds to consider the appropriateness of interpreting death and detention on Lampedusa in terms of ‘bare life’. While acknowledging how Giorgio Agamben's formulation of bare life has been problematized in relation to irregular migration and taking into account the frequent acts of migrants' political agency on the island itself, it is argued that the transformation of Lampedusa by the media and political establishment into a spectacle of bare life is not only instrumental to the functioning of migration management at Europe's southern border but is also constitutive of the subordinate position of migrants in Italian society and its labour market.     

A sauropodomorph tooth increases the diversity of dental morphotypes in the Cañadón Asfalto Formation (Early – Middle Jurassic) of Patagonia

This communication aims to describe an isolated sauropodomorph tooth (MPEF-PV 10860) from the Cañadón Asfalto Formation and test its phylogenetic relationships with other sauropodomophs. The novelty of this specimen implies a combination of features present in non-sauropod sauropodomorphs (coarse denticles at 45° with respect to the margin, absent marginal grooves and lingual concavity) and others previously referred to as synapomorphic of Sauropoda and subgroups of this lineage (D-shaped cross section, enamel-wrinkling). A comparison with formerly defined sauropod tooth morphotypes from Cañadón Asfalto highlights major differences in enamel-wrinkling, having a simpler and more homogeneous pattern. The crown proportions, compared with other sauropodomorph teeth, retrieve MPEF-PV 10860 within the morphospace of sauropods in two different age-ratio scatterplots, and the phylogenetic analysis depicts this specimen in multiple positions within Sauropodiforms but outside Eusauropoda, indicating the presence of both eusauropods and non-eusauropods in the Cañadón Asfalto Formation, and of a putative new species.     

Magical Pursuits: Legitimacy and Representation in a Transnational Political Field

ABSTRACT  In this article, I examine the strategies of Salvadoran state actors to contain and control transnational political subjects in the postwar period. The civil war in El Salvador (1980–92) precipitated massive emigration, most of it to the United States. Most Salvadoran migrants have been excluded from formal participation in national politics in both El Salvador and the United States. However, they have become important transnational political actors, owing in no small part to the increasing dependence of El Salvador on migrant remittances. This contradiction between their formal exclusion and their informal influence shapes an emergent regime of transnational governmentality, a system of domination that submits mobile subjects to the tactics of containment and control traditionally reserved for nonmobile citizens. This transnational governmentality depends on the appropriation of popular forms of organizing and expression associated with civil society as a way to mask the inequality at the heart of this relationship.     

Crisis-management: Tzeltal-Maya transnational migration and the Foucauldian apparatus

This paper offers a Foucauldian analysis of Tzeltal-Maya transnational migration from Cañada Estrella, Ocosingo, Chiapas, to San Francisco, California, placing it within the context of North American neoliberalism. It asserts that Tzeltal-Maya migrants, through their creation of new transnational social relations, bring into articulation an informal neoliberal migration apparatus (a Foucauldian dispositif). This apparatus assembles and coordinates a variety of indigenous, ladino, and gringo strategies, techniques, tactics, and technologies for dealing with and harnessing the crises and opportunities presented by international capitalism. Such an apparatus functions in tandem and tension with neoliberal state apparatuses and produces a transnational neoliberal order in indigenous ejidos. Further, this paper demonstrates that this apparatus has allowed Tzeltal-Maya ejidos in the Lacandon Jungle greater degrees of autonomy from the Mexican municipal, state, and federal governments and the local rancher elite, while also making them increasingly interdependent with small businesses in the United States.     

Women,warfare, and the life of agency: Papua New Guinea and beyond

‘Agency’ entered anthropological discourse as a key word from the 1970s in renewed social‐philosophical theorizations (e.g. ‘structure and agency’) as major deterministic theories (e.g. Marxism, structuralism) became less persuasive. It came to play an increasing role in ethnography. Though agency, too, has been partly replaced in some of its earlier semantic range, it has been more fully retained in some areas of usage than others, especially in analyses of subordination in the face of power. This article considers several different conceptualizations of agency. Ethnographically, it focuses on women's differing forms of action in two episodes of warfare in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In contrasting these, the article concurs with critiques of approaches to ‘agency’ that turn it into a (liberatory) abstraction, and proposes a view of agency as lived relation of intervention and involvement in social action, inherently linked to values and constraints. The combination may be, but is not always, liberatory. The article considers the life and (partial) expiry of agency as a term of social science art.     

Fossil Nelumbonaceae from the La Colonia Formation (Campanian–Maastrichtian,Upper Cretaceous), Chubut,Patagonia, Argentina

We describe here fossil leaves and fruits assignable to the family Nelumbonaceae Dumortier 1828. Fossils were collected at the Cañadón del Irupé locality, La Colonia Formation (Campanian–Maastrichtian, Upper Cretaceous), Chubut Province, Patagonia, Argentina. The fossil leaves are simple, with symmetrical and peltate lamina, orbicular in shape, and an entire margin. The venation is truly actinodromous with at least 15 primary veins, the secondary veins are poorly developed and intercalated with the primary veins, the third category vein is opposite, and the areoles are well-developed and 4- to 5-sided. These features are characteristic of the extant genus Nelumbo Adamson 1763, and the presence of these characters in the fossils allows their placement within this genus. Reproductive structures, similar to the fruit-receptacle of Nelumbo with fruits in situ, were found associated but not in organic connection with the leaves. These fossils constitute the only and oldest record for the family in the Southern Hemisphere. This record indicates that Nelumbo was more widespread in the past than today.     

Policy actors' narrative constructions of migrants' integration in Malmö and Bologna

Governments have policies explicitly directed at the integration of migrants. This article addresses how policymakers and politicians privilege certain constructions of the social relationship between migrants and the majority society (expressed through narratives of ‘integration’), while making it seem as if they were presenting facts in their policies. These constructions provide the justifications for adopting a direction in policy-making over other alternatives. This article sets to analyse comparatively how policy actors in two urban contexts construct migrants' integration through policy narratives and how, within this, they evaluate migrants as ‘integrated’ and ‘non-integrated’. Through narrative analysis, the article sheds light on how migrants are positioned by political institutions within the normative order of the society in which they live. Furthermore, it shows that local policy-making is shaped by national citizenship regimes, models of steering, welfare regimes and stories about the nation and its people.     

De impact van het wijkgerichte werken voor de toeleiding naar zorg van oudere migranten

This article studies how older migrants gain access to care through neighbourhood-based forms of working. In the Netherlands, the neighbourhood is increasingly viewed as an ideal place to organize care and social services, close to citizens. To this end, municipalities are developing neighbourhood structures and facilities in which local providers cooperate. In our qualitative research we studied the developments in crafting practices relevant to access to care of older migrants in the city of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In Nijmegen the new neighbourhood structures are only partly successful in helping older migrants gain access to care. Older migrants visit neighbourhood facilities not for the services these facilities provide, but because of the presence of care professionals who speak the same language, or share the same cultural background as do these older migrants. These caregivers are able to bridge the mental distance between the health care system and the lifeworld of older migrants. Relations also arise outside the neighbourhood structures, for instance at culture-specific day care facilities. To prevent too great a claim on professionals with a migration background, agreements between the city of Nijmegen and local providers to enhance cultural sensitivity should be better monitored.     

Foucault in the Bush. The Social Life of Post-Structuralist Theory in East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg

This essay seeks to make critical theory an object of ethnographic con-textualization and inquiry through an exploration of the social life of post-structuralist theory in 1980s East Berlin. The 'Prenzlauer Berg Scene' of artists and writers utilized post-structuralism as a distinctive register for defining their social identity and as an analytical and interpretive paradigm for articulating their alienation from the state-crafted language of GDR public culture. The essay discusses how the subversive practice of post-structuralism in the Prenzlauer Berg came at the price of linguistic exclusion and political withdrawal from mainstream GDR society. In conclusion, it is argued that the Prenzlauer Berg case emblematizes the difficulty of politicizing expert theoretical registers since these registers' objective critical 'power' relies upon structures of epistemic inequity that cultivate distinctions between critical experts and naïve practitioners.     

Obelionic cranial deformation in the Puebloan Southwest

As a form of cranial deformation, obelionic flattening is rare. Originally named and described by Stewart (J Wash Acad Sci 29 ( 1939 ) 460–465), based on a small sample from Florida, it has been little noted since. Previously [Nelson and Madimenos, Paper presented at the Paleopathology Association annual meeting (2007)], we reported the discovery of two individuals from the Pueblo III Gallina site of Cañada Simon I who exhibit flattening of this type. Although technically undescribed in the Southwest before now, there are tantalizing clues in the literature that it occurred in low frequencies throughout the Ancestral Pueblo world. To determine whether the obelionic flattening found at Cañada Simon I was isolated or an indication of a more widespread phenomenon, we undertook a survey of crania from other Gallina sites, Chaco Canyon, and the literature (type of deformation can be determined on lateral photographs of crania properly positioned along the Frankfort Horizontal). We examined 146 crania (78 firsthand) of which seven exhibit obelionic flattening. Our results indicate that obelionic flattening should be added to the suite of cranial deformations that occur in the Southwest. Here, we propose parameters by which obelionic flattening can be described and differentiated from the more common lambdoidal and occipital forms and suggest that the three types of flattening form a continuum of cradleboard induced deformation, although the exact mechanism for obelionic flattening remains elusive. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Existential Displacement: Health Care and Embodied Un/Belonging of Irregular Migrants in Norway

Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in Oslo and Bergen, Norway, this article discusses irregular migrants’ experiences of existential displacement and the tactics they use to try to re-establish a sense of emplacement and belonging. More specifically, it argues that irregular migrants’ experiences of embodied unbelonging are a consequence of a violent form of governmentality that includes specific laws, healthcare structures, and migration management rationalities. The article makes this argument by tracing how these experiences translate into embodied effects that feature prominently in migrants’ narratives of suffering while living in a country that purports to provide welfare services to all. The narratives of their state of being-in-the-world are ways through which migrants both experience and express the violence and deprivation they face. I argue that these narratives are instances of structures of feeling (Williams 1973), which are shaped by modes of governmentality. The article shows that irregular migrants’ coping strategies centrally involve faith, religious communities and friends. Irregular migrants draw on these relationships to get by, access healthcare, and to resist the (health) effects of social deprivation and political violence. These relationships allow irregular migrants to find meaningful ways of being-in-the-world and rebuilding, to some extent, a sense of entitlement and belonging.

     

Genetic and geographical structure in grapevines from northwestern Spain

The grapevine germplasm bank from Estación de Viticultura e Enoloxía de Galicia contains 110 accessions collected from more than 100‐year‐old grapevines from northwestern Spain. We identified 60 different genotypes (among which ‘Pinot Noir’ and ‘Shyrah’ were included as references) with 32 polymorphic microsatellites (SSRs), 21 of which were unlinked SSRs and without null alleles, which were used to detect genetic structure. We found four reconstructed populations that were highly differentiated by analysis of molecular variance (18.3%): (i) western Galician group (‘Caíño Bravo’); (ii) eastern Galician group (‘Merenzao’); (iii) Castilian group (‘Garnacha’) and (iv) southern Spanish group (‘Moscatel’). The greatest genetic differentiation was found between the western Galician/eastern Galician groups and the southern Spanish/Castilian groups, with Fst > 0.13. Western and eastern Galician groups contained most of the ancient Galician cultivars (86%) and included ancestors from central Europe, such as ‘Pinot Noir’ and ‘Shyrah’ in the western Galician group and the introgressant ‘Merenzao’ (French ‘Trousseau’) in the eastern Galician group; the Castilian and southern Spain groups included traditional cultivars from central and southern Spanish and suggest a further introduction of those cultivars in northwestern plantations. Genetic structure corresponded with East‐to‐West geographical differentiation in the northern Iberian Peninsula, following the old path to Santiago de Compostela from France, with the southern Spanish and Castilian groups in the East (Castilian plateau and southern Spain), the eastern Galician group and the western Galician group in the West. Five new relationships were discovered: ‘Caíño Bravo’/‘Caíño Longo2’, ‘Albarín Tinto’/‘Torrontés1’, ‘Treixadura’/‘Treixadura Francesa’, ‘Moscatel’/‘Moscatel de Bago Miúdo’ and ‘Moscatel’/‘Moscatel de Hamburgo’, indicating that hybridisation and further selection by growers have been the origin of most of the genetic diversity found in northwestern Spain.     

Earlier arrival of some farmland migrants in western Poland

A dataset consisting of observations on the first arrival dates (FAD) of 16 species of birds from a locality in western Poland during the period 19131996 is presented and analysed. For 14 of the 16 species, there is evidence of a trend towards earliness in recent years. In the 19701996 period this trend was significant for Pied Wagtail, Wood Pigeon, Black Redstart and Barn Swallow, and marginally significant for a further four species: European Serin, Blackcap, Common Nightingale and Red-backed Shrike. Only two species showed the opposite trend in the 19701996 period: Lesser Whitethroat and Whinchat, of which only the former is (marginally) significant. The trend towards earliness was more pronounced for short-distance (European) migrants than for long-distance (African) migrants. Short-distance migrants generally displayed a correlation with spring temperatures in the breeding locality, a feature less obvious in the long-distance migrants.     

Trans-Kemalism: the politics of the Turkish state in the diaspora

Abstract

In contrast to the huge amount of research on Turkish migration and migrants, the diasporic politics of the Turkish Kemalist state constitutes a neglected research subject in the scholarship on Turkish diaspora. How does the Turkish state reach out to its nationals and expatriates abroad? In what ways does the Turkish Republic seek to make Islam (as it does in Turkey) into an instrument legitimizing its politicizing and mobilizing enterprises? To explore these questions, this article investigates the long-distance Kemalism engaged in by the Turkish state to Turkify and secularize its nationals in the diaspora, using its activities in Australia as its case study. In sketching out trans-Kemalism's dimensions, the analysis directs attention to the intimate relationship between the political and religious fields of transnationalism manufactured by the state. The paper concludes that the intense political polarization in Turkey in the present makes the future of trans-Kemalism abroad somewhat uncertain.     

Altitude, migration, and fertility in the Andes

In order to examine the relationship between hypoxia and reduced fertility of high Andean populations, a sample of 241 females living in the low-altitude Tambo Valley of Peru was studied. 63 of the subjects were born in the low-altitude valley, 121 were migrants from high altitudes, and 57 were migrants born in low altitudes. The rate of abortion was low among high-altitude subjects before they migrated, but became greater after migrating. It was found that the high-altitude populations had almost twice as long parity intervals than the low-altitude populations. Compared to migrants born at low altitudes, the high-altitude-born subjects who migrated to low altitudes had higher fertility rates. The results of the study are consistent with the hypothesis that high altitudes, through anoxia, have a lowering effect on fertility. Of the several possible explanations which might account for the increase in fertility of downward migrants on migration from high to low altitude (migration, socioeconomic factors, acculturation, seasonal male emigration from high altitude, and removal of hypoxia stress), altitude appears to be the most significant.     

Flexible kinship: shaping transnational families among the Chinese in Tahiti

This article examines the practices of ‘flexible kinship’ used by Chinese migrants in colonial Tahiti. ‘Flexible kinship’ draws attention to the strategic uses that are made of kinship in the context of migration and diaspora: the adjustments to cultural, political, and legal borders that lead to changes in family forms and in the relations between kin. Using a multi‐generational perspective, I examine how families were shaped by successive changes and reversals in legal‐political and economic events and conjunctures over the long twentieth century. I argue for the importance of addressing transnational border‐crossing practices that involve not just a spatial extension of networks but also legal strategies within the host locality. I further show that if it is true that the Confucian hierarchical order has conditioned transnational practices of flexible kinship, then this hierarchy has not only bent to the circumstances, it has to a great extent been weakened. Finally, I argue that the history of familial adjustments has shaped a habitus that maximizes economic and legal security, especially among women.     

SUNSET AND THE ORIENTATION BEHAVIOUR OF MIGRATING BIRDS

1. Migratory birds integrate information from a wide array of environmental sources. As our knowledge of migratory orientation depends heavily upon the results of cage-experiments with nocturnal migrants, it is essential that the results of these cage studies be interpreted in the light of field observations of migratory behaviour and experiments with free-flying migrants. When this is done, the impression emerges that night-migrating birds integrate directional information prior to departure, probably during the transition between daylight and darkness. At this time, information gained from the sun, in conjunction with other references, becomes especially valuable. 2. Despite intensive work with a few species, how migrants integrate information in the selection and maintenance of a direction is not well understood. The relationship between magnetic stimuli and solar cues at sunset in the selection process, for example, remains to be resolved, as does the contribution of skylight polarization patterns at sunset. Once a migratory heading is selected, birds probably use the stars or winds aloft to maintain that direction. How migrants integrate information is largely a matter of unravelling the complex causal relations among the different environmental stimuli that serve as orientation cues. Imagine a hypothetical migrant that departs on a migratory flight around the time of sunset. Given the uncertain relationship among variables (orientation cues) that might influence her migratory orientation, a path diagram is a useful device for displaying graphically the pattern of causal relations among the set of variables (see Fig. 1). This technique is adopted from path analysis, which is a statistical method developed by Sewall Wright for studying the direct and indirect causal relations among variables (see Kerlinger & Pedhazur, 1973). The pattern depicted in the figure is less a specific model of causal relations than it is a summary of possible relationships among the several cues based on current understanding. Causal flow in this ‘model’ is unidirectional, i.e. at any given point in time a variable cannot be both a cause and an effect of another variable. For example, variable 3 is dependent on variables 1 and/or 2, and is one of the independent variables in relation to variable 5 (orientation of migratory activity). Although the value of path analysis to the study of migratory orientation may be largely heuristic at this point, ‘one virtue of the method is that in order to apply it the researcher is required to make explicit the theoretical framework within which he operates’ (Kerlinger & Pedhazur, 1973). For instance, path diagrams (and path analysis, to the degree that correlations between variables can be specified) would help researchers study (i) the apparent redundancy built into the orientation process (see Fig. 1), (ii) alternative or competing causal models of orientation and navigation, or (iii) the ontogenetic changes that affect the relationship among orientation variables. Imagine, for example, how path coefficients might change in value with migratory experience. 3. Migrants probably redetermine preferred directions soon after landing or shortly before their next departure rather than while aloft. Cage-orientation results as well as observations of free-flying migrants suggest that solar-related information is involved in the morning orientation of ongoing migratory flight and possibly the re-determination of direction following night-time displacement. 4. Evidence is not clear on whether migrants respond to sunset by constant-angle orientation (menotaxis) or constant-azimuth orientation. 5. How migrants correctly identify sunset as a reference stimulus is an unresolved question. Identification might be based upon the characteristic spectral distribution of sunset, its pattern of illumination, or some other feature, such as the characteristic pattern of skylight polarization at sunset. 6. Several lines of evidence suggest that migrants learn to use the setting sun and associated skylight features as orientation cues. 7. The setting sun functions not only as a source of directional information but also as an environmental stimulus that influences the likelihood of migratory activity.