scholarly journals Archaeological Demography as a Tool for the Study of Women and Gender in the Past

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer C. French

In the last 20 years, demography has re-emerged as a key research area within archaeology. This research has refined archaeological demographic methods and examined the relationships between demographic, cultural and environmental change. Here, I discuss how the results of the growing corpus of archaeological demographic studies can contribute to gender archaeology, aiding the incorporation of women into narratives of the past. By considering the important role of women in the demographic regimes of small-scale societies, I explain how archaeological demography can provide insights into the behaviour and lives of women, without relying on the often problematic identification of gendered artefacts, activities and/or places. Archaeological demography as a tool for gender archaeology also permits a move away from the female empiricism of simply adding women into archaeological narratives, to provide an alternative framework for the analysis of gender roles and practices. I demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this approach using an example from the Upper Palaeolithic of southwestern France.

Author(s):  
Émilie Perez

The role of children in Merovingian society has long been downplayed, and the study of their graves and bones has long been neglected. However, during the past fifteen years, archaeologists have shown growing interest in the place of children in Merovingian society. Nonetheless, this research has not been without challenges linked to the nature of the biological and material remains. Recent analysis of 315 children’s graves from four Merovingian cemeteries in northern Gaul (sixth to seventh centuries) allows us to understand the modalities of burial ritual for children. A new method for classifying children into social age groups shows that the type, quality, quantity, and diversity of grave goods were directly correlated with the age of the deceased. They increased from the age of eight and particularly around the time of puberty. This study discusses the role of age and gender in the construction and expression of social identity during childhood in the Merovingian period.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 694-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild

This paper argues for greater integration of considerations of women and gender in the history of the 1917 Russian Revolutions. Two key issues have long been discussed by historians: the spontaneity/consciousness paradigm, and the role of class in the revolution. Neither has been adequately analyzed in relation to gender. Women's suffrage has been largely neglected despite the fact that it was a significant issue throughout the year and represented a pioneering advance won by a countrywide coalition of women and men from the working class and intelligentsia, and from almost all political parties. In this centennial year, accounts of the Revolution remain one-dimensional; women remain the other.


2000 ◽  
Vol 151 (4) ◽  
pp. 99-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josef Senn

After excessive cutting in Swiss mountain forests and extirpation of most of the wildlife during the past centuries, efficient forestry and hunting laws allowed a wide regeneration of the forests and a rapid increase of ungulate populations in the present century. As a consequence, the impacts of ungulates on the vegetation became obvious. Regeneration of forest trees, however, is influenced not only by ungulates, but by a number of physical site factors and biotic impacts. As these impacts and their interactions vary extensively, regeneration is neither spatially nor temporally constant. Most of the presently used tree-regeneration methods, however, assume constant conditions, which renders a proper evaluation of tree regeneration in mountain forests and the role of ungulates impossible. Furthermore, the effect of this variation on forest development and forest functions is unknown with regard to the long term. While society requires a multipurpose mountain forest, structured at a small scale, wild ungulates use their habitat at a larger scale. This often leads to conflicts. Consequently,solutions including different scales are necessary. A lack of knowledge will, therefore, have to be met by research making data available to the practice as well as through coordinated investigations and experiments.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-161
Author(s):  
Fernanda Neubauer ◽  
Michael J. Schaefer

We discuss the important role of the feminist critique in bringing awareness to gender, childhood, and identity research, and in giving voice to the perspectives of underrepresented groups. As a case study of ancient social lives and gender, we discuss a range of Marajoara identity markers interpreted through the study of ceramic tangas (female pubic coverings) from Marajó Island in the Brazilian Amazon (A.D. 400-1400). There, tangas were made and used by women as a material representation of social position, gender, and individual identity. We argue that identity constitutes a fundamentally important aspect of archaeological research, and that the strongest case studies in identity are those that encompass a variety of gendered inferences to understand social lives of the past.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Bright

Abstract This essay examines contemporary Tibetan medical literature that deals with menstruation, focusing on the relations among medical, religious and cultural perceptions of women and gender. Present-day medical writers present a hybrid account of menstruation, incorporating key aspects of Tibetan medicine, such as the refining processes of digestion and the red element, with biomedical knowledge, notably the role of hormones. The integration of biomedical thought by Tibetan writers works to substantiate and bolster the validity of Tibetan medical claims, rather than discredit them. Consequently, contemporary writers are able to articulate medical knowledge about women that is as much about Tibetan religious and cultural perceptions of gender and sexed-bodies, as it is ‘scientific’.


Author(s):  
Robert Blobaum

This chapter examines the intersection of war and gender in Warsaw. The resurrection of an independent Polish state in the aftermath of the First World War was accompanied by the establishment of equal political rights and suffrage for women, a cause that had minimal support before the war but was accepted after the war with little public debate or dissent. However, that the war itself had something to do with this important development in Polish political culture is assumed rather than established in the historiography of modern Poland and the emerging scholarship about women and gender. Moreover, in the scant literature on the role of women in wartime Poland, the focus had been placed—or misplaced—on a small minority of women who served as volunteers in auxiliary military organizations, particularly those in support of the Polish legions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katia Frangoudes ◽  
Siri Gerrard ◽  
Danika Kleiber

AbstractThe need to uncover, interrogate, and integrate women’s contributions to fisheries in research and development has never been clearer. As coastal and fisheries management continues to look to the Sustainable Development Goals and the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication, as frameworks and mandates, gender equity and equality have become a central concern. To fill the still existing gap of documentation and theoretical engagement, in this thematic collection, we gather together voices from researchers and practitioners from around the world, with one overarching common approach of using a gender lens to examine the relationship between humans and aquatic resources. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s classic feminist concept of situated knowledges, we examine the many and varied approaches researchers are using to engage with the intersection of gender and fisheries. Beginning and ending with two reviews that examine where gender and fisheries has come from, and where it is going, this thematic issue includes case studies from 10 countries, engaging in the topic at various scales (individual, household, national, institutional etc.), and using multiple methodological approaches. Taken together, these pieces explore the mechanism by which women’s contribution to fisheries are overlooked and provide direct evidence to contest the persistent invisibility of women in fishing, fisheries labor, and fisheries decision-making. Going beyond the evidence of women’s contributions, the authors go further to examine different coastal contexts, intersectional identities such as age, and explore gender transformative approaches to fisheries development.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Solana

AbstractOver the past few years, the number of climate cases being filed against corporations and public authorities around the world has been on the rise. Aware of the central role of finance in economic development, the financial sector has remained vigilant. Traditionally, climate litigation in financial markets had been rare, but that seems to be changing: in 2018 there were more cases filed than in any previous year. The development of existing and forthcoming private and public sector initiatives with the aim of promoting sustainable finance may usher in even greater numbers in the next few years. This article provides the first systematic overview of climate cases in financial markets and introduces a typology to classify this type of climate case. This classification reveals common issues across different financial systems and raises questions for further enquiry that define a new research area within the emerging literature on climate litigation.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hari Prasad Pathak ◽  
Mukunda Gyawali

This research study focuses on role of microfinance program in creation of enterprise and employment generation. In the Nepalese context various microfinance programs have been running with the aims of socio-economic empowerment, mobilization of internal resources, creation of awareness and generation of self-employment targeting the rural poor. Microfinance has been one of the few effective tools for poverty reduction over the past years. It has been revealed that the loans have been mostly invested on small scale business, livestock and other agro-based enterprises. The study shows that micro finance program has been helpful to create enterprises and generate employment.The Journal of Nepalese Business StudiesVol. Vii, No. 1, 2010-2011Page : 31-38Uploaded date: July 7, 2012


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana María Aguilar López ◽  
Marta Miguel Borge

Our model of the world that we perceive within ourselves, our conscience, in short, our psychological balance is influenced by our surroundings. Part of the input to which we are exposed in this immediate environment is related to texts, self-managed discourse, which can also influence our internal model of the world; hence they are deserving of our attention. In the same way as the models of the world that we construct throughout our lives, reality is not static and also changes as time goes by. From a social point of view, we can see that the roles of women in modern-day society and the ways that those roles can be perceived today are a consequence of changes initiated in the past within different areas and in a prolonged process over time up until our day. With the aim of evaluating whether female drama has contributed to that change, we present an analysis in this paper of the play La Cinta Dorada [The Golden Ribbon] by María Manuela Reina, written and set in the 1980s, a decade that for Spain implied a more obvious abandonment of the most traditional conceptions of the role of women. In the analysis of the play, we see how the models of the world of the older people are counterposed with those of the younger people, a generational divide that is enriched with the gender difference, as we also analyze how the psychological structures of the female and male characters confront the clichés pertaining to another era in reference to such topics as success, infidelity, matrimony, and gender. The results of our analysis demonstrate how Reina responds to archaic conceptions, thereby inciting the audiences of the day to question their respective models of the world, especially, with regard to the role of the woman in society. 


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