scholarly journals Re-thinking communities: Collective identity and social experience in Iron-Age western Anatolia

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Steidl
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Western Anatolia ◽  
Identity Studies ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Ideal Framework ◽  
Research Assumptions

Reference to identity is ubiquitous in archaeology. Even when identity is not part of the questions driving research, assumptions about it affect interpretations of data; the terms used to designate individuals or collective groups carry implicit ideas about their identities. Default categories used to describe people, however, are often rooted in binary oppositions instead of the interactions that made up their daily social lives. In an archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, these oppositional categories are most frequently rooted in ethnicity. This article presents the community as an ideal framework to address the problems posed by an overreliance on ethnicity for understanding ancient identities, but also to compare collective social dynamics more broadly. Laying out a methodology for communities’ archaeological study, it uses two case studies from Emporion (Spain) and Ephesos (Turkey) to illustrate the new questions and conversations facilitated by an archaeology of communities that complement ongoing identity studies.

scholarly journals Viral hauntology: Specters of AIDS in infrastructures of gay sexual sociability

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Møller ◽  
Chase Ledin
Keyword(s):  
Viral Load ◽  
Hiv Infection ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Viral Transmission ◽  
Hiv Treatment ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Medical Regimen ◽  
Somatic Condition ◽  
Exposure Prophylaxis ◽  
Hiv Negative

In recent years, HIV treatment has become so effective that a patients’ viral load can become so low that it is undetectable, which in turn reduces the risk of viral transmission to zero. At the same time for people who are HIV negative, the use of the medical regimen “pre-exposure prophylaxis”, or “PrEP”, reduces the risk of HIV infection by 92%-99%. In case studies of "the PrEP whore" and health disclosure on gay hookup apps, we think about HIV/AIDS not only as a somatic condition affecting a body, but also as a socio-technical matter. We argue that our concept of "viral hauntology" allows us to think deeply about how “old” technologies and their social lives fold over and into new ones, and how the folding process “drags” in order to imagine other, more inclusive, gay socio-sexual futures.

Introduction: Searching for Gold in an Age of Iron

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Meredith E. Safran
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Patrimony ◽  
Historical Societies

This volume introduction analyzes a pervasive fantasy in American popular media: the desire to escape an “iron age” deemed materially and morally degraded in comparison with an idealized lost world that people hope somehow to recover. This idealized “golden age” is viewed with the painful longing of nostalgia and the sorrow of belatedness from the degraded “iron age” of the viewer’s present time, often accompanied by inquiry into how and why golden conditions no longer obtain. Self-proclaimed heirs to classical antiquity’s cultural patrimony adopted this myth with alacrity, and its deployment can be traced continuously throughout the classical tradition, including in popular media not conventionally associated with classicism. The introduction reviews key strands of golden-age discourse in ancient Greek and Roman texts, including views on human-divine relations, gender relations, and technological innovations; and modern receptions of historical societies as golden ages to be emulated, especially Periclean Athens, Thermopylae-era Sparta, and Augustan Rome. Case studies include the Vergilian concept of “Arcadia” as deployed in the sci-fi television series The 100 and “golden age thinking” as a psychological malady in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Communicating and Collaborating

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-98
Author(s):  
Julie Thompson Klein
Keyword(s):  
Public Engagement ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Communicative Action ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Community Based Research ◽  
Community Stakeholders ◽  
Planning Project ◽  
Management Project

This chapter joins Lury et al. in treating interdisciplinarity as a verb rather than a noun, as well as Davidson and Goldberg’s recasting of institutions as mobilizing networks rather than static structures. The chapter begins by defining the nature of talk across boundaries, including pidgin and creole forms of language, linguistic and social dynamics of communication, a culture that fosters them, epistemic dimensions of dialogue, and relational thinking. It then focuses on collective identity in teams and stages of collaboration, followed by a section on integration and differing assessments of its centrality to crossdisciplinary work. The chapter turns next to public engagement and community-based research, moving beyond narrow characterization of translation as application and transfer to highlight intersubjectivity, communicative action, and participatory research. It concludes by illustrating translation boundary work in two cross-sector case studies, an urban planning project and a waste management project involving both academics and community stakeholders.

scholarly journals Integrated Assessment—How Does It Help Unpack Water Access by Marginalized Farmers?

Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 3444
Author(s):  
Serena H. Hamilton ◽  
Wendy S. Merritt ◽  
Mahanambrota Das ◽  
M. Wakilur Rahman ◽  
Sumana S. Bhuiya ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Integrated Assessment ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Water Access ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Coastal Bangladesh ◽  
Integrative Framework

Water is critical to the lives and livelihoods of rural communities in developing countries; however, access to water can be inequitable within communities. This paper uses a generalized integrated assessment approach to explore the determinants of water access by marginalized farmers in two villages in coastal Bangladesh, before and after the setup of local water institutions. The study was part of a broader project aimed at promoting socially inclusive agricultural intensification. An integrative framework was developed in this study to capture and link the diverse range of factors that influence the distribution of water, including the often-overlooked role of social dynamics and governance arrangements. While interventions around improving water resource infrastructure can be critical for freshwater availability, the case studies show that a breakdown of asymmetric power structures may also be needed for water access to all individuals, especially marginalized groups. Establishing a community-based water institution on its own does not necessarily address power issues in a community. It is imperative that the agency and capacities of the marginalized members are developed and that the institutional arrangements foster an enabling environment for marginalized members to influence decision making. Integrated assessment allowed the case studies to be explored from multiple perspectives so as to gain a greater understanding of the barriers and levers to obtaining equitable outcomes from water interventions.

Sites of Pluralism

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Education History ◽  
Critical View ◽  
Frame Difference ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Arab Spring

Scholars and policymakers, struggling to make sense of the ongoing chaos in the Middle East, have focused on the possible causes of the escalation in both inter-state and intra-state conflict. But the Arab Spring has shown the urgent need for new ways to frame difference, both practically and theoretically. For some, a fundamental incompatibility between different ethno-linguistic and religious communities lies at the root of these conflicts; these divisions are thought to impede any form of political resolution or social cohesion. But little work has been done to explore how these tensions manifest themselves in the communities of the Middle East. Sites of Pluralism fills this significant gap, going beyond a narrow focus on 'minorities' to examine the larger canvas of community politics in the Middle East. Through eight case studies from esteemed experts in law, education, history, architecture, anthropology and political science, this multi-disciplinary volume offers a critical view of the Middle East's diverse, pluralistic fabric: how it has evolved throughout history; how it influences current political, economic and social dynamics; and what possibilities it offers for the future.

Gath of the Philistines

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Pioske
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Archaeological Remains ◽  
The Creation ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

Chapter 2 begins a series of case studies that are devoted to exploring what knowledge was drawn on by the biblical scribes to develop stories about the early Iron Age period. This chapter’s investigation is devoted to the Philistine city of Gath, one of the largest cities of its time and a site that was destroyed ca. 830 BCE. Significant about Gath, consequently, is that it flourished as an inhabited location before the emergence of a mature Hebrew prose writing tradition, meaning that the information recounted about the city was predicated primarily on older cultural memories of the location. Comparing the biblical references to the site with Gath’s archaeological remains reveals moments of resonance between these stories and the material culture unearthed from the location. Accordingly, what comes to light through this chapter’s analysis is one mode of remembering that informed the creation of these biblical stories: that of resilience.

Counter-monumentality and the vulnerability of memory

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Outward Appearance ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Creation

Monuments have been a staple of archaeology since the beginning of the discipline and have been used as case-studies for a diverse range of topics. In recent years, monuments have been considered particularly often in studies of social memory. By materializing memorial ambitions, however, the creation of monuments provides a venue for collective memories to be challenged. Despite their outward appearance of strength and permanence, monuments additionally render the memory of their creators vulnerable and open to contestation. In particular, the practice of counter-monumentality, or active and deliberate interventions in traditional monuments, illustrates how the erection of monuments exposes the inherent fragility of memory. Examples from the present and the past demonstrate these points: a statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in Baltimore, Maryland, and a corpus of monumental statues from southeastern Anatolian and northern Syria during the Iron Age.

Coinage and Identity in Pre-conquest Britain: 50 BC–AD 50

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Williams
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Symbolic World

This Chapter Looks at Coins made and used by peoples on the edge of the Roman world in Britain just before and just after their conquest. In it I want to ask what the evidence of the coinage, its inscriptions, designs, and findspots, can say about various kinds of collective identity in Britain in the late pre-Roman Iron Age and early Roman periods, how they were constituted, and how they changed. The reason for focusing on Britain in this period is not merely that I know more about it than anywhere else. It provides a well-attested external case for comparison with contemporary developments within the Roman empire discussed elsewhere in this volume, especially with regard to such overarching and perhaps overused narrative themes as ‘Romanization’. It also allows us to explore certain current propositions about how to exploit coins as a source for understanding ancient identities. In recent scholarship in ancient history and archaeology, particularly English-language scholarship, ‘identity’ and its kindred concepts have become a major focus of thought and debate, particularly with regard to questions of ‘ethnic identity’, or ‘ethnicity’. So intense has been the focus and so absorbing the debate, however, that certain important aspects of human identity often tend to be left out of the picture. As an instance of this, I might cite the notion of ‘identity’ underlying this very volume, which seems essentially restricted in range to those aspects of identity which we think Roman provincial coin-types are able to tell us about—ethnic, civic, and political. These are important, of course, but they aren’t by any means the whole story. There is perhaps also a general presumption that provincial coin-types take us straightforwardly into the shared symbolic world of the civic communities in whose names they were made. The possibility that the coins and their designs might rather be selectively representing symbols associated with certain groups, the sponsors or adherents of a particular local temple depicted on a city’s coins, or the wealthy participants in a festival whose prize-crowns were adopted as a civic coin-type, is not generally taken into account.

Gender, Temporalities, and Periodization in Early Iron Age West-Central Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Danube River ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Social Variables ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Individual Mobility ◽  
The Social ◽  
Archaeological Chronologies

Archaeological chronologies tend to conflate temporalities from all cultural contexts in a region without consideration for the different depositional trajectories and life histories of the objects that serve as the basis of those chronologies. Social variables, such as gender, age, status, and individual mobility, act on artifacts in ways that must be identified and differentiated in order for seriations derived from one context to be applicable in another. This article presents evidence from early Iron Age contexts in Southwest Germany to illustrate this phenomenon and discusses its ramifications from the perspective of a case study focusing on the mortuary landscape of the Heuneburg hillfort on the Danube River. Gender in particular is strongly marked in this society and can be shown to affect the depositional tempo of certain artifact categories, which have different social lives and depositional fates depending on context. Artifact assemblages vary not only in terms of archaeological context and temporality but also are impacted by the social personae of the human agents responsible for, or associated with, their deposition.

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