A Macroregional Perspective on Chiefly Cycling in the Central Region of Panama During the Late Ceramic Ii Period (A.D. 700–1522)

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam C. J. Menzies ◽  
Mikael J. Haller

AbstractThe sixteenth-century indigenous societies who inhabited the Pacific plains of Panama have occupied an important place in discussions of social hierarchy in the Americas. Beginning with the discovery of the richly stocked tombs at Sitio Conte in the 1930s the origins of social hierarchy and wealth accumulation has been a key theme in the Central Region of Panama. Although the most lavish burial hoards at Sitio Conte contained hundreds of sumptuary goods elaborately decorated with cosmological iconography, no other contemporary cemetery shows evidence for this degree of wealth accumulation. The only other site with mortuary patterning suggestive of high ranking individuals is He-4, where high ranking mound burials were interred following the abandonment of the Sitio Conte cemetery. From a macroregional perspective the increase in access to prestige goods in mound burials at He-4 contemporaneous with, or immediately after, the decline of Sitio Conte is best explained as a result of changes in political organization of the kind often associated with the growth and decline of chiefly polities.

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathieu Tillier

AbstractThis article undertakes first a reconstruction of lists of legal scribes (kātibs) and investigators (ṣāḥibsal-masāʾil) active in Fusṭāṭ between the 1st/early 8th and the 4th/10th century. Identification of these people allows a better understanding of the recruitment of Egyptian judiciary staff. Their reputations as scholars, as well as their ethnical, geographical and tribal origins, show that legal careers were limited by social barriers for a long time. Up until the 3rd/9th century, the office of scribe was mostly held bymawālī—high-ranking clients could possibly aspire to the office of investigator—, whereasqāḍīs were recruited among Arabs. The partitioning of the judiciary reveals a complex social hierarchy beyond the mere distinction between Arabs and non-Arabs. The results of this study also allow a re-evaluation of the Abbasid revolution’s impact on Egyptian society.


1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-488
Author(s):  
Charles D. Sheldon

Merchants in the Tokugawa period were placed at the bottom of the shinōkōshō hierarchy of samurai-peasants-artisans-merchants. This social hierarchy was produced by a combination of social reality at the time Japan was unified in the late sixteenth century and an ancient Chinese physiocratic theory, never taken very seriously, in practical ways, in China. Once the country was unified, the social mobility of the previous years, of a kind which permitted men of ability to climb from the lowest ranks to join the military nobility—Hideyoshi is the prime example of this mobility—was viewed, by Hideyoshi above all others, as a cause of prolonged chaos and internecine warfare. With the argument that war had been abolished and common people therefore no longer needed weapons, Hideyoshi carried out his ‘sword-hunt’. He thus established the most fundamental of the class distinctions, between the samurai, the ruling class, who now enjoyed a monopoly of bearing arms, and the common people, who were henceforth expected simply to produce the food and other necessities of life, and to pay their taxes, which remained high even though warfare was supposedly ended.


Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 233-235
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny

Chapters 16–19 are a case study of the family that produced the best-selling vernacular literary author of sixteenth-century France: Clément Marot. The example of this family also provides one way of examining the relationship to family and social hierarchy of a genre of writing that was fundamental to literate culture: poetry. The aspiration to social ascent was only one of the reasons why poetry was so widely composed in sixteenth-century France, but it was a key one. Like other cultural practices—ranging from dress and heraldry to forms of address—poetry was therefore itself part of the very mechanics that constructed social hierarchy.


Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-9
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny

Families were fundamental to social hierarchy in early modern France. Birth was widely accepted to indicate one’s divinely ordained social status, even if that view was not universal—in practice, some freedom was allowed for individuals to improve their status (especially among certain social groups) or indeed to worsen it. Certainly, the relation of birth to social status varied. It had a changing history even in respect of the nobility, which could be entered by routes other than birth. But birth was primordial at all levels of society, and for the nobility it became even more so in France in the second half of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth. It was widely believed that the members of a given noble family shared their own, generally superior, instantiation of human nature. On the other hand, heredity was widely believed to predispose commoners too in certain directions.


1962 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-310
Author(s):  
Jacques J. Maquet

Since African Political Systems, edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard in 1940, many monographs have been published on particular political organization of pre-colonial Africa. Some attempts have been made to synthesize these data in order to constitute a typology of African political organizations; for instance the segmentary type has been studied in Middleton's Tribes Without Rulers (1958), and the absolute monarchies have been given an important place by Murdock in his Africa (1959) and by others (e.g. P. Hadfield: Traits of Divine Kingship in Africa, London, 1949). Typological research falls within the historian's province if he is interested in the problem of uniformities in history.


1961 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-135
Author(s):  
David Fellman

The personnel of the Supreme Court remained unchanged during the 1959 Term. From the point of view of the decisions rendered in the public law field, this was an undistinguished Term. Few of the constitutional cases are likely to hold an important place among the precedents, and a considerable number of well-argued decisions turned entirely upon private law questions. But there was no dearth of writing, during the period under review, about the Court as an institution and about the Justices who sit there.Note may be made at this point of the latest chapter in the long dispute over the so-called tidelands. In 1947 the Supreme Court had ruled that, as against the claims of California, the United States possessed paramount rights in lands underlying the Pacific Ocean seaward from the low-water mark. Similar rulings were made in 1950 as regards the claims of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. But with the enactment in 1953 of the Submerged Lands Act, the United States relinquished to the coastal states all of its rights in all lands beneath navigable waters within the three-mile limit, and in excess of that limit within state boundaries as they existed at the time a state became a member of the Union, or as theretofore approved by Congress. The limit of the grant was three leagues (about ten and one-half miles) in the Gulf of Mexico and three geographical miles in the Atlantic and Pacific. The actual extent of the claims of the coastal states involved in the question was therefore left to be settled by litigation.


1910 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 589-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
George W. McCoy

The United States has been fortunate in never having had any extensive epidemics of plague. With the exception of a few cases, not over a dozen, that are directly chargeable to the infection of the indigenous rodents (ground squirrels), the disease has been confined to the two largest and most important cities on the Pacific Coast, San Francisco and Seattle. In each city the disease has yielded promptly to vigorous sanitary measures carried out by the public health arm of the Federal Government. Under the political organization of the Government, direct control of measures for the suppression of a disease is taken by the central sanitary authority only when a request is made by the local authorities, but it has been the experience that local authorities are prompt to make requests for assistance whenever any serious epidemic appears.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-550 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS TYACKE

ABSTRACTTraditionally puritanism has been treated as a religious phenomenon that only impinged on the world of that ‘secular’ politics to a limited extent and mainly in relation to church reform. Such an approach, however, is to employ a misleadingly narrow definition which ignores the existence of a much more all-embracing puritan political vision traceable from the mid-sixteenth century. First clearly articulated by some of the Marian exiles, this way of thinking interpreted the Bible as a manifesto against tyranny whether in church or state. Under the successive regimes of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, puritans can be found who continued to judge the actions of government by the same biblical criterion, which also helps to explain among other things their prominence in opposing unparliamentary taxation. Puritan ideology itself was transmitted down the generations partly via a complex of family alliances, underpinned by teaching and preaching, and this in turn provided a basis for political organization. Moreover, the undiminished radical potential of puritanism is evident from responses to the assassination of Buckingham in 1628. Given these antecedents the subsequent resort to Civil War appears less surprising than historians often claim.


Author(s):  
Anna Stirr

Nepal's twentieth-century tradition of leftist music, known as pragatisil git or progressive song, developed musically during the 1960s and 1970s along with state-sponsored nationalist genres meant to serve as musical representations of Nepali identity. The differences were primarily in the lyrics: pragatisil git's leftist themes were deemed too incendiary for a regime that forbade political organization. Composers writing songs for the national radio were encouraged to produce love songs, deemed apolitical and therefore safe. At first glance, communist pragatisil git avoids themes of love, in stark contrast to mainstream folk and popular music. Yet, while themes of romance are indeed absent from most Nepali communist music, a closer look demonstrates a strong concern with other forms of love and sentiment. This chapter focuses upon the theme of class love, examining how it is imagined to be socially transformative, and how it has changed through different communist parties' imaginings.


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