Reading between the Lines: The Social Value of Dogoszhi Style in the Chaco World

Archaeologists have pointed to certain architectural or decorative designs as representing “elite styles” that mark status distinctions. We look at one such style—Dogoszhi—that was applied to several pottery wares across the Chaco World of the northern Southwest. Using a large database of ceramics, we test whether this style comprised an elite style or whether it signaled participation in a broader Chaco social network. We compare the distribution of Dogoszhi style to measures of settlement importance, including site size and network centrality, and we investigate whether this style occurs differentially at Chacoan great houses as opposed to small houses, or by subregion. We also compare its spatial distribution to an earlier style, called Black Mesa style, similarly applied to a number of different wares. Our results indicate that both styles were consistently distributed within Chaco communities (whether great houses or small houses) but variably distributed across subareas and most measures of settlement importance. We conclude that Dogoszhi style was used to mark membership in social networks that cross-cut great house communities, a pattern more typical of heterarchical rather than hierarchical social structures. Such variation questions the uniform category of “elites” and points to the ways that representational diversity may be used to interpret different regional histories and alliances.

Anti-Roma Discourses: The Struggle for Roma Holocaust Recognition, Collective Memory and Identity

"This paper aims to trace and chart the interplay between the struggle for recognition of the Genocide and the Roma civil rights movement, respectively to what extent memory, commemoration, reconciliation play a role and contribute to building a collective identity for the Roma, the Roma narrative – in which persecution, past trauma are important. The paper will also analyze the struggle for recognition and identity as a resistance to the manifestations of Antigypsyism in contemporary society. Furthermore, the paper proposes to analyze the European dimension of the Roma mobilization, respectively to what extent there is a Europe-wide movement for recognition of the Roma Holocaust, given the many Roma groups, different regional histories and the heterogeneous identity of the Roma. Keywords: Roma civil rights movement, Roma genocide, Antigypsyism, Memory, Identity, Recognition, Remembrance"

High variability between regional histories of long-term atmospheric Pb pollution

The advent of metal processing was one of the key technological evolutions presaging the development of modern society. However, the interplay between metal use and the long-term changes it induced in the development and functioning of past societies remains unclear. We present a compilation of global records of anthropogenic atmospheric lead (Pb) spanning the last 4000 years, an effective indirect proxy for reliably assessing Pb emissions directly linked to human activities. Separating this global Pb pollution signal into regionally representative clusters allows identification of regional differences in pollution output that reflect technological innovations, market demands, or demise of various human cultures for last 4000 years. Our European reconstruction traces well periods of intensive metal production such as the Roman and Medieval periods, in contrast to clusters from the Americas, which show low levels of atmospheric Pb until the Industrial Revolution. Further investigation of the European synthesis results displays clear regional variation in the timing and extent of past development of polluting activities. This indicates the challenges of using individual reconstructions to infer regional or global development in Pb output and related pollution.

Dyeing the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia

This paper explores the metaphorical and material significance of short-lived fabric dyes in medieval and early modern South Asian art, literature, and religious practice. It explores dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and popular and devotional poetry to demonstrate how the existence of ephemeral dyes opened up possibilities for mutability that cannot be found within more stable, mineral pigments, set down on paper in painting. While the relationship between the image and the word in South Asian art is most often mutually enhancing, the relationship between words and color, and particularly between poetry and dye color, operates on a much more slippery basis. In the visual and literary arts of South Asia, dye colors offered textile artists and poets alike a palette of vibrant hues and a way to capture shifts in emotions and modes of devotion that retained a sense of impermanence. More broadly, these fragile, fleeting dye materials reaffirm the importance of tracing the local and regional histories even of objects, like textiles, that circulated globally.

Yen Or En?

This concluding chapter addresses the question of how have and do cross-border marriage practices come to be. In examining local–transnational dynamics, this question has revealed itself to be deeply intertwined with a second one: What makes others marriageable? For those involved in the processes of marriage migration between China and Japan, it was the tactical deployment of socially and historically created conceptions of proximity that rendered their partners marriageable. Such notions of proximity were locally created and shaped by deeper regional histories, but they also played important roles in mobilizing individuals to further partake in transnational flows. The chapter then offers some “afterward stories.” As these stories reveal, the issue of marriageability remained something with which participants continued to grapple, even within so-called happy marriages. Finally, the chapter discusses how shifting perceptions of global power dynamics have subsequently influenced the meanings associated with cross-border marriages and migration from China to Japan.

Historical Sources for Earthquakes before 1900 on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Offshore Region

Information about historical earthquakes in the Iberian Peninsula going back to Antiquity (Roman times) can be found in different types of documents, such as unpublished contemporary manuscripts preserved in archives, general, and regional histories in Spain and Portugal, published documents and reports on the damage of specific earthquakes, and reports in newspapers and magazines. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake marks an important point for the study of historical earthquakes in the peninsula. The compilation and interpretation of historical data presents many problems, one of which is how to express the many uncertainties in the focal parameters of historical earthquakes in earthquake catalogs.

Introduction

This introduction offers a critical survey of existing scholarship on security and surveillance, especially post-9/11. Presenting the five essays of this special section, it illustrates the new directions they provide for the study of civil-military relations and surveillance, animated by critical regional histories.

Introduction

THOUGHT AND PLAY IN MUSICAL RHYTHM seeks to explore representations, ideal types, and implicit theorizing of rhythm in relation to aspects of performance that “play”—that pull against these ideal types, resist objectification, and/or are elastic. Our aim has been to incorporate a diversity of musical traditions and scholarly approaches, embracing those of performers, music theorists, and music ethnographers. The performance dynamic implicit in “thought and play” can, with some imagination, be recast in terms of a larger dynamic in scholarly discourse on rhythm and music more generally—that between “universalizing” and “local” approaches. The former include efforts to create overarching models that accommodate the diversity of music and to gain insight into human cognition generally, as well as craft terminologies (meter, beat, etc.) that apply cross-culturally. Local, by contrast, signals attention to musical systems and practices as they are constituted in one region, however narrowly or broadly defined; attention focuses on the specifics of musical interaction, uses of language, and regional histories. Most music scholars attempt to bring out the historical and regional specificity of what they study while also contributing to general knowledge about musical process....

The “Fused Horizon” of Abolitionism and Islam

This article considers slavery and abolition in Muslim societies globally as a historical and historicist problem. I argue that the changes in popular consensus among Muslims about the desirability and permissibility of owning slaves is primarily due to a Gadamerian “fused horizon” of abolitionism and Islam. I theorize one site of its emergence from interreligious African cooperation in New World slave rebellions. By studying slavery as a global process and parochializing the boundaries between the civilizational and regional histories of Islam, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, there emerges a radical critique of slavery and capitalism that combines elements of both abolitionism and Islam. The historical experience of enslaved people provides an experiential and evidential basis for this new hermeneutical horizon.