W poszukiwaniu Bukowińczyków wśród społeczności polonijnej Brazylii. Kilka refleksji z badań w stanach Santa Catarina i Parana

The article presents an account of research among a group of immigrants in Brazil, con- sisting of people originating from Bukovina. The group is presented against the backdrop of history and contemporary life of the Polish community residing in the states of Santa Catarina and Paranaʾ. The article describes trajectories of people hailing from various parts of Poland, who migrated to southern Brazil at the turn of the 19th and 20th century following the so-called “Brazilian fever” (the economic bubble of the 1880s). It presents the results of field research carried out in 2016–2017 and 2019, most of which refer to the research participants’“ethnic condition” and identity.

Stature, Poverty, and Inequality in 19th- and 20th-Century Mexico

Anthropometric studies have shown that the evolution of human stature can be helpful to examine human welfare. Adult stature is an indicator of health status and living standards for periods in which there has not been a systematic collection of data of other indicators, such as the price of goods and wages, as is the case in Mexico prior to 1950. Mexican anthropometric history studies have revealed that stature is a good measure to examine the evolution of living standards in the long run and that it has been effective for assessing poverty and inequality. These studies have shown that, for the period 1850–1950, the evolution of living standards was heterogeneous. There were different trajectories depending on the socioeconomic status. People from working-class backgrounds experienced a deterioration and/or stagnation, while people from upper-class backgrounds experienced a sustained increase in average stature. These trends challenged the official history of the post-revolutionary period, which argued that the living standards of the Mexican population deteriorated during the Porfirio Díaz administration (1876–1911) and improved afterwards with the promulgation of social legislation in the post-revolutionary era (post-1910). Additional studies show that, during the post-1950 period, there was a generalized improvement in stature, but it was limited by the challenges of economic downturns and persistent structural inequality.

Geomorphology and Earth System Science

This chapter surveys the history of geomorphology and Earth system science 1965-2000. With roots in Enlightenment thought from Hutton, Somerville, Humboldt and Darwin we see a preoccupation with a holistic form of Earth system science develop through the reductionist, mechanistic ideas of the 19th and 20th century to be re-awoken in the 1960 and 1970s environmental movements and the space age, culminating in the major research programmes set by NASA and others subsequently. At the same time the chapter charts the evolution in geomorphology to consider plate tectonics and the origins of mountain ranges, geochemistry and its links between surfaces systems and the atmosphere, to later ideas emphasising the interplay between landforms and life. This chapter surveys changing interconnected ideas within this field and draws parallels and contrasts between the holistic depictions of Earth system science in the early part of the subject's history and the fundamental challenges facing us today as we grapple to find science-led solutions to global environmental change.

Brněnské školství v kontextu lex Perek

The main aim of this study is to present an analysis of the education conditions in the provincial capital of the Moravian Margraviate in the context of the national struggle for compulsory schooling between the German municipal government and Czech national activists at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. At the provincial level, the sharpest edges of Czech­ ­German conflict were to be blunted by the Moravian Compromise concluded in 1905, which included four provincial laws for the most troublesome areas, including the lex Perek. This study analyses and interprets the situation in Brno education through the lens of Czech emancipatory efforts from the mid-1870s to the passing of the lex Perek. Furthermore, it explains the situation after its passing, when the fight for the child was not coming to an end despite the concluded Czech­‑German Compromise – it rather escalated. This text thus deals with the real impact of one of the four provincial laws concluded within the Moravian Compromise, using the example of pre­‑war Brno. It is a probe into the issue at hand that uses the example of the provincial capital. The probe represents a practice that was far removed from the contemporary government’s presentation of the concluded compromise as a „model“ solution to the problematic Czech­‑German coexistence within the multinational monarchy.

Material evidence? Re-approaching elite women’s seals and charters in late medieval Scotland

Medieval Scottish women’s seals remain largely unexplored compared to the scholarship on seals and sealing practice elsewhere in medieval Britain. This article has two chief aims. First, it seeks to demonstrate the insufficiencies of the 19th- and 20th-century Scottish seal catalogues as a mediated record of material evidence and the use of them as comprehensive and go-to reference texts within current research on late medieval Scotland. This includes a discussion of the ways in which medieval seals survive as original impressions, casts and illustrations and how these different types of evidence can be used in the construction and reconstruction of the seal’s and charter’s context. Second, this paper will explore the materiality and interconnectedness of seals and the charters to which they are attached. A reading of these two objects together emphasises the legal function of the seal and shows its distinctive purpose as a representational object. While the seal was used in con-texts beyond the basic writ charter, it remained a legally functional and (auto)biographical object, and, as such, the relationship between seal and charter informs meaning in representational identities expressed in both. The article will apply this approach to several examples of seals belonging to 14th- and 15th-century Scottish countesses. Evidence reviewed this way provides new insight into Scottish women’s sealing practice and female use of heraldic device. The deficiencies of assuming women’s design to be formulaic or that their seals can be usefully interpreted in isolation from the charters to which they were attached will be highlighted. The interconnectedness of word and image conveyed personal links and elite ambitions, and promoted noble lineage within the legal context of charter production.

Conclusion

The conclusion draws together the diverse narrative strands that characterized the 19th- and 20th-century colonial humanitarian project. It reemphasizes the argument of the book by redirecting attention to the colonial ambivalence towards animals. It argues that the colonial project of protection towards animals – a largely unsuccessful one at that – demonstrated how the colonial state, predicated on benevolence, constantly sought to control, subjugate and discipline its subjects – human and non-human. Nonhuman animals became powerful signifiers and markers of identities, and yet remained marginal to the larger project of colonial control, which was bent on dominating human subjects more than nonhumans. Each of the case studies in the preceding chapters – politics of rinderpest control, slaughterhouse inspection, and carters’ strikes are the outcome of the colonial ambivalence. Additionally, the conclusion argues that knowledge produced in the colony was a product of a network of material, social, and scientific relations between and among human and non-human actors.

“The Waters Were Made for Her”: River Mumma beliefs in 19th and 20th century Jamaican ethnographic accounts

During her fieldwork in Jamaica in the 1920s, the American anthropologist Martha Warren Beckwith was told by an interviewee that he had seen a river mumma sitting by a pool near St Ann’s Bay, combing her long hair. The river mumma, a form of duppy or spirit, was said to inhabit ponds, lakes and rivers. Not only was she believed to be guardian of such bodies of water, but she was also accredited with the ability to cause and end droughts, bestow the power to heal and to wreak revenge. In this article I examine the folklore and spiritual beliefs surrounding the river mumma in 19th and 20th Century Jamaica and look at where her origins may lie. There is a particular emphasis on material from the late post-emancipation era as this was a time of an awakening interest in Jamaican folk cultures and a number of influential ethnographic accounts, such as Thomas Bainbury’s Jamaica Superstitions (1894) and Martha Warren Beckwith’s Black Roadways (1929), were published.