Ok lá þar at óvilja hennar: A Reconsideration of Sexual Violence in the Old Norse World

Despite the popularized image of the raping and pillaging Viking warrior, the culture of sexual violence in Old Norse society has remained surprisingly understudied. This article uses skaldic verses, a literary genre produced in Iceland and Norway, mainly from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries, to suggest a reconsideration of sexual violence in the Old Norse world. It suggests that skaldic verses can help scholars discern a spatial and cultural geography of sexual violence against free men, women, and slaves, which suggests it was widespread and multidimensional and had ties to a pan-north Atlantic slave trade in the Viking Age.

Statistics and Genealogy: A Match Made in Heaven? The Forecasting and Inference Tool, an Application of the Central Limit Theorem in Genealogical Research

Applications of econometrics and statistics are widely used as tools in many disciplines as a means to provide quantitative analysis to investigate hypotheses. Examples include economics, sociology, and cliometrics. While so far in a genealogy such an approach has not been attempted, in this exploratory work we suggest some possibilities for the application of such quantitative tools to the subject. In doing so, we introduce and discuss the Forecasting and Inference Tool, an application of this framework, and a tool that can help genealogists to be more productive in their fieldwork by estimating years of death, marriage, and birth.

The “Escape” Behavior and Strategy of Married Lahu Women in Southwest China

In the last several years, marriage and family patterns among the Kucong Lahu of Jinping County, Yunnan, have changed significantly due to rapid economic and social changes all over China. Based on ethnographic research in Lu Village, this article explores the current “escape” migration behavior of married Lahu women. They used migration as a strategy to escape patriarchal husbands, families, and local society. This paper describes a paradox between the autonomy of women's individual actions and the inability to escape the system even when on “escapes.” This sort of “escape” strategy cannot ultimately change the gender inequality and social status.

Carrying the Family in the Body: Family Trajectories of Paraguayan Women in the Paraná Tri-Border Area

This article discusses the results of ethnographic case studies on female cross-border experiences in the Paraná Tri-Border Area (between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay) conducted in 2018 and 2019. Reclaiming the life histories of thirty Paraguayan women, we will analyze the tensions that lie between family trajectories, female transgenerational acquisition of cultural and social capitals, rural-urban and transborder mobility, and labor insertion. Our analysis will explore more in-depth the impact that productive and reproductive work overloads have on different generations of women who share family bonds, showing how their care responsibilities are intrinsically related to their agency strategies.