Kinship Bonds Research Articles

Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country by Robert Michael Morrissey

Reviewed by: Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country by Robert Michael Morrissey Michael J. Mullin (bio) Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country ROBERT MICHAEL MORRISSEY Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015 326pp. Empire by Collaboration is the type of book one wants to review. It is illuminating, provocative, and insightful. Readers can easily fit this work into a variety of historiographical traditions. For example, Robert Michael Morrissey shows us how far scholarship of the trans-Mississippi [End Page 774] region has moved since Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991) first appeared twenty-five years ago. Whereas White’s book gave us an overview of the pays d’en haut, Morrissey’s book reveals how Algonquians and Euro-Americans created an “intercultural community in the Illinois” via “durable agreements” (10). These agreements often forced European officials, whether French or English, to place the needs of Illinois residents over imperial desires. Morrissey, however, does more than just explain the history of these multiethnic communities; he challenges the notion that Illinois residents were, as officials complained, lazy, indolent, and lawless. Rather, the residents of the region under study were “opportunistic and innovative. Not wedded to tradition, they were flexible and adaptable” (140). They had to be, since both French and English officials only reluctantly integrated Illinois inhabitants into their North American holdings. The Indians and colonial settlers who made the Illinois region home were newcomers to the prairie. Each group sought something different when it settled, but what they shared was a desire to take advantage of the area’s natural resources. The Illinoisans became bison hunters, and eventually slave traders. The colonists started as fur traders, but eventually became grain exporters. Geography gave the area strategic importance. The Illinoisans, while nominally allied with the other eastern Algonquian peoples, often looked westward militarily and economically. The French arrived in the 1670s, in the midst of the Beaver Wars. Initially, the Jesuits and René-Robert de La Salle fought over whether French secular or religious interests would dominate the region. During the struggle, the colony of Illinois sprang up unplanned and unwanted. As a result, Indians and colonists created a unique society, one where “local agency” took precedence. The result was an “empire by collaboration” (87). The question was how to create the working relationships both sides wanted. Their solution was fictive kinship, and while scholars are familiar with how this system allowed both sides to frame a particular mind-set, what Morrissey does with fictive kinship is illuminating. Initially, fictive kinship gave traders and Indians a means of creating both personal and political relationships. A mature colonial community did not eliminate the bonds of kinship. Morrissey shows how communities used God parenting to create fictive bonds between French, Indian, and Creole residents. He speculates that slaves might have found their way into the network, but does not push beyond what the baptismal records allow. As colonists [End Page 775] moved from being traders to farmers, and the Illinoisans gradually entered the Jesuit orbit, Morrissey uses godmother networks to show how fictive kinship ties continued to hold families, and communities, together. Officials, whether French or English, believed the colonists who settled the area were libertines because, as Morrissey makes clear, settlers pursued their own agenda. They made practical decisions that often ran counter to imperial policy. For example, despite French policy, Illinois colonists secured their land fee simple, rather than as renters with seigneurial obligations. This development gave colonists an independence that residents of New France or Louisiana did not have. This independence showed up in other places too, namely in marriage. For French officials, it was one thing for a voyageur or coureur de bois to take an Indian woman as a wife, it was quite another to have the leading residents of a colony do the same thing. But the Illinois region accepted Indian-colonist marriage throughout the period under study. As Morrissey notes, “French officials objected to intermarriage for two specific reasons: race and property” (150). At a time when “racial” purity was becoming more important in Europe, the mixed-race communities of Kaskaskia and Chartres challenged the notion of...

Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen by Sheila Johnson Kindred

Reviewed by: Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen by Sheila Johnson Kindred Lisa Surridge Sheila Johnson Kindred. Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen. McGill-Queen's up, 2017. 291 pp. $34.95. 1805. St George's, Bermuda. The fifteen-year-old Fanny Palmer, daughter of Bermuda's attorney general, has just met a twenty-six-year-old British naval officer, Charles John Austen, whose eighteen-gun sloop, hms Indian, is being equipped for service in the harbour. The pair will marry in 1807. Meanwhile, in Britain, Charles's "brilliant, and yet-to-be published" (29) sister Jane has written much of Northanger Abbey and laid the ground-work [End Page 227] of Sense and Sensibility, which will, in 1811, become her first published novel. Her knowledge of the navy, so important to her later novels Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817), is about to be expanded: in Fanny, she will acquire a new sister-in-law whose "diverse and challenging" (7) experiences of naval life, together with her cheerful pragmatism, will inform Jane's sense of female possibility. Such is the thesis of Sheila Johnson Kindred's Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister, the first full-length biography of Fanny Palmer Austen—a woman whom Jane called sister, as was the custom at the time. Transatlantic Sister is a feat of scholarly transatlanticism, detailing the female kinship bonds that linked Jane Austen to Fanny and, through her, to the navy's Atlantic stations: Bermuda, Halifax, Portsmouth, and the Nore. Kindred's biography is necessarily focused on the social and cultural contexts of Fanny's life. There remains limited primary evidence of Fanny's life: her twelve letters, dating from 1810 to her death in 1814 (passed down in the Austen family and published here for the first time); her red morocco diary for 1814 (partially erased by an unknown hand); her portrait (painted in 1810 by Halifax-based artist Robert Field); and her silhouette (created in London by Miers and Field between 1812 and 1814). This evidence, substantiated by mentions of Fanny by Jane, Charles, and Cassandra Austen, as well as by her friend Esther Esten, forms the basis of Transatlantic Sister. Kindred's lovingly assembled biography reaches beyond Fanny's correspondence and diary, then, to place her in the fascinating contexts of her short and varied life: St George's, Halifax, the Nore, and the Austen circle. She locates Fanny as part of a well-off and educated slave-owning family in the "close-knit colonial community" of St George's. Her marriage to Charles at seventeen exposed her to an exciting but hazardous naval life, bringing the peril of shipwreck and risk of battle, as well as the financial vicissitudes of prize agents and Admiralty Courts. To these hazards of her husband's profession, Fanny joined those of wife and mother: she gave birth to her first child, Cassandra, in Bermuda but when pregnant with her second, Harriet, set out with Charles on the Indian to Halifax, the British navy's base in the North Atlantic, where Harriet would be born. Kindred provides a vivid picture of Halifax in 1809, from the parties of the in-crowd to the efficiency of the naval yard, which restored the Indian's copper bottom. Indeed, Kindred's fascination with Fanny is clearly sparked by Fanny and Charles's presence in her home city, where the author formerly taught Philosophy at St Mary's University. Kindred's biography follows Fanny on five voyages between Halifax and Bermuda and then across the Atlantic in hms Cleopatra in 1811. Crossing [End Page 228] the Atlantic in a fighting vessel, Fanny risked both weather and battle; Kindred highlights her intrepidity in undertaking the voyage with two small children. However, Fanny had incentive to reach England, where she was reunited with her beloved sister as well as with her parents, who had earlier left Bermuda for Bloomsbury. The family's time in England also allowed Fanny to meet sister-in-law Jane just as her writing career blossomed with the publication of Sense and Sensibility. When Charles was commissioned as flag captain to...

Gościnne myślenie świata. Podmiotowość zwierząt w perspektywie kosmopolitycznej

The article aims to discuss the question of the political agency and the subjecthood of animals within the framework of cosmopolitan thinking that features the notions of citizenship of the world and cosmopolitan right (as a condition of ‘perpetual peace’ in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy). Cosmopolitanism, as elucidated by Kwame Anthony Appiah, is in its basic meaning a gesture of transcending the particularity of political interests and alliances to approach the whole universe. It involves going beyond the bonds of kinship and citizenship and embracing a global biological community on the basis of moral obligations arising from coexistence and cohabitation with other beings, regardless of how distant and alien they are. This broad, indeed hospitable, definition of cosmopolitanism seems to invite interspecies applications, especially in relation to the far-reaching consequences the needs of one species to dominate the Earth that give rise to a sense of community with a distinct set of moral commitments.

The Bonds of Kinship, the Ties of Freedom in Colonial Peru

By contrasting how families who mobilized African-descent networks gained more autonomy than those who relied on slaveholder patronage, this article explores the interplay between kinship and manumission on the northern Peruvian coast from the mid-seventeenth century into the early eighteenth century. For enslaved and freed people, kinship did not constitute a status, but a series of exchanges that required legal or public recognition and mutual acknowledgment. Manumission was embedded in articulated kinships, or announced relations, as well as in silenced kinships that often occurred because owners refused to recognize their relationships with enslaved women.

Dancing bodies and Indigenous ontology: what does the haka reveal about the Māori relationship with the Earth?

This essay seeks to explore the extent to which the haka can be seen as an unparalleled source for approaching Māori understandings of the world and their relationship with the Earth. Taking into account the growing interest in the ontological turn and post‐humanist phenomenologies, the main focus of this paper is to examine how the haka could be a way of demonstrating Māori ontology. One of the merits of the ontological turn has been to destabilise colonial forms of thinking. After discussing the need for decolonising research related to Indigenous issues, the haka is regarded as a discourse of the earthly human experience in which the meaning of places for Māori plays an important part in the construction of the message. Later, the narrative of the body is re‐contextualised in terms of its spatiality. Three interlocked spatial scales of analysis reveal different aspects of the ontological significance of the haka. Beyond its first aim of intimidating enemies, the haka is addressed as a performative experience of the relationship between Māori and the natural environment. Non‐human and inanimate things in the surrounding environment are regarded as relatives by Māori, and as with songs and stories, the dance renews the strong bonds of kinship that exist between Māori and the natural world.

Relatos de adopciones monoparentales: tensiones y potencialidades

Aquí exploramos los modos de construir el parentesco por parte de las mujeres que adoptan en Buenos Aires como familias monoparentales. Estas reflexiones se desprenden de una investigación de mayor alcance, en la cual hemos observado frecuentemente en las parejas heterosexuales la presencia de sentidos que refuerzan la pertenencia del adoptado al nuevo grupo, sin desafiar el modelo tradicional de sustitución de familias. Sin embargo, durante el trabajo de entrevistas con mujeres que deciden adoptar independientemente de la conformación de pareja, hallamos que se les suelen otorgar niños de mayor edad, con vínculos afectivos más presentes. Planteamos que dadas estas circunstancias —a veces no deseadas—, las adopciones monoparentales, si bien no representan un modelo alternativo, pueden auspiciar construcciones más flexibles e inclusivas.

The Strategies Of Scavengers In Maintaining Their Viability Based On Social Networks In Surabaya City

As a big city, Surabaya still becomes its own magnetic attraction for the urban to come and earn a livelihood. The informal sector is basically a form of response to the migrants and the poor people of the city towards the uneven development in many regions. The informal sector operationally growing or developing in urban areas generally includes the fields of trade, construction, services, and transportation. And one of the types of work that can be categorized important is trading rubbish/garbage. The front-liners in trading rubbish/garbage are scavengers. Social network has its leading role in their effort to maintain the survival. It is very important to fulfill the need of information concerning employment, food, clothing, housing and others. Social network is formed because basically humans have their limitations in dealing with other people and the social network is used by scavengers as a strategy to maintain their survival. The study explored the ability of the scavengers in maintaining their viabilitybased approach to social network. This is a descriptive-qualitative research. The techniques applied were purposive and random samplings, data collection based on FGD, and in-depth interviews. After careful observation, it was known that the social network was formed due to the bond of kinship in the scavenger community. Besides the mechanical and organic ties of solidarity could develope a chain of trading to sell their scavenging goods. There was a mutual beneficial relationship between scavengers and collectors. They also developed their social interaction outside the communities. After some prudent observations were conducted, the strategies of scavengers in maintaining their viability based on social network were described. Keywords: strategy to maintain viability, scavengers, social network

Loss, Diaspora, Displacement, and Parentage in Alistair MacLeodʼs No Great Mischief

Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief is a novel about family, history, clan bonds and the preservation of Scottish tradition and history by Scottish immigrants in Cape Breton, Canada. Spanning over two centuries, narrator Alexander MacDonald’s family history maps out the generational effects of the Scottish diaspora on the extended clan, clann Chalum Ruaidh, including loss of land, language, music, and clan members. Clann Calum Ruaidh becomes dispersed within Canada itself, although it is never spiritually divided as kinship bonds are repetitively enforced, and its members remain, as Lily Cho writes of diasporic communities, “connected by a sense of a homeland” (2007, p. 12). Yet while the novel is about familial relationships during a lifetime of cultural preservation in a new country, what ultimately haunts the text is significant loss of parentage. If the diasporic experience means to be “marked by loss”, as Cho suggests (2007, p. 19), then Alexander and the various members of clann Chalum Ruaidh are undoubtedly diasporic subjects. The novel is shaped by familial loss and the characters as products of the Scottish diaspora are challenged to preserve their Scottish traditions, language, lore and sense of the homeland in Canada in and amidst these tragedies. Throughout the text, the diasporic experience is manifested in the deaths of the parents of central characters such as Alexander, Catherine, Calum, the initial children of Calum Ruadh, and Grandfather MacDonald. While parentage is a means with which these characters connect to Scotland and Scottish tradition, the preservation process is hindered by the deaths of parents in clann Chalum Ruaidh. The mother and father figures in the clan function as the closest ties to the Scottish homeland generationally and genealogically, and as they disappear, these ties to homeland and history become obscured, and the children of the clan, displaced.

Kinship Bonds and Emotional Ties: Lack of a Family Relationship as Ground for Disinheritance

Abstract: A topical issue in the context of the general debate about the need to retain or abolish forced share in Spain is the question of whether to broaden the range of grounds for excluding a forced heir from his or her share of the estate. There is particular debate surrounding the appropriateness of adding estrangement or the lack of a family relationship to the list of grounds, with the aim of increasing testamentary freedom. Some countries have a tendency to allow ties of affection to prevail over purely family or kinship ties in this matter, but sometimes at the cost of legal certainty and – since such a vague ground is not necessarily more respectful with freedom of testation – despite the risk that the courts may not always achieve the justice sought by a testator who wishes to disinherit a forced heir that shows no affection for her. This paper considers the different approaches to this topic between different legal systems. The Catalan and the German ones just represent extreme examples of radical different tendencies. In Spain, recent case law has provided new arguments for thinking about what the law says, how the courts interpret, and, finally, what the society expects. Resumée: Faut-il étendre les causes qui permettent d’exclure un héritier réservataire de sa part dans le patrimoine? Telle est une des questions brûlantes qui agitent le débat sur le maintien ou l’abolition de la réserve héréditaire en Espagne. Le débat porte en particulier sur le point de savoir s’il est opportun d’ajouter aux causes d’exclusion, la séparation ou l’absence de relations familiales, dans le but d’accroitre la liberté testamentaire. Certains pays ont tendance à faire prévaloir les liens affectifs sur les liens de famille ou de parenté, parfois au détriment de la sécurité juridique. Le caractère vague d’un tel motif ne respecte pas nécessairement la liberté de tester, parce qu’il n’est pas sûr que les tribunaux y parviendraient à l’objectif de justice recherché par le testateur qui souhaite déshériter un héritier réservataire lorsqu’il ne montre pas de proximité affective avec lui. Cet article met en évidence les différentes approches de cette question par différents systèmes juridiques. Le système catalan et le système allemand donnent par exemple des réponses radicalement différentes. En Espagne, la jurisprudence récente a fourni de nouveaux arguments pour réfléchir à ce que dit la loi, ce que les tribunaux donnent comme interprétation et, enfin, ce que la société attend.

‘Moi aussi, alors, je serai grand-mère’. La construction de la parenté dans les familles homosexuelles

ABSTRACTUsing the gift as epistemological category, the article explores the social processes of kinship formation in homosexual families. Analysing the stories of lesbian families, the article tries to explain the reason why the mothers want to have kinship networks and kinship bonds. Through kinship connections, all the members are and want to be (or don't want to be) publicly recognised as reciprocal parents of the new-born.

Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour: highly conserved neurobehavioural mechanisms across species.

Empathy reflects the natural ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others, coupled with a motivation to care for their well-being. It has evolved in the context of parental care for offspring, as well as within kinship bonds, to help facilitate group living. In this paper, we integrate the perspectives of evolution, animal behaviour, developmental psychology, and social and clinical neuroscience to elucidate our understanding of the proximate mechanisms underlying empathy. We focus, in particular, on processing of signals of distress and need, and their relation to prosocial behaviour. The ability to empathize, both in animals and humans, mediates prosocial behaviour when sensitivity to others' distress is paired with a drive towards their welfare. Disruption or atypical development of the neural circuits that process distress cues and integrate them with decision value leads to callous disregard for others, as is the case in psychopathy. The realization that basic forms of empathy exist in non-human animals is crucial for gaining new insights into the underlying neurobiological and genetic mechanisms of empathy, enabling translation towards therapeutic and pharmacological interventions.

A Chosen Missionary People? Willibrord, Boniface, and the Election of the Angli

In the seventh and eighth centuries, missionaries from Anglo-Saxon England travelled to the continent with the aim of spreading the gospel among its Germanic peoples. This movement has been seen as a response to a sense of collective vocation tied to the belief that the English were God’s chosen people. This article combs sources associated with the circles of the missionaries Willibrord (d. 739) and Boniface (d. 754) for evidence of such a belief. It breaks down the concept of ethnic election with a missionary purpose into its separate components to be analysed in turn. In the first section, it is argued that Anglo-Saxon missionaries saw themselves as belonging to the Angli, a people united by faith, homeland, and bonds of kinship. The second section presents evidence that the missionaries viewed their own people and its church as specially favoured by God; this favour was tied to the maintenance high standards of belief and practice. The final section considers whether this sense of election acted as a motivator for Anglo-Saxon missionary efforts. It concludes that, despite subsequent claims to the contrary by their contemporaries and successors, the missionaries themselves did not specifically connect the special status of their people with the purpose of evangelism.

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature by Rachel Trubowitz

Reviewed by: Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature by Rachel Trubowitz Lauren Shook (bio) Keywords maternal body, Breastfeeding, English nation, modernity, Milton, Judeo-Christian relations, Seventeenth century Rachel Trubowitz. Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 251 pages. $115.00. “The breast replaces the pen as the authorial implement of choice” for the seventeenth-century English nation, argues Rachel Trubowitz in Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (26), citing the breast as the origin of the new modern nation and its components: the new spiritual mother, the reformed English subject, the Stuart political debate over the nation’s name, and the reformed nation. Trubowitz presents the reader with a diverse array of literary, extra-literary, and visual texts to support this argument. Literary works include Macbeth and popular querelle des femmes texts (ch. 2); political writings of James I, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and John Milton (ch. 3); Paradise Lost and Mary Cary’s and Anna Trapnel’s prophesies (ch. 4); and Samson Agonistes (ch. 5). The extra-literary include domestic guidebooks by Robert Cleaver and John Dod, William Gouge, Robert Pricke, and Elizabeth Clinton. Finally, visual culture takes a prominent place in Trubowitz’s book, including Renaissance portraits of the lactating Virgin Mary, such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Madonna del Latte (ca . 1330s), and frontispieces of English print culture, such as Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612) and Richard Braithwaite’s The English Gentleman and English Gentlewoman (1641). This impressive, yet admittedly “ambitious scope,” successfully demonstrates the pervasiveness of the [End Page 149] nurturing mother in seventeenth-century debates regarding the English nation (33). For Trubowitz, the emergent English modern nation of the seventeenth century signals a different relationship among English subjects. Rather than being defined by rank, class, or bloodline, the modern English subject is defined in abstract, spiritual (“reformed”) terms. The modern nation is a reformed nation but is also Janus-faced and paradoxical, consisting of warring parties and ideologies: it is both royalist and reformist, dynastic and post-dynastic. And yet, the maternal breast is central to all. This modern nation, Trubowitz insists, begins at home where mothers were charged with the spiritual nurture of children. As Trubowitz shows in chapter 1, seventeenth-century England’s preoccupation with maternal breastfeeding, as opposed to wet-nursing, figured as a reformed interest among the emerging middle-class, one that would promote social bonds over bloodlines. What is so compelling about Trubowitz’s argument is that the language of maternal nurture was not just reserved for one particular type of English subject; rather reformists, proponents of an emerging middle-class, and royalist aristocrats all took up the rhetoric of the maternal breast. This is the primary argument of chapter 3, “Nursing Fathers and National Identity.” For instance, Trubowitz identifies James I’s political discourse surrounding the proposed unification between Scotland and England as a nurturing one that names both the Scottish and English as James’s children, figuring the king himself as the metaphorical mother. Likewise, Oliver Cromwell plays the nursing mother in his speeches aimed at solidifying the New Model Army and evokes “the language of nurturing motherhood to activate new affective forms of social attachment capable of overriding the bonds of blood and natural kinship that determined rank, status, title, and other customary forms of social distinction and stature in ‘the Kingdome old’” (126). Trubowitz is at her best when she highlights the ubiquitous nature of reformed motherhood and the nursing mother in both anti-Stuart and pro-Stuart rhetoric. What Trubowitz so convincingly proves is that social order nursed at the mother’s breast. The healthy futurity of England depended on the mother’s breast. Chapter 1, “Nursing Mothers and National Identity,” offers a sweeping examination of the visual and textual culture of the lactating breast and traces how reformist seventeenth-century domestic guidebooks by Dod and Cleaver, Gouge, and Clinton promote breastfeeding as a holy, spiritual necessity, which they argue should replace wet-nursing. The guidebooks present the Virgin [End Page 150] Mary’s holy breast as just one maternal breast among a typological, “scriptural line of exemplary, natural nursing mothers” which includes Jochobed...

Creating religiously compliant milk banks in the Muslim world: a commentary

Human milk banks are vital for providing donor milk to infants for whom there are maternal or postnatal barriers to the mother’s own milk. Although more than 35 countries have active milk banks, not one of those is a Muslim country.1 Despite widespread support for breastfeeding across the Muslim world, religious constraints surrounding milk-sharing have created challenging barriers to the creation of milk banks. The religious objection centres around the Islamic tenet that consuming human milk builds a kinship bond between individuals who have consumed the same woman’s milk which prohibits future marriage between the ‘milk-brothers and sisters.’ While a small-scale, experimental ‘milk exchange’ programme has been attempted in two Muslim countries (Kuwait and Malaysia), the only proposed milk bank in the Muslim world was a pilot programme in Turkey that was halted because of religious concerns. The problem with milk banking is the step in the process during which the milk from individual donors is pooled and de-identified, making it impossible to trace its origins and acknowledge the newly formed kinship relationship. To meet the need for Muslim children to be able to access human milk while remaining compliant with the prevalent understanding of Islamic doctrine on milk-sharing, we propose a new approach to milk banking that we term the Conditional Identified Milk Banking System (CIMBS). In this new system, both the donor’s and recipient’s identities are accessible to all parties through a voluntary registry, and the milk-pooling is limited to three milk donors. Based on recent survey data, we believe that there would be receptivity among practicing Muslims and religious leaders to this alternative approach.

Investigación paleoantropológica de los fósiles neandertales de El Sidrón (Asturias, España)

Tras 13 campañas de excavación metódica, y una vez concluidos definitivamente los trabajos de campo en la Galería del Osario de la cueva de El Sidrón (Asturias, España), se presenta una breve evaluación de las investigaciones paleoantropológicas realizadas. Los restos neandertales recuperados ascienden a más de 2550, a los que hay que sumar las 400 piezas de industria lítica musteriense y los muy escasos restos de fauna; asociación que hace de este yacimiento un lugar muy singular. Análisis sedimentológicos, tafonómicos y estructurales del karst aclaran que el depósito fosilífero se encuentra en posición secundaria y procede, por desplazamiento en masa, de una galería/abrigo de un nivel superior. Todas las partes del esqueleto están representadas y se han identificado 13 individuos: 7 adultos (3 masculinos, 4 femeninos), 3 adolescentes (2 masculinos, 1 femenino), 2 juveniles masculinos y un infantil. En la actualidad, la colección de El Sidrón constituye la muestra de neandertales más numerosa y diversa de la Península Ibérica y permite abordar estudios sistémicos sobre el tempo y modo de aparición de los caracteres derivados en el linaje neandertal. El amplio programa de investigación paleobiológica emprendido abarca los diferentes niveles de organización biológica, desde los anatómicos macroscópicos al molecular. En este último destaca especialmente la extracción de secuencias de ADN, con participación de El Sidrón en los proyectos genoma y exoma neandertal, además de la caracterización de los haplotipos de ADN mitocondrial de 12 individuos. Los resultados genéticos, ratificados por datos osteológicos, definen a los neandertales de El Sidrón como un grupo homogéneo, con estrechos lazos familiares entre sus individuos. Finalmente, las numerosas evidencias del tratamiento antrópico de los restos hacen de El Sidrón un ejemplo paradigmático de prácticas de canibalismo entre los neandertales.

What Rights Get Wrong about Justice for Orphans: An Old Testament Challenge to a Modern Ideology

This article challenges Nicholas Wolterstorff’s rights-based reading of Old Testament orphans by arguing that the prophetic demand for their cause not only assumes a right-order ethos championed in the Torah, but in doing so exposes the shortcomings in how justice is defined for orphaned children within current rights ideology, whether theistic or not. I present the orphan’s historical trajectory towards becoming socially vulnerable as the final stage in the transition from the kinship-redeemer justice of Israelite village clans to the chesed justice of the patronage economy in emerging urban conditions. In light of these conditions, I show how the orphan laws in Deuteronomy are, counter to Wolterstorff’s claims of corruption, attempting to re-create in legal terms the kinship bond and chesed benevolence that defines the orphan’s justice as the return to a family. I argue that the prophet does not blame inherently corrupt laws, but rather blames patrons and elders who have ignored good laws and ignored right-order by forgetting their brothers’ and sons’ children.

The Socio-Cultural Functions of Kazakh Kinship Terms

This paper reports the results of a study of the Kazakh kinship structure, classification and the socio-cultural functions of the Kazakh kinship terms. The Kazakhs have developed at first glance very complex and many branched kinship bonds with the moral codes, family relationship etiquette, the patterns of rights , duties and responsibilities thus being one of the strongest binding forces. The first and foremost principle of the Kazakh kinship system is the principle of “the seven ancestors”-a particular kind of chain of parent-child links between ancestors and descendants. The principle of 7 ancestors defines marriage rules, sex regulation, and incest taboo. For Kazakhs kinship was one of the strongest survival strategies thanks to which they could save integrity of their country. Every terminologically identified kinship category is associated with a culturally distinctive pattern of behavior which should be followed in relation to EGO.

Sudsy Sovereignty: Indigenous Workers and the Hops Industry of the Pacific Slope

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous people in the Pacific Slope—California, Oregon, and Washington—worked in the hops industry. After the Civil War, the cultivation of hops, one of the principal ingredients used to make beer, moved from the Midwest to California, Oregon, and Washington to take advantage of developing urban transportation networks, a long growing season, and good soils. Native workers erected hop poles, trained vines, picked hops, and transported the crop to urban distribution centers. In return for their labor, Native peoples earned cash wages, which they used to compensate for poorly provisioned reservations. In addition to earning cash wages, Indigenous people used hop picking to establish credentials for leaders, participate in social activities banned on reservations, and create kinship bonds. Hops and the food product it made—beer—were not used to undermine American Indian power on the Pacific Slope; American Indians used hops and beer to reclaim what had been lost during the colonization of the Pacific Slope and to articulate their sovereignty.

Kinless or Queer: The Unthinkable Queer Slave in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Robert O’Hara’s Insurrection: Holding History

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and Robert O’Hara’s play Insurrection: Holding History foreground nonnormative sexuality in their reinhabitations of American slavery. Sexuality has a unique relationship to the fundamental conditions of enslavement: preclusion from legally recognized kinship bonds and the inability to generate reproductive futurity. Morrison deploys nonnormative sexuality to represent the perversions of slavery from which the postbellum black psyche must recover to attain heteronormative patriarchy, while O’Hara sends a contemporary queer character back in time to discover the parallels between himself and his enslaved ancestors. Despite their differences, both works demonstrate that the conditions of kinlessness and lack of futurity preclude the enslaved from exercising or articulating queer sexuality.

Revisiting “Assabiyyah” in Ibn Khaldun’s "Muqadimmah": Explaining the Recalcitrance of Social Solidarity in the Political

International Relations theories are increasingly trying to grapple with the phenomenon of resurgent identities changing the dynamics of international politics. This remains true for explaining post-9/11 US policy in West Asia, the Arab Spring, and also the current isolation of the US on Syria. Though the Realist explanations (such as the dissolving of USA's central authority being the reason for intensified emergence of other anchors of politics based on identity) abound, the recalcitrance of social bonds of solidarity and the role of their nodal points in politics demands theorization in their own right. The field of inquiry into the intellectual history of this idea has been rather dry. The study of the treatment of Assabiyyah in Khaldun can be said to offer a starting point. The paper revisits the history and context of the idea of Assabiyyah in Ibn Khaldun, the 13th century Islamic scholar, to inquire as to how much it can be said to define the realm of the political today. It argues that the concept of social solidarity can neither be refuted as primeval bonds of kinship nor can the complexity of its social evolution and persistence in the political be captured by the Durkheimian dichotomous classification of mechanical and organic solidarity. It thus tries to explore the potential of the idea of Assabiyyah in Ibn Khaldun as a non-dichotomous one which cannot be restricted to the discipline of sociology but is an explicitly political one, to explain the turn towards identity, culture, and civilization in the theories of international relations.