bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Too many lemons to make lemonade? Disentangling mental health during the third wave of COVID-19 infections in Spain
Authors: Miragall Marta , Escrivá-Martínez Tamara , Wrzesien Maja , Vara Mª Dolores , Herrero Rocío , Desdentado Lorena , Baños Rosa Mª
Published: October 2022

The study aimed to analyze the longitudinal change in mental health during the third wave of COVID-19 infections in Spain. Negative (e.g., emotional distress) and positive (e.g., positive functioning variables) outcomes were analyzed. Protective factors (e.g., resilience) as predictors of psychological adjustment (i.e., positive mental health, openness to the future, and low burden due to COVID-19) after ten months of the pandemic were also examined. The sample consisted of 164 participants, and self-reported questionnaires were administered at the beginning of the lockdown (March 2020), at the end of the lockdown (June 2020), and during the third wave (January 2021). Linear mixed models showed that individuals’ emotional distress increased, and positive functioning variables (i.e., meaning in life, gratitude, resilience, and life satisfaction) decreased over time, but an increase was observed in some dimensions of posttraumatic growth. Regression analyses showed that resilience scores at all three data collection time points were significant predictors of positive mental health, openness to the future, and burden during the third wave. Mediation analyses showed that positive mental health and openness to the future were mediators of the effect of resilience on burden. The prolonged situation of the COVID-19 crisis had an important impact on positive and negative mental health. However, resilience may help to build up resources that can act as a buffer against adverse psychological effects.
An Ecological Expert System Optimization for Assessing Environmental Water Requirements of Hypersaline Lakes
Authors: Sedighkia Mahdi , Abdoli Asghar
Published: October 2022

The present study proposes an applicable methodology to optimize environmental water requirement of hypersaline lakes with a focus on Urmia lake as the case study in which remote sensing analysis, machine learning model and fuzzy expert system are linked. A machine learning model was developed to simulate effective abiotic parameters in which bands of operational land imager (Landsat 8) were inputs and depth and total dissolved solids were the outputs of the model. Moreover, an ecological expert system using Mamadani fuzzy inference system was developed to generate the habitat suitability map for the selected target species. Then, a multivariate linear model was developed to assess unit habitat suitability in which water level and total inflow of the lake were the variables of the model. An optimization model was developed to assess environmental water requirement in which habitat suitability between natural and regulated flows and water supply loss was minimized. The multivariate linear model was applied to assess habitat suitability in the optimization model. Based on the results in the case study, the proposed combined model is able to balance the ecological requirements and water demand by allocating 60% and 40% of total inflow to environmental water requirement and water demand respectively. Average habitat loss proposed by the optimal environmental water requirement was less than 20% which implies the robustness of the model. Generating habitat suitability maps of the lake by a reliable method which is used in the environmental flow optimization might be the significance of the proposed method.
Exploring the Influence of Race in Mate Copying Using Former Partner Evaluations
Authors: Zhang Joseph , Anderson Ryan C.
Published: October 2022

Human mate choice is a complex, nuanced process that incorporates factors including physical attractiveness, race, culture, and social values. Choosing the wrong partner can be a risky and costly affair; hence, mate choosers may copy the choices of others to inform their own decisions about the mate quality of a potential partner. This phenomenon is known as mate copying (MC). Consistent with previous research methods, the current study presented a sample of 461 Australian women with photographic stimuli of target men of one of three races paired with a description of a former female partner evaluating the target man either positively or negatively. Racial similarity between participants and the target man was statistically controlled for. As hypothesised, positive evaluations elicited MC whereas negative evaluations elicited mate avoidance. Racial similarity was also shown to influence measures of desirability and MC propensity. Results were discussed within the context of existing human MC literature, with particular emphasis on exploring how new factors affect the expression of MC intent within the Australian female demographic. Recommendations for further research based on these outcomes were also made.
Discrete micro-physics interactions determine fracture apertures
Authors: Couples Gary D.
Published: October 2022

An important question arises in relation to a rock-mass that is disrupted by an array of fractures, namely: how to quantify the evolving spatial arrangement of fracture apertures that are a major factor in bulk fluid flow processes. The approach herein employs a discrete micro-physics model of the rock texture, enabling the formulation of analytical expressions that explicitly define the fluids//geomechanics interactions that occur at the micro-scale. The resulting macro-scale responses of the model define the stress, bulk strain, and pressure states that characterise the porous rock. Via extending the discrete model by introducing a planar discontinuity, the fracture-normal bulk strain determines the status of the fracture aperture, as a consequence of the movement of the rock//fracture interface. The micro-physics model shows that a closed fracture cannot change to an open fracture by pressure changes alone; instead, bulk strain must elongate the porous rock in a direction normal to the fracture. Once opened, fracture apertures respond to changes in fluid pressure. A realistic context, within which the required bulk strain occurs, is the discontinuum geomechanics of fractured rock-mass systems, for which previous simulations exhibit a range of emergent local states that relate to the conditions, identified via the micro-physics, as being the essential controls on aperture evolution.

Article highlights

Discrete rock-texture model underpins micro-physics expressions that lead to macro-scale material response of matrix//fracture

Closed fracture cannot open without local elongation normal to fracture; high pressure alone does not open fracture

Open fracture changes aperture with changing pressure
Identification of TUBB8 Variants in 5 Primary Infertile Women with Multiple Phenotypes in Oocytes and Early Embryos
Authors: Yu Wenzhu , Zhang Shaodi , Yin Baoli , Dong Chang , Zhang Victor Wei , Zhang Cuilian
Published: October 2022

Tubulin beta 8 class VIII (TUBB8) is a β-tubulin isotype that is specifically expressed in human oocytes and early embryos. It has been identified as a disease-causing gene in primary female infertility by affecting oocyte maturation arrest. This study investigated the genetic cause of female infertility in five patients from four families. Five women with primary infertility were recruited. Medical-exome sequencing and Sanger sequencing were performed on the patients, and their family members to identify candidate genes that explained infertility. Additionally, the morphology of oocytes and zygotes from the patients and controls were assessed. We observed recurrent oocytes MI arrest, oocytes abnormal fertilization, uncleaved embryos, and embryo transfer failure in the patients. Heterozygous missense variants in TUBB8, c.538G > A (p.V180M), c.527C > G (p.S176W), c.124C > G (p.L42V), and c.628A > C (p.I210L), were verified in four unrelated families. This study expanded the mutational spectrum of TUBB8 by identifying three novel heterozygous missense variants. Screening for TUBB8 mutation demonstrated the diagnostic utility of female infertility.
A review of the modern principles and applications of solid-phase extraction techniques in chromatographic analysis
Authors: Badawy Mohamed E. I. , El-Nouby Mahmoud A. M. , Kimani Paul K. , Lim Lee W. , Rabea Entsar I.
Published: October 2022

Analytical processes involving sample preparation, separation, and quantifying analytes in complex mixtures are indispensable in modern-day analysis. Each step is crucial to enriching correct and informative results. Therefore, sample preparation is the critical factor that determines both the accuracy and the time consumption of a sample analysis process. Recently, several promising sample preparation approaches have been made available with environmentally friendly technologies with high performance. As a result of its many advantages, solid-phase extraction (SPE) is practiced in many different fields in addition to the traditional methods. The SPE is an alternative method to liquid–liquid extraction (LLE), which eliminates several disadvantages, including many organic solvents, a lengthy operation time and numerous steps, potential sources of error, and high costs. SPE advanced sorbent technology reorients with various functions depending on the structure of extraction sorbents, including reversed-phase, normal-phase, cation exchange, anion exchange, and mixed-mode. In addition, the commercial SPE systems are disposable. Still, with the continual developments, the restricted access materials (RAM) and molecular imprinted polymers (MIP) are fabricated to be active reusable extraction cartridges. This review will discuss all the theoretical and practical principles of the SPE techniques, focusing on packing materials, different forms, and performing factors in recent and future advances. The information about novel methodological and instrumental solutions in relation to different variants of SPE techniques, solid-phase microextraction (SPME), in-tube solid-phase microextraction (IT-SPME), and magnetic solid-phase extraction (MSPE) is presented. The integration of SPE with analytical chromatographic techniques such as LC and GC is also indicated. Furthermore, the applications of these techniques are discussed in detail along with their advantages in analyzing pharmaceuticals, biological samples, natural compounds, pesticides, and environmental pollutants, as well as foods and beverages.

Graphical abstract
China and Global Food Security
Authors: Zhan Shaohua
Published: October 2022

In less than half a century (1978–2020), China has transformed itself from a country that barely fed itself to a powerful player in the global food system, characterized by massive food imports, active overseas agricultural engagement, and the global expansion of Chinese agribusiness. This Element offers a nuanced analysis of China's global food strategy and its impacts on food security and the international agri-food order. To feed a population of 1.4 billion, China actively seeks overseas agri-food resources whilst maintaining a high level of domestic food production. This strategy gives China an advantageous position in the global food system, but it also creates contradictions and problems within and beyond the country. This could potentially worsen global food insecurity in the long term.
Agrarian Inequality and the Theory of Peasant Rebellion
Authors: Seligson Mitchell A.
Published: October 2022

Insurgency has largely subsided in Central America, but the academic debate over the causes of the violence in the 1980s waxes hotter than ever. As scholars, we have an obligation to subject our theories to the acid test of reality. As individuals interested in the policy process, we must evaluate the outcomes of those policies, even though they are sometimes based on faulty readings of our theories. The increasingly rich body of literature and data available on Central America compels observers to move away from the speculation that dominated early scholarship on the region and toward serious empirical tests of our theories. In doing so, scholars will be in a position to evaluate the policies pursued by the United States and various Central American governments. My article in this journal on land tenure in El Salvador attempted to address both theory and policy with new data (Seligson 1995). Judging by the reactions of Martin Diskin and Jeffery Paige, the conclusions that I drew have succeeded in stimulating a rich debate.
Decentering the Regime: Culture and Regional Politics in Mexico
Authors: Rubin Jeffrey W.
Published: October 2022

As a preeminent enduring regime in the world today, Mexico provides a compelling case study regarding the nature and locus of power. Since the 1970s, accounts of politics in postrevolutionary Mexico have assumed that ongoing domination has resulted from centralized, relatively homogeneous power transmitted outward through corporatist mechanisms. The process of transmission replicated the dynamics of the center through a combination of skillful management and efficient coercion. Even now, as researchers are emphasizing the breakdown of corporatism and the complexity and nuance of current Mexican politics, they continue to codify the past according to the terms of the 1970s analysis and view the present through this lens. But while social scientists in the 1970s were right to characterize the postrevolutionary Mexican regime as authoritarian and hegemonic, they were wrong about the nature of hegemony. In constructing a state-centered and center-centered understanding of politics, social scientists then and now have misunderstood the nature of power and domination in Mexico and the reasons for the endurance of the Mexican regime.
Entre Dios y el Cesar: El clero secular rioplatense de las reformas borbónicas a la Revolución de Independencia
Authors: Di Stefano Roberto
Published: October 2022

Esta nota analiza las profundas transformaciones que en distintos órdenes—religioso, social, cultural y político-eclesiástico—experimentaron la diócesis de Buenos Aires y su clero secular a fines del período colonial. Si bien en el Río de la Plata la política reformista de la corona española en el terreno eclesiástico no tuvo la misma incidencia que en otras áreas de América, las últimas décadas del siglo XVIII—ricas en fermentos innovadores como en situaciones conflictivas—resultan decisivas para comprender el desarrollo de los acontecimientos político-religiosos de la primera mitad del siglo XIX, entre ellos la cuestión de la politización del clero y la reforma eclesiástica de 1822.
Human Rights Archives and Research on Historical Memory: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay
Authors: Bickford Louis
Published: October 2022

This research note discusses an emerging subfield of inquiry in the study of democratization in Latin America: a focus on the relationships between past human rights abuses and democratization processes. It outlines four sets of questions emerging around the themes of “historical memory” and “legacies of authoritarian rule.” The study then examines documentary collections of major human rights nongovernmental organizations (HRNGOs) in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. The purpose of this endeavor is to provide researchers interested in studying the four issues with specific information on documents produced and currently held by the HRNGOs in the Southern Cone. The essay examines seven HRNGOs in Chile, ten in Argentina, and four in Uruguay, and ends with practical hints for researchers who wish to use these resources.
Brazilian Archives and Recent Historiography on Colonial Brazil
Authors: Russell-Wood A. J. R.
Published: October 2022

This article draws attention to archival research by Brazilian historians in Portugal and Brazil and the fruits of these labors in monographs, dissertations, and articles. Following a survey of historical writing in the colonial period, this essay discusses the growing movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to preserve documents in libraries, archives, and museums in Brazil. The existence of such institutions spurred divulgation of manuscript collections through journals and published transcriptions of documents. The essay then traces Brazilian historiography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as Brazilian responses to new trends in historical writing in the 1960s. A survey of archives consulted by scholars of colonial Brazil provides the background for the main section, which uses case studies to demonstrate how Brazilian historians have used these depositories. Scholarship published between 1983 and 1999 is emphasized. The intensive use of manuscript collections and the high quality of publications testify to the vitality of studies by Brazilian scholars of colonial Brazil.
Mexican Tourism: Export Growth and Structural Change since 1970
Authors: Clancy Michael
Published: October 2022

Over the past three decades, tourism has become integral to the Mexican economy. Mexico easily leads Latin America in tourism exports, the provision of tourist-related services to foreigners visiting the country. Today tourism also serves as the second-largest employer in Mexico and ranks consistently among the top three earners of foreign exchange. This study traces the origin of Mexico's tourism boom by examining state policies and private-sector activity during the last thirty years. It also presents data on distributional patterns associated with tourism in an effort to evaluate Mexico's tourism record within the larger context of development.
Neoliberalism, Gender, and Property Rights in Rural Mexico
Authors: Hamilton Sarah
Published: October 2022

The Mexican Constitution was revised in 1992 to foster privatization of agrarian reform lands. Legal inheritance protections for spouses were removed, and individual title holders (85 percent male) obtained rights to sell land formerly considered family patrimony. State disinvestment contributed to economic crisis in the land-reform sector. This longitudinal study of four communities in northern and central Mexico explores the counterintuitive effects of agrarian law, customary inheritance norms, and women's changing roles in household economies and community sociopolitics on the material and ideological bases for women's entitlement to land. Quantitative and qualitative data show that women's rights to land under customary inheritance norms were upheld locally and that women's control of family land increased along with growing responsibility for production and community activism. Women's property rights were enhanced rather than eroded as families and communities struggled to meet the economic and social challenges posed by the neoliberal agenda.
Rural Puerto Rico in the Early Twentieth Century Reconsidered: Land and Society, 1899–1915
Authors: Ayala César J. , Bergad Laird W.
Published: October 2022

The U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898 radically altered patterns of social and economic development. Examination of census and archival data on land tenure reveals that contrary to generally accepted conclusions, land tenure did not become more concentrated in fewer hands in the years from 1898 to 1915. Instead, and despite massive agro-industrial investments by U.S. sugar corporations, more small farmers owned land in 1915 than at the end of the Spanish colonial period in 1898. This surprising revelation contradicts the findings of all previous studies, and it prompts us to research further the social and economic impact of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico in the first decades of the twentieth century.
The Politics of Decentralization in Latin America
Authors: Willis Eliza , Garman Christopher da C. B. , Haggard Stephan
Published: October 2022

One of the most significant developments in Latin American politics and political economy in the last two decades has been the increasing decentralization of government. This development has generated a substantial literature on the pros and cons of decentralization and on subnational politics but few attempts to explain differences in the pattern of decentralization across countries. Fiscal decentralization must be understood as a political bargain involving presidents, legislators, and subnational politicians, each having somewhat conflicting preferences. How these bargains are struck will depend heavily on the lines of accountability within political parties. In systems with centralized political parties, the central government has exercised greater control over resources and uses than in countries with decentralized parties, in which subnational politicians exercise strong influence over legislators. The article explores this hypothesis through a comparative analysis of decentralization in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico.
The Mexican State and Transmigrant Organizations: Negotiating the Boundaries of Membership and Participation
Authors: Goldring Luin
Published: October 2022

This article examines relations between the Mexican state and transmigrants through an analysis of migrant- and state-led transnational practices and policies. It addresses discussions of the strength and extent of Mexican state control and hegemony as well as debates in the transnationalism literature on the potential autonomy of transmigrant groups and the role of subnational linkages. The analysis is based on information on transmigrant organizations and Mexican political authorities in Los Angeles and Mexico and focuses on Zacatecas. Mexican transmigrant organizations predate current state initiatives aimed at Mexicans in the United States, but state involvement has been crucial to the institutionalizing of transnational social spaces. The state's hegemonic project involves the largely symbolic reincorporation of paisanos living abroad back into to the nation but depends on provincial and municipal authorities and transmigrant organizations for implementation. Because these vary, the project has been implemented unevenly. The complexity of these processes can be captured only by examining transnational social spaces at a subnational level. The case of Zacatecas shows how a corporatist and semi-clientelist transmigrant organization has managed to gain concessions that broaden opportunities for participation. It remains to be seen whether and how promises of political representation will be fulfilled.
Technological Elites and Political Parties: The Venezuelan Professional Community
Authors: Martz John D. , Myers David J.
Published: October 2022

As Latin America has moved through the second half of the twentieth century, both the public and private sectors have required increasing levels of technological skills and specialized expertise. In the public sector, this necessity has occasioned the rise to prominence of a sector known in Latin America as profesionales y técnicos. This emergent elite has assumed a significant role in shaping and implementing public policy because its members command skills critical to the functioning of modernizing technological society. As a result, participation by professionals and técnicos has become central to bureaucratic efficiency, economic development, and the manipulation of symbols that reinforce political legitimacy. Yet the political role of professionals and técnicos has been little explored, and direct relationships between professional elites and national parties, often central to the democratization of developing nations, have received minimal attention.
The Cautionary Tale of Carolina Maria de Jesus
Authors: Levine Robert M.
Published: October 2022

Carolina Maria de Jesús was a fiercely proud black Brazilian woman who lived in a São Paulo favela with her three illegitimate children (each with a different father). She had learned to read and write by continuing to study on her own after only two years of primary school. In 1958 fragments of her diary came to the attention of an enterprising journalist, Audálio Dantas, who helped her get it published. For a brief period, Carolina Maria de Jesús became an international celebrity as the author of the best-selling book in Brazilian publishing history. For many reasons, however, Carolina fell from favor: the rise of a military dictatorship in 1964, which led to an accompanying reaction against social criticism, and especially the ways in which she handled her fame and related to the press and the literary elite. Within a few years, she was forced to move back into the favela and scavenge for a living. A brief flurry of publicity in 1969 about her fallen condition prompted a slight improvement in her circumstances, but she was soon forgotten again. Carolina died in 1977, on the verge of indigence. Her complete life story has never been told, and most Brazilians today are unaware that a black favelada in the 1960s became the symbol (to foreigners, at least) of the struggle to rise above poverty. Most Brazilians neither read her books nor consider them noteworthy. Evidently, the author of what The New York Times called a “rarely matched essay on the meaning and the feeling of hunger, degradation, and want” touched no nerve in the Brazilian sensibility.
The Guinea Pig in the Andean Economy: From Household Animal to Market Commodity
Authors: Morales Edmundo
Published: October 2022

The guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) has been raised and consumed throughout the Andean subregion since before the arrival of Spaniards in America. According to sixteenth-century native chronicler Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, the Incas and the indigenous peoples who preceded them used the guinea pig, or cuy, for ceremonial purposes (Guarnan Poma de Ayala 1980, 55). Hundreds of years later, on the brink of the twenty-first century, mass production of cuys outside their native habitat is turning these animals into an exchange commodity that is generating many economic activities.
The Valenzuela Collection in the Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala
Authors: Little-Siebold Todd
Published: October 2022

The principal facts that direct the historic life of a country lie in the rulers who have served during different political eras. One can be sure that they are the protagonists of history because each of them creates with his or her actions chapters that will be recounted in many volumes through the years.

Gilberto Valenzuela González

While many researchers who have worked in Guatemala in the past decade would take issue with the perspective on the past reflected in Gilberto Valenzuela's statement, few would deny the importance of the collection of documents he began. In an era when history was the history of kings and battles, presidents and laws, one family's tradition of collecting any and all documents on Guatemala gave rise to a remarkable collection. The Sección Valenzuela of the Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala offers today the basis for an in-depth reconstruction of Guatemalan history during the last century and a half.
Opportunistic Government or Sustaining Reform? Electoral Trends and Public-Expenditure Patterns in Peru, 1990-1995
Authors: Graham Carol , Kane Cheikh
Published: October 2022

Consensus is growing about the fundamental principles underlying economic policy reforms. In addition, a series of recent comparative studies have increased scholarly understanding of the political conditions necessary for launching such reforms. Yet understanding of the factors that make reforms sustainable over the longer term is far less developed. A wide-ranging and unresolved debate continues over the roles played by institutions, politicians, interest groups, and the popular sectors. The influence of such groups tends to be marginal during the initial implementation of policies, a process involving an insulated group of technocrats. As the reforms proceed, the opposition of different societal groups to specific policies may have some impact but is less critical to the success or failure of the adjustment program than overall economic performance (see Geddes 1995). The primary strength of these groups is retrospective and collective: they can vote reforming governments out of office. Elections—and therefore voter behavior—are critical in sustaining economic reforms over the long term. Voters can reverse economic reform programs, and at times they do. Yet they also can play a major role in making programs more sustainable by legitimating their continuation at the ballot box.
Studying the History of Latin America: A Case of Hemispheric Convergence
Authors: Skidmore Thomas E.
Published: October 2022

The belief survives among us[Latin Americans] that United Statesscholars would write better historiesof Latin America if they studiedless and invented more.Daniel Cosío VillegasHistory and the Social Sciences in Latin America

This article will analyze the way in which U.S. historians' writing on Latin America, especially on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been influenced by the changing relationship between the United States and Latin America. It will also trace more briefly the changing approaches of historians from Latin America. In my view, the two groups have taken different routes but have arrived at much the same destination.
The Struggle for Control of a Commodity Chain: Instant Coffee from Latin America
Authors: Talbot John M.
Published: October 2022

Latin America has long provided most of the world's coffee. At the same time, dependence on coffee exports has profoundly affected many Latin American countries. This research note will analyze the relationship between primary-commodity exporting and development by means of a case study of attempts by Latin American countries to industrialize their exports by exporting instant coffee rather than green coffee beans. A commodity-chain approach will be used to explain how the initiatives of Latin American states and private firms have responded to and changed the structure of the global system of producing instant coffee. Three Latin American countries—Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador—have become significant exporters of instant coffee, but the benefits they have realized from this effort have been limited by the control exercised by transnational corporations over the global production system.
Taming Capitalism: The Evolution of the Indigenous Peasant Economy in Northern Ecuador
Authors: Korovkin Tanya
Published: October 2022

In the age of corporate empires and free trade, little attention has been paid to those who live and work on the margins of the mainstream capitalist economies. In Ecuador, these workers constitute a vast sector of the national population. Some 60 percent of urban dwellers and probably a much larger proportion of rural families exist below the poverty line, eking their living out of family plots of land or micro-enterprises (World Bank, cited in Larrea and North n.d.). Many of these belong to indigenous ethnic groups and nationalities. What is the effect of capitalist expansion on these workers and the way in which they organize their economy? Are they destined for Marx's “dustbins of history,” or have they been able to adapt to and even take advantage of capitalism without losing their historical specificity as noncapitalist producers?
State and Unions in the Transformation of the Brazilian Countryside, 1964-1979
Authors: Houtzager Peter P.
Published: October 2022

In the early 1960s, the dramatic mobilization of rural wage laborers and small farmers placed the agrarian question at the top of the Brazilian political agenda. The question facing governing elites was how to modernize an archaic agrarian sector that was widely perceived as posing a major bottleneck for development and a breeding ground for agrarian radicalism. Until that time, wage laborers and small farmers in various forms of land tenure had effectively been excluded from existing labor legislation, social security, and coverage by national law in general. Instead, various traditional and clientelist forms of social control regulated rural social relations. The new rural movements were led by relatively moderate urban groups or individuals seeking to create a rural political base. Their appearance soon after the Cuban Revolution however, and in the larger context of the cold war, triggered fears of possible revolution. National debate quickly centered not on whether but on how the Brazilian state should intervene in the countryside. Attempts by the populist government of President João Goulart to address the agrarian question were cut short by the military coup of 1964. In its wake, the fledgling rural movements were brutally repressed in a wave of state-sponsored repression and private landowner violence.
Democracy and Military Control in Venezuela: From Subordination to Insurrection
Authors: Norden Deborah L.
Published: October 2022

During the dramatic wave of democratization in the 1980s, Venezuela stood out as South America's wise elder. While neighboring militaries had shifted in and out of power, sometimes ruling for decades, Venezuela had maintained a stable democracy since 1959. After a relatively brief period of adjustment, the country settled into a political system in which two dominant political parties alternated in power and the armed forces remained peacefully in the barracks. Yet twice in 1992, important sectors of the armed forces took up arms to displace what they and many other Venezuelans viewed as a decrepit and corrupt political system. The coups failed, but they left the political system shaken and the military's political subordination seriously in doubt. The coup attempts also raised doubts about Venezuelan strategies for military control that had been a model for the rest of Latin America.
Environmental Networking in Mexico: The Comité Nacional Para la Defensa de los Chimalapas
Authors: Umlas Elizabeth
Published: October 2022

In fact, for the chimas, the defense of their patrimony is a fundamental part of their history.... What is new is the growing interest of different branches of government and of national and international groups, which have realized the importance of the Chimalapas. Voces en la selva

Although often individually weak and marginalized in Mexico, environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and indigenous communities coalesced in the early 1990s around the issue of preserving the Chimalapas rain forest in southeastern Mexico. They then brought the problem to national and international attention and eventually helped force the redrawing of a proposed highway route. This research note will analyze the formation and activities of the Comité Nacional para la Defensa de los Chimalapas (CNDCHIM), a network of environmental NGOs, artists and intellectuals, activists and researchers, and representatives of forty-five indigenous communities in the Chimalapas. CNDCHIM formed in 1991 in response to a proposed highway that was to run through La Reserva El Ocote in the Chimalapas, one of Mexico's last two rain forests. The Chimalapas issue is extremely complex, entailing social justice, land tenure, megaprojects, federal and state politics, and environmental policy. This study will focus mostly on CNDCHIM and its relationship with the Mexican government, placing the organization within the context of agrarian conflict and the political and ecological issues surrounding the potential destruction of the Chimalapas.
From the Marginality of the 1960s to the “New Poverty” of Today: a LARR Research Forum
Authors: de la Rocha Mercedes González , Perlman Janice , Safa Helen , Jelin Elizabeth , Roberts Bryan R. , Ward Peter M.
Published: October 2022

This paper derives from a LARR-sponsored forum at the LASA 2003 Congress held in Dallas in March 2003. Targeted at younger scholars, a panel of leading researchers whose early work was shaped by marginality and dependency thinking of the 1960s were invited to reflect cross-generationally about how paradigms analyzing poverty in Latin American cities have shifted from that time to the present. Specifically, each of the authors compares “marginality” as it was construed more than three decades ago with contemporary constructions of poverty and social organization arising from their more recent research. While there are important continuities, the authors concur that the so-called “new poverty” today is very different, being more structural, more segmented and, perhaps paradoxically, more exclusionary than before. Moreover, the shift from a largely patrimonialist and undemocratic state towards one that, while more democratic, is also slimmer and downsized, thereby shifting state intervention and welfare systems ever more to local level governments and to the quasi-private sector of nongovernmental organizations. If earlier marginality theory overemphasized the separation of the poor from the mainstream, today's new poverty is often embedded within structures of social exclusion that severely reduce opportunities for social mobility among the urban poor.
Santal indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage, and the politics of representation
Authors: Carrin Marine
Published: October 2022

Using different archives, I show how indigeneity was constructed by the Santal themselves during the second half of the nineteenth century, through various figures such as rebels and prophets. This has produced a Santal indigenous knowledge at the interface of orality and writing, revolving around two dimensions—an emergent historical consciousness and a feeling of shared identity, which still informs Adivasi resistance today, enabling them to voice assertion over natural resources. The sacralization of the landscape through pilgrimages and ritual commemorations entails the liberation of formerly encompassed identities, allowing the subaltern communities a certain visibility in the public sphere. Providing a new imagining against dispossession and memory loss, indigenous knowledge, which combines multi-scripturality and ritual innovations, becomes a resource for politics of representation as well as of a common Santal identity.
Insurgent law: Bengal Regulation III and the Chin-Lushai expeditions (1872–1898)
Authors: Sen Anandaroop
Published: October 2022

This article studies the adjudicatory practices deployed by colonial military and police forces during a series of punitive British expeditions in the eastern frontiers of British India and the northern reaches of British Burma, specifically the Lushai and Chin Hills in the late nineteenth century. It magnifies the lives, deaths, and afterlives of two ‘tribal’ chiefs of Lushai Hills. Among others, these figures were held responsible for a series of raids carried out in the settled British territories of the northeastern frontiers in the 1890s. After a few inconclusive skirmishes with the British expeditionary force, they were apprehended and imprisoned in a jail in Hazaribagh under the preventive detention act of Bengal Regulation III of 1818, which was reserved and designed to arrest political dissidents of the empire. After a few months, two of them, Liengpunga and Khalkam, were found hanging from the windows of their prison latrine. The British administration labelled these deaths as suicides and closed the cases. The article opens them up. In doing so, it narrates an oblique history of the Scheduled District Act of 1874 which removed hill districts from the jurisdictions of regular courts. By focusing on the historical imbrication of Bengal Regulation III of 1818 in the Scheduled District Act, the article highlights the punitive techniques embedded in the seeming protectionist impulse of the colonial state, something that persists in India's administration of the Northeast region. Closer to the concerns of this issue, it reflects on a legal genealogy of tribal subjects in South Asia.
Can migrants be indigenous? Affirmative action, space, and belonging in the Andaman Islands
Authors: Zehmisch Philipp
Published: October 2022

In India, the contested category of Scheduled Tribes (STs) is enacted in order to socially uplift certain indigenous communities. This article concentrates on analysing the intersection between modes of indigenous self-definition, political assertion, and localized conceptualizations of space and belonging. My ethnographic example from the Andaman Islands focuses on the Ranchis, aboriginal labour migrants from the Chotanagpur plateau in central India. Being classified as STs, both in their homelands and other localities to which they migrated, Ranchi activists seek to accomplish coeval recognition in the Andamans. Their demands to be rewarded for the labourers’ contribution to the islands’ development are complicated by their occupation of non-ancestral lands that were originally inhabited by indigenous hunter-gatherer communities. By narrowing the notion of indigeneity, and hence ST status, down to communities who live on ancestral lands and who are culturally, socially, and economically different to migrant communities, state authorities and activists reject the Ranchis’ demands for affirmative action as Adivasis from but not of the Andamans. Reflecting on the existential relationship between land and people in popular understandings of indigenousness, this article aims to investigate the Ranchis’ claims of being migrants, yet also indigenous, in order to explore alternative possibilities to think through the notion of indigeneity. In so doing, I focus on the Ranchis’ subaltern history of racialized labour migration, their lack of voice within the post-colonial welfare regime, and their striving for autonomy and autarky by applying principles of indigenous knowledge and cosmologies from their homelands to the Andamans.
The Oraons of Chhotanagpur: A journey through colonial ethnography
Authors: Dasgupta Sangeeta
Published: October 2022

This article explores nineteenth-century colonial representations of the Oraons of Chhotanagpur. Described in administrative reports of early nineteenth-century Chhotanagpur as mlecchha and dhangar, or as part of a ‘village community’ of Coles/Kols, these Oraons, by the late nineteenth century, were referred to as a ‘tribe’. To trace the categories through which the Oraons journeyed across colonial records, I discuss texts and reports which later became part of bureaucratic memory. The shifts within official understanding, I argue, were related to the working of official minds, changing assumptions, and differing languages; the tensions within the discipline of anthropology and its application in the colony; the variations within ideologies of governance and the imperatives of rule; and interactions with ‘native’ informants and correspondents, along with personal observations of local practices. There remained, however, an uneasy tension between wider intellectual trends in Europe and their reverberations in the colony, and the experiences of governance: colonial knowledge was not always produced with arrogance and assurance but also with doses of uncertainty, hesitation, disquiet, and often despair. In the shifting representations of the tribe across the nineteenth century, there is, I suggest, a pattern. In the pre-1850s, local nomenclature was adopted and voices of dissent—expressed through agrarian protests in Chhotanagpur—were addressed. By the 1850s, the utilitarian agenda structured colonial imaginaries and interventions. The 1860s witnessed the interplay of ethnological concerns, missionary beliefs, and Arcadian principles. From the 1890s, the idea of tribe was overwhelmingly structured by the supremacy of disciplinary knowledge systems that increasingly supplanted the role of the ‘native’ informant.
Framing the Fifth Schedule: Tribal agency and the making of the Indian Constitution (1937–1950)
Authors: Tewari Saagar
Published: October 2022

As a means to resolve the Tribal Question in India, the centrality of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Indian Constitution is widely acknowledged. However, their final incorporation, despite intense nationalist opposition in the run-up to Indian Independence, remains historically unexplained. This article addresses this lacuna by reconstructing the circumstances under which the Indian National Congress came to accept scheduling as a viable method of providing protection to tribal communities. This strategic shift can be explained as a result of combined political pressures generated by communist-led tribal movements and a steadily mounting challenge heralded by a new stream of educated middle-class tribal activists in eastern India. Foremost among the latter was Jaipal Singh Munda who mobilized a large constituency of supporters demanding a separate province of Jharkhand. Taken together, there is enough evidence to prove that in the period 1937–1950, the tribes were not silent and their collective agency had a deep impact on the constitution-making process. Finally, the article argues that this period witnessed a significant change in the character of the Congress as erstwhile freedom-fighters turned into ruling elites.
Glorious pasts of forest dwellers: Memories of land in the ex-zamindari of Borasambar, Central Provinces, 1861–1905
Authors: Sengupta Sohini
Published: October 2022

This article discusses the shifts in rights over land of Binjhal Adivasi people in the wake of colonial rule in the ex-zamindari of Borasambar, located in the British Central Provinces in the eventful period from 1860–1926. Oral narratives and documents preserved by Binjhal villagers juxtaposed with archived records of military expeditions, village surveys, administrative letters, and land settlement reports reveal how Binjhal ancestors lost titled land and offices of headmanship, which, over time, impoverished and diminished them in the rural hierarchy. The research finds that the codification of selective custom as legal rights accommodated colonial land policies to promote social change and agricultural improvement. Environmental histories document how nineteenth-century forest enclosures and agrarian order brought Adivasi areas within state control. Revisionist research highlights historically contingent outcomes of colonial rule. The Adivasi pasts in this article reveal how the interpretations of legal culture by local actors, who transacted with the administration, led to variable outcomes for a pre-colonial land-controlling group. By examining the truth claims in fragments of Binjhal voices and narratives about them, in village memories and archives, through a threefold examination of the past—pragmatic, habitual, and episodic—this article explores the historicity of Adivasi land memories. Here, stories of past glory lead to claims of legal entitlements rather than restitution of ancient rule, and injustices are described in the idiom of disrupted kinship and transgressions of women, illuminating the varied routes through which groups residing in relatively non-agrarian upland habitats became Adivasi.