Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa became major health concerns in the 1970s and 1980s, attracting particular attention from second-wave feminists because the conditions were perceived as women’s illnesses. Because these illnesses were thought to exclusively strike prosperous and educated women of the middle class, critics hypothesized that there was something particular to middle-class identity that made these girls and women distinctly vulnerable. Industrial capitalism was newly framed as a cause for the development of eating disorders. Historians traced the origins of anorexia to the Victorian era—the disease first appeared in the medical record in the 1870s—seeing it as a reaction to the pressures and struggles women faced in the newly ascendant bourgeoisie. Although anorexia was itself an obscure diagnosis in the 19th century, late-20th-century literary critics and historians traced anorexic aesthetics and ideals in art and culture of the time, and industrial capitalism was thought to delineate a particular, and pathological, relationship between consumption and bourgeois women. Anorexia became a way to conceptualize the harms of capitalism on middle-class women and to articulate their lives as simultaneously prosperous and deeply oppressive, if not incapacitating.
The idea that early industrial capitalism primed middle-class women for eating disorders was revised by contemporary cultural critics who were struggling to understand why such unprecedented numbers of girls and young women were developing and being diagnosed with eating disorders during the 1970s and 1980s. This unprecedented and inexplicable epidemic implied that postwar consumer growth had specifically gendered harms. Thus, second-wave feminists, including historian Joan Brumberg, psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, and philosopher Susan Bordo, analyzed anorexia and bulimia as a way to articulate the dangers posed by postwar consumer capitalism for girls and women. For them, consumer capitalism was perceived as a primary driver of anorexia and bulimia. The analysis hinged upon the paradoxical meaning of consumption in postwar capitalism, which was the cause of and symbolized by the deadly self-denial of the anorexic and the irrational gorging and purging of the bulimic. Eating disorders thus expressed the gendered and destructive impacts of late-modern capitalism on the female body, combining the demand for unbridled consumption and individual empowerment with expectations of female self-denial and physical smallness. These new ways of thinking about the relationship between economic systems and the health and appearance of individual bodies, particularly though not exclusively female bodies, had profound consequences that shape 21st-century conversations around obesity and the neoliberal market. These attempts to contextualize and historicize anorexia and bulimia by exploring their relationship to consumer capitalism not only made material the link between economic systems and women’s lives and bodies; they also suggested that affluence itself could be a source of sickness.
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Anorexia, Bulimia, and the Embodiment of Capitalist Consumer Culture
Alice Weinreb
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Astronomical Diaries
Kathryn Stevens
The Astronomical Diaries are Akkadian texts from Babylon which contain observations of astronomical phenomena and selected events on earth. They are written in the cuneiform script and preserved on several hundred clay tablets, most of which are today in the British Museum.
Very few of the tablets are complete, and some are in an extremely fragmentary state. Where no date formula survives, it is often possible to date them based on the astronomical observations recorded. The surviving tablets range in date from the mid-7th to the 1st century
Diaries usually cover periods of four to six months, divided into monthly sections. Daily astronomical observations form the bulk of each section. At the end of each month, the Diaries report the river level of the Euphrates; the market exchange values of several commodities in Babylon, and sometimes selected historical events such as warfare, disease outbreaks, visits from kings or officials, and cultic activities. The Diaries contain no explicit indications of purpose, but since they exhibit significant parallelism with prognostic material, it is likely that they were connected to some extent with divination. There are also parallels in content and phrasing between the Diaries and the Late Babylonian Chronicles.
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BaHananwa
Lize Kriel
The people identifying as BaHananwa are descendants of Setswana-speaking BaHurutshe who migrated to the area south of the Limpopo River (21st century Limpopo Province of South Africa) sometime between 1750 and 1830. The Hananwa language is a variety of Sesotho sa Leboa, or “Northern Sesotho.” Blouberg (the Blue Mountains) is the historical site of the capital (mošate) of the Leboho rulers. The Boers of the Transvaal, whose independence was recognized by Britain in 1852, considered the African polities between the Vaal and the Limpopo Rivers as their subjects. Until the 1890s, ruler Kgaluši Leboho continued to act independently in the area around Blouberg and resisted Boer demands for taxes. In 1894, the State Artillery and Boer commandoes embarked on a campaign to subjugate the BaHananwa. After a three-month siege, Kgaluši and his royal entourage were taken prisoner. Many BaHananwa were indentured as farm laborers for Boers, but many more managed to escape capture, some 500 finding refuge on the Berlin Mission Station at the foot of the mountains. Kgaluši’s mother Mmaseketa acted as regent for six years. In 1900, with the British invasion of Pretoria, Kgaluši was released from prison and allowed to return to Blouberg. In the 20th century, the BaHananwa rulers resisted colonization. The adoption of a Bantu Tribal Authority was delayed until the 1970s. The apartheid government then acknowledged the original reserve demarcated in 1888 along with additional tribal, privately owned, and trust farms as BaHananwa land. The territory was governed as part of the Lebowa “homeland,” which was incorporated into the new Northern (later renamed Limpopo) Province in 1994. Traditional leadership continues to be acknowledged under the postapartheid democratic constitution and a supreme court ruling of 2010 affirmed the chiefship of Ngako Isaac Leboho.
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Blindness and Literature: Critical Engagements with the Representational Binaries of Western Modernity
David Bolt
Literary blindness refers to the renderings of blind people in literature or the sustained critical engagement with which is sometimes termed literary blindness studies. Literary blindness studies is a formally emerging field in which a particular focus falls on the binaries of literary blindness. These binaries date back to antiquity but proliferated in Western modernity. Blind characters were usually drawn in extremes, negative and positive, which in modernism came to build and bolster the sociocultural metanarrative of blindness by which ocularnormativism and the supremacy of sight were implied if not stated. Academic interest in these representations ranged from early-20th-century work in the social sciences to late-20th-century cultural disability studies and 21st-century literary disability studies. The prototypical and foundational studies involved identifying recurrent literary motifs and evidence of pejorative or laudatory characterization, which often revealed remarkably lengthy lineage and resonance with social attitudes to blind people. These readings paved the way for more nuanced literary theory and criticism that explored nonnormative means of perception with a growing appreciation of experiential knowledge. This being so, the authors of both literary blindness and literary blindness studies have become recognized for their positionality: whether or not the creators and critics are themselves blind has become factored into the related discourse. Literary blindness studies, then, has emerged as an interdisciplinary field, explicitly informed by literary studies but implicitly underpinned by the epistemology and values of disability studies; it provides a space in which literary blindness can be explored with heightened awareness of the sociocultural implications for blind people.
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Brown, William Neal
Richard L. Edwards
William Neal Brown (1919–2009) was a social work educator who began his professional career after service in World War II as a Tuskegee Airman. The son of an African American father and Native American mother, in 1956 he became the first black professor at Rutgers University, where he taught in the School of Social Work for the next 33 years.
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Cannabis in Uruguay
Rosario Queirolo, Eliana Álvarez, and Belén Sotto
In 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize the entire cannabis market, from production to distribution and sales. Consuming cannabis had been legal in the country since 1974, and consumption had been increasing before the 2013 legalization. Still, the history of the regulations concerning cannabis in Uruguay had not been very different from those in most of the countries in the Western world: around 1920, the country had moved to prohibit cannabis following international conventions on the issue and pressure from conservative elements of the nation. Uruguay’s two important departures from the international norm have been Law 14.294 and Law 19.172. Law 14.294, enacted by the military regime in 1974, prohibited the planting, cultivating, and sale of any plant from which a narcotic drug could be extracted—including cannabis—but consumption and possession for personal consumption were not to be prosecuted. Law 19.172 was passed almost forty years later, in 2013, to regulate the entire cannabis market. The current regulations can be understood as a moderate version of legalization because the government is responsible for control of the import, export, cultivation, harvesting, processing, acquisition, storage, sale, and distribution of cannabis. Today, ten years after the establishment of the legal cannabis market, most users still access cannabis illegally. In other words, despite having the option of accessing cannabis legally, most users choose not to. National data from 2018 shows that unregistered users do not differ from registered ones in their socio-demographic characteristics, as one might have expected, but they do differ in their consumption patterns: registered cannabis users consume with greater frequency and, possibly as a consequence of this, they also are at greater risk of abusing the drug.
Article
Climate Change and Baltic Sea Genetic Diversity
Kerstin Johannesson
Up until the beginning of the previous millennium, threats to the environment were mostly local and hence less difficult to combat. In the early 21st century, a large human population and high and increasing demands of energy, food, and other resources have led to a global climate crisis affecting nearly all life on Earth, biodiversity, and human societies alike. How will such a dramatic environmental shift affect the ecosystems? The Baltic Sea ecosystem is an interesting example in this respect, as it includes a dramatic environmental shift, starting from a freshwater lake but 8,000 years ago turning into a marine (brackish) sea with initially somewhat higher salinity than in the early 21st century. Marine populations of species that colonized the brackish water basin had to tolerate or adapt to one third their original salinity, lower density of the water, no regular tides, winter ice, and generally colder waters. Overall, these were dramatic environmental changes of magnitudes and rates of change similar to what is predicted from contemporary global environmental changes, including climate change. Indeed, the Baltic Sea is a “Darwinian laboratory” that can be explored to understand the role of plasticity, genetic variation, genetic structure and architecture, and demography using the sharp footprints of both phenotypic and genetic changes of organisms that survived this rapid environmental shift. What is observed is firstly that many marine species outside did not make it into the Baltic Sea, but among those that were successful, almost all (among the >30 studied macrospecies) show large genetic changes due to genetic drift and directional selection. The latter show that adaptation to a strong environmental shift is possible over a relatively short period of time for some species. Among successful survivors were species with very large population sizes and thus large standing genetic variation. In some species, hybridization contributed to increased levels of genetic variation. Only very few macroscopic species show evidence of recent adaptation following new mutations, while this was common among microbes. Reduced rates of recombination among genes through chromosomal inversions enable local adaptation, and it certainly supported the establishment of at least a handful of Baltic populations of species. Cloning, is also overrepresented among Baltic populations, and there may be several reasons for this. Cloning conserves suitable genotypes in marginal environments, and it also supports efficient range expansion in species that under sexual reproduction would require two individuals (one female and one male) to arrive close together after migration into a new spot. Being in an enclosed sea, the Baltic populations of largely cold water–adapted species are now facing the next large challenge—a much more rapid warming than elsewhere in the oceans.
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CO2 in Earth’s Ice Age Cycles
Mathis P. Hain and Daniel M. Sigman
Earth's history is marked by episodes of large-scale continental glaciation. Most recently, beginning 3 million years ago, northern hemispheric glaciation expanded and developed cyclic variations known as the ice age cycles. With the 19th-century discovery of these cycles in ice extent and climate, changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration were proposed as a possible cause. Since the 1980s, scientists have produced detailed reconstructions revealing that, during ice ages, atmospheric CO2 was as much as a third lower than its preindustrial concentration—enough to explain almost half of the approximately 5 °C ice age cooling by weakening the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect. The consensus is that the ice age climate cycles result from cyclic changes in Earth’s orbit, which redistribute sunlight between regions and seasons but do not in themselves significantly heat or cool the globe on an annual-average basis. If so, the regional and seasonal effects of orbital change must cause changes in aspects of the Earth system that then induce changes in global annual-average climate. Changes in the reflection of sunlight by the ice sheets are widely believed to have played such a role. Atmospheric CO2 appears to be a second key Earth system property, and one that caused the ice age cycles to be global rather than simply regional phenomena. The ocean was likely the dominant driver of atmospheric CO2 change between warm “interglacial” and cold “glacial” periods, through multiple aspects of its behavior. First, ice age cooling and other changes allowed bulk global seawater to absorb additional CO2 from the atmosphere. Second, during ice ages, the ocean’s “biological carbon pump” was stronger: Ocean plankton and their sinking debris more effectively removed CO2 from surface waters and the atmosphere, sequestering it in the ocean interior. Polar ocean changes were key to this stronger biological pump, involving some combination of changes in biological productivity, ocean circulation, and air–sea gas exchange. Third, the net effect of these ocean changes was to enhance deep ocean CO2 storage and thus to dissolve calcium carbonate sediment off the seafloor, changing the ocean’s acid/base chemistry so that it absorbed additional CO2 from the atmosphere. The specific polar ocean changes that drove the strengthening of the biological carbon pump and the ensuing seafloor calcium carbonate response are a topic of ongoing debate.
Article
Commercial Credit in New Spain in the Late 18th Century
Guillermina del Valle Pavón
The large-scale merchants of Mexico City controlled the main trade circuits within and outside of New Spain, thanks to the dominance they exercised over currency in circulation, commercial credit, and financial credit. This was possible due to the control they held over silver and their ability to construct dense networks of credit in the viceroyalty, as well as in Cadiz, Manila, and many other commercial enclaves of the Spanish Empire. These commercial actors were the largest buyers of silver, financed mining production, dominated trade, and engaged in other productive activities. In order to have more money in circulation to conduct their business, they secured loans for considerable sums from other merchants, were the main recipients of loans granted by religious corporations, and received interest payments on loans made to financiers. To maintain liquidity, they limited the disbursement of capital they had accumulated by bartering merchandise, making payments in kind, buying in installments, and making payments by means of “libranzas,” a kind of promissory note or payment order.
Article
The Construction of Muslim Families, Interfaith Marriage, and Religious Education in Mexico
Ruth Jatziri García Linares
Fieldwork conducted in the Islamic Center of the North (Centro Islámico del Norte, or CIN) in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, between 2015 and 2017, yielded several findings. First, it examined the reasons for women’s conversion to Islam; second, it looked at the ways these women and their husbands raise their children under Islamic religious precepts. Thus, the author seeks to shed light on how this conversion and child-rearing take place within both Muslim and interfaith homes, dividing her discussion into three parts. The first contextualizes the women and men who make up these families and households and also discusses the Muslim community settled in Monterrey, of which they are members. The second provides an outline of interreligious and Islamic marriages, as well as what Islam has to say about marriage between Muslims and people of other religious faiths. The last section consists of a series of examples taken from interviews with Muslim women who are members of the CIN in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. The narratives provide insight into how religious values are transmitted to children and young people, as well as the ways in which marriages initially considered interreligious sometimes become completely Islamic.
