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Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Alzate family, of Medellín, Colombia, grasped the magnetism of the Natural Man (a malleable myth with porous edges that combines both the Edenic and the cannibalistic visions of indigenous peoples) and its economic potential and orchestrated a family craft business of fake pre-Columbian pottery. They created pieces that would engage in dialogue with collectors’, anthropologists’, museums’, and tourists’ desires and imaginaries, as well as authenticity criteria, about indigenous pre-Columbian peoples. This article shows the relationship between these forgeries’ production, circulation, and consumption and the ways Latin American indigenous peoples have been conceived of by others. Moreover, this research stresses how authentic fakes, together with official and popular discourses and images, certain exhibition and validation rhetorics, and other mises-en-scène construct what is sacralized as uncontaminated, original, and traditional. Such fakes operate politically by undermining social hierarchies linked to essentialized race and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I explore hagiographical narratives about Khwāja Yaḥyā Kabīr (d. 1430), among the earliest of the Sufi masters to be identified as Afghan. The social memory of Yaḥyā Kabīr's life exemplifies the function of hagiography as a key arena for the production of historical knowledge, generating a vivid and specific imaginary of the past for devotees. My goal here is to present a reading of the hagiography, but first I will situate it within the discursive nexus of Persian historical writing, which often essentialized Afghans as innately barbarous while peripheralizing Afghan homelands (identified with the Sulaiman Mountains). Yaḥyā Kabīr's hagiography is both reflective of Indo-Afghan anxieties about social hierarchies and a device by which marginalizing traditions could be subverted through a highly textured portrayal of the past. As such, it exemplifies how saints' lives can index not only the hierarchies of imperial life, but also the techniques by which to escape them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On September 28, 1673, Catalina de los Reyes declared before the Royal Tribunal Court that she refused to surrender her property in Oaxaca's provincial capital of Antequera. Her land dispute with the bishop of Oaxaca shows how African-descended women navigated the court system in colonial Mexico and negotiated their social status in this Spanish colonial society. This article examines race and gender in colonial Mexico. It focuses on the ways in which local authorities attempted to confiscate one of the most valuable properties in Antequera from an African-descended woman named Catalina, as well as the strategies she used to challenge the social hierarchy in the city. By analyzing judicial records along with parish and census data, I argue that colonial women such as Catalina contested elite expectations of gender and race to redefine or secure their social status in colonial Oaxaca. My findings show that although colonial authorities marginalized African-descended women such as Catalina, these colonial women understood the judicial system in colonial Mexico, confronted authorities, and fought to retain their properties and their place in the social order. This article thus advances our understanding of the wide range of roles, experiences, and subjectivities of African-descended women in Spanish America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott and adapted from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), incorporates the media of film and photography and utilizes various filmmaking techniques, including cinematography, sound effects, and dialogues, to reflect on the complex relationship between humans, technology and power. Through cinematographic techniques such as light and dark contrast, shifting eye-level and high camera angles, as well as geometric patterns, the film portrays a technologically-advanced futuristic city and its underlying issues of power struggles and social hierarchy. The portrayal of replicants, through static and moving images and sound effects, emphasizes their close resemblance to humans, particularly their performance of emotions, and how technology alters the fundamental concept of humanity. Photography, as a medium, captures an unreliable and incomplete moment of childhood to expose the dystopian nightmare of memory manipulation that severs the connection between memory and identity. This article analyses Blade Runner as an intermedial narrative that highlights the tension between the deceptive appearance of a futuristic city, with flying cars, replicants, and other technologies created for human convenience, and the harsh reality of posthuman crises such as social hierarchy, technological dominance, memory manipulation, and replicant rebellion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A determined expansion in the productive capacity of Spanish agriculture was a fundamental and contentious objective during the crisis of the country's ancien régime and the formation of the liberal state, in the years of transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this study we examine a fundamental reorientation that occurred in an ambitious project for the expansion of irrigation in the region of Valencia. In this region, characterised by a well-rooted commercial agriculture, the original scheme, initiated by an enlightened aristocrat well connected with the royal court, would be profoundly altered in the transition from one political regime to another. The irrigated area increased much more than had been anticipated, and very diverse sections of the social hierarchy eventually benefited from this agricultural expansion. In contrast, the control exercised over the irrigation canal by the aristocrat himself would be increasingly questioned in the context of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new genre of treatises on practical seamanship emerged in eighteenth-century Britain. Authored by a group of seamen with decades of experience on the lower deck of merchant and naval vessels, these texts represented the ship as a machine, and seamanship as a form of mechanical experiment which could only be carried out by deep-sea sailors. However, as this article finds, this group of sailor–authors had only a brief moment of authoritative legitimacy before their ideas were repackaged and promoted by land-bound authors and naval officers, and the progenitors of the 'science of seamanship' were deemed unfit participants in its ongoing practice. This article explores this brief moment, taking seriously the ideas and influences of the maritime milieu which spawned it, and arguing that the codification and circulation of 'useful knowledge' in eighteenth-century Britain often hardened social hierarchies. Examining seamanship forces us to question the progressivist linear trajectory of an increasingly open scientific culture during this period, and to focus instead on a repeating pattern in which the working knowledge of labourers and artisans was appropriated and its original practitioners denigrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern public-health initiatives in industrialized countries revolve around immunization against contagious diseases. The practice of engendering immunity against disease through disease first emerged in Western European social and medical landscapes in the eighteenth century as inoculation, based on the imported Middle Eastern practice of 'engrafting'. By the nineteenth century, this practice had evolved into the procedure of vaccination, in the first instance directed against smallpox. Popular and academic narratives thus often categorize inoculation as a procedure from the Middle East which was transformed into the truly scientific procedure of vaccination by English and French knowledge. This characterization has obscured the complex traditions of intellectual exchange between English and French networks and Middle Eastern societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article examines these networks in order to show how knowledge was transformed as it circulated between communities during this period. Both Western Europeans and Egyptians across different social hierarchies translated foreign or new medical practices according to the needs of their knowledge and goals, creating cycles of adoption and adaptation. This exploration of inoculation and vaccination furthers our understanding of the bilateral translation processes ingrained in the global circulation of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the analytical framework of "factional model-making" to describe and explain the open political contention of Chinese Communist Party elites in the policy process. Party elites undertake factional model-making to express policy disagreements and to signal their power to the regime: by flouting the Party line publicly without punishment, they show that they can influence the Party line and therefore pressurize the regime into acknowledging their position in the opaque power structure. This article chronicles the history of factional model-making from the 1960s to 2012 and examines in detail the making of Henan's Nanjie Village into a re-collectivization model by the Party's left. The process began in the 1990s and ended soon after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, which prompted Nanjie's patrons to recast the village as a Party model trumpeting Xi's line. The suppression of factional model-making under Xi is discussed in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of modern India have emphasized the reflexivity of men and women in the making of womanhood, paying attention to notions of gender difference emerging from both primordial, restrictive codes of behaviour and contrarian impulses towards what was popularly called progress. There have been relatively few attempts to trace gender interaction in outdoor leisure activities, public displays of femininity, and male regulatory anxieties in the post-colonial context. By studying the symbolism of women's presence in the Eden Gardens, the international cricket stadium in Calcutta, from the 1960s to the 1990s, this article reflects on the nature of power, authority, and gender hierarchy in urban Indian society. This study of questions of gender hierarchy, women's mannerisms, social identity, and informal resistance through a historical lens will enable us to understand the trajectory of women's outsider status in urban public spaces. Through a reading of the mediated parti pris impressions of female spectators, it will also map the transition in society's approach to sport from a structured homosocial community activity to a relatively unstructured field of shared experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many accounts of Chinese migration in Africa compare China to "the West." However, lived historical experiences, social hierarchies and moral mappings of the division of labour have mediated how different peoples in different contexts have received, interacted with and given meaning to Chinese migrants. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Tanzanians talk about so-called Chinese "wamachinga" (petty traders) who have complicated long-standing ideas about "African" and "non-African" roles in the economy, and who have both opened and closed opportunities for different African traders. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the key Tanzanian wholesale market of Kariakoo, I examine how the entry of Chinese goods and traders has been associated with shifting local economic hierarchies. I argue that debates over the presence of Chinese traders are less about "China" than about the politics of which roles belong to whom in a hierarchical division of labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a detailed analysis of Xenophon's defence against a charge for hybris among the Ten Thousand, this paper discusses violence, reputation and hierarchy in Greek military and social contexts. Contrary to other recent treatments of the episode, the study highlights the centrality of honour/shame dynamics and of desert in establishing and upholding social order, showing that these notions are found consistently in numerous examples as early as Homer. Addressing the apparent lack of strict discipline in Greek armies, the paper concludes that shame and peer pressure had a strong normative power in acknowledging and reconciling personal claims and common interests within a group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorises the nexus between mnemonical status anxiety and militant memory laws. Extending the understanding of status-seeking in international relations to the realm of historical memory, I argue that the quest for mnemonical recognition is a status struggle in an international social hierarchy of remembering constitutive events of the past. A typology of mnemopolitical status-seeking is presented on the example of Russia (mnemonical positionalism), Poland (mnemonical revisionism), and Ukraine (mnemonical self-emancipation). Memory laws provide a common instance of securing and/or improving a state's mnemonical standing in the relevant memory order. Drawing on the conceptual analogy of militant democracy, the article develops the notion militant memocracy, or the governance of historical memory through a dense network of prescribing and proscribing memory laws and policies. Similar to its militant democracy counterpart, militant memocracy is in danger of self-inflicted harm to the object of defence in the very effort to defend it: its precautionary and punitive measures resound rather than fix the state's mnemonical anxiety problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores blackface minstrelsy in the context of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's singing career of the 1850s–1870s. Although Greenfield performed a version of African American musicality that was distinct from minstrel caricatures, minstrelsy nonetheless impacted her reception. The ubiquity of minstrel tropes greatly influenced audience perceptions of Greenfield's creative and powerful transgressions of expected race and gender roles, as well as the alignment of race with mid-nineteenth-century notions of social class. Minstrel caricatures and stereotypes appeared in both praise and ridicule of Greenfield's performances from her debut onward, and after successful US and transatlantic tours established her notoriety, minstrel companies actually began staging parody versions of Greenfield, using her sobriquet, "Black Swan." These "Black Swan" acts are evidence that Greenfield's achievements were perceived as threats to established social hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classic Maya (a.d. 250–900) art is filled with expressive figures in a variety of highly stylized poses and postures. These poses are so specific that they appear to be intentionally communicative, yet their meanings remain elusive. A few studies have scratched the surface of this issue, suggesting that a correlation exists between body language and social roles in Maya art. The present study examines whether one type of body language (hand gestures) in Classic Maya art represents and reflects elements of social structure. This analysis uses a coding approach derived from studies of hand gesture in conversation to apply an interactional approach to a static medium, thereby broadening the methods used to analyze gesture in ancient art. Statistics are used to evaluate patterns of gesture use in palace scenes across 289 figures on 94 different vases, with results indicating that the form and angling of gestures are related to social hierarchy. Furthermore, this study considers not just the individual status of each figure, but the interaction between figures. The results not only shed light on how gesture was depicted in Maya art, but also demonstrate how figural representation reflects social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The kings' travel patterns in thirteenth-century Norway raise the question of the relationship between geographic and social mobility. A clearer social hierarchy would reduce the king's need for travelling and the introduction of permanent and professional administrators would mean that these people would visit the king rather than vice versa. Moreover, the king did not travel exclusively for political reasons, but also for hunting and other entertainments and on pilgrimages. The changes in this field form a significant part of the development of European monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her study on the configuration of difference in colonial New Granada, Joanne Rappaport contends that many studies "tend to ignore how different practices of distinguishing one individual from another came into play in concrete situations," and as a result they "end up labeling as 'race' something that was much more multifaceted." Subsequently, she urges scholars to interpret colonial subjects and their identities on their own terms. This study responds to Rappaport's call by analyzing the workings of the historical concept of calidad in colonial Spanish America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the Hobbesian account of the state of nature and the formation of states, attending to Hobbes's account of the family. Drawing on feminist readings, we find in the Leviathan an account of the family as a natural political community. We contend specifically that a focus on conceptions of family life in the Leviathan , and in works by Hobbes's early modern peers, points to the role of the family as a site of socialisation in the prelude to early state formation and in the formation of political hierarchies more generally – including, we suggest, the formation of international hierarchies. These accounts have thus far been missing from International Relations theory. Contra conventional IR theoretic readings of the Leviathan , the Hobbesian state of nature contains the seeds of both anarchy and hierarchy, as overlapping social configurations. While anarchy emerges clearly in the famous condition of 'war of all against all', hierarchy also exists in Hobbes's depiction of family life as a naturally occurring proto-state setting. On the basis of this contemporary feminist analysis of a classic text, we consider implications for the emerging 'new hierarchy studies' in IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When contemporary dispossessed urban classes are figured as a "proletariat," a potent historical analogy is activated in which the well-documented experience of the burgeoning industrial working classes of nineteenth-century Europe provides an implicit template for interpreting events and processes far removed in time and space. Yet Karl Marx's own deployment of the figure of the proletariat, which often provides the inspiration and model for such analogic moves, was itself in its own time already a complex historical analogy, invoking the social hierarchies of ancient Rome. Rethinking this doubly analogical intellectual history provides an occasion both for considering the uses and abuses of historical analogy, and for using a reflection on the original (Roman) proletarians as a conceptual lever for prying apart some outdated assumptions about the contemporary politics of certain propertyless urban populations, in southern Africa and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes two contributions. First, I argue that contrary to what was often assumed in the recognition literature, social hierarchies (as in the Hegelian master–slave dynamic) are very stable. Though social hierarchies are relationships of misrecognition, they nevertheless allow for the simulation of recognition for 'the master', and also trap 'the slave' in that role through stigmatisation. Second, I make a historical argument about the state and its role in recognition struggles. The modern state is relatively unique (historically speaking) in being tasked with solving the recognition problems of its citizens. At the same time, the modern state has to derive its own sovereignty from the recognition of those same citizens. There is an inherent tension between these two facts, which forces the modern state to turn increasingly outward for its own recognition. This is why 'the master–slave dynamic' was increasingly projected onto the international stage from nineteenth century onwards (along with the diffusion of the modern state model). As a result, international recognition came to play an even larger role in state sovereignty than domestic recognition (in contrast to common historical practice). This also explains how and why social hierarchies came to dominate international politics around the same time as the norm of sovereign equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes an ethnographic approach to language standardisation. My research focuses on Romani language use in Prizren, Kosovo, which has a tradition of multilingualism. Moving away from approaches to standardisation that focus only on linguistic processes, I look more broadly at the social processes behind language standardisation. I explore discussions, debates, and attitudes towards me as a language learner to show how a Romani standard is being produced and legitimised in Prizren. Applying theories of purism and standardisation, I examine how certain speech practices are made inferior and how social hierarchies legitimise this. I relate this more broadly to the politics of Romani language and to theories of sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics. (Romani, Kosovo, standardisation, purism, language ideology)* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current studies of burlesque position it as a subversive genre that questioned cultural and social hierarchies and spoke to diverse audiences. Central to this interpretation are burlesque’s juxtapositions of high and low culture, particularly popular and operatic music. This article problematizes this view, proposing that mid-Victorian burlesques lost their satirical bite. Demonstrating little concern for the tastes or interests of the poorer or the most elite members of the audience, they specifically targeted the bourgeoisie. The article places three mid-Victorian burlesques in the wider context of the commercial development of the West End following the 1851 Great Exhibition. It proposes that this broader context, and not the genre’s perceived social role, provides the key to understanding the impulses driving the musical choices. It argues that juxtapositions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music were far from subversive; rather they were included for commercial reasons, offering variety – but variety within strict bourgeois limits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When it comes to discourses around women's labor in global contexts, we need feminist philosophical frameworks that take the intersections of gender, race, and global capitalism seriously in order to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of women's lives within global processes. Women of color feminist philosophy can bring much to the table in such discussions. In this essay, I theorize about a concrete instance of global women's labor: transnational commercial gestational surrogacy. By introducing a 'racialized gender' analysis into the philosophical debate on this issue, I argue that women's reproductive labor is becoming increasingly stratified within the global economy along racial and other lines. This paves the way for a 'transnational reproductive caste system,' which ends up reifying various social hierarchies and sustaining existing global inequities. I aim to expose the kind of violence that surrogates experience due to such stratification as women of color in a transnational space. I discuss how discourses of race and existing racial hierarchies play out in international surrogacy and ways in which these, and indeed, the very category of 'woman of color' get complicated in international contexts when they intermingle with other localized social forms and global inequities. For the purposes of my argument, I engage several insights from feminist of color Dorothy Roberts's work on race and reproductive technologies in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I revisit Kimberlé Crenshaw's argument in 'Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex' (1989) to recover a companion metaphor that has been largely forgotten in the 'mainstreaming' of intersectionality in (white-dominated) feminist theory. In addition to the now-famous intersection metaphor, Crenshaw offers the basement metaphor to show how-by privileging monistic, mutually exclusive, and analogically constituted categories of 'race' and 'sex' tethered, respectively, to masculinity and whiteness-antidiscrimination law functions to reproduce social hierarchy, rather than to remedy it, denying Black women plaintiffs legal redress. I argue that in leaving the basement behind, deployments of 'intersectionality' that deracinate the concept from its origins in Black feminist thought also occlude Crenshaw's account of the socio-legal reproduction of hierarchical power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on settlement patterns in the Río Bec micro-region, a study zone (100 km2) focused on the eponymous site, there is no evidence that any of the monumental groups underwent true processes of significant, sustainable nucleation on a broad sociopolitical level. This paper analyzes Río Bec settlement patterns in order to better understand why processes of agglomeration did not occur at the site. Our approach to this question consists of analyzing the spatial distribution of settlements in relation to their internal hierarchy, while taking in account evolution through time. The study was carried out at two different scales of analysis, and results are presented for both the “micro-region” and “nuclear zone” (159 ha) scales. The overarching objective of this contribution is to gain greater insight into the social dimensions of the processes that took place at Río Bec during the Classic period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research at Río Bec has revealed that interments in residential structures were limited to a very small portion of the population. Although these burials are relatively modest compared to those found in many other Classic period Maya sites, the funerary procedure suggests that they were important individuals in the household. Grave wealth and the size/elaboration of the burial structure do not correlate with the striking socioeconomic differences expressed in residential architecture. In fact, it seems that Río Bec funerary ritual was a private affair focused within the domestic unit, rather than a public display. A study of the variation found among these residential burials reveals two important patterns of mortuary ritual that seem more reflective of ancestor veneration than of social hierarchy: (1) “transition burials” (stressing centrality, verticality, the link to earth, and the transformations of the dwelling) and (2) “occupation burials” (stressing laterality, horizontality, a link to fire and the domestic hearth, and the permanence of the domestic space). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Archaeological studies of specialized craft production in hierarchies often highlight the crucial roles of prestige goods in ancient political economies. Yet elaborate crafted items are also produced and circulated widely in heterarchically-ordered societies, where powerful elites are absent. In this latter case, attributing crafting to the agency of elites — or to the demands of political economy — is unconvincing. This article investigates the alternative cultural logic underlying crafting in heterarchies, seeking to understand both the contexts of crafting and the nature of the ‘social projects’ in which artisans were engaged. Expectations for archaeological signatures of craft activity are developed and applied to a case study, drawing upon recent excavations in northwest Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on Late Neolithic--Early Bronze Age society in southernmost Scandinavia has to a large extent focused on the creation of social hierarchy and on elite networks upheld by individuals. This has meant that the importance of collective strategies has been underplayed. In the south-west corner of Sweden, about eighty house remains from the Late Neolithic and the earliest Bronze Age have been excavated within a small area. It is the largest concentration of houses from the period so far excavated in southern Scandinavia. The settlement pattern reveals both single farms and one site, Almhov, with a concentration of several contemporary farms with large houses. The aim of this article is to highlight collective aspects, recognizing that both collective and individual strategies are important in the formation of hierarchical societies. House remains as well as graves and their placement in relation to each other within the local landscape are the archaeological material in focus, regarded as materializations of economic and social relations. It is argued that collective strategies were an important part of creating and maintaining economic and social position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sixteenth-century indigenous societies who inhabited the Pacific plains of Panama have occupied an important place in discussions of social hierarchy in the Americas. Beginning with the discovery of the richly stocked tombs at Sitio Conté in the 1930s the origins of social hierarchy and wealth accumulation has been a key theme in the Central Region of Panama. Although the most lavish burial hoards at Sitio Conté contained hundreds of sumptuary goods elaborately decorated with cosmológica! iconography, no other contemporary cemetery shows evidence for this degree of wealth accumulation. The only other site with mortuary patterning suggestive of high ranking individuals is He-4, where high ranking mound burials were interred following the abandonment of the Sitio Conté cemetery. From a macroregional perspective the increase in access to prestige goods in mound burials at He-4 contemporaneous with, or immediately after, the decline of Sitio Conté is best explained as a result of changes in political organization of the kind often associated with the growth and decline of chiefly polities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the low-income housing programme in China has so far failed to provide adequate housing for the poor for three main reasons: the central government's failure to define a clear mission; a lack of commitment from local governments; and an exclusionary policy towards migrants. A systematic review of low-income housing policy in China shows that the central government juggles its economic and socio-political goals thereby causing constant changes in low-income housing policy. Meanwhile, the existing public finance system, the performance evaluation system and localization in policy implementation have all resulted in a lack of commitment from local governments to low-income housing. Inadequate provision is made worse by problems with allocation. Despite encouraging changes since 2010, many factors underlying the government's failures remain unchanged, thus the fate of low-income housing remains uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, discussion of technology in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century colonial world has moved away from earlier insistence on the centrality of imperial agency and the instrumentality of empire's technological “tools” of conquest and exploitation. There has been a broad shift from diffusionist preoccupations with a one-way traffic in “technology transfers” that privileged Euro-American innovation and entrepreneurship, to consideration of the “social life of things” within the colony. This has corresponded with a move away from understanding technology through European representations of machines as the measure of the imperial self and colonized other, to rethinking technology's role in reconfiguring social hierarchies and cultural practices in colonized or semi-colonized non-Western societies. Without ignoring empire's importance in facilitating change or restricting the socio-economic parameters within which innovative technologies might operate, there has been a growing tendency to identify colonialism as a conduit for technological modernity rather than its primary embodiment. The colony is understood as a locally constituted, rather than merely imperially derivative, site for engagement with techno-modernity and its discontents. Scholars now commonly eschew emphasis on the implanting of “big technologies” such as railroads, telegraphs, steamships, modern weaponry, major irrigation works, and electrification systems (capital-intensive, often state-managed technologies that figured proudly in the rhetoric of imperial achievement), in favor of the ways in which these were understood, assimilated, and utilized by local agency. There has also been growing interest in small-scale, “everyday technologies,” from the sewing machine, wristwatch, and radio, to the typewriter, camera, and bicycle. Colonial regimes were unable to monopolize or disinclined to control these, and they passed with relative ease into the work-regimes, recreational activities, social life, and cultural aspirations of colonized and postcolonial populations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the careers of craftsmen and other commoners, who succeeded in joining the bureaucratic system and occupying high positions in the Mamluk administrative establishment, eventually acquiring great power and even political authority. At the same time Sufi shaykhs, also men of common origin and beneficiaries of Mamluk philanthropy, emerged as mighty and authoritative figures, venerated equally by the aristocracy and the populace. The newly privileged groups also figure as founders of Friday mosques following a flexible new attitude on the part of the authorities. This social fluidity, often criticized by historians of the period, was the result of the pious patronage of the Mamluk aristocracy, which brought academic education to the reach of a large part of the populace. Towards the end of the Mamluk period, the structure of religious institutions had itself been levelled: the Friday mosque with Sufi service replaced the earlier madrasas and khanqāhs. The article also discusses how the visual arts of the period mirror the social changes with new aspects of artistic patronage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are many different questions about intelligence that easily become confused. They concern its measurement, its psychological basis (if any), its heritability and its relevance to human group differences. Even a discussion of the importance of intelligence could range widely. (1) The evolution of intelligence might consider what selection pressures generate and maintain the higher levels of intelligence that humans are generally thought to possess. (2) The persistence of individual differences in human intelligence could consider whether such differences serve some ‘group’ function in establishing clear bases for social hierarchy: individuals might differ just because intelligence is irrelevant to fertility under conditions of social hierarchy. Or the differences might be temporary, because Western social hierarchies depend on intelligence differences that they will soon undermine. (3) Is intelligence an explanatory concept in psychology? Or must attribution of scholastic or other successes to ‘intelligence’ always yield to further analyses that somehow break down intelligence into hypothetical ‘components’? (4) Educational relevance might be the issue: is it important to take intelligence differences into account when deciding on how to educate children? (5) Or the concern might be with democratic sentiment and the importance people attach to intelligence for themselves and in their spouses and children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social hierarchy is an ubiquitous principle of social organization across animal species. Although some progress has been made to understand how humans infer hierarchical identity, the neuroanatomical basis for perceiving key social dimensions of others remains unexplored. Here, we combined Event Related Potentials and structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging to reveal the neuroanatomical substrates of early status recognition. We designed a covertly simulated hierarchical setting where participants performed a task either with a superior or with an inferior player. Participants showed higher amplitude in the N170 component when presented with a picture of a superior player compared to an inferior player. Crucially, the magnitude of this effect correlated with brain morphology of the posterior cingulate cortex, superior temporal gyrus, insula, fusiform gyrus and caudate nucleus. We conclude that early recognition of social hierarchies relies on the structural properties of a network involved in the automatic recognition of social identity which is involved in processing social cognition. Crucially, morpholgy of this network has been related to deficits in social cognition (in particular, processes as social recognition, emotional empathy processing, and mentalizing of other's intentions) in patients with autism spectrum disorders and fronto temporal dementia. Here, we revise the temporal dynamics of social recognition and its neuroanatomical markers and we discuss the implication of these results in the comprehension of the social processing in patients with mental disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social hierarchies modulate cognitive processes. Nevertheless, the study of the influence of social hierarchy on sentence comprehension is scarce. We presented sentences with different levels of plausibility uttered by speakers with different hierarchical status (as previously established through a hierarchical video game) and measured the modulations of the N400 component. Participants heard three subsets of sentences with different plausibility value, depending on the last word (high, intermediate and low-plausibility). Sentences could be spoken by a superior or by an inferior status player. When listening to the superior player, the modulation of the N400 component followed the expected pattern (inverse relationship between amplitudes and sentence plausibility). However, when participants heard the Inferior speaker the amplitude of the N400 in high plausible sentences matched that of intermediate plausibility (increased). This result indicated that participants’ did not trust low rank speakers, even if sentences were high-plausible. We have observed specific personality traits modulating these hierarchical influences. The present research sets the ground for future studies exploring the influence of social hierarchies in other cognitive domains, specifically in relevant mental disorders where the social cognition is a nuclear field of symptoms such as the anxiety and other obssesive compulsive spectrum disorders. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]