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This paper examines the evidence from Wales for the common but now largely forgotten custom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of using hearthstone, rubbing stone, or the sap of green leaves to decorate the thresholds, hearths, and floors of farmhouses, cottages, and terraced houses on a daily or weekly basis. It traces the known history of the custom and attempts to place it into the development of homes and housework. The custom was thought by at least some of its practitioners to prevent evil but, whilst the patterns used were ancient, the apogee of the custom may well have post-dated the Industrial Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global population flows leave some social groups dislocated from their home territories and languages. Under these conditions processes of ethnolinguistic identification can become complex and the use of a home language can take on new symbolic values. We consider the case of Welsh-affiliating people in the United States of America, and the use of the Welsh language in one particular, long-running Welsh American community newspaper, Y Drych (The Mirror). Quite differently from its earliest forms in the second half of the 19th century, Y Drych nowadays positions the Welsh language as a richly iconic resource, available for ceremonial and celebratory social purposes — to celebrate Welshness at a remove from 'the homeland'. We interpret the use of Welsh in Y Drych as a form of language display, and as part of a process of retraditionalisation. Linguistic and cultural elements of 'old Wales' are re-embedded into Welsh-American consciousness and practices, in ways that might be paralleled in other sociolinguistic diasporas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year in the towns and cities across Wales, humans and ex-racing greyhounds come together onto the streets in the name of charity. These public fundraising and awareness-raising events offer unique opportunities to unravel the reciprocal strands of canine and human experience which coalesce in leisure contexts. I conducted ethnographic research culminating in an autoethnographical account of four of these events, to determine how these encounters might be constituted for multispecies participants. Humans intra-acting with greyhounds on the street experienced an affective state; what I have termed an 'auric imprint', which prompted further exchanges of an emotional, economic and practical nature. Ideologies about greyhounds were underpinned by cultural understandings, situating these dogs as 'not-like-other-dogs' and resulting in a perpetuation of their representation as objectified, homogenous entities, and limiting their recognition as individual dogs. A practical embodied approach, inspired by discourse supporting attentive awareness to non-human animals, was discussed as a mechanism for enabling the recognition of greyhound subjectivities at street collections. Future research might examine how street collections may provide spaces of insight where human behaviour change for non-human animals can be tested and enacted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article quantifies the concentration of Welsh male immigrants in a nineteenth- century Australian gold town within one occupational category (gold mining), and considers the extent to which that concentration was maintained and the relevance of this economic specialisation to culture maintenance. In addition, this study provides an analysis of intragenerational and intergenerational changes in socio-economic status amongst the Welsh, as indicated by occupational shifts, which gives a clearer picture than the images promulgated by contemporary Welsh leaders who strove to emphasize the industry and upward mobility of their fellow countrymen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]