The Reproductive Revolution

Este texto fue publicado en 2009 por The Sociological Review. Rogamos que, a efectos de divulgación, docencia y cita bibliográfica se acuda a la publicación impresa (u online de la propia revista) y la cita sea esta: MacInnes, J., Pérez Díaz, J. (2009), "The reproductive revolution" The Sociological Review 57 (2): 262-284. Su versión html puede encontrarse en esta dirección:http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122368561/HTMLSTART Quienes estén interesados en ampliar la información sobre nuestra Teoría de la Revolución Reproductiva pueden visitar la página web siguiente: http://www.ieg.csic.es/jperez/pags/RRweb/RRweb.htm También encontrarán en este mismo repositorio otra publicación con unaexposición en castellano de las mismas ideas y publicada en la REIS bajo el título “La tercera revolución de la modernidad: la reproductiva”.We suggest that a third revolution alongside the better known economic and political ones has been vital to the rise of modernity: the reproductive revolution, comprising a historically unrepeatable shift in the efficiency of human reproduction which for the first time brought demographic security.As well as highlighting the contribution of demographic change to the rise of modernity and addressing the limitations of orthodox theories of the demographic transition, the concept of the reproductive revolution offers a better way to integrate sociology and demography. The former has tended to pay insufficient heed to sexual reproduction, individual mortality and the generational replacement of population, while the latter has undervalued its own distinctive theoretical contribution, portraying demographic change as the effect of causes lying elsewhere. We outline a theory of the reproductive revolution, review some relevant supporting empirical evidence and briefly discuss its implications both for demographic transition theory itself, and for a range of key social changes that we suggest it made possible: the decline of patriarchy and feminisation of the public sphere, the deregulation and privatisation of sexuality, family change, the rise of identity, ‘low’ fertility and ‘population ageing’.Peer reviewe

Determining precolonial botanical foodways: starch recovery and analysis, Long Island, The Bahamas

Descriptions of precolonial foodways in the Caribbean Islands have relied primarily on contact-period European descriptions, which have been used to inform archaeological research. The use of ethnohistoric and indirect archaeological evidence is debated, and competing reconstructions of potential botanical foods and their cooking processes have resulted. To address this issue, starch analysis, which is suitable to provide information on human-plant interactions in tropical regions with poor botanical preservation, was carried out on samples from shell and limestone potential plant-processing tools from the Rolling Heads site, Long Island, The Bahamas. Results of this study revealed that some of these shell and lithic tools were used to process several different starchy food sources: maize (Zea mays L.), manioc (Manihot esculenta Crantz), and coontie (Zamia spp.). The presence of more than one plant species on both the microlith and shell tools, demonstrates their multi-purpose use. These novel data have also generated interpretations of plant processing with limestone grater chips. Overall, our research provides integral data regarding regional-specific processing of manioc, maize, and coontie. This report provides new information regarding human-plant interactions in the Caribbean. Finally, this study provides data on the use of shell tools and lithic graters for processing plants it contributes to ongoing discussions of reconstructing ancient Bahamian and related Caribbean foodways.</p