‘La Comida Mambisa’: food, farming, and Cuban identity, 1839-1999

Describes how Cuba developed a countrywide system of food meaning and production in the mid-19th c. that became a national, and eventually "nationalist", cuisine during Cuba's revolutionary moments. Author explains how the centrality of food within Cuban national identity was strongly related with the valency associated with the subsistence farming on small family farms ("sitios"), producing these native foods and Caribbean ingredients, e.g. cassava, guava, and sweet potatoes. The self-sufficiency of these small farmers was in emerging nationalist discourses opposed to the large-scale, export-oriented, colonial plantations and to slavery. Many small family farmers, of which many were ex-slaves, participated in the armed struggles in part to defend their right of independent, subsistence agriculture. Author outlines how since the early, mid-19th-c. Creole nationalism, Creole food and the small farms remained associated with authentic Cuban folk culture and with national identity, and related to independence struggles, and self-sufficiency, including during and after the 1959 Revolution

La ville sauvage: 'Enlightened' colonialism and creole improvisation in New Orleans, 1699--1769.

This study examines the formation of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the French colonial period (1699--1769), both as a place in the colonial imagination and as a creole port in a busy corner of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. The objectives are twofold. First, I attempt to understand the city's early reputation for 'disorder' and 'failure' from within the worldview of Ancien Regime France. This contextualization then enables an ethnographic reassessment of New Orleans that moves beyond the discourse of order/disorder to examine the processes, both imposed and improvised, that went into making this unique place in colonial America. It argues that two major factors in the French period contributed to New Orleans' character: (1) the role of the Enlightenment in engineering the city and colonial life, and (2) the rapid development of a local creole society during a period of imperial 'abandonment' beginning in 1731. The blueprints for New Orleans represented an experiment in 'enlightened' colonialism that paralleled 'enlightened' absolutism in France. Yet implementation required the cooperation of a population of Canadians, Africans, Native Americans, poor Frenchmen, and creoles who preferred to improvise their own version of town life. Instead of developing into a French-dominated opulent metropolis as planned, New Orleans became an untamed hub of the Mississippi-Caribbean world defined by smuggling, ethnic diversity, social mobility, a spirit of insubordination and, increasingly, the complex animosities and intimacies of slavery. The methodology comprises an interdisciplinary history drawing on sources from archaeology, archives, and literature, highlighting sites excavated by the author and records of the Louisiana Superior Council. Discussions engage with the fields of Louisiana history, colonial studies, French social history, and historical archaeology. Chapters trace several 'tensions of empire' between metropolitan intentions and local realities, including: urban planning and struggles with nature; John Law's mercantilism and New Orleans' smuggling economy; census-taking and self-fashioning; architectural segregation and the growth of urban slavery; social engineering of class and race amid a climate of fraternization, defamation, and violence; and the contrasts between two literary traditions, one that depicts New Orleans as a rational experiment, the other as a place of uncontrolled passions.Ph.D.American historyArchaeologyLatin American historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123818/2/3106042.pd

Gabriel Moshenska's "Reverse Engineering und die Archäologie der modernen Welt Welt": eine Antwort

Moshenska draws a convincing parallel between reverse engineering of obsolete technology and archaeological inference. Interestingly, many of the arcane experts in orphaned software and discontinued machinery themselves recognize this parallel with their cooption of the term ‘archaeology’ (they are ‘digital archaeologists’ and perform ‘software digs’). What is not clear from either their appropriation or from Moshenska’s summary is whether archaeology itself works as ‘tacit knowledge’ of past know-how. Also left unresolved is whether we could take a more ambitious step of inference from ‘how things work’ to ‘how society works.

Ruins for the future

In 2011 a tsunami over 20 meters high struck Japan's northeastern coastline. Along with causing close to 20,000 deaths, it destroyed many buildings, leaving behind a landscape of ruins. In the years since the disaster, various groups in Japan have interpreted these ruins as a way to work through “what went wrong.” Some pointed to local officials’ failure to properly prepare for the disaster, as well as the form of economic development that they had promoted. Others, however, particularly state officials, argued that the ruins of failed development reveal something that can be used to stimulate economic recovery and legitimize further development. Ironically, these groups mobilized the debris of “progress” to advance progress itself, complicating theories of recent ruins as “counter-sites.” This shows that actors can construct and leverage the truth content of ruins in support of the very ideologies and processes that caused their ruination in the first place. [3.11, disaster, governance, materiality, modernity, ruination, Japan] Global Challenges (FSW