Violent conflict in Colombia has been intrinsically associated with territorial administration, that is, with the relationship that has been configured, within the framework of the state-building process, between the center and the territories. The historical trajectory of Caquetá shows the conflictive nature of this process. Caquetá has been a territory affected by the Colombian armed conflict and the war in Caquetá has traditionally been explained as a product of the "absence of the State". In the present research we argue that the conflict has not been due to the "absence of the State" but to the way in which the State has been configured in the region and therefore the research sought to understand how the State had been historically configured in the territory. In particular, we focused on the configuration of the local bureaucracy. In the first chapter of this research we wanted to provide a context of the historical configuration of the bureaucracy in Colombia. Since the beginning of the republic, the configuration of the bureaucracy in the territories was related to the development of the population structure and the negotiation between the center and the regional powers. The local governance that took shape had a weak bureaucratic apparatus complementary to the role of the church, the gamonal and the tinterillo. The precarious character of the local bureaucracy continued into the 20th century.

During the National Front (1958-1974) there was a transformation in the relationship between the State and the territories and this affected Caquetá, which at that time was undergoing a massive colonization process. The colonists helped shape the local bureaucracy and the presence of the State in the region. A review of the correspondence between the national government, the regional government and the settlers shows a much greater state presence than traditionally assumed. The articulation of the territory during the National Front was characterized by the clientelist system and thus a local gamonal, Hernando Turbay Turbay, emerged as the most important political figure of those decades. While Turbay increased his power thanks to relations with Bogotá, local institutions, following local disputes, were put at his service.

From the territory there was an important opposition to turbayism from diverse social and political sectors. This opposition coincided with demands for public services and infrastructure in the region. The settlers were living in very difficult conditions and there were large mobilizations demanding change. The discontent was repressed by the government and sectors of the mobilization became radicalized. The review of correspondence shows how Bogotá's response turned the colonists' claims into a public order problem. The colonists and the territory were the object of distrust. Caquetá became a territory conducive to the emergence of guerrillas. In the 1980s, the "Caquetá War" began in the territory when the State came to fight the guerrillas. Local governance was subsumed by the war and a military intendant was appointed. In this context, leftist political forces had an important electoral reception and represented a threat to the status quo of turbayismo. There was strong pressure in the country to democratize the political system and a series of reforms were proposed, including the popular election of local authorities. The intensification of the war forced the start of peace negotiations with the guerrillas and this generated an atmosphere of change in local governance. However, the negotiations were fragile and the war did not stop.

Despite the war, and the so-called "abandonment", the inhabitants of the territory never stopped trying to build and push for governance that would allow them to live with dignity, whether it was organizing to send letters, build small infrastructure, pay teachers' salaries, participate in elections, denounce violence and call for negotiation. The communities allowed the existence of the State and local institutionality. The discourses on the "absence" of the State strip them of their participation and restrict the type of powers that are expected to "order" the territory. The discussion on the nature of the State is not only conceptual but has important political implications in the regions and the solution to the conflict involves problematizing these traditional visions that have predominated not only in the government but also in Colombian academia.

En septiembre de 1973, una Junta Militar en Chile tomó el control del país a partir de la imposición de la violencia y el terror. La voz disidente es apagada con la clausura de los medios de comunicación, el cierre de los espacios de reflexión y debate, y la violencia represiva cuyo efecto más devastador fue el asesinato y desaparición de personas. Con todo, la represión no sería la única vía para el dominio efectivo del poder. En efecto, tras el 11 se despliegan esfuerzos para legitimar el Golpe de Estado, desacreditando al gobierno de la Unidad Popular para, de manera paralela, asignarle los militares una misión reconstructora. Considerando que la Unidad Popular le había otorgado un lugar especial a la producción de imágenes, se constató que uno de los espacios a disputar era el imaginario. Por ello se despliega una política representacional que construye visualmente, y por antítesis, el pasado marxista versus el presente promisorio de la Junta Militar. Esta investigación devela los discursos que subyacen a las fotografías de uso propagandístico en El Mercurio y La Tercera y, en menor medida, otros medios impresos. Lo particular es el uso del dispositivo fotográfico que incide en que la imagen sea leída no como interpretación de mundo, sino como presentación “objetiva” de la realidad. El análisis se enfoca principalmente en el mes de septiembre entre 1973 y 1980.

More than an entire archaeological generation has passed since “post-processual” critiques up-ended the world of archaeological theory, and we now travel through a rich and varied theoretical landscape that draws inspiration from scholarship from the natural sciences to the humanities. Our collective obsession with new methodologies still threatens to overwhelm our interpretive frameworks, as advances in science, geomatics, and AI offer ever more precise tools for data recovery and analysis. Against this backdrop, and with metrics looming ever larger as the primary criterion of intellectual success, it is perhaps not surprising how few archaeologists today read the source literature from which we draw our dominant theoretical frameworks. Like their predecessors a generation ago, most archaeologists still engage in the mining-and-bridging strategy that Norman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt (1993: 3) described during the peak of the post-processual era: grab a current approach from the social sciences or humanities and cobble it into archaeological shape, without fully understanding the source field from which it originated. Few archaeologists today cite Immanuel Wallerstein when they invoke some revisionist world-systems model, and still fewer mention Benedict Anderson when discussing variations on imagined communities. We are not unique among scholars in doing this, as such ideas become deeply embedded in our interpretive world. Yet understanding how this intellectual current shape-shifts as it wafts across the field of archaeology requires returning to its source. James Scott has been a more important contributor to these currents of the last several decades than I suspect most archaeologists recognize.

This essay employs James Scott’s (1990) concepts of hidden and public transcripts to explore shifting power relations during the Iberian encounter with early modern Japan. Introduced by Charles Boxer (1951), the term ‘Christian Century’ is sometimes used to refer to the dynamic period of contact between Europe and Japan between 1543 (the first recorded arrival of Europeans in Japanese waters) and 1639 (the expulsion of all Iberian merchants and missionaries from the archipelago). This was Japan’s first global moment, a time of intense cultural contact with Europe and new links with India, Southeast Asia, coastal Africa and the Americas. While the dynamism of the period makes the phrase ‘Christian Century’ inapt in certain respects, it will be used here (without scare quotes) as a convenient label. The question of the nature of power is central to my discussion. Japanese archaeologists and premodern historians often work with a view of power which, in the terminology of Michael Mann, is both intensive and authoritative. Intensive power “refers to the ability to organize tightly and command a high level of mobilization or commitment from the participants”, while authoritative power is “actually willed by groups and institutions” comprising “definite commands and conscious obedience” (Mann 1986: 7–8). Such a view of power is arguably appropriate for the ‘absolutist’ regime of the early modern Tokugawa era (1603–1868), but can hardly be applied to the Kofun period (250–700) when an early state first appeared in the Japanese Islands. For instance, the influential proposal made by archaeologist Yukio Kobayashi in the 1950s that the distribution of a particular type of bronze mirror in the third century reflected the spread of state power now seems like a clear over-interpretation (cf. Edwards 2006). In Mann’s (1986) IEMP model of the sources of social power (ideological, economic, military and political) situated within overlapping networks, the bronze mirrors analysed by Kobayashi were a source of ideological power, but the extent to which they also supported economic, military and political power remains an open question.

Scott returned time and again to the topic of how states produced land cadasters (and vice-versa). “[A] state cadastral map,” he wrote in Seeing Like a State, “created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law” (1998: 3). This is lyrical and axiomatic. But best of all, not content to point out the artificiality of a system, Jim pressed on to pursue the purpose states had in simulating powers. The cadaster performs a kind of ontological alchemy: it not only helps to create state capacity, but it grounds it in ways of knowing (as law, as science) which are discursively fixed and unquestionable, with obvious political benefits. As he did with everything from moral economies to grain baskets, Jim always forged ahead to think through why forms of control worked – how they served state projects – and not just expose them.

When you read about James Scott, you commonly come across words such as ‘provocative,’ ‘contrarian,’ alongside ‘counter-narrative’ – such are the attempts to place his histories as outside the mainstream of thought. For this reason alone, his work is so worthwhile. He has always offered a striking perspective that can have a lasting influence on how you view things thereafter. In a way, he finds the blind spots in much of historical and cultural perspectives, and shows us how much we miss when not shining the light in such directions. I maintain here that it is the anarchistic elements of Scott’s thought that leads him to address the blind spots of others. He developed his anarchist perspective increasingly throughout his books, culminating in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) and Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012). At first, he described how he characterized political organizations in his lectures and seminars in ways in which he found himself noticing how much they shared with anarchist perspectives, finding himself saying, “Now, that sounds like what an anarchist would argue” (Scott 2012: ix; see also 2020: 64; Holmes 2023). So, he began to explore anarchist theorists more closely, and in the process he even taught a course on anarchism at Yale. We should note that his anarchism is not at full throttle. After all, he did only offer “two cheers” (2012) for it, not three, but the weight of his scholarship is surely towards the anarchist side. In this sense, Scott represents one of the few prominent intellectuals that opted to work in this vein, alongside the contributions of Noam Chomsky (2005, 2013) or David Graeber (e.g., 2004, 2009, 2020). There are also several works that collect together scholars working in this direction for the social sciences, social movements, and theory (e.g., Shukaitis et al. 2007; Klausen and Martel 2011; Lilley and Shantz 2015; Levy and Newman 2019), all of which reveals that there’s been an increasing turn to this line of thought, after a period in which Marxist thinking was more common in the academy. Here, I discuss how Scott’s lifework has had an important influence on archaeology, anthropology, political science, and history through his theoretical approach in addition to several concepts that he developed that have been useful for considering political dynamics at various scales, in ancient early states (and their peripheries) to contemporary states and non-state regions such as the zomias of Southeast Asia. Throughout, I emphasize how Scott’s thinking upends so many common perspectives about political dynamics.

James C. Scott was the most incisive theorist of the state for people who are ambivalent about the state’s existence. He was a major theorist of power, revealing the covert weapons that groups without formal, coercive power wield against the state and its representatives. He pioneered ethnography in political science, insisting throughout his career on dangers of neglecting local context and knowledge. In doing so, he expanded our understanding of politics to include the politics of peasants, pre-state, and stateless people. Despite Scott’s eminence and his relevance to central questions in the field, his thought remains at the margins of political theory. The field has barely begun to mine the potential of Scott’s scholarship for new insights and research programs. If there is a theme that unifies Scott’s major works, it is the need to dispel state myths and to uncover and examine social and political life that are omitted or distorted by state agents (among whom are academics, especially political scientists). Scott dedicated his career to overcoming a major blind spot: that much of our evidence is produced by states. He consistently applied an “anarchist squint” to political life, illuminating features that otherwise remained invisible (Scott 2014).

At the time of working on this paper (December 2024), I attended a session organized by Bidar Research Institution in Tehran, where a young feminist was presenting the results of her M.A. dissertation on the Iranian women’s movement, One Million Signatures Campaign, in the 2000s. When I questioned the application of theories developed to study the agency and political action of subaltern groups, particularly Asef Bayat’s work, one member of the audience responded that this is not relevant to feminism and women’s movement. Nobody provided a counter argument, but a young male student mentioned another work by Bayat, Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam, where he discusses the agency of ordinary women in the Iranian post-revolutionary society. He briefly discussed the relevance of Bayat’s work to the exploration of women as a subaltern group. In Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Asef Bayat (2010) introduces the quiet encroachment of the ordinary. Drawing on James Scott’s everyday forms of resistance, Bayat discusses how subaltern groups such as the poor and women seek “life chances” through quiet encroachment in daily life in post-revolutionary Iran. He claims that “in many authoritarian Muslim states, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, where conservative Islamic laws are in place, women have become second-class citizens in many domains of public life. Consequently, a central question for women’s rights activists is how to achieve gender equality under such circumstances” (Bayat 2010: 96). Bayat answers this question in the framework of Scott’s theory: “Women resisted these policies, not much by deliberate organized campaigns, but largely through mundane daily practices in public domains, such as working, playing sports, studying, showing interest in art and music, or running for political offices” (Bayat 2010: 97). Bayat calls this “feminism of everyday life” (2010: 96). This short narrative brings me to the point that I want to discuss in this paper: the application of theories of political action and the resistance of subordinate groups in feminist and gender archaeology. I briefly discuss the relevance of subaltern studies generally and James Scott’s “everyday forms of resistance,” then turn to the methodological and socio-political outcomes of this expansion for feminist and gender archaeology. Finally, I discuss two examples to demonstrate the significance of daily life as a site of conflict and resistance.

James C. Scott, political scientist and anthropologist, passed away on 19 July 2024 at the age of 87. He was Sterling Professor of Political Science and Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University – and a farmer. His scholarship focused on agrarian societies, state power, and forms of political resistance. Scott conducted extensive fieldwork in southeast Asia. A prolific writer (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott), Scott’s books inspired scholars across many fields – and many of us in the editorial collective of Forum Kritische Archäologie (FKA) as well. His work has influenced our perspectives on the mechanisms of state power and ways of resisting or avoiding it. His challenges to traditional narratives of state formation and state control and the alleged powerlessness of the marginalized have helped us as archaeologists to think about material traces of ‘everyday forms of resistance’, ‘hidden transcripts,’ and ‘weapons of the weak.’

This research reconstructs the historical process of the formation of local political power and the state in the department of Chocó, Colombia. Throughout the text, the idea of the state as a homogeneous and aseptic entity is challenged, and it is rather understood in terms of its ambiguous and contradictory features in its practices, which even become "illegitimate". The first chapter seeks to understand the process of state formation and local power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The configuration of local power in those years represented a tense interaction between the minority 'white' political power in the territory and the majority black and indigenous population, but with limited access to the state apparatus and its institutions. In the midst of this, a relationship with Bogotá was established that positioned the territory as peripheral and abandoned throughout the twentieth century. This chapter examines the role of roads and rivers as instruments of power over the territory, since they were and are spaces through which the daily lives of the Chocoan people passed and through which the state made its way in the process of configuration. This was the perception of the local and regional powers, who had a desire to control them and to establish a particular domination over the territory. However, this attempt at domination did not go smoothly and the fires, as an apparent response of resistance to white power, show the level of confrontation and dispute that took place in the territory. Despite these disputes, at the beginning of the 20th century these conflictive relations began to change as the local political power, in its claim for autonomy from the tutelage of Bogotá, began to recognise the black population as fundamental to the development of local political life and a "better" relationship with the Andean power. In addition, the extractive processes, which involved confrontations between large mining companies, black people (artisanal miners) and local powers, highlighted the use of state instruments by the population to defend the forests and acquire mining titles. These conflicts were part of the beginning of the rapprochement between local traders, who were part of the local power, and the black mining population, as both groups were building the extractive and commercial economy from which they also benefited. Although the two sectors had different relationships with the state, this interaction is in itself evidence of the inhomogeneous and contradictory character that characterised the state-building process of those years. The second chapter shows the process of reconfiguration of political power in the territory between 1920 and 1950. These were the years of the rise of black power in the territory. The process of state 231 formation in those years was linked to the type of governance that emerged in Chocó as a result of the processes linked to the mining circuit and the department's position as the border of the recently separated Panamanian territory. This allowed for a certain capacity to negotiate with the power in Bogotá. The local power demanded autonomy, and although they obtained some, it was limited and under the watchful eye of Bogotá. This showed the capacity of the state to be present in the territory and linked the local powers to the national project. The participation of black people in mining gradually opened the way for them within the state and political power, and made concrete their intention to be part of the institutional game of the state, and the channel used was the political parties. These were central to local government. The presence of the parties led to a significant politicisation of the territory, as evidenced by the frequent electoral disputes. Thus, while the parties played a central role in access to the state and the national project, blacks who had made their fortunes in mining, trade and agriculture gradually entered popularly elected and appointed bureaucratic positions. The presence of black people and the role of commerce were central to the constitution of the territory as a liberal majority. Because access to the state was mediated through the role of political parties, the territory, like the rest of the nation, was caught up in the dynamics of partisan violence. This violence was also a manifestation of Chocó's connection to national dynamics. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church sided with the conservatives in an attempt to whip up sentiment against the liberals. However, the church's limited roots in a predominantly black area meant that its impact was limited. The rise of black power also transformed the church in the area. These changes and manifestations showed a shift in power relations within the territory. The emergence of workerism and the promotion of public education led to the definitive rise of black power in the political scenarios of the territory, coinciding with the revaluation of the black and the Chocoano, in contrast to the stereotypes coming from outside the territory. However, the rise of this new power was not without contradictions. Ethnic tensions intersected with class tensions. The rise of the blacks did not mean a break with white demands for traditional political power; on the contrary, many of them were taken up. Despite the denunciations of the state's dysfunctionality, its legitimacy does not seem to have been lost, but rather continually sought. The arrival of blacks in positions of power coincided with the rise of socialist discourse, which generated a discussion of the black question in local power circles. Moreover, this rise was indicative of a transformation that was taking place in the territory, leading to the departmentalisation of the territory. 232 The third chapter discusses the role of local power in Chocó during La Violencia and the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship between 1948 and 1957, and how different forms of social mobilisation emerged in response to political repression. Half a century of violence had a moderate impact compared to the dynamics of the Andean world. The characteristics of Chocó's liberals and conservatives showed an "affinity" to statehood in the years of the recently won departmentalisation, which in part would have distanced the possibility of confrontation with the state, although the discourse of La Violencia was used as a channel of communication with the national. Likewise, the socio-economic structure of the Chocó, with the absence of a hacienda model and the dominance of the Liberal Party, whose local militancy had no one to confront. However, the expansion of the conflict from the borders with Antioquia showed how the territory was linked to national dynamics. The violence served as a channel for the emergence of new forms of governance, in which the state of siege provoked the retreat of the Liberal Party, which capitulated to Bogotá and submitted to the temporary power of the military. Meanwhile, the conservatives were unable to capitalise on their electoral power, despite their dominance of the local state administration, because the absence of elections limited their ability to build a bureaucracy that could guarantee their permanence in local political power. Despite the low level of violence in Chocó, its existence affected the territory's relationship with the central government. The liberals were temporarily excluded from local power and the autonomy mechanisms achieved through departmentalisation were not implemented, while the imposition of military mayors was a sign of state control based on violence. Local political power was able to make traditional demands for infrastructure and state presence in the early years of the Rojas dictatorship. The figure of the governor and the Comité de Acción Chocoana were the intermediaries for these demands. Beyond the dictatorship, local power was able to consolidate its hold on the territory. The military also consolidated local political and state power in the area by attempting to dismember the department. The lack of services and infrastructure provoked a constant demand from the state, and local power, through the parties, continued to become the intermediary of this demand. In this way, Chocó was more than just a marginal territory; it had an important articulation with the process of state formation during this period. The fourth chapter focuses on the local impact of the National Front and the decentralising reforms of the Colombian state and the emergence of the violence of the armed conflict. During this period, 233 the territories were put on an equal footing in terms of their articulation with the political system. It shows that local administrations were put on an equal footing in terms of local governance and the implementation of the new regime. These changes were preceded by the death of one of the most important political leaders in Chocó and the departure of the traditional white families and the former Syrian-Lebanese traders due to the fire in Quibdó. One of the effects of the new regime was to equalise the bureaucracy, despite the fact that Chocó was a predominantly liberal area. The state thus homogenised the territories without taking into account local electoral dynamics, and the population and political power do not seem to have rebelled against such a situation. The new regime brought with it the expansion of the state and the arrival of new resources in the territory. The aim was to rehabilitate areas affected by violence and to accelerate the growth of areas lagging behind in order to prevent the outbreak of new violence. As a result of this expansion, the central, departmental and municipal governments grew, along with a decentralised parastatal bloc and the expansion of the legislative and judicial branches. This expansion brought with it the creation of new offices and bureaucracies for the territory and meant a local struggle for its control during the National Front and later years. As a result, ideological labels and party affiliations were lost in the search for access to the bureaucracy. Politics in the Chocó was reduced to the administration of elections, and it became increasingly clear that the parties were preventing social change, with the result that the support of the Chocoanos for elections, which had always been the mechanism for legitimising the political and party system and one of the main channels for linking the population to the institutions of the state, was declining. As in the rest of the country, the Chocó saw an increase in social protests, mainly demanding the extension or implementation of public services. Despite these popular demonstrations and denunciations of the absence of the state and of corruption, the leftist parties did not achieve major electoral successes, but the demands did provoke a response from the state that led to the search for a broadening of the political system. 234 The reaction of the traditional parties to the possibility of a democratic opening triggered the intensification of violence, which began to escalate in the 1980s. The "opening", however, did not mean any significant changes for the parties, for the local authorities or for the improvement of the administration of the state at the local level. Despite the denunciations of bad administration, political power continued to be shared amidst the traditional disputes within the party, which did not undergo any unfavourable changes in the eighties in terms of the electoral aspect. The point of arrival is the emergence of the violent reaction of local power and the state to the attempt to open up the state itself. It is part of the beginning of the violence of the armed conflict in Chocó.

This article explores how archaeo-politics generates violence woven into everyday life by analysing Israel’s archaeological apparatus in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). In light of former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to the Tell Seilun archaeological site, I examine how state and non-state actors exploit archaeology to legitimise territorial claims. I argue that archaeo-politics is not limited to a revisionist self-awareness and the way that current politics uses, misuses, and abuses archaeology. It encompasses the subtle and pervasive ways in which violence is embedded in state structures, norms, and power dynamics, ultimately perpetuating not only spatial injustice and exclusion but also becoming a factor in fuelling ongoing cycles of Israeli settlers’ oppression and direct violence against Palestinian subjects. The article investigates how archaeo-political violence is materialized through Israel’s archaeological state and non-state apparatus operating within frameworks of settler colonialism and entrepreneurism. By scrutinising American officials’ fixation on archaeological sites in internationally recognised occupied territories, I question the motives behind these activities and explore the forms of violence they engender that go beyond physical harm. This analysis contributes to understanding how archaeology is weaponised within contested landscapes, revealing the complex relationship between heritage, power, and structural violence in contexts of ongoing settler colonialism and military occupation.

Richard Bussmann, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cologne, recently published the book The Archaeology of Pharaonic Egypt: Society and Culture, 2700–1700 BC (2023, Cambridge University Press), which places people at the centre of an analysis of the so-called “Pyramid Age” of Ancient Egypt. The book focusses on life “in the shadow of the pyramids” by exploring aspects of daily life (and death) as well as social interactions beyond the traditional Egyptological focus on royal and elite spheres. Bussmann examines cross-cultural themes such as urbanism, materiality, non-elite culture, political and religious practice, gender roles, and perceptions of the body. As a comparative approach to ancient societies and as a study drawing heavily on anthropological and theoretical concepts, the book raised the interest of the FKA Editorial Board. To allow us and the author to critically reflect on some of the issues raised in our discussion, we took the opportunity to pose a set of questions to Richard Bussmann, which he kindly answered.

The aim of this research is to historically reconstruct the main features of the processes of disciplinary professionalisation and renewal of forms, contents and methodologies that urbanism, photography and design experienced, both in Germany and Argentina, during the first half of the 20th century. The hypothesis poses that the figure of empathy and the experience of vision towards the end of the 19th century contributed to the foundation of a new paradigm of perception through which it is possible to jointly reinterpret the historical circulation of modernist ideas during the 20th century. Thus, the syntax of empathic and visual perception constitutes the focus of analysis that will shed light on three highly significant experiences of this global historical process in order to demonstrate how each of them contributed to a common way of perceiving space and forms.

Esta tesis versa sobre la historia de la cultura de viaje del turismo en Nicaragua durante la dictadura somocista (1936-1979), en cuanto a su surgimiento, desenvolvimiento y consolidación en el siglo veinte como un proyecto de desarrollo y modernización de la nación nicaragüense. El objetivo principal es historizar dos procesos centrales del turismo como proyecto de desarrollo nacional liderado por el régimen de los Somoza, la institucionalización por parte del Estado y la naturalización del turismo por parte de las élites nicaragüenses. Para ello se analizan y se reconstruyen las historias de la infraestructura y la narrativa de viaje en Nicaragua, especialmente de la Carretera Panamericana y las conexiones aeronáuticas junto con sus guías de viaje, debido a que ambas historias demuestran la imbricación de los actores regionales y nacionales en la invención de la nación nicaragüense como un inventario de atracciones a ser integradas en los mercados internacionales del turismo. La conclusión principal es que el turismo fue una empresa delineada por los ejes del imperialismo y el somocismo, en cuanto se estructuró como proyecto de nación en base a los fundamentos económicos, políticos y, sobre todo, raciales, patriarcales y dictatoriales que dominaron las relaciones entre Estados Unidos y Nicaragua, especialmente durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y la Guerra Fría.

Das südbrasilianische Blumenau, gegründet als Privatkolonie durch den Chemiker Hermann Blumenau, galt in deutschen Kolonialdiskursen als Beispiel für ein erfolgreiches Kolonisierungsprojekt in Übersee und in brasilianischen Kreisen als „deutscher“ Ort. Während des Estado Novo (1937–1945) wurde es von der Regierung, der Armee und einem Teil der brasilianischen Intellektuellen als Grenzgebiet der Nation betrachtet. Aus diesem Grund war es eines der Hauptziele der Nationalisierungspolitik für Einwanderer und ihre Nachkommen. Die Unterdrückung, die Verbote und die Einführung von Praktiken, die darauf abzielten, die „Brasilianität“ aufzubauen, wirkten sich auf das kulturelle und politische Leben in der Gemeinde aus. Ziel des Buches ist es, die Veränderungen und Kontinuitäten in den Identitätsdiskursen der Bevölkerung von Blumenau zwischen zwei Gedenkfeiern zu untersuchen: dem hundertsten Jahrestag der deutschen Einwanderung nach Santa Catarina (1929) und dem der Gründung der Kolonie Blumenau (1950). Die Autorin zeigt die enge Beziehung zwischen Kultur und Politik und beleuchtet die Akteure, Reaktionen, Aushandlungen, Widerstände und Anpassungen der lokalen Eliten in der Zeit des Vargismus (1930–1945) und des Zweiten Weltkriegs sowie die Auswirkungen auf die Neuformulierung von Identitätsdiskursen. Wie das Buch zeigt, war der Diskurs, der Blumenau 1929 als „engere Heimat“ in Brasilien oder sogar als „Musterkolonie“ dank der Aufrechterhaltung des Deutschtums darstellte, nach dem Ende des Krieges und des Estado Novo-Regimes in der Öffentlichkeit tabu. 1950, im Kontext der Demokratisierung, verteidigten einige Mitglieder der lokalen Eliten das Recht auf kulturelle Besonderheiten und betrachteten die „Pluralität der Kultur“ als Faktor für wirtschaftlichen Fortschritt, während sie gleichzeitig die „Brasilianität“ der Stadt bekräftigten. Der verbotene Diskurs über die Überlegenheit der „deutschen“ Arbeit wurde angepasst, indem die Rolle der europäischen Einwanderer bei der Industrialisierung von Blumenau und des Itajaí-Tals betont wurde.

Bei der vorliegenden Studie handelt es sich um eine kulturwissenschaftliche Doktorarbeit, die an der Universität Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS) in São Leopoldo im brasilianischen Bundesstaat Rio Grande do Sul verteidigt wurde. Zentrales Thema sind die Repräsentationen und Debatten über Deutschtum, Schule und Lehrer in der Allgemeinen Lehrerzeitung für Rio Grande do Sul, dem Vereinsblatt des Deutschen Evangelischen Lehrervereins in Rio Grande do Sul, das zwischen 1902 und 1938 monatlich erschien. Die Zeitschrift ist eine wichtige Quelle für die Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Presse in Brasilien und für die Geschichte des brasilianischen Bildungswesens. Darüber hinaus besteht eine Beziehung zur deutschen Geschichte, da die Redakteure und Autoren der Lehrerzeitung, von denen die meisten Deutschlehrer waren, Darstellungen des Deutschtums, der Schule und des Lehrers konstruierten, die deutsche Identität vor Ort verwalteten, Verhaltensregeln aufstellten und Lektüreempfehlungen für Lehrer gaben, die an den sogenannten deutsch-brasilianischen evangelisch-lutherischen Schulen arbeiteten, die die Hauptleserschaft der Zeitschrift bildeten. Die Studie diskutiert auch die Rolle der Schule für die brasilianische Nationalisierungspolitik und den Nationalsozialismus. Im Mittelpunkt stehen Verhandlungsstrategien, die sich in der Zeitschrift finden lassen, um das deutsch-evangelische Privatschulwesen aufrechtzuerhalten, das die Förderung des Deutschtums und die Erziehung zu brasilianischen Staatsbürgern zum Ziel hatte. Auch die Beziehung zwischen dem Deutschen Evangelischen Lehrerverein und der Riograndenser Synode, die damals eine der wichtigsten Stützen des Deutschtums war, wird erörtert.

In order to shed light on the status and economic model of Banassac’s Early Empire terra sigillata workshop, systematic surveys were carried out on the karstic terrain of the area surrounding the town. Due to a shortage of sources, the project was carried out as an integrative ‘community archaeology’ project, from the definition of the scope of research to the drawing of conclusions and consideration of results.With the synthesis of settlement dynamics from the Mesolithic times to the Middle Ages provided by the study and precise data about occupied sites in Roman times (38 villae and 55 workshops),it is now possible to see at Banassac a villa controlling a fundus through an integrated economic system linking clay, pitch and iron.

It was between the Late Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age when wool was introduced as raw material for textile production. It is expected that this innovation had a comprehensive effect on the socio-economic life of people and their environment. However, little is known about spatio-temporal trajectories of the process and the environmental influences it actually had. The approach presented demonstrates how such a comprehensive and complex research question may be operationalized. Decomposition of the overall process and gathering of information from different fields allows to reconstruct particular aspects of the phenomenon and their diachronic change. Subsequent synthesis enables addressing the overall question. This paper focuses on the role of landscape within the process of wool sheep introduction. Besides covering the particular approach to reconstruct herdingrelated landscape changes it is shown how deeply different disciplinary approaches are interconnected. Finally, difficulties and constraints of data integration are addressed.

After a decade of research the functions of circular enclosures of the middle Neolithic are still debated. In a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) two of these roundels were excavated in order to learn more about their structure, history of construction, their function as well as their spatial characteristics. Based on high-resolution digital elevation models, possible orientations towards topographical and astronomical features are systematically investigated using a GIS-based visibility analysis and a self-developed tool in Wolfram Mathematica. In this article preliminary results of two (partially) excavated roundels in the northern Forelands of the Harz Mountains are presented.