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Use-value and exchange-value are pragmatic features of commodity exchange which are apparent from the careful study of specific interactions, as well as from the viewpoint of economic processes at large. While Marx's well-known attempt to describe this pair of concepts in Capital (2001) takes the latter tack, I attempt here to take the formeri.e., to approach the composition of the commodity from the point of view of the pragmatics of interaction. In doing so, I offer a semiotic model of the valuation of commodities which differs from accounts given by Kockelman (2006) and Agha (2011). The ethnographic object at stake in this essay is StreetWise, a Chicago street newspaper said to have empowering effects on its vendors.

Human sacrifice in the Inca Empire at times took the form of the capacocha, a sacrificial rite involving the most beautiful children in the empire. In this study, we investigate a possible capacocha at the pre-Columbian site of Choquepukio in the Cuzco Valley of Peru. During excavations at Choquepukio in 2004, seven children (aged 3-12 years) were discovered buried together; accompanying them was an elaborate assemblage of high status artifacts similar to those from other recent archaeological finds that are believed to be capacocha sacrifices. Since colonial documents indicate that capacocha children were selected from diverse regions of the empire, we initiated a radiogenic strontium isotope analysis to determine the origins of the children found at Choquepukio. Our analysis showed that, indeed, two children in the assemblage had non-local origins. When considered together, the osteological, archaeological, and isotopic evidence suggest that a capacocha event occurred at Choquepukio, representing the only lower-elevation capacocha to have been found in the Cuzco region. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This article addresses the bioarchaeological evidence for Inca warfare through an analysis of 454 adult skeletons from 11 sites in the Inca capital region of Cuzco, Peru. These 11 sites span almost 1000 years (AD 600-1532), which allows for a comparison of the evidence for warfare before the Inca came to power (Middle Horizon AD 600-1000), during the time of Inca ascendency in the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1400), and after the Inca came to power and expanded throughout the Cuzco region and beyond (Inca Imperial Period, AD 1400-1532). The results indicate that 100 of 454 adults (22.0%) showed evidence of cranial trauma. Of these, 23 individuals had major cranial injuries suggestive of warfare, consisting of large, complete, and/or perimortem fractures. There was scant evidence for major injuries during the Middle Horizon (2.8%, 1/36) and Late Intermediate Period (2.5%, 5/199), suggesting that warfare was not prevalent in the Cuzco region before and during the Inca rise to power. Only in the Inca Imperial Period was there a significant rise in major injuries suggestive of warfare (7.8%, 17/219). Despite the significant increase in Inca times, the evidence for major cranial injuries was only sporadically distributed at Cuzco periphery sites and was entirely absent at Cuzco core sites. These findings suggest that while the Inca used warfare as a mechanism for expansion in the Cuzco region, it was only one part of a complex expansion strategy that included economic, political, and ideological means to gain and maintain control. Copyright © 2011 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

We document evidence for trophy-taking and dismemberment with a new bioarchaeological database featuring 13,453 individuals from prehistoric central California sites. Our study reveals 76 individuals with perimortem removal of body parts consistent with trophy-taking or dismemberment; nine of these individuals display multiple types of trophy-taking and dismemberment for a total of 87 cases. Cases span almost 5,000 years, from the Early Period (3000-500 BC) to the Late Period (AD 900-1700). Collectively, these individuals share traits that distinguish them from the rest of the population: a high frequency of young adult males, an increased frequency of associated trauma, and a tendency towards multiple burials and haphazard burial positions. Eight examples of human bone artifacts were also found that appear related to trophy-taking. These characteristics suggest that trophy-taking and dismemberment were an important part of the warfare practices of central Californian tribes. Temporally, the two practices soared in the Early/Middle Transition Period (500-200 BC), which may have reflected a more complex sociopolitical system that encouraged the use of trophies for status acquisition, as well as the migration of outside groups that resulted in intensified conflict. Overall, trophy-taking and dismemberment appear to have been the product of the social geography of prehistoric central California, where culturally differentiated tribes lived in close proximity to their enemies.

A conjecture by Albertson states that if χ(G) ≥ n then cr(G) ≥ cr(Kn), where χ(G) is the chromatic number of G and cr(G) is the crossing number of G. This conjecture is true for positive integers n ≤ 16, but it is still open for n ≥ 17. In this paper we consider the statements corresponding to this conjecture where the crossing number of G is replaced with the skewness µ(G) (the minimum number of edges whose removal makes G planar), the genus γ(G) (the minimum genus of the orientable surface on which G is embeddable), and the thickness θ(G) (the minimum number of planar subgraphs of G whose union is G.) We show that the corresponding statements are true for all positive integers n when cr(G) is replaced with µ(G) or γ(G). We also show that the corresponding statement is true for infinitely many values of n, but not for all n, when cr(G) is replaced with θ(G).

The demise of America's state mental hospital system, or “deinstitutionalization,” has received much attention from sociologists and historians of medicine. Less understood is the manner in which the public experienced and came to terms with it. Using elements of folklore and horror studies, I will examine how popular films accommodated audiences to institutional decline and confirmed popular antistatist pessimism. The Exorcist (1973), One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Halloween (1978), and When a Stranger Calls (1979) helped weave a tapestry of distrust. By endorsing popular conceptions of institutional failure and presenting mythical narratives of individualist triumph, these films helped pave a path towards the conservative Reagan era to come.

Three novel experiments investigated the effectiveness of color-coded word-families flashcards for facilitating kindergarteners' word recognition skills. Flashcards were constructed with the rime of the word family (vowel and remaining consonant sounds) printed in black ink, indicating that words with this spelling pattern sound the same, and the onsets (initial consonant sounds) shown in different colors, indicating the sound changes from word to word. All experiments involved preand post-testing on word recognition and phonological awareness and random assignment to intervention or control conditions. The length of intervention and type of control condition differed among experiments. Results suggested that word-families may facilitate word recognition skill development and that factors such as amount of practice, phonological awareness, and socioeconomic status impact the efficacy of the intervention.

"The Lamb's New Song" argues that the Book of Revelation is the primary model for the Christ-centered liturgy of early Dissenting hymnbooks. In particular, the depiction of heavenly worship in Revelation, in which the slain Lamb is exalted to the throne of God and then sung a new song, is fundamental to the theology and symbolic vocabulary of the early British hymn. Dissenting writers in the 1690s drew on the Apocalypse to challenge the hegemony of the psalter in congregational worship, replacing the recital of scriptural psalms with the creation of new hymns to Christ. The essay features the work of Richard Davis, a controversial Independent minister whose Hymns Composed on Various Subjects (1694) anticipates Watts ground-breaking volume Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707). Both writers foreground the christological drama at the heart of Revelation, in which the crucified and enthroned Lamb brings access to God, whose presence is made real during the public enactment of the hymn. The essay also challenges the influential theory of Stephen Marini, whose "Hymnody as History" (2002) posits an unbridgeable spiritual distance between the divine and human realms as a defining feature of eighteenth-century Anglophone hymns, a claim that fails to account for their central apocalyptic features. Putting early British hymnography in dialogue with New Testament studies can help show that British hymnists engaged with scriptural texts not simply as sources of doctrine and devotion but as fonts of inspiration and creativity.