This study examines the role of genealogy in the construction of noble identity and social legitimacy through the case of the Villafañe lineage between the Kingdom of León and Spanish America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing upon archival documentation, genealogical records, heraldic sources, and colonial evidence from León (Spain), La Rioja, Tucumán, and Córdoba (present-day Argentina), the article combines historical genealogy, social history, and Atlantic studies to reconstruct the trajectory of the lineage and its transregional networks. The findings indicate that the continuity of the Villafañe family was sustained through the interaction of documented descent, kinship alliances, municipal participation, Atlantic mobility, and the preservation of genealogical narratives that reinforced lineage identity and noble status across geographically distant settings. Migration to Spanish America did not represent a rupture with Leonese origins; rather, it facilitated the adaptation and projection of pre-existing forms of social organization and collective identity within colonial environments. The study argues that genealogy functioned simultaneously as a documentary practice and as a mechanism through which noble memory, social distinction, and historical continuity were articulated and reproduced. More broadly, the Villafañe case illustrates how family networks connected local Iberian societies with colonial elite environments, contributing to the formation and persistence of noble identities across the Atlantic world.
This article analyzes the creative and social practices surrounding batida do gueto (ghetto beat), an emerging Afro-diasporic electronic music genre developed by Lisbon’s peripheral youth. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2025—including participant observation in home studios, semi-structured interviews, and digital netnography—this study explores how young Afro-descendant DJs transform digital music production software, specifically FL Studio, into technologies of postcolonial belonging. The discussion is structured around three main dimensions: first, the emergence of the “Fox clan,” a symbolic kinship network and musical lineage built through peer-to-peer knowledge transmission; second, the analysis of home studio musicking, highlighting the emic category of descompasso (rhythmic micro-displacement) as an esthetic and identity element that encapsulates postcolonial experiences of racialization and displacement; and finally, the urban and transnational circulation of batida do gueto through parties that challenge the boundaries between peripheral neighborhoods and Lisbon’s central neighborhoods. By bringing digital musicking into dialog with contemporary debates on the Black Atlantic and the politics of belonging, this article argues that the sonic subversions embedded in the genre operate as crucial resources of contestation, allowing peripheral youth to claim spatial visibility, citizenship, and historical recognition within contemporary Portuguese society.
Burial and mourning practices in Africa have long been embedded in deeply rooted cultural, spiritual and communal value systems. However, these traditions are undergoing significant transformation through modernisation, urbanisation, migration, religious change and economic pressure. This study examines the changing dynamics of burial and mourning practices in Southern Africa, with particular attention to Zimbabwe and Lesotho. Drawing on qualitative insights from existing scholarship, cultural analysis and the researchers’ contextual observations, the paper explores how mourning periods, communal participation, ritual ceremonies, ancestral relations and attachment to burial land are being reconfigured rather than simply abandoned. In both countries, prominent shifts include the professionalisation and commercialisation of funerals, the influence of Pentecostal Christianity, the growing role of funeral assurance schemes and the disruption of expected rites by COVID-19. Using functionalist, symbolic interactionist and African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) perspectives, the paper identifies a continuing tension between cultural identity and contemporary practical realities. It argues that some indigenous practices have weakened, while others have been adapted or hybridised into new cultural forms. The comparison contributes to debates on cultural continuity, genealogy, identity and social change by showing how communities preserve the social and spiritual functions of mourning even when its outward forms change. The paper is positioned primarily within cultural studies, specifically the interdisciplinary study of religion, ritual and social change. Among the factors considered, Pentecostal reinterpretation and ritual substitution, the professionalisation and commodification of funerals, and migration, together with pressure on burial land, appear most influential. COVID-19 is retained as a historically bounded accelerator rather than the dominant continuing force.
Post-apartheid South Africa continues to grapple with a paradox. Constitutionally, the country is founded on values of human dignity, equality and the advancement of human rights. Socially and politically, however, the country has witnessed recurrent episodes of intra-communal violence, particularly directed at foreign nationals and marginalized groups within its own borders. While scholarship on themes such as justice, Ubuntu, reconciliation and liberation is well developed in South African theology, there remains a need to engage biblical texts that directly address brotherhood betrayal within the rainbow of nations. The Book of Obadiah provides such a resource. Using historical-critical, literary and intertextual exegesis, African biblical hermeneutics and theological reflection, the study seeks to find how Obadiah can be used both as a critique and source of hope in the South African context. The main research question guiding this study is: How can a contextual African reading of Obadiah contribute to theological and ethical reflection on community violence and restoration in contemporary South Africa? From the findings, it is quite clear that the prophetic text resonates with current realities in South Africa, including nationalist gloating, politics of space and xenophobic violence. In light of the message in Obadiah, the study recommends that South Africa needs to rethink kinship, restitution and pan-African solidarity. Just as Edom forgot its shared womb with Jacob, South Africa risks forgetting the assistance it received from fellow African states. The politics of space demands memory work.
In this article, I analyze white American performances of South Asian music as concurrent performances of racial identity. I deploy a performance studies perspective that treats the visible and audible manifestations of race as performative agents in the manufacturing of racial structures. Scholars of interracial performance such as Philip Deloria, Eric Lott, and E. Patrick Johnson have long examined the ways white Americans have used the traditional art forms of ethnic Others as a means of understanding their own whiteness in silhouette. Likewise, I argue here that the performance and consumption of Hindustani music in its American diasporic context serves as a sort of funhouse mirror, forcing white practitioners and spectators to confront their own Orientalizing impulses and thereby affording them the opportunity to do whiteness differently. This article is structured in two parts. The first follows ethnographic interviews with a white American sitar player across his interactions with South Asian collaborators and audiences; the second reverses this gaze, this time analyzing a South Asian tabla player’s performance before a white Euro-American audience. I demonstrate the ways the question of authenticity generates a productive anxiety in white practitioners and consumers of South Asian music, one that ultimately leads them to perform their whiteness differently before the brown gaze. In calling this a “performance” of whiteness, I mean that these cross-cultural transgressions go beyond making whiteness visible, as Lott and Deloria suggest, towards actually producing a different kind of whiteness, one that is in dialogue with the perspective and demands of the non-white Other.
This article examines how laïcité (secularism) discourse regarding the need for neutrality in sport acts as an enabler of racialised governance in contemporary France. I first provide a brief contextual discussion of Republican political culture as a ‘perpetual civilising mission’, which is founded on an abstract universalist framing of the concepts of equality and liberty. The article subsequently discusses how the mobilisation of what I call a ‘civilising secularism’ in contemporary France has shifted from a primary fixation on schools, universities and the workplace to sports and sporting practices, thus illustrating how its ‘civilising’ work is never done. However, in the face of sustained efforts to mobilise laïcité as a civilising concept, I also demonstrate how Muslim women are resisting secularist calls for ‘neutrality’ through collective action against their exclusion, notably via campaign groups such as Les Hijabeuses and Basket Pour Toutes. Furthermore, I argue that their resistance needs to be understood not only empirically but also conceptually. My analysis of these two collective campaigns therefore illustrates how they are actively contributing to a re-evaluation of Republican conceptions of equality and liberty. I draw on the work of Étienne Balibar regarding ‘equaliberty’ in order to analyse the campaigns of Les Hijabeuses and Basket Pour Toutes before proposing an extension to his concept that more fully reflects their activism. I propose the concept of ‘sororal equaliberty’ to capture this contribution.
This study examined parents’ and grandparents’ perspectives on intergenerational interactions within an innovative school–family partnership in early childhood education (ECE). Drawing on sociocultural concepts of learning and a ‘more-than-parents’ approach to intergenerational learning (IGL), this research project adopted a two-way partnership perspective, encouraging children and their family members to explore and reconstruct local cultural heritage sites together by utilising their lived experiences and cultural resources. A qualitative case study approach was employed, with data derived from an online open-ended questionnaire completed by 20 adult participants (i.e., 14 parents and six grandparents). Inductive thematic analysis revealed five core themes: (a) acknowledging children as capable agents; (b) identifying children’s learning; (c) adults as learners; (d) shared activities as a space for fostering family connection; and (e) challenges and suggestions for future implementation. The findings demonstrate that the shared exploration of cultural heritage can enhance mutual learning and foster vivid intergenerational communication, thereby strengthening family relationships. By observing the active role of young learners in intergenerational activities, participants acknowledged capabilities that they had previously overlooked in their children and/or grandchildren. However, challenges relating to time constraints, available resources and practical issues suggest that schools need to provide families with tailored information about such initiatives. Overall, this study emphasises the pivotal role of early childhood education in fostering IGL through reciprocal school–family partnerships.
This article examines queer Hmong identity and cultural change in the United States over the past fifty years, a period shaped by refugee resettlement, intergenerational negotiation, and evolving family practice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ten queer Hmong individuals and analyzing the findings through two frameworks centering Hmong epistemologies, this article argues that queer Hmong belonging is negotiated through placement: the positioning of queer Hmong children in Hmong genealogical structures. Participants describe acceptance not only through “coming out” or verbal acceptance, but through everyday acts of care, inclusion, and protection that sustain family life. By centering acceptance, obligation, and sacrifice, this article reframes queerness as an act of cultural continuity emerging through intergenerational care, mutual accommodation, and shared responsibility, rather than through the rejection of Hmong tradition. These findings show how Hmong parents and queer children actively negotiate shifting norms while reconfiguring belonging, family cohesion, and cultural responsibility within the diaspora. In doing so, this article contributes to critical Hmong studies, queer of color critique, education, and social work by offering a framework for understanding queer identity formation that is grounded in Hmong genealogical and epistemological terms, rather than measured against Western models of visibility and disclosure.
How do ordinary place names make a major river legible as heritage? This article examines Yellow River toponyms as everyday infrastructures through which hydrological space becomes spatialized memory in contemporary China. The study uses a nested mixed-methods design rather than treating every record as equivalent evidence. Its administrative frame contains 2249 unique current statutory township-level units in 178 county-level targets across all nine Yellow River province-level regions. A record-level audit links 1039 of the original 1314 survey records to 1008 unique current units, while 1215 units contain at least one place-specific interpretive field. Six non-exclusive tags identify hydrological space, multi-ethnic interaction, transport and trade, historical memory, state governance, and cross-cutting heritage activation. An E0–E3 rubric separates administrative identity from externally corroborated explanation, traceable survey narrative, and structural context. Forty-five cases form an evidence-graded pool, but only seven core and eleven qualified cases carry the main qualitative argument. Hydrological and historical narratives are the most widely supported layers, while interpretive coverage remains geographically and evidentially uneven. Place names make river heritage through localization, multilingual translation, mobility, temporal layering, and administrative circulation. Official standardization can preserve recognized forms, but it also produces selective legibility by making some variants, scripts, meanings, and origin accounts easier to retrieve than others. The article contributes to critical toponymy and critical heritage studies by showing how ordinary names mediate between local memory and national spatial infrastructures. It reframes the Global East as a setting where heritage is produced through accretion, translation, and database-mediated standardization, not only spectacular renaming.
Scholarship on Nazar Eshonqul has primarily interpreted his fiction through the frameworks of absurdism, symbolism, and postmodern alienation. In this article, I make a different claim: that his title story, Maymun Yetaklagan Odam (“The Man Led by a Monkey”), and the stories that cluster around it in the 2008 collection can best be read as a sustained meditation on genealogical rupture: what happens to a family and a community when the lines along which memory, value, and identity are supposed to pass are broken. The study is based on memory studies (Halbwachs, the Assmanns), postmemory theory (Hirsch), cultural trauma theory (Alexander, Caruth), and theories of narrative identity and habitus (Ricoeur, Bourdieu, Hall) and reads these in conjunction with recent work on post-Soviet narrative and inherited trauma in similar literary works in order to interpret the painter, his monkey-led-man canvases and his estranged son in close detail. The study argues that the monkey functions as a symbol of inheritance detached from its origin, a transmission that lives on mechanically, without meaning. The narrative fictionalises the violent social changes that were part of twentieth-century Central Asian life and which emptied the spaces of familial and cultural continuity, resulting in alienation, social amnesia and an identity that no longer knows how to tell itself. This reading situates Uzbek modernist fiction within broader debates on genealogy and memory, showing how literary narrative can more effectively illuminate disruptions in cultural inheritance than discursive analysis alone.
Entrepreneurship in South Africa is widely recognised as a critical driver of economic inclusion and job creation. While existing research highlights the role of formal education in enhancing entrepreneurial capability, less attention has been given to how entrenched gender norms, historical inequalities, and informal learning processes shape entrepreneurial visions. This study aims to investigate how gender dynamics shape entrepreneurial visions beyond formal educational attainment, particularly in contexts of persistent structural inequalities and high unemployment. The study adopts a qualitative research design. Using purposive sampling, 60 participants were selected and organised into three focus groups. Guided by Social Feminist Theory, the analysis foregrounds gendered social structures as central to the formation of entrepreneurial visions. Data were analysed thematically to explore recurring patterns related to structural uncertainty, informal learning, gendered perceptions of risk and confidence, and the reframing of entrepreneurial aspirations. The findings reveal that entrepreneurship often emerges in response to structural uncertainty rather than purely from opportunity-driven motives. Informal learning through community networks, lived experiences, and adaptive strategies constitutes a central source of entrepreneurial knowledge, particularly for women. Women participants frequently reported constrained growth aspirations shaped by structural barriers and questioned their own legitimacy, while men tended to benefit from broader institutional networks and greater perceived entrepreneurial confidence. The study highlights the need for policy interventions that extend beyond formal education. It recommends recognising informal competencies, addressing structural constraints, and developing gender-responsive support systems that validate diverse entrepreneurial pathways. Such interventions are essential for fostering inclusive entrepreneurship and reducing inequality in South Africa. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by foregrounding the role of gendered social realities in shaping entrepreneurial visions. It further demonstrates how informal learning processes inform these visions beyond formal educational attainment.
This article argues that Foucault’s work demonstrates a historical trend moving towards an exclusion from space. This exclusion is predicated on a gaze that has systematically moved further away from the corporeal body to include the digital realm. This study deploys Foucault’s conceptualisation of ‘heterotopia’ as a tool for analysing the transformations in the relations between spaces and bodies. The article investigates Foucault’s work on space throughout his oeuvre to demonstrate that such an investigation reveals an emergent focus on bodily surveillance in relation to space, emerging with disciplinary power. Foucault’s analysis reveals that the emergence of biopolitics and regulatory controls allowed for the emergence and proliferation of exclusionary practices from spaces and institutions beyond the body. His later work on liberal governmentality and security reveals an even more dramatic reorganisation in power’s approach to space, which allows for a hyper-specific approach towards determining the inclusionary and exclusionary criteria from space. Foucault’s contemporary interlocutors demonstrate that this trend towards exclusion has been exacerbated and expanded even further beyond the body by the turn towards digital criteria for inclusion/exclusion from heterotopic space. The relation between Foucault’s spatial analyses and the emergence of digital ‘spaces’ provides new insight into the analysis of the contemporary relation between digital data, corporeal bodies, and heterotopic spaces.
The scholarship on Chinese womanhood has highlighted a split female subjectivity and fostered an enduring image of Chinese women as victims. Going beyond this image, the current study sought to explore how Chinese female doctors construct a polyphonic individual selfhood through flexible practices of coordination and adjustment on the continuum between work and family commitments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 female physicians working at a private hospital in Shanghai. Analysis of the data revealed that these professional women presented themselves as individuals striving for career development who also had to address gender stereotypes in their workplaces. Based on our findings, we argue that female medical workers in China shape an inclusive notion of the gendered self by mediating work and family commitments and integrating them into a polyphonic form of subjectivity.
Bereavement in Southern Africa is not a private event. It is rather a shared and communal experience, shaped by rituals, faith, and relationships. In Botswana, mourning is influenced by Botho, a way of life that says, “I am because we are,” where a whole community carries the pain of loss together and takes responsibility for the bereaved. These communal rituals bring comfort, meaning and a sense of belonging, helping families accept death and move towards healing. Yet research also shows a harder side: many mourning practices are gendered and favors male gender. Widows often face long, strict rituals, social isolation and suspicion, rooted in patriarchy and ideas about impurity or danger, which can harm their emotional, social, and economic well-being. This article uses conceptual/theological analysis within pastoral theology and African relational ethics to examine these practices and to explore how churches and caregivers can honor culture while resisting injustice. Drawing on work of Botho African pastoral care and gender, it shows that the same communal systems that care can also exclude and marginalize widows. The article proposes a Gendered Botho Pastoral Care Model that calls Christian communities to sustain communal solidarity and shared mourning, challenge patriarchal and violent widowhood rites, reinterpret rituals in life-giving ways, and build resilience, dignity and agency for widows, so that mourning spaces become places of healing, justice and restored humanity Pastors for widows in Botswana and across Southern Africa.
The novel Mehrobdan Chayon by Abdulla Qodiriy has been studied mostly as a historical, social and literary text, and its representation of motherhood and women as agents of cultural transmission has received little scholarly attention. This article suggests that Qodiriy presents motherhood not primarily as a biological relationship but as a cultural institution, in which Uzbek society is reproduced across generations in terms of literacy, religious and literary canon, comportment and marital expectation. The analysis, based on close reading of three figures, i.e., the neighbourhood girls’ teacher, Nigor oyim; the educated daughter, Ra’no; and the marital-futures-managing woman, Mohlar oyim, and an interdisciplinary cultural-studies approach, demonstrates that the maternal line functions as the novel’s mechanism of cultural continuity, transmitting both knowledge and social constraint. The article adds a Central Asian case to the study of motherhood and rethinks Qodiriy’s domestic scenes as the place where Uzbek womanhood is reproduced and reformed.
Immanuel Kant is synonymous with modernity, enlightenment and secularity. This reputation is earned through the incredible influence of his three weighty critiques, which have laid the intellectual, moral and aesthetic foundations for modern philosophical thought. Despite this reputation, many scholars in recent years have argued that Kant’s intellectual contribution to secularism, moral universality and political republicanism ought to be approached more critically. The ‘other’ Kant is also one of the progenitors of the modern concept of race. Kantians have defended Kant against charges that race is essential to his entire critical project. This essay moves beyond the stalemate between race scholars and Kantians by reading his concept of race together with his philosophy of religion. Drawing on critical approaches to religion, race and secularism, this essay argues that race is constitutive of his philosophy. More specifically, it demonstrates how race and religion are deeply entangled in Kant’s construction of Jews and Judaism as the constitutive outsiders of Euro-Christian modernity.
Indigenous languages in Southern Thailand are increasingly affected by modernization, digital communication, and language contact, yet the relationship between kinship terminology, social organization, and linguistic sustainability among Indigenous Austroasiatic-speaking communities remains insufficiently explored. This study addresses three research questions: (1) how Tan’ean and Jaahaai kinship systems differ in their semantic structures and classificatory patterns; (2) how kinship terms reflect cultural worldviews, social organization, and relational values of the Manni and Mueng’ra communities; and (3) what challenges influence the transmission and sustainability of kinship-related linguistic knowledge. This study aims to comparatively analyze consanguineal and affinal kinship terminology in the Tan’ean language of the Manni ethnic group and the Jaahaai language of the Mueng’ra ethnic group, focusing on how kinship systems encode cultural worldviews, social relations, and adaptive strategies under contemporary change. Guided by Componential Analysis and Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory, this study employed a qualitative ethnolinguistic approach. Data were collected through genealogical elicitation, in-depth interviews, and participant observation with 40 key informants from Trang, Phatthalung, Satun, Songkhla, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces. The data were analyzed through semantic feature identification and comparative interpretation of kinship structures. The findings demonstrate that, despite shared Austroasiatic heritage, Tan’ean and Jaahaai exhibit distinct kinship systems reflecting different cultural logics. In response to the first research question, the findings reveal that the Manni system resembles the Hawaiian type, emphasizing egalitarian relations, generational categories, and inclusive incorporation of affinal relatives, whereas the Mueng’ra system shows Crow–Omaha characteristics, including generational skewing, gender-specific markers, hierarchical classification, and stronger influence from dominant regional languages. Regarding the second research question, the findings demonstrate that kinship terminology functions as a cultural mechanism for organizing social relationships, identity, and intergenerational obligations, reflecting different models of Indigenous social organization. For the third research question, the study identifies language contact, changing social conditions, and reduced intergenerational transmission as challenges affecting the continuity of Indigenous kinship knowledge. Therefore, the study recommends community-based orthographies, participatory digital learning platforms, and policies supporting Indigenous linguistic rights to strengthen language revitalization, cultural continuity, and Indigenous communities’ capacity to adapt to social transformation.
In the original publication (Şanda and Gün 2026), the Acknowledgments section was inadvertently omitted during the publication process, and the author would like to add the following acknowledgement: [...]
Names and naming are some of the ways by which Igbo families and communities of Southeastern Nigeria construe and express ideation about their origins, kinship, intergroup relations, social and spiritual roles, and identity. The names that most Igbo families and communities bear provide information about their ancestry, historical ties, and the experiences and circumstances that define their existence as a distinct people. Among the Igbo, names are not merely a means of identification; they are perceived as carriers of history and social experiences. Igbo communities and families use names to identify the descendants (umu—children) of a particular progenitor, indicate the specific number of in-group members that share common ancestry or social bond (name + number marker), indicate the spatial location of a community, and indicate the spiritual roles of a community or family. Igbo families in particular use the names they bear to frame the social experiences and situations that surround the birth of a child (nwa), peculiar professions associated with a family, and peculiar social, economic or spiritual roles associated with some families, among other uses. Thus, based on the tenets of anthropological/cultural linguistics, this study will examine the social and cultural–cognitive factors that shape how the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria derive community and family names. While insights from anthropological linguistics provide the framework for the study of the names in the social and cultural contexts, the cognitive dimensions of this study derive from the framework of Cultural Linguistics (CL). This ensures that the cognitive aspects of the names are integrated into the analysis. Many of the existing studies on Igbo names and naming practices have centred chiefly on personal names, while only a handful have focused on community and family names among the Igbo. This study, which draws chiefly from anthropological linguistics (AL) and Cultural Linguistics (CL), aims to address this lacuna.
For over a century, the South African secular state refused to legally recognise Islamic marriages (nikah), primarily due to their potentially polygynous nature. This statutory exclusion left Muslim women without civil legal protections during marriage, upon divorce, and at the death of a spouse. This article examines the fifteen-year strategic litigation campaign led by the Women’s Legal Centre (WLCT), which culminated in the landmark 2022 Constitutional Court judgment. Utilising a qualitative analysis of public court filings, legal pleadings, and judicial decisions, the author explores how marginalised Muslim women used civil courts to bypass and challenge the exclusive authority of conservative male clerical councils (ulama). The article analyses this legal trajectory through two primary theoretical lenses: Robert Cover’s concept of jurispathy (the state’s suppression of a community’s laws) and Afro-feminist frameworks. The findings reveal a critical tension in state-led legal reform. While the 2022 judgment secured vital financial and proprietary protections for women, it simultaneously introduced the limitations of ‘state feminism’ by replacing informal religious control with a rigid state bureaucracy. The paper argues that developing an authentic decolonial family law requires a jurisprudence that enforces the material and financial rights of African Muslim women without forcing their religious unions to conform entirely to Western, secular concepts of civil marriage.
