The emergence of writing has often been scrutinized through the lens of linguistic notation, while the visual and metaphorical strategies employed in invented scripts are typically sidelined. Being predominantly iconic, ancient, invented scripts offer substantial potential for visual metaphor, a strategy that can operate independently of linguistic coding. Metaphors can operate in multimodal ways, as shown by conceptual metaphor theory, and they play a crucial role in shaping human thought, beyond a language-dominated realm. Here we argue that visual metaphor is also deployed extensively in the invention of writing. We offer a novel comparative outline of the dynamics in script metaphor in the earliest invented scripts: Mesopotamian proto-cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the Chinese oracle bone inscriptions. These scripts rely on specific types of visual metaphor, especially based on metonymy, to convey information. Skirting the traditional view of writing as a primarily language-based phenomenon, we instead focus on the broader visual cognitive mechanisms that influence script evolution. The integration of visual metaphor in script formation is a dynamic process, shaped by selective, yet sometimes cross-culturally convergent, visual strategies that draw on cognitive salient features and categorization strategies.
Time, especially the modern clock, was elemental in setting social relationships in modernity, in particular as regards the rationales and praxis of wage labor. However, this central framework of time has fallen from grace in the neoliberal workplace. Based on ethnography in the high-tech centers of Tel Aviv and Toronto, this article asks what temporal understandings are used to coordinate, in light of the rejection of modernist standardized time in favor of neoliberal ideologies of individual freedom and responsibility. Building on Evans-Pritchard's foundational work on Nuer time, I argue that new temporalities of labor tend to be organized around shared tasks and offer that a new clock is being used in the contemporary workplace that sets task parameters, not hours or minutes, as the basic units of time. This new logic transforms time from a prime source of alienation into a mechanism to harness individual will in the workplace. Therefore, it has significant consequences for the ways in which work relationships are shaped in the tech industry and beyond.
Black studies critical theorizations have much to offer the field of archaeology both in theory and in practice. For Saidiya Hartman, redress entails confronting formations of epistemic violence that undergird the archival record; it is a praxis that is always incomplete. This article maps Hartman's theory of redress onto the practice of community archaeology to explore the opportunities and challenges that arise when archaeologists center youth engagement, capacity building, and cultural and natural heritage stewardship. Using the Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project as a case study, we explore one way archaeologists attempt to offer restitution to the issues their work reveals (i.e., legacies of environmental racism, truncated avenues of economic sustainability, racialized disenfranchisement) through an "archaeology of redress."
This article inquires how specific bodily movements, such as kneeling, crawling, bowing, and other forms of approach-oriented, low-posture locomotion, produce religious experiences and spatial public manifestations of the sacred. To address this question, I present and theorize kinetic rituals: the directional and counted sequences of embodied movement elicited by site-specific architectural conditions. The analysis focuses on microchoreographies generated through scripted pilgrimages and devotional approaches to sacred centers. My formulation departs from Mauss's "techniques of the body" (learned motor schemes), Bourdieu's habitus (durable dispositions), Csordas's embodiment (the body as existential ground or modality of attention), and Coleman's accounts of pilgrimage mobility (circulation across networks). Instead, in what I term "kinetic rituals," I make an analytic distinction between potentiality (i.e., the socially and materially charged capacities to move) and the kinetic emplacement (i.e., their actualization in mimetic, repetitive, directional motion that reactualizes sacred times in public centers). On the basis of a multisite ethnography at Catholic shrines, I show how architectural fittings and surfaces (carpeted knee paths, enumerations of steps, low portals, narrow stairs) render kinetics empirically legible and ritually efficacious. I describe how repetitive locomotion generates devotional attention, temporal blending, and spatial claims that link the sacred and profane registers in public spaces while simultaneously having political consequences, including the inscription of territorial claims. By identifying the kinetic ritual as a distinct mechanism, this article extends embodiment and mobility approaches and puts forward a movement-centered framework for analyzing how built form and disciplined motion together make the sacred experientially present in already secularized spaces.
Long neglected and marginalized by the state, inhabitants of Turkey's southeast region, particularly its Kurdish communities, look not to the official courts but to renowned local figures, religious leaders, and civil organizations to resolve disputes. This paper explores three types of alternative judicial bodies (AJBs): (1) traditional Heq & icirc; AJBs, which prioritize religion and patriarchy in their decision-making; (2) self-identified progressive AJBs run by local civil society organizations; and (3) newly emerging AJBs aligned with state institutions, reflecting the state's new frontiers in the region. Although these judicial bodies, shaped by diverse adjudicative tendencies and deeply embedded in the region's religious, political, and social fabric, differ in their impact in terms of whom and what they include or exclude, they collectively provide alternative pathways for dispute resolution. This paper examines the role of AJBs in resolving disputes in the Kurdish southeast, focusing on gender, religious discourses, the involvement of feminist activists and organizations, and the positionality of these bodies within regional politics and sovereignty formation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mardin, it examines interactions between Kurdish AJBs and women's agency and mobility, while situating AJBs within broader debates on legal pluralism and gender justice in feminist legal scholarship.
