Interest in household food insecurity (FI) within scientific and policy groups has motivated efforts to develop methods for measuring it. Questionnaires asking about FI experiences have been shown to be valid in the contexts in which they were created. The issue has arisen as to whether such questionnaires need be developed from the ground up or if a generic questionnaire can be adapted to a particular context. This study aimed to gain an in-depth understanding of household FI in urban Costa Rica, develop and validate a questionnaire for its measurement, and inform the choice between the 2 methods of development. The study was conducting using qualitative and quantitative methods provided in the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) guidelines. In-depth interviews were conducted with 49 low-middle-income urban women using a semistructured interview guide. A 14-item FI questionnaire was developed based on results from these interviews. A field study was conducted in 213 households. The results show that the developed questionnaire provides valid measurement of household FI in urban Costa Rica and is simple and quick to apply in the household setting. FANTA developed a guide during the period that this research was completed that provides a generic questionnaire that can be adapted for use in various countries, rather than building the questionnaire from the ground up. This study provides evidence that careful attention to the procedures in this guide will likely yield a questionnaire suitable for assessing household FI in middle-income countries.
The concept of hybridism has its origins in the natural sciences and was important in nineteenthcentury debates about race. Nowadays it is especially relevant to various disciplines of the social sciences in connection with issues such as globalization, transnational dynamics, postcolonial diasporas and multiculturalism. 'Hybridism' has been recently introduced into archaeological literature, only to risk becoming an overly simple explanation of changes in material culture if deprived of its theoretical background. If material culture is hybrid by definition, what are the advantages of using the word 'hybrid' to describe it? In this paper I test the value of hybridism as a useful concept in approaching local reinterpretations of exogenous objects and the influence of Roman colonialism in local contexts, using as a case study Late Iron Age sculptures (third to first centuries BC) from the south and the east of the Iberian Peninsula. KeywordsHybridism; colonization; postcolonialism; cultural difference; 'third space'; Late Iron Age sculpture. Hybrid origins: race and cultureThe English word 'hybrid' comes from the Latin hybrida, used in antiquity to refer not only to a half-bred or crossbred animal, but also to the descendants of human progenitors, specifically the offspring of Romans and slaves or Romans and foreigners (OLD 1982). This notion was also used in the modern age in relation to the progeny of a dissimilar, heterogeneous or unlike couple. It later became an important concept in nineteenthcentury debates on race, although the grounds of some of the arguments in the dispute can be already found in the eighteenth century, when different varieties of human beings were included in the animal kingdom as part of the hierarchical scale of the Great Chain of Being (Young 1995: 6). The idea of humans belonging to a different species, which allowed the placing in this classification of the African next to the ape at the bottom of the human family, clashed, however, with the biblical account of a single origin shared by the human race. Eighteenth-century naturalists generally accepted the test for distinguishing species developed by the Comte de Buffon in France and John Hunter in Britain: while animals of the same species were considered to be able to reproduce their kind for ever, the product of two different species, the hybrid, was deemed infertile or bound to perish over the course of time. Clear examples of this case were the mule and the hinny, female-male and malefemale crosses of horse and ass respectively. Faced with the impossibility of negating the fertility of the mixed-race population in the colonies, some authors, including Long in his History of Jamaica, compared mulattos to mules and stated that their fertility tended to decline over generations (Long 1774: 335, quoted in Young 1995. Even though Enlightenment views sustaining universality as well as humanitarian and egalitarian ideas prevailed in the debate that opposed the theories of monogenesis (one original species) and polygenesis (man...
A set of OER electrodes based on Co(OH)2 nanoparticles and carbon microfibers of tailored composition is reported, which allows extracting valuable insights on the influence of the metal-support interface in their electrocatalytic performance.
Iberia was one of the first overseas territories to fall under Roman control when the provinces of Hispania Citerior and Ulterior were established in 197 B.C., preceded only by Sicilia (241) and Sardinia et Corsica (227).1 Renieblas and the sites surrounding Numantia are among the first camps of Rome‘s earliest overseas expansion to be confidently identified archaeologically. They are central in analyses of the Republican army and Roman siegeworks,2 the conquest of Hispania,3 and the effects of the war on local communities.4
The Roman Empire is as valid a case study for comparative analyses of imperialism and colonialism as any other. Thus, the proposal of Fernández-Götz et al. (2020: 1630-1639) to use the notion of 'predatory regimes'-developed by Achille Mbembe (2001) and adapted to archaeology by González-Ruibal (2011, 2015: 425) to understand the "darkest sides of [Roman] imperialism"-seems relevant. I wonder, however, whether classical archaeologists will be willing to engage in a meaningful debate about ancient Rome as a 'predatory regime'. Despite the publication of influential post-colonial analyses of Roman expansionism some 20 years ago (Webster 1996; Mattingly 1997; van Dommelen 1998), and critical studies on the use of Rome as a conceptual model for nineteenth-and twentieth-century European colonisation (Hingley 2001), the expressions 'Roman imperialism' and 'colonialism' appear in the work of a minority of authors. Many scholars remain wary about using these concepts to understand the incorporation of new territories in pre-modern societies. Consequently, Rome is rarely equated to the more recent and supposedly 'sophisticated' forms of brutal conquest and submission of the European powers from the fifteenth century onwards, even if the terms 'Roman Empire' and 'Roman colonisation' are often used. Ironically, the words colonia and imperium have Roman origins. They were used not only to articulate the Romans' own written accounts of conquest, but also formed the basis of a complex classificatory framework of lands, settlements and peoples at the core of a new system of domination and its representation through maps, triumphal monuments, sculptural reliefs and coinage. Although studies on the concepts of colonia and imperium and their historical evolution are numerous (see Richardson 2008; Lavan 2013), more research is needed to illuminate the material dimension of Roman colonialism, which, of course, must be analysed in its historical context (see Sweetman 2011). The obvious place to start looking, as suggested by Fernández-Götz et al. (2020), are sites that allow us to trace episodes of violence. These include Roman camps, battlefields, siegeworks and mass burials. But what were the consequences of imperialism beyond the instances of more archaeologically visible overt violence? What were the effects of the symbolic and systemic violence that generated those outbursts, and that sustained the 'normal' peaceful order of things (Žižek 2008)? How do archaeological remains help us to understand the ramifications of a new "system structured by systematic differences, differences that both sustained and were the product of Roman power" (Woolf 1998: 242), in which Rome was placedboth metaphorically and literally-at the centre, while the provinces were moulded as her peripheries? What makes the material culture of the provinces provincial, and how can
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