Tuberculosis transmission in South Africa is marked by significant disparities across gender, race, and class, with Black working-class men bearing a disproportionate burden. An eighteen-month ethnographic study in Modimolle utilizes Northern Sotho concepts of personhood to analyze the sociocultural structuring of tuberculosis infections. Findings indicate that men perform masculinity through ritualized sharing of alcohol and tobacco in male-dominated spaces. Although these practices promote comradeship and solidarity, they also increase the risk of tuberculosis transmission. Effective interventions should address the moral values underpinning masculine sociability to inform culturally relevant, gender-sensitive strategies aimed at reducing health disparities. By grounding tuberculosis risk in local understandings of masculinity, the article contributes to masculinity studies and, drawing from medical anthropology and sociology, deepens knowledge of infectious disease in global health and African studies.

How do competing political projections, economic motives, and security rationales inform infrastructural policy? How do state actors project infrastructural imaginations into the future when they perceive the present to be under duress? This article examines these questions by looking at Turkey’s infrastructural development from the late Ottoman period to the early Cold War through archival research and fieldwork. In this article, I argue that state actors can clash over the objectives, disposition, tempo, and modality of infrastructural development and opt for policy choices that may seem counterintuitive from the perspective of theories that treat infrastructure as a force multiplier of state power and identify in the state an insatiable and uniform drive for infrastructural power. These clashes are framed as contestations over infrastructural ideology and shows how state elites may consciously pace, manipulate, and even withhold infrastructural development in national territories, particularly in light of crisis perceptions and conditions. It claims that contests over infrastructural ideology arise from the recognition that infrastructure is ambivalent and can accommodate different power projections. In tracing Turkey’s infrastructural development since the Ottoman era and the gradual consolidation of centripetal preparedness as the state’s predominant infrastructural ideology, the article demonstrates how unorthodox forms of infrastructural policymaking under crisis conditions can entrench spatial fragmentations and skew the distribution of resources and life chances across national space and populations.

How and why did East Asians develop their tight-knit social relationships? In answering this question, I have developed a theoretical notion, the social cage, which is a social institution that rice-farming societies have built to discourage their members from exiting. Initially, this comparative-historical study traces back to the Song Dynasty to consider two institutionally complementary revolutions as the sources of contemporary social cages in East Asia: the emergence of the wet-rice transplanting technique and the evolution of Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism (Sung Idea). Next, by comparing the Jiangnan area of Southern China, Korea, and Japan during the premodern period, this article provides antecedent, premodern footages of contemporary rice cultivation cultures and their caging institutions. The article also suggests that the social cage institutions shaped through ecology–human interactions in the premodern era persistently affect industrialization outcomes today. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings as they pertain to contemporary social theory.

This article explores the early history of the Lakedaimonians through the lens of two archaeological sites: the recently discovered Mycenaean palace at Aghios Vasileios near Xirokambi and the Sanctuary of Apollo Amyklaios on the hilltop of Aghia Kyriaki near modern Amykles. From their first appearance in the Linear B record to late Archaic times, the Lakedaimonians were a group that underwent significant changes in size and shape. In this sense, I argue, they were not dissimilar to other Greek ethne. As the seat of the wanax of the Lakedaimonians, the palace near Xirokambi provided the initial focal point of sentiments of togetherness. Seven kilometres to the north, cult activity on the hilltop of Aghia Kyriaki at Amykles overlapped with the history of the palace for about two generations; the two sites were in conversation with one another. With the demise of the palace, Amyklai gradually absorbed the role of a Lakedaimonian memory place, instilling people with a lively sense of belonging. The rise of Sparta deeply altered the picture. Yet Amyklai retained its quality as a prime location of Lakedaimonian legacies. Discussion of the ritual script of its festivals, most notably the Hyakinthia, highlights the long-term sentiments, conditions, and beliefs as they prevailed in the local horizon. In tracing these developments, this article takes a decentred perspective on the Eurotas corridor, beyond prominent focalisation on Sparta. It accentuates the role of place before the backdrop of omnipresent spatial dynamics and diachronic change.

At the start of the seventeenth century the eastern Cuban town of Bayamo became a regional entrepôt. Merchants from France, England, Genoa, and the fledgling Dutch Republic arrived at the shores of the port of Manzanillo to trade linens, silks, and enslaved Africans for hides from the Cuban interior. The governor of Cuba, Pedro de Valdés, sought to stop this unlicensed trade and sent his lieutenant governor to Bayamo to investigate. His investigation found that Bayamo was a microcosm of the Caribbean itself, with people from all nations congregating on the shores of the Cauto River, where they formed both mercantile and social bonds in defiance of Spain’s trade monopoly. The lieutenant governor’s efforts to end contraband trade provoked a rebellion in Bayamo and a raid in the nearby city of Santiago de Cuba, where English raiders attempted to capture the investigator. The townsfolk appealed to the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo and reaffirmed their loyalty to the Spanish empire, while simultaneously playing overlapping jurisdictions against each other. This article demonstrates the complex relationships between local Spanish colonists, foreign merchants, and the regional colonial institutions that impacted the way local actors navigated commercial and legal channels.

This study uncovers hidden disputes in China’s law-making process by systematically tracking bill changes across executive and legislative phases. Utilizing an original dataset of 45 executive-initiated bills (2008–2023), it identifies a consistent pattern of reversions – instances where executive-approved changes to draft bills were overridden in the legislature – revealing the National People’s Congress to be a key policy battleground. Reversions are concentrated in bills concerning health, safety and environment, often involving scope, regulatory frameworks and legal liability. Combined with qualitative case studies, these findings demonstrate the legislature’s crucial role in facilitating monitoring and negotiation in the policy process, offering new insights into executive–legislative dynamics in China’s single-party regime.

In the early 1970s, emerging photographer Matsumoto Michiko (1950–) turned her camera towards Ūman Ribu (Women’s Liberation Movement). Published in both the mainstream press and the self-produced materials of various Ribu collectives, Matsumoto’s work provided a striking visual account of the movement’s activities and of the matters on which the radical feminists insisted. Women’s self-determination, control over their bodies, the deconstruction of social and familial structures: all these elements can be traced in Matsumoto’s visual narratives, which became instrumental for Ribu to reappropriate their own representations from the negative views offered by the mass media.

Focusing on the strategy game The Opium War (1997), developed in mainland China, this article argues that, while designed as a patriotic product about the Opium War, the game moves beyond simple propaganda. Through its rule-based systems, it constructs a nuanced historical argument that operationalizes the tension within the Marxist concept of historical inevitability and contingency. The inevitability of the Qing Empire’s structural weakness is conveyed through a high degree of difficulty and the mechanics of systemic corruption, while contingency is enabled by allowing skilled players to achieve a counterfactual victory, subverting the orthodox narrative of the Qing’s inevitable defeat in the war. This subversive design was politically tenable because it operated within the accepted framework of Marxist historiography. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that video games can generate more complex historical experiences than traditional media. By analyzing this non-Western case, the article calls for a more globally conscious approach to game studies, and it recognizes games as significant sites of historical debate within politically sensitive contexts. It addresses a dual gap: the Western-centric bias in historical game studies and a lack of inquiry into the extent to which video games can engage with Chinese history.