This study reconstructs Late Holocene vegetation and Indian summer monsoon (ISM) variability over the past ∼2700 years from the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, located in central India’s Core Monsoon Zone (CMZ). High-resolution pollen data reveal five distinct vegetational phases, with the period between ∼2700 and 2300 cal yr BP characterized by a dense moist deciduous forest dominated by Shorea robusta, indicating strong monsoonal activity. The interval between ∼2300 and 1600 cal yr BP shows four distinct sub-phases: a warm and humid episode (∼2300–2200 cal yr BP), a pronounced dry spell (∼2200–2030 cal yr BP), an ameliorating phase (∼2030–1680 cal yr BP), and renewed monsoon intensification (∼1680–1600 cal yr BP). A moderately strong and stable ISM persisted until ∼820 cal yr BP, followed by a dry, open vegetation regime (∼820–400 cal yr BP) coinciding with increased anthropogenic indicators. Since ∼400 cal yr BP, the resurgence of moist deciduous taxa reflects climatic recovery and forest regeneration. Pollen-based climate reconstructions provide valuable insights into long-term monsoon–vegetation interactions in tropical India.

This article seeks to develop a critical theory of political resentment that can account for the role of toxic sentiments of hatred and spite in contemporary processes of democratic backsliding by analyzing the Brazilian case. After reviewing debates about the concept of political resentment in modern and contemporary social theory, the article advances the concept of toxic resentment and outlines its three main constitutive elements. The article then presents the foundations for a critical theory of toxic resentment that focuses on two contextual factors: economic transformation or decline and actual or perceived status losses. The final sections discuss how such a theory can advance our understanding of the recent rise of conservative movements and the resulting crises of democratic politics. By highlighting the intersections between gender hierarchies, economic transformation, and support for the far right in Brazil and elsewhere, the conclusions define toxic resentment as a type of social and political bond that agglutinates different types of anxieties and hostile responses.

This article examines the historical process from environmental to climate activism in Chile, showing how it has occupied an intermediate and dynamic position that connects the local and the global, often ahead of national policies. Through an ethnographic approach and a genealogical and historical methodology (reviewing primary newspaper sources and administrative records), complemented by nine in-depth interviews, this research analyses the trajectories, organisations and knowledge of activists in relation to national institutions and international governance. The study highlights processes of professionalisation, diversification of strategies and the creation of transnational networks, consolidating activism as a key actor in climate governance, although constrained by limited resources and the restrictions of the neoliberal model.

Why did Chile’s think tank sector become more concentrated even as supply and demand for expert opinion expanded? This article examines nine organizations between 2011 and 2022, tracking 18,948 public interventions and conducting sixty-six interviews with think tank members and stakeholders to understand this apparent paradox. While political crises, from student movements to the 2019 social “outbreak” offered opportunities for new voices to emerge, established think tanks systematically consolidated their advantages. This article develops the concept of intellectual infrastructure—the material, institutional, technological, and network conditions enabling expert interventions—to explain how advantages in funding and media access become self-reinforcing. In a middle-income country where international funding dried up without the emergence of domestic philanthropy, organizations with larger, more flexibly allocated resources could effectively crowd out competitors. This challenges assumptions about expertise democratization, revealing how intellectual authority becomes concentrated even during periods of apparent openness.

This article examines the role of physicians in reinforcing structures of violence in the slaveholding society of nineteenth-century São Luís, Maranhão. Focusing on two cases, it shows how medical professionals collaborated with elite slaveholders, particularly Ana Rosa Viana Ribeiro and Carlos Fernando Ribeiro, in concealing the abuse, torture, and deaths of enslaved individuals. The study analyzes both the denial of medical care to the enslaved woman Carolina by Dr. Paulo Saulnier de Pierrelevée and the fabrication of forensic evidence by Dr. Antonio dos Santos Jacintho to cover up the murder of the enslaved boy Inocêncio. In Brazil, where medical institutions developed within the broader framework of slavery, such complicity was neither exceptional nor incidental. Rather than merely exposing tensions between scientific authority and the brutality of slavery, these cases reveal how medical legitimacy was used to justify violence and reinforce the impunity of the slaveholding class. Drawing on newspapers, police reports, court records, and forensic documents, the article demonstrates the complicity of medical discourse in sustaining enslavement and legitimizing its power.

This article examines the evolution of COVID-19 vaccination efforts during 2021 and 2022 in six Central American countries, each with distinct social policy legacies and political regimes. Drawing on official data sources, the article differentiates two phases: the initial rollout of vaccines and the subsequent expansion of second-dose coverage to secure immunity. We advance three main arguments. First, differences in performance can be partly explained by the state capacities needed to implement vaccination campaigns. Second, regime type does not explain success; Nicaragua matched the performance of the most effective democratic countries. Third, presidential will accounts for the divergent trajectories of autocratic regimes. These findings underscore that in times of crisis, effective social intervention is possible without democratic pressures and accountability and highlight the need to further examine variation within nondemocratic regimes.

La historia contemporánea de la solidaridad internacionalista está compuesta por miles de trayectorias anónimas que estuvieron inmersas en las grandes trasformaciones globales del pasado siglo. La multiplicidad de sujetos, silencios y barreras socioculturales sostenidas a lo largo del tiempo ha dificultado el acercamiento interdisciplinar desde la historia oral al estudio de una realidad particularmente influyente en territorios como Cuba. El análisis histórico de cuarenta testimonios inéditos relacionados con la proyección externa del proceso revolucionario introduce nociones desconocidas en torno al impacto de un fenómeno que ha marcado a sucesivas generaciones de cubanos desde la década de los sesenta hasta la más inmediata actualidad. Las diversas perspectivas recogidas sobre las raíces, dimensiones y legados de la solidaridad internacionalista revelan un heterogéneo mosaico de experiencias subjetivas que trascienden las narrativas institucionales producidas alrededor de un horizonte todavía presente en los desafíos actuales de la sociedad cubana contemporánea.

Las condiciones de inseguridad que enfrentan las y los trabajadores de la educación en México para desarrollar su quehacer en contextos de violencia criminal y alta densidad de actividades delictivas constituyen desafíos contemporáneos que repercuten en las prácticas cotidianas de las escuelas. En la actualidad, ahondar en esta dimensión del trabajo docente desde una perspectiva antropológica y un enfoque etnográfico, muestra qué ocurre con las trayectorias del magisterio y sus subjetividades para lidiar con estas problemáticas cada vez más recurrentes en territorios de expansión del narcotráfico. Al mismo tiempo, nos permite encontrar pistas conceptuales para comprender desde el ámbito de la docencia las violencias originadas por la disputa entre grupos armados que buscan monopolizar las economías ilegales en los márgenes del Estado. El interés del artículo radica en describir el despliegue de un repertorio de violencias en entornos escolares de Michoacán donde ejercen su labor los educadores, así como las limitaciones de la política educativa para atender las problemáticas locales.

Este artículo analiza la presencia del arsénico en la vida cotidiana y en los imaginarios científicos, literarios y culturales de la América Latina finisecular. A partir de materiales provenientes de Argentina, México y Venezuela, se examina la ambivalencia de una sustancia que circuló libremente como cosmético, medicamento, insecticida y veneno doméstico. La ubicuidad del arsénico —facilitada por la débil regulación sanitaria y por su disponibilidad en comercios comunes— permitió que se integrara simultáneamente en prácticas de blanqueamiento, dispositivos de ortopedia corporal y crímenes pasionales difíciles de demostrar para la naciente toxicología. El artículo propone que el arsénico operó como un dispositivo que disciplinaba cuerpos considerados “impuros” (según categorías de género, raza y clase) y, a la vez, alimentaba relatos melodramáticos y policiales sobre el suicidio y el envenenamiento. El artículo muestra cómo esta flexibilidad —remedio y veneno, cura y daño, belleza e intoxicación— otorgó al arsénico un papel central en la construcción moral, estética y científica del fin de siglo, en el que la frontera entre medicina, cosmética y delito se volvió particularmente porosa.

This article introduces the Database on South America’s Transnational Human Rights Violations. We describe this dataset, which provides rich descriptive statistics on 805 victims of transnational repression between 1969 and 1981. We show how it complements the existing literature on transnational repression by focusing on a historical instance of collaboration among South America’s dictatorships that jointly silenced hundreds of dissidents living in exile abroad during their reigns of terror. This new data generates novel conclusions that help better understand the complex dynamics of transnational repression and Operation Condor in the region while also providing useful insights for contemporary instances of transnational repression. The most original empirical takeaways from our dataset include the following: (1) Uruguayans are the largest victim group by nationality; (2) political activists constitute the majority of the victims by affiliation; and (3) clandestine renditions of the victims occurred in a quarter of the recorded cases.

En este artículo me propongo abordar Advertencias de uso para una máquina de coser (2017), de Eugenia Prado Bassi; y El clan Braniff (2018), de Matías Celedón, como textos chilenos contemporáneos que utilizan la noción de archivo para crear ficciones documentales. La materialidad de la escritura es el resultado de operaciones que involucran máquinas (fotográfica, fotocopiadora, de coser) y la técnica de montaje o collage, cuyo uso convierte al libro en un dispositivo visual que —como en las vanguardias históricas— rompe con la linealidad de la escritura y al mismo tiempo la vinculan con un referente exterior a ella misma, generando tensiones, negociaciones y ambigüedades en torno a la noción de indexicalidad y de virtualidad.