This article examines the economic culture of urban food markets in early modern England. It focuses on London between 1590 and 1640 to argue that market regulation, even in fast-growing, commercializing cities, was underpinned by moralized values. It also assesses a largely untapped citywide book of fines, containing payments for regulatory offences. The first section outlines London's market system and regulation, the second looks at enforcement in practice and the third discusses the underlying values. This contributes to our understanding of day-to-day food marketing and proposes that studies of ‘moral economy’ should examine everyday commerce and major cities.

In the eleventh to thirteenth century, Southern African Nguni-speakers made a counterintuitive choice to begin investing in large herds of cattle. Despite a long-standing knowledge of cattle, the earliest Nguni-speakers did not take to cattle-keeping as a way of life. Rather, the transition came as the result of changing social circumstances as households sought to manage the lifecycles of young men and reliably exploit their labor through gendered and generational expectations of decorum. Nguni-speakers grounded new concepts about cattle in older practices and norms regarding the social reproduction of young men. Agropastoralists situated cattle-keeping among the obligations young men faced after passing through initiation, giving cattle local salience. The transformation unfolded in gendered and generational household choices, but was shaped by the broad context of an increasingly interconnected Southern Africa.

In August 1677, the Genevan consistory, a church court preoccupied with regulating sexual sin, summoned Louise Bouffa. Louise was a single woman recently hired by the wealthy Sarasin family as a wet nurse, an occupation that signaled to the consistory that she had recently given birth. The pastors and elders wanted to know who the father was and where the child was now. Louise was at first evasive. She claimed not to know the name of the father, although she did admit that the man with whom she had had sex was “very well dressed.” She said that she had given birth not far from Geneva, in the village of Gy, where the baby had been baptized and then had died. These claims turned out to be false. The Genevan consistory contacted the pastor in Gy who denied that her child had been baptized there. Summoned to tell the truth, Louise admitted that she had given the baby away to a man named Bertet to present as his own child for baptism, although she added that she was aware he had not done so. She also revealed that the father of the infant was a well-respected Genevan citizen and lawyer, Léonard Revillod, in whose household she had been working when she became pregnant. The consistory admonished Louise for lying about the baptism and sent her and her master to the criminal court to be prosecuted. This court, an elected body called the Small Council, duly fined Léonard for having had sex with his servant and for having “obliged her to give the baby to a stranger.” As for Louise, she was merely sent back to the consistory, which excluded her from participating in communion. No further investigation of the fate of the infant ensued.

This article utilizes Bourdieu's sociology to grasp the relations between linguistic practice and spatiality, and, through that effort, to position language as a pivotal terrain in internationalizing academe. Empirically, it explores Swedish academe and the linguistic practices of its dwellers: Swedish-speaking and non-Swedish-speaking researchers in four disciplines. Here, Swedish co-exists with English as a lingua franca and other languages. Observational and interview data show that this situation gives rise to complex linguistic practices in the workplace, consisting of speakers alternating between Swedish and English or evading other languages. Following Bourdieu, these phenomena manifest in moments when matters of space are rendered salient. They show that linguistic practice is bound up with space to the extent that their interrelationship becomes discernable only when the spatial logic that confines linguistic practices is rejigged. While linguistic practices seemingly operate on a location-based principle, they actually pertain to speakers’ linguistic habitus in relation to the linguistic market conditions in play. (Linguistic practice, space, internationalizing academe)*

This article investigates the relationship between legal personality for nature and Indigenous philosophies by comparing two cases: the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 and the 2014 Te Urewera Act of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Through these case studies the article considers the nature of Indigenous relations with the concept of rights of nature, arguing that this relation is primarily strategic, not genealogical. The article engages with the concept of legal personality and shows that it is not a direct translation of Indigenous conceptions, but rather a potential straitjacket for Indigenous emancipatory politics. The radical character of Indigenous ontologies is not fully reflected in the concept of legal personality. Furthermore, the way in which rights are granted to the natural environment is an important part of the effect that such rights might have on Indigenous communities. Despite some affinities between rights of the environment and Indigenous philosophies, overstating the connection might constrain the radical political and legal implications of Indigenous thought.

This article unlocks the complex indexicalities pertaining to names in a multilayered diasporic field, one in which descendants from different ancestral areas of a former homeland (India) have merged loosely into a new community (in South Africa). The focus falls on large-scale innovations in officially registered personal names over a period of 150 years. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative analysis of over 2,300 names shows the influence of social variables like religion, class, and subethnic affiliations via different ancestral languages. These result in different choices in retaining traditional names, modernising them, or adopting Western ones. There is also evidence of asymmetric accommodations as names flow from one subgroup to another, but not vice versa. A novel pattern in Indo-Dravidian studies is presented, that harnesses rhyme (or consonant mutation) and ablaut (or vowel mutation) to generate new names, carrying the indexicalities ‘Indian South African’, but also ‘modern’ and ‘globally oriented’. (Socio-onomastics, name changes, Indian South Africans, Indian languages, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, asymmetric accommodations)*

The COVID-19 Pandemic a stress test for clinical medicine and medical ethics, with a confluence over questions of the proportionality of resuscitation. Drawing upon his experience as a clinical ethicist during the surge in New York City during the Spring of 2020, the author considers how attitudes regarding resuscitation have evolved since the inception of do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders decades ago. Sharing a personal narrative about a DNR quandry he encountered as a medical intern, the author considers the balance of patient rights versus clinical discretion, warning about the risk of resurgent physician paternalism dressed up in the guise of a public health crisis.

Two decades ago, a personally-addressed ten-page survey printed on salmon-colored stock appeared in my campus mailbox. An accompanying letter explained that the sender was a student collecting data for a graduate-level thesis and included contact information for the thesis advisor … in marketing. It was the one and only ‘Consumer Durable Goods Study’ I would ever receive as an applied linguist.