Trends and lessons of anti-crisis legal regulationin in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic

The article attempts to structure the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the sociopolitical organization of society and legal regulation. The authors offer their own vision of the most significant changes that have occurred in various spheres of society in this specific period. The pandemic has demonstrated the diverse effects of digitalization (both highly positive in terms of social progress and sustainable development, and extremely negative). In addition, during the period of antiviral regulation, certain trends and patterns of legal regulation were spontaneously laid down; they can lead to fundamental and critical changes in the legal system. The article features the trends outlined by the pandemic and formulates proposals, allowing to take into account the extreme experience of survival in the conditions of the viral threat and to enter the post-pandemic world with minimal losses.

Late Intermediate Period Funerary Traditions, Population Aggregation, and the Ayllu in the Sihuas Valley, Peru

The Late Intermediate period in the south-central Andes is known for the widespread use of open sepulchres called chullpas by descent-based ayllus to claim rights to resources and express idealized notions of how society should be organized. Chullpas, however, were rarer on the coast, with the dead often buried individually in closed tombs. This article documents conditions under which these closed tombs were used at the site of Quilcapampa on the coastal plain of southern Peru, allowing an exploration into the ways that funerary traditions were employed to both reflect and generate community affiliation, ideals about sociopolitical organization, and land rights. After a long hiatus, the site was reoccupied and quickly expanded through local population aggregation and highland migrations. An ayllu organization that made ancestral claims to specific resources was poorly suited to these conditions, and the site's inhabitants instead seem to have organized themselves around the ruins of Quilcapampa's earlier occupation. In describing what happened in Quilcapampa, we highlight the need for a better understanding of the myriad ways that Andean peoples used mortuary customs to structure the lives of the living during a period of population movements and climate change.

Castas, raças e a política colonial na Índia

<p>Em <em>Homo hierarchicus</em> (1966), Louis Dumont apresenta o sistema das castas como uma instituição social central da Índia e o opõe ao fenômeno do racismo, que o autor relaciona a sociedades nominalmente igualitárias nas quais perduram desigualdades justificadas com base em argumentos biológicos. Buscando uma alternativa a esta análise estruturalista clássica, o artigo aponta para os contextos históricos em que as castas se tornaram importantes organizações sociopolíticas e sofreram diversas remodelações: busca-se mostrar como as disputas locais, que envolviam colonizadores, elites brâmanes, protonacionalistas e até líderes dalits, contribuíram para a consolidação e disseminação do sistema de castas em todo o subcontinente. Nos diversos discursos, tanto a casta quanto a raça foram usadas como argumento não apenas para incentivar processos de identificação ou distanciamento, mas também para justificar tratamento desigual e exclusão ou reivindicar direitos específicos.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave: </strong>casta | raça | colonialismo | Índia.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><em><strong>Abstract:</strong></em></p><p><em>In </em>Homo hierarchicus<em> (1966), Louis Dumont presents the caste system as a central social institution in India and opposes it to the phenomenon of racism, which the author relates to nominally egalitarian societies in which inequalities justified by biological arguments persist. Seeking an alternative to this classic structuralist analysis, this article points to the historical contexts in which caste became an important sociopolitical organization and underwent several remodelings: it seeks to show how local disputes involving colonizers, the Brahmin elites, proto-nationalists and even Dalit leaders contributed to the consolidation and dissemination of the caste system throughout the subcontinent. In various discourses, both caste and race were used as arguments not only to encourage processes of identification or distancing, but also to justify unequal treatment and exclusion or to claim specific rights.</em></p><p><em><em><strong>Keywords: </strong></em>caste | race | colonialism | India.</em></p>

Archaeology and Political Evolution

Humans are able to aggregate and cooperate at scales larger than almost all other animals. In contrast, however, to species such as social insects, whose communities are composed of close biological relations, humans form large groupings with individuals who are not necessarily close kin. Although from a global, long-term perspective, the size and density of human social groupings reveal a basic trend toward larger political affiliations and concentrations of people, the specific historical pathways from place to place and region to region have been neither uniform nor unilinear. Human social networks and cooperative arrangements are generally fragile, so that the course of political history is littered with failed states and institutional collapses, as well as eras of rapid growth, imperial expansions, and the foundation of dense urban centers. The temporal record of human political formations, changes in them, and ultimate breakdowns and dissolutions in cooperative arrangements occurred before the advent of written records. These include key shifts that occurred in many global regions where mobile foraging populations settled down in more-sedentary communities, a shift that frequently provoked new behaviors, challenges, and institutions. Likewise, the establishment of the earliest cities and their associated means of governance often preceded the presence of documentary accounts of how such processes occurred. For these reasons, archaeological fieldwork and interpretation now is recognized as a vital empirical basis to document, study, and compare human political evolution over time. As recently as the mid-20th century, a much-narrower vision for archaeology that scripted little potential for the study of prehistoric sociopolitical organization was followed. Sociopolitical organization was seen as nearly impossible to investigate. To study ancient social organization, archaeologists had to frame the right questions and then devise the investigatory means to address them. The current examination of preindustrial human political evolution and change reflects more than a century of iterative interplay and debate involving models of political behavior derived from history and social sciences and the collection and processing of multiscalar, global suites of evidence from archaeological research. As the empirical foundation of human political history is strengthened, and long-held unilinear models and dichotomous frames that artificially divide the West from the rest and the past from the present are transcended, we enter an exciting era in which the diverse forms and temporal pathways through which human cooperative institutions evolved must be acknowledged and used to help guide better futures.

Settler Colonialism

Colonialism is a form of sociopolitical organization in which the colonizing power not only exploits the land, labor, and natural resources of the colonized but also attempts to eradicate their cultures, histories, and independent identities. As such, it is inherently genocidal. This chapter provides an overview of classic or external colonialism, internal colonialism, and settler colonialism, developing a framework that will be applied throughout the rest of the text.

Monumental Landscapes, Changing Ideologies, and Political Histories in the Mopan Valley

In Chapter 14, Brown and Yaeger discuss the sociopolitical organization of several key sites in the Mopan Valley from the early Middle Preclassic through the end of the Late Classic period. Through an examination of monumental architecture, public art, and ritual practices, the authors describe the political development over this 1,600-year period beginning with Early Xunantunich, the first major political center beginning in the early Middle Preclassic, to the latest, Classic Xunantunich, which was abandoned in the 9th century. The centers of Actuncan and Buenavista del Cayo filled a vacuum in the valley in the intervening centuries, playing major roles on the political landscape during the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods, respectively. The authors trace how political authority and ideology became more centralized and the institutions of divine kingship developed as each center succeeded one another. It is clear from the data presented in this chapter that monumental constructions are at the forefront of our understanding of the development of the political landscape in the Mopan Valley, a landscape where ritual and religion played key roles in the rise of complexity.

Ritual Practice, Urbanization, and Sociopolitical Organization at Preclassic Ceibal, Guatemala

In Chapter 4, Melissa Burham and colleagues examine urban growth, monumentality, and local community formation during the Late Preclassic period at Ceibal, Guatemala. Rather than focusing on the monumental epicenter of the site, the authors turn to the small communities that grew around the site core, each anchored by a minor-temple complex. Though smaller than temples in the site core, these community temples nonetheless represent monumental constructions that required considerable communal effort to build and maintain over an ever-expanding area. In this way, Burham and her coauthors consider how scale informs the definition of monumentality. Chapter 4 draws together various lines of evidence, including excavation and mapping data from Harvard’s previous work at the site and newer data from the current project, to spatially define communities and examine the role of minor temples and ritual in fostering local group identities.