Womens Role in Colonial Latin America Politics Essays

Womens Role in Colonial Latin America Politics Essays Womens Role in Colonial Latin America Politics Paper Womens Role in Colonial Latin America Politics Paper In many culture of the world, women have always been treated as second-class citizens inferior to men. Women were limited in their access to the occupational field and their roles are constricted mainly in the domestic field as to raise children and home-making. This idea has rooted since the beginning human civilization and has further undermined the roles of women in society throughout humans history. As Lavrin (1995:1) put it, â€Å"assumption that the restrictions imposed on the female sex by law and custom were needed to maintain the integrity of family and society†. In some society, this discrimination is often enforced under the guise of religion. In the Islamic world, religious restrictions on the activities of women of reproductive age tend to keep them near home, where they often engage in domestic food gardening and especially in food processing (Nye 1993:13) The Culture of Honor In order to have comprehensive view of the gender issue in the time of the colonial Latin America, we will examine how the honor was defined and defended In the case of Latin America, the patriarchal system of the society has formulated the culture of honor which dictates the administration of the society and its individual lives. Although this set of value concerning the culture of honor apply to both men and women, in practice, they are often used as a means to further diminish the status and roles of women which in turn aimed at maintaining the status quo of the male dominance. Nye (1993:13) argues that these claims of honor often were necessarily an attempt to place others in a position of inferiority. This system was usually manifested in legal codes, social gatherings, seating arrangements at public events The culture of honor in the time of the Colonial Latin America is believed to have rooted from the cultural concept which was based on the Iberian legal and customary practices. These system suggest that adultery and the initiation of a sexual relationship or remarriage within a year after a husbands death as dishonorable (Johnson 1998:4) Furthermore, there is this issue of biological differences that kind of legitimizing the gender discrimination issue. This aspect has been used to influence the cultural norms in a patriarchal world in relation to the idea of honor. In this case, women are always in losing end since they cannot deny their physical nature. Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera (1998:82) argue that this biological difference is the main factor which established parameters for sexuality and procreation and influenced cultural norms that defined the presence or absence of honor. According to them, there were several logical explanation which accounts for this: First, unlike females, males could never physically demonstrate proof of their virginity at the time of first intercourse, so male sexual abstinence was never an issue of honor. Secondly, since males never become pregnant, they never had any potential to manifest overt signs of their sexual activity in public, and so the ensuing consequences of intercourse never directly threatened their personal honor. Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera (1998:82) further contrasted female honor which could rest on tangible proofs of virginity, and women physically showed that they had been sexually active when they became pregnant or gave birth. Women who consented to intercourse risked their personal honor in ways that men could not.

The History of the Common Bean

The History of the Common Bean The domestication history of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is vital to understanding the origins of farming.  Beans are one of the three sisters of traditional agricultural cropping methods reported by European colonists in North America: Native Americans wisely intercropped maize, squash, and beans, providing a healthful and environmentally sound way of capitalizing on their various characteristics.   Beans are one of the most important domestic legumes in the world, because of their high concentrations of protein, fiber, and complex carbohydrates. P. vulgaris is by far the most economically important domesticated species of the genus Phaseolus. Domesticate Properties P. vulgaris beans come in an enormous variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, from pinto to pink to black to white. Despite this diversity, wild and domestic beans belong to the same species, as do all of the colorful varieties (landraces) of beans, which are believed to be the result of a mixture of population bottlenecks and purposeful selection. The main difference between wild and cultivated beans is, well, domestic beans are less exciting. There is a significant increase in seed weight, and the seed pods are less likely to shatter than wild forms: but the primary change is a decrease in the  variability of grain size, seed coat thickness and water intake during cooking. Domestic plants are also annuals rather than perennials, a selected trait for reliability. Despite their colorful variety, the domestic bean is much more predictable. Centers Of Domestication Scholarly research indicates that beans were domesticated in two places: the Andes mountains of Peru, and the Lerma-Santiago basin of Mexico. The wild common bean grows today in the Andes and Guatemala: two separate large gene pools of the wild types have been identified, based on the variation in the type of phaseolin (seed protein) in the seed, DNA marker diversity, mitochondrial DNA variation and amplified fragment length polymorphism, and short sequence repeats marker data. The Middle American gene pool extends from Mexico through Central America and into Venezuela; the Andean gene pool is found from southern Peru to northwestern Argentina. The two gene pools diverged some 11,000 years ago. In general, Mesoamerican seeds are small (under 25 grams per 100 seeds) or medium (25-40 gm/100 seeds), with one type of phaseolin, the major seed storage protein of the common bean. The Andean form has much larger seeds (greater than 40 gm/100 seed weight), with a different type phaseolin. Recognized landraces in Mesoamerica include Jalisco in coastal Mexico near Jalisco state; Durango in the central Mexican highlands, which includes pinto, great northern, small red and pink beans; and Mesoamerican, in lowland tropical Central American, which includes black, navy and small white. Andean cultivars include Peruvian, in the Andean highlands of Peru; Chilean in northern Chile and Argentina; and Nueva Granada in Colombia. Andean beans include the commercial forms of dark and light red kidney, white kidney, and cranberry beans. Origins in Mesoamerica In 2012, work by a group of geneticists led by Roberto Papa was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Bitocchi et al. 2012), making an argument for a Mesoamerican origin of all beans. Papa and colleagues examined the nucleotide diversity for five different genes found in all forms- wild and domesticated, and including examples from the Andes, Mesoamerica and an intermediary location between Peru and Ecuador- and looked at the geographic distribution of the genes. This study suggests that the wild form spread from Mesoamerica, into Ecuador and Columbia and then into the Andes, where a severe bottleneck reduced the gene diversity, at some time before domestication. Domestication later took place in the Andes and in Mesoamerica, independently. The importance of the original location of beans is due to the wild adaptability of the original plant, which allowed it to move into a wide variety of climatic regimes, from the lowland tropics of Mesoamerica into the Andean highlands. Dating the Domestication While the exact date of domestication for beans has not yet been determined, wild landraces have been discovered in archaeological sites dated to 10,000 years ago in Argentina and 7,000 years ago in Mexico. In Mesoamerica, the earliest cultivation of domestic common beans occurred before ~2500 in the Tehuacan valley (at Coxcatlan), 1300 BP in Tamaulipas (at (Romeros and Valenzuelas Caves near Ocampo), 2100 BP in the Oaxaca valley (at Guila Naquitz). Starch grains from Phaseolus were recovered from human teeth from Las Pircas phase sites in Andean Peru dated between ~6970-8210 RCYBP (about 7800-9600 calendar years before the present). Sources Angioi, SA. Beans in Europe: origin and structure of the European landraces of Phaseolus vulgaris L. Rau D, Attene G, et al., National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, September 2010. Bitocchi E, Nanni L, Bellucci E, Rossi M, Giardini A, Spagnoletti Zeuli P, Logozzo G, Stougaard J, McClean P, Attene G et al. 2012. Mesoamerican origin of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is revealed by sequence data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. Brown CH, Clement CR, Epps P, Luedeling E, and Wichmann S. 2014. The Paleobiolinguistics of the Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). Ethnobiology Letters 5(12):104-115. Kwak, M. Structure of genetic diversity in the two major gene pools of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L., Fabaceae). Gepts P, National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, March 2009. Kwak M, Kami JA, and Gepts P. 2009. The Putative Mesoamerican Domestication Center is Located in the Lerma-Santiago Basin of Mexico. Crop Science 49(2):554-563. Mamidi S, Rossi M, Annam D, Moghaddam S, Lee R, Papa R, and McClean P. 2011. Investigation of the domestication of common bean ( Functional Plant Biology 38(12):953-967.Phaseolus vulgaris) using multilocus sequence data. Mensack M, Fitzgerald V, Ryan E, Lewis M, Thompson H, and Brick M. 2010. Evaluation of diversity among common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) from two centers of domestication using omics technologies. BMC Genomics 11(1):686. Nanni, L. Nucleotide diversity of a genomic sequence similar to SHATTERPROOF (PvSHP1) in domesticated and wild common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). Bitocchi E, Bellucci E, et al., National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, December 2011, Bethesda, MD. Peà ±a-Valdivia CB, Garcà ­a-Nava JR, Aguirre R JR, Ybarra-Moncada MC, and Là ³pez H M. 2011. Variation in Physical and Chemical Characteristics of Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) Grain along a Domestication Gradient. Chemistry Biodiversity 8(12):2211-2225. Piperno DR, and Dillehay TD. 2008. Starch grains on human teeth reveal early broad crop diet in northern Peru. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(50):19622-19627. Scarry, C. Margaret. Crop Husbandry Practices in North America’s Eastern Woodlands. Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology, SpringerLink, 2008. J, Schmutz. A reference genome for common bean and genome-wide analysis of dual domestications. McClean PE2, Mamidi S, National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, July 2014, Bethesda, MD. Tuberosa (Editor). Genomics of Plant Genetic Resources. Roberto, Graner, et al., Volume 1, SpringerLink, 2014.