This article focuses on how Peruvian elites mobilized representations of masculinities as part of discourses on national progress and as essential elements in their assertions of hierarchy. By addressing intellectual elites’ discourses in two cultural magazines, El Perú Ilustrado and Variedades, and various literary works during the 1884–1912 period, the article presents three arguments. First, elites’ diagnosis of the country’s backwardness emphasized Peruvian men’s deficient masculinity, which included the elites’ own white creole masculinity. Thus, intellectual elites placed great importance on catching up with European “masculine” traits as pathways to progress and modernization. Second, discourses on masculinity were central elements by which elites asserted their legitimacy. Elites mobilized discourses on masculinity selectively—either as self-restraint or as physical prowess—to reinforce their hierarchical status vis-à-vis subaltern men. Third, intergenerational conflicts between the elites’ younger and older cohorts also transpired in terms of masculinity. Each generation depicted the other as embodying abject effeminacy. As a whole, by incorporating the analytical lens of masculinity, the article provides new insights into the construction of elites’ identities and of long-standing hierarchies in Latin America.

I compare Christopher Lasch's thought to specific features that research in political science attributes to contemporary populism. Lasch openly favoured a historical form of populism but is rarely considered when current forms of populism are discussed. The research literature characterizes populism as superficially tied to democracy while undermining it, as committed to the moral binary of people and elites, and as intellectually “thin” because it does not engage with the complex theories that ground other ideologies. These characters make populism incoherent and inimical to democracy. Lasch manifests all three characters while connecting them to a sustained worldview. Humans’ awareness of death is the core feature that makes them rational, ethical and equal. Attempts to dilute that awareness are inimical to the equality at democracy's basis. Experts and professionals encourage this dilution by promising remedies and progress. Democracy depends on ordinary people who resist elites and their complex phraseologies.

The metal-mining boom Latin America experienced in recent decades precipitated highly contentious anti-mining social movements in Central America. In this context, El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban all metal mining by law. In contrast, policy in nearby Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua remained pro-mining. These cases are compared using a most similar systems design. Comparison reveals the importance of three variables: how national economic-elite networks and interests relate to multinational corporations; national movement coordination and goals, specifically in relation to prohibition; and how parties and leaders relied on popular bases or capital. These factors shaped the contention between elites and movements that influenced state actions around mining and led to this ‘least likely case’ of extractive policy change in El Salvador.

This article offers a new perspective on a diverse corpus of high-status Western Slavic objects from the domain of the Piast dynasty in Poland, dated between the tenth and eleventh centuries ad. It is proposed that the lavish zoomorphic decorations, often depicting snakes, found on jewellery, weapons, and equestrian equipment reflected Western Slavic pre-Christian religious ideas and served as material markers of elite identity. The results of this study lead to a more nuanced understanding of Western Slavic worldviews and their material expressions, paving the way for new investigations into cultural interactions both within and beyond the Slavic homelands.

The Low Countries' Early Iron Age is marked by the emergence of lavish burials known as chieftains’ graves or princely burials. These extraordinary elite burials of the Hallstatt C/D period contain weaponry, bronze vessels as well as decorated wagons and horse-gear imported from the Hallstatt culture of Central Europe, where the same objects are found in the famous Fürstengräber. While the connection between these regions has long been recognized, the nature of this contact remains poorly understood. Here we present the preliminary results of an on-going re-examination of elite funerary practices in both regions and the likely direct long-distance interactions reflected in them. Similarities and differences in the treatment of objects and the dead in funerary rituals indicate that, to a certain extent at least, these geographically separated social groups were integrated in a specific elite burial practice, indicating frequent contact across hundreds of kilometres.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted among parents living in the affluent neighbourhoods of Ipanema, Brazil, and El Condado, Puerto Rico, I examine how urban Latin American elites deployed their parenting practices as moral justification for their racial and class privilege (what I call ‘sovereign parenting’). One way in which they do this is by producing particular forms of affective relationships with their nannies. The women these upper-class parents hired were largely dark-skinned immigrants: from the Dominican Republic, to work in El Condado, and from the Brazilian Northeast, to work in Ipanema. I demonstrate how elites cultivated a form of ‘informality’ and expressions of care in relation to childcare workers in ways that not only produced whiteness as a pillar of Latin American liberalism, but also associated whiteness with the world of interiority and personal growth.