Queensland Aborigines,Multiple Realities and the Social Sources of Suffering: Psychiatry and Moral Regions of Being: Part 1

ABSTRACT This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico‐religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal ‘other’ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio‐political realities. I conclude that the residents' narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream ‘commonsense’ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.     

Breaking into the conversation: cultural value and the role of the South African National Arts Festival from apartheid to democracy

The paper examines the value of the South African National Arts Festival (NAF) in the transition to democracy using theories of cultural capital. NAF history from 1974 to 2004 is used to argue that the Festival provided an important arena for the expression of political resistance in the 1980s and, to some degree, continues to do so today. It is concluded that an important part of the value of the arts is their ability to provide a forum for debating the goals and values of society and that individualistic utility theory is not always successful in measuring such social value.     

The Politics of Development Metrics and Measurement: Impact Evaluations in Fairtrade‐certified Plantation Agriculture

This article presents an analysis of impact evaluations in the case of Fairtrade International in order to track the political effects of metrics and measurement procedures in development practice today. Metrics or ‘indicators’ have long been understood to have the effect of transforming the political visions of socioeconomic change that shape development interventions into seemingly non‐contentious, technical models. The common practice among development organizations of using such metrics as evidence of apolitical, technical development outcomes has wide‐ranging implications for the field of development and for development subjects. The article explores two specific implications by detailing impact evaluations on three Fairtrade‐certified cut‐flower plantations, which Fairtrade International contracted to inform a 2014 revision of its certification standards. The authors find, first, that debates over competing visions or definitions of development became concealed in technical debates over adequate metrics and measurements; and, second, that such debates over metrics and measurement consolidated the roles of experts and expert knowledge as mediators of what development can or should be. These findings enhance prior critiques of the supposed neutrality of development metrics by illustrating empirically how the processes of defining metrics and measurement conceal and circumscribe political debates over the meaning and making of development practice.     

From folklore to patriotic and protest songs: Music,youth, and Basque identity during the 1960s

Taking a bottom‐up approach to the study of nationalism, the following pages constitute an attempt to shed light on the role singing played for a young generation of Basques who actively participated in the process of construction of Basque collective identity during the cultural revival movement of the 1960s. In doing so, this article aims at showing the fundamental role of active audiences, as well as their changing political and social context, in conforming the meaning of “Basque songs” as means to promote Basque nationalism and sustain opposition to the Franco regime. The study of the production, reception, and reinterpretation of Basque music during the cultural revival of the 1960s presented here intends to emphasize the interest of focusing on how ordinary people contribute to the recreation of the nation through their appropriation and interpretation of cultural symbols and practices.     

Barcelona as imagined community: Pasqual Maragall's spaces of engagement

This paper looks at how cities can function in much the same way as nations in the construction of political projects. Taking Pasqual Maragall's mobilization of Barcelona during his period as mayor of the city (1982–97) as an example, it explores how locally dependent politicians attempt to exploit 'spaces of engagement' (Cox 1998) to escape from the territorial and scalar limitations which city councils have to operate within. It argues that mayors can embody cities, and explores how Maragall located himself within a set of performatively, discursively and institutionally constructed visions of Barcelona embedded in wider economic, political and cultural spaces.     

Romans,barbarians, and Franks in the writings of Venantius Fortunatus

This paper aims to contribute to the broader discussion of strategies of identification and of Romanness by exploring the changing meaning of Roman, barbarian, and Frankish identity in the writings of Venantius Fortunatus. A close examination of the cultural, ethnic and political nuances of these terms in Fortunatus's works highlights the ways he used the resources available to him within his social context to promote Roman identity as still prestigious and as compatible with a barbarian‐ruled society.     

Seoul,Korea: its concept of culture and nature in heritage planning

This paper explores the concept of heritage as part of sustainable development planning. Heritage is taken to include both the cultural and natural spheres to incorporate people, activities, landscapes, monuments, landmarks, artefacts, and nature. Heritage planning then involves the sustainable development of the cultural and natural environment to prepare for its stewardship, research, and communication for the benefit of society. This perspective leads to broader questions on approaches to heritage planning where the cultural environment is considered specifically within sustainable development planning just as the natural environment is studied separately in specialised disciplines. The paper proposes that in developing resource‐management plans the effects of cultural resources on natural resources, and vice versa, must be integrated and addressed. Seoul, Korea, an historic metropolitan city that has gone through radical political and economic changes, is examined as a case study. It identifies how the city is integrating sustainability of the contextual association of the cultural and natural environment with promotion of economic growth.     

Globalising Economic Governance,Political Projects,and Spatial Imaginaries: Insights from Four Australasian1 Cities

This paper explores how territorial economic governance is discursively constituted in a globalising and neoliberalising world. It acknowledges both the increasingly recognised formative role of spatial imaginaries in economic interventions and the workings of co‐constitutive political projects that link particular imaginaries with political ambitions and policy strategies. Embracing recent calls for comparative ethnographic urban research at the local‐global interface, it explores currently dominant spatial imaginaries across the four Australasian cities of Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Based on multiple qualitative methods, this study claims that a considerable number of actor's spatial associations and reference points can be related to particular city‐specific governmental projects; Auckland's Super‐City, Sydney's Global and Green City, Melbourne's Liveable City, and Perth's Vibrant City. It is demonstrated how discursive governance techniques such as ‘story‐telling’, benchmarking, and policy transfer have been pivotal in the activation, circulation, and performance of those spatial imaginaries and their transformation into temporarily dominant visions for strategic urban interventions aimed at repositioning urban actors, spaces, and activities. While spatial imaginaries can be related to differently framed global aspirations, the effects of spatial political projects on urban governance and investment trajectories differ significantly across space. Theoretically, the paper stresses the importance of particular conceptions of territorial relations and time‐ and place‐specific institutional mediation in shaping context‐dependent discursive material governance alignments.     

PRACTICING THE CULTURAL GREEN ECONOMY: WHERE NOW FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL SCIENCE?

Debates concerning the development of the green economy necessarily focus on “upstream” issues that underpin the re‐structuring of national and regional economies through the lenses of financial, institutional and regulatory change. However, the growing interest in the cultural green economy requires a re‐scaling of debates surrounding the links that occur in complex socio‐technical systems, notably between individual consumers, social units and the architectures of the developing green economy. This necessitates a research and policy agenda that is attentive to both the complexities of such interactions (between structures, processes and practices) and the imperative to foster change in practices within wider society. This article explores the ways in which environmental social scientists have examined and evidenced these issues, arguing that two major barriers still exist for creating adequate understandings and opportunities for change. First, the overt focus on the individual consumer as a unit of measurement and political attention has stifled debate concerning the ways in which environmentally related social practices have developed in association with wider economic contexts. In this way, environmental social scientists have often failed to make the connections between individuals, practices and the economic system. Second, in adopting a largely individualistic perspective, environmental social scientists have tended to focus their attention on incrementalist and narrowly defined views of what ecological citizenship might look like and constitute in the green economy. The article therefore argues that environmental social scientists need to constructively engage in a new inter‐disciplinary dialogue about the role, purpose and ethics of citizen participation in developing and sustaining the green economy in an age of climate change and potential resource scarcity.     

Insurgency,heritage and the working class: the case of the Theatre of Union Nº6 of the Coal Miners of Lota,Chile

This paper examines the construction and preservation history of the Theatre of Union Nº6 of the Coal Miners in Lota, Chile, a city whose identity has been redefined due to changes in the capitalist economy, becoming known as an ‘ex-coal mining community’. Drawing on insurgent planning theory and through a political, economic and social analysis of the history of this national monument, the paper explores how grassroots heritage movements, grounded on their historical memory of social struggle, question authorised voices in the field, influencing the production and definition of their urban heritage. The strategies used by these groups are discussed in the context of the emergence of social movements at the beginning of the twentieth century, the influence of the Modern Movement in Chile as a symbol of social justice, and the communities’ current preservation efforts. Through interviews, participant observations, archival research and analysis of the physical built environment, I argue that moving across ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces of participation, Lotinos are capable of disrupting hegemonic conceptions of heritage, using it for their own social, cultural and economic purposes and creating opportunities for a more inclusive and democratic cultural process.     

Politicized moral geographies: Debating biodiversity conservation and ancestral domain in the Philippines

Research in political ecology has paid inadequate attention to the multifaceted cultural politics surrounding discourses of environmental conservation in the developing world. Specifically, it has tended to neglect the rich politicized moral geographies integral to conservation debates. This paper, then, makes the case for thinking about conservation as an envisioning process sensitive to these politicized moral geographies as well as their linkages to political and economic processes. After a brief critique of political ecology, the paper sketches a theoretical approach in which environmental conservation is understood as a process of envisioning social relations, moral discourse and socionatural place. The approach is used to explain two contrasting visions of conservation based on the notions of integrated protected areas management and ancestral domain which are prominent today in the Philippines. The conclusion reiterates the call for a discursive political ecology alive to the politicized moral geographies that condition conservation trajectories.     

Seeing for the state: Kemalist long‐distance nationalism in Australia

The recent literature on Muslim organisations in the Turkish diaspora context is voluminous as is analysis of Kurdish and Alevi grassroots politics against the Turkish state. Yet nothing has been written on those whose political orientation is in line with the secularist‐nationalist ideology of the Turkish Republic, that is, of Kemalists. As a contribution to this endeavour, this paper explores Kemalist actors' mobilisation in Australia. The paper argues that their current activism is related to a threatened economic privilege, a loss of cultural capital and a waning political dominance in the ongoing social life of Turkey.     

Managing Meaning at an Ancient Site in the 21st Century: the Gummingurru Aboriginal Stone Arrangement on the Darling Downs,Southern Queensland

ABSTRACT Aboriginal stone arrangements occur throughout Australia and are of ritual importance to Aboriginal peoples. Stone arrangements are part of the dynamic context within which Aboriginal peoples lived in the late Holocene, where constant renegotiation of social alliances required an increasing reliance on ceremonial places with ritual importance. This is the past social context for the Gummingurru Aboriginal stone arrangement site complex on the Darling Downs, Queensland. In the late 19th century Gummingurru was a highly significant men's initiation site but by the early 20th century most of the traditional custodians of the site had been removed to the government‐run Aboriginal mission of Cherbourg. Since 2000, traditional custodians have returned to the site and have given the place and its cultural landscape a new meaning. No longer used for initiation, Gummingurru now has contemporary value as a site of learning and reconciliation for all Australians. Today Gummingurru has been given a new meaning and occupies a new place in Aboriginal society and political networking.     

Magunkaquog Materiality, Federal Recognition, and the Search for a Deeper History

This article explores the manner in which archaeology can address some of the issues that confront contemporary Native American groups trying to gain federal recognition. Often frustrating and at times capricious, the federal recognition process privileges documentary evidence over other forms of information in determining the political and cultural continuity demanded of groups seeking recognition. Demonstrating cultural continuity is hindered by the antiquated, assimilationist views that underpin the recognition process which equate the adoption of European cultural practices with the loss of Indian identity. This issue of authenticity is linked to even broader questions concerning materiality and the construction of identity. Drawing on archaeological and documentary investigations of the Christian Indian community of Magunkaquog, this paper explores the ambiguities of an archival record that can be challenged by material evidence. Archaeological evidence of cultural persistence discussed in the paper supports the political arguments of contemporary Native American groups that their ancestors maintained their political and cultural identity in the face of European colonization.     

The "Trial" of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the "New Political History" in the United States

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a “systematic” revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over‐reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the “new political history”—an attempt to apply social‐science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War‐era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex‐Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed—in part—out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth‐century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra‐class versus inter‐class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social‐science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade‐long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left‐wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo‐Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.     

Luritja Management of the State

In the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu the Luritja management of the State is not only subversive to the development of representative democracy and a capitalist economy, but this discourse of (dis)engagement empowers community members. This offers autonomy, albeit marginal, from the mainstream. The ‘problem of the cultural’ emerges in this engagement and the production of meaning requires enunciating the ‘third space‘: the ambivalent space of the cultural interface. Within this post‐settlement space certain modalities have been reformulated to structure a complex locality that defies the reification of social structures that anthropology so readily draws. How do people operate in this space and what type of person is most active here? The theoretical tools for this examination of Amunturrngu's engagement with the State are taken from political anthropology and post‐colonial theory.     

The New Militia: War,Politics and Gender in 1750s Britain

This article explores the role of gender in the debates around the creation of a ‘New Militia’ at the beginning of the Seven Years War. The humiliating military defeats of 1756 had precipitated a cultural crisis that focused upon gender distinctions, as the ‘effeminacy’ of men and the ‘boldness’ of women threatened to collapse the social order. In this context, militia service was presented as a cure for the nation's moral, social, political and sexual ills. This article therefore examines a range of textual and visual sources in order to suggest that certain mid‐Georgian political worldviews were fundamentally gendered, since they were predicated upon martial masculine virtues of the citizenry.     

Burned,Broke, and Brilliant: Latinx Community Workers’ Experiences Across the Greater Toronto Area's Non‐Profit Sector

This paper explores how women and non‐binary Latinx community workers (LCWs), in the Greater Toronto Area, navigate multiple interlocking forces of oppression like racialisation, heterosexism and neoliberalism, when advancing social justice across the non‐profit sector. Using an intersectionality framework in tandem with testimonio methodology, including 37 testimonios, a workshop and participant observation, I show how LCWs are constrained by, but also contest, a white neoliberal non‐profit funding structure and patriarchal political system. I also explore how community work has contradictory effects on the mental, physical and economic wellbeing of LCWs. Lastly, I demonstrate how LCWs persist by weaving together their family and community histories, personal experiences and women of colour feminisms to enact a Latinx decolonial feminist praxis. I consider what lessons a Latinx decolonial feminist praxis can bring to bear on debates in human geography around neoliberalism, the non‐profit sector and social justice transformation.     

A study of social‐market interventions in the shaping of the field of cultural production

A social analysis based on extensive evaluation of the Dance and Drama Awards programme reveals the social‐market political paradigm underpinning the formation of cultural policy in the UK underthe New Labour government. This specific intervention in the field of cultural production is placed in the context of broader government interventions in the cultural domain that seek to give respect to undervalued social and cultural groups. There is a political analysis of the characteristics of the social‐market political formation that underpin New Labour’s “affirmative” actions, and the political strategies informing the government’s “access” and “inclusion” agendas and their impact on the cultural and creative industries. The authors argue that the construction of a “social‐market” position in New Labour’s cultural policy represents an attempt to bridge or “hyphenate” the contradictory claims of social democracy, on the one hand, and economic fatalism, on the other. Despite the rhetoric of social and cultural “transformation”, the authors argue that a “faith” in the market prevents New Labour from transforming the political‐economic and cultural structures that generate economic and cultural injustices.     

Visions of Albion: ancient landscapes,Glastonbury and alternative forms of nationalism

Nationalist visions are often connected with a cult of the land. This article considers some of the cultural‐nationalist ideas linked to the Somerset town of Glastonbury, a prominent New Age centre. It discusses the legacy of British pastoralism as shown in the work of H. V. Morton and Cecil Sharp. It considers the evolution of an English–Celtic tradition, drawing on the legacy of the Arthurian legend, but being re‐formulated in the late twentieth century as a vehicle for New Age conceptions of British society. The article concludes by evaluating the political values inherent in the New Age.