Fleshing out the geographies of social movements: Colombia's Pacific coast black communities and the ‘aquatic space’

The intersections between the concepts of space, place and resistance have recently received increasing attention from geographers dedicated to the study of social movements. Space and place are not merely seen as providing a physical background for mobilisations but as mutually constitutive of social movement agency. Yet, critics of theoretical frameworks drawn up by geographers have often rightly pointed to the lack of convincing empirical evidence presented in their support.This paper addresses these critiques by offering a theoretically informed and empirically grounded account of recent mobilisations by the social movement of black communities in the Pacific coast region of Colombia. Drawing on both the objective aspects of place and the subjective feelings that are derived from living in a place, I will show how these mechanisms have impacted on the specific spatial organising forms adopted by black communities. In particular, I will propose the concept of ‘aquatic space’ as a set of spatialised social relationships among Afro-Colombians, and show how these concrete everyday geographies have been drawn upon by black communities in the establishment of community councils along river basins.The paper argues that to make a strong point for more spatially sensitive analyses of social movements, geographers have to sustain their theoretical frameworks with concrete empirical data that not only illustrate spatial processes at play, but also convincingly demonstrate their very embeddedness in social practice. I thus argue for a strong consideration of ethnographies as a privileged research methodology to flesh out the geographies of social movements.     

Digitisation,digital interaction and social media: embedded barriers to democratic heritage

Abstract

The democratisation of heritage through digital access is a well-documented aspiration. It has included innovative ways to manage interpretation, express heritage values, and create experiences through the ‘decoding’ of heritage. This decoding of heritage becomes democratised, more polyvocal than didactic exhibitions, and less dependent on experts. However, the decision of what ‘heritage’ is and what is commissioned for digitisation (the encoding) is not necessarily a part of this democratisation. This paper will consider how digitisation reinforces the Authorised Heritage Discourse through the lens of Stephen Lukes’ three (increasingly subtle) dimensions of power: conflict resolution, control of expression and shaping of preferences. All three dimensions have an impact on how public values are represented in heritage contexts, but the introduction of digitisation requires more resources, expertise and training within established professional discourse. Social media may have a positive impact on the first two dimensions, but can reinforce hegemony. Alternatives are subject to epistemic populism. The role of digitisation and social media in the democratisation of heritage needs to be better understood. Questions regarding the nature and process of digital interaction, in terms of whose heritage is accessible, affect the very issues of democratisation digitisation appears to promote.     

Heritage builds communities: The application of heritage resources to the problems of social exclusion

Abstract

The concept of ‘social exclusion’ has become central to the UK government's political philosophy. The need to combat the causes and deal with the symptoms of ‘social exclusion’ has become vital to many policy initiatives. The use of heritage resources to help deal with social problems has been practised since the early years of the 19th century and can provide a community with a focus, identity and pride as well as making a contribution to regional economies. This paper traces the use of heritage resources in community regeneration programmes and demonstrates their lack of objectives and unplanned nature. A holistic multi‐agency approach is advocated to tackle social exclusion, with heritage playing a central role. Finally, the paper calls for research which will clarify the contribution that heritage resources can make and identify a framework within which heritage can realise its potential to build communities.     

Welcome to the club! An exploratory study of service accessibility in commodity housing estates in Guangzhou,China

In post-reform China, gated commodity housing estates play a crucial role in the provision of urban services. Such collective service provision is criticized in the urban studies literature, because ‘club goods’ are thought to exclude people that do not live in gated communities. This paper reflects on the global relevance of that argument with an exploratory study in Guangzhou, China. We argue that access to collective services is structured in local social practices, involving diverse actors and specific rules and resources. Discussions on the exclusionary effects of service provision through gated communities should therefore focus on the characteristics of these practices of access in specific cities. Employing this perspective, the paper shows that in Guangzhou at least two mechanisms partly ease the exclusion of non-residents from club goods. On the one hand, municipal government maintains a considerable role in service management, mediating exclusion from services for people who do not live in commodity housing estates. On the other hand, generally the management of services is separated from housing estate management, and service providers try to increase profits through service provision to non-residents. We discuss the consequences of such mediations for an adjusted research agenda on service provision by gated communities.     

From Sorcery to Laboratory: Pandemics and Yanyuwa Experiences of Viral Vulnerability

The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted renewed attention among health professionals, Aboriginal community leaders, and social scientists to the need for culturally responsive preventative health measures and strategies. This article, a collaborative effort, involving Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola and two anthropologists with whom Yanyuwa have long associations, tracks the story of pandemics from the perspective of Aboriginal people in the Gulf region of northern Australia. It specifically orients the discussion of the current predicament of ‘viral vulnerability’ in the wake of COVID‐19, relative to other pandemics, including the Hong Kong flu in 1969 and the Spanish flu decades earlier in 1919. This discussion highlights that culturally nuanced and prescribed responses to illness and threat of illness have a long history for Yanyuwa. Yanyuwa cultural repertoires have assisted in the process of making sense of massive change, in the form of past pandemics and the onset of sickness, the threat of illness with COVID‐19 and the attribution of ‘viral vulnerability’ to this remote Aboriginal community. The aim is to centralise Yanyuwa voices in this story, as an important step in growing understandings of Aboriginal knowledge of pandemics and culturally relevant and controlled health responses and strategies for communal well‐being.     

From war service to domestic service: ex-servicewomen and the Free Passage Scheme 1919-22

At the end of the First World War, the British government put into operation a Free Passage Scheme for ex-servicemen, ex-servicewomen and their dependants to emigrate to the colonies and dominions of the Empire. This scheme was driven by a complex network of interlinked beliefs and policies concerning both the relationship between the metropole and the Empire, and the perceived necessity for social stability in Britain and in the dominions and colonies. This article examines the Free Passage Scheme, paying particular attention to the ways in which it was envisaged as a means of restoring a gendered balance of the population in Britain, where young women outnumbered young men at the end of the war, and in the dominions, where men outnumbered women, and was also seen as a way of emigrating women whose wartime work experiences were understood to be in conflict with gendered identities in the post-war period. The article argues that the Free Passage Scheme needs to be understood as gendered, as it envisaged the transformation of female members of the auxiliary wartime services into domestic servants for the Dominions. The scheme's failure, it is argued, prefigures the failure of the far larger Empire Settlement Act of 1922 to emigrate large numbers of British women as domestic servants.     

From bricks and mortar to social heritage: planning space for diversities in the AHD

This article investigates the authorised heritage discourse (AHD) through the lens of conservation planning practice. The AHD is characterised as an exclusionary discourse that privileges the physical nature of ‘heritage’, defined scientifically by ‘experts’. Set within the context of wider international trends towards more inclusive heritage practices, the article advances understanding of the contemporary AHD. Using local heritage designation as an investigatory platform, a thesis is developed to explain professional representations of heritage operating in this setting. In doing so, a pervasive, yet nuanced AHD is exposed. At the same time, a complex variety of contextual factors that constrain radical readjustment of the AHD are also uncovered. These include struggles over the subjectivity and operationalisation of social and cultural heritage values in rational planning environments. The conclusions drawn from this research challenge and subtly refine the AHD, and crucially, propose that wider trends in the heritage discourse cannot be adequately implemented within the current legal apparatus and mind-set of traditional rational planning. The article suggests that further research is required to understand how the multiple and diverse layers of heritage meanings can be emplaced and legitimised within planning settings.     

Work and life in the clear-cut: communities of practice in the northern Ontario tree planting industry

Based on ethnography, interviews with tree planters and a survey of tree planting contractors, this article focuses on work cultures in northern Ontario tree planting camps. The compressed planting season and the relatively high yearly turnover in the workforce requires that new workers quickly learn how to plant efficiently. These features result in the development of distinctive work cultures and practices that facilitate learning and the sharing of tacit knowledge between planters. Using the concept of communities of practice, we emphasize the social practices that facilitate the integration of planters into their working communities. At one level, tree planters belong to an extensive network of practice and have a shared sense of identity, irrespective of for which contractor, in which region or in which camp, they work. However, at a finer level there are noticeable variations between camps. Both the client for whom planting is done and the operational practices of the tree planting contractor shape the communities of practice in individual camps. However, the most important factor accounting for differences between camps is the process by which communities of practice are socially produced, reproduced and transformed over time and the role, played in this process by worker turnover and retention.     

社会保障与收入公平分配的关联性研究

社会保障作为实施国民收入再分配的一种手段和方式,与收入公平分配之间存在正相关。但在实践中,社会保障的具体实施又在一定程度上进一步加剧了收入分配的不公,与收入公平分配又存在负相关。为实现收入公平分配,必须采取相应的对策,以强化社会保障与收入公平分配的正相关,弱化社会保障在实践中存在的与收入公平分配的负相关。     

From the familiar to the extraordinary: local residents' perceptions of risk when living with nuclear power in the UK

Nearly two decades since the last nuclear power station was built and began operating in the UK, nuclear energy is firmly back on the political agenda domestically and elsewhere in the world. Yet since the 1980s, little research has investigated perceptions of nuclear power in the UK, particularly those of communities living in very close proximity to such facilities. Using biographical narrative interviews (n = 61), we explore how local residents living close to two nuclear power stations in the UK (Bradwell, Essex and Oldbury, South Gloucestershire) have come to view their local facility. We reveal how the power station is constructed through processes of familiarisation and/or the normalisation/normification of risk as part of everyday life; how this ordinariness is juxtaposed with moments of extraordinariness in which, due to direct and mediated events, the power station is reframed as a risk issue; and how risk awareness is associated with moments of anxiety which ebb and flow through our interviewees' lives. We conclude that biographical experiences dynamically unfolding through space and time can be interrupted by risk events (mediated and direct, real and symbolic, nuclear and non-nuclear) to disrupt the usually taken-for-granted ordinariness of a power station's presence in a particular locality. Our findings suggest that those involved in debate about new nuclear build must be sensitive to the heterogeneity of the extraordinary in nuclear affairs and the importance of socio-cultural histories of place.     

Globalizing the local in Roman Britain: An anthropological approach to social change

This article considers the incorporation of part of Britain into the Roman empire in the context of globalization theory and world-systems history. Emphasis is placed on the local effects of the expansion of global systems and their impact on the social practices of eating and drinking at a range of settlements in the southeast of Britain in the Iron Age to Roman transition, c. 50 BC–AD 200. Through the analysis of consumption practices via quantitative pottery assemblage data, it is argued that globalization offers a more sophisticated framework to describe change than current archaeological approaches to Romanization and identity. The results show that while much of the populace was subject to a progressively homogenizing supply of food-related pottery vessels, the use of such technologies was negotiated within social practices drawing on the integration of both local and global cultural elements. Such findings highlight the potential of critical applications of globalization theory to conceptualize economic, social, and cultural changes in Roman provincial societies.     

以科学发展观为指导建立健全农村社会保障体系

本文分析了建立农村社会保障体系的必要性及农村社会保障体系的现状和存在的问题,探讨了建立符合社会主义市场经济体制要求的农村社会保障体系的内容和应该采取的措施。提出建立农村社会保障制度,是一项艰巨而复杂的社会系统工程,既需要政府积极引导与高度重视,又需要农村集体与广大农民的积极支持。     

Cutmarks on Capsian human remains: implications for Maghreb Holocene social organization and palaeoeconomy

In 1930, the remains of five adults, one subadult, and one infant were excavated from Site 12, a ca. 8000 bp Capsian escargotière in Algeria. Recently, cutmarks were found on several postcranial bones of each of the adult individuals. In an attempt to reconstruct the burial circumstances, archival materials including photographs and field notes were retrieved from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the Logan Museum at Beloit College, and a detailed study of the cutmarks was carried out. The cutmarks are associated mostly with long bones and skulls, while two individuals show cutmarks on the thorax. Using theories relating secondary burial practices to a nomadic lifestyle, it is hypothesized that the individuals died away from camp. Initial preparations, while awaiting transport to Site 12, involved limited exposure, followed by decapitation, dismemberment, and possibly defleshing of the thorax and removal of the internal organs. At Site 12, a formal burial ceremony was conducted during which red ochre was used. In some cases the dismembered extremities were placed in the grave with the rest of the body, but several skulls and long bones are missing. It is not known what the missing bones were used for, although Capsian groups are known for modifying human bones for either utilitarian or ritual purposes. This is the first time that cutmarks on human remains are reported for this area and period. The idea that Capsian people practiced decapitation and dismemberment has been suggested before, based on observations on other sites, however. Studies of human skeletal material from the Maghreb, often excavated decades ago, may therefore reveal similar types of evidence. It is suggested that such studies will contribute significantly to our understanding of Holocene Maghreb burial practices, and our ability to reconstruct social organization and palaeoeconomy. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

From Tobacco Revolt to Youth Rebellion: A Social History of the Cigarette in Iran

Focusing on the cultural influence of the cigarette, this paper synthesizes a wide range of evidence to argue that the cigarette was a fundamental primer for Iran's encounter with modernity, especially as understood in the context of western influence. Applying the dramaturgical theories of sociologist Erving Goffman, it is argued that the cigarette is an instantiation of the “sign-equipment” of modernization used to refashion the identity and subjectivity of Iranian men and women. This refashioning has occurred in three distinct periods. In the first period (1860–1930), cigarette smoking was a habit adopted by the Persian elite in an attempt to mediate the encounter with European colonial figures. In the second period (1930–70), cigarettes were leveraged by Iranians who wished to be seen as upwardly mobile. In the final and contemporary period (1970–present), cigarettes have become ubiquitous among the adult population, but smoking itself has become the act of youth rebellion as experimentation occurs at increasingly young ages.     

The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court

In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'     

Using chaîne opératoire and communities of practice to identify interaction in the Contact and Mission periods in southern Georgia,AD 1540–1715

ABSTRACT

In this article, the pottery production of indigenous groups living inside and outside of colonial spaces in southern Georgia is compared by identifying portions of the chaîne opératoire of pottery production. Diachronic and geographic changes to production demonstrate that groups living in the interior of Georgia were in continual interaction with coastal groups in the mission system. This interaction likely contributed to the emergence of the Altamaha pottery tradition, which spread from southern South Carolina to northern Florida during Spanish colonization of the region. This research shows that Native American groups navigating colonialism drew on a wide network of communities to alter traditions in the face of unprecedented social change.     

From left-behind children to young migrants: the intergenerational social reproduction of rural migrant labor in China

ABSTRACT

Growing in number in the last two decades, rural migrant workers in China have completed intergenerational replacement, and young migrants have become a principal part of the migrant population. However, the process of such intergenerational reproduction has not been thoroughly examined. Based on field studies in the Chinese countryside, this paper analyzes the mechanisms of intergenerational reproduction of rural migrants from the perspective of rural communities, families, and school education. “Left-behind” rural communities, their migration-oriented social culture, and the cognition of rural–urban differences as constructed through migrant parents facilitated a subjective willingness for migration among left-behind children. Exclusion from urban-biased rural education is often the final external thrust for their migration. Having finished the transition, the households of a new young generation of rural migrants are experiencing a different crisis of reproduction. This paper argues that there is a systematic rupture between labor, households, and rural society and that this presents a critical development trap for China.