‘Popular demands do not fit in ballot boxes’: graffiti as intangible heritage at the Iglesia de San Francisco,Santiago?

Contemporary practices and conflicts of cultural heritage preservation reflect shifting conceptions of what heritage is and what it should conserve. As such, the traditional notion of graffiti upon national monuments is currently being called into question, and within the context of this debate, this study argues that the emerging framework of intangible heritage is a useful model for reconsidering graffiti at heritage sites. Arguments for such graffiti as intangible heritage are particularly strong when it can be shown to function as a societal mirror that reflects political climates and protest activities. Such graffiti poses tensions between traditional theories and practices of heritage preservation, in which these markings are seen to interrupt conservation, and emerging inclusive models such that view these works as relevant layers of a site’s history. Within this context, we explore the case of the political graffiti on the north wall of a historical monument, the Iglesia de San Francisco in Santiago, Chile, through the lens of the emerging field of intangible heritage.     

Australia's national climate: learning to adapt?

Pride in Australia's extreme climate has long been a part of Australia's national identity. Today, climate continues to be enrolled in a range of nationalistic projects, including the (re)development of climate science and other responses to climate change. In this paper, we outline some of the contours of the ‘Australian national climate’, claims to know it, and four idealised responses to it: bounce back, dismissal, endurance, and migration. We argue that the deeply cultural framing of climate in Australia—in particular, Australians' emphasis on the climate's inherent variability and unknowability, and their own historical adaptability—is being exploited by the federal government and hampering climate change mitigation nationally.     

Collaborative Governance of Climate Change Adaptation Across Spatial and Institutional Scales

We examine two related questions that are key for understanding collaborative outcomes in complex governance systems. The first is the extent to which collaboration among policy actors depends upon their joint participation in policy forums. The second is how the scales at which these forums operate conditionally affect the likelihood of collaboration. We address these questions using data from a recent survey on actors’ collaborative interactions as well as their participation in climate change adaptation policy forums in the Lake Victoria region in East Africa. Exponential random graph models show that actors are more likely to collaborate if they jointly participate in policy forums. However, this effect weakens at progressively higher spatial levels at which forums operate. Similarly, collaboration is less likely among actors jointly participating in forums that sponsor decision making at the higher collective choice level rather than lower operational choice level. While policy forums may catalyze collaboration, our findings suggest that their capacity to do so may be subject to scale‐dependent transaction costs of political contracting.     

Industry Influence in Stakeholder‐Driven State Climate Change Planning Efforts

Drawing from the literature on public participation and stakeholder collaboratives, this article investigates the influence of power and wealth, as well as political and economic context on the output of stakeholders advisory committees convened to formulate state greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation policies. Using small sample regression techniques, we analyze the outputs of stakeholder groups in 18 states that have completed Climate Action Plans to reduce GHGs. We find that an increase of 1 percent in the number of energy industry representatives that participate in Climate Action Councils significantly predicts a 4 percent reduction of GHG mitigation targets for the energy sector. More surprisingly, the results also show that where the utilities represent a larger share of the state economy, the Climate Action Plans identify more aggressive GHG reduction goals for the energy sector. We also find that the political orientation of the executive of the state is not correlated with GHG mitigation requirements for the energy sector, suggesting that GHG mitigation is less partisan at the state level than in Washington, DC. We find no evidence that state wealth is associated with GHG mitigation requirements. Finally, we suggest additional research needed to clarify the role of stakeholder participation processes in the evolving arena of climate change policy.     

Temporal and Narrative (Dis)junctures: Guillermo Núñez’s Aesthetics of Memory and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Santiago,Chile)

Focusing primarily on Guillermo Núñez’s work, this essay juxtaposes two almost-identical exhibits of his ‘exculturas’ (sic: xculptures/ex-cultures) – one at the Chilean-French Cultural Institute in 1975, which resulted in his detention and exile, the other in 2010 for the official inauguration of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MM) – to explore their relationships to memory production in Chile four decades after the military coup. In the first, Núñez offered a pointed critique of the repressive post-coup context through a series of caged and netted objects; the second reconstructed the first as a memory gesture, framed within the ultra-modern, state-sponsored MM, in its designated art space, at once included and physically separated from the historical narrative of the Museum. How do the politics, aesthetics and design of the MM work to complement, complicate, or contradict Núñez’s – and, perhaps, any – artistic proposal? What challenges might the aesthetic of memory in Núñez’s work pose to the Museum’s narrative frame? Examining Núñez’s ‘exculturas’ (and, briefly, Gonzalo Díaz’s reconstructed Lonquén) reveals several tensions – around politics of inclusion and exclusion, the state’s role in memorysites, and the relationships between human rights concerns and museological and artistic strategies – marking the social production of memory in Chile today.     

Recent Major Themes and Research Areas in the Study of Human-Environment Interaction in Prehistory

ABSTRACT

We report a study in which we systematically reviewed the recent literature dealing with human-environment interaction in prehistory. We first identified the 165 most highly cited papers published between 2005 and 2015. We then identified the major research themes covered in the sample of papers and assessed whether the themes fall into clusters and/or vary greatly in popularity. Subsequently, we identified potentially important lacunae. Our review identified dozens of themes and four major clusters: 1) improving our reconstructions of past environments; 2) the impact of climate change on past human societies; 3) human adaptation to past environmental conditions; and 4) human impacts on past environments. We also identified several gaps that led us to make a number of suggestions for future work. One is to pay more attention to the epistemology of causality. A second is to take into account nonlinearity when considering causal relationships. A third is to study the impact of chronological uncertainty on analyses. Lastly, our review revealed that there are differences between the aspects of human-environment interaction in prehistory that interest scholars and those that interest policy-makers and the general public. This needs to be addressed for obvious reasons.