A Space and Time for a Generation to React: The Gattjirrk Cultural Festival in Milingimbi

This article deals with the annually held Gattjirrk Cultural Festival organised in Milingimbi, a Yolngu community in Northeast Arnhem Land, and has the objective of analysing its socio‐cultural and political meaning. Although this event is considered an amusement (wakal), it nevertheless constitutes an arena to negotiate postcolonial realities in which Yolngu people are forced to live. Focusing on the organisers' overall frame of ‘sharing culture’ and youths' interpretations of hip‐hop dances as ‘performative tactics’, I suggest that the Milingimbi Festival creates a space in which generational perspectives within the community as well as the tension between Yolngu people and the non‐indigenous (balanda) world may be displayed and mediated. While the Festival has been mainly conceived as a space for encountering and ‘sharing culture’ with other groups and people both within the community and with the balanda world, it is also seized as an opportunity by young people to generate new ways to engage with and challenge others. By weaving together elements of Yolngu heritage and pop culture, I argue that fun or burlesque dances (wakal bunngul) are ‘tactics of cultural remix’ that through laughter and irony demand a witnessing: a mutual recognition, engagement, and responsibility to participate and to respond. It is thus in their own ways that these performances produce new connections and relationships bringing together old and young, Yolngu and balanda in an effective although fleeting encounter.     

The Islamic State lexical battleground: US foreign policy and the abstraction of threat

This article suggests that President Obama's consistent references to the extremist Sunni group as ‘ISIL’ (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is not a trivial matter of nomenclature. Instead, the Obama administration's deliberate usage of the ISIL acronym (as opposed to other commonly‐used terms such as ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ or ‘ISIS’, ‘Islamic State’, ‘IS’, ‘so‐called Islamic State’ and ‘Daesh’) frames the public perception of the threat to avoid engagement with the requirements of strategy and operations. Both the labelling and the approach could be defended as a response to the unique challenge of a transnational group claiming religious and political legitimacy. However, we suggest that the labelling is an evasion of the necessary response, reflecting instead a lack of coherence in strategy and operations—in particular after the Islamic State's lightning offensive in Iraq and expansion in Syria in mid‐2014. This tension between rhetoric, strategy and operations means that ‘ISIL’ does not provide a stable depiction of the Islamic State. While it may draw upon the post‐9/11 depiction of ‘terrorism’, the tag leads to dissonance between official and media representations. The administration's depiction of a considered approach leading to victory has been undermined by the abstraction of ‘ISIL’, which in turn produced strategic ambiguity about the prospect of any political, economic or military challenge to the Islamic State.     

‘The Sun Always Shines in Perth’: a Post‐Colonial Geography of Identity,Memory and Place

In this paper I explore some of the textual possibilities of post‐colonial geography. Using the conceptual tool of place as a palimpsest, I trace some geographies of memory across selected colonial and post‐colonial texts. By focusing on the relationship between representations of ‘sunny Perth’ and ‘Nyungah Perth’, I tease out some of the more general theoretical issues which pertain to a politics of place and space within this (post)colonial Australian context. The nexus of memory, place and cultural identity is central to my analysis. I give particular attention to the ways in which cultural memories are inscribed in some very specific and very ordinary places, and how these places become site‐markers of the remembering process and of identity itself.     

Ideas around prehistoric societies (Idéer omkring f⊘rhistoriske samfunn)

This book does not aim at documentation of the ideas around prehistoric societies launched. It is just intended as a guiding pointer for future studies. In this respect it has been necessary to give a critical evaluation of the ‘New Archeology’ which has based itself on logical empiricism which is obsolete in modern philosophical thinking. Instead the book claims the complementarity of science and art. Otherwise the problem of social groups is considered all the way from human palaeontology of. Interdisciplinary studies on a wide scale is strongly recommended, the writer himself having one foot in prehistory and the other one in socio‐cultural anthropology. But if archaeology shall be able to reach a truly holistic view, which is considered absolutely necessary, inter‐disciplinarity must be still more comprehensive, including ecology, history of religions, early historical sources, etc.

The socio‐cultural distinction between the older hunting‐fishing economy and the slow process of Indo‐Europeanization is stressed, and the following emphasis in patrilinearity in the upper social strata, whereas bilaterality may have continued to exist in the lower and dependent strata.

Being a study claiming the necessity of a holistic theory ecological studies cannot be confined to the exploitation of material resources but must be extended to social organization, and, in fact, even to Cosmos. Modern students of religion claim that in non‐Western societies religion is not considered an autonomous category but is a completely integrated part of the whole socio‐culture. The immigration of various Indo‐European groups from Middle‐ or late Neolithic times of are pointed out, the latest from the 3rd to the 5th centuries A.D., and the political consequences these may have involved.

An Epilogue considers archaeology's relation to the modern ‘action anthropology’ pointing to the fact that we all have responsibility for people, not only for our small scholarly community, but for humanity as a whole. Archaeology scarcely can come to be ‘action anthropology’ proper, but indirectly it may contribute to “action anthropology’ by demonstrating certain basic trends in Western civilization, such as warlikeness, the basic background for our organizations, etc.     

Totem and Transaction: the Objectification of ‘Tradition’ Among North Mekeo

Most recent treatments of Melanesian post‐contact change have presumed that objectifications of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ have intensified and proliferated in response to the forces of colonialism and the penetration of the nation‐state. Harrison (2000) has recently argued, however, that in pre‐colonial times too Melanesians characteristically objectified their cultural practices and identities as ‘possessions’ that could be readily exchanged or transacted. Supposedly, the key difference between the two eras has accorded with different formulations of ‘property’: ‘private property’ and the logic of ‘possessive individualism’ in the post‐contact era; and ‘trading and gift‐exchange systems’ or ‘prestige economies’ in pre‐contact times. In this article I examine Harrison's portrayal of Melanesian cultural practices as ‘possessions’ and the notions of ‘property’ that he sees as key to the cultural objectification in both pre‐ and post‐colonial settings with reference to ethnographic and historical information regarding the North Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea. I argue from the perspective of the New Melanesian Ethnography that Harrison's view of pre‐contact prestige economies and trade and gift exchange systems retains several misleading a priori assumptions about ‘commodity exchange’ and, illustrating the potential of the New Melanesian Ethnography for historical applications, that he overemphasizes the extent to which post‐contact changes in cultural objectification have involved individualised and commodified forms of property. Consequently, in the case of North Mekeo, both the continuities and the changes between pre‐ and post‐contact cultural objectifications may have proceeded differently from the ways Harrison has outlined for Melanesia generally.     

Soviet rule,nation and film: the Kyrgyz ‘Wonder’ years

ABSTRACT. What happens if a community is encouraged to imagine itself visually when its political vessel is a modernising nation‐state within a multinational communist federation? Cinematic works, in their distillation of time and space, contribute to the kinds of imaginings that sustain nation‐states. How this cultural technology reflected and promoted nation‐building in the Soviet era is the subject of this article. It explores how the tensions within the diktat ‘national in form, socialist in content’ played out in practice in the Soviet cultural landscape of 1960s Kyrgyz film, dubbed by Soviet critics as a ‘wonder’.     

Searching for the Intercultural,Searching for the Culture

This paper questions a dominant view of culture as being relatively bounded and hermetic by questioning the concept of an intercultural domain that is brought into existence as a necessary consequence of this view. The paper suggests that recognition of cultural processes does not lead to the need to posit ‘a culture’ which is constituted by them. The view that ‘a culture’ is a relatively autonomous, relatively hermetic and relatively homeostatic entity arises, this paper argues, in the birth of nationalism and the founding years of anthropology, which are intimately linked. This approach, characterised here as modernist, is criticised for failing to deal well with complex cultural relationships. It results in the need to theorise an intercultural space, or a realm of cultural change, between cultures theorised as entities. Here the later work of Malinowski is used as an exemplar. The paper argues for alternative conceptualisations, such as Gluckman's suggestion that intercultural relations occur within social fields which are the proper subject of anthropology, and Strathern's contention that ‘society’ is a redundant concept, yet not denying ‘sociality‘. The case of the Aboriginal people of Broome in their struggle with the state over the terms in which their prior rights to land will be recognised is used to illustrate this.     

The Politico‐Historical construction of the Pintupi Luritja and the Concept of Tribe

This paper explores the history of the emergence of Pintupi Luritja as the dominant language in the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu (Mt Liebig), traced from the people's first encounters with settlement in the 1940s at Haasts Bluff, through to the present. It is a political history, as movement toward settlement demanded a re‐structuring of social relations within a newly settled polity. To elaborate on this polity I examine the concept of a language community through the construction of Pintupi Luritja as a ‘communilect’. The development of this communilect as a lingua franca in these early settlements signals the value of the original term ‘Luritja’ as a trope. The meaning of this original Indigenous term is not only indicative of the regional history, but also of the flexible potential in group formation. The pattern of contact and settlement in this Pintupi Luritja region has compelled a socio‐linguistic re‐configuration, lending a currency to the label Pintupi Luritja that suggests a modern, firmed up, ‘tribe’. This tribe is a ‘secondary phenomenon’ formed through the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations — stateless societies — by the colonial State (Fried 1975). At issue here is the inter‐cultural aspect of this language formation that is the elemental process in the creation of this ‘new’ social formation.     

Deep Impact: Robert Goddard and the Soviet ‘Space Fad’ of the 1920s

Using newly available information from Russian archives, this paper explores American rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard’s relationship to the Soviet space‐flight advocacy community in the 1920s. In post‐Revolutionary Russia, Goddard enjoyed a curious kind of fame. News of his alleged plan to launch a rocket to the Moon permeated widely through a Soviet audience interested in the possibility of space exploration. Goddard’s practical work in developing rockets became a metaphor for the aspirations of the many in Soviet Russia who were unwilling to limit their horizons to theory and prognostication. The new research into Goddard’s relationship to the Soviet space‐flight enthusiast community underscores how international contacts shaped the space advocacy movements of the early twentieth century. The new evidence prompts us to consider an alternative approach to the ‘foundation myth’ of space history involving Tsiolkovskii, Goddard and Oberth, one that privileges an international context instead of the usual multiple national contexts.     

Citizenship at war: Passports and nationality in the 2008 Russian‐Georgian conflict (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

By analyzing the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, this paper stretches the limits of the anthropology of war and citizenship. Trying to overcome anthropologists' usual unease about commenting on ‘big topics’, I examine citizenship policies ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ that potentially lead to conflict and war. Special attention is paid to the role of nationality as a crucial feature of post‐Soviet citizenship, and to citizenship as an effective means of neo‐imperial expansion. In my conclusion, I contextualize my findings within anthropological debates about citizenship and argue that the recent stress on rights and entitlements needs to be balanced by an analysis of the repressive dimensions of citizenship regimes.     

Participatory action in the age of green urbanism. How Futurefarmers leapfrogged the culture consumer?

This article looks at a shift in urban governance and policy-making from a culture-led approach towards a ‘green turn’ and an environmentally informed approach. The particular focus of this exploration is how public art practices participate in this ongoing reconfiguration. We are especially concerned with the parallel effort by public administration and the art community to activate citizens through nature-oriented, public spaces. Our main target of interest is the city of Oslo where we investigate the art group that goes by the name of Futurefarmers, whose engagement with land development relates to planning, cultural strategies, curatorial approaches and related art projects. Our findings indicate that while this work pursues a mission of its own, it also has the potential to advance its position in public space by representing green values in decision-making processes. We argue that through this ability to operate both within and outside the system, art practice can introduce interdisciplinary collaborations that can drive change in cultural policy.     

Queering the Field? The complexities of sexuality within a lesbian-identified football team in England

Lesbian-identified sports teams provide a challenge to the heterosexing, and heterogendering, of sport and sport space. An ‘out’ lesbian football (soccer) team can be understood as offering resistance to compulsory heterosexuality. It is this disruption of normative sexuality that can be described as queer and contributes to the queering of sport space. Given evidence of obdurate heteronormativity in most sporting arenas, such a team could be described as a queer community. However, a critical engagement with lesbian subversion is necessary before claiming lesbian ‘subjects’ as queer ‘subjects’. In this vein, the discussions that follow reflect an engagement with marginalised sex–gender–sexuality identities within a specific lesbian sport community in London, England. Relatively little is known about the social relations that exist within lesbian sporting communities. Through an engagement with femme-inine players and transsexual players this article aims to highlight the diversity of sex–gender–sexuality experiences. Moreover, it demonstrates the tensions and complexities within a particular footballing sub-culture, which can be described as both queer and anti-queer. In this way it contributes to developments in the feminist–queer theorising of the spatiality of sexuality. The research is drawn from a larger ethnographic study of the team, which includes analysis of archival materials and club documents, semi-structured interviews and participant observation.     

The future of the enthnographic museum (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This essay discusses the recent past of ethnographic museums and raises questions about their future. In the last thirty years or so, ethnographic museums have faced many challenges arising both from within and beyond anthropology to the extent that in the post‐colonial and post‐modern era they could be said to have suffered an identity crisis. Many have been renamed, remodelled or rehoused in spectacular new premises (such as the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris). Only a few have remained largely unaltered, as at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford where the authors of this essay are employed. Drawing on the theoretical literature in museum anthropology and material culture, many years of ‘hands on’ curatorial experience and the insights gained from a five year collaborative research project involving ten major ethnographic museums in Europe, the authors investigate how ethnographic museums might engage with new audiences and new intellectual regimes in the future.     

Claude Lévi‐Strauss (1908–2009): The apotheosis of heroic anthropology (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Claude Lévi‐Strauss is one of the greatest interdisciplinary writers of the twentieth century whose influence extends far beyond his own discipline of social anthropology. His inquiry illuminates the borderlands between ‘primitive’ and non‐primitive, self and other, myth and history, human and animal, art and nature, and the dichotomies that give structure to culture, society, history and agency. This commemorative article of his legacy assesses disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates influenced by Levi‐Strauss's inquiry and methods, and looks at potential challenges for the future. Lévi‐Strauss's ideas continue to be influential in our assessments of what we mean by culture, values, social organization, including social transformations and cultural ideologies such as ethnocentrism, nationalism, fundamentalism, pluralism, neo‐liberalism, post‐modernism, relativism, humanism and universalism.     

Participatory Governance in Urban Management and the Shifting Geometry of Power in Mumbai

This article questions the participatory dimension of urban governance in Mumbai. Based on surveys of a number of participatory projects for urban services, it compares the differentiated impacts of participation in middle‐class colonies with those in slums. Results demonstrate that changing citizen–government relationships have led to the empowerment of the middle and upper middle class who harness the potential of new ‘invited space’ to expand their claims on the city and political space. In contrast, the poor end up on the losing side as NGOs function more as contracted agents of the State than as representatives of the poor. Direct community participation empowers influential community members, small private entrepreneurs and middlemen, and contributes to labour informalization. Ultimately, these processes consolidate a form of ‘governing beyond the State’ that promotes a managerial vision of participation and leads to double standards of citizenship.     

Social Capital and Post‐Conflict Reconstruction in Burundi: The Limits of Community‐based Reconstruction

Using an examination of three NGO interventions in post‐conflict Burundi, this article questions community‐based reconstruction as a mechanism to rebuild social capital after conflicts, particularly when direct livelihood support is provided. The authors demonstrate a general shortcoming of the methodology employed in community‐based development (CBD), namely its focus on ‘technical procedural design’, which results in what may be termed ‘supply‐driven demand‐driven’ reconstruction. The findings suggest the need for a political economy perspective on social capital, which acknowledges that the effects on social capital are determined by the type of economic resource CBD gives access to. Through the use of a resource typology, the case studies show that the CBD methodology and the potential effects on social capital differ when applied to public and non‐strategic versus private and strategic resources. This has particular consequences for post‐conflict situations. A generalized application of CBD methodology to post‐conflict reconstruction programmes fails to take adequate account of the nature of the interventions and the challenges posed by the particular post‐conflict setting. The article therefore questions the current popular ‘social engineering’ approach to post‐conflict reconstruction.     

Ceremony and Citizenship: African American Weddings, 1945–60

Following the Second World War, many Americans embraced the white wedding – an event marked by conspicuous consumption, gendered roles and responsibilities, and welcoming of ‘traditions’ such as formal dress, proper vows and post‐ceremony reception. For aspiring, middle‐class and elite African Americans, the wedding served a dual purpose. Through the ceremony, they demonstrated adherence to the ideals of post‐war American citizenship while preserving distinct cultural practices and values. Focusing primarily on the upwardly mobile black community of Indianapolis between 1945 and 1960, this article emphasises the wedding as a site of both personal and public significance. Adoption and enactment of the white wedding reinforced the strength of the black family and declared African Americans’ rightful belonging to the American middle‐class community.     

The Legendary Commander: the construction of an Albanian master‐narrative in post‐war Kosovo*

ABSTRACT. The ongoing, post‐war construction of Albanian martyrs, memory and the nation in Kosovo has produced iconic tropes of militant resistance, unity and national independence. This critical interpretive account, based on years of the authors' ethnographic and political engagement with Albanians in post‐war Kosovo, focuses on the making of a master narrative that is centred on the ‘sublime sacrifice’ of the insurgent KLA leader Adem Jashari, known as the ‘Legendary Commander’. It also aims to trace voices of discord with this master narrative, testing contestations in terms of the rural–urban, political and gender divides in Kosovo‐Albanian society. It concludes that the narrow international view of Albanians as either ‘victims’ or ‘perpetrators’ has contributed to the consolidation of this powerful narrative, its celebration of Albanian agency in militant resistance and the closing of public debate within Albanian society.     

Heading west? Georgia's Euro‐Atlantic path

Events in Ukraine in 2014 are likely to transform the presence and role of western institutions such as NATO in the post‐Soviet area. The crisis has starkly revealed the limits of their influence within Russia's ‘zone of privileged interest’, as well as the lack of internal unity within these organizations vis‐à‐vis relations with Moscow and future engagement with the area. This will have long‐term implications for the South Caucasus state of Georgia, whose desire for integration into the Euro‐Atlantic community remains a key priority for its foreign and security policy‐makers. This article examines the main motivators behind Georgia's Euro‐Atlantic path and its foreign policy stance, which has remained unchanged for over a decade despite intense pressure from Russia. It focuses on two aspects of Georgia's desire for integration with European and Euro‐Atlantic structures: its desire for security and the belief that only a western alignment can guarantee its future development, and the notion of Georgia's ‘European’ identity. The notion of ‘returning’ to Europe and the West has become a common theme in Georgian political and popular discourse, reflecting the belief of many in the country that they are ‘European’. This article explores this national strategic narrative and argues that the prevailing belief in a European identity facilitates, rather than supersedes, the central role of national interests in Georgian foreign policy.     

Indigenous Research: Whose Priority? Journeys and Possibilities of Cross‐Cultural Research in Geography

Decolonising research in geography is part of a broader ‘reflexive’ process which continues to question the positivist status of ‘researcher as observer’. This paper contributes to this reflexive turn, drawing on the particular experiences of a cross‐cultural Honours thesis. The paper is pursued through a parallel journey involving a non‐Indigenous researcher (and author of the cross‐cultural Honours thesis) engaging Indigenous research 1 with interpretative insight from an Indigenous adviser or ‘on‐looker’. The methodological difficulties revealed by the parallel journey are emphasised to highlight both the complexities and reflexive possibilities of cross‐cultural research but also to consider potential institutional and pedagogic implications that stem from the experience. One of the substantial findings of the paper is that, by linking Indigenous community priorities to research and coursework, conventional (and often unequal) research relations are minimised and colonising tendencies reduced. By challenging the conventional way that cross‐cultural research is conceived, and the way that institutional practices and research frameworks are implemented, geographers can continue their prolonged and complex efforts at decolonisation of the field and their own practices.