Strongly aligned coastal boulders on Ko Larn island (Thailand): a proxy for past typhoon‐driven high‐energy wave events in the Bay of Bangkok

Recent studies of elevated carbonate boulder deposits on several rock islands near Bangkok have indicated that Thailand's capital city may not be as protected from typhoon strikes as previously thought. Here, new evidence is presented for past high‐energy wave (HEW) events in the form of statistically significant patterns of boulder alignment on exposed rocky shorelines of Ko Larn island. The long‐axis orientations of 193 coastal sandstone boulders were analysed across four study sites. Several scenarios for the unimodal, bimodal, and polymodal patterns found can be envisaged. Either the most recent HEW event was the strongest—in which case most clasts were rearranged unimodally (one observation site), or the strongest HEW event was earlier and subsequent weaker ones realigned only smaller boulders to produce bimodal or polymodal patterns (three observation sites). Inferred northeastward or eastward onshore flow directions are consistent with palaeo‐typhoons penetrating into the Bay of Bangkok on northwestward curving tracks. The calculated minimum flow velocities required to transport all sampled boulders are 5.5–7.8 m s^?1, similar to other findings throughout the Asia‐Pacific region. It was observed that the absence of a fitted boulder geomorphology lends credence to the earlier proposed time frame of 150–200 years between typhoon phases in the upper Gulf of Thailand. The current work has provided additional insights into the characteristics of past HEW events that have a possibility of reoccurring again at some time in the future. Our findings continue to raise awareness for a reassessment of the risks of coastal hazards for the Chao Phraya River delta and densely populated Bangkok, for which storm surge modelling should be an urgent priority, so as to give better perceptions on how typhoon‐driven marine incursion would impact the city.     

The Myth of Bondi's Black Sunday

On 6 February 1938, five bathers drowned while swimming between the flags at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia. In surf lifesaving history, the day is known as Black Sunday. The dominant heroic narrative of Black Sunday highlights freak surf conditions and the gallantry, efficiency, and adeptness of Bondi's volunteer surf lifesavers. In this article I analyse this representation as a myth. Here I employ the French philosopher Roland Barthes' concept of myth, not as a falsehood, but as simplistic story, replete with silences and devoid of critical assessment. I argue that the myth of Black Sunday served the interests of Surf Life Saving Australia well in establishing its status as the country's premier safety service. However, the culture that underpinned that myth still persists with ongoing ramifications for risk assessment at the beach.     

On reductionism and emergence in geomorphology

Much geomorphological enquiry has been devoted to the understanding of landscapes via the construction of models based on the relationships between process and form. This paper examines the philosophical, theoretical and practical problems involved in bridging the gap between studies of geomorphological processes and explanations of landscape development. It argues that process geomorphology is essentially reductionist and discusses the practical and logical limitations of such an approach to science. It suggests that landscapes are emergent phenomena and, by drawing from the philosophical and practical lessons derived from the physics of non-linear systems, demonstrates that they are not amenable to reductionist explanations.     

Signs of Masculinism in an 'Uneasy' Place: Advertising for 'Big Brothers'

'Big Brothers' is an international, philanthropic fraternal organisation dedicated, in its own words, 'to match boys seven to seventeen from lone-parent female families with mature male role models over eighteen … toward contributing to the healthy development of these children'. A primary objective of this 90 year-old institution is thus to instil a masculine culture and nurture a masculine identity in male children by providing an adult male presence, 3-4 hours a week, in the lives of boys without a male role model. This article asks, which kinds of masculine identities are promoted as acceptable and why? Drawing upon the geographies of feminism, masculinity, and advertising, the article presents a socio-semiotic analysis of the format, content and signs employed by 'Big Brothers' of Canada and the USA in their recruitment campaigns. Using printed promotional material spanning the institute's history, as well as an interview with the Marketing Director of a recent Big Brother recruitment campaign, the slogans, icons, and gender-myths used to represent males and same-sex friendships in the symbolic spaces of their advertisements are critiqued. Results exemplify the instability of the 'masculine gaze' and suggest that the discourse of patriarchal masculinity situates the Big Brothers institute itself in an 'uneasy' place, one where the masculine gender-myths may be collapsing but are nevertheless evoked to ensure volunteers and society at large that a 'legitimate' form of homosocial masculinity prevails, one that does not transgress 'out of bounds' and into the 'homosexual'.     

Autochthony and orientation patterns in Olduvai Bed I: a re-examination of the status of post-depositional biasing of archaeological assemblages from FLK North (FLKN)

Recent excavations at FLK North (Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania) have produced new information on the orientation of archaeological materials at various levels of the site. This information includes the uniform distribution of material azimuths, which contrasts with previous inferences of highly patterned orientations of materials in the Bed I archaeological sites. Those previous inferences of patterned material orientations are based on Mary Leakey's 50-year-old drawings of artifact and fossil bone distribution, but are not verified by our precise measurements of archaeological objects made in situ. Nor do those previous results agree with the general lack of geological, geomorphological, and/or taphonomic data that would indicate significant post-depositional movement of archaeological materials in the sites. We argue here that Leakey's drawings are incomplete (only portions of each assemblage were drawn) and inaccurate in their representation of the original locations, shapes and orientations of most archaeological specimens. This argument is supported by several important mismatches in object representations between a photograph taken of a small portion of the FLK 22 Zinjanthropus site floor before the removal of the archaeological items, and the sketch of the same area drawn by Leakey. Thus, we conclude that primary orientation data of excavations (i.e., direct measurements taken from items) generated prior to object removal are the only valid indicators of the relative isotropy or anisotropy of these important paleoanthropological assemblages.     

The 'Shadows of The Colonial Period' to 'Times of Sharing'

The killing of the first Bishop of Melanesia, John Coleridge Patteson, in 1871, on tiny Nukapu island in the Reef Islands of what today is the Temotu Province of Solomon Islands, is a central event in the mission history of the Western Pacific and continues to be a key narrative within Anglican Melanesia. In the standard explanations, Patteson's killing was retaliation for the alleged kidnapping of five Nukapu men by labour traders. Here, this interpretation is questioned. By scrutinising written representations of the event, we endorse the argument that key personnel of the Melanesian Mission used the incident in a political struggle against the labour trade. By juxtaposing the various versions from published and archival sources with two contemporary accounts, obtained during recent linguistic fieldwork on Nukapu proper and elsewhere in Temotu, we identify what Bronwen Douglas has termed ‘indigenous countersigns’ and suggest other explanations for the killing.     

Implications of Thrown-Out Boulders for Earthquake Shaking

In the source areas of some large shallow earthquakes, we have found many dislodged boulders struck by severe ground shaking. Some boulders were located at quite distances from the former sockets, which remained undisturbed with surrounding clear edges. This fact indicates the possibility that vertically upward seismic acceleration exceeded the earth's gravity (1g). This phenomenon of upthrown boulders is investigated herein by examining the effects of waves, which emanate deep in the ground due to an earthquake, propagate through the ground and boulder, and reflect back to the ground, involving a variety of their interaction. An elastic dynamic analysis is carried out on the basis of a one-dimensional continuum model consisting of the ground and boulder. It is subjected to the input of the Ricker wave, which is intended to simulate an earthquake-generated wave, emanating from the bottom of the model ground. The upthrow of a boulder is taken to occur when the dynamic response at the bottom of the boulder satisfies certain conditions. It turns out that the possibility of upthrow occurrence is high when the period of the Ricker wave coincides with the fundamental period of the ground vibration. It leads to the conclusion that the upthrow takes place due to resonance in the response of the system of the ground and boulder to the external wave input. The upthrow possibility increases as the input acceleration increases. Trial is made of predicting the maximum acceleration and velocity of an earthquake, based on this consideration of the up throw phenomenon.     

Is international affairs too ‘hard’ for women? Explaining the missing women in Australia's international affairs

Women are demonstrably under-represented at senior levels in Australia's international affairs. Empirical evidence shows a continuing gender imbalance in leadership positions, including in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Defence and academia. Two explanations commonly offered are that women are less motivated or lack interest in ‘hard’ international relations. These explanations are found to be unconvincing, given studies showing similar levels of ambition and interest at recruitment. Four alternative explanations are offered to account for the scarcity of female leaders in Australia's international affairs: the legacy of direct discrimination, continued indirect discrimination, inadequate support for women who balance work and family responsibilities, and socially constructed gender norms. Instead of the subject matter of international relations being too ‘hard’, or inherently masculine, it appears that it is the combined impact of these factors that has made it ‘hard’, or difficult, for women to progress to senior levels. In order to show how these barriers can be overcome, three case studies are presented of women who have achieved senior positions: Professor Emeritus Helen Hughes, Her Excellency Ms Penny Wensley and Professor Hilary Charlesworth. These examples suggest strategies that women can use to further their careers and measures that can be implemented in workplaces to improve the representation of senior women in Australia's international affairs.     

Kurangara in Queensland?: A Critique of Duncan-Kemp's Account

A particular historical travelling religious complex in northern Western Australia, usually known as Kurangara, has been the subject of anthropological attention since the late 1930s. Overlooked in all the literature is a similar account assigned to 1912–1918, in the distant Channel Country of southwest Queensland. This is in Alice Duncan-Kemp's last book, published in 1968. My examination shows that a good deal of Duncan-Kemp's account repeated parts of a 1954 popular magazine about Kurangara in the Pilbara. In other respects Duncan-Kemp may have drawn on her own childhood experiences, but in the absence of corroboration her account has to be considered unreliable.     

Recent Storm Boulder Deposits on the Beecroft Peninsula,New South Wales,Australia

This paper documents the deposition of large boulders on the Beecroft Peninsula, New South Wales, during a one in four‐year swell event in October 1999. The size of the boulders in relation to the magnitude of the swell suggests that the boulder field at Whale Point on the Beecroft Peninsula is explicable in terms of storm swells alone.     

Fear of the city 1882-1967: Edward Hopper and the discourse of anti-urbanism

This paper traces the extent to which some of the major cityscape representations of the American 'Realist' painter, Edward Hopper, have contributed to the production and articulation of the discourse of anti-urbanism in American culture. Following an introductory background to this discourse, the paper discusses the development of Realism in American art, and how the urban representations that emerged were a response to the rapidly changing, early twentieth-century American city. A brief biographical account of Edward Hopper is presented to explore the intertextual influences behind his anti-urban sentiments, and how these translated into the unique form of Realism for which Hopper is renowned. This sets the stage for a reading of four key Hopper works that are suggestive of the anti-urban discourse: Night Shadows, Nighthawks, Approaching a City and Sunday . The powers of representation and the artist's popularity have fed into the discourse of anti-urbanism - a discourse that has a material effect on urban life in America.     

OPACITY AND TRANSPARENCY IN HISTORICAL REPRESENTATIONS

In his latest book Frank Ankersmit develops a comprehensive philosophical perspective on the problem of the truth and reference of historical representations. The approach and the wider perspective of the book largely belong to what could be called the postmodernist paradigm, in spite of some recent attempts to interpret Ankersmit's recent work differently. Since his 1983 Narrative Logic Ankersmit has propounded the view that individual statements that constitute historical representations may have reference, but that representations themselves do not. His most recent book remains faithful to this position and elaborates it further. This essay examines Ankersmit's arguments as well as the assumptions and implications of this view.     

Taking Stands: A feminist perspective on 'other' women's activism in forestry communities of northern Vancouver Island

The author examines alternative and possibly contradictory positions associated with 'other' women's political activism in forestry and land use debates. The article traces research on women's activism, noting that the main focus has been placed on community management and social mothering as sources of motivation, political perspective and activity. The author suggests that these explanations have been imbued with a predetermination of appropriate action (progressiveness) that effectively renders as radical the activism by some women while ignoring the activism by others. This separation and privileging has arisen, in part, because of a theoretical preoccupation by feminist researchers with illustrating women's marginality and an empirical focus on public actions. When feminist perspectives have been applied to women's participation in environmental debates, there has been a narrowing of visibility of women's motivations, perspectives, and actions. It is argued that feminist conceptions need to go beyond maternal/community explanations and advocate that activism be considered in terms of its embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts. The author suggests that embeddedness overcomes the implicit reverse hierarchy of marginalisation discourses and includes both private and public spaces and actions in conceptions of women's activism. Turning to northern Vancouver Island, the author illustrates how embeddedness helps to render visible and intelligible, the multiplicity, consistencies and contradictions in women's positions and activities in support of conventional forestry. For these reasons, the author believes that embeddedness is useful as a means to generate dialogue across current divisions among women, forms of activism, and notions of appropriate relations with non-human nature.     

Red Tory and Blue Labour: More Theology Needed

Abstract

Phillip Blond's Red Tory project has been widely credited with influencing the policies of the Conservative Party under David Cameron, and especially Cameron's "Big Society" thinking. Maurice Glasman has, meanwhile, been a key voice in rethinking Labour Party policy in the post-Blair/Brown years—the so-called Blue Labour programme. Both make space for religion, and Christianity in particular, within the core narratives of their projects and both have sought to build alliances with church bodies. The two projects are united in their critique of liberal assumptions, and this leads to significant congruences between them. Yet the place of Christianity and religion in their thinking is surprisingly different, reflecting the political genealogy of their projects in Burkean Toryism on Blond's part and Alinskian Community Organizing on Glasman's. Nevertheless, the attacks which both have suffered at the hands of social and economic liberals suggest that their ideas have traction. Both, however, are deficient in that their focus on communities as sources of virtue refuses to acknowledge that Enlightenment liberalism has any virtues to its credit. This is fundamentally a theological, rather than just a political, error, since it fails to capture the essential both/and embedded in Christian orthodoxy and the importance of corrective perspectives in Christian practice this side of the eschaton.     

HANNIBAL GONE ASTRAY? A CRITICAL COMMENT ON W. C. MAHANEY ET AL.: ‘THE TRAVERSETTE (ITALIA) ROCKFALL: GEOMORPHOLOGICAL INDICATOR OF THE HANNIBALIC INVASION ROUTE’ (ARCHAEOMETRY, 52, 1 [2010] 156–72)

For a long time now, historians have considered the way across the Col de Clapier as the most likely invasion route of Hannibal's army across the Alps. Mahaney et al. challenge this view by introducing a two‐tier rockfall into the discussion, which they believe is mentioned in the ancient texts and has gone unnoticed by modern scholars. Since a deposit of this kind can only be found at the Col de la Traversette—and there alone—Hannibal's crossing of the Alps, so they reason, must have followed this alternative route. However, a critical reassessment of the ancient texts and a closer look at the geomorphological situation clearly show that this interpretation is unwarranted.     

Realizing Carbon's Value: Discourse and Calculation in the Production of Carbon Forestry Offsets in Costa Rica

Abstract: This article examines the relation between discourse and value in the production of a carbon forestry offset project among indigenous smallholders in Costa Rica. By analyzing a pivotal cost–benefit calculation that changed the trajectory of the project, this article makes two principal claims. First, the intelligibility of the calculation is grounded in a discursive formation that is emergent from a history of development projects in the region, where particular ways of speaking about the relation between indigenous bodies and agriculture have allowed carbon's commodification to emerge as a desirable project. Second, the calculations resulted in quantified representations of space that were necessary for the offset to become useful within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. In this case, the forestry offset's use value derived from quantified representations of agricultural space; a process that opened some forms of land use for receiving carbon while foreclosing on others.     

A Lapse in Historical Memory: Guy Weadick and the Calgary Stampede

Guy Weadick was the American founder of the Calgary Stampede in 1912. By 1930, due to Weadick's vision and promotional genius, the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede (two events having merged by then) was internationally recognized as the premier event of its type in the world. Then, with dramatic suddenness, Weadick was fired in 1932. This article suggests that the mutual bitterness and resentment that accompanied this termination resulted in “a lapse of historical memory” and to Weadick's relative under-recognition by the organization for which he did so much.     

Editorial: new moves in Britain

Melaka is represented in Malaysia's tourist and heritage industries as the place 'where it all began'. This article examines the meaning of this slogan in the context of the cultural policies of the Malaysian state in the 1970s and 1980s when constructions of the political and religious traditions of the pre-colonial feudal Melakan Sultanate were presented as emblematic of the modern nation. The images of the Sultanate, of colonial rule and of Malaysian nationalism in Melaka's museums are analysed.The emphasis on ethnic Malay heritage also indigenised that of other Melakan inhabitants, such as the Portuguese Eurasians or the Peranakan, and ignored that of the majority, later Chinese immigrants. Finally the article questions the future of these representations with the shift in Malaysian cultural representations in the 1990s to those of a modernising, multi-ethnic nation in which a feudal past plays a lesser role.     

The West's moral and political crisis

The West is in the grip of a moral panic with unforeseeable political consequences. After four decades of neoliberalism, cracks are beginning to appear in the form of nationalist challenges from the right and a youthful insurrection from the left, both frequently described as ‘populist’ by establishment figures. The Faustian compact made with finance capital by the traditional parties of the centre‐left in the 1990s now leaves them on the verge of extinction. The underlying conditions for this disarray are a massive demographic shift at the global level which will see Asians and Africans with over four‐fifths of the world's population in 2100. This editorial briefly reviews the Cold War and the transformations that have occurred since. A world revolution after 1945 was overthrown by a counter‐revolution in 1979–1980 which is itself under threat now. The American Empire is sustained by mercantilism, militarism, the world currency, intellectual property and the Internet economy. Free markets are just an ideological fig leaf for this. The editorial concludes with a review of recent political events in the US, France and Britain: Trump's presidency, Macron's improbable rise and Corbyn's surge in May's snap election. In Britain's case, the terrorist attacks, hung parliament and Grenfell Tower fire constitute a perfect storm that could sink the British political right.