‘Symbolic reservoirs’ and inter-group relations: West African examples

A number of archaeologists have recently considered the possible functioning of shared systems of symbols and beliefs — sometimes called symbolic reservoirs — within and between more or less closely related West African societies. Elements from these systems are expressed in behaviour and in material culture to support and articulate group social strategies; they are therefore capable of structuring artefact variation on a large scale. This concept has obvious implications for our understanding of regional variation in archaeological assemblages. In this paper, I offer a critique of the concept of the symbolic reservoir; I believe that the metaphorical implications of the term reservoir are not useful, and that present conceptions are of an entity too bounded and too stable usefully to reflect the dynamics of social interaction within and (especially) between African societies. I then offer an alternative view of the spread of symbolic and stylistic elements between groups.

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Résumé Un certain nombre d'archéologues ont récemment envisagé la possibilité de systèmes communs de symboles et de croyances — parfois désignés par le terme réservoirs symboliques — au sein de sociétés d'Afrique occidentale entretenant entre elles des rapports plus ou moins étroits. Des éléments de ces systèmes s'expriment en termes de comportement et de culture matérielle et permettent de soutenir et d'articuler des stratégies sociales de groupes; ils peuvent donc structurer sur une grande échelle variation des objets façonnés. Ce concept a des conséquences évidentes par rapport à notre compréhension des variations régionales entre collections archéologiques. Dans cet article, je présente une critique du concept de réservoir symbolique; j'estime peu pertinentes les implications métaphoriques du terme réservoir et je pense que les conceptions actuelles représentent une entité trop bornée et trop stable pour pouvoir bien refléter la dynamique de l'interaction sociale au sein des sociétés africaines et (surtout) entre elles. Je présente ensuite un point de vue différent sur la propagation d'éléments symboliques et stylistiques parmi des groupes.

     

Tibetan livelihoods and the ‘Great Development of the West’:Modernization,pastoral resources,and the ‘urban future’ of the grasslands

1.Introduction Rural livelihoods in Tibet2 have,during the last fifteen years,undergone fast and profound processes of economic transformation and state-led modernization,both in the TAR and the Eastern parts of the Tibetan plateau.Local life styles have changed at a pace rarely seen in an area where people subsisted,until the late 1990s,almost entirely on nomadic mobile livestock production.New local socio-economic structures with peculiar characteristics have emerged.They include the decline of traditional livestock-based (mobile) pastoralism;the emergence of a ‘post-pastoral’ economy based on the extraction of medicinal fungi for Chinese and international markets;and the emergence,often from below,of new arrangements governing rangeland access and usage.     

Consumption and the ‘Social Self’ in Medieval Southern England

Over the last 30 years we have become increasingly aware of the commercialising nature of the medieval English economy. However, these insights have had little impact on narratives of consumption, which persist in seeing it as a characteristic of modernity. Here it is argued that we must move away from seeing an early modern consumer revolution and instead think about consumption in medieval society, particularly to examine the implications of commercialisation for identity and selfhood. A framework is developed, building upon David G. Shaw’s use of the ‘social self’ and the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to explore how the increasing variability, and wider range, of objects impacted upon the negotiation of selfhood in the 13th–15th centuries.     

Reinforcing Diversity: From the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’

This paper focuses on Jan Monk's contribution to reinforcing diversity and collaboration in the field of human geography. It illustrates how gendered diversity and feminism is promoted in her academic work both inside the Anglo-American academic world and outside, by exposing the feminist voices from around the world and mainstreaming them in her collaborative work. Fostering and reinforcing diversity has become a body of knowledge in her extensive publications in which she assesses the varying extent and nature of feminist geography in the Anglophone world and across countries, attempting to interpret differences in terms of geographical and cultural contexts and disciplinary trends. The paper emphasizes how fostering diversity and collaboration in Jan's academic work is not only about writing articles, editing books and producing a film, but also engages the formulation of organizational structures such as the Routledge book series and the initiation and establishment of the Commission of Gender and Geography of the International Geographical Union which have contributed to the production of collaborative feminist geographical knowledge across spaces and places.     

‘‘This Secret Town’: British Intelligence,the Special Relationship,and the Vietnam War’

This article seeks to revise our understanding of Cold War intelligence as a practice. The conventional view is that Britain's MI6 waged a battle in the shadows consisting of espionage and covert action. However, a number of MI6 officers operated as observers, conducting what we might call ‘intelligence without espionage’. The dual identity of these officers raises important questions about how intelligence operated in the blurred space between traditional diplomacy and human espionage using agents. Using the case of MI6 officers in the British Consulate-General in Hanoi between 1965 and 1972, this article explores how a dual identity provided alternative means of acquiring intelligence within a highly secure state that exhibited remarkable paranoia about foreign spies. Furthermore, the United States lacked diplomatic representation in Hanoi and so the British Consulate provided a remarkable window for Western intelligence on the effect of ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’, Lyndon Johnson's escalating air campaign against North Vietnam. Both Johnson and Harold Wilson were avid readers of this material. Accordingly, in the context of the Cold War intelligence partnership between the UK and US, the consulate in Hanoi was an example of the ‘inverse’ special relationship, in which Britain enjoyed unique value.     

‘Cultivating the African’: Barclays DCO and the Decolonisation of Business Strategy in Kenya, 1950–78

While there is a great deal of recent research on the response of British business to decolonisation and a wide range of literature examining the alleged ‘neo-colonial’ relations between business and state in the post-colonial period, few studies of business attempt to straddle the awkward periodisation defined by the official hand-over of political responsibility. Barclays Bank DCO embarked on its decolonisation strategy in Kenya in anticipation of political and economic change and continued to follow that same strategy after the formal transfer of power from London to Nairobi. The article demonstrates the precise nexus of political and commercial reasons for Barclays’ approach in Kenya and outlines its successes and failures in responding to political and economic change in a newly emerging nation. In so doing, it emphasises that this particular British business, while not always in complete control of events on the ground, was more than a victim or beneficiary of circumstances about which it knew little and could do less. Rather, Barclays was an active participant in the process of decolonisation, reorganising and adapting its business model and employment structure to suit the times in Kenya.     

Between Internationalism and Empire: Ireland,the ‘Like-Minded’ Group,and the Search for a New International Order, 1974–82

This article examines the response of a group of small and medium-sized states to the Global South's demands for a new international economic order in the 1970s and early 1980s. Reading that experience through the eyes of the group's smallest state, Ireland, it describes the rise of a loosely organised collective whose support for economic justice was based on three pillars: social democracy; Christian justice; and a broadly held (if variously defined) anti-colonialism. Internationalism, and in particular support for the institutions of the United Nations, became another distinguishing feature of ‘like-minded’ action, and was an attempt by those states to carve out a space for independent action in the cold war. Détente and the decline of US hegemony helped in that respect, by encouraging a more globalist reading of the world order. Once the United States resumed its interventionist policies in the late 1970s, the room for ‘like-minded’ initiatives declined. Yet the actions of the ‘like-minded’ states should not be understood solely in terms of the changing dynamics of the cold war. This article concludes by arguing for the prominence of empire, decolonisation, and the enduring North–South binary in shaping international relations in a post-colonial world.     

Youth geographies of urban estrangement in the Canadian city: risk management,race relations and the ‘sacrificial stranger’

This paper explores the impact of urban social divisions and changing race relations on the experiences of disadvantaged youth living on the periphery of two Canadian cities: Vancouver and Toronto. We analyze a cross-national subsample of 60 disadvantaged youths’ perceptions of urban social conflict and changing race relations in their city and school. We raise the larger question of how and why economically disadvantaged young people might embody particular understandings of safety, race, the other and security in different spatial registers of the city. We utilize an ethnographic methodology drawing from diverse but interrelated fields: border studies, the phenomenology of estrangement and a materialist version of critical race studies [(Ahmed, S. 1999. “Home and Away Narratives of Migration and Strangeness.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329–347, Ahmed, S. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Ahmed, S. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge; Kearney, R., and V. E. Taylor. 2005. “A Conversation with Richard Kearney.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6 (2): 17–26)].     

‘Our Boys With the Maple Leaf on Their Shoulders and Straps’: Masculinity,the Toronto Press,and the Outbreak of the South African War, 1899

Abstract

Coverage of the South African War by the Toronto daily press at its outbreak in late 1899 was implicitly gendered. Placed within the context of nineteenth-century connections between manhood and war, claims of ineffective soldiering, poor shooting ability, and indecisive political action were also implicit attacks on the manhood and character of Canadian politicians at home and the Boer enemy in South Africa. Representations of soldiers, enemies, and politicians in the press also expose connections between war and gender and allow historians to question how war is sold and characterized to the nation through ideas about masculinity.     

‘We are of the connections’: migration,methodological nationalism,and ‘militant research’

Abstract

If there were no borders, there would be no migrants – only mobility. The persistent reification of migrants and migration – even in critical migration studies –(re-)fetishizes and (re-)naturalizes the epistemological stability attributed to the (‘national’) state as a modular fixture of geopolitical space. In this regard, migration scholarship (however critical) is implicated in a continuous (re-)reification of ‘migrants’ as a distinct category of human mobility. Thus, the methodological nationalism that rationalizes the whole conjuncture of borders-making-migrants supplies a kind of defining horizon for migration studies as such. The dilemma of methodological nationalism has never been merely a problem of thought, however. It is indeed a manifestation of the veritable participation of researchers and scholars – whether consciously or unwittingly – in the very same sociopolitical processes and struggles through which the ‘national’ configuration of ‘society’ (or, the social field) is reified and actualized as the territorial expression of state power. Therefore, the questions of methodological nationalism and what might be called ‘militant research’ are deeply interconnected, indeed, mutually constitutive. As scholars of ‘migration’ – and above all, as practitioners of ‘militant research’ – we must attend to a self-reflexive critique of our own complicities with the ongoing nationalization of ‘society’. Hence, as researchers or scholars of migration, we are indeed ‘of the connections’ between migrants’ transnational mobilities and the political, legal, and border-policing regimes that seek to orchestrate, regiment, and manage their energies. We are ‘of’ these connections because there is no ‘outside’ or analytical position beyond them. The larger juridical regimes of citizenship, denizenship, and alienage configure us to be always-already located within the nexus of inequalities that are at stake in these conflicts.     

Modernisation without ‘banalisation’: Towards a new era in French African aid relations?

This article considers recent changes in France's assistance programme to black Africa. It looks at the historic logic underpinning France's aid policies and structures; examines the latest reforms; and attributes these to the election of a reformist socialist government, a favourable political climate, globalisation and the constraints of EMU. The main obstacle to reform is said to be President Chirac who remains attached to the old logic of French African relations. Ultimately, however, it is not the struggle between modernisers and traditionalists but pressures from France's African and European partners which will determine the future of French aid policy.     

The new ‘Pacific Century’ and the rise of China: an international relations perspective

The re-emergence of the ‘Pacific Century’, or ‘Asia-Pacific Century’, discourse centred on the rise of Chinese power raises important questions in the discipline of international relations (IR). These questions relate to the conceptualisation of the Pacific Century discourse, its application to the contemporary empirical case, and its relationship and amenability to IR theories. In order to address these questions, the article subjects the concept of a ‘Pacific Century’ to critical analysis through the synergy of three pertinent ‘debates’. First, it creates a novel analytical framework to define and codify the parameters of the Pacific Century debate; a discourse that has until now remained diffuse and inchoate. Second, it engages with the present ‘great debate’ in IR between the traditional/rationalist and critical/reflectivist approaches, applying them in juxtaposition to the notion of a ‘new’ Pacific Century, led by China. Thirdly, then, the article speaks to the ‘rising China’ debate, which currently captivates commentators both in academic and policy-making circles. The article explores how the ‘Pacific Century’ concept is a compound of both ideational and material factors: it is at once both a political/ideological project and a reified intellectual frame of reference. Through this multidimensional analysis, the article aims to shape the re-emerging debate on the Pacific Century, affirm the enduring value of the term, and demonstrate the efficacy of IR theories in deconstructing conceptual problems.     

International conservation ‘volunteering’ and the geographies of global environmental citizenship

Growing numbers of fee-paying ‘volunteers’ leave the UK each year to work on international nature conservation projects. Powerful advocates argue that such volunteering offers active global environmental citizens the opportunity to make a difference, delivering public services through a politically and economically appealing model of social enterprise. This paper reviews the geographies of citizenship performed in international conservation volunteering from the UK to critically examine these claims. It draws on and develops three conceptual approaches from political geography. First, it examines international conservation volunteering as a mode of cosmopolitan global environmental citizenship, guided by the universal framework of natural science across a flat earth of difference making opportunities. Second, it reviews the material reality of conservation volunteering as an illustration of the neoliberal and neo-colonial tendencies within mainstream global environmentalism. Third, it moves beyond these familiar theoretical tropes to present a more-than-human account of international conservation volunteering from the UK. This attends to the material assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies, practices and affects caught up in within these expressions of citizenship. In conclusion the paper critically compares the different materialisations of citizenship offered by these approaches. It finds that the geographies of citizenship performed within the sector are neither ‘global’ or ‘environmental’, nor do they comprise modes of citizenship that embody planetary humanism or panoptic rationalism. Instead, the modes, subjects and spatialities of citizenship performed here are asymmetric, affective and more-than-human. This has important implications for the scope, practices and future of international environmental politics and for the emerging sub-discipline of the geographies of citizenship.     

Anton Dumitriu,the ‘Axiomatic Culture’ and the ‘Crisis of the West’

Anton Dumitriu (1905–92) was a Romanian philosopher and logician who attempted to develop the more or less consistent theory of an ‘axiomatic’ tradition, referring to culture and civilisation in the ‘East’ (defined actually as Far East) vs. the ‘West’ (mainly Europe, both Western and East-Central) especially in the inter-war and post-war periods. Dumitriu's essays on Romanian culture or on Eastern vs. Western culture as published in his book Eleatic and Heraclitic Cultures (1987) will make the object of this study. This work is a revised version of his East and West (1943). It should be noted that most of the material discussed here is actually still available only in Romanian since Dumitriu's work on Logic is already translated into English, but his musings on culture and civilisation are available only in Romanian and are, consequently, almost unknown outside the country. This study attempts to make up for that and also to connect Dumitriu's views on culture and civilisation or East and West both to earlier Romanian views and currents in defining culture as well as to contemporary general European trends, while also taking into account the context of the Communist regime in which the second edition of his book was issued.     

On the edge: ‘Community’ and ‘sustainability’ on the Isle of Harris,Outer Hebrides

Although scholars have recently begun to question the manner in which nationalist temporal narratives are constructed, a similar analysis of nationalist spatial narratives has yet to occur. Instead, scholarship often remains trapped within the territorial boundaries of the nation‐state; the only ontologically given container of nationalism. In order to advance theoretical understanding of nationalism, however, it is imperative that geographers break this sedentary spell, by beginning to map the interstitial historical‐geographies of nation‐building in the context of globalisation. Through an analysis of the transnational development of Irish nationalism in the second half of the 19th century in particular, this paper will illuminate the important role played by the diaspora and other transnational actors in the development of Irish nationalism in Ireland.     

Museums and the ‘Death of Experience’: singularity,interiority and the outside

This paper discusses a number of well-known critiques of the museum that seek to identify it as a problematic space for experience. The key argument put forward is that we can find within that analysis a critical geography around the museum that help us to understand the work that it does in relation to experience. Three spatial motifs are drawn from this analysis and discussed: the singular, the interior and the outside. The paper argues that museums since the nineteenth century have established a topos for experience based on a mimetic realism around the experience of both culture and history through the first two of these spatial expressions. Through them museums produces a fabulation of culture and history that supplements for the lack of topos for experience found within modern society as a whole. The latter spatiality – that of the outside – is found in the form of the absent–presence of the event in relation to the archiving principle of the museum, thereby continually unsettling the first two expressions and calling them into question. This dynamic reveals the museum as a space to critically think about what it does with experience and the importance of spatial analysis for that.