The Ethics of Philanthropy

Abstract

This essay considers the ancient antecedents to the “new field” of the ethics of philanthropy, arguing that key questions such as “to whom should we give our money?” have already been explored by ancient authors and that the answers they give to these questions can be quite different to the answers given by contemporary scholars. By analysing the treatment of giving in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero’s De Officiis, and Seneca’s De Beneficiis, I argue that the focus of ancient thinkers upon giving within one’s own community can be viewed as a possible response to a number of issues that have been raised by modern scholars, including the “problem of acting at a distance” and the “problem of accountability.” Moreover, these ancient thinkers have additional, positive reasons for thinking that philanthropy should take place within one’s own community, based upon their ideas of man’s natural duty to his political community, and the social benefits that can be derived from local philanthropy. The integration of ancient perspectives, then, into these modern debates, can serve to complement and broaden research in this emerging field.     

The Spirit and the Gifts: Dako,Benjamin Morrell and Cargo in the Vitiaz Trading area,New Guinea

In 1830 an American trader, Benjamin Morrell, abducted Dako, the son of a prominent leader from Uneapa Island in the Bismarck Sea, took him to New York and, four years later, returned him to Uneapa. Dako's encounter with America and his return provides insight into the region half a century before colonization, and in particular into local mytho‐practical knowledge at that time. This enables us to discern subsequent transformations. Myths concerning an origin spirit and guardian of the dead, Pango, which then dominated Uneapa cosmology have since ‘disappeared’. This, we argue, is not because Pango has been superseded or suppressed, but because the parallel ‘white’ world over which the mytho‐practical Pango presided has become ever more manifest as Uneapa has been drawn into a colonial, post‐colonial and globalised world. Today, Pango refers predominantly to white people. Islander's experience of American ‘Pango’ was a shocking event at the time, but we show how trading with Pango established transformatory possibilities for reciprocal trading relations with the dead which remain the concern of today's Cult movement on the island.     

Producing African-descent: afro-peruvian music,intangible heritage,authenticity and bureaucracy in a Latin American music compilation

ABSTRACT

Policy and actions for the safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) are laced with politics of representation and meaning-making of expressive culture within and outside communities. This article explores how ICH experts, practitioners, activists, and other actors negotiate and re-construct ideas of racial identity and authenticity in one such initiative. Sponsored by CRESPIAL in 2012, the album Cantos y Música Afrodescendientes de América Latina is a compilation of music of Afro-descendant communities in Latin America. Conceived as a project for safeguarding the musical ICH of these communities, it involved participation from thirteen Latin American governments. This paper, centered on the Peruvian participation in this project, studies the bureaucratic intricacies of this project, exploring how ideas on racial identity and authenticity overlap with political agendas and administrative requirements in order to produce a unified representation of ‘Afro-Latin American’ music. My analysis highlights 1) the local knowledge systems that inform the ideas of racial identity and authenticity advanced by the project’s actors; 2) their adopted strategies within Peru’s bureaucratic network of heritage management; and 3) the positionality, capacity and agency of each actor for achieving their particular goals in this collaborative project.     

Towards a new philosophy of history. European Vichianism and Neapolitan Hegelianism (1804–48)

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Hegel’s reception among nineteenth-century Neapolitan authors went hand-in-hand with a renewed interest in Giambattista Vico’s philosophy of history. It considers the mechanisms of circulation and reception that shaped responses to Hegelianism within the broader context of European debates on La Scienza Nuova. These developments largely directed Neapolitans’ understanding of Hegel’s ideas and encouraged the merging of local thought with wider European currents. Neapolitan Hegelians engaged very extensively with the works of French and northern Italian authors, such as Jules Michelet and Carlo Cattaneo, who had understood Vico as a proponent of an absolute concept of historical time that neatly dovetailed with the philosophical preoccupations common among German idealists. The article makes a case for a transnational understanding of Neapolitan Hegelianism, arguing that this current of thought did not merely stem from the passive absorption of Hegel’s ideas, but emerged as the synthesis of a local and a European dimension of philosophy.     

Tourism and sacred landscape in Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park,Nepal

Abstract

While tensions between the sacred and the profane in tourism have been of long standing interest to tourism scholars, there is a dearth of literature on the growing influence of tourism on local residents’ spirituality and religious practices in sacred landscapes. This paper examines how local residents’ interpretations of sacred landscapes are influenced by tourism development, and whether tourism plays a role in influencing and reproducing sacred landscape and place-based spiritual values. This exploratory study is based on four months of fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015 in Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park in Nepal’s Khumbu Region. Results of the 33 interviews conducted with ethnic Sherpa community indicate the Sherpa consider their homeland as a beyul (sacred, hidden valley), and its landscapes (i.e. mountains, forests and lakes) as the abode of local deities. Tourism’s influence on local spiritual values is evident and reflected in changes in mountain deity worship, shift in human-environment relationship, and alterations in religious routines and practices. Although Sherpa still regard Khumbu as a sacred place and are actively involved in maintaining their spiritual values and cultural identity, the religious influence of beyul is slowly diminishing as reliance on tourism grows.     

Grief as method: topographies of grief,care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands

Abstract

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief’s methodological implications using the concept of ‘grief as method,’ an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, ‘grief as method’ also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of ‘caring with’ our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief’s geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape ‘grief as method’ profoundly. I examine grief’s spatial implications by building on Katz’s ‘topography’ to theorize a ‘topography of grief’ that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions (‘the field’ vs. ‘the not-field’) and methodological ones (the ‘researcher-self’ vs. the ‘personal-self’). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. ‘Grief as method,’ in offering a spatial analysis of grief’s impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.     

Uncomfortable proximity. Literary technique,authorial provocations and dog whistles in Michel Houellebecq’s fiction

ABSTRACT

In 2002, following an interview with the magazine Lire where he described Islam as ‘la religion la plus con’, Michel Houellebecq was prosecuted, and eventually acquitted, for ‘injure raciale et incitation à la haine religieuse’. In discussions of Houellebecq’s case, supporters were quick to invoke the ‘special value’ of the literary space for the free discussion of ideas, however provocative or unpalatable. Houellebecq’s acquittal, and support from figures such as Salman Rushdie, have afforded the writer an unprecedented degree of literary freedom. Subsequent novels such as La Possibilité d’une île (2005) and Soumission (2015) show the author fully inhabiting this freedom in order to undertake a provocative critique of Islam. This article explores how both literary technique and authorial presence endorses the controversial ideas of his texts within Houellebecq’s writing and demonstrates how a movement from ambiguously undermining towards reinforcing those ideas can be observed. In particular, the framing of provocative ideas and assertions expounded in his fiction has become less robust throughout his career. This leads to, I suggest, a greater porosity between Houellebecq’s fiction and that of contemporary right-wing essayists such as Alain Finkielkraut and Renaud Camus.     

Doing gender and the GeoHumanities – celebrations and intoxications

Abstract

This paper celebrates Gender, Place and Culture’s 25th Anniversary by staging a dialogue of sorts between feminist, queer and trans knowledge projects and the interdisciplinary field of practice based GeoHumanities, in other words creative research practices such as film-making, theatre, creative writing or live art. In embracing the vibrancy of these fields together the paper addresses two much wider issues; firstly, the continued challenges that these knowledge projects face, especially in an era of post-truth and the undermining of expertise, which together risks a reactive retrenchment of academic practices. Secondly, within the GeoHumanities, feminist scholar-practitioners have been leading the way in evolving the critical-political dimensions of these interdisciplinary practices, but as they acknowledge, much more remains to be done to ensure that the critical potential of these doings is realised.

In short, this paper asks, what can/have GeoHumanities ‘doings’ contributed to the challenges of gender based knowledge projects, and further, how can/are the critical questions framed by these knowledge projects evolving GeoHumanities practices? Three large concerns frame discussion of possibilities for mutual learning and advancement; what forms of knowledge count; who can make and legitimate knowledge, and how we might build critical perspectives for the transformations claimed in the name of these practices? As such, the paper honours GPC’s quarter century through a forward looking celebration of exciting scholarly practices that remain committed to the foundational tenants of feminist, trans and queer knowledge projects: namely their ongoing critique and remaking of knowledge hierarchies, academic practices, and the political economies of the academy.     

Beyond Revolution,Beyond the Law: Christian Anarchism in Conversation with Giorgio Agamben

ABSTRACT

The Christian anarchist tradition and the work of Giorgio Agamben fit within a subversive trajectory of political theology that critiques the state paradigm, while also operating at a distance from it in their creation of a newly imagined political community. This research asks what it could look like to conceive of a political community beyond the state, imagined from the subject position of the marginalized. It also seeks a mutually informed path towards the practical formation of such communities, as elaborated through a case study of the Anabaptist tradition. Agamben’s concepts provide a renovation of the political themes of Christian anarchism, including the ideas of moving beyond revolution, voluntary exile through the abdication of rights, and messianic vocation. As the space for political praxis within Agamben’s work continues to evolve, the Anabaptist tradition provides helpful practices to imagine a withdrawal from the governmental machine as a community of voluntary exiles.     

An outline of Alan Wilson’s philosophy of knowledge,with special attention given to the importance of interdisciplinarity and its role in undergraduate education

ABSTRACT

This article explores two ideas due to Alan Wilson: superconcepts and enabling disciplines. These ideas emerge from Wilson’s philosophy of knowledge and, in particular, from his thinking on interdisciplinarity. Both ideas are described, analysed and developed in the context of their wider importance in interdisciplinary undergraduate education and their implementation on the Arts and Sciences BASc at UCL. Some suggestions for future developments of these ideas at the proposed new university at the London Interdisciplinary School are offered.     

‘Let’s find out’: the historian laureate and participatory heritage discovery

ABSTRACT

Developing modes of engagement in the construction of public heritage knowledge emphasize participatory media and active collaboration with citizens. The City of Edmonton created the first historian laureate position in Canada in 2010, and related programs are still rare. This article considers the interaction of narrative content with social and technological contexts of production, viewing the role of the historian laureate as amateur historian and professional storyteller. The historian laureate operates primarily in accessible contexts of leisure, mediated in part through digital technologies, and can respond relatively directly to community interests as a heritage coordinator rather than expert. Rather than representing oppositional or disruptive power to official heritage discourses, the project enables the production of ‘small heritages’ through a series of story episodes. These stories focus on events, people, places and artifacts that typically fall outside the meta-narratives and monuments of a city’s heritage landscape. The historian laureate, embodying or articulating local experience in ways amenable to leisure activity, demonstrates capacities to produce largely indeterminate, diverse and porous ideas of place and histories as part of a bottom-up social generation of knowledge.     

Relations among Clusters

Abstract

Many papers on economic geography have analysed industrial clusters, but few have addressed the relations among clusters. This paper discusses three types of relations among clusters to better understand why they occur and the roles that human resources, capital, knowledge and markets play in such relations. It provides theoretical ideas, empirical illustrations and suggestions for future research on the relations among clusters in a globalized economy.     

Cultural democracy: an ecological and capabilities approach

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been sustained critique of the conceptual and normative foundations of UK cultural policy – the paternalism of ‘excellence and access’ and the neoliberal logic of ‘creative industries’. Whilst these critiques are well established, there is little work offering alternative foundations. This paper makes a contribution to this task. It does so in three ways. Firstly, by identifying ‘cultural democracy’ as a key discourse offering a counter-formulation of what the aims of cultural policy could and should be, and analysing uses of this term, it highlights the need to more effectively conceptualize cultural opportunity. Secondly, drawing on research with one UK-based initiative, Get Creative, the paper identifies a particularly consequential aspect of cultural opportunity: its ecological nature. Thirdly, it shows that the capabilities approach to human development provides ideas with the potential to help build new conceptual and normative foundations for cultural policy. Proposing a distinctive account of cultural democracy characterized by systemic support for cultural capabilities, the paper concludes by indicating the implications this may have for research, policy and practice.     

Extra-regional linkages through MNCs in organizationally thick and specialized RISs: a source of new path development?

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how global innovation networks (GIN) within multinational companies (MNCs) act as extra-regional sources for path development in a regional innovation system (RIS) specializing in the oil and gas sector. We combine the literature on intra-firm knowledge dynamics in MNCs’ GIN with the literature on RISs to better understand their interrelatedness and their dynamics. Based on interviews with 15 MNCs located in the south-west of Norway, we find that firms are highly dependent on competence throughout the MNCs’ entire networks, as well as interaction with the overall RIS. The findings expose that MNCs’ GINs can act as extra-regional sources for path ‘extension’ in thick and specialized RISs through intra-firm mobility, observation and sharing of routines and best practice, mainly resulting in incremental innovations. We find some signs of potential path ‘renewal’, including radical innovation ideas. However, there are hampering factors linked to strong internal competition for innovation projects, pressure for local profitability and ownership motivation. At the level of RISs, new initiatives going beyond existing cluster initiatives and specializations need support.     

J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and intellectual history

ABSTRACT

Recent thinking about Intellectual History has moved beyond studying only verbal texts, to encompass other kinds of visual and aural texts that can be vehicles for generative thought. Where might music fit into this expanded conception? If ideas are defined purely as concepts that can be expressed in words, music can be no more than an “epiphenomenon”, a consequence or representation of ideas that lie behind it, but not capable of embodying those ideas in itself. Yet to many musicians, it seems obvious that music can function as a way in which ideas are developed and worked out. What kinds of knowledge might be embodied in music, then, and how do its meanings change over time? In this paper, I examine some of these issues through consideration of one of the key texts of Western art music, J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, exploring how it was conceived in a liturgical context in Bach’s time, how its meaning changed when transposed to the very different milieus of concert performance in nineteenth-century Berlin and colonial Sydney, and as it has been re-imagined in a variety of recent staged and recorded versions.     

Evaluating Community Archaeology in the UK

Abstract

Does community archaeology work? In the UK over the last decade, there has been a boom in projects utilising the popular phrase 'community archaeology'. These projects can take many different forms and have ranged from the public face of research and developer-funded programmes to projects run by museums, archaeological units, universities, and archaeological societies. Community archaeology also encapsulates those projects run by communities themselves or in dialogue between 'professional' and 'amateur' groups and individuals. Many of these projects are driven by a desire for archaeology to meet a range of perceived educational and social values in bringing about knowledge and awareness of the past in the present. These are often claimed as successful outputs of community projects. This paper argues that appropriate criteria and methodologies for evaluating the efficacy of these projects have yet to be designed. What is community archaeology for? Who is it for? And is it effectively meeting its targets? Focusing on the authors' experiences of directing community archaeology projects, together with the ongoing research assessing the efficacy of community archaeology projects in the UK, this paper aims to set out two possible methodologies: one of self-reflexivity, and one of ethnoarchaeological analysis for evaluating what community archaeology actually does for communities themselves.     

Some reflections on mental maps

ABSTRACT

The point of departure for this essay is a map drawn in 1963 by the writer’s maternal grandfather. It represents the village of Berg, located in northern Sweden, and depicts his activities as a farmer and hunter. But it is also based on grandfather’s collective knowledge of the village. In what follows I will examine mental maps of microspaces that reflect what is important to an individual or to the members of a community. One shows how Aivilik Inuits perceive their local environment; another set of urban maps from Los Angeles, California, are based on the views of residents in different areas. The social divides become strikingly apparent on these mental maps. Among the conspicuous features of my grandfather’s map are the images he drew to supplement the various geographical locations he laid out. In this respect one might compare medieval mappae mundi that is, maps of the world representing compendiums of all things worth knowing. I also consider the appearance of mysterious gaps on grandfather’s map, that is, “the silences”. Many general perspectives on mental mapping are suggested by a consideration of the map my grandfather drew.     

Caretakers of the Earth: integrating Canadian Aboriginal perspectives on culture and sustainability into local plans

Abstract

While still contested in most jurisdictions, a consensus on the four-pillar approach to sustainable development is slowly emerging. This perspective attempts to integrate the environmental, social, economic and cultural elements of a community into local sustainability planning processes and has been widely adopted in Canada as the basis of Integrated Community Sustainability Plans. However, Aboriginal perspectives have generally been marginalised in such efforts, largely because Aboriginal peoples take a more holistic approach to both sustainability and culture than Western-educated planners and decision makers. This article examines current approaches and methodologies adopted by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities in Canada to integrate culture in sustainability planning and presents several case studies that examine the application of medicine wheel and other Aboriginal integrative worldviews to community sustainability planning. It discusses whether Aboriginal perspectives on culture can provide an alternative narrative that will advance our understanding of culture’s role in community sustainability and counteract the monocultural perspectives that are the legacy of colonialism throughout the world.     

Public folklore dialogism and critical heritage studies

Abstract

Public folklore’s dialogic engagement with communities incorporates methodologies for sharing representational and interpretive authority, collaborative programme development, mutually constructed modes of presentation and stakeholder participation in policy-making. While recognising that heritage interventions inevitably involve power asymmetries, public folklore seeks to mitigate and diminish these imbalances as it develops approaches to enable communities to present their culture on their own terms. This paper explores dialogic public folklore practice through community self-documentation projects, folklife festivals, government folk arts funding programmes and a project promoting places of local cultural significance. It provides examples of the integration of multiple roles of public folklorists as scholars, administrators, producers of folklore presentations and government heritage officers. Public folklore praxis achieved through the integration of these roles is seen as a potential model for critical heritage studies praxis for scholars who are advisors and researchers in intangible cultural heritage (ICH) initiatives. Critical heritage scholars involved with ICH can learn from how public folklorists engage with communities and foster cultural self-determination. For public folklorists, collaboration and increased dialogue with critical heritage scholars could foster greater awareness of hegemonic discourses, reconceptualisation of the social base of ICH and recognition of the pitfalls of fostering economic development through heritage.     

Migration discipline hijacked: distances and interruptions of a research militancy

Abstract

In this paper we reflect on some instruments to interrupt the governmentalization of knowledge production at play in migration studies – mainstream, critical, and radical alike. We take knowledge production as the struggle-field where confronting, resisting, and interrupting the disciplining of migrations that arises from their academic and governmental incorporation as objects (of research and of policies). In contrast, we sketch a political epistemology of migrations, asking: which knowledge practices and interventions account for the contestedness migrations spark, and for the turbulence, excess, and upheavals migrants trigger? The paper discusses two of such paths. First, we sketch an approach to research that works ‘within and against’ the distances that perform and define migration field-sites and their pristine subject positions; second, we argue for the development and deployment of interruptions against those unquestioned chains of equivalences that are embedded in migration knowledge. Building on our engagement with Libyan war refugees in Tunisia and in Italy, we reflect on how these instruments somehow bring scholarly knowledge to its limits while working within its premises.