Growing Knowledge in Bolivip,Papua New Guinea

Knowledge practices in the Mountain Ok or Min area of Papua New Guinea have, since Fredrik Barth's pioneering Baktaman study, come to exemplify ‘secrecy’ in Melanesian ethnography and have consequently represented something of an enigma to anthropological interpretation. This paper reports research among the Angkaiyakmin of Bolivip village, Western Province, and addresses the problem posed by Min revelatory practices. The Barthian paradigm interprets awem as ‘secret knowledge’, and holds that revelations are restricted to infrequent performances of male initiation rituals which serve to manage the distribution of secrets exclusively among suitably qualified men. The Bolivip data, however, suggest that awem (glossed here as ‘important’) is more widely known, and conventionally revealed to women and junior initiates in hidden contexts. Through analysing the movements involved in composing efficacious forms by combining ‘halves' in Bolivip, and illustrating the comparison Angkaiyakmin draw between taro gardening and cult ritual, the paper argues for a reorientation of approaches to ‘secrecy’ and to conceptions of ‘knowledge’.     

Sustainability Standards and the Water Question

Increased global trade in agricultural commodities has boosted fresh water consumption. This export of ‘virtual water’, embedded in products sold abroad, has increasingly affected local communities and ecosystems, especially in arid regions. Recent initiatives to certify agricultural production are showing a rapidly growing interest in considering water issues within schemes of quality assurance, sustainable production and fair trade. This article scrutinizes current water sustainability certification schemes, and how they affect local water user communities. The authors use three notions of governmentality to examine water sustainability standards and how they aim ‘to conduct the conduct’ of water users: (1) standards as ‘production of truth’ and ‘mentalities’ that constitute systems of collective rationalities, values, norms and knowledge; (2) standards as networks that prescribe roles and establish power relations between companies and producers; and (3) standards as ‘techniques of visibilization’ that control practices and discipline producers. Private standards in general reinforce the political and market power of private sector agro‐food chains in local water management, to the detriment of local water user communities and national governments. However, sustainability certification could also potentially enable local, regional, national and international organizations of user communities to stake claims and negotiate to protect their water sources and livelihoods.     

Climates of control: Violent adaptation and climate change in the Philippines

This paper considers the limits of adaptation as a concept in global environmental governance and advocacy by examining the climate change policy of the populist Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. By focusing on heterogenous state responses to the 2018–2019 El Niño drought, I demonstrate how the Duterte administration has worked to achieve a violent vision of climate adaptation through a jarring combination of practices: exhorting the devastating reality of climate change; denigrating multilateral mitigation efforts as colonial injustices; subverting indigenous peoples' land rights; and fostering the extrajudicial assassination of activists. Though Duterte's wider climate change policies are often viewed as a strategic distraction or the isolated product of an erratic populist, I argue that these recent responses to climate change in the Philippines, which fuse decolonial and nationalist sensibilities to confrontational forms of illiberalism, should be examined as part of the larger unfurling of illiberal adaptation politics across Philippine history and the Global South. These politics, and their considerable (though far from total) local resonance, challenge both universalist Western political rationalities and new directions in climate justice movement calling for ontological inclusivity. I highlight the need for a closer examination of the origins, practices and implications of violent adaptions.     

Variation in the taphonomic effect of scavengers in semi‐arid Australia linked to rainfall and the El Niño Southern Oscillation

Scavenging is one of the primary taphonomic processes shaping the final composition of fossil faunal assemblages. The taphonomic effect of scavengers is variable and must be understood in the context of the causes of that variation. In this study, we investigated relationships between the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), variable rainfall and scavenging on 20–40 kg mammal carcasses in semi‐arid New South Wales over four years. Following periods of above‐average rainfall (coincident with the La Niña phase of the ENSO), there was an increased availability of non‐carrion food and scavenging activity was moderate. Following below‐average rainfall (coincident with the El Niño phase of the ENSO), foraging options diminished, leading to a greater importance of carrion in the diet of scavengers and a resultant increase in carcass disturbance, transport and destruction by scavengers. Feral pigs (Sus scrofa) and red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) were the most taphonomically significant scavengers in the study. Australian ravens (Corvus coronoides) and wedge‐tailed eagles (Aquila audax) were active scavengers throughout the period of the study, but had little impact on bone survival. Lace monitors (Varanus varius) also fed mostly on soft tissue and were only present seasonally. We found that climate variability in the form of short‐term oscillation can result in significant variation in the impact of scavengers on carcasses and may be an important consideration when evaluating site formation scenarios and biases in fossil faunal assemblages. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Regional History and Ethnic Identity in the Hub of New Guinea: the Emergence of the Min1

Recent approaches to the ethnography of Papua New Guinea stress the historicity of local cultures and their encompassment in larger fields of relations. In this paper I consider the historical and cultural background to the emergence of the ‘Min’ as a novel ethnic designation among the Mountain Ok peoples of the Fly-Sepik headwaters. While Min identity draws much of its impetus from responses to mining operations and resistance to provincial governments, it is also clear that it grows out of a complex interaction between pre-existing cultural identities, a history of colonial administration and Christian evangelism. Emerging at the intersection of local and global processes, Min identity constitutes a regionalization of ethnicity which has led to agitation for the creation of a Min province, producing a movement that may outlive its immediate political aims.     

Port cities and hinterlands: A comparative study of Singapore and Calcutta

This paper analyses the evolution of Singapore and Calcutta from colonial port cities to a post-colonial city-state and a city within a state, respectively. It will examine how the historical trajectories of these cities were determined and complicated by their maritime character and evolving relations with their respective hinterlands. Singapore had a fluid (literally and metaphorically) hinterland and its economic, social and cultural orientations were defined by the maritime trade that it conducted and the networks that were developed as a result of its commercial activities. The modern state of Singapore, which embraces the world as its ‘hinterland’, remains in essence a port city – subjected to global flows, multi-cultural influences and fully integrated with and dependent on regional and global commercial networks. Calcutta's position as port city, too, grew out of empire and imperial trade, but unlike Singapore, it had a clearly defined and dominant hinterland – Bengal. Its identity as a Bengali city is therefore unmistakable and it clearly shares in the strengths and weaknesses of its immediate social, economic and political hinterland, especially in its post-colonial incarnation, when it shifted from being an imperial city to a regional city.     

Late Pleistocene marine birds from southern Peru: distinguishing human capture from El Niño-induced windfall

The Central Andean hyperarid littoral has abundant marine fauna that would have been attractive to the earliest inhabitants. Whether people hunted or scavenged marine animals during the terminal Late Pleistocene have social and technological implications for understanding ancient Andean foraging. The periodic phenomenon of El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) disrupts marine food chains and results in the death of significant numbers of marine vertebrates and microorganisms. The onset of ancient El Niño events may have created a subsistence opportunity for human coastal inhabitants along the Pacific coast of the Central Andes when large numbers of guano-producing birds (cormorants, boobies, and pelicans) became weak and eventually died. The remains of numerous marine birds dominate the Late Pleistocene archaeological site of Quebrada Tacahuay in far southern Peru. This Terminal Pleistocene occupation dating to 10,770–10,290 years ago (uncalibrated radiocarbon years; 12,880–11,970 calendar years ago) was buried and sealed by an apparent ancient El Niño-induced debris flow. Using characteristics of the faunal assemblage I assess whether people hunted marine birds or ENSO created a subsistence opportunity for people to either scavenge a catastrophic assemblage or collect a community of vulnerable birds prior to the debris flow. I present avian skeletal part frequencies, butchering patterns, and the quantities and variety of marine bony fishes. An analysis of vertebrate taxonomic and skeletal composition in conjunction with an analysis of site context does not support the hypothesis that paleoenvironmental conditions generated an opportunity for the facile collection of either dead or weak birds. In contrast, the faunal data suggest that humans actively hunted, captured, and consumed healthy marine birds. When evaluating the possible role of environmental fluctuations on human behavior and diet, researchers must consider not only the taphonomy of the most abundant remains, but also how other vertebrate taxa in a region are affected as well as the archaeological context.     

Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited

For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change was a contributory factor in the extreme drought experienced within Syria prior to its civil war; this drought in turn led to large-scale migration; and this migration in turn exacerbated the socio-economic stresses that underpinned Syria's descent into war. This article provides a systematic interrogation of these claims, and finds little merit to them. Amongst other things it shows that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in Syria's pre-civil war drought; that this drought did not cause anywhere near the scale of migration that is often alleged; and that there exists no solid evidence that drought migration pressures in Syria contributed to civil war onset. The Syria case, the article finds, does not support ‘threat multiplier’ views of the impacts of climate change; to the contrary, we conclude, policymakers, commentators and scholars alike should exercise far greater caution when drawing such linkages or when securitising climate change.     

Special Days of Worship and National Religion in the Australian Colonies, 1790–c. 1914

Throughout the period between 1790 and 1914 the governments of the Australian colonies asked their populations to suspend work and amusements and join in collective acts of prayer. Australia’s special days of prayer have much historical significance and deserve more scholarly attention. They had an enduring popularity, and they were rare moments when a multi-faith and multi-ethnic community joined together to worship for a common cause. This article builds on recent work on state prayers in Britain by considering what the colonial tradition of special worship can tell us about community attachments in nineteenth-century Australia. ‘Fast days’ and ‘days of thanksgiving’ had both an imperial and a regional character. A small number of the Australian days were for imperial events (notably wars and royal occasions) that were observed on an empire-wide scale. The great majority, such as the numerous days of fasting and humiliation that were called during periods of drought, were for regional happenings and were appointed by colonial authorities. The article argues that the different types of prayer day map on to the various ways that contemporaries envisaged ‘Greater Britain’ and the ‘British world’. Prayer days for royal events helped the empire’s inhabitants to regard themselves as imperial Britons. Meanwhile, days appointed locally by colonial governments point to the strength of regional attachments. Colonists developed a sense that providence treated them differently from British communities elsewhere, and this sense of ‘national providence’ could underpin a sense of colonial difference—even a colonial nationalism. Days of prayer suggested that Greater Britain was a composite of separate communities and nationalities, but the regional feelings they encouraged could still sit comfortably with attachments to an imperial community defined by commonalities of race, religion and interest.     

Tethered mobility and riparian resource exploitation among Neolithic hunters and herders in the Galana River basin,Kenyan coastal lowlands

Abstract

Human activity along the Galana River inside Tsavo National Park, Kenya extends from 6000 years BP until at least 1300 years BP. This time period in East Africa predates and includes the Pastoral Neolithic – geographically and temporally linked early cattle-herding cultures comprised of autonomous communities with loose cultural connections to one another. Data from some sites located in the Great Rift Valley, Lake Victoria Basin and Central Kenyan Highlands indicate that after 3000 years BP, residential mobility patterns increased and pastoralists adopted a strong dependence on maintaining and culling herds of domesticated animals. This pattern is not borne out in Tsavo, where artefact analyses indicate that people had restricted mobility and relied primarily on exploitation of an endoaquatic resource base. This study hypothesises that subdecadal periodicity in El Niño/Southern Oscillation index (ENSO) along with a general trend toward aridification of East African landscapes provided the environmental backdrop for a subsistence regime focused primarily within riparian environments of the Coastal Lowlands region.     

Feeding fears: competing discourses of interdependency,sovereignty, and China's food security

Following the release of the 1994 report ‘Who will feed China?’ by the Worldwatch Institute, there has been much debate over the implications of China's growing demand for grain. The question of China's food production has elicited a variety of responses. While for some it raises the specter of regional and global instability as China becomes an environmental threat, for others the entrance of China into the world market promises increased trade and profits. In this paper I explore the responses in China and the US to the different notions of interdependence which have shaped the debate. I first turn to how concerns over China's food supply have, despite appeals to the concepts of global environmental and economic interdependence, become linked to classical state-centered geopolitical concerns such as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘containment.’ I then look at how the debate has also been actively distanced from national security concerns through the invocation of an alternative interdependence founded on the logic of commerce. I conclude by arguing for the need within critical geopolitics to further examine the circulation of strategic texts between and within states, particularly in the analysis of texts that map worlds beyond the boundaries of North America and Europe.     

Drought and cooperation in a conflict prone area: Bedouin herders and Jewish farmers in Israel's northern Negev, 1957–1963

Climate change is increasingly considered a security problem by academics and politicians alike. Although research is challenging such neo-Malthusian views, it focuses on conflict, or lack thereof, paying limited attention, if any, to cooperation. This study examines the effect of a severe drought on a spectrum of both conflict and cooperation in a highly incendiary setting, between Muslim Bedouin herders and Jewish agricultural settlements in Israel's semi-arid northern Negev region. This region, lying between the Mediterranean zone and the Negev Desert, has historically been a battle ground between farmers and pastoralists.Using archival data, both conflictive and cooperative interactions between the two groups during the 1957–63 drought, the worst in the 20th century, were examined. The results indicate that although the entire range of responses occurred, violence was limited and occurred only when some of the Bedouins migrated to the more northern Mediterranean zone. In the semi-arid northern Negev the Bedouins and two settlements engaged in substantive cooperation and assistance. Grazing on damaged crops in return for payment was also practiced during the drought.A number of factors that affected both conflict and cooperation are identified. The severity of conflicts increased when farmers and herders lacked previous familiarity, while the need to reduce the drought's impacts and settlements' left-wing political affiliation formed main incentives for cooperation. Measures taken by state institutions to directly reduce frictions and to provide relief assistance were central to the overall limited level of conflict, but also reinforced the power disparities between the groups.     

Re-tribalization in the 21st century,part 1

This exploratory study presents ‘re-tribalization’ as a framework for comprehending contemporary global patterns and phenomena. It posits a link between the erosion of modernity's traits and a resurgence of tribal behaviour – the more elements that we associate with modernity diminish, the more we see the emergence of group formations akin to anthropological notions of tribes. This trend manifests not only in societies where tribal and lineage affiliations remain central to identity but also – perhaps more notably, considering modernity's promises – in developed nations, including global powerhouses like the USA, India and China. ‘Re-tribalization’ signifies a modern-day recourse to a so-called tribal past, fortifying intra-group cohesion and creating a distinction from other groups, thus delineating ‘us’ and ‘them’. This process highlights the drawing of boundaries between communities, positing that such delineations were more apparent in the past and need to be re-established to navigate today's challenges and crises. The study traces the historical lineage of re-tribalization appeals and their ties to nationalism, citing instances from Johann Gottfried Herder's works. This argument leverages the authors’ nearly two decades of ethnographic fieldwork, a collection of four studies and initial insights from their soon-to-be-published book.     

Nunneries,Communities and the Revaluation of Domesticity

This is a review of three books: a collection of essays edited by Diane Watt on medieval women in their communities, and two monographs, by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Marilyn Oliva, on nunneries in late medieval Germany and England. All three suggest in different ways that women's activities are regularly undervalued by the assumption that women try to do the same things as men, and fail. Hamburger argues that the artistic production of late fifteenth‐century nuns has been dismissed because it does not satisfy the criteria of (male) ‘high’ art. He shows that ‘nuns' work’ is in fact the product of a complex symbolic visual and textual culture. Oliva argues that the study of nunneries has been neglected because it is assumed that, since they were not rich and powerful like the monasteries, there is no evidence about them. She shows that it is possible to undertake a detailed prosopographical study of a group of nunneries from a single diocese. I argue that when in this context we talk about ‘women’, we are often in fact talking about the domestic sphere, with which women were so strongly associated. A revaluation of women's activities entails a revaluation of domesticity and the home.     

Spatial Disparities and Economic Development in China, 1953-92: A Comparative Study

It seems to be widely accepted that China's interior development during the Maoist period was based on ‘equality’ considerations, which narrowed Chinese regional disparities. By contrast, the recent coastal development during Deng's reform era has been coined as ‘uneven’ and ‘undesirable’, because it has created tremendous inequalities across the country. However, the findings of this study suggest that the question may not be that simple. This article examines the spatial disparities of economic development in China between 1953 and 1992, focusing on a time-series comparison between the development policies of Mao and Deng, their outcomes and the resulting changes. By using provincial and regional economic and investment data, the article elaborates why Mao's interior development did not lead to a more equitable outcome than Deng's uneven strategy of’ east coastal development’. The findings provide an insight into some of the unexpected outcomes of more than forty years of socialist development, in the realm of economic growth and disparity.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

A relationship between equatorial lower stratospheric QBO and El Niño

Cycle-to-cycle evolution of zonal wind QBO is studied making use of meteorological balloon and M-100 rocket data at Trivandrum (8.5°N, 77°E) for a period of about 19 yr from 1971 to 1990. The height of occurrence of zonal wind QBO maxima is found to vary systematically from one cycle to the next. The successive QBO maxima (easterly or westerly) occur progressively at greater heights and, after reaching a particular height, the next maximum (easterly or westerly) occurs at a lower height. Thereafter, the upward progression of the successive maxima starts again. It is found that the upward progression of the QBO maxima is closely associated with the occurrence of an El Niño event. A simple physical mechanism is suggested for this relationship between the QBO and El Niño. It is hypothesized that if the vertical wavelength of the Kelvin and mixed Rossby-gravity (MRG) waves are smaller during an El Nino event, the observed upward progression of the QBO maxima can be explained.     

Mapping Common Futures: Customary Communities,NGOs and the State in Indonesia's Reform Era

The post‐Suharto ‘Reform Era’ has witnessed explosive revitalization movements among Indonesia's indigenous minorities or ‘customary’(adat) communities attempting to redress the disempowerment they suffered under the former regime. This study considers the current resurgence of customary claims to land and resources in Bali, where the state‐sponsored investment boom of the 1990s had severe social and environmental impacts. It focuses on recent experiments with participatory community mapping, aimed at reframing the relationship between state and local institutions in planning and decision‐making processes. Closely tied to the mapping and planning strategy have been efforts to strengthen local institutions and to confront the problems of land alienation and community control of resources. The diversity of responses to this new intervention reflects both the vitality and limitations of local adat communities, as well as the contributions and constraints of non‐governmental organizations that increasingly mediate their relationships to state and global arenas. This ethnographic study explores participants’ experiences of the community mapping programme and suggests its potential for developing ‘critical localism’ through long‐term, process‐oriented engagements between communities, governments, NGOs, and academic researchers.     

‘Wanting the Children and Wanting K2’: The incommensurability of motherhood and mountaineering in Britain and North America in the late twentieth century

The death of British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, in 1995 while climbing K2 in Pakistan, the world's second-highest mountain, sparked debates in Britain and North America within mountaineering communities and the press. Hargreaves was a contentious figure because she climbed distant, high mountains as the mother of young children, and was thus constructed a ‘bad mother’. Drawing on ethnographic research in Banff, Canada and Nepal in 1999 and 2000, as well as mountaineering and other media, I examine the social anxiety arising over mother-mountaineers, in particular at a mountain film festival in Banff. Hargreaves and American Kitty Calhoun, who was also criticized, were both professional mountaineers and identified themselves as ‘normal working mothers’. I contextualize their maternal subjectivities within the wider public scrutiny over white, middle-class, working mothers at that time, to show how female mountaineers mediated their mountaineering desires within dominant discourses about ‘sacrificial motherhood’, which resulted in ambivalence. Hargreaves wrote in her diary while waiting to climb K2, ‘It eats away at me—wanting the children and wanting K2. I feel like I'm being pulled in two’. I argue that these women were situated at the intersection of two clashing discourses—mountaineering as a journey far removed from home and motherhood as an intensive presence with one's children bound to home.

‘El deseo de niños y el deseo de K2’: la inconmensurabilidad de la maternidad y el alpinismo en Inglaterra y Norte América en los finales de siglo XX

La muerte de la alpinista británica, Alison Hargreaves, en 1995 mientras escaló K2 en Pakistán, el segundo pico más alto del mundo, resultaba en debates en Inglaterra y Norte América en las comunidades de alpinismo y los medios de comunicación. Hargreaves era una figura discutidora porque como una madre con niños pequeños, escalaba montañas altas y lejos, y como consecuencia fue construido como ‘mala madre’. Haciendo uso de medios de comunicación de alpinismo y otros, y una investigación etnográfica in Banff, Canada y Nepal en 1999 y 2000, examino la ansiedad social surgiendo de alpinistas madres, en particular en la festival cine de Banff. Hargreaves y la americana Kitty Calhoun, que fue criticado también, eran alpinistas profesionales y se identificaban ‘madres trabajadoras normales’. Contextualizo sus subjetividades maternales dentro del escrutinio del público a las madres trabajadoras blancas de media clase y muestro como median las alpinistas femeninas sus deseos de escalar dentro de discursos dominantes sobre ‘la maternidad expiatoria’, lo que resulta en ambivalencia. Escribío Hargreaves en su diario cuando esperaba a escalar K2: ‘Me está comiendo—deseando a los niños y deseando a K2. Siento que se me parte en dos’. Argumento que estas mujeres se situaron a las intersecciones de dos discursos en conflicto—alpinismo como un viaje que está muy lejos del hogar y la maternidad como una presencia intensiva con los niños que están obligado al hogar.     

Parliament,the Tories and Frederick,Prince of Wales*

The alliance between the tories and Frederick, Prince of Wales has usually appeared at best a passing interlude of opportunism in eighteenth‐century politics, dismissed alike by scholars upholding ‘jacobite’ or ‘Hanoverian’ constructions of the party's identity. This article offers a re‐examination of the relationship, assessing tory actions at Westminster against the larger hinterland of party literature and journalism. It argues that, especially after 1747, the association fronted a much more serious enterprise than is conventionally assumed, highlighting the continued political and ideological independence of the party into the 1750s and shaping the subsequent evolution of its identity. Intellectually, Frederick's image as a ‘Patriot King’ was driven by radical manifestos originating within the jacobite diaspora in Paris. Inside Westminster, his patronage changed the balance of power, bringing the tories to a point of primacy hitherto unmatched over the larger opposition. For four years, the promise of the prince of Wales provided the glue to hold the tory party together; his death threatened to unleash a process of fragmentation. The long‐term legacy of the alliance informed the direction of those who remained tories into the following decade, determining the section of the party that would gain the ascendancy within the reign of George III. By showing how a member of the ruling dynasty could be recast in a favourable and highly partisan political complexion, the pact with Frederick represented a decisive stage in the reinvention of English toryism, and its movement from mid‐century opposition towards rebirth as the loyalist champions of the house of Hanover.