“Middling” Chinese Returnees or Immigrants from Canada? The Ambiguity of Return Migration and Claims to Modernity

This paper investigates the conceptual overlaps between transnational return migration and immigration by drawing on a qualitative study of Mainland Chinese return migration from Canada. The paper argues that reframing return migration as a distinct type of immigration draws attention to the citizenship vulnerabilities experienced by “middling” returnees who are not privy to the preferential treatment given to highly skilled returnees. They come to be considered as “foreigners” in their homeland because they have naturalised elsewhere. The paper also explores the double diasporic identifications of Mainland Chinese returnees from Canada; it highlights the tensions and fissures manifested in secondary diasporas, particularly in light of China’s growing prominence in international business, foreign diplomacy and cultural exchanges. The paper suggests that social encounters that marginalise such migrants in Canada are reproduced in China. The returnees navigate such encounters by mobilising their transnational affiliations to different national contexts.     

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

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

Modernity and Matrifocality: The Feminization of Kinship?

The extensive analytical focus on how gender relations in working lives, employment, education, political engagement and public life change under modernity needs extension into a consideration of the ways in which kinship and relatedness have also been changing. This article argues that relatedness under modernity tends towards matrifocality. This is explored through looking at broad patterns of social change in kinship practices across a range of societies experiencing transitions towards modernities over the past fifty years, and at how state and NGO development and social protection programmes contribute to this matrifocal turn.     

Whose Streets? Roadway Protests and Weaponised Automobility

The article examines the role of automobility in US-based anti-racism demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. We contrast the spatial strategies of highway occupations by racial justice activists, with so-called “weaponised car” attacks by the American far right. Analysing online memes and anti-protest legislation, the article explores under-acknowledged links between “automobile supremacy”—the structure of motorists' privilege as embedded in law, the built environment and the popular imaginary—and the patterns of racial stratification often termed “white supremacy”. We document three ways in which automobility has been enlisted as means of violence against protestors and against wider Black communities in the US: through the use of vehicles, right-of-way conventions, and roadways as weapons. The article demonstrates how the imperative to make way for the motorist has long provided cover for racial injustice.     

Land,Labor, and Indigenous Response: Huaquechula (Mexico), 1521–1633

During New Spain's early colonial period, the Crown pursued a seemingly contradictory policy of exploiting and protecting its indigenous subjects. On a continuum of possible responses, many indigenous peoples chose to appeal to the Crown to defend their interests against arbitrary abuse by Spanish settlers. Based on early colonial-period documents, this article focuses on the case of Huaquechula, a town with deep prehispanic roots in the fertile Valley of Altixco, to describe its attempts to fend off land encroachment and excessive demands for labor. It is suggested that, by using rhetorical strategies that resonated with the Crown, in conjunction with a combination of characteristics specific to it, Huaquechula's attempts were relatively successful.     

Whose aid? Whose influence? China,emerging donors and the silent revolution in development assistance

Rising economies including China, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Korea, India, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are subtly changing the rules of foreign aid with profound consequences for the role of multilateral institutions and conditionality. Fears abound that this new aid is bolstering rogue states, fuelling corruption, and increasing the debt burdens of poor countries. This article critically assesses these arguments before dissecting the attractions of emerging donors' aid against a background of established donors' failure to deliver on promises to increase aid, reduce conditionality, better coordinate and align aid efforts, and reform the aid architecture. It argues that a silent revolution is taking place whereby the emerging donors are not overtly attempting to overturn the rules of multilateral development assistance, nor to replace them. Rather, by quietly offering alternatives to aid‐receiving countries, they are weakening the bargaining position of western donors. The resulting tensions underscore the urgency of reforming the multilateral aid system.     

Flogging a Dead Horse? Neo-Marxism and Indigenous Mining Negotiations

Historically, Indigenous Australians have been marginalised, both economically and politically, in mineral development processes in Australia. The Australian state structures the interaction between Indigenous people and mining companies through general legislation and policies, and is therefore a key determinant of the mineral negotiating environment. This paper examines the state's role in the negotiations for the Century Mine in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and argues that recent neo-Marxist theories offer the most cogent theoretical explanation of the state's behaviour. It contends that, despite a noted tendency to consign Marxist theorising to the history books, analysis of the behaviour of the state in the Century negotiations provides critical evidence of the continued relevance of neo-Marxist theories of the state.     

Whose Minerals,Whose Development? Rhetoric and Reality in Post‐Conflict Sierra Leone

Despite boosts in mineral exports, popular post‐conflict minerals‐for‐development reforms in Sierra Leone have failed to significantly reduce poverty. This article uses power as an analytical lens to explore the reasons for this failure, with empirical material from the diamond sector's mining cooperatives scheme (2005), the Diamond Areas Community Development Fund (DACDF), and Kono District. The study shows that there was no significant improvement along four dimensions: material deprivation, education and health, vulnerability, and powerlessness. The authors argue that understanding the impact of these reforms requires a nuanced multi‐scalar examination of power relations, actors, and the social, political, economic and historical context within which mining is embedded. Their findings point to: 1) limits to mineral‐led poverty reduction and the need for realistic expectations and diversification of livelihood opportunities; and 2) the need for interventions that balance power asymmetries and the way that power is exercised among diverse actors, wherein decentralization offers early hope.     

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Deuteronomy and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

Deuteronomy portrays itself as Moses's speech at the edge of the promised land. This article examines the book's attitudes towards the other within this rhetorical setting by concentrating on the indigenous peoples, also in contrast to those outside the land of Israel. It is pointed out that the ideology of Deuteronomy is very exclusive, and its treatment of indigenous peoples compatible with ideologies that accompany genocides and conquests. Mitigating such exclusive thinking can serve as a model for human interactions today, and this would also seem to be compatible with the overall thinking of the New Testament canonical documents.     

Whose Economy for Whose Culture? Moving Beyond Oppositional Talk in European Debate about Economy and Culture

This paper provides an overview of the economy-culture debate as currently rehearsed within European urban and regional change circles, explores some of the key theoretical inadequacies of this debate and outlines and illustrates one possible way of moving debate forward. The paper begins by identifying the different ways in which economy and culture, and economy-culture articulations, are thought about within this debate and by arguing that what purports to be a debate about articulation collapses in practice into the respective privileging of either culture or economy. Subsequently, after a critique of the "economy-culture as differential logics" argument, we forward what we consider to be the minimal conditions for conjoining economy and culture theoretically. These entail according economy and culture equivalent conceptual standing, centring meaning and seeing meaning and practice as conceptually inseparable. We then illustrate this approach at the level of particularities, using a range of examples that span commodities, "productive" practices and processes of consumption and exchange.     

In vino veritas? Indigenous wine and indigenization in Israeli settlements

In recent years, wineries have proliferated in Israel’s West Bank settlements, some of which are now producing world-class wine. However, growing grapes and making wine in this context represents more than simply commercial viticulture. These wineries are part of a trend to re-establish ancient Jewish winemaking practices, which fosters the imagination of returning and reconnecting to biblical sites. Moreover, high-tech grape science is now being employed to engineer wines from so-called indigenous varietals to create a wine identity for Israel. Some religious settlers regard these developments as the fulfilment of a messianic biblical prophecy. This pursuit of indigenous wine thus bolsters a religiously inflected historical imagination of indigeneity that naturalizes the Jewish presence in this contested territory. This article shows that claims to authentic indigeneity emerging from viticulture entangle high-tech grape science, biblical prophecy and an aesthetic connection to the land so that indigenous wine and an indigenous identity are co-produced in a mutually constitutive process.     

Whose Mandate? Policy Promises,Strong Bicameralism and Polled Opinion

The political theory of Australian politics has been dominated, since the election of a Liberal-National Party government in 1996, by claims and counterclaims about electoral mandates. The government has privileged its position in the House of Representatives; opposition parties have pointed to their support in the Senate. This paper provides a historical re-examination of the meanings and merits of mandate theories; it outlines the difficulties posed by strong bicameralism for any mandate theory; and it shows how the rise of survey research has strengthened some claims to a mandate, especially in bicameral systems, while weakening others.     

Recreating the Judean Hills? English hermits and the Holy Land

This article explores the place of the Holy Land in the devotions of medieval English hermits and recluses between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It first outlines the importance of physical travel to Palestine in the career of anchorites, with pilgrimage to Jerusalem followed by seclusion held up as a powerful ideal in literary sources. It then suggests that some of the dwellings of English solitaries formed deliberate monumental recreations of the holy places of Palestine. It considers the extent to which the cells of recluses were understood as recreations of the tomb of Christ, functioning as living Easter Sepulchre structures, and the dedication of churches used or built by hermits and recluses. Finally, it notes possible links between the hermitage of St Robert of Knaresborough and Jabal Quruntul (Mount Quarentayne), the site of Christ's temptations in the wilderness.     

Whose world and whose archaeology? The colonial present and the return of the political

El autor identifica un proyecto colonial crecientemente agresivo funcionando en Irak y Afganistán y considera que el fallo catastrófico de la comunidad arqueológica occidental de responder apropiadamente a las condiciones en ambas naciones. La manera de énfasis sobre arqueología está contribuyendo activamente no solamente a la legitimidad de una guerra ilegal y sin ética, sino también a la reproducción del régimen de poder y verdad que la guerra busca establecer. Se llama al WAC a “descentralizar” al mundo como es visto por los centros metropolitanos Occidentales, dejando a la “periferia” tomar la iniciativa, poner la agenda, y promover las medidas arqueológicas alternativas.

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Résumé L'auteur identifie un projet colonialiste de plus en plus agressif en Irak et en Afghanistan, et considère léchec catastrophique de la communauté des archéologues occidentaux à répondre de fa?on approprée aux conditions dans chacune de ces deux nations. Insister sur l'archéologie contribue activement, non seulement à légitimer une guerre illégale et immorale, mais aussi à reproduire le régime de force et de vérité que la guerre cherche à établir. Il en appelle au WAC pour'dé-centrer'la vision du monde des centres métropolitains occidentaux, afin de permettre à la ‘périphérie’ de prendre l'initiative, de mettre en place un agenda, et de préconiser des épistémologies archéologiques alternatives.

     

For Whom the Nation? Internationalization,Zapatismo, and the Struggle Over Mexican Modernity

Recent literature on interactions arising between capital forces and local communities has tended to equate "the global" with economic globalization and "the local" as a more or less reactive formation. Less attention is paid to the fact that processes very particular to a locale are crucial mediators between global and local scales. Perhaps the most salient of these is the production of national ideology. This paper examines Mexico in the 1990s and explores the way leaders wove articulations of modernity through reproductions of nationalism to exclude those—poor, largely rural and indigenous—who didn't fit the picture of progress, then looks at how several indigenous communities contested these elite notions, demanding equal access as citizens of Mexico, and radically altered the public view of elite notions of progress.     

Indigenous African Furnace Types and Slag Composition—Is there a Correlation?

Within variation, three major iron smelting furnaces were used in the Iron Age of sub‐Saharan Africa, ranging from the natural draught driven tall shaft to the forced draught powered low shaft and bowl furnaces. These furnace types are, however, mostly known from the ethnographic context. Often, archaeologists are confronted with remnants from the smelting process, forcing them to speculate on the anatomy of the extant furnaces. The presence of multiple fused tuyeres has been used to identify natural draught furnaces in the archaeological record. However, working back from smelting remains such as slag to the furnace type using physical and chemical evidence has generally proved to be ‘undoable’. Thus, when randomly selected, the chances are high that one cannot separate bowl furnace slags from those that formed in their tall or low shaft counterparts. This observation is hardly unexpected; analogous thermodynamics and thermo‐chemical reactions governed bloomery smelting irrespective of furnace type. Rehren et al. (2007) have labelled this phenomenon the ‘tyranny of system driven constraints’. In this study, we argue that the hierarchical use of statistical methods may add another layer of evidence which, when coupled to archaeological indicators, may be useful in correlating slag chemistry to furnace types used in antiquity.     

REFINA—An Integrated and Multilevel Approach to Dealing with Land Consumption?

In Germany, land consumption for settlement and transport development amounts to 100?ha/day, thus significantly exceeding the goal set by Germany's sustainability strategy, which aims at reducing the rate of the expansion of built-up areas to 30?ha/day by the year 2020. Increased orientation of local authorities and stakeholders towards the promotion of economic competitiveness, complex interrelations between actors involved in planning, substantial planning autonomy of Germany's local administrative units, as well as stronger democratic norms in planning, render a traditional linear planning scheme obsolete. The federal administration and publicly funded research institutions therefore opted for a non-legislative approach aiming at the production of a body of methodologies, which would engage participation processes and deliberative decision-making. The name being a German acronym for “Research for the Reduction of Land Consumption and for Sustainable Land Management”, this collaborative national programme gathered a number of planning actors who have framed the complex topic of sustainable land use into a series of manageable, fundable and adjustable projects which take into account multiple spatial and time scales. This paper emphasizes the elements found within REFINA which lead the way towards a strategic communication-based, integrated and multilevel approach to dealing with land consumption.     

Political Theory and International Relations: Promised Land or Exit from Eden?

Political theory and International Relations have become increasingly interpenetrated over the last few years. This article traces the evolution of this relationship and the emergence of a literature now termed international political theory. It also suggests that a convergence of contemporary political and economic factors, together with a particular intellectual fashion, run the risk of promoting an unnecessarily and inappropriately narrow international political theory, and closes by suggesting how this might be avoided.