Understanding ethnic differences in perceptions,attitudes, and behaviours: a study of domestic water use in Sydney

There is growing realisation among environmental and social studies researchers that people's decision‐making about water use conforms to their internal norms and beliefs, which are developed in social and cultural contexts. Little research, however, has addressed the possible impacts that ethnic and cultural diversity may have on domestic water use and management. This paper presents the results of a study conducted in Sydney, with specific reference to questionnaire findings. Among respondents from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, significant differences were observed in terms of perceptions, specific knowledge, attitudes, and self‐reported behaviours in relation to water use and conservation. The disparities identified were not masking socio‐demographic and economic characteristics but were the result of a series of constructs closely tied to ethnicity, including cultural value, environmental experience, language preference, and information access. As a factor explaining variation in the engagement of pro‐conservation behaviour, ethnic status was found to be more useful than some socio‐economic factors. The study highlights the importance of including ethnicity and cultural sensitivity issues in the decision‐making process of environmental management.     

Conserving Natures? Co-producing Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mongolian Rangelands

Despite well-founded concerns over the proliferation of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes, critical geographers have begun to challenge the ‘milieu of apprehension’ associated with PES (Jackson and Palmer, 2014: 122). There is a growing call for more nuanced analyses of ways in which the ecosystem services paradigm and PES may, in particular circumstances, encompass and make legible diverse ways of being in/knowing nature and provide opportunities for local/indigenous actors to advance their own needs and values. Adopting a ‘radical pragmatist’ approach, the author of this article worked with Mongolian herder groups to develop a locally-grounded manifestation of PES, with specific attention to the incorporation of diverse socio-ecological relations, beliefs and values. The article argues that such co-produced iterations of PES, with due attention to tripartite dimensions of environmental justice, can facilitate local stewardship, whilst eschewing enclosure of commons and crowding out of non-market values and motives for conservation, albeit shaped and constrained by diverse manifestations of power.     

THE ORIGINS OF PREGNANCY SUPERSTITIONS RELATING TO CONGENITAL MALFORMATIONS

PREGNANCY superstitions relating to abnormal foetal development are common in modern societies. The universality and intensity of such beliefs suggest that their origins might be found in less-modified cultural groups. This study, from Mornington Island, indicates that such beliefs are already highly evolved in Aboriginal peoples. Three types of beliefs are identified — maternal impression, spirit influence and totemic identification. Examples of each type are presented, as they relate to congenital malformation, and reasons advanced for their origin and cultural stability. A knowledge of the origins of such beliefs is of help to the counsellor of parents who have children with congenital malformations.     

Natural and Unnatural Disasters: Responding with Respect for Indigenous Rights and Knowledges

A key challenge for contemporary democratic societies is how to respond to disasters in ways that foster just and sustainable outcomes that build resilience, respect human rights, and foster economic, social, and cultural well‐being in reasonable timeframes and at reasonable costs. In many places experiencing rapid environmental change, indigenous people continue to exercise some level of self‐governance and autonomy, but they also face the burden of rapid social change and hostile or ambiguous policy settings. Drawing largely on experience in northern Australia, this paper argues that state policies can compound and contribute to vulnerability of indigenous groups to both natural and policy‐driven disasters in many places. State‐sponsored programmes that fail to respect indigenous rights and fail to acknowledge the relevance of indigenous knowledge to both social and environmental recovery entrench patterns of racialised disadvantage and marginalisation and set in train future vulnerabilities and disasters. The paper advocates an approach to risk assessment, preparation, and recovery that prioritises partnerships based on recognition, respect, and explicit commitment to justice. The alternatives are to continue prioritising short‐term expediencies and opportunistic pursuit of integration, or subverting indigenous rights and the knowledge systems that underpin them. This paper argues such alternatives are not only unethical, but also ineffective.     

Indigenous claims and heritage conservation: an opportunity for critical dialogue

Abstract

Indigenous claims of ownership and access to material culture challenge the field of heritage conservation. This article illustrates how indigenous concerns conflict with basic constructs of Western conservation, and how conservators respond to these claims. Despite efforts of inclusion, relatively few conservation projects integrate indigenous knowledge with scientific research. Redistribution of conservation authority is rarely put into practice. The article concludes by pointing to conservation as a meeting ground where collaborative decisions can be made about material culture on display. Conflict negotiation in conservation presents a potential forum for cultural representation and contested meaning of objects on display.     

Exploring the context and elements of local environmental stewardship: An embedded case study of the Niagara Region,Canada

Environmental stewardship—a concept that describes the relationships between humans and the environment—is gaining increased attention as an approach that can address planetary sustainability issues. In-depth empirical investigations of local environmental stewardship are needed to understand how social-ecological context influences stewardship, as well as the arrangement of conceptual elements in applied settings. This study addresses these needs by conducting an in-depth exploration of environmental stewardship in the Niagara Region of Canada. A single embedded case study design is employed, with environmental stewardship initiatives constituting the individual units of analysis with the case. Analysis of the spatial arrangement of a total of 89 initiatives indicated that initiatives tended to cluster closer to the Niagara River and in more populous municipalities. The significance of collaboration, tensions between the environment and economic development, and concerns about political impacts emerged as themes across contextual factors. The configuration of stewardship elements reveals interesting discrepancies between initiatives and previous stewardship research focused on larger scales, individuals, and organizations. Further analysis is encouraged to illuminate environmental stewardship in other settings as well as advance relational understanding of conceptual elements.     

Book Reviews

Heritage is important for the social and cultural health of communities, whilst local stewardship of cultural heritage has the capacity to empower and recover cultural identity. This paper describes a recent project in Lakhnu – a small rural village in Uttar Pradesh, India – to restore a nineteenth century villa formerly used as the village school as an educational facility. In this discussion, we draw attention to the right of groups to manage their culture. The loss of cultural heritage is linked to a loss of identity. We argue that heritage projects have the capacity to empower communities to sustain their heritage and identity and provide useful places for social and material advancement through the concept of a shared ‘symbolic estate’. At Lakhnu, we plan to evoke grass-root conservation where local communities become the rightful stakeholders and decision-makers who are encouraged and facilitated in the realisation of their right to cultural heritage and to stimulate growth and build capacity for the community.     

Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction from Faunal Remains: Ecological Basics and Analytical Assumptions

Paleozoologists have long used taxa represented by ancient faunal remains to reconstruct paleoenvironments. Those ancient environments were the selective contexts in which hominin biological and cultural evolution took place. Knowing about those particularistic selective environments and how organisms responded to them is increasingly seen as critically important to identifying both how biota will respond to future (to some degree anthropogenically driven) environmental change, and biological conservation and management applications that will ensure sustainability of ecological resources and services. Reconstructing paleoenvironments requires knowledge of species’ ecological tolerances, geographic ranges, habitats, environments, and niches. It also requires assumptions that extant species had the same ecological tolerances in the past as they do today and that changes in taxonomic composition or abundances reflect environmental change rather than sampling or taphonomic factors. Greater knowledge of ecological processes as well as increased analytical sophistication in paleozoology is providing increasingly rigorous and detailed insights to paleoenvironments.     

The Green Frog and Desalination: A Nyungar Metaphor for the (Mis‐)Management of Water Resources,Swan Coastal Plain,Western Australia

ABSTRACT In common with Aboriginal groups around Australia, the indigenous people, or Nyungars, of Perth adopt a holistic attitude towards groundwater resources. Of cultural significance are lakes, springs, soaks and watercourses that feature in Dreamtime creation narratives. Perth is experiencing major water shortages and many Nyungars feel that the degradation of the freshwater supply is a result of mismanagement and unsustainable development by non‐Aboriginal people. Proposals for dealing with the issue are seen as equally out of balance with the natural order of things. Water regulators have much to learn from indigenous Australians about water and environmental management. Although water continues to be central to Nyungar identity, the study on which this article is based found evidence of attenuated knowledge about the Dreaming, with discontinuities evident in the way significance is increasingly being read in everyplace rather than in specific ‘story places’.     

博物馆理论研究与博物馆发展方向——苏东海先生专访

21世纪以来,我国的博物馆事业进入新的发展高潮,博物馆理论与发展研究面临许多新的重大课题。博物馆学家苏东海先生认为:博物馆理论研究需要从博物馆发展实践着手,博物馆发展研究要重视发展战略和时代主题的研究;生态博物馆作为一种文化遗产保护理论与行动的新思维,呈现出与传统博物馆两极分化、对立统一的关系,其成功应建基于让文化的主人真正成为自己文化的主人;文化遗产的保护与发扬体现了当前国际博协的战略思想,是博物馆的时代主题;博物馆应充分认识并强化自身独特的知识、审美和道德特征及其价值,提升专业功能与社会职能,增强文化竞争力;博物馆理论工作者应直面博物馆领域的复杂形势,加强对国内外博物馆以及博物馆学基础理论的研究,探索适合中国博物馆发展的理论体系和发展道路,建设有中国特色的博物馆学。     

RETHINKING THE BUILDING BLOCKS: ONTOLOGICAL PLURALISM AND THE IDEA OF 'MANAGEMENT'

ABSTRACT. The persistence of indigenous ontologies rooted in human systems that pre-date the creation of colonial property rights and assertions of frontier conquest and dispossession unsettles the dominant idea that 'management' is an unproblematic and universally endorsed goal for communities, regions and nations in their environmental and development discourses. This paper argues that conceptual building blocks which render management, be it of environments, economies or people, as unquestionably good, need to be reconsidered. Drawing on diverse indigenous knowledges in Australia, particularly in relation to wildlife management, the paper examines the hidden cultural specificity of management, planning, institutional strengthening and capacity building as well as their implicit silencing of alternative narratives of the economic, environmental and cultural dimensions of social life.     

无酸纸的发展及其在文物保护中的应用

无酸纸是很重要的一种馆藏文物保护载体.本文对无酸纸的发展现状及在文物保护中的应用进行了总结.同时指出,根据我国文物保护的需要,研制文物保护专用无酸纸并建立相关的评价标准是无酸纸的发展趋势.     

Community,Connection and Conservation: Intangible Cultural Values in Natural Heritage—the Case of Shirakami‐sanchi World Heritage Area

Intangible cultural heritage, according to a UNESCO definition, is ‘the practices, representations, expressions as well as the knowledge and skills that communities, groups and in some cases individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage’. Using a case study of Shirakami‐sanchi World Heritage Area, this paper illustrates how the local community's conservation commitment was formed through their long‐term everyday interactions with nature. Such connectivity is vital to maintaining the authentic integrity of a place that does not exclude humans. An examination of the formation of the community's conservation commitment for Shirakami reveals that it is the community's spiritual connection and place‐based identity that have supported conservation, leading to the World Heritage nomination, and it is argued that the recognition of such intangible cultural heritage is vital in conservation. The challenge, then, is how to communicate such spiritual heritage today. Forms of community involvement are discussed in an attempt to answer this question.     

Balancing Archaeological Responsibilities and Community Commitments: A Case from Honduras

Abstract

Exploring the implications of a recent discovery in NW Honduras, this paper considers the ethical dilemma that arises when an archaeologist's responsibility to disseminate information conflicts with her/his commitment to protect cultural resources. We suggest that applied archaeology that benefits local communities among which investigations are conducted is a first step toward developing long-term solutions to conservation and stewardship challenges.     

新型文物封护保护材料氟橡胶耐紫外性能研究

封护措施对文物保护修复具有重要的意义,封护保护能有效阻隔环境因素(水分、氧气、空气污染物)对文物的影响,提高文物的耐腐蚀性。目前丙烯酸树脂B72和有机硅在文物封护领域应用较多,它们对于馆藏文物的保护有显著的效果,但它们的耐紫外性能不佳,不能很好地满足户外文物长期保护的要求。近年来氟碳材料由于具有优异的耐候性和耐老化性,已逐渐受到文物保护工作者的重视,本工作选择了一种新型氟碳材料F2311型氟橡胶作为研究对象,近年来已有将氟橡胶应用于金属文物、陶器、彩绘、壁画等文物封护保护的报道,但报道多侧重于应用,未见从理论方面验证或考察氟橡胶保护效果的研究。为了研究氟橡胶的耐老化性和在文物封护领域的适用性,本工作选用了丙烯酸树脂B72和2种有机硅涂料(分别为正硅酸乙酯和工业成品KSE-OH300)作为性能对比研究,通过紫外加速老化实验对它们进行了长期老化测试,利用红外、接触角、色差仪进行了结构和性能表征。结果表明:1)新型氟碳材料氟橡胶具有较优的紫外线耐受性,其在长期的紫外照射作用下颜色、结构和疏水性能均未发生明显变化,推测氟橡胶能够长期用于文物户外或户内封护保护,特别是针对处于复杂存储环境的文物保护有广阔的应用前景;2)B72在紫外照射下会发生氧化降解行为,红外证明这种降解反应在紫外照射初期就开始发生了,B72在紫外光下氧化降解导致封护膜发生黄变,在文物表面造成色差,推测B72不适用于户外文物的长期封护保护;3)2种有机硅类材料成膜后疏水性能一般,且在紫外辐射下结构趋于不稳定,外观也会发生黄变,推测这2种有机硅同样不适用于户外文物的长期封护保护。本工作通过评估材料的耐紫外性能来考察它们的耐老化性和在文物封护领域的适用性,研究结果表明新型氟碳材料氟橡胶与B72和2种有机硅相比,具有更优的紫外线耐受性,该考察结果可为文物封护材料的选择提供参考。     

Rethinking authenticity in the implementation of China's heritage conservation: the case of Hongcun Village

Authenticity is a constructive concept and the core principle for protection of cultural heritage, but it is also a controversial issue, along with its practice in different geographical and cultural contexts. Both the heritage management system and its authenticity principles are not indigenous, but were developed in western society and exported from western countries. As a result, conflicts arise with its implementation and therefore often lead to counterintuitive behaviors. This paper examines the heritage conservation process in the case of Hongcun by applying the social constructionism theory. The paper attempts to point out that both the heritage and the authenticity principles are socially constructed concepts and that the construction process is very much influenced by the power relationships involved. Authenticity in Hongcun is an implementation of the principle of material, static, and superficial style understandings, while less attention is paid to the non-material cultural heritage protection, which is especially reflected in the neglect and the development restrictions on local craft and folk art. The study shows that there is a need to be aware of the nature of the constructiveness and power relationships in the heritage management and to integrate local voices in the heritage conservation process to avoid conflicts and to achieve conservation goals.     

INTEGRATING INDIGENOUS AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE BASES FOR DISASTER RISK REDUCTION IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

In investigating ways to reduce community vulnerability to environmental hazards it is essential to recognize the interaction between indigenous and scientific knowledge bases. Indigenous and scientific knowledge bases are dynamic entities. Using a Process Framework to identify how indigenous and scientific knowledge bases may be integrated, three communities impacted upon by environmental hazards in Papua New Guinea, a Small Island Developing State, have established how their vulnerability to environmental hazards may be reduced. This article explores the application of the framework within the communities of Kumalu, Singas and Baliau, and how this could impact upon the future management of environmental hazards within indigenous communities in Small Island Developing States.     

基于LoRa与NB-IoT技术的文物保存环境监测系统探索及思考——以四川博物院为例

针对当前文物保存环境监测系统实际应用中,存在布线复杂、通信稳定性差、造价及安装维护成本高、需要频繁更换电池等一系列问题,本工作比较研究了几种成熟网络通信技术在文物保存环境监测系统中的应用现状及特性,并以四川博物院现有433 MHz技术监测系统为例,通过对博物馆应用场景的实验测试,从信号强度、丢包率和电池功耗等多方面,对比分析采用433 MHz、LoRa和NB-IoT等3种网络通信技术的优劣。实验结果表明,基于433 MHz技术的文物保存环境监测系统,存在现场布线复杂、建设成本较高、安装维护困难等明显弊端,而基于LoRa、NB-IoT技术的监测系统,与现有的433 MHz技术相比,在大大降低安装维护成本的同时也减少了中间节点的传输损耗,但所有测试点信号质量并未达到监测所需的覆盖效果,需要通过调整监测系统部署、优化网络应用性能等方式加以解决。在此基础上,结合文物预防性保护的实际应用需求,提出初步思考及建议,以探索一种布局安装方便快捷、使用维护成本低廉的新型文物保存环境监测系统。研究结果对今后文物保存环境监测系统网络构架的选择和博物馆预防性保护工程建设具有重要参考价值。     

Latin America: trade and culture at a crossroads

ABSTRACT

Trade liberalization took the cultural community in Latin America by surprise, forcing a defensive reaction that took years to generate adequate public policy responses. However, cultural policy has changed unevenly in the region. Two issues became the center of culture and trade debates after the 1990s: cultural industry production and traditional indigenous knowledge. Mexico, by far the largest producer of audiovisual content on the continent, has been reluctant to adopt defensive approaches or red lines during trade negotiations. In fact, Chile is the only country that negotiated a ‘cultural reserve’ in its FTA with the United States. Regarding traditional knowledge, only states with large indigenous populations like Guatemala, Panama but especially Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador in the Andean Region dedicated significant efforts to fight for intellectual property protection for traditional knowledge, including benefit-sharing for the commercial use of genetic resources, derived through indigenous collective knowledge.     

Pastoralism and conservation: The politics and notions of environmental justice under the grazing ban policy in Inner Mongolia,China

Environmental justice is a key concept for understanding the contested relationship between pastoralism and conservation. Our study adopted a political approach to examine conservation, pastoralism, and justice in the context of the grazing ban policy in China. Employing a qualitative, in-depth case study, we investigated the local political actors and processes that lead to environmental (in)justice. The evidence shows how injustice is perpetuated by both centralized and decentralized political processes and how herders use their knowledge and strategies in resistance to the injustice. In addition, the study contributed to a pluralistic understanding of justice by examining the different notions of justice held by the herders. We found that herders perceive injustices through different lenses, namely economic, ecological, and cultural aspects. Further, the similarities and differences between Han and Mongolian herders are discussed in terms of their notions of environmental justice and counteractions.