Working holiday makers in Australia: food security,climate change,and the backpacker tax

This commentary considers an often overlooked contribution to food security in Australia—the labour of working holiday makers. Their ability to act as a flexible and mobile temporary workforce is essential to the maintenance of the Australian agricultural industry. Previously, no tax was payable on income below $18,200, but a 2015 proposal to increase their tax rate sparked a vigorous political debate and so revealed their importance to the agricultural industry. A decline in backpacker numbers would cause agriculture to shrink to cope with smaller workforces. But the effects of climate change are expected to further shrink agricultural areas as extreme events and hotter temperatures impact crops, livestock, and the productivity of agricultural workers. Issues that appear manageable when viewed in isolation, such as increases in the tax rate on working holiday makers, become more problematic when viewed in conjunction with other impacts affecting agriculture. Thus, the ‘backpacker tax’ risks making food security harder to maintain at a time when Australia's agricultural system is already vulnerable to climate change.     

Frank Clifford Rose Memorial Lecture: The tale of three trephines: Surgeons and their surgical-instrument makers in Britain,France, and America in the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT

Trephines and trepanning date to ancient times, but a “modern” form of instruments was codified by the seventeenth century. This did not preclude efforts to “improve” the trephine in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Surgeons and instrument makers in Britain (Jardine and Savigny), France (Thomson and Charrière), and America (Galt and Otto & Reynders) endeavored to make the trephine safer and more precise. In exploring their interactions, this presentation shows the evolving role of the instrument makers not only as fabricators of tools, but as creative design collaborators of surgeons and physicians.     

The weird tales,spicy detectives,and startling stories of Irish-America: Irish characters in American pulp magazines

The pulp magazines that dominated early twentieth-century American popular culture helped shape popular understandings of Irish-American identity. Several notable types of pulp hero (cowboy, detective, G-Man, masked hero) were defined in part by Irish stereotypes and counter-stereotypes. They played upon notions of the Irish as figures straddling the border between civilisation and savagery to evoke an image of a new kind of American who was well equipped for the rapidly changing and chaotic American century. Irish-American pulp stories often lack explicitly Irish cultural or historical references and instead focus on describing Irishness as a more generic Americanness. Similarly, the Irish-American character moved further from ethnic stereotype to become a generic masculine ideal. In several ways, the pulp magazines chronicle the formation of an assimilated Irish identity in the USA.     

The 1948 war veterans and postwar reconstruction in Israel

This article deals with the characteristics of postwar reconstruction in the State of Israel at the end of the 1948 war and during the early 1950s, focusing on the patterns and priorities of reconstruction of society as a whole and the rehabilitation of veteran soldiers in particular. The article addresses the social impact of the rehabilitation of the 1948 war veterans on the emerging Israeli society, including the creation of a social distinction between different sectors undergoing rehabilitation in terms of employment and housing. The article also discusses the social and political protests that accompanied the rehabilitation of the demobilized soldiers who campaigned for recognition and commemoration.     

The reconciliation trap: disputing genocide and the land issue in postwar Guatemala

ABSTRACT

Guatemala’s reconciliation debate is as much about the present and the future as it is about history. In order to highlight its political dimension, I propose to read this controversy through the lens of hegemony theory. It is precisely because of the entwinement of specific political economic interests, centuries-old ethnic conflict and structural racism in Guatemala that charging genocide constitutes a key moment in a fight over power—a fight in which controversies about the politics of history are also expressions of struggle over economic resources and political hegemony. In this light, reconciliation does not appear to be a solution but a trap, set by those who defend their interests against the changes that the Peace Accords and the recommendations of the Historical Clarification Commission demanded. In the first section, I show that one crucial motive for these elites to deny the Guatemalan genocide, besides obvious reasons of historical shame and responsibility, is economic issues, among them the century-old land question. In the following sections I present two seemingly contrary arguments from the political and academic left. One takes apart, from a poststructural perspective, simplifying binary logics of class and ethnic conflict and thus delegitimizes the indigenous and peasant struggle for economic reform in the process. The other proposes a form of universal guilt that also ends up depoliticizing the history of the civil war.     

The modernizing bias of human rights: stories of mass killings and genocide in Central America

This article analyses selected cases of mass killings and genocide during the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and the way in which the truth commissions in both countries reframed locally grounded narratives to fit the state-centred language of human rights. Redefining wrongdoings as human rights violations produces stories that communicate poorly with local worldviews because the 'truths' that human rights language proposes disregard local realities and transform local conflicts into a type of 'modern', nationwide struggles. Thus, while the concept of genocide might capture well the horrendous nature of a mass killing, it will also ethnify the conflict. Comparisons between local readings and human rights-based reinterpretations reveal a 'modernizing' or 'Westernizing' bias of international law; the article argues for more awareness about such effects in analysis as well as in policy-making.     

论二战后期中英美围绕香港战后地位问题的交涉与斗争

在第二次世界大战后期,美国、英国和中国围绕香港的战后地位问题展开激烈斗争。美国政府支持战后由中国收回香港主权。罗斯福总统为此作出许多外交努力。英国拒绝战后将香港主权交还中国。这样,蒋介石将希望完全寄予美国的支持上。但是在战争结束前夕,美国与苏联开始进行冷战,美国需要英国的支持,因此放弃了原来的政策。其结果是英国在战争结束时重新占领香港。     

The Battle of the Camel: Revolution,transition and tourism in Cairo

This article asks how the 25 January 2011 revolution in Egypt led to the entrenchment of existing forms of privilege and marginality. To answer this question, critical scholars have taken for granted the revolution's linear temporality and focused largely on institutional processes at the state level following the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. In contrast, I provide an original take on this question through extensive ethnographic engagement, focusing on moments of rupture and urban spaces of contestation at the time of the revolution and beyond. More specifically, I trace the significance of an understudied moment during the revolution: the ‘Battle of the Camel’, when horse/camel drivers who sell rides to tourists at the Pyramids charged at protestors in Tahrir Square. An ethnography of this moment allows me to draw out the complex temporalities of the revolution by recognizing diverse moments of contestation by marginalized subjects at its different ‘stages’. This article traces how these alternative temporalities were driven but also obscured by longer-term patterns of tourism and urban development. It finds that relations of power and marginality were reproduced through tourism and elite Egyptian visions of temporality and authenticity in the key urban spaces relevant to this battle – the Pyramids of Giza and Tahrir Square. These sites were positioned as spaces of Egypt's ‘authentic’ past and future respectively, reinforcing a colonial and neoliberal narrative of development that made possible the protection of tourism and elite priorities and the remarginalization of ‘underdeveloped’ camel drivers and street vendors in these sites.     

战后法国第三产业的发展和妇女就业

自工业社会形成以来,发达国家的产业结构在本世纪,尤其是二战后经历了重大调整,第三产业异军突起,其产值在国民经济中所占比重以及就业人数大大超出第一和第二产业,并对经济发展和社会生活形成强大冲击力,也使劳动力市场发生结构性的变化。本文以发达国家之一的法国...     

Corporate advertising,public relations and popular exhibits: The case of du pont

Abstract

After recapitulating and re‐evaluating the principal early signals that the Soviet Union was planning to launch an artificial earth satellite (Sputnik 1) in 1957, which have long been familiar to space historians, this article presents some additional pre‐sputnik material from Radio, the Soviet government's monthly magazine for radio amateurs, and from other sources, which has not previously been identified by western scholars. The preparations of the Soviet radio amateurs for satellite tracking are also described. The fact that western radio amateurs were no more successful in discovering Soviet intentions, at the time, than the scientists or the intelligence agencies, is documented and discussed. To complete the picture, contemporary assessments of the scientific value of amateur radio observations of the early satellites are surveyed. The article concludes by discussing the surprise aspect of the first sputniks in the light of the fresh information presented, and by noting some still unanswered historical questions.     

Rethinking activism: tourism,mobilities and emotion

Abstract

This article seeks to trouble distinctions between activism and tourism, and activism and regionality. It does this by exploring the role of tourism, mobilities and emotion for a regional Australian queer collective, and their 1400 km return journey to the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade. In illustrating the ways this touristic journey represents alternative ways of performing queer activism, I argue that the existence of regional activism deconstructs notions that non-normative sexualities and queer politics do not exist beyond urban centres. Granting attention to the alternative ways the queer collective utilises tourism mobilities as part of their activism strengthens characterisations of leisure as always more than a space of hedonism and escape. Understanding the broader significance of events enables scholars to rethink festivals as spatially and temporally bounded, one off events but rather crucial to the ongoing sustainability of regional queer collectives and performances of queer activism in peripheral areas.