From the Little Tree,Half a Block Toward the Lake: Popular Geography and Symbolic Discontent in Post‐Sandinista Managua

Abstract: The inhabitants of Managua, Nicaragua have a sophisticated, often bitingly ironic, popular geography that they use to navigate the city. The Nicaraguan capital has been destroyed twice by earthquakes, ravaged by war, left to decay for lack of funds, transformed by the creative destruction of speculative capitalism and subjected to a series of ideological impositions. Few people know the official names of streets, and recent governments have not had the ability to put up signs. So a supple system of popular geography dominates, resisting and ridiculing attempts to impose an official order, and adapting to change while preserving a bottom‐up sense of memory, history and place. Drawing on Allan Pred's classic account of popular geography in late nineteenth century Stockholm, I use Managua's language of spatial orientation as a window into peripheral modernity and the politics of everyday life.     

On the Particularism of English Landscape Archaeology

The aim of this paper is to explore the question: why is the archaeology of English historic landscapes apparently so provincial? Inevitably the response must be that matters are more complex. In this paper, I examine the work of W. G. Hoskins, the “father of English landscape history,” and draw attention to: the complex way in which landscape is embedded in nationalism; the relations between locale, province, and nation; and the way wider tensions, in particular of colonialism are embedded within Hoskins's own discourse. In conclusion, I examine ways in which this problematic continues to structure enquiry into the English landscape today and to inhibit a genuinely international and comparative approach to historic landscapes.     

War without end? Military humanitarianism and the limits of biopolitical approaches to security in Central America and the Caribbean

In 2008, the U.S. Southern Command launched Operation Continuing Promise as an ongoing mission to provide humanitarian aid and assistance to vulnerable populations in the Caribbean and Latin America. Conceived as a means of fostering regional security, the Operation's humanitarian aim was designed to improve regional security by ensuring life against the risk of a range of disasters. Much as that mission reflects biopolitical analyses of humanitarianism that emphasize the ability to protect life as the basis for sovereignty, closer attention to the timing and location of SOUTHCOM's efforts offers a more contextual understanding. That approach is developed here through an analysis of Operation Continuing Promise's stop in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, contrasting SOUTHCOM's focus on biophysical vulnerability with intended recipients' sense of their condition as a historical and political outcome. That contrast frames a contextual understanding of Operation Continuing Promise, placing it within broader efforts to construct Puerto Cabezas as vulnerable. That approach also points up the limits of biopolitical analyses of humanitarianism, suggesting the ways in which vulnerability is never merely a biological condition. The narrow humanitarian focus of Operation Continuing Promise can therefore be assessed in terms of its inability to address political and historical factors shaping vulnerability. So long as vulnerability persists, the potential for intervention persists indefinitely, making humanitarianism into a means of waging war without end.     

Opening Panama's Darien Gap

The Darien "gap" was opened in the 1970s when a ribbon of highway was cut through the wilderness allowing uncontrolled colonization to penetrate the region. The Gap Highway and associated settlement frontier led to the removal of rain forest habitats and resulted in drastic reductions in wild plant and animal resources. Other resettlement programs also altered the indigenous landscape which had survived largely intact since colonial times. The region's historic Negro riverlowns have declined while population growth has occurred along the new "cattle front" and in the "cultural parks." These new patterns have undermined the region's traditional subsistence base. Although the Darien has experienced considerable deforestation, it nevertheless contains one of the last remaining stands of Central American rain forest and continues to nurture the cultural heritage of the Kuna and Choc Indians.     

Rescuing the Future: César Vallejo and Postcolonial Thought

This article explores some of the ways in which the Heptaméron's thirteenth nouvelle plays upon epistolary expectations established by medieval letter-writing traditions, and it suggests how sixteenth-century epistolary exchange had shifted from its medieval antecedents, particularly in regard to the materiality of letters. It also considers the implications of Marguerite's epistolary play for the letter-writing landscape and for the subject at the very heart of the Heptaméron: love, and the fictions we necessarily engage in writing about it.     

Disciplined Mobility and the Emotional Subject in Royal Dutch Lloyd's Early Twentieth Century Passenger Shipping Network

This paper examines the disciplined mobility and emotional geographies of “between‐deck” passengers in Royal Dutch Lloyd's early Twentieth Century passenger shipping network. Specifically, it is concerned with the ways in which the network was established and with the efforts made to maintain it. It is found that such a disciplinary network furthers the firm's goal of shipping healthy and productive bodies for corporate profits and that transhipment facility Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam was integral to the performance and maintenance of such a transnational disciplinary network. The key consequence of such disciplined mobility was the creation of an emotional passenger‐migrant subject shaped in relation to the power of corporate, cultural and other authorities in maritime travel and migration. In identifying this historic network of disciplined mobility and its emotional subject, this paper seeks to reveal the emotional geographies relating to mobile subjectivities and the power relations associated with their historically significant travels.     

The Sound of Silence: Valuing Acoustics in Heritage Conservation

This paper explores the reasons behind the omission of historic acoustic values from heritage assessments in Australia. Best practice dictates that all cultural heritage values associated with significant places should be assessed in order to make informed conservation and management decisions. However, the multi‐sensory nature of aesthetics has been reframed in guidance documentation in ways that run counter to the primary frame. Conventions that have developed around the way places are assessed also work against comprehensive identification of values. As a result, the consideration of aesthetics in cultural heritage is limited to contemporary visual qualities. Furthermore, because the assessment of historic value takes a diachronic rather than synchronic approach, we have little knowledge of the places past communities valued for the sounds they experienced there. Research into landscape preference and acoustic ecology highlights the importance of identifying the inherent acoustic dimension of places and the role sound plays in developing a sense of place. Two landscape areas in Western Australia's south‐west with historic acoustic values, the Boranup Sand Patch and the Lower Reaches of the Blackwood River, illustrate how historic soundscapes can provide insightful contrasts and resonances with contemporary values, and how vulnerable such places are when the sound of place is overlooked in land management policies.     

Archaeology as a Tool to Illuminate and Support Community Struggles in the Black Metropolis of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Abstract

The South Side of Chicago — the 'Black Metropolis' — has been the site of many struggles over the years: for human dignity and civil rights; against restrictive real estate covenants; and to control present-day gentrification, to name a few. This legacy is inscribed on the landscape above and below ground. Black Chicagoans are keen to preserve the material manifestations of prior struggles and use preservation to benefit the current inhabitants of 'Bronzeville'. These activists have welcomed the author into collaborative projects that use archaeology and historic preservation to further their goals. Excavation at the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls and the Bronzeville Cultural Garden has contributed to our efforts to identify and present stories of the Great Migration and its consequences. At stake are our understandings of how racial and other identities shaped life in this community in the past as well as the neighbourhood's role in the city's future.     

Rethinking Development Space in Emerging Countries: Turkey's Conservative Countermovement

Despite an increasingly flexible global policy context, most emerging countries refuse to venture beyond their pre‐existing development strategies. This article contends that in some cases domestic political constraints under liberalized markets might preclude policy dynamism. In particular, it draws attention to the tension between market expansion and social cohesion as a formative influence over policy patterns. This tension is sometimes addressed through a conservative countermovement whereby liberally‐oriented governments entice sections of the poor into broad electoral coalitions by employing palliative interventions alongside market‐expanding policies. Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is one example. Central to the Turkish case has been the redeployment of the country's historic foreign capital‐dependent pattern of growth in the service of selective redistribution and credit‐fuelled consumerism. The ensuing deficit‐led neoliberal populism assured stable and equitable growth in the extraordinary international and domestic context of the mid‐2000s, but has proven unfeasible since the global crisis. However, this coupling of market and social preferences has become politically so firmly entrenched in time that it now constrains the policy options to address Turkey's developmental impasse.     

Analysis of Explorers' Records of Aboriginal Landscape Burning in the Kimberley Region of Western Australia

The accounts of explorers and colonists in the Kimberley region of Western Australia were searched to find records of landscape burning by Aborigines. Analyses of these records provide estimates of the spatial and temporal patterns of fire across the region in historic times. The seasonality of fire varied across the region. In northern parts of the Kimberley landscape fire was recorded from May to October with peak levels in June and September. In southern parts of the region there are records of burning as early as February and March, through to August but no records of fire were made in late dry season months. Modern fire regimes were compared with historic by superimposing the routes taken by five explorers over a modern fire history map derived from satellite imagery. Tallies of the number of modern fires that intersect the explorer's daily and monthly route were compared with actual observations of fire made by the explorers in historic times. The results indicate an increase in early dry season fires and the overall frequency of fires across the region in modern times. Explorers' accounts were also examined to derive further information regarding Aboriginal landscape burning in different environments and to distinguish landscape burning from other uses of fire such as smoke signals and cooking fires.     

Reform in Turkey: Liberalization as government and critique (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Turkey is in the midst of a wide‐ranging reform of historic proportions, the most profound reorganization and restructuring of institutions and practices since the foundation of the Republic in 1923. These reforms, inspired and guided by the country's EU integration, are multifaceted but can be summarized as liberalization of economy, politics and society. While capitalist penetration and privatization are obvious features of the reform, its techniques, kinds of knowledge and objects, as well as its reflexive aspects – the ways in which it studies itself unfolding – have not been sufficiently conceptualized.     

False,cheap and degraded: when history,economy and environment collided at Cades Cove,Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Great Smoky Mountains National Park was created in 1934 after decades of popular activism. The National Park Service initially planned to restore wildness to all formerly settled lands through the process of secondary succession, but did not in a valley in the northwest corner of the park, Cades Cove. Transforming the 1200-ha agricultural setting into forest would have eliminated the visual charm highly prized by the tourists who had long come there. Additionally, experts promoted the preservation of Cades Cove's historic–cultural landscape because they falsely perceived the local culture to be a relic of the past. The Park Service acceded, but its commitment to historic preservation was tempered by a concern to minimize its expenses. Consequently, an agricultural permit system was adopted in 1945, which allowed modern farmers to operate on the historic landscape, keeping it open. This cheap method kept open the beautiful vistas of Cades Cove. Unfortunately, the agency's commitment to beauty and economy led to decades of ecological degradation, including water pollution and species extirpation. Only in the last two decades, has park management moved away from its focus on a low-cost, attractive landscape to embrace one that is also ecologically healthy, and thus more sustainable.     

Being(s) in relation at home: socio-natures of patio ‘gardens’ in Managua,Nicaragua

Human–nature relations of home have been gaining more attention in geography, especially in the study of gardens. This article contributes to this growing literature, but in contrast to much research, it examines human–nature relations in the patios (garden) of homes in a marginalized barrio (slum) of Managua, Nicaragua. I suggest that the human–nature relations in these patios need to be understood differently than those in North American and European gardens. Based on research carried out in Managua, I argue that such relations are at the centre of everyday domestic activities and are critical in producing home as a liveable space in the city. The article draws on feminist geographic understandings of home and current work around human–environment relations, and identifies three different sets of socio-ecological relations: corporeal, aesthetic and economic. It argues that these three different relations between humans and the plants and trees in their patios are critical in the imaginaries around home and in the production of habitable spaces in cities, as well as to our understanding of urban natures.     

Ways of Belonging: Reconciliation and Adelaide's Public Space Indigenous Cultural Markers

As an arguably ‘post colonial’ society, Australia is evolving its particular identity and sense of self, but reconciliation with its Indigenous peoples remains a significant political and cultural issue. Social inclusion or marginalisation is reflected in the construct of the civic landscape and this paper traces and contextualises public space Indigenous representation or ‘cultural markers’, since the 1960s in Adelaide, South Australia, the Kaurna people's land. This paper identifies social phases and time periods in the evolution of the ways in which Indigenous people and their culture have been included in the city's public space. Inclusion of Indigenous peoples in civic landscapes contributes not only to their spiritual and cultural renewal and contemporary identity, but also to the whole community's sense of self and to the process of reconciliation. This has the potential to provide a gateway to a different way of understanding place which includes an Indigenous perspective and could, symbolically, contribute to the decolonisation of Indigenous people. An inter‐related issue for the colonising culture is reconciliation with the Indigenous nature of the land, in the sense of an intimate sense of belonging and connectedness of spirit through an understanding of Indigenous cultural landscapes, an issue which this paper explores. The paper also sets out suggestions for the facilitation of further Indigenous inclusion and of re‐imagining ways of representation.     

Capital Shares: The Way Back into the With of Christianity

Abstract

In the ten years since the publication of Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's Empire, the relationship between Christianity and global capital has received increasing theological attention among the adherents, critics, sympathizersssa, and apostates of Radical Orthodoxy. At stake in this conversation is the possibility that Christianity might provide a universal ontology sufficient to ground a counter-hegemonic, specifically socialist, praxis. One question that many of these authors rarely address, however, is the extent to which Christian universalism has been responsible for the emergence of global capital in the first place. This article will address this profound split at the heart of a tradition; that is, Christianity's culpability for and resistance to global capital. To this end, "Capital Shares" sketches the aporia of Christianity's relation to Empire and then appeals to Jean-Luc Nancy's "deconstruction of Christianity"; in particular, his attempt to find "a source of Christianity, more original than Christianity itself, that might provoke another possibility to arise."     

The Struggle Between the United States and Israel over Recognition for Jerusalem as Israel's Capital, 1952–67

This study analyses the key role played by Washington in the international community's battle from 1952 to 1967 not to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital. It tries to explain both why the United States took on such a role and why its efforts were rewarded with such little success. It is suggested that the United States was guided chiefly by the principle of showing respect for the United Nations' authority. Yet, when this principle clashed with another, namely Israel's resolve for Jerusalem to be its capital, it was generally the United States that backed away.     

Protecting historic Hanoi in a context of heritage contestation

Abstract

Since the introduction of the doi moi (renovation) policies in 1986, economic liberalisation and modernisation have led to redevelopment pressures on the cultural heritage of Vietnam's cities. A lively debate has ensued, most notably in the capital. Hanoi, about what is worth keeping. The views of international and local developers are opposed to the ‘Vietnamese heritage only’ of the most narrowly nationalistic of politicians and planners. The complicated decision‐making environment is made more difficult by the presence of Western planning advisers who argue for the protection of the French and Russian layers in Hanoi's cultural landscape. This is part of a long history of heritage contestation and redefinition in Hanoi which largely reflects the succession of political regimes controlling the city. Consideration of key philosophical and practical issues is timely given the current intervention by the Australian Hanoi Planning and Development Control Project team which is helping shape the future of a variously‐defined ‘historic Hanoi’.     

Sovereign wealth funds: dangers and opportunities

Soaring oil prices since the early 2000s have led to a historic transformation of wealth from consuming regions to major oil exporters. In recent years many of these exporters have set up oil funds to utilize their massive and growing oil revenues. These funds are divided into two categories—stabilizing and saving. Their large investments in western markets have raised concerns that they might be driven by political and strategic interests rather than commercial ones. This article examines oil funds in the Persian Gulf, Norway and Russia. It discusses US and European proposals to regulate oil funds' investments. The article examines the International Monetary Fund's efforts to forge a consensus on a ‘code of conduct’ that would guide the relationship between oil funds and the recipient markets. The analysis argues against excessive regulation.     

Political Alignments,Political Economy and Political Change in Australia 1890-1940

This paper explores the applicability of class-coalitional explanations to broad patterns of public policy in Australia at the turn of the century and during the Great Depression. It argues that this approach, with its strong comparative emphasis, does shed light on the 'historic compromise' between capital and labour established after Federation and provides some useful hypotheses about Australia's failure to 'break with orthodoxy' in the 1930s. In particular, it provides an important comparative framework for understanding the nature and role of the labour movement in Australian history, and a corrective to prevailing interpretations. The paper also argues, though, that evidence from the Australian case calls into question simple factor-endowment models of political change.