The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource: History,Ecology and Locality in a Tank-irrigated Landscape in South India

Today there is a pervasive policy consensus in favour of ‘community management’ approaches to common property resources such as forests and water. This is endorsed and legitimized by theories of collective action which, this article argues, produce distinctively ahistorical and apolitical constructions of ‘locality’, and impose a narrow definition of resources and economic interest. Through an historical and ethnographic exploration of indigenous tank irrigation systems in Tamil Nadu, the article challenges the economic-institutional modelling of common property systems in terms of sets of rules and co-operative equilibrium outcomes internally sustained by a structure of incentives. The article argues for a more historically and politically grounded understanding of resources, rights and entitlements and, using Bourdieu's notion of ‘symbolic capital’, argues for a reconception of common property which recognizes symbolic as well as material interests and resources. Tamil tank systems are viewed not only as sources of irrigation water, but as forming part of a village ‘public domain’ through which social relations are articulated, reproduced and challenged. But the symbolic ‘production of locality’ to which water systems contribute is also shaped by local ecology. The paper examines the historical and cultural production of two distinctive ‘cultural ecologies’. This serves to illustrate the fusion of ecology and social identity, place and person, in local conceptions, and to challenge a currently influential thesis on the ecological-economic determinants of collective action. In short, development discourse and local actors are seen to have very different methods and purposes in the ‘production of locality’. Finally, the article points to some practical implications of this for strategies of ‘local institutional development’ in irrigation.     

The problem of interests in contemporary liberal political theory

‘Interest’ is a central concept in contemporary liberal political theory. Much of this discussion is marked by related confusions between ‘interest’ and ‘actions‐in‐interests’ and between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ interests. These confusions are damaging, since liberal theorists are ostensibly firmly opposed to treating objective interests as politically relevant, but they inevitably finish up admiting the relevance of some form of objective interests. They do this by limiting valid interest judgements to those which are rational, or which favour future over present interests, or which are made post facto, or which favour public over individual interests. This admission of objective interests into liberal theory has important implications for the way in which liberal theorists conceive of relationships between the liberal democratic state and its citizens. In particular, it seriously undermines the democratic element in contemporary liberal democratic theories of political representation.     

Contesting captive cetaceans: (il)legal spaces and the nature of dolphins in urban Singapore

Drawing on the debate over dolphin captivity in Singapore, we examine the ways in which human–animal relationships are contested. Departing from most animal geography studies which often focused on the conflictual spatial transgressions of animals into human spaces, we use the idea of ‘captivity’ as a heuristic to posit that human–animal relationships are necessarily moral, spatially enmeshed in contestations over what is (un)natural and increasingly entwined in legal geographies. While such an argument mirrors other sites of animal captivity (for example, zoos), dolphin captivity sits in a more ambiguous legal terrain than most other captive animals in zoos. Moreover, the very ‘nature’ of dolphins makes debates over their ‘authenticity’ ever more complex. The moralities of cetaceans are simultaneously underpinned by questions of the spatial (‘captive sites’ and ‘open seas’), the socio-cultural (‘charismatic animals’) and the legal (‘regulatory frameworks governing their welfare and whether they are endangered or not’). Hitherto, cetaceans are less researched (compared to terrestrial creatures) in animal geographies with even fewer studies focusing on cetacean captivity. We call for an expanded notion of ‘captivity’ that is relative, relational and non-absolute and underpinned by the notions of ‘nature’. In so doing, we align ourselves more with the anti-captivity camp.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

Madness and colonisation: The embodiment of power in Pangia

The article considers two examples of ‘madness’ which occurred during the colonial era in Pangia district, Southern Highlands Province, PNG. The first, immediately prior to pacification, concerned outbreaks of madness among young Wiru men which were similar to the ‘wildman’ behaviour described in the Highlands ethnography. The second style of madness was associated with the so-called ‘hysteria’ accompanying revival activity by Christian missions. The two styles are compared using a Foucauldian perspective, primarily for the ways in which colonial technologies of power were inscribed on the bodies of Pangia people. The article presents an anatomy of colonial power, and suggests an ethnohistory of the body is possible. It examines the ways in which this power was created through discourses and practices involving concepts of the ‘primitive’ and ‘heathen,’ resulting in a transformation of the Wiru subject.     

Educating for Sustainability in Archaeology

‘Sustainability’ is a concept that suffuses the present. Policy initiatives require ‘sustainability’ as one of the criteria by which projects are judged. In recognition of their role as interpreters and custodians of the past, archaeologists are one of the many groups contributing to the creation of ‘a sustainable historic environment’ and ‘sustainable communities’. Accordingly, sustainability is a concept that we perhaps need to incorporate into our activities as educators of future good citizens and into our training for the profession of archaeology. This paper seeks to address this issue, particularly in the light of Themes and Sessions relating to both sustainability and education at WAC8, but where the link between them remains unexamined.     

Creating meanings and traps: competing interpretations of the idea of nation in the debates of Russian Slavophiles and Westernisers in the 1840s

To use Benedict Anderson's metaphor, there are different ways to ‘imagine’ the nation. This means that in the same community there might be various competing interpretations of ‘an idea of nation’. They contribute to some kind of ‘repertoire of meanings’, to which participants of nationalist discourses consciously or unconsciously appeal. If so, it is useful to explore the process of shaping and interaction of competing interpretations of ‘an idea of nation’, resulting in (terminal) domination of particular cohesions of meanings in the public discourses. This article offers a case study of the debates between Russian Slavophiles and Westernisers in the 1840s that are treated as the controversy between two distinct models of ‘an idea of nation’, the conservative-traditionalist and the liberal-progressivist. This distinction, familiar for many countries, was especially evident in Russia with regard to the problem of the preservation of ‘the national self’ in the context of ‘catch-up’ modernisation which took a significant place amongst the complex of issues that shaped the nationalist ‘repertoire of meanings’.     

The rediscovery of ‘the national’ in the 1990s – contexts,new cultural forms and practices in reunified Germany

This article examines how and in which societal and political contexts nationhood is expressed and symbolised in reunified Germany. This ‘rediscovery’ of nationhood since the 1990s mixes new and old motifs of the cultural repertoire of ‘the national’ for different purposes. Three main contexts triggered a rediscovery of ‘the national’ after 1989: reunification, immigration and the retrenchment of the social state. I argue, by analysing ethnographic material and political discourses, that these contexts, on the one hand, rearticulate old forms of ethnic and cultural nationalism and, on the other hand, create new images and symbols of an open civic society and immigration country. There are ‘playful’ forms, such as campaigns of nation branding, that symbolically include the ‘productive’ and ‘useful’ immigrant into the national project. Moreover, such campaigns serve to legitimatise the downsizing of the national state that – according to a neoliberal attitude – relies on a new community spirit of entrepreneurial, ‘activated’ citizens who ‘help themselves’. Thus, focusing on these pluralised renationalisation processes makes evident how polyvalent ‘the national’ still is. It can be employed by those who attempt to ‘reunite’ the East and West Germans, by businesses to sell their goods and ideas and by almost any political orientation, be it right‐wing or left‐wing.     

Contested Sources of Authority: Re‐claiming State Sovereignty by Formalizing Traditional Authority in Mozambique

In Mozambique, the current legal framework institutionalizes a rural–urban differentiation of local governance, allowing for elected representation in thirty‐three urban settings and the recognition of ‘community authorities’ in rural areas. This article deals with the latter by exploring the implementation of Decree 15/2000, which is the first legislation in post‐colonial Mozambique to formalize ‘traditional authority’. Views of traditional authority as either a ‘genuine’ African form of authority legitimized by traditional beliefs and practices, or as a form of power ‘corrupted’ by colonial rule, are inadequate for understanding the current situation. In formerly war‐torn Sussundenga District, kin‐based authorities drew on elements from ‘traditional’ and ‘state‐administrative’ domains of authority in order to be recognized. Varied definitions of tradition came to justify leadership, but the content on which legitimization was based defies any generalized Weberian dichotomy between traditional and modern/state types of office. Different sources of legitimacy sometimes foregrounded administrative needs and at other times maintained what became defined as traditional.     

A zone of exception: gendered violences of family ‘Happiness’ in Vietnam

This article examines the ways in which women’s ‘family happiness’ in Vietnam paradoxically, and alarmingly, is rendered compatible with the endurance of what is diminished as ‘minor’ partner violence. Thus focusing on the gendering of ‘happiness’ and the discrepancies between ideals and practices, the article unfolds how intersections between a number of ‘power-geometries’ including violence preventive legislation, an official family discourse, and the patrilineally organized family facilitate the conditions that allow for male-to-female violence in the domestic sphere. The article highlights how Intimate Partner Violence transmutes the ‘happy family’ into a ‘zone of exception’ wherein which the laws prohibiting violence are suspended, the juridico-political status and rights of a woman blurred, and a state of chronic precariousness and crisis generated. Such tendencies are fortified by the ambiguous strategies of the Women’s Union. In maneuvering between violence preventive legislation and family ideals, the Union is criticizing patriarchal family hierarchies while also encouraging women to nurture family happiness by complying with an abusive partner.     

International Solidarity in reproductive justice: surrogacy and gender-inclusive polymaternalism

Reproductive justice and gestational surrogacy are often implicitly treated as antonyms. Yet the former represents a theoretic approach that enables the long and racialised history of surrogacy (far from a new or ‘exceptional’ practice) to be appreciated as part of a struggle for ‘radical kinship’ and gender-inclusive polymaternalism. Recasting surrogacy as a dynamic contradiction in itself, full of latent possibilities relevant to early Reproductive Justice militants’ family-abolitionist aims, this article invites scholars in human geography and cognate disciplines to re-think the boundaries of surrogacy politics. As ethnographies of formal gestational workplaces, accounts of gestational workers’ self-organised resistance, and readings of the attendant public media scandals show (taking examples from India, Thailand, and New Jersey), there is no good reason to place these new economies of ‘third-party reproductive assistance’ in a ‘realm apart’ from conversations about social reproduction more generally. Surrogacy, I argue, potentially names a practice of commoning at the same time as it names a new wave of accumulation in which clinicians are capitalising on the contemporary – biogenetic-propertarian, white-supremacist – logic of kinmaking in the Global North. Ongoing experiments in the redistribution of mothering labour (‘othermothering’ in the Black feminist tradition) suggest that ‘another surrogacy is possible’, animated by what Kathi Weeks and the 1970s intervention ‘Wages Against Housework’ conceive as anti-work politics. In making this argument, the article revives the concept ‘gestational labour’ as a means of keeping the process of ‘literal’ reproduction open to transformation.     

Experiencing Dracula's homeland

ABSTRACT

Transylvania has not only a geographical location as a province of Romania but also a mental meaning as Dracula's land. Dracula has become an important brand name for Romania, attracting many tourists in recent years – especially after the fall of communism. The main dimensions of Dracula's castle (i.e. Bran Castle) experiences shared online by tourists were identified to ascertain the primary reasons for satisfaction and dissatisfaction with visits and to test whether narratives and satisfaction vary according to the occasion (i.e. Halloween). Quantitative (i.e. computer-based) and qualitative (i.e. narrative) content analyses were conducted on the Web reviews written by visitors. The results reveal that the experiences are multidimensional, and they include the following themes: ‘castle’, ‘visit’, ‘Dracula’, ‘inside’, ‘tourist’, ‘outside’, ‘trip’, ‘souvenirs’, ‘stairs’ and ‘Dracula's castle’. The main reasons for dissatisfaction are overcrowding, which is connected with the outside theme, and the disappointment of tourists regarding the old furniture, which is associated with the inside theme. The results also reveal that visitors are the most satisfied with their experience around the time of Halloween. The narratives shared online emphasise tourists’ need to associate their imaginings with this region and castle, giving their experiences greater meaning through this destination's image as Transylvania.     

Villagizing the city: turning rural ethnic heritage into urban modernity in southwest China

This paper examines the rural ethnic heritage-inspired transformation of the built environment of a relatively small county town in China. The paper explores the ways village-based ethnic heritage is being repositioned by local leaders as a resource for tourism-oriented revenue generation and for ‘improving’ the ‘quality’ and behaviour of town residents. Viewing heritage as a ‘technology of government,’ the paper provides an analysis based on three interrelated themes: the discourses by which town leaders and planners have conceived the heritage development project as one of improvement, the spatial practices by which those discourses have been realised in the built environment, and the ways residents themselves have appropriated and ‘inhabited’ this new ‘villagized’ city as they go about their everyday urban lives. Based on ethnographic field work, a survey, and extended interviews over a period of four years, the paper finds the town leadership’s faith in the ability of the built environment to shape and improve the conduct of citizens to be overstated. While the town’s transformation has generated a new sense of urban modernity among residents, their ways of inhabiting and using urban space have little relevance to the ‘heritagized’ environment in which they now live.     

Sweet nationalism in bitter days: a commercial representation of Zionism

ABSTRACT. This article identifies several theoretical approaches to the role of culture in the construction of national identity. Embedded in the presently emerging approach, which emphasises the relations between popular culture/consumerism and national identity, this study focuses on a specific consumer good manufactured in Israel in the early 2000s, the height of the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising): small sugar packets bearing portraits of the patriarchs of Zionism. The analysis of this product, employing semiotic analysis, interviews and focus groups, locates it in the five ‘moments’ of du Gay's ‘circuit of culture’ (i.e. identity, representation, production, consumption and regulation). Three main gen e ral arguments were stated, empirically examined and largely sustained: (1) Consumer goods are used not only for constructing national identity but also as a means for ‘healing’ it; (2) in their ‘healing’ capacity, representations of nationalism on consumer goods do not add new elements to representations offered by the ‘high’ official version of nationalism but replicate them in a simplified way; (3) while trivialising the insights and concepts that originated in ‘high’ culture, consumer goods expose the prejudices, stereotypes and rules of inclusion and exclusion that in ‘high’ culture are often hidden in a sophisticated manner.     

Learning to belong? ‘Culture’ and ‘place making’ among children and young people in Hull,UK City of Culture 2017

ABSTRACT

Despite the rise of ‘child-friendly cities’ internationally, and a growing interest in youth engagement in urban planning, the role of children and young people in culture-led regeneration and ‘place making’ schemes, remains under-researched. Notwithstanding the wealth of research into childhood and youth cultures, little is known about the ways in which the abstract (and perhaps predominantly ‘adult’) notions of ‘culture’ and ‘place’ are negotiated by younger citizens. Drawing on participative research with schools across Hull, the UK City of Culture 2017, this contribution explores children’s and young people’s understandings of culture and place within this cultural regeneration event. Although our findings suggest that the City of Culture designation has brought benefits to children and young people in a marginalised city, there is still much to be learned from their often personal and informal interpretations of ‘place’ and ‘culture’, as well as the role played by schools in this context.     

Tackling gender inequalities in music: a comparative study of policy responses in the UK and Sweden

Cross-disciplinary research has highlighted the persistence of gender inequalities across music scenes. However, the way in which cultural policy shapes responses to gender inequalities in music has been relatively underexplored. This article draws on research from Swedish and UK contexts, supporting analysis with reference to 9 key-stakeholder interviews from both. Comparing perspectives from ‘more’ and ‘less’ gender-equal contexts, with sufficiently different cultural policy traditions, the article explores how responses to gender inequalities in music are influenced by ‘cultural democratic’ and ‘arm’s length’ approaches. It demonstrates that, as a result of these traditions, there is a comparatively more interventionist approach in Sweden at a national level, whereas the lack of central government response in the UK has encouraged more market-oriented solutions. It suggests that this ‘arm’s length’ approach necessitates different grassroots organisational strategies in order to affect change but notes that these, alongside austerity agendas, are insufficient in the long term.     

‘Living Liminality’: everyday experiences of asylum seekers in the ‘Direct Provision’ system in Ireland

Mechanisms to exclude people seen as ‘other’ which were once considered exceptional have now become normal. Global patterns of increased state security lead to people on the move or seeking protection being detained, dispersed and deported, their lives treated as ‘waste’ or ‘reject’. The Irish ‘Direct Provision’ system is part of an increasing network of liminal, or threshold, spaces, situated between and within borders, in which such people are detained or forced to wait in often inhumane conditions and often for years at a time. Based on ethnographic participatory photographic research, this article explores the ways in which imposed liminality plays out in people’s everyday lives in ‘Direct Provision’. The article looks at how liminality is lived in spatial and temporal terms and develops the idea of ‘ontological liminality’, a means of expressing the ways in which a chronic sense of fear, insecurity, invisibility and a highly controlled existence are lived and internalized; it also shows the ways in which people negotiate this imposed liminality through everyday practices, creating various forms of attachment, engagement and belonging. Exploring the concept of liminality in this context holds broader implications not only for understanding experiences of people waiting or held in the increasing number of refugee camps, border zones and detention centres in and beyond Europe, but also provides insight into the architectures of exclusion created by states to contain or exclude the ‘other’.     

Beyond ‘Crisis’ in Understanding Gender Transformation

Since the late 1980s, historians have described certain eras as marked by ‘crisis’ in the production of gender norms. At the outset, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ proved useful for understanding changes in normative cultural systems. The rhetorical trope of crisis distinguished key turning points in the construction of gender and helped to shape a coherent narrative centred on moments of breakdown and reconstruction. Unfortunately, however, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ has now outlived its usefulness; it has lost its analytic purchase. This article reviews the notion in modern, American and European historiography, then critiques its usefulness as an analytic concept. ‘Gender crisis’ has been overworked to the point of semantic collapse. It has been so reified as to foreshorten analysis, and it conceptualises masculinity as a fixed set of essentialised norms. Finally, ‘gender crisis’ describes subjectivity and its relation to normative systems in overly binary and mechanistic terms. Using the case study of postwar French masculinity, the author proposes the alternative concept of ‘gender damage’ as a way to understand periods of transformation in gender. The term ‘gender damage’ moves beyond a mechanistic notion of interaction with normative systems in order to incorporate such emotions as frustration, humiliation and confusion in our thinking of human subjectivity. In addition, the term forces us to specify exactly which gender norms are being reconfigured in some way. ‘Damage’ is by nature specific and local because it does not totalise catastrophe in the same way as does ‘crisis’.     

'Homo Sacer' out of left field: communist "slime" as bare life in 1930s and Second World War Sweden

This article maps ways in which radical left‐wing politics in 1930s and Second World War Sweden were conceived in medico‐biological and eugenic terms that expressed strong dehumanizing sentiments. The article engages Agamben's and Foucault's thinking on ‘biopolitics’ and ‘biopower’, and extensively exemplifies dehumanizing discourse as deployed by leading Social Democratic politicians, leading figures of government within the police and military, as well as by editors of both right‐wing and Social Democratic press. Ways in which individuals labelled ‘Communists’ were spatially managed in terms of extensive surveillance, registration, detainment planning and forms of incarceration are addressed. I further discuss state measures that may be seen as elements of a state of exception, some measures implemented against ‘Communists’, and others against individuals deemed to have undesirable characteristics seen to be hereditary. In employing Agamben's notion of ‘inoperosity’ in a discussion of a state paradigm of social productivity, eugenic measures in the building of the Swedish welfare state are then related to the dehumanizing framing of ‘Communists’. In conclusion, conditions for regaining a place in the body politic are briefly addressed. The article's focus on ways in which the ethnic and racial same was dehumanized within a democracy on political grounds results from a conscious effort to complement studies of dehumanization as related to colonialism, dictatorial regimes as well as identity politics.     

A conception of the self in the later middle ages

This paper presents a conception of the nature of the individual self in the late middle ages, involving the stance from which the ‘I’ beholds the world (in this case, one newly more autonomous from the corporate/ecclesiastical world view), and the manner in which the self (‘I’) apprehends itself (in this case, self-apprehension involves sensing that one's essentially public face is ‘being seen’ as standing out from the group by others, as well as knowing oneself via ‘reflections’ from others). A theme of ‘seeing’ the world from a more autonomous standpoint while ‘being seen’ as a more separated psychic entity is discerned, which is in keeping with an emphasis on vision in this age, discerned by other researchers. The paper bases its case partly on examination of the arguments and evidence cited by other researchers who have studied the self or individuality in the later middle ages.