‘There was never anythin’ like this!!!’ Valeska Gert's Performances in the Context of Weimar Culture

This paper explores Valeska Gert's contributions to dance against the backdrop of Weimar Germany. The first section considers the themes of her choreographies. Eschewing both idealism and abstraction, her work presented a gritty account of the realities of contemporary quotidian life, often featuring outcasts from bourgeois society. It also reflected a growing German interest in aspects of American culture, including sport and multi-ethnicity. Whereas many expressive dancers offered bucolic images of nature, Gert fully embraced modernity, including the process of urbanisation and technological developments. The paper's second section turns to stylistic features of Gert's dance, using an analysis of Alfred Meyer's poem about the dancer as a springboard for discussion. Consideration is given to the montage-like structure of many of Gert's works, her invocation of elements of ‘lower’ culture such as the street ballad, and her association with the carnival and grotesque. Her frequently shocking body images are viewed as subverting social conventions, in particular by presenting a radical take on femininity.     

Dwelling in the Virtual Sonic Environment: A Phenomenological Analysis of Dancers’ Learning Processes

This article discusses the Embodied Generative Music (EGM) project carried out at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics IEM in Austria. In investigating a new interface that combines motion capture and sound processing software with movement improvisation and performance, I focus on dancers’ learning processes of dwelling in the virtual sonic environment. Applying phenomenology and its concepts, I describe how dancers explore reversibility of sound and movement to shape this connection in an artistically expressive manner. The article proposes that dancers build bodily knowledge through both the sonic environment and their own passive and active, intuitive and deliberate, movement choices. While dwelling in a digital environment changes dancers’ habitual manners of behaving, it opens up to them new kinds of kinaesthetic opportunities of intimacy and pleasure in motion. The findings from this research reveal the importance of bodily interaction with virtual environments in developing new movement-based interfaces.     

Returning home: the return of Irish-born football migrants to Ireland’s football leagues and their cultural re-adaption, 1945–2010

This article examines a number of Irish professional soccer players’ career trajectories subsequent to their return to Ireland from the United Kingdom. More specifically, we explore their experiences following termination of their careers there, their adjustments to life after their professional football careers as well as the options and challenges in relocating into alternative professions and migratory positions. Moreover, how players cope and deal with the considerable difficulties in adapting to post-professional football career transition and termination is highlighted. Prior experience of League of Ireland or Irish League football does not impact on career duration in English League football. The majority of players that return following a career there stay in the game through participation as players with Irish professional clubs. This article also identifies the lack of structures, at many clubs in England and Ireland, for facilitating players’ adaptation to alternative careers following a career in professional football.     

The tourist gaze: cycling tourists’ impressions of Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

Cyclists’ written records of their Irish tours in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been overlooked by those scholars who have studied travellers’ impressions of Ireland in this period. The tricycle and the bicycle opened Ireland to a new form of tourism in the form of cycling tourism, and many of these holidaymakers, both Irish and foreign, were keen to record their experiences and impressions awheel, either in the cycling press or in other publications. This article is the first sustained effort to present a scholarly analysis of this material. It shows that the cycling tourists’ writings, as is the case with other travel writings, reveal more about the authors’ prejudices and their preconceived ideas about the places that they would visit and the people that they would encounter than they necessarily do about the realities of Irish life.     

Follow the Thing: Data

This research starts its journey from a video that failed to be published during the 2009 uprising in Iran. By following data outside the common trajectories of data circulation in the global North, this paper offers new geographical and data imaginations neglected by the universalised understandings of data and its political economy. Consequently, data’s behaviour as a thing is thoroughly investigated in the “follow the thing tradition” by scrutinising data as a commodity, its meanings and its associations. Using actor-network-theory, the paper highlights data’s open and contested character as well as the breakdowns throughout its journey. Following an uncirculated video via its traces sheds light on data’s agency in evoking different assemblages and spatialities. It also reflects on the epistemological importance of not treating the Southern data as exceptional and calls for a theoretical landscape that does not leave many realities of data out in its homogenised universal narrative.     

The Dancers Who Became Transformed into Wood: the mai masks of the Iatmul,Papua New Guinea

Borrowing, exchanging, and violent appropriation of ritual artefacts have been actions that have contributed to the development of cultural diversity within a particular frame of variations in the Middle Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. The mai masks of the Iatmul, already mentioned by Bateson, are the well‐documented result of a violent appropriation, as indigenous evidence shows. However, the ‘model’ which served for the mai were ritual dancers captured in the Alexander Mountains. These dancers displayed heavily painted faces (but no masks) and rich body decoration. In the process of making the powerful ‘model’ into one of their own, the Iatmul artists transformed the painted faces into carvings according to their preferred material of artistic expressions, wood, and their predilection for the interplay of elevated and deepened surfaces. As this article shows, the creation of mai as (enlivened) persons needs the establishment of socio‐cosmological relationships in which ancestral spirits and ‘natural’ substances are crucially involved. Thus, apart from sculpting as making, actions of growing are essential for turning the masks into beings endowed with ancestral power.     

Social decision-making driven by artistic explore–exploit tension

We studied social decision-making in the rule-based improvisational dance There Might Be Others, where dancers make in-the-moment compositional choices. Rehearsals provided a natural test-bed with communication restricted to non-verbal cues. We observed a key artistic explore–exploit tension in which the dancers switched between exploitation of existing artistic opportunities and riskier exploration of new ones. We investigated how the rules influenced the dynamics using rehearsals together with a model generalized from evolutionary dynamics. We tuned the rules to heighten the tension and modelled nonlinear fitness and feedback dynamics for mutation rate to capture the observed temporal phasing of the dancers' exploration-versus-exploitation. Using bifurcation analysis, we identified key controls of the tension and showed how they could shape the decision-making dynamics of the model much like turning a ‘dial’ in the instructions to the dancers could shape the dance. The investigation became an integral part of the development of the dance.     

回流移民再融入的生活史研究——以加拿大回流北京的技术移民为例

论文以回流北京的加拿大技术移民为研究对象,对回流者的再融人经历展开个案研究,研究显示了回流者再融人母国社会的三个主题策略：心理调适、生活和行为方式本土化以及跨国社会资本的经营和转化。认为无论回流者的实际遭遇如何,他们倾向于对自身的再融人经历做出积极评价。这种积极的主位评价,与当事人的回流期待得到实现和满足的程度密切相关。从回流者个体的视角,再融人作为个体内在需求和外界社会现实之间进行持续互动的过程,是一个以实现自我价值期待为核心的个体微空间的建构行为。     

A FRESH LOOK AT A LITTLE-KNOWN SOUTHEASTERN COPPER PLATE

Abstract

Chauga (38OC47) is a mound site now under Lake Hartwell at the head of the Savannah River in Oconee County, South Carolina. Excavations in 1958–1959 by the University of Georgia recovered a Mississippian copper plate. Upon comparison to others of its kind, it is clear that this lesser-known plate encompasses some interesting design features, most notably the presence of the only known depiction of a chunkey stone on copper. We have recently created a more accurate representation of its design. The plate appears to portray many similarities to depictions of Birdman dancers: kilted dancers and dancing elders within the “Stack” style. Birdman themes are common in Mississippian iconography. Given the importance that copper plates have for interpreting Mississippian art and belief systems, this updated examination provides useful new information for researchers studying Mississippian iconography.     

Queensland Aborigines,Multiple Realities and the Social Sources of Suffering: Psychiatry and Moral Regions of Being: Part 1

ABSTRACT This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico‐religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal ‘other’ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio‐political realities. I conclude that the residents' narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream ‘commonsense’ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.     

Career paths and mobility in the Swedish hospitality sector

ABSTRACT

How career paths are interpreted and conceptualised by hospitality workers and industry representatives remains underexplored in current literature. In this paper, we highlight and discuss sector-specific and contextual factors that influence the possibility of establishing a career within the Swedish hospitality sector. The paper uses interviews with hotel managers, who describe and discuss motivations and choices made throughout their own careers and interviews with young (former) seasonal hospitality workers who describe and reflect on their future plans and work-life experience. Additional data are derived through observations at national seminars and meetings for representatives from the Swedish tourism and hospitality industry, where issues of competence and careers were discussed. The findings indicate that the shaping of career paths within the hospitality sector is influenced by two normative and discursively produced ‘truths’ about career paths in the hospitality sector: the importance of internal knowledge transfer and the importance of high mobility. These narratives impose expectations on individuals to be mobile, to change jobs frequently and to work their way from the bottom-up within the industry, and are based on a presumption of a diversified and dense local hospitality labour market. However, since the conditions are different due to contextual, geographical features of labour market size and structure, attractiveness of places, etc., these expectations are difficult to fulfil in places other than in larger urban areas. These normative assumptions of what a successful hospitality career is also have consequences for the development of the hospitality sector as external influences of competence from other sectors and higher education are not seen as valuable, which makes the sector self-contained and not open to external, potentially innovative knowledge.     

The precarious and the transitional: labor casualization and youth in post-bubble Japan

ABSTRACT

In recent decades economic globalization and neoliberal restructuring have constricted longstanding pathways to middle-class citizenship in Japan and other postindustrial economies. Much attention has been given to how the shift from ‘lifetime’ salaried employment to ‘flexible’ labor markets has disenfranchized many young people, leaving them struggling to reconcile dominant middle-class expectations of adulthood with neoliberal economic realities. Taking an anthropological approach, this article reconsiders this prevailing assessment of labor casualization by examining ways in which young casual workers in Tokyo’s retail, service, and creative industries navigate the transforming economy. Their circumstances, choices, and self-representations shed light on the active role they play in the formation of alternative transition regimes that challenge normative transitions to work and adulthood in Japan. These findings have broader implications for the limits of conventional social scientific approaches to the impact of economic crises and neoliberal restructuring on youth in the early twenty-first century.     

The parliamentary wife: Participant in the two‐person single career

The concept of the ‘two‐person single career’ was introduced by Papanek (1973) to describe those occupations in which the wife is expected to participate in her husband's career, although her participation is neither directly acknowledged nor remunerated. Using data collected during interviews with Australian federal parliamentarians, this paper argues that, with minor differences, the occupation of the member of parliament exhibits the typical characteristics of the two‐person career. The paper then examines the increasing tendency for some parliamentary wives to reject this role and argues that this, plus the fact that unmarried male members of the parliament and the ever increasing numbers of female parliamentarians function effectively without the backing of a parliamentary spouse, suggests that the parliamentary career, as indeed may be the case for similar careers mentioned by Papanek, is a two‐person one by convention and convenience rather than of necessity.     

Work in crisis: managing fantasies about distant strangers,managing aid workers

This article provides an insight into the world of Polish development workers operating in South Sudan. It shows that the conceptualisations of aid work in terms of a ‘mission’, a unique job with a special, ethical goal, a difficult, risky operation requiring specific skills are not incidental. Instead, the point is made, that such ways of thinking about foreign aid and distant locations are strongly institutionalised sets of values and behavioural patterns, here defined as ‘work in crisis’. This specific notion is shaped by aid organisations who actively promote this rhetoric firstly through producing ‘truth’ about the aid work and project locations, and secondly through governing lived realities of the aid workers. The ‘work in crisis’ rhetoric helps to draw people into a development movement as devoted and allegiant followers. It also enables the management of these employees who are the most crucial for the industry – project coordinators – but who are separated from the organisational headquarters and NGO management by thousands of miles. Finally, it assists in the promotion of foreign aid among wider audiences in donor societies.     

Antonin Scalia and the Dilemma of Constitutional Originalism

Antonin Scalia has had a very significant and healthy impact on the way people talk about American constitutional law. Thanks largely to Justice Scalia’s forceful and eloquent voice, originalism is now so respectable that even those who seek to advance an aggressive and progressive “living constitution” frequently find it prudent to pose as expositors of the Constitution’s original meaning. Scalia’s substantial effect on the terms of debate in constitutional law, however, is not likely to be matched by a comparable influence on the future of the law itself. Apart from political realities that affect appointments to the Court, originalism faces obstacles that have deep historical roots. This essay explores those obstacles before considering two examples that suggest why Scalia’s originalism is unlikely to make a decisive contribution to the reformation in constitutional law that he sought.     

Transitional Justice and Political Economies of Survival in Post‐conflict Northern Uganda

This article explores the interplay between transitional justice and ‘everyday’ political economies of survival in post‐conflict Acholiland, northern Uganda. It advances two main arguments. First, that transitional justice — as part and parcel of conventional liberal peacebuilding packages — promotes a repertoire of normatively driven policies that have little bearing on lived realities of social accountability in post‐conflict settings. Second, that in transcending the epistemological and ontological boundaries of transitional justice and using concepts developed in the critical peacebuilding literature — the ‘everyday’ and ‘hybridity’ — a nuanced understanding of this dissonance emerges. Based on extensive fieldwork in Acholiland in the period 2012–14, using a range of qualitative research methods, the author examines the means through which people negotiate social and moral order in the context of post‐conflict life and analyses the tensions between these forms of ‘everyday’ activity and current transitional justice policy and programming in the region.     

Schomburgk’s Chook: the entangled South Australian collections of a German naturalist

Focusing on the politics of museums, collections and the untold stories of the scientific ‘specimens’ that travelled between Germany and Australia, this article reconstructs the historical, interpersonal and geopolitical contexts that made it possible for the stuffed skin of an Australian malleefowl to become part of the collections of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. The author enquires into the kinds of contexts that are habitually considered irrelevant when a specimen of natural history is treated as an object of taxonomic information only. In case of this particular specimen human and non-human history become entangled in ways that link the fate of this one small Australian bird to the German revolutionary generation of 1848, to Germany’s nineteenth-century colonial aspirations, to settler–Indigenous relations, to the cruel realities that underpinned the production of scientific knowledge in colonial Australia, and to a present-day interest in reconstructing Indigenous knowledges.     

Women's International Thought in the Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Academy: Autobiographical Reflection,Oral History and Scholarly Habitus

Methodologies of textual and linguistic analysis have long held sway in Anglo-American practices of intellectual history. Such approaches tend to decouple the ideas being traced from the human subject, or scholar, producing the thought. Taking the lead from the rich theorising work done in feminist, gender, race and cultural histories, this article asks what changes in our understanding of intellectual histories of international thought when we connect the lived and bodily realities of the human subjects producing the ideas to the ideas themselves. In so doing, the article makes a case for the importance of fleshing out what the author calls ‘scholarly habitus’ and suggests the potential utility of oral history as a methodology for reconstructing ‘scholarly habitus’. The article will draw upon an oral history archive comprised of twenty interviews conducted with senior women International Relations scholars from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to flesh out this argument. The article argues that oral history, as a medium for autobiographical practice, can reveal aspects of how gender, race and class shaped the scholarly practice and career trajectories of these women, as well as shed light on the historical dynamics of the discipline of International Relations as a whole.     

Handle with Care! A Qualitative Comparison of the Fragile States Index's Bottom Three Countries: Central African Republic,Somalia and South Sudan

For the past four years, the Fund for Peace has ranked the Central African Republic, Somalia and South Sudan as the ‘most fragile states’ in the world, in its annual Fragile States Index (FSI). The three countries’ almost identical scores suggest comparability; however, critics raise concerns about the FSI's data aggregation methods, and its conflation of causes and consequences. This article treads the uncharted path of unpacking the empirical realities that hide behind FSI indicators. Drawing on data collected during field research in the three states, the authors investigate three security indicators (security apparatus, factionalized elites, and external intervention) and propose an alternative, qualitative appreciation. Each country's fragility is based on how security forces, elites and interventions evolved over time and installed themselves differently in each region of the country. The qualitative assessment presented here shows that not every indicator matters in all cases at all times or throughout the country. Most crucially, the authors unveil enormous differences between and within the FSI's three ‘most fragile states’. Such variations call for better‐adapted and more flexible intervention strategies, and for quantitative comparisons to be qualitatively grounded.