‘I Can't Eat That,It's Purple’: a Geography Field Course in Vanuatu and Fiji

A month‐long field course in the Pacific island states of Vanuatu and Fiji focused on development issues, involving lectures, seminars and much informal interaction. Students completed daily journals as a means of learning, a form of self‐assessment of learning, a way of evaluating their participation in the course and their perception of its value. Journal themes reflected an evolution from unsettling rhetorical questions towards notions of discovery, autonomy, reflexivity and emerging cultural sensitivity. Students developed valuable social skills, and gained first‐hand experience of various concepts of development and social justice. Grading the journals was difficult because of the extent of subjectivity and diverse personal experiences. The course, and the journals, emphasised the diverse values and roles of courses both on, and particularly in, developing countries, despite the substantial costs.     

Policing the Holy Nation: The State and Righteous Violence in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT In Vanuatu, the police force has in recent years been strengthened by foreign government aid. AusAid and NZAid are heavily involved inside the police force, seeking to create ‘good governance’ and to shape Vanuatu's national developments. However, these measures also coincide with some other unexpected developments. Recent cases of violence, and especially of sorcery, have led the police to intervene in a quest for moral order. Police are becoming part of the articulation of new occult understandings of wealth and power. These developments are traced back partly to the history of colonial governance and the idea of righteous violence, but also to current restructurings of the Vanuatu state and growing Christian conceptions of Vanuatu as a holy nation.     

Handling Sorcery in a State System of Law: Magic,Violence and Kastom in Vanuatu.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the consequences of a local sorcery accusation that came to the attention of Vanuatu state police, courts and media. The paper discusses what happens to sorcery practices when these become absorbed into a modern, bureaucratic context. The argument revolves around the national imaginary formed by state power and the mass media in people's contemporary lives. In formulating new forms of opposition to sorcery, they also create a new imaginary space of national belonging.     

Strathern's Melanesian ‘dividual’ and the Christian ‘individual’: a Perspective from Vanua Lava,Vanuatu

What happens to people's concept of the person when their ‘dividuality’ engages with the Christian concept of the ‘individual’? According to Vanua Lava kastom, when people die they go to sere timiat, the place of the dead. But do they still go there when the person had been a Christian during their life time? Where is the Christian heaven and hell? Is there a separate Christian ‘soul’? Will the dead be eternally separated from each other and their ancestors? Can kastom and Christian concepts be reconciled? Depending on denomination and degree of conversion (devout, nominal, or ‘back‐slider’) people have found multiple answers that help them conceptualise their final resting place. Their answers are of relevance for theoretical debates in anthropology about dividuality, individuality and engagement with modernity.     

‘We’re moving out’: Youth Out‐Migration Intentions in Coastal Non‐Metropolitan New South Wales

This article discusses youth out‐migration on the non‐metropolitan New South Wales Eastern Seaboard. High levels of in‐migration and counter‐urbanisation, typical of many coastal non‐metropolitan towns in NSW, mask the out‐migration of youth. There are relatively few 15–24 year olds in the coastal communities of non‐metropolitan New South Wales, because many youths out‐migrate to larger centres, for a range of reasons. Out‐migration also demarcates a life transition away from school life, adolescence and the parental home. This paper draws from research with senior high school students in one coastal town – Coffs Harbour – where such trends have been particularly apparent. It examines the propensity for youth out‐migration and discusses how young people articulate their migration intentions. Young people's perceptions of their current and future prospects feature prominently in their discourses about intended migration, although this research also demonstrates that the life courses of regional youth are unorthodox and diverse in nature.     

Re‐mythologizing the State: Public Security, ‘the Jesus Strategy’ and the Fiji Police

ABSTRACT My primary concern is with tracing how the police force has been transformed from a secular institution into an overtly religious one. Drawing from scholarly work on charismatic leadership and its routinization in institutional forms, much of it inspired by Max Weber's early work on these themes, my overarching aim is to grapple with the significance of Commissioner Teleni's reforms not only for the Fiji police force but more broadly for the shape of the Fijian state. While recognizing the acute importance of international relations in establishing and supporting Fiji's various political regimes, my focus here is firmly on the domain of the nation‐state as I wish to assess how politicians, military leaders, and now the Commissioner of Police attempt to constitute mass public support through their use of Christian rhetoric.     

Securing Modernity: Towards an Ethnography of Power in Contemporary Melanesia

ABSTRACT Contemporary public discourses, which depict Melanesian nation states as weak or as having failed, serve to legitimize the imposition of external, neo‐paternal, regulatory structures on former colonies. Such discourses problematise the numerous local experiments that combine custom, state structures and religion so as to create modern Melanesian ways of governing. Starting with the colonial policy of indirect rule, Melanesia has had a long history of experiments that have sought to tie together different regimes of power in relays, which are meant to remediate, supplement and strengthen state structures. Today, those relays are pathologised as dysfunctional precisely because they can be used to subvert, contest and divert state programs. Current political problems arising from growing ethnic and economic divisions are producing new conflicts, new moral languages for figuring evil, and new tactics and technologies of power. Many of these new experiments seek to reconnect the nation state with the moral authority, pastoral regimes, and individualizing practices of Christianity.     

Geopolitics of gender and violence ‘from below’

This article examines geopolitical violence, gender and political constructions of scale from the site of the body to international discourse and politics. The political constructions of scale and body-politics analyzed in this study draw on feminist and political geographic analysis and an empirical study of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This study includes an examination of state, military and paramilitary violence from below as articulated through the lens of RAWA's documentation and political framing. RAWA clandestinely used photographic and video technologies to document the corporeal results of state/military violence and politically constructed scale by way of linking this violence to international discourses and political action. A number of opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls are identified as part of RAWA's geopolitics of violence from below. The post 9-11-01 U.S.-led military invasion of Afghanistan demonstrates a significant shift in the management and manipulation of RAWA's documentation. Both the U.S. and RAWA politically constructed scale and drew upon western-led “universal” moralities and human/women's rights discourses for alternative purposes. This paper also discusses the use of gender politics and its various manipulations to resist, criminalize, or legitimize the use of violence in the name of human/women's rights.     

‘We disputed every word’: how Kyrgyzstan's moderates tame ethnic nationalism

In post‐violence Kyrgyzstan, a small group of civic‐minded nationalists are fighting to tame extremist voices by formulating their own reconciliation policies. These moderates have adopted several strategies, including persuasion and bargaining with nationalistic elites. This process is not without its limitations. Important issues, such as forging a civic identity for the majority ethnic group, remain unaddressed. Still, moderates' policy achievements and concrete actions are likely to continue to undercut nationalist rhetoric. The case of Kyrgyzstan offers one possible alternative to the Soviet paradigm of framing nationhood alongside citizenship.     

NRM Regions in Australia: the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’

This paper identifies external factors affecting the capacity of Australia's now‐formalised 56 regional natural resource management (NRM) bodies and their community‐based Boards to meet planning and management responsibilities. It demonstrates that little is known about the basic capacity‐related characteristics of NRM regions, despite the lengthy and elaborate process of regionalism that Australia has embarked upon, with its associated and substantial devolution of responsibilities and resources. A suite of indicators is used to develop an ‘exploratory’ capacity typology of NRM regions. The ten regional ‘types’ identified are found to attract varying budget allocations under the Natural Heritage Trust Extension and National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. There are indications that State and regional interests within and outside NRM can significantly influence the distribution of resources. An examination of resources allocated to capacity‐building activities shows significant differences between regions in the scale of resources allocated (0–96% of total budget). The paper argues the case for intervention to reduce the gap between ‘have’ and ‘have not’ regions, and for further exploration of disparities in the allocation of resources to capacity‐building activities. Clarification is needed of the extent to which capacity‐building activities adequately target regional NRM bodies and their Boards.     

Leading Lights in the ‘Mother of Darkness’: Perspectives on Leadership and Value in North Ambrym,Vanuatu

In comparative political theory in Anthropology, Pacific leadership has had a prominent place, with a long history of debate about typologies and forms. In this paper I eschew such approaches in favour of a demonstration of the complexity of interactions fostered in local communities by interpretations of a protean ‘tradition’, refracted by a history of encounters with modernity and its social imaginary at a particular historical moment. The narratives of three local leaders in Vanuatu's recent history, provide a context for evaluating the relative merits of such typologies when the grounds of leadership itself are contested.     

Recategorizing ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Property in Ghana

In the course of political struggle in northern Ghana, the classification of land and resources has shifted between the two ‘master categories’ of public and private. Despite the fact that master categories may be wholly inadequate in accounting for the actual complexity of property objects, social units and rights, they are not divorced from the agency of people who have something at stake. Laws, rules and by‐laws are referred to as important markers and fashion the local political struggles over the rights to and control over resources. This article offers a general account of conflicts and the recategorization of resources in the property system of small‐scale irrigation. It examines the logics and positioning of the different stakeholders, and discusses how different levels of public policy have provided opportunities for such changes. A case study presents the opportunity to examine the details of a particular controversy demonstrating the social and political powers involved in the recategorization of property.     

‘Building Kachin’: Youth and Everyday Action in one of Myanmar's Ethnic States

In 2011, Myanmar started its political transition after decades of military rule. In Kachin State this coincided with the breaking of a 17‐year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Organization/Army (KIO/A) and the state army, the Tatmadaw. For youth living in Kachin State, this meant that opportunities for civic and political participation opened up while at the same time their context remained volatile and uncertain. Using citizenship theory and the concept of the ‘everyday’, this article analyses how youth in Kachin State connect the challenges they experience to their sense of citizenship, and how this informs everyday forms of youth action as well as youth participation in policy processes. The article argues that young people act out of moral and political reasons to ‘build Kachin’, in response to deeply historically rooted experiences of discrimination and state repression. While the agency of young people living in conflict settings is often believed to be limited to tactical agency for individual and immediate survival, an analysis of youth's experiences of citizenship shows that they also act strategically to advance the interests of their society.     

‘Parry’ fractures and female-directed interpersonal violence: Implications from the Late Archaic Period of west Tennessee

The recognition of a high frequency of ‘parry’ fractures in the females from the Late Archaic Period (2500–1000/500 BC ) west Tennessee site of Eva prompted a more thorough examination of female-directed interpersonal violence in prehistoric Tennessee sites. The study examined forearm fractures in eight (N = 308) Late Archaic Period hunter-gatherer sites and five (N = 501) Mississippian Period (c. AD 1200–1600) agriculturalist sites. On the basis of chi-square test results, there does not appear to be any gender bias in forearm fracture occurrence in the Archaic Period. The high frequency of female ‘parry’ fractures at Eva was an artefact of the ratio of females to males. More importantly, craniofacial trauma data do not support an aetiology that would explain mid-shaft forearm fractures as a result of interpersonal violence.     

‘A Remarkably Patterned Life’: Domestic and Public in the Aztec Household City

This article argues that the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan should be understood as a ‘household’, a structure that gave powerful significance to binary gendered ideologies at every level of city organisation. Male and female roles were configured around ‘public’ and ‘domestic’ spheres, but these concepts were perceived in a broader and more flexible way than traditional public/private dichotomies suggest and might helpfully be understood in political terms as distinguishing between exterior/foreign and interior/domestic realms. Building on understandings of parallelism and complementarity, the article demonstrates that gendered pairings, based on distinctive masculine/public and feminine/domestic spheres, mirrored the household not only in social, economic and political contexts, but also in religious settings, providing space for both male and female power at every level of urban life. Just as a married couple provided the basis to a successful and productive home, so the parallel responsibilities of men and women, structured according to concepts of ‘household’ and reflected throughout the institutions and activities of the city, were believed to form the foundations of a thriving Aztec city.     

From ‘Problem City’ to ‘Promise City’: Gentrification and the Revitalisation of Newcastle

The city of Newcastle is a complex and changing landscape. Once regarded as Australia's ‘problem city’, Newcastle's identity is being significantly transformed. This identity transformation draws significantly upon the emergence of more cosmopolitan landscapes within inner Newcastle associated with the gentrification of these areas. The discourse of gentrification is inherently post‐industrial, providing a cleaner and more positive identity as Newcastle seeks to erase the stigma of its’ industrial heritage. However, as landscapes are the amalgam of multiple identities, Newcastle's industrial heritage periodically re‐emerges to problematise the city's newly adopted cosmopolitan identity.