Implications of gendered environmental knowledge in water allocation processes in central Australia

The existence of gendered knowledge has been identified as a significant feature of Indigenous Australian culture, and the importance of considering the implications of gendered environmental knowledge in collaborative cross-cultural natural resource management has been highlighted. There is a lack of case studies that demonstrate how Indigenous women's knowledge and laws can be provided for in resource management contexts. From collaborative research with Anmatyerr women in central Australia, we discuss the implications of gender bias in relation to gendered knowledge in natural and cultural resource management, with a specific focus on Anmatyerr women's involvement in providing inputs about the cultural values of water within water allocation planning processes. This research highlights Anmatyerr women's own perspectives of their roles in contemporary contexts and identifies the existence of cultural change and continuity in relation to rights and responsibilities around water.     

Locating physical disability in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis: Problems and prospects

In this paper, I use psychoanalytic theory to look at the meaning of disability within an ableist culture, and its relationship to issues of sexuality and death. I suggest that while disability has not been a central focus of psychoanalysis, it has been employed to stand in for something else, and this has had important implications for disability that have yet to be fully explored. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of disability as a 'symbolic substitute' for castration as conceived by Freud and Lacan, and the implications of this formulation for the cultural construction of disabled bodies as lacking. While there is cause for continued caution with respect to this theoretical tradition, psychoanalysis offers important insight into the complex origins of 'aesthetic anxieties' that surround disability within ableist culture, and the way in which these emotions are implicated in the geographic exclusion of 'different' bodies. In particular, psychoanalysis helps to demonstrate the illusory nature of the 'able-body' as a key source of oppression.     

International relations and the Himalaya: connecting ecologies,cultures and geopolitics

ABSTRACT

This article examines international relations (IR)'s approach to the Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over contested international borders is not the region's primary international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by state-building and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical tensions, threaten the region's ecologies, cultures and languages. The Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a mosaic of ethnic groups, many of whom speak threatened languages. Its ice-deposits feed most of Asia's large rivers. In recent years, India and China have pursued large-scale infrastructure development in the region, enabling greater militarisation and extraction, and a tourist rush. These threats are amplified by climate change, which is occurring in the Himalaya at twice global averages, contributing to landslides, flooding, and droughts. However, the region's complexity is not matched by IR's theorisations, which overwhelmingly focus on the possibility of violent conflict between state actors. We argue that IR's analysis of the region must go beyond a states-and-security, Delhi-Beijing-Islamabad centred approach, to look at the numerous interconnections between its geopolitics, cultures and ecologies. We suggest this can be accomplished through incorporating more interdisciplinary analysis, and through focusing on the interaction between the organisation of political authority and the region's environment.     

Doing the Doric: The institutionalization of regional language and culture in the north-east of Scotland

The focus of this paper is on the practices and processes of joint action and knowledge, the performativity of language and the tracing of how particular items of rhetoric move, solidify and change. The paper illustrates the contingent factors that give language and practice variable meanings through an examination of the Doric dialect and culture of north-eastern Scotland. Doric has, in recent years, been increasingly discussed and debated by the press and the academy. Here, it is argued that the continued reproduction of 'north-easterness' is related to the ways in which dialect and culture have been mobilized, politicized and legitimized through the erection and operation of an institutional framework. The role of 'expert' and enthusiast knowledges in the propagation of cultural trends is analysed, contrasting the existence of north-eastern tradition as an allegedly 'organic' culture, when dialect use and 'traditional' practices were unproblematic and everyday, with contemporary institutionalized 'north-easterness'. This is achieved through an exploration of the spectacularization of tradition, unpacking some of the tensions this creates with regard to the Bothy Ballad and literary traditions of the north-east.     

Scientists and the media: the struggle for legitimacy in climate change and conservation science

Abstract

Despite the uncertainties associated with forecasts of the possible negative effects of climate change on natural environments, such research is often widely reported in the news media. Here we review the presentation in the UK news media and on the internet of an academic study published in Nature, forecasting future global extinctions as a result of climate change. The results and conclusions of the study were widely misrepresented, especially in the news media, to make the consequences seem more catastrophic and the timescale shorter. Representations of the original article on the internet were more variable, with several sites ranked highly on popular search engines being overtly critical of the underlying science. We suggest that such polarised representations of environmental science are indicative of a 'struggle for legitimacy' between environmentalist and anti-environmentalist groups, with potential negative consequences for public trust in science.     

The two cultures and Renaissance humanism

Abstract

C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' distinction between scientific and humanistic thought is perennial. It may be said to correspond to empirical and metaphorical bents in human nature. Since antiquity, attempts have been made by some to bridge the gap. The natural bridge of scientific (in the broad sense) scholarship has been largely overlooked, but the development in the West of philological and historical methods by fifteenth and early sixteenth century humanists (in the technical sense) exhibits numerous criteria and examples of a scientific approach to the world around us, as does such scholarship today.     

The Veil and Urban Space in Istanbul: Women's dress,mobility and Islamic knowledge

The issue of veiling marks an ideological fault line in urban Turkey. Based on focus groups conducted with migrant women to Istanbul in the spring of 1999, this article aims to show how veiling, as a form of dress, is a spatial practice that gains its significance through women's urban mobility and their construction of Islamic understandings in the city. At the same time, both urban mobility and Islamic knowledge are structured by wider relations of power, such as the struggle between the secular state and resurgent Islamic politics. In order to situate the practice of veiling within these structures, the author argues that Istanbul is marked by a pattern of shifting 'regimes of veiling,' and that these spatialized norms of dress affect the meaning and enactment of women's veiling choices. This concept is particularly useful to draw out the ways in which veiling, despite providing some protection from urban harassment, may actually constrain women's urban mobility in the context of Istanbul. The focus group analysis illustrates these points and demonstrates how women's views on Islam provide a basis for their attitudes towards veiling, mobility and space. The author suggests that among the participants, two main trends in Islamic understandings related to veiling can be observed: one towards the 'privatization' of religion along secularist lines, accompanied by a flexible attitude towards veiling, and another towards the public contestation of formal anti-veiling regimes justified in terms of knowledge gleaned through direct, textual engagement with Islam. In this way, this study aims to link veiling, as a socio-spatial practice, to the local, gendered production of Islamic knowledge in Istanbul.     

“You've Got to Work on This Axon”: J. Z. Young and Squid Giant Axon Preparations in 20th-Century Neurobiology**

Employing and extending Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's analytical concept of epistemic things, this essay proposes one reason why squid giant axons, unusually large invertebrate nerve fibers, had such great impacts on twentieth-century neurobiology. The 1930s characterizations of these axons by John Zachary Young reshaped prevailing assumptions about nerve cells as epistemic things, I argue. Specifically, Young's preparations of these axons, which consisted of fibers attached to laboratory technologies, highlighted similarities between giant axons and more familiar ones via lines of comparative study common to aquatic biology. Young's work convinced other biologists that the squid giant fibers were, in fact, axons, despite their unusual fused (syncytial) structures, thereby promoting further studies, such as intracellular measurements, made possible by the fiber's size. Tracing direct relations between preparations of squid axons and broader interpretations of neurons as epistemic things, this paper renders an actors’ category, “preparations,” into an analytical one. In turn, it offers glimpses into how aquatic organisms shaped twentieth-century neurobiology and how local experiments can drive broader, disciplinary changes.     

Remembering and Forgetting Sites of Terrorism in New York, 1900–2001

Abstract

This article assesses the manner in which terrorist attacks have been remembered and forgotten within New York during the twentieth century. As a 'global city', New York has frequently been the focus of individuals and groups seeking to promote their cause by attacking targets in the city, its businesses, its infrastructure, its organizations, and its citizens. By examining how these events were reported and subsequently incorporated or dismissed within both the urban fabric and the city's 'collective memory', this article addresses how violent terrorism is engaged with by society. Building upon the advances made within the study of modern conflict archaeology, this article examines the possibility of an archaeology of terrorism.     

Bilingualism and geographical knowledge: A case study of students at the University of Wales,Aberystwyth

This paper explores the role of languages in the constitution of geographical knowledge. We argue that the fact that people speak different languages is significant to the ways in which they engage with geography as a subject. We unpack some of the processes through which languages make a difference to geography through an empirical project based on students at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where geography is taught bilingually through Welsh and English. Student geography is a particularly interesting arena to further this theme, because of students' mediating role in translating professional geography into the popular sphere, which in the case of students at Aberystwyth is also a different linguistic sphere. Our empirical work suggests that the use of Welsh creates a particular linguistic culture of geography, because of the shared experience of specific practices and politics in bilingual education. This makes a difference to the kinds of geography consumed and produced by bilingual students. Through a discussion of the linguistic identity of Welsh geography, we address some of the implications and limitations of this social formation. We conclude by arguing that a focus on language has the potential to open up new ways of talking about geography.     

'Enlivening' Development Concepts through Workshops: A case study of appropriate technology and soil conservation

In comparison with the teaching of most other geography topics, where fieldwork can be conducted relatively easily and seminars can be based on some pre-existing knowledge and first-hand experience of the issues, the range of resources and approaches available to tutors teaching the geography of development is necessarily more limited. Tutors often have to rely more heavily on 'top-down' teaching and more passive learning approaches, such as using videos, slides and lectures. While students may gain a theoretical understanding of development concepts, issues and problems, they may be left without a deeper 'experience' of such material. This paper describes a practical workshop designed to communicate to students the idea of 'appropriate technology'. The workshop enables students to actively 'experience' a development concept rather than simply understand it in theory. It tests comprehension and understanding, through the application of a concept to real examples, stimulates discussion and debate, and draws upon problem-solving and critical thinking skills.     

Michael Choniates,poet of love and knowledge

Abstract

This article situates an epigram by Michael Choniates on medieval Athens in the broader context of European poetry by examining Michael's use of the 'lover as idolater' and 'looking for Rome in Rome' topoi in comparison with treatments of these themes in the Italian and medieval Latin traditions. It then discusses the poem in light of Michael's engagement with Byzantine romance and liturgical verse. The author attempts to show that this poem, commonly read for its 'O! tempora, O! mores' sentiment, is a subtle and rich text that creatively deals with some of the major themes of medieval literature.     

Hydrogeological Knowledge from Below: Water Expertise as a Republican Common in Early-Modern Venice**

This essay looks at early-modern Venice hydroculture as a case of episteme from below. The forms of water knowledge it developed were multilayered and collective in their essence and solidly rested on a social experiential basis that was rooted in labour (especially fishing) and practices (especially water surveying and engineering). In accordance with the city's republican esprit (and correspondent political values), its episteme emerged as the encounter and negotiation between various institutions and groups: the fishermen of San Niccolò in Venice, the practitioners of the water magistrature and political authorities. This essay explores the institutional settings of this water culture, seen as an instance of bottom-up epistemic construction. It especially addresses three historical instances: firstly, a seventeenth century program to map public waters in order to block their alienation for private fish farming; secondly, water officers’ interviews with fishermen aimed to assess the state of the lagoon hydromorphology and, thirdly, fishing regulations. Venice communitarian and circular forms of knowledge production are here contrasted to an opposite paradigm, which was embodied by the Galileian mathematician and Rome courtier, Benedetto Castelli. His interactions with the Republic of Venice on water management and his approach to hydraulic problems are revealing of an elitist and abstract understanding of scientific knowledge that guided political decisions from above without taking in any consideration the opinions of the ‘vulgar’. While his science was the expression of a top-down political epistemology, Venetian water knowledge was more egalitarian. It left room for exchange, inclusiveness and bottom-up codification; it valued the gathering of different experiences (including the fishermen's practical knowledge of their waters) and rested on a concrete and systemic (organicist) understanding of natural-anthropic processes.     

The Indexification of Poverty: The Covert Politics of Small-Area Indices

In recent decades statistical indices have become a dominant method for measuring many features of the social world. While the resulting enumerations are regularly cited by critical human geographers, the wider political stakes of indexing the world remain unaddressed. In this article, we theorise indexification as the process through which composite statistics transform theoretical constructs into epistemic objects, and then geographically bounded rankings. Rather than a neutral process, we argue that these epistemological manoeuvres can mask various forms of violence. Through a detailed analysis of the UK's Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), we highlight the clandestine politics of indexification and their tendency to conceal harms meted out by the state. Seeking a more critical reckoning with indices, we conclude by calling for and outlining a project of radical indexification—a participatory, democratic, and transparent endeavour that takes spatial justice as its organising principle.     

The disciplining of scientific communities

Abstract

Amidst ongoing concern with training students in the skills and knowledge necessary to contribute towards a knowledge-intensive economy, we explore how particular ‘epistemic subjects’ are produced within specific epistemic communities. We examine how social studies of science have probed the ‘disciplining’ practices that constitute scientific knowledge production, but have tended to overlook how students participate in, and become members of, epistemic communities. We propose that training contexts provide a window onto the disciplining processes through which scientific fields and their practitioners are co-produced. We offer an empirical example of an emerging scientific field that is working to establish community boundaries through the recruitment and training of university students. We explore how newcomers’ practices, values and identities are disciplined through participation in this nascent community whilst remaining open to negotiation and resistance. The conclusion calls for more scholarly attention to educational trajectories as processes through which disciplines and their disciples are produced.     

VICO'S NEW SCIENCE AND A NEW POETIC PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

This review essay discusses Giambattista Vico and the New Psychological Science, which contains seven essays that challenge traditional anthropological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions that define psychology as a social science and instead interpret it as an embodied understanding of human cultural activity. The authors use Vico's New Science to support this endeavor because, they suggest, it traces the creation of human existence from a prehuman animal state with the agency of poiesis, an embodied meta‐phoric language and social practices that are inseparable from that language. This effort is a potentially transformative reinterpretation of Vico, whose verum factum principle scholars interpret as challenging Cartesian epistemology. Identifying the true with the made, Vico's principle limits human knowing to what humans make—that is, their historical world. The authors rightly emphasize the embodied nature of making with poetic language and social practices. However, they undermine the significance of that embodiment by assuming that knowing what is made with poiesis is, like traditional understandings of knowledge, epistemic. Thus, they implicitly retain humanism's metaphysical assumption that grounds epistemology: humans know intelligible reality because they are dualistic beings who possess rational, subjective natures. By contrast, I claim that Vico's poetic humanism is a more radical move from traditional humanism's belief in epistemology toward a culturally active anthropology. For Vico, bodily skills of perception, memory, and imagination create a metaphoric language based on random perceptions, images, and sounds. This metaphoric language is inseparable from social practices and physical skills, creating a meaningful human world. The making achieved by embodied poetic language cannot lead to epistemic knowledge; it can only lead to the self‐referential hermeneutic understanding that humans are the creators of their human existence. Vico's verum factum is not an epistemological principle in the Cartesian tradition but an ontological unity of knowing and making through sociophysical skills that are inseparable from poetic language. Humans make their ontologically real, meaningful human world and know themselves as its creators.     

Small may be inevitable*

Today's global culture system is experiencing a phase of accelerating change. This change is powered by technological innovation which produces social and economic turbulences in the system as unforeseen side-effects of the changes wrought by technology. This turbulence takes many forms: the economic system must grow to avoid collapse; institutions grow bigger and more unwieldy; individuals become increasingly alienated. Therein lie the seeds of the system's disintegration, leading to the likely emergence of a subsequent culture system (or systems) of smaller dimensions, signs of which are already manifest.     

Postcolonial theory and globalized empathy: from development to difference

ABSTRACT

Postcolonial theory, with its focus on epistemological difference, material subversion, and cultural hybridity, is said to be at odds with the emotional and cognitive takeover implied in empathy. My paper will, to the contrary, suggest that the critique of political developmentalism and the turn towards a preference for cultural difference that inaugurated postcolonial studies as we know it may have actually helped to forge a relation between the perspectives of postcolonial theory and empathy. This relation is based on the ultimately individual focus that both imply through their rejection of abstract rational politics, which politically limits them to humanitarianism. My reading of Indra Sinha's Animal's People will show how this novel performs the heavy impact of this entanglement between postcolonial otherness, empathy, and humanitarianism by arguing that the novel ironically restructures its plot and political imaginary to suit the needs of humanitarian empathy that governs the global market for postcolonial literatures.     

Vergleichende Verhaltensforschung: Grundlagen der Ethologie

Abstract

Based on an extensive personal investigation and study of the ethnographic literature, three methods of observation that are still used for time measurement in various minority nationality areas in South West China are reviewed: observation of the terrestrial environment; observation of the celestial environment; and use of specially constructed instruments. The sequence of developments in time measurement and the motivations behind them are analysed from the point of view of the 'needs theory' of Maslow. Physiological needs are deduced to be dominant among those who obtain food by gathering, fishing and hunting. To fulfil these needs, such people initially consider changes in the terrestrial environment and determine time by observing objects in that environment. Because errors made in determining the time have caused people's safety to be jeopardised, 'safety needs' have emerged as an important motivation for finding more accurate means to measure time. In their search for more refined methods of measurement, attention has shifted from the terrestrial to the celestial environment, using data about the movement of the Sun, Moon and stars to determine time. When human culture becomes complex, people have more complicated needs and require more specific methods of measuring time. Thus, they create artificial instruments to fulfil what Maslow called 'high motivations', such as 'belongingness and love needs', 'esteem needs' and 'the needs for safety actualisation'.     

David's 'Hatred' for the Lame and the Blind (2 Sam. 5.8A)

Abstract

Scholars have often dismissed the rendering of veyigga' batsinnor (2 Sam. 5.8) as 'get up the water shaft' or 'get up the water canal' on the grounds that it has no natural connection with David's expressed 'hatred' for 'the lame and the blind'. This article argues that such a dismissal is perhaps hasty, and that David's reference to the physically afflicted alludes to the custom of their gathering at pools and springs (which were widely held to possess healing powers).