Front and Back Covers,Volume 28, Number 4. August 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 4 Front cover: OLYMPIC LEGACY: FOOD Over the last decades, the Olympic Games have increasingly claimed to deliver a social and economic ‘legacy’ to the host city. The 2012 Olympic Games in London have set out to deliver a legacy of better food for east London, an area perceived as ‘deprived’, with higher than average rates of obesity and significant ‘food deserts’ in its midst. Various Olympic organizations have considered the issue, resulting in the publication of a Food vision for the first time ever in Olympic history. However, with companies such as Coca‐Cola and McDonald's having been appointed official suppliers to the Games, and with an extremely limited time frame, will the Games be able to deliver on this promise? Allotments have been demolished and plans are afoot for Queen's Market, Upton Park, to be replaced by a supermarket. In response, Queen's Market traders and customers protest that demolition of their market goes against the Olympic spirit. Indeed, the Games could be used instead to help improve access to London's ethnically diverse markets far beyond the borough limits, as suggested in this postcard distributed by campaigners. As Freek Janssens argues in his guest editorial in this issue, the 2012 Games provide the opportunity to more critically assess how food serves the marginalized in our ethnically diverse inner cities. Also in this issue, Johan Fischer deals with halal, another topic that impacts athletes and spectators at the Games, with sporting events taking place during ramadan. Back cover: POVERTY AND GRASSROOTS COMMERCE Aisha, a door‐to‐door entrepreneur in CARE Bangladesh’ s Rural Sales Programme (RSP), is one of 3,000 previously ‘destitute’ women who now earns an income by selling branded consumer goods across rural villages under a partnership between CARE and global multinationals such as Danone, Bic, and Unilever. Similar female distribution systems are now popping up across the world. From Procter and Gamble's distribution of sanitary pads to ‘poor’ adolescent girls in Kenya and Malawi, to Unilever's Shakti ammas distributing soap village‐to‐village in rural India, companies aim to expand their bottom line by fostering entrepreneurial opportunities among the poor through so‐called ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) initiatives. Such initiatives reflect the changing nature of international development where new development actors – celebrities, philanthrocapitalists, multinational corporations, social entrepreneurs etc. – spearhead efforts to reduce poverty, replacing the role long occupied by states and aid agencies. Today some of the world's largest corporations have become key players in global development by selling ‘socially beneficial’ products to the ‘poor’, and by drawing them into global commodity chains as entrepreneurs. These efforts are now widely endorsed as part of a pro‐market development agenda that looks to the perceived ‘efficiency’ of the private sector to do what billions of aid dollars have been unable to do. BoP distribution systems can offer ‘poor’ women like Aisha an opportunity to earn an income and contribute to the food security of their family. But these engagements pose risks as well as rewards, and raise pressing questions for anthropologists about how, under what terms, and with what effects, global capital is linking up with informal economies in the name of development.     

Non-events and their legacies: Parisian heritage and the Olympics that never were

This paper examines three failed bids by the French Olympic Committee and the City of Paris to host the summer Olympic Games of 1992, 2008 and 2012 in an attempt better to understand the role of heritage designations in the context of urban change. Introducing the various sites earmarked for the Games, the paper explores the relationship between planning as a political tool and its impact on the built environment within the context of a complex web of local, national and international demands, needs and aspirations. Based on archival research, the paper explores the dialectical relationship between the demonstrated ability of city councils to declare designated ‘Olympic’ spaces as functionally ‘ready’ to absorb massive new infrastructures and questions posed by whatever physical infrastructure remains after a bid has failed. Since the timeframe chosen for the paper (1986–2006) coincides with a move by the International Olympic Committee to prioritise ‘sustainable urbanism’ as a key legacy of ‘successful’ Olympic Games, this relationship between presences and absences is mediated not just with the help of possible futures in the form of Olympic sites but has had to validate and justify the choice of terrain as well. The paper concludes with a brief meditation on the relationship between present urban heritage and possible futures in the context of mega-events like the Olympic Games.     

“De-Risking” East London: Olympic Regeneration Planning 2000–2012

The concept of legacy has emerged in the twenty-first century as a dominant narrative within mega-event projects. Accordingly, event hosts now engage in detailed legacy planning. This often means creating new agencies and new plans; something that has important implications for wider urban governance and planning. This paper focuses on initiatives attached to the 2012 Olympic Games in London. One of the main aims of staging the Games was regenerating East London; and the pre-event planning (2000–2012) associated with this legacy promise is the focus here. Using evidence collected from primary and secondary research, the paper records how the governance and planning arrangements evolved over 2000–2012. These were designed to achieve regeneration effects at different scales; in the Olympic Park, the fringes of the Park and in the wider sub-region. The paper acknowledges the pioneering work undertaken in London, but also identifies the key issues, challenges and dilemmas involved. The paper concludes that Olympic regeneration planning has rescaled regeneration governance in London, privileging city-wide and national stakeholders. It also suggests that, rather than a process driven by corporate interests and public–private partnerships, London 2012 regeneration planning is best understood as government intervention that de-risked East London for private-sector investors.     

Celebrating British multiculturalism,lamenting England/Britain's past

Drawing upon Littler and Naidoo's ‘white past, multicultural present’ alignment, this article examines English newspaper coverage of two ‘British’ events held in 2012 (the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympic Games). In light of recent work on English nationalism, national identity and multiculturalism, this article argues that representations of Britain oscillated between lamentations for an English/British past – marred by decline – and a present that, while being portrayed as both confident and progressive, was beset by latent anxieties. In doing so, ‘past’ reflections of England/Britain were presented as a ‘safe’ and legitimate source of belonging that had subsequently been lost and undermined amidst the diversity of the ‘present’. As a result, feelings of discontent, anxiety and nostalgia were dialectically constructed alongside ‘traditional’ understandings of England/Britain. Indeed, this draws attention to the ways in which particular ‘versions’ of the past are engaged with and the impact that this can have on discussions related to multiculturalism and the multiethnic history of England/Britain.     

Olympic legacy and cultural tourism: exploring the facets of Athens’ Olympic heritage

This study examines the effects of the Olympic Games on Athens’ cultural tourism and the city’s potential to leverage the Olympic legacy in synergy with its rich heritage in order to enhance its tourism product during the post-Games period. In doing so, a qualitative and interpretive approach was employed. This includes a literature review on Athens’ 2004 Olympics to identify the sport facilities and regeneration projects, which constitute the Olympic legacy and heritage. Based on that, an empirical analysis was undertaken, by collecting official documents about the 2004 Olympics, and conducting five semi-structured interviews with tourism/administrative officials. The findings indicate that the Olympiad contributed significantly to Athens’ built and human heritage, revealing the dimensions of new venues/facilities, infrastructure, transportation and aesthetic image of the city, and human capital enhancement. Hence, the Games affected to the multifaceted representation and reconstruction of the city’s identity and cultural heritage. However, the potential afforded from the post-Olympic Athens remains unrealised due to lack of strategic planning/management. The study concludes that there is a need to develop cross-leveraging synergies between the Olympic legacy and cultural tourism for the host city. Finally, a strategic planning framework for leveraging post-Games Olympic tourism is suggested in order to maximise the benefits of Olympic legacy and heritage in a host city’s tourism development.     

Counting eyeballs,soundbites and ‘plings’: arts participation,strategic instrumentalism and the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad

This article examines cultural participation, its metrics and ‘drivers’ as they are defined through cultural programming for the London 2012 Olympics. The meanings and interpretation of these terms are considered by examining the development of an evaluation framework for the We Play programme in the North West of England, an initiative funded by Legacy Trust UK and part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. It argues that in spite of the dissonance between arts and sports within Olympics programmes and claims of the deleterious impact on arts funding, particular within the regions, London 2012 has engendered creative programming which strategically deploys the Cultural Olympiad to satisfy local cultural policy objectives as well as meeting broader interests in ‘legacy’ from the Games. Such ambitions require the development of appropriate methodologies for understanding arts participation and engagement for the purpose of evaluation and evidence-based policy making, a particular challenge for such a complex range of activities, sites and settings for arts participation.     

London’s Olympic waterscape: capturing transition

The waterways of London are an essential component of the city, with the River Thames playing a prominent role in the heritage, history and identity of place. The upcoming 2012 Olympics are highlighting the Lea Valley waterways in east London as another important part of London’s waterscape, expanding London’s global presence as a ‘water city’. As part of the Creative Campus Initiative, we undertook a project based on the broad themes of water, London and the Olympics that would give voice to the changes taking place. The result is London’s Olympic Waterscape, a 20-minute film comprising both ‘expert’ interview material discussing broad themes and developments and an embodied record of our engagement with the Olympic area during a brief period in the construction process. The present article is about the journey we took through and around the east London ‘Olympic’ waterways as we attempted to capture this transitional moment on video.     

Politics and the London 2012 Olympics: the (in)security Games

This article traces the emergence of security at the Olympic Games as a key concern of host governments and of the Olympic movement and analyses the implications of this heightened concern for the delivery of the Games, the local host community and for national security policy. It is argued that the Olympic Games, as a high profile media event, provide an increasingly attractive political opportunity structure for a range of political actors—an attraction that is intensified when the Games are held in a world city such as London. Since the 9/11 attacks in New York there has been a sharp increase in security expenditure for the Olympic Games, arguably significantly out of proportion to the likely risk. The cost of security has risen from approximately $108 million in 1996 (Atlanta) to an estimated $1.99 billion in 2012 (London). It is argued that the period since 2001 has been characterized by hyper‐insecurity and a culture of intense risk aversion based not on probability but on the possibility of attack. Among the consequences of this development is a desensitization of host nations to the increased securitization of their cities. It is also argued that the impact on the local UK host community of Newham will be significant not only as a result of the intense level of policing, but also owing to the redevelopment associated with the Games and the use of the surveillance infrastructure to create a virtual gated community in the post‐Games athletes' village. The article concludes by discussing some of the longer‐term implications of the increased securitization of the Olympic Games, including the normalization of intense surveillance, the further encroachment on civil liberties and the growing tension between the values espoused by the Olympic movement and the reality of a successful delivery of the Games.     

Editorial — Industrial Heritage at Risk

Abstract

This article is based on a lecture given in Oxford in 2009 and was first intended as a contribution to the 300th anniversary of the invention of the Newcomen engine in 2012, but has been revised following the attention given to Britain’s industrial transformation in the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games. The discovery and diffusion of new technologies pervades human history, yet ‘industrialisation’ is thought to be an 18th-century phenomenon. This paper will argue that it was the invention of technologies which speeded up the actual process of work itself which led to massive social change, rather than those which resulted in higher levels of production whilst not changing the actual methods of working. It will consider the contribution that industrial archaeologists have made to a greater understanding of the nature of the so-called ‘Industrial Revolution’ as well as considering how this phenomenon was viewed both at home and abroad.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 35, Number 3. June 2019

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 3 Front cover THE RITUAL PROCESS Victor Turner developed van Gennep's concept of liminality, the transitional moment in rites of passage, into an innovative approach to the study of ritual dynamics. He also put the concepts of liminality and communitas to work, so as to understand larger processes of sociopolitical and cultural transformation such as those he was living through in the late 1960s. He was particularly interested in the relation between moments of transition, with their communitarian forms of sociality, and how – paradoxically – they failed to endure, giving rise to new forms of hierarchy. The covers of this special issue present two men jumping across thresholds, signalling its focus on transition. The anticipation and dramatization of transition is a key facet of the routinized ritual life of the Enawenê-nawê, portrayed on the front cover, who live in southern Amazonia, Brazil. While most Enawenê-nawê men are away fishing during the ritual season of Yankwa, hosts anticipate their return by performing a daily spectacle, ending with dramatic jumps into the flute house. During this time of mounting expectation, hosts adorn their bodies with particular care and their rousing performances cater to women and children who watch the spectacle from the dwellings that surround the open central arena. While circling the arena to elicit the fishermen's long-awaited return, the hosts play chaotic and ludic flutes – known as ‘pets’ to the civilized melodic flutes – and take on their character. In this issue, Chloe Nahum-Claudel argues that the Enawenê-nawê have achieved permanent communitas – an egalitarian social structure – by living in a permanent state of transition. Back cover THE OLYMPIAN'S THREE BODIES Competitive sporting events have historically been a prime site of ritual. Indeed, many argue that sport itself is ritualistic in nature. The history of the Olympic Games demonstrates the complex way in which ritual relates to society and to the polity. The lighting of the Olympic flame and the Olympic torch relay are rituals that have been central to the Olympic Games since 1928 and 1936 respectively. Chinese gymnast Li Ning after running, suspended by wires, around the upper rim of the Bird's Nest National Stadium and flying up to light the cauldron with the Olympic flame, the apical act of the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony on 8 August 2008. As an individual body, Li won three gold, two silver and one bronze medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, nearly 20 per cent of those attained by the national body of China as it re-entered the Summer Games after a 32-year absence. By 2008, Li was a national icon as well for his economic success under ‘reform and opening up’. Now heroic ritual custodianship of the Olympics' most sacred symbol of common humanity was added to his Olympian's status as a human body. Dramatic demonstration of the potential compatibility of Individuality, Nationality and Humanity is at the heart of Olympic ideology and ritual practice and the global attention paid to them. In this issue, John J. MacAloon analyzes the familiar Olympic victory ceremony and its infrequent alterations, such as the reversal in 2002 from gold-silver-bronze to the bronze-silver-gold medal presentation sequencing we know today.     

Rebranding the Republic: Rome and the 1960 Olympic Games

The 1960 Rome Olympic Games were held at a pivotal moment in the history of modern Italy and its capital. At the height of the ‘economic miracle’, tourists, international movie stars and entertainers, in addition to a record number of international athletes, flocked to the city to participate in the Games and the dolce vita. As a great ‘national’ project within a global and European context, Rome 1960 offered the organizers and ruling Christian Democratic Party (DC) the opportunity to rebrand Italy and show how far the country had come since the fall of Fascism and the end of the Second World War. While Rome 1960 was a marketing success – Italy’s international reputation was significantly enhanced – close examination of the preparations for the tournament, as well as the Games itself, reveals significant continuities, deep and unresolved political and social tensions, evidence of corruption, and a failure to come to terms with Italy’s recent past and the memory of Fascism. Questioning the extent to which the 1960 Olympics was a turning point in Italian sport and society, it exposes the Italy that existed beneath the sheen: one of stagnation, minimal change, political division and corruption.     

Property,rights ans community in a South African land‐claim case (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In the context of South Africa's land reform programme, the concepts of ‘property’ and ‘rights’ carry a heavy ideological baggage. This is evident in the country's land reform policies, which have sought to reach a compromise between differing and often contradictory histories involving both rights and property. A shift in government policy, from treating land reform as a question of rights to a question of the transfer of land, has been accompanied by a reification of the idea of community. The result is a policy that is seriously out of touch with the complex legacy of dispossession that the land reform programme was meant to address. As shown by the case presented in this article, these problems become exacerbated when the land in question is part of a conservation area.     

北京奥运会对非举办地入境旅游的影响——以桂林阳朔为例

奥运会对旅游的影响是重大事件研究的热点,但现有研究很少从非举办地的视角进行分析。本文以阳朔为例,基于文献分析和深入访谈,剖析在奥运会前期和中期,非奥运举办地的入境旅游市场受到的影响,研究发现:①阳朔入境旅游市场萧条,2008年3.14西藏事件、5.12地震和奥运会引发的签证政策收紧在奥运前期是影响入境市场的重要因素,签证对入境市场的抑制持续且突出的表现在奥运中期;②北京奥运会对以阳朔为例的非举办城市的促进作用不在奥运前、中期,甚至也不在奥运结束后的短时期内,而只能从长远角度考虑其影响;③旅游业是非常脆弱和敏感的产业,但口碑好的旅游企业抗风险能力较强。最后作者在讨论中指出,2010年上海将举行世博会,有望处于上海辐射范围的长三角非举办城市应谨慎分析世博会能够带来的利好。     

Social media and the transformation of ‘Chinese nationalism’: ‘Igniting positive energy’ in China since the 2012 London Olympics (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

During the 2012 London Olympics, a spontaneous movement to ‘ignite positive energy’ emerged in Chinese social media from the massive and fervent support for the Chinese grassroots torch bearers. This grassroots‐oriented movement has generated a ‘transcendental Chinese patriotism’, in which patriotism is intertwined with individualism, transnationalism, and universalism. The ideal and sentiment of this hybrid Chinese patriotism forms a stark contrast to the mainstream ‘Chinese nationalism’, which has been characterized by scholars as various forms of reactive collectivism derived from state authority, Confucian tradition, and the wounded memories of China's recent history. This online movement has also demonstrated an impressive efficacy in shaping the socio‐political landscape of China beyond transforming Chinese nationalism.     

A hobby no more: Anxieties of engaged anthropology: at the heart of empire (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Previous calls for an engaged anthropology were met by scholars who rose to the challenge successfully. But the current conservative political climate witnesses a regression of ‘academic standards’ to the traditional publish‐or‐perish model in many institutions, which themselves claim as mission not ivory‐tower academics but contribution to world affairs. Anthropologists may have to place themselves at the forefront of institutional reform if the ‘engaged anthropology’ moment is to be more than a passing fashion.     

Putting the crisis to work: The real estate sector and London's housing crisis

The idea of ‘crisis’ plays an important role in academic and policy imaginations (Heslop and Ormerod, 2020), particularly since the global financial crisis. Across major western cities, at the same time as policy-makers have had to respond to ‘the (economic) crisis’, many have also experienced intense ‘housing crises’ and the acute divergence of average incomes and house prices. In response, cities such as London have become central sites in debates around housing acquisition by the ultra-wealthy, land value extraction and growing levels of unaffordability. However, much critical geography research on housing crises is state-centred or focused on civil society impacts, with relatively little reflection on the real estate sector and the work that crisis does as a narrative in shaping institutionalised and actor-centred practices. In this paper, we draw on in-depth research with developers, investors, and advisors in London to argue that crisis-driven policy responses have created political risk which is differentially experienced by actors across the sector, with large housebuilders and advisors benefitting whilst smaller niche developers move out. Moreover, we show how consultants, investors and developers have used the crisis situation to create new geographies, products and investor types in the housing market. These, in turn, require regulatory support and demonstrate the inherently political nature of crisis narratives' use. We use the London case to broaden understandings of the impact that conceptualisations of ‘crisis’ have on urban and regional planning practices, and how these influence and shape processes of contemporary urban development.     

Competition or exhibition? The Olympic arts and cultural policy rhetoric

Though they are widely forgotten today, the modern Olympic Games once offered competitive medals for art. This tradition, which lasted through the seven summer Games held from 1912 to 1948, found artists competing for gold much as athletes do now. These artists represented their nation in judged competitive events showcasing artistic works. In its initial form, the ‘pentathlon of the muses,’ as it was called, included competitive events in Architecture, Musical Composition, Sculpture, Painting, and Literature. This paper considers the history of these arts competitions and their eventual demise as a study in cultural policy, arguing that no understanding of cultural policy is sufficient unless it considers the rhetorical factors that contribute to its formation. Without abandoning the Foucauldian backbone of cultural-policy studies, this argument makes an interdisciplinary plea to open cultural policy studies to the field of rhetorical scholarship, which it has almost wholly neglected to date.     

The new face of development: The ‘bottom of the pyramid’ entrepreneurs (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In recent years, ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) initiatives – from Grameen Phone Ladies and Solar Sister, to Women First and Living Goods – have captured increasing attention, not only in corporate boardrooms where the desire for untapped revenue streams looms large, but also in the arenas of development policy and practice, where entrepreneurship is celebrated as a way to repurpose ‘informal’ and/or ‘subsistence’ workers through new forms of private sector engagement. Based on fieldwork with BoP schemes in Bangladesh and South Africa, and cases drawn from other regions, this paper explores how development is outsourced through the figure of the BoP entrepreneur, the ‘poor’ woman who travels door‐to‐door delivering a range of branded manufactured goods across the ‘retail black spots’ of developing countries. These women are actively converted into entrepreneurial subjects through a set of ideological and material practices that aim to produce and hone the requisite traits of industry, market discipline and entrepreneurial distinction to succeed in global business; subject positions that can bring tangible rewards to those who successfully assume them. However, the process of outsourcing development to a reservoir of ‘informal labour’ unsettles BoP claims of ‘inclusive capitalism’, as an ethos of meritocracy and individual responsibility not only deflects the responsibility for development onto the poor themselves, but remakes their subjectivities in service to global brands.     

The marginalisation of Paralympic heritage

The impact of the Paralympic Games and disability sport upon the lives of people with disabilities and the perceptions of non-disabled society regarding people with disabilities has been immense. Yet examples of this disability sport and Paralympic heritage are all but invisible amongst the wider area of sports heritage. This paper will attempt to outline some of the possible reasons why this might be the case and cite some examples of how this apparent marginalisation of Paralympic heritage might be overcome as we move forward beyond the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.     

奥运会对城市经济的助推作用

本文主要讨论了现代奥运会在城市经济活动中的作用以及不断增强的产业化。企业化促使奥运承办费用日益增长,同时对举办城市经济的影响日益加大。2008年北京奥运会的申办以及预期结果表明:现代城市为获得奥运会主办权而不断增强的竞争,已经成为城市经济发展的重要组成部分。