Endangerment-driven heritage volunteering: democratisation or ‘Changeless Change’

This article is the product of prolonged wrestling with the question of how heritage professionals and researchers can facilitate and sustain public agency in caring for heritage in the UK during austerity without exploiting volunteers or devaluing professionals. It offers critical perspectives on efforts made to democratise heritage in the UK by increasing public participation through a critique of neoliberalism and the rise of neoliberal approaches in the heritage sector. It argues that the adoption of neoliberal approaches, such as crowdsourcing, that profess to democratise yet reinforce existing power structures, is the inevitable result of insisting on protecting material culture from harm, despite the continuing accumulation of more ‘heritage’. Drawing on critical perspectives on participation from a number of disciplines, it is suggested that efforts to increase public participation in heritage cannot hope to avoid exploiting volunteers, devaluing professionals and marginalising traditionally underrepresented demographics unless they also let go of the perceived need to protect the materiality of the past. Drawing on Sarah May’s archaeology of contemporary tigers, this article argues that the application of endangerment narratives to heritage reinforces uncritical understandings of both heritage and volunteering that preclude heritage from fulfilling its potential function as a contemporary social process.     

Stability amid Change: Ontario’s Religious Schools and Canada’s Regime of Secularism

Canada’s religious landscape has changed a great deal over the last forty years and, in most provinces, educational institutions have changed to accommodate this social shift. The articles reviews the divergent ways in which educational regimes have responded to this change and then turns to an examination of the one province in which little has changed regarding religious schools, Ontario. Ontario’s educational structure, which has continued to publicly support only a secular and Roman Catholic separate school systems in one of the most religiously diverse jurisdictions on the planet, is a surprising example of institutional rigidity in the face of societal change. This article highlights the peculiarity of this outcome, attempts to explain this surprising example of institutional continuity, and considers its implications for Canadian secularism more broadly.     

Monongahela Subsistence-settlement Change?

Abstract

The Late Prehistoric (c. A.D. 1050/1100–1635) Monongahela tradition of southwestern Pennsylvania and portions of adjoining states has come to be associated with specific subsistence-settlement traits. These include a heavy dependence on maize-based agriculture, large percentages of villages in upland locales, and use of semisubterranean storage facilities. In the traditional approach, that entails the construction of a series of sequential time periods, changes in subsistence and settlement traits are most often interpreted to have occurred at the boundaries of the time periods. These periods are defined on the basis of pottery style changes and the addition of European artifacts. An accumulation of data now allows for statistical analysis of posited changes in Monongahela tradition settlement and subsistence traits. Results of this study do not support the proposed subsistence and settlement pattern shifts at time period boundaries. Rather, the results support the position of continuous variation in the settlement and subsistence traits through the entire sequence with no evidence of regional uniformity.     

‘The Wind has been Gathering Force’: Iain Macleod and his Policy Change on Tanganyika

This article examines the decision in May 1960 by the British colonial secretary, Iain Macleod, to accelerate dramatically the independence timetable for Tanganyika. Making extensive use of recently released archive material, it looks at the key factors behind this largely neglected but nevertheless significant episode, seeking to demonstrate that, despite Macleod's subsequent recollection of events, there was a clear policy change in May 1960; that it was for the main part external nationalist and internationalist pressures which led to the policy change; that, importantly, newly identified short-term factors of a change of heart by nationalist leader Julius Nyerere, events in Somaliland and the need to demonstrate positive Commonwealth credentials were the immediate and decisive reasons behind the acceleration; and that, in explaining the advancement, it is valuable to understand why and how individual factors contributed to the policy change and how they worked together.     

Winds of (Democratic?) Change

Democratic experiments in Africa: regime transitions in comparative perspective. By Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997.     

The Samoan Farmer: A Reluctant Object of Change?

Stagnation and a failure to break out of a subsistence-oriented type of production continue to characterize the agricultural sector in Western Samoa. The lack of dynamism in agriculture has variously been ascribed to subsistence affluence and limited wants, the inhibiting impact of fa'asamoa – the Samoan way of life – and, more recently, to the effects of migration, remittances, aid and bureaucracy on economic development. This article suggests that the explanatory power of these factors by themselves is unsatisfactory. Instead, it argues that an absence of secure market outlets offering predictable and sufficiently attractive prices to farmers and the lack of rural-urban links in general are at the heart of the problem. The economy seems to be caught in a vicious circle where farmers fail to commit themselves to production for the market because of a lack of secure outlets, while adequate downstream distribution and processing channels do not develop for lack of secure supplies. The interchangeable nature of commercial and subsistence production in agriculture, widespread access to overseas remittances, and the smallness of the domestic economy serve to perpetuate the deadlock.     

Women With AIDS: Will It Change aids Service Organizations?

In the early 1980s, gay men formed AIDS service organizations (ASOs) in areas hardest hit by the disease, such as San Francisco and New York City, to provide assistance to infected members of their own communities. The Ryan White CARE Act of 1990 made funds available for community-based groups, such as ASOs, to provide support services to all people with HIV/AIDS. The epidemiology of AIDS has changed greatly in recent years, and increasing numbers of poor, minority women with children now contract HIV/AIDS. To determine if ASOs are in compliance with the CARE Act, this study surveyed 20 ASOs across the country and a number of their female clients to see if ASOs, some of which were started by gay men, have tailored their services for a growing minority, heterosexual population. The results indicate that a number of ASOs have been slow in responding to the diverse needs of women. Recommendations are offered to make the organizations more responsive.     

Climate Change: How Should the World Heritage Convention Respond?

The World Heritage Convention has been considering how best to respond to the impacts of climate change. This poses a number of challenges, aside from the complexities of climate change itself. The Convention is not accustomed to addressing broad, interdisciplinary matters beyond World Heritage; it has not historically had strong links with other conventions outside UNESCO; it has relatively few resources; and climate change will result in escalating change, whereas the World Heritage Convention is based upon a presumption of relative stability and manageable change. Responding to climate change in the longer term will require a clear definition of the role of the World Heritage Convention in this area, and new types of expertise within the Convention process. This article reviews these and other issues to chart a forward path.     

Some Demographic Problems in Belorussia's Urban Population Change in 1959–1971

The relative significance of the natural and migrational components of population change are analyzed for urban places of the Belorussian SSR using a graphic analytical technique proposed by J. W. Webb (Economic Geography, 1963, No. 2). A total of 59 out of 204 urban places in Belorussia are found to have a net out-migration, most of them being places of 5,000 population or less, with few employment opportunities. In 26 places, natural increase is inadequate to compensate for the outflow, resulting in a population loss, and three other places combine an excess of deaths over births with net out-migration. All 28 places of 20,000 population or more combine natural increase with net in-migration, with the natural component predominating in six places and the migrational in 22. In Minsk, the republic capital, and the five other oblast centers, the migrational component represents 70 to 75 percent of the population increment.     

How Neoliberal Is China's Reform? The Origins of Change during Transition

A UK-based geographer and specialist on China's urbanization reviews changes occuring in China during its market transition through the prism of neoliberalism. More specifically, by reviewing the recent literature on neoliberalism, the author searches for parallels between that approach and the political-economic, historical, and social developments associated with market transition in China (e.g., land and housing commodification, rural to urban migration, changes in access to education and health care). The question of to what extent (and in what ways) China's reforms— featuring an expanding role for the market—can be considered neoliberal is conditioned by the continuing importance and involvement of the state in all spheres of activity.     

A Simulation Model of Fission–Fusion Dynamics and Long-Term Settlement Change

Archaeological analyses often detect abrupt changes over time in the hierarchy of settlement sizes and the spatial distribution of residential units. These transformations have been explained looking at a variety of possible causes, from climatic changes to the sudden release of slowly cumulating political tensions. While many of these models offer plausible explanations for specific historical contexts, a broad-breadth model is desirable if cross-cultural analysis is sought. This paper tackles this problem by starting from the theoretical proposition that human groups are characterised by a non-linear relationship between size and per-capita fitness. Increasing group size has beneficial effects, but once a certain threshold is exceeded, negative frequency dependence will start to predominate leading to a decline in the per-capita fitness. Such a relationship can potentially have long-term implications in the spatial structure of human settlements if individuals have the possibility to modify their fitness through group fission–fusion dynamics. I will illustrate the equilibrium properties of these dynamics by means of an abstract agent-based simulation and discuss its implication for understanding long-term changes in human settlement pattern. Results suggest that changes in settlement pattern can originate from internal dynamics alone if the system is highly integrated and interconnected.     

The Creative Economy: Vision or Illusion in the Structural Change?

This contribution discusses the hopes associated with the rise of the creative industries and gives explanations for the debates in politics, science and the media. In doing so, our underlying thesis is that the culture and creative economy is a virtual sector and that a uniform promotion—also by means of staged events that attract a lot of media attention—needs to be challenged. In a further step, the scientific implications will also be outlined on the basis of the term's “career” in the public debate. A brief analysis of the empiricism of the creative economy will provide further insight into its real significance and demonstrate possible definitional weaknesses of the term. The creative industries are an essential element of modern economic infrastructure. They will play an important role in the future, especially for cluster strategies. However, the scientific research so far is not able to reach more accurate conclusions regarding the effects of governance on the culture and creative industry. Therefore, this contribution shows future research fields. We will conclude by venturing an outlook on the further development of the sector and demonstrate its social and economic effects using the example of the Ruhr Area in North Rhine-Westphalia.     

Mary Shelley’s ‘Romantic Spinozism’

ABSTRACT

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) developed a ‘Romantic Spinozism’ from 1817 to 1848. This was a deterministic worldview that adopted an ethical attitude of love toward the world as it is, must be, and will be. Resisting the psychological despair and political inertia of fatalism, her ‘Romantic Spinozism’ affirmed the forward-looking responsibility of people to love their neighbors and sustain the world, including future generations, even in the face of seeming apocalypse. This history of Shelley’s reception of Spinoza begins with the fragment of the otherwise lost translation of the Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) on which she collaborated. It extends through her journals, letters, poetry, and her second great work of speculative fiction after Frankenstein (1818): a post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2100, The Last Man (1826). Through a creative synthesis of Spinoza with Plato, Cicero, Wollstonecraft, and Glasite Christianity, Shelley developed an anti-apocalyptic conception of love as apocatastasis: a cyclical restoration of an ethical attitude of stewardship toward the whole world and its necessity. Through this recovery of a vital chapter in the history of European ideas, Shelley emerges as a central figure in Spinozan philosophy, especially the ethics and political philosophy of love.