‘Memory is the strength of our resistance’: an ‘other politics’ through embodied and material commemoration in the San José Peace Community,Colombia

Scholars have shown how memory is an embodied and spatial practice that potentially generates more just possible futures, and that peace is a politicized and contextually specific process, but how does place-based memory performance actually contribute to social movements’ construction of peace? This article explores massacre commemoration pilgrimages and stones painted with victims’ names in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, a group of small-scale farmers living in the war-torn region of Urabá, Colombia. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Colombia from 2011 to 2014, including participant observation and 49 interviews, I explore the relationship between these spatially embodied practices and the community’s resistance to forced displacement and peace-building project. I argue that these forms of memorialization cultivate key elements for an autonomist ‘other politics’, including solidarity with allies; mobilizing bodies across space to defend life and land; and ongoing reflection, education and strategic planning that strengthen community cohesion and organization. Integrating scholarship on memory performance, peace geographies, and social movements, I illustrate how the San José de Apartadó Peace Community’s massacre commemorations and stones reject vindictive violence and instead build an alternative, transformative and emancipatory politics through internal and external solidarity.     

Ambiguous heritage and the place of tourism: Bangkok’s Rattanakosin

ABSTRACT

Bangkok’s ancient city, Rattanakosin, is a major tourism focus displaying palaces, temples, exotic street life and frenetic waterfront. However, this ‘first-level’ heritage landscape makes little sense dissociated from that of an underlying ‘second level,’ comprising surviving remnants and lost memories of a vast array of other palaces whose occupants sustained the ancient Siamese state and accounted for a present culture of royal-elite-military hegemony. The first five Chakri kings had an immense multiplicity of sons who could serve as defenders of both realm and dynasty, later as royal ministers and administrators and as commercial collaborators. Multiple daughters were useful in buying loyalty of an often restive nobility. Royal fecundity, however, posed a real-estate challenge as sons had to be housed appropriately, calling for an extraordinary profusion of both large and small palaces. While most have now been swept away for other development, the remnants constitute a suppressed and uninterpreted cultural landscape that also intersects with multiple sites of both dark and hedonistic tourism. These intersections of first and second levels of heritage, then with both dark and hedonistic levels of heritage-identity, yield ambiguity, demanding interpretation.     

Annie Moore and the archives of displacement: towards an immigrant history of the present

Annie Moore, the first immigrant to enter the USA through the Ellis Island immigrant processing station, stands as an originary figure of the so‐called golden age of European immigration to the USA in the late nineteenth century. The contemporary archivization of the Irish immigrant Annie Moore in the Ellis Island Museum, New York and the Cobh Harbour Heritage Centre in County Cork, Ireland repeats the democratic rhetoric of immigration which underpins the foundation of the USA, as well as the national imaginary of Ireland. Yet in so doing, this archivization effaces the hierarchies of race and class that have historically underpinned the democratic rhetoric of immigration. With reference to Jacques Derrida's work on the archive and hospitality, this article expands on a performance‐based critical art intervention into the archivization of Annie Moore entitled ‘Calling Up Annie Moore’. Focusing on the blindspots, ellipses and discontinuities which the archive represses, the article traces the different histories and experiences of immigration which the art intervention disclosed.     

基于游客自愿拍摄法（VSEP）的旅游审美研究方法探索

旅游活动是一项审美实践活动。旅游者旅游审美偏好的影响因素是什么？西方学界强调以照片为基础的景观偏好（landscape preference）研究,中国学界重视经验性思考,但至今未有共识性结论。数码相机的普及使通过考察大众游客的摄影动机与行为来研究其审美行为成为可能。本文以游客受雇拍摄法（VEP）为基础,提出了＂游客自愿拍摄法＂（VSEP）;通过探测九寨沟、张家界、嵩山3个知名旅游地大众旅游者摄影动机与影响因素,研究检验了以往以照片为基础的景观偏好影响因素部分结论,探索了＂游客自愿拍摄法＂（VSEP）在研究旅游审美方面的可行性,并在此基础上有新的研究发现。     

Judicialization and Health Policy in Colombia: The Implications for Evidence‐Informed Policymaking

The existence of the tutela mechanism and the endemic weaknesses of the legislative and executive branches of the Colombian state have led to a de facto judicialization of health policymaking. The objective of evidence‐informed policy is to identify effective policy approaches and legitimize policy decisions. Questions arise about the basis on which judges take decisions with significant policy and budgetary consequences, and the forms of evidence they use to inform these. This article focuses on the extent to which courts take account of research evidence in judgements and assesses the implications for health policy in Colombia. We place these discussions in the context of a broader analysis of the ongoing reforms to the Colombian health system and the most recent literature on evidence‐informed policymaking. The judicialization of health policymaking offers a suboptimal means to achieve the objective of evidence‐informed policymaking. The emergence of a range of evidence advisory bodies in recent years is an attempt to address the issue of judicialization alongside the other constitutional and political weaknesses Colombia faces.     

Pre-hispanic goldwork technology. The Quimbaya Treasure,Colombia

One of the most important pre-Columbian gold assemblages made up of more than one hundred objects from two tombs in the Cauca river valley, Colombia, was studied to obtain archaeometric information. Although several attempts have been made to arrange gold production in time and space from the stylistic point of view, no firm conclusions were possible due to the lack of archaeological contexts. This paper presents first results of a new, fully instrumental approach, in which different analytical techniques, including OM, SEM-EDS, XRF, PIXE, RBS, AMS and X-ray imaging, were applied in order to determine a technological, metallurgical and chronological frame of the so-called Quimbaya Treasure.     

An attempt to push back frontiers – digital near-ultraviolet aerial archaeology

Even though the sun has its peak emission of electromagnetic (EM) radiation in the visible waveband, it still produces a substantial amount of ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths (10–400 nm). However, the largest portion of this emitted energy is blocked by the ozone layer of the atmosphere, only allowing the near-ultraviolet or NUV (comprising the spectral band between 315 nm and 400 nm) to reach the earth's surface. Additionally, sensors acquiring this part of the UV wavelengths must be operated from low altitudes to minimize the effects of strong Rayleigh scattering to which the NUV radiation is subjected. Consequently, this waveband of the EM spectrum is rarely employed in aerial photography and its reflected portion only acquired in very specific applications.     

Alongside Violence: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia

The naturalization of violence in Colombia has made gory testimonies a common yet counterproductive product when creating narratives that reproduce some of the violence they attempt to scrutinize. This article explores women’s activism as an everyday survival practice, as well as the ethics of researching and writing about survival in Chocó. I focus specifically on two groups of Chocoan women activists and their counternarratives of violence: (1) the group Vamos Mujeres founded by women from the rural community of San Francisco de Ichó and (2) the members of the Gender Commission of a farmworker’s organization, both groups belong to Consejo Comunitario Mayor de la Asociación Campesina Integral del Atrato (COCOMACIA), the Main Community Council of the Integral Peasant Association of the Atrato River. Based on my ongoing collaboration with COCOMACIA’s Gender Commission since 2010, I argue that everyday practices reflect an ‘alongside’ (which is neither oppositional nor resistant) narrative of violence that challenges linear explanations of survival within the Colombian armed conflict. Centering survival narratives allows us to move from gory memories that reproduce violence, to an ethical rehearsal that recognizes the utopian potential of moving beyond victimhood.     

试谈深色器物的摄影用光方法

本主要探讨了物摄影中深色器物的摄影用光方法。     

The study of collector variability in the transition to sedentary food producers in northern Colombia

Human adaptation to the tropics by populations of collectors has been a longtanding issue of debate, especially with regard to the role that collectors may have played in pathways toward sedentism and food production. In this essay, I examine significant differences in strategies developed for estuarine environments versus the inland environments of the transitional savannas of northern Colombia to analyze how these two adaptations articulate with the processes which led toward sedentism and food production in neotropical northern Colombia. Contrary to the received wisdom, I argue that the exploitation of rich estuarine environments is not necessarily a prelude to food production; seed exploitation early in the sixth millennium B.P. in the northern Colombian transitional savanna zone provides a second and arguably more probable model.     

Orinoquia: The Archaeology of the Orinoco River Basin

Orinoquia is one of the most important riverine ecosystems complexes of the world. However, it has been seldom recognized as an ecological or historical entity in general accounts of South American archaeology. This essay reviews systematically and comparatively the archaeology of Orinoquia, by discussing research done from the 1940s onwards in all the areas of the Orinoco Basin: the Andes, the plains or llanos, the Orinoco river proper, the highlands of Guayana, and the Delta. It is proposed that, in the last 20 years, there has been a sustained movement away from a traditional archaeology, concerned mostly with environmental determinism and cultural history, to new and pluralistic models that share, in spite of their diversity, a regional, long-term, and multidisciplinary approach.