Weathering time: walking with young children in a changing climate

ABSTRACT

Children growing up today face a multitude of climate-related challenges, requiring a capacity for creative and ethical modes of attending to both the known and unknown effects of a changing climate. In response to these challenges, I explore the potential in children’s weathering encounters, as observed during an ethnographic research project titled Walking with Wildlife in Wild Weather Times. In particular, I consider the various ways children engage with the weather and what this reveals about our (human) interconnections and minglings with the weather world. In this paper, I focus specifically on the temporal dimensions of child/weather encounters. My aim is to show that taking the time with children to slow down and attend to the elemental affects in the world, can reveal a weathered entanglement of past, present and future and a foundation for a curious and open attentiveness in responding to the climate challenges ahead.     

Gendered Inuinnait (Copper Inuit) landscapes of Banks Island’s northern interior,Arctic Canada, 17th–20th centuries a.d.

Abstract

Archaeological survey data from the northern interior of Banks Island in Canada’s western Arctic builds upon traditional interpretations of past land use to explore the ways in which this landscape was perceived by different groups. The data confirm earlier archaeological, ethnographic, and oral history work which suggest that the area was occupied primarily in the summer months at two separate times in the past: the Palaeoeskimo period and the Inuinnait (Copper Inuit) period. The earlier occupation was less intensive than the latter and both were focused on muskox hunting. Drawing on ethnographic studies of the Inuit in both the early and late 20th centuries, and on the distribution of archaeological camp sites versus hunting sites, a reconstruction is made of the different ways in which men and women experienced and understood the survey area during Inuinnait times. It suggests that the main drainages formed important travel routes, and that while women’s knowledge of the region was concentrated along these corridors and in favorite camping places, men’s knowledge extended into hunting areas beyond their peripheries.     

Shellfish Gathering and Conservation on Low Coral Islands: Kiribati Perspectives

ABSTRACT

Low coral island societies in the Pacific have always lived in a precarious environment. Consequently, some writers have stated that people living on atolls and table reefs must have devised effective conservation strategies. Predictions from three optimal foraging models in ethnographic contexts (patch choice, patch sampling, and risk) applied to shellfish gathering in Kiribati, Micronesia, do not support the assumption that human foragers are motivated by a desire to conserve resources. While historical ecology data are sparse, there is little to indicate that coral islanders in the past needed to practice conservation of marine resources, including shellfish.     

From excess to encompassment: Repetition,recantation, and the trashing of time in Swedish Christianities

ABSTRACT

I explore the conversion of a Swedish Pentecostal Prosperity preacher to the Roman Catholic Church in order to examine questions of analytical perspective, temporal scale, and ethical discernment in the operation of religiously charged forms of repetition. The paper juxtaposes neo-Pentecostal with Roman Catholic understandings of temporality through tracing the ideological movements of Pastor Ulf Ekman over the past three decades, summarizing these understandings as based around tropes of ‘excess’ and ‘encompassment’ respectively. In exploring repetition as both theoretical category and ethnographic object of observation, I distinguish between actively marked repetition and the merely repetitious, while also drawing distinctions between continuity and the iterative, oscillatory character of repetitive actions.     

The comfort of the river: understanding the affective geographies of angling waterscapes in young people’s coping practices

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on ethnographic research with angling intervention programmes working with ‘disaffected’ young people in the UK to demonstrate how young people use the affective geographies of waterscapes to regulate their feelings and escape stressful lives. But rather than interpret the restorative or therapeutic quality of waterscapes as the consequence of (passive) immersion into green/blue spaces, we argue that ‘comfort’ is derived from an ongoing, active engagement with(in) the world. Drawing on works influenced by phenomenological theories and relational understandings of the more-than-human world, we illustrate how the affectual qualities of waterscapes are continually ‘woven’ into being through the material and embodied practices of young anglers. However, understanding why waterscapes ‘matter’ to young people also requires accounting for those assemblages originating in the past that shape these co-experienced worlds.     

Landesque capital as an alternative to food storage in Melanesia: Irrigated taro terraces in New Georgia,Solomon Islands

Abstract

In the Pacific islands, subsistence diversity made possible continuous production of food while well-developed exchange networks redistributed these foodstuffs as well as items within the prestige economy. All these were aspects of the ‘storage structures’ that enabled social and nutritional value to be saved, accumulated and later mobilised. In addition, there were investments in the land, landesque capital, which secured future food surpluses and so provided an alternative to food storage, in a region where the staple foods were mostly perishable, yams excepted, and food preservation was difficult. Landesque capital included such long-term improvements to productivity as terraces, mounds, irrigation channels, drainage ditches, soil structural changes and tree planting. These investments provided an effective alternative to food storage and made possible surplus production for exchange purposes. As an example, in the New Georgia group of the western Solomon Islands irrigated terraces, termed ruta, were constructed for growing the root crop taro (Colocasia esculenta). Surplus taro from ruta enabled inland groups to participate in regional exchange networks and so obtain the shell valuables that were produced by coastal groups. In this paper, we reconstruct how this exchange system worked in New Georgia using ethno-archaeological evidence, we chart its prehistoric rise and post-colonial fall, and we outline the factors that constrained its long-term expansion.     

Re-imagining the kitchen as a site of memory

Extending the focus of previous geographical research on public spaces of remembering, this paper demonstrates the ways in which memory work also takes place in private domestic spaces. The paper draws on a combination of life history and ethnographic research undertaken in Northern England, examining kitchens as a specific lieu de mémoire, showing how they serve as places where valued items are displayed and material artefacts are curated as part of the construction and reproduction of personal memories and familial identities. Using ethnographic and visual evidence from two case study households, the paper demonstrates the role of material artefacts in curating the past and materialising memory. Additionally, life history interviews with older women reveal narratives of everyday cooking practices which seemingly contradict popular discourses of the past, questioning conventional ideas about the distorted nature of nostalgia. In combination, our data represent complex narratives in which the past can be seen as infusing the present, and where present-day concerns are revealed as actively shaping public discourses which favour a return to an idealised past, which may have little bearing on people’s actual lived experience.     

Domestication,Reindeer Husbandry and the Development of Sámi Pastoralism

Abstract

A recurrent topic in ethnographic, historical and archaeological research has been the origins of Sámi reindeer pastoralism. The article discusses how prevailing theories have been influenced by general conceptual schemes, apriori constructed models and an extensive use of taxonomies. The debate has centered around how and when domestication took place, presupposing a paradigmatic change from hunting to pastoralism. However, there has probably never been an abrupt change; hunting and herding have both been parts of a multifaceted adaption existing up to the nineteenth century. What did change was the social organization of herding when a pastoral economy became the norm at that time. Such a change also had qualitative consequences in terms of new values and economic strategies.     

Creation in Art and Science

Abstract

The proposition that the creations of art are unique (in the sense tbat we would not have had Timon of Athens had Shakespeare not lived), whereas the creations of science are inevitable or commonplace (in the sense that we would have had the DNA double helix even if Watson and Crick had not lived), has little philosophical or historical merit. For, this proposition conflates works of art and science (the texts of the play Timon and of the paper A structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid), both of which are unique, and their semantic content (the insights into human affects provided by Timon and the concept of the DNA double helix), both of which are commonplace as well as unique.     

Habsburg coffeehouses in the shadow of the empire: Revisiting nostalgia in Trieste

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on Trieste’s representation as ‘the ghost of its Habsburg past’ (Hametz, M. 2014. ‘Presnitz in the Piazza: Habsburg Nostalgia in Trieste.’ Journal of Austrian Studies 47 (2): 131–154. doi:10.1353/oas.2014.0029., 136) – a city that laments the irreversibility of time – to explore instead the ways in which nostalgic attachments to the empire have come under suspicion. Drawing on interviews, literary texts, and atmospheric data (McCormack, D. 2014. ‘Atmospheric things and circumstantial excursions.’ Cultural Geographies 21 (4): 605–625. doi:10.1177/1474474014522930), I explore the narrative and performative strategies adopted to reframe the political and cultural relations with the empire. By discussing how events and places expected to celebrate the Habsburg legacy refuse to become nostalgic, I trace the emergence of contested feelings for the empire to explore how nostalgia becomes an ambivalent sentiment that is discursively and performatively re-appropriated and mobilized to attach and detach Trieste from the empire.     

Swift Creek paddle designs and the imperative to be unique

ABSTRACT

The emergence of the Swift Creek style tradition represents a shift from two or three simple carved paddle designs to many thousands of unique paddle designs by middle Swift Creek then back to merely a few in late and post Swift Creek times. This explosion in designs is a striking phenomenon, in need of consideration. Increased design diversity implicates a rise in creativity, verging on an imperative to be unique, where none previously existed in this medium. In this paper, we offer a revised model of Swift Creek social dynamics by reference to the new-found creativity of paddle makers situated within the context of ethnographic case studies.     

Community Archaeology as Knowledge Management: Reflections from Uneapa Island,Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Over the last decade the concept of community archaeology has become a worldwide phenomenon; a convenient tagline largely describing the involvement of non-archaeologists in the practice of interacting with, uncovering, interpreting, and presenting the past. A plethora of new definitions and methodologies have been postulated, a marked increase in public funds invested in such initiatives is notable, as is the development of more rigorous evaluation strategies. Using Etienne Wenger’s ideas about ‘communities of practice’ (1998), I argue that community archaeology can be conceived as a form of knowledge management. In doing so, this paper reflects on the interactions between a small research team and local community during six months fieldwork on Uneapa, a remote island in the Bismarck Sea, Papua New Guinea. It considers the sets of relations that emerged whilst fi?eld-walking, surveying, and excavating Uneapa’s monumental landscape, and discusses how local ideas and knowledge influenced and altered the project methodologies and research questions being asked. This paper also highlights the challenges faced when reifying such engagements into research outputs.     

Finding Fear in the Iron Age Of Southern France

Abstract

Changes in settlement organisation in Mediterranean France throughout the Iron Age have long been viewed as a social and cultural by-product of contact with Greece and Rome. While relationships with the state societies of the Mediterranean would doubtless have left their mark on settlement structures, it is possible that changing habitat-forms during this period could also be used to extrapolate patterns of conflict in the region.

Recent anthropological research has revealed a correlation between 'warlike', non-state societies and 'socialization for fear'. In ethnographic accounts this manifests itself as an increased delineation of personal space and reductions in social access on an individual level. It is possible that the fairly commonplace sets of evidence which reveal this 'fear' are apparent in the settlement record of the later Iron Age throughout the Bouches du Rhone.     

Black man's Burden: some South African parallels with North America

ABSTRACT

Muthi, intelezi and associated rituals have played an important role in the lives of Africans for many centuries. For almost everything they do, muthi and rituals are applied, more so during times of war. Controversy around the use of intelezi, muthi, ritual killing and the role of izinyanga in, prior to and during the colonial period, is well documented. This paper, first, challenges the Comaroffian analysis of the subject which purports to contextualise the ‘deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends’. They add that the discourse is entirely about ‘modernity’ and ‘neoliberalism’. Here I fundamentally disagree with this explanation; I indicate that it is a cultural continuity. The paper contends that ritual killing and muthi use continues into the present and was prevalent during the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal during the 1980s and 1990s. Secondly, the paper will discuss the centrality of the use of muthi during the violence. I reason that izinyanga played a clandestine but powerful role in this violence. In this, they were at the core of the violence and of the rise of warlords to power in the region. In this paper, I will also present reasons (or offer recommendations) why historians should pay attention to these practices in the recent past, as well as in colonial times. For one thing, they are a means of understanding the present. However, in many ways, because of its reliance on oral histories and insider content, this paper is neither history nor ethnography, but could be described as historical ethnography.     

The Atlantic Challenge: How Political Science Understands Canada’s Smallest Region

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how Canadian political science portrays Atlantic Canada, along with some of the consequences of persistent misrepresentations. I first explore traditional portrayals of Atlantic Canada as well as arguments challenging those conceptions, demonstrating that it is no longer appropriate to treat Atlantic Canada as primarily defined by either economic processes or common political culture. I then survey the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Canadian Public Administration and Canadian Public Policy to determine the extent to which discussions of Atlantic Canada still, (a) emphasize economic phenomena, and (b) assume a common Atlantic political culture. I find that, while political scientists are now less likely to study the region in terms of economic phenomena, they still perpetuate outdated depictions of Atlantic political culture. This tendency results in a certain degree of methodological imprecision and reinforces problematic assumptions about Atlantic political life.     

Everyday life and water tourism mobilities: mundane aspects of canal travel

ABSTRACT

Tourism is frequently construed as unusual and extraordinary in contrast to the routines and predictability of work and home life. However, the tourism spaces are co-created through practices that are simultaneously mundane and unusual. Yet everyday touristic practices are seldom researched, especially regarding water tourism. The mundane strategies of creating the boatspace form an important part of the tourist experience of everyday life on canals of England. Movements of bodies in the space, gastronomic experiences, and hygiene practices studied here via ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation and semi-structured interviews with leisure boaters) become defining characteristics of the leisure boaters’ everyday. We show that spatial practices, temporal structures, and search for ontological security are essential elements of domesticating and co-creating the emergent boatspace, where physical and social space are negotiated between various actors.     

‘Hidden from view’?: an analysis of the integration of women’s history and women’s voices into Australia’s social history exhibitions

ABSTRACT

‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big picture history to intimate and deeply personal stories that recast our understanding of the past in ways that are inclusive of gendered experiences. We investigate the use of the curatorial voice as reflected in Willis’ work, aligning it with the notion of curatorial activism, before exploring the changing curatorial practices that expanded the potential for an interpretive approach that incorporated the voice of the subjects themselves as a central component in the telling of history. We then analyse the impact of these strategies on traditional understandings of the past through three exhibitions developed by Melbourne Museum over 30 years: The Story of Victoria, a successor exhibition The Melbourne Story, and their Great War centenary exhibition, WWI: Love & Sorrow.     

Objects of Memory: The Ethnography and Archaeology of Heirlooms

With the emergence of chiefdoms, a new ideology of inherited social difference had to be created and sustained over time. One way that inherited social inequalities may have been constructed, legitimated, and maintained is through the transmission of heirlooms or artifacts that objectified a collective ancestral past. Archaeologists have generally viewed heirlooms as anomalies or complications in the archaeological record. In this paper, however, I argue that, if identified, heirlooms have the potential to provide a richer and finer-grained understanding of the human past, in general, and to aid in the determination of hereditary rank, in particular. I discuss and compare the ethnographic evidence for heirloom use in bands, tribes, and chiefdoms, and, based on this evidence, I suggest criteria by which heirlooms might be identified in the archaeological record. Some examples of possible heirlooms from the archaeological literature are also presented. Finally, an evolutionary model for the circulation and disposal of heirlooms is proposed.