Language identity,linguistic diversity and political cleavages: evidence from Ukraine

ABSTRACT. This article revisits the notion of linguistic diversity and its function as a political cleavage. It argues that people's linguistic and cultural attitudes are influenced not only by their communicative practice but also by their identification with particular language(s) – even though they may not always communicate in that language. In Ukraine, from which my empirical data is drawn, language identity is embodied in the concept of native language that was imposed by the Soviet institutionalisation of ethnicity and came to mean ethnic belonging as much as linguistic practice. My analysis of survey data demonstrates that native language is a powerful predictor of people's attitudes and policy preferences with regard to both language use and other socially divisive issues, such as foreign policy and historical memory. This finding should also be applicable to other societies with a large‐scale discrepancy between language practice and identity.     

Wak’a/shrine making and pilgrimage tourism in Copacabana,Bolivia

Abstract

The cultural landscape of the town of Copacabana and nearby ancient sites on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, have functioned as magnetic places of pilgrimage from Inka times to the present. They are analyzed as landscape constructions through the eyes of political and religious authorities as well as through those of the common pilgrims in a bottom-up perspective from Inka to Colonial times and to the present. Methodologies used are study of pertaining archaeological data and Colonial documents complemented by ethnographic interviews and participant observation. The data demonstrate how the past is redefined in the present as local heritage in a landscape perceived as Andean as well as Christian. Throughout Andean history, Copacabana has been the land terminal for pilgrims to set over to the Islands of the Sun and Moon to visit empowered shrines (wak’as) viewed as places of emergence of the Sun and the first humans. This pilgrimage was fabricated into state ideology by the Inka from ca. A.D.1450–1550. After the Spanish invasion, Copacabana became the seat of a widely revered Virgin who attracts pilgrims from all over Bolivia and southern Peru. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in early August 2015 and 2017 during one of the pilgrimages. Most visitors identify as pilgrim-tourists and many walk to five spatially distinct but thematically related wak’ as at which the past coalesces with the present and the secular with the divine in passionate and colorful performances for family wellbeing. Discussions center on the limited spatial control of the Catholic Church and on the growing practice of making new wak’as in Andean terms to the Virgin at selected landscape features outside of town as a form of popular heritage. Findings demonstrate that local Aymara people are not passive Colonial victims but selectively adopt from their conquerors what they hope may help alleviate poverty.     

Commensurable language and incommensurable claims among the Greek linguistic minority of Southern Italy

Abstract

More than ever, minorities reflexively engage with global frameworks in their endeavour to promote distinctiveness. Scaling local diversity through specific frameworks has resulted in familiar commensurable languages of international claim recognition. By presenting the case of the Grecanici – a Greek linguistic minority of Southern Italy – this paper critically assesses the creative mingling of global structures and local particularities which effects commensurable languages of representation. These languages in their global dimension reveal a certain degree of commensurate social commentary between global agents and local actors. This commentary is veryoften structured around master tropes such as awareness, victimization and consumption. Despite their global applicability, languages of representation do not necessarily imply commensurability at the local level. Often it is only after careful mediation by skilled rhetors that commensurability on a local level becomes possible.     

Spatial and temporal tourism considerations in liminal landscapes

Abstract

Anthropogenic geographic studies in tourism should consider the liminality of the experience. Tourism by definition means a temporal and/or spatial movement takes place. How the tourist interacts and behaves during this transitory experience is a logical progression into human leisure behaviour. Several recent international gatherings of geographers provide the foundation to explore liminality in tourism and we build on those papers in this special issue. The papers are varied in geographies, yet have a central theoretical basis in all things liminal. Invited papers in this special issue are founded on the research presented at two international geography conferences in sessions devoted to tourism. The American Association of Geographers meeting in Boston, Massachusetts in 2017 and the Royal Geographic Society with the Institute of British Geographers in Cardiff, Wales in 2018 gathered geographers from around the world to study this theme. The following papers give the most comprehensive geographic review in tourism to date and we encourage additional dialogue.     

Yeats,Wittgenstein and the ladder of linguistic inversion

This paper will consider the philosophy of language by Ludwig Wittgenstein in relation to the later modernist poetry of W. B. Yeats in Last Poems (1939). Accordingly, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) are used to understand the limits of language in conveying the facts of existence and the necessity for the inversion of previously held truths to navigate the altering nature of reality through time. W. B. Yeats’s final volume of poetry, Last Poems (1939), is shown to parallel the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein, thus demonstrating the subversive nature of Yeats’s last written poetry as an interrogation of his own constructed truths of the past. Both philosopher and poet are shown to coalesce in the deconstruction of linguistic representations of the world through the “form of life” that is the game of language in order to question limiting worldviews.     

Shared places,unshared identities: vernacular discourses and spatialised constructions of identity in the linguistic landscape of Trieste

Language as it appears in the public space is at the centre of investigations into linguistic landscapes. Language agents immersed in a given geo-historical context contribute to the construction of spatialised meaning and to the transformation of space into place. The visibility of a language in a linguistic landscape does not just index a reality, i.e. the use of one or more languages within a community, but contributes to the symbolic construction of a given space. The current study aims to investigate the peculiarities of place-making and -marking of the Slovenian-speaking community in the area of Trieste via an analysis of written signs displaying the minority language. The paper will show that the tension resulting from achieved equality in the legal status of Slovenian and the perception of unequal power relations between different ethnic groups is reproduced in the construction of the local linguistic landscape. The final part of the discussion will suggest that public use of the Slovenian language is central to the performance of a material border.     

Academic Cartography,Internal Map History,and the Critical Study of Mapping Processes

ABSTRACT

Academic cartographers consistently expressed an interest in the history of map form (design and practice), at least until the 1980s. This essay reviews the formation of academic cartography, primarily in central Europe and the United States, and the scholarly work on the internal history of cartography that was clearly manifested in Imago Mundi. Internal map history catalysed the development of socio-cultural map histories after 1980 but did not itself change along those new lines. This was unfortunate because it is by paying attention to internal questions of the physical and graphic form of maps and the practices of mapping—albeit critically reconfigured as the processes of producing, circulating and consuming maps—that map historians will discover new and fertile intellectual ground.     

Refusing to be Toured: Work,Tourism, and the Productivity of “Life” in the Colombian Amazon

Starting from the contention that exercising a “right to tour” is predicated on the work of producing tourability, I examine how tourability itself is a contested process involving relations of land and labour. Examining the current “resource boom” of ecotourism in the Colombian Amazon, I use an analysis of work and capital accumulation to unravel a seemingly small act of refusal by the community of Nazaret that has barred tourists’ entry to their land. I argue that this act of refusal opens up space for critically examining the relationships of land and labour, especially through the production of “life”, in the accumulation of tourable places in contemporary global capitalism. Engaging literature on both tourism studies and land politics in the Amazon region, I contribute to the scholarship on tourism and work while examining how Indigenous landscapes are being made productive towards the ends of capitalism.     

Islands,the Anthropocene,and Decolonisation

The Anthropocene is deployed as incontrovertible fact, yet its foundations merit strong critique to challenge how particular voices and locations are absented, silenced, or enrolled in the fallacies that attend this epochal framework. Other placed, grounded, and scale-sensitive explanations exist for present and future state scenarios, including on islands—often the focus of apocalyptic thinking. Dealing with historical and contemporary struggles to decolonise is more powerful than engaging with a reified framework that is part of ongoing colonial-imperial excesses, uneven development, and racial capitalism. This work considers how four of us, as instigating authors, worked with five others, as collaborating authors, to understand academic works, activism, and artistic expressions of island life and concerns. Our aim was to learn about how and why their efforts to prioritise decolonisation is at the heart of what is needed to shore up island peoples’ futures.     

Understanding ethnic differences in perceptions,attitudes, and behaviours: a study of domestic water use in Sydney

There is growing realisation among environmental and social studies researchers that people's decision‐making about water use conforms to their internal norms and beliefs, which are developed in social and cultural contexts. Little research, however, has addressed the possible impacts that ethnic and cultural diversity may have on domestic water use and management. This paper presents the results of a study conducted in Sydney, with specific reference to questionnaire findings. Among respondents from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, significant differences were observed in terms of perceptions, specific knowledge, attitudes, and self‐reported behaviours in relation to water use and conservation. The disparities identified were not masking socio‐demographic and economic characteristics but were the result of a series of constructs closely tied to ethnicity, including cultural value, environmental experience, language preference, and information access. As a factor explaining variation in the engagement of pro‐conservation behaviour, ethnic status was found to be more useful than some socio‐economic factors. The study highlights the importance of including ethnicity and cultural sensitivity issues in the decision‐making process of environmental management.     

Youth,gangs and violence: Analysing the social and spatial mobility of young people in Guatemala City

Youth gangs have become an increasingly significant, and controversial, social institution in low-income communities in many cities in Central America, and yet the local-level impacts of this phenomenon, especially on young people, remain under-explored. Drawing on research with young people in Guatemala City, this paper explores the multiple barriers to the social and spatial mobility of both gang and non-gang members resulting from gang violence. It also examines how young men and women cope with violence, and, given the severe impacts of gang activity on young people, highlights the pressing need for social alternatives to gangs.     

Masculinity and political geographies in England,Ireland and North America

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.     

Soft power,Russia and the former Soviet states: a case study of Russian language and education in Armenia*

Abstract

As in human relations, attraction can be an influential force in international relations. A well-known tool in Western countries, in Russia ‘soft power’ has come into play mainly under Putin’s presidency in the 2000s. This paper focuses on language and education as sources generating ‘soft power’. It looks first on the institutional framework progressively established to attract and integrate culturally the former Soviet space. Second, it studies the evolution of the Russian language and education in Armenia. The findings suggest that even if the previous decline in the usage of Russian has been reversed, the monopoly once enjoyed by this language seems to be over. Russian is promoted in a multicultural environment – alongside English, French, German or Chinese – which reflects the new geopolitical reality. Multicultural landscape characterises also the Armenian higher education system.     

Geopolicing Race,Gender, and Class: How the Police Immobilise Urban Allochthones

City landscapes are ever-changing stages for the protagonists that pass through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses to positively and negatively code subjects. As such, geography matters to the body. Rather than taking geographic locations, crime statistics, predictive maps and human bodies as objective truths, I focus on the work of police officers, not in terms of an instrumental-rational “meeting of policy targets” or attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make raced, gendered and classed geographical differentiations. This process culminates in geopolicing: the spatial imaginations and practices of police officers as to who, what and where to police and, of course, why. Geopolicing includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of urban “matter out of place”. Police officers perceive exclusionary territories in which landscapes racialised as white and identified as affluent are threatened by urban allochthones identified by class, race, gender, age and residential status. The findings are based on my ethnography among police officers in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, between 2007 and 2011.     

Hunters and gatherers past and present: Perspectives on diversity,teaching, and information transmission

This article reviews four books on hunters and gatherers. It begins with a discussion of the debates over the concept of hunter-gatherers. Theoretical approaches to hunter-gather studies are examined briefly. The view then assesses the four books and the various subjects which they address. These subjects include the issue of ethnographic analogy, diversity, evolution, and archaeological perspectives as well as understanding contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. Additional topics include land use, the assignment of meaning to landscapes, way finding, territoriality, boundary-marking, and networks. Social learning, teaching, and information dissemination are discussed, with emphasis on some of the things that are learned, such as sharing, fair treatment of others, the importance of compassion, and moral values. Hunter-gatherer studies have evolved to the point where both archaeologists and anthropologists are taking into careful consideration the need to consider both past and present in their investigations and to focus also on the non-hunter-gatherer societies with whom they are interacting. As people who defined themselves as indigenous, hunter-gatherers are well aware of the social, economic, environmental and political challenges that they are facing, and they are seeking to address these challenges along with support organizations and researchers in an attempt to ensure their long-term security and well-being.     

Reproducing,transforming and contesting gender relations and identities through migration and transnational ties

This article contributes to conceptual debates on gender transformations in the context of migration and transnationalism. We do so by discussing developments in gender relations and identities among Polish post-accession migrants in Norway; analysing the intersections of continuities and changes, relationally, as these are produced spatially and temporally. We draw on ethnographic data collected among Polish migrants in the Norwegian cities Oslo and Bergen (2009–2012). Our focus on continuity and change in gender relations and identities, in the context of migration and transnationalism, stems from a realization that migration often leads to assumptions of either radical change, or conservative continuity. Meanwhile through an analytical lens sensitive to relationality and socio-spatial circumstances, we find friction, disagreement, as well as negotiation and resolution, and we argue for the variety of ways in which continuity and change may run parallel, reflective of variations in transnational habitus produced in relation to social class. We pay attention to locations and scales, as salient for how gender relations and identities are reproduced, transformed or contested. The flexible continuum we find reveals diverse strategies of coping with migratory situations, as well as complex interplay between migrants’ agency, existing structures and engendered understandings.     

The spatial anatomy of an epidemic: influenza in London and the county boroughs of England and Wales, 1918–1919

From uncertain origins in the spring of 1918, an apparently new variant of influenza A virus spread around the world as three distinct diffusion waves, infecting half a billion and probably killing around 40 million people. This paper examines the spatial structure of influenza transmission during the ten–month course of the epidemic in England and Wales, June 1918–April 1919, using the weekly counts of influenza deaths in London and the county boroughs as collated by the General Register Office, London. In addition, a particular case study of the borough of Cambridge is presented. From mid–1916, Cambridge contained, as well as its undergraduate population, a large naval contingent billeted in both the colleges and the town. It therefore affords the opportunity of studying the effect of the epidemic in contiguous groups with widely differing demographic characteristics. Through the application of a range of statistical methods (average lags, correlations and regressions), it is shown that the three waves that comprised the pandemic had fundamentally different spatial and temporal characteristics. The first, moving through a population that was a virgin soil to the new virus strain, was explosive in its north to south progress across the country. The second wave was somewhat slower in its rate of diffusion and displayed a south to north drift. Finally, the third wave reverted more closely to the form of the first. The spread of all three waves, however, was underpinned by a clearly defined process of spatial contagion. The Cambridge study showed the special characteristics of this pandemic in terms of the ages of those attacked: high rates were experienced across the age spectrum, a feature also seen internationally.     

Leroi-Gourhan, a Philosopher of Technique and Evolution

With the publication of two volumes on technology—L'Homme et la matière and Milieu et technique in 1943–45, and Le geste et la parole (translated into English in 1993 as Gesture and Speech)—-Leroi-Gourhan asserted himself as a major social anthropologist, prehistorian, and the founder of the French schools of the ethnology of technique and of prehistoric ethnology. This paper analyzes the innovative concepts and the content of these original works, which draw their inspiration and data from biology, physiology, psychology, anthropology, and prehistory to study evolution, and technique as its medium, to create a global science of humanity.     

Household and community behavior at Bronze Age Politiko-Troullia,Cyprus

Abstract

We investigate intrasite patterns of artifacts and floral and faunal data to interpret household and community behavior at the Middle Cypriot (Bronze Age) village of Politiko-Troullia in the foothills of the Troodos Mountains, Cyprus. Floral evidence indicates cultivation of orchard crops (e.g., olive and grape), as well as the persistence of woodlands that provided wood for fuel. Animal management combined herding of domesticated sheep, goat, pig, and cattle with the hunting of Mesopotamian fallow deer. Metallurgical evidence points to the production of utilitarian copper tools in household workshops. Group activities are reflected by the deposition of anthropomorphic figurines, spinning and weaving equipment, and deer bones in an open courtyard setting. In sum, Politiko-Troullia exemplifies a diversified agrarian economy on a distinctly anthropogenic landscape that fostered the development of household and supra-household social differentiation in pre-urban Bronze Age Cyprus.     

清末英国租借威海卫交涉始末——以总理各国事务衙门档案及舆图资料为例

中日甲午战争清廷战败后,李鸿章(1823—1901年)奉派担任特使,与日本签订《中日讲和条约》(即《马关条约》)。随后俄国联合德国与法国,要求日本放弃占领辽东半岛,此即近代史上著名的“三国干涉还辽”事件。光绪二十二年(1896年)清廷与俄国签订《中俄密约》。光绪二十四年(1898年)三月,清廷又与俄国签订《旅大租地条约》,将旅顺、大连两港口租予俄国,英国为阻止俄国势力扩张,即向清廷提出要求租借威海卫。依据档案史料记载,英国租借威海卫是经过分析与策划并与列强交涉协商后,即与清廷进行威海卫租借交涉,并逼迫清廷签订《租威海卫专条》,将威海卫划入其势力范围。本文拟以《租威海卫专条》原件以及相关舆图、“中央研究院”所藏《总理各国事务衙门清档——英租威海卫案》等档案史料为基础,对英国租借威海卫交涉史实作简单的探讨。