Anthropology of exile: Mapping territories of experience

While it is possible to define exile broadly as a specific type of mobility – ‘forced migration’ – the expression is subject to multiple definitions. In this article, the author looks at exile by drawing on ethnographic examples from the Associação de Exilados Políticos Portugueses (Association of Portuguese Political Exiles, AEP61-74), founded in Lisbon in 2015. The author suggests that the concept of exile should not be a mere label for a particular type of person or situation (present in classic literary examples), but rather a conceptual category that can include a multitude of socio-economic, historical, psychological and biographical realities.     

The statistical politics of exceptional territories

The so-called Rotterdam Act enables municipal governments in the Netherlands to bar poor households with no or limited residential history in the metropolitan area from moving into certain neighborhoods. Although evidently at odds with principles of equality enshrined in law, the Act has emerged as a standard part of the policy tool kit. This article seeks to explain how the Rotterdam Act came to pass. Asking this question sets us on the path of reconstructing how specific urban areas suffering from extraordinary problems were identified and how using exceptional measures to exclude specific groups were instituted. In a word, we are interested in the construction of exceptionality. We show that the construction of exceptional territories is based on the interplay of discretionary power and statistical calculation. We discuss the wider relevance of our analysis to the emerging field of critical data studies and for understanding the links between sovereignty, territory and statistics in constitutional democracies.     

民族情结:作为满族作家的浓重书写 --李惠文小说摭论

名满族作家李惠,一生创作长、中短篇小说达500万字,在十七年和新时期的农村题材小说创作中产生过重要影响,在当代满族学史上占有重要地位。他有着浓重的,难以消解的民族情结,是当代为数不多的,自觉以满族作家姿态进行写作的作家之一。从满族特点出发,以开掘宏观的中华民族特色为旨归,他的小说创作典型地呈示了当代满族作家的独特风采。     

Site exploitation territories and topography: Two case studies from palaeolithic spain

Several methods of relating on-site and off-site data for developing and testing hypotheses about man-environment relationships and prehistoric subsistence economies have been devised since the original proposal for site-catchment analysis in 1970. We review the principles involved in these methods, and emphasize the importance of distinguishing clearly between Site Catchments (SCs) and Site Exploitation Territories (SETs). We propose that the distorting effects of variable topography have crucial importance in understanding the tactical reasons for using particular sites in regional exploitation strategies and demonstrate a simple technique for calculating this distortion. Two case studies from the Upper Palaeolithic of Spain show the potential of the technique. One focuses on the relationships between site clusters, the other explores the relationships between sites within site clusters.     

Public Authority and Conservation in Areas of Armed Conflict: Virunga National Park as a ‘State within a State’ in Eastern Congo

Much research on nature conservation in war‐torn regions focuses on the destructive impact of violent conflict on protected areas, and argues that transnational actors should step up their support for those areas to mitigate the risks that conflict poses to conservation efforts there. Overlooked are the effects transnational efforts have on wider conflict dynamics and structures of public authority in these regions. This article describes how transnational actors increasingly gained influence over the management of Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and how these actors contributed to the militarization of conservation in Virunga. Most scholarly literature suggests that ‘green militarization’ contributes to the extension of state authority over territory and population, yet this is not the case in Virunga. Instead, the militarization of Virunga translates into practices of extra‐state territorialization, with the result that many in the local population perceive the park's management as a project of personalized governance and/or a ‘state within a state’. This article thus argues that it is important to depart from an a priori notion of the ‘state’ when considering the nexus of conservation practices and territorialization, and to analyse this intersection through the lens of public authority instead.     

Government Protection of Domestic Communications as National Defense: Assessing Canadian Government Policies

In the nominal interest of promoting a national identity and a stronger federation, a range of public policies have been implemented by the Canadian government to encourage and facilitate cross-subsidization in the Canadian telecommunications and broadcasting industries. The main policy instruments involve government regulations and foreign ownership restrictions that contribute to higher revenues for domestic producers of communication services than would otherwise be realized. The quid pro quo is that domestic telecommunications carriers and broadcasters must undertake costly and unprofitable actions that involve subsidizing activities such as rural telephone services and “Canadian entertainment content.” Unfortunately, there is little evidence that the relevant policies promote the goal of strengthening Canada’s national identity. Furthermore, they are inefficient, as well as nontransparent. The fact that several other countries, particularly France, have lauded Canadian content regulations as a “model” for smaller, open economies, they are more appropriately viewed as the socially undesirable outcome of a muddled public choice dynamic.     

Cartographies of supranationalism: Creating and silencing territories in the “Arab Homeland”

In the predominately Arab states of north Africa and southwest Asia, a geopolitical entity exists that is rather uncommon elsewhere in the world. The “Arab Homeland,” as it is referred, is a readily accepted cartographic discourse throughout much of this extensive region. The construction of this entity emerged at the same time as the pan-Arab movement of the mid-twentieth century, which was fueled and motivated by 20th century geopolitical conflicts between Arabs and European imperialists, and between Arabs and Israelis. Through a critical reading of its cartographic construction since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1919, I provide unique insights into the numerous, complex, and even contradictory geopolitics of the construction of the Arab Homeland. My analysis of several hundred maps produced in eight different states of the Arab Homeland reveals that from the mid 1950s onward that the Arab Homeland was not only commonplace, but also how this supranational territorial entity confused and at times defied generally accepted divisions of the world. Expanding upon literature on supranational entities and the state, I show that territory is not only still important in our globalized world, but that it also has a complex and at times contradictory relationship with the concepts and scales of the state and the supranational. In emphasizing the role of territory in its construction, I also inject the importance of geography and territory for the pan-Arab movement, which is a factor that has been greatly under-theorized.     

Place mapping with teenagers: locating their territories and documenting their experience of the public realm

The purpose of this paper is to present, analyse and critique a research method, ‘place mapping’, used to document and understand teenagers' experience, use and perception of public spaces. Researchers in two case study sites, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Sacramento, CA, employed conventional street maps as a basis for eliciting and recording young people's spatial experiences. This method offers an effective mechanism for generating and structuring discussion – through dialogue – by the participants about their dynamic and shared experience of place, geographically recording places and ensuring equitable participation.     

Urban Neighborhoods as a National Resource: Irreversible Decisions and Their Equity Spillovers

The differential timing and pace of private versus public sector disinvestments in declining neighborhoods have some positive spillovers for their residents. Public services are not withdrawn or reduced as rapidly as private investments and the opportunity is preserved for future redevelopment or rehabilitation. This “public service bonus” is vulnerable, however, during periods of austerity and general retrenchment. During such crises, the pressures to rationalize service provision are able to overcome local political and bureaucratic resistance to service reallocations. The analysis is based upon the investment theory literature dealing with irreversible decisions and is exemplified by the reallocation of services in New York City's declining neighborhoods during the past decade.     

The Nation as a Problem: Historians and the "National Question"

How is it that the nation became an object of scholarly research? As this article intends to show, not until what we call the “genealogical view” (which assumes the “natural” and “objective” character of the nation) eroded away could the nation be subjected to critical scrutiny by historians. The starting point and the premise for studies in the field was the revelation of the blind spot in the genealogical view, that is, the discovery of the “modern” and “constructed” character of nations. Historians’ views would thus be intimately tied to the “antigenealogical” perspectives of them. However, this antigenealogical view would eventually reveal its own blind spots. This paper traces the different stages of reflection on the nation, and how the antigenealogical approach would finally be rendered problematic, exposing, in turn, its own internal fissures.     

Multicultural iteration: Swedish National Day as multiculturalism‐in‐practice

This paper examines the creation of ‘national day’ in Sweden in order to understand how such a holiday works to shape the Swedish nation's relationship with diversity. Analyzing parliamentary debates and press coverage, the author finds that official national day coverage tends to invest the nation with progressive and multicultural meanings, foregrounding immigrant voices. However, this multiculturalism is polysemic, vague and subject to contestation, both from far right ‘traditionalists’ seeking to ‘protect’ Swedishness from outside influences and cosmopolitans who see the nation as outdated and dangerous. The creation of a new national holiday can be seen as a ‘democratic iteration’ wherein democracy is restated and reinvested with meanings, and new lines of cleavage are drawn, and also as a ‘multicultural iteration’ where multiculturalism is invested with new meaning. Finally, the author argues that multiculturalism benefits from polysemy in that the concept can then adapt to changing circumstances, and, thus, survive.     

Remembrance as a Tool for Reflecting a National Identity: A Cuban Punk Approach

This paper takes several examples from the work of one Cuban punk band – Porno Para Ricardo – to assess the use of memory as a tool for reflecting fragments of a national identity which is both quotidian and contemporary. This singular case study is chosen not for their pertinence within Cuban culture, or even within Cuban alternative music, but rather as an exemplar of the assertion that popular music, rather than changing identities, often reflects aspects of identity and how they manifest in the everyday. Porno Para Ricardo are one such point of reflection. However, their remembrances often stray into areas too traumatic or politically admonished to be ‘remembered’ as part of a more rigid revolutionary history. By remembering the cultural (and thus, vicariously, the political) legacy of the Soviet Union within Cuba, and by re-personalising (or personifying) the traumas of mass generational exodus experiences in the early 90s, Porno Para Ricardo both augment the space of collective Cuban memory, and thus identity, but also attempt to reconnect the slabs of Cuban history often cleaved into evental epochs after which a ‘new way of being’ is constructed, as a means to better make sense of, and better reflect, contemporary Cuban identity.     

Achilles or Adonis: Controversies Surrounding the Male Body as National Symbol in Georgian England

This paper analyses the controversy that arose when a monumental bronze nude statue of Achilles was unveiled at Hyde Park Corner (London) in 1822 as a monument to the Duke of Wellington and his army. The neoclassical statue (made by Richard Westmacott) perfectly embodied the ‘modern male stereotype’. According to historian George Mosse, this masculine image was a powerful and stable symbol of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century bourgeois societies. Intended by the commanders and artist as just such a symbol, the statue in practice was unable to express these high ideals. Ever since its unveiling, the statue has elicited laughter and ridicule. The uneasiness created by male public nudity is an aspect that Mosse missed in his history of masculine imaginary, in which he focused on certain moments of ‘spectacular’ masculinity in modern Western history. Ultimately, the failure of Westmacott's Achilles can best be understood from the well‐known feminist framework on the gendered ‘economy of the gaze’, a framework that is all too often absent in the historiography on masculinities.