Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 6. December 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 6 Front cover AI and humanity A statue by Stephen Kettle of Alan Turing, sitting pensively at one of his code‐breaking machines in Bletchley Park. Made up from half a million pieces of Welsh slate, this statue was a landmark feature for the Life and Works of Alan Turing exhibition in 2012, which was curated following a public campaign to save the Turing‐Newman Collaboration Collection, a rare collection of his mathematical papers. Members of the Turing family additionally contributed some of the mathematician's personal belongings, including a teddy bear he used to practise his lectures on. Bletchley Park is now a huge heritage attraction, more so since The Imitation Game, a film based on the life of the pioneering computer scientist, came out. Previously known as the UK Government Code and Cypher School, this is now a site for the National Museum of Computing, which ncludes the huts and blocks that hosted a group of codebreakers whose work is said to have helped shorten the war by two years. In this issue, Ting Guo looks at Turing's personal trajectory in life and asks to what extent his search for artificial intelligence was inspired by considerations other than purely technical ones. To design artificial intelligence is to reproduce what is the essential ‘us’, what Pamela McCorduck refers to as an ‘odd form of self‐reproduction’. The desire for such machines, she argues, is a desire equally rooted in fear and allure, which reflects not only the drive for knowledge and human progress, but the discovery of the human self, which is itself driven by fundamental problems of being human. Back cover WORLDS IN MINIATURE Miniature worlds fascinate us. Taking familiar objects, scenes and environments and scaling them down to the minute generates a sense of wonder, forming a special connection between object and audience across which information can flow in subtle and unexpected ways. For centuries, people have used miniaturization to create tiny settlements with streets down which traffic doesn't flow and shops where no purchases are made. In doing so, they generate a fantasy, an idealized portrayal of a world they wish to see, not the one they inhabit. One of the most famous of these miniature communities is Madurodam in the Netherlands. Attracting more than 700,000 visitors a year, this park seeks to replicate particular dioramas of Dutch life, employing a dedicated team of professional modellers focusing on specific aspects of Dutch architecture and urban environments to portray a particular, explicitly positive, image of the Netherlands. The choices made at this site, and others like it all over the world, are part of a complex process of representation in miniature, a selection of iconography and design intentionally assembled to create unconscious impressions in visiting tourists, particularly children, about the full‐sized communities they resemble. As such, their representative powers are partial, a carefully curated miniature snapshot of certain aspects of an entire nation designed to act as a cultural and educational ambassador. In this issue, Jack Davy explores how the process of miniaturization, as evidenced by a Lego figurine, can encapsulate and transmit complex and controversial themes in a child‐like, non‐threatening manner. These processes operate subtly and inexplicitly, shaping our understanding of the wider world around us through the affordances of the small.     

Early English Receipts for Painting,Gilding, &c.

This research reviews the occurrence of animal remains in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age funerary contexts in three southern British counties: Wiltshire, Dorset, and Oxfordshire. Biases of survival and recovery are discussed before the data for species and body parts are analyzed. Explanations for the occurrence of animal remains are first offered in terms of chronology, monument architecture and the character of pre-existing deposits. It is then argued that animal remains (most notably deer antler) could be used to express notions of cyclical temporality and to evoke landscapes relevant to the living and the dead within the funerary context.     

Indigenous peoples,local communities,and Payments for Ecosystem Services

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs are reshaping the governance of ecosystems and natural resources around the world. These programs often occur in spaces that are unceded, contested, or otherwise not legally recognized as Indigenous homelands, customary areas, and territories. Building on the discourses of Indigenous self‐determination, nationhood, and cultural responsibilities, this paper examines how PES programs produce unique outcomes for Indigenous peoples as ecosystem services providers. Our findings demonstrate and substantiate three themes that impact Indigenous ecosystem services providers uniquely: (1) the internationally recognized right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent for Indigenous peoples; (2) the reinforcement of settler colonial jurisdiction; and (3) mismatches between Indigenous knowledges and PES‐type approaches. The ways that PES programs run the risk of reifying and reducing Indigenous knowledges have not yet been adequately considered within current PES approaches. Our findings enable a conceptualization of PES as a new conservation tool within ongoing histories of land management and dispossession by settler colonial governments. We assess the strengths and challenges of PES programs as a departure from previous conservation modalities.     

Troubled Encounters: Payments for Ecosystem Services in Chiapas,Mexico

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is a well-established conservation policy approach worldwide. Where forests are owned and managed by rural and indigenous communities, PES initiatives often aim to incentivize the joint adoption of forest protection and sustainable management practices. However, not all communities might have the will or capacity to maintain such practices over the long term. This article examines a PES programme in a rural community of Chiapas, Mexico. It shows that while a majority of the community's landowners have engaged in PES through two distinct working groups, a large share of the community forests remain outside the PES programme, and many landowners resist the extension of PES rules to non-targeted forests. The authors argue that this incipient form of fragmented collective action on forest management results from challenged leaderships, and from PES accommodating a history of increasing individuation of the commons. This accommodation, however, has ignited social conflict, reified tenure inequalities, and failed to strengthen local institutions to enable them to legitimately deal with the contested interests that underpin the fate of community forests. This article shows the limits of PES when parachuted into a context of uneven land tenure, weak collective action and contested leaderships.