Waste Not Want Not? Australia and the Politics of High-level Nuclear Waste

During 1999 and 2000, Australian governments rejected a proposal put forward by Pangea Resources to place an international high-level radioactive waste repository somewhere on the Australian continent. The decision was marked by tensions between competing political objectives, and was driven partly by an unusual alliance between pro-uranium mining governments and anti-nuclear non-government organisations (NGOs). The article begins by placing Australia's current nuclear policies in historical context, focusing on the stances taken by the major political parties. The second section briefly describes the Pangea proposal and the Australian response. The third section considers why Australia might have reacted differently. The fourth section critically reviews some of the reasons why the Pangea proposal elicited such hostility. Finally, the article discusses key policy barriers to the proposal, concluding that these are unlikely to disappear and that as a result Pangea and any other similar organisations would have little chance of pursuing their objectives in Australia.     

In the shadow of Franz Boas: the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems and the physical assimilation of immigrants (1938–1955)

ABSTRACT

Between 1938 and 1955, the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems (C.I.S.P.), headed by the world-renowned statistician and demographer Corrado Gini, organized a number of field expeditions in order to empirically verify the influence of the environment on the bodily changes of immigrants (Albanian and Ligurian ‘colonies’ in Italy, and Italians in the U.S.). Based on original archival sources, this article analyses, first, how the C.I.S.P. organized the demographic, anthropological and medical investigations on the physical assimilation of immigrants, by adopting a specific research model inaugurated in 1911 by American anthropologist Franz Boas; secondly, it shows how C.I.S.P. research was conceived, from the very beginning, as a fundamental contribution to the elaboration of an alternative, ‘Latin’ eugenic agenda as well as a form of critical distancing from the launch of the ‘Race Manifesto’, in July 1938.     

Is Androcentric Archaeology Really About Men?

The article starts with a discussion of the relation between feminist archaeology and gender archaeology followed by a short account of how androcentrism may influence on archaeological research. By exploring two representative examples I will argue that androcentric archaeology mainly reproduces stereotype images of men and do not provide much new or real knowledge about prehistoric men or understandings of masculinity. Consequently, there is a need to study prehistoric men as gendered and I will argue that to include studies in men and masculinity into a gender archaeology based on feminist theory might challenge androcentric archaeological studies just as much as to study women in prehistory.     

Not Like the US? Europeans and the Spread of American Culture

work reviewed:
Not like us: how Europeans have loved, hated, and transformed American culture since World War II . By Richard Pells     

Did Organization Really Matter? Party Organization and Conservative Electoral Recovery, 1945-59

Organizational recovery has traditionally been considered animportant factor in any explanation of the Conservative Party'selectoral recovery during the fifteen years after 1945. Thisarticle examines the extent of this recovery in three marginalseats, which the Conservatives either held or regained to formtheir new parliamentary majority. It demonstrates that, in anumber of constituencies, whatever the wider community mighthave thought, the reality of local organization—whetherin terms of financial health, membership numbers, the deliveryof political education, election campaigning, the effectivenessof party agents, or level of activity—was considered tobe less than impressive to those involved intimately. The articleconcludes that although the value of the Conservative Party'sextensive grass roots should not be denied, the precise roleand effectiveness of local organization should be reconsidered.     

Really shit work? Bodily becoming and the capacity to care for the urban forest

The urban forest has a significant impact on the city’s social and ecological performance. However, shrinking space and resources needed to care for trees means cultivating community care for the urban forest is an increasingly salient issue. To this end, the paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the powers shaping people’s capacity to care for trees. It identifies the body as one of these powers and turns to Deleuze and Guattari for a theory of corporeality that illuminates the body’s role in the process of becoming a ‘bushcarer’. This highlights the trans-corporeal practices and encounters that endow people with the skills and desire needed to care for the urban forest. With the ethical utility of the body being debated by social and cultural geographers, this article defends its potential by suggesting the body and its encounters are deeply implicated in the development of a dyadic capacity to care for the urban forest. For urban forestry, this means community engagement might be framed as an ethical event that facilitates experiments in bodily composition that might change our ways of thinking, feeling, and being with the urban forest.     

Is a Picture Really Worth a 1,000 Words?

Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past. By David J. Staley.     

The Howard Government's Foreign Policy: Really Realist?

Several scholars have suggested that the Howard government took a Realist approach to foreign policy, and others have claimed that it made important deviations from Realism. This article constructs a template of a Realist foreign policy and examines the Howard government's policies against it. It finds that the government scores highly on two of the indicators of Realism – emphasis on military power and lack of enthusiasm for multilateral institutions – and scores fairly well on the third, the subordination of values promotion to the advancement of interests. The Howard government, however, promoted democracy and human rights in situations in which no other Australian interest was involved, so its Realism was somewhat modified.     

Do the Buildings Really Matter? Czech,Polish and Slovak Museums and Centres of Contemporary Art in Adapted Buildings

This paper discusses the connection between museums and centres of contemporary art operating in adapted buildings, on the one hand, and on the other, the history of the place where the buildings are located. I discuss seven discrete case studies, representing a variety of approaches to buildings and the areas in which they operate, in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. My analysis of each case study covers four main subject areas: (1) discussions connecting the building’s history with its new role; (2) the architectural features and appearance of the building; (3) references3 to the history of the site in the institution’s programme and communication; and (4) efforts to build bonds with local communities. In my conclusions, I argue that the identity of the institution may either be rooted in the history of the place presented and discussed in its programme, or be independent of the history of the building but nonetheless connected to the area in which it is located.     

‘Seeing in the Dark’: Franz Joseph Thun and his Encyclopedia

Abstract

In the late 1790s the extravagant Bohemian aristocrat Franz Joseph Thun (1734–1801) composed a massive encyclopedia containing his wide-ranging and esoteric knowledge, which was not discovered until 2009. In this article I discuss the contents of his encyclopedia and investigate Thun’s place within the broader intellectual climate in Central Europe. I argue that Thun was an exceptional case in the Habsburg context, where scientists generally rejected outright the sort of excesses his encyclopedia contains. None the less, he became famous for his experiments with a spirit named ‘Gablidon’ and for his sessions in Mesmerism. His encyclopedia focuses on three topics: human ethics, man’s place in nature, and the sins of the French Revolution. He saw man as the middle link in the ‘great chain of being’, whose morality must be based on submission to God. Although he distanced himself from the Catholic Church, he rejected the French Revolution as an attempt to establish a state without religious basis.     

Employment and Training Alternatives for Non‐College Women: Do Redistributive Policies Really Redistribute?

Employment and training programs aimed at women and men without 4‐year college degrees address the needs of the majority of the working population. Noncollege women tend to hold lower‐paying jobs with fewer opportunities for advancement, compared with the opportunities noncollege men have. One type of policy seeks to increase the numbers of women in occupations where men hold most of the positions, or “nontraditional occupations for women” (NTOs). Since many NTOs require a college education, do such policies improve noncollege women's economic self‐efficacy? Is there a link between holding a nontraditional occupation and earning significantly higher wages? This study establishes that, indeed, these programs provide access to jobs that are linked to higher earnings. Such policies redistribute earnings opportunities to noncollege women successfully, and therefore improve the economic efficacy of noncollege women.     

Does the Standardization of Ceramic Pastes Really Mean Specialization?

In the literature dealing with the development of ceramic specialization, paste uniformity has been suggested as a surrogate index of product standardization and the result of a more intensive level of specialization. More recently, the amount of paste variability has been seen as an indicator of different types of production organization. Ethnoarchaeological data from Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala suggest that a variety of environmental, technological, and social factors influence paste variability. These factors are important in all production contexts and complicate inferences drawn about production organization in antiquity. As a consequence, social and economic inferences derived from ancient ceramic pastes need to be understood in relation to numerous other factors such as natural variability of the ceramic raw materials, their procurement, and their use in paste preparation. Furthermore, changes in resource use and paste preparation over time can obscure intracommunity and other fine-scale patterns. As a consequence, it is argued that little, if anything, can be learned about the organization of production below the level of the local production community. Rather, the primary usefulness of paste compositional analyses lies in the identification, in geographic and geological spaces (community signature units), of source communities that exploit raw materials within a limited range of probably no more than 3 to 4 km. Paste analyses thus provide important information about the organization of ceramic distribution, revealing the emergence and demise of source communities and the movement of their ceramic products.     

Did Cecil Rhodes Really Try to Control the World?

A twentieth-century American historian claimed, in a posthumously published book, that Cecil Rhodes and Lord Milner plotted to take over the world by establishing secret societies, conniving with key British politicians, various lords of the realm and influential publicists. The Rhodes Scholarships are supposedly but one example of the long hand of their cabal. That both Rhodes and Milner favoured imperialism, and believed the world the better for inculcated British values, there can be no question. But were they conspiracists, as alleged? Or are the accusations based too much on suspicion and circumstantial evidence to be taken seriously?     

Do the Banaro Really Exist? Going Back After Richard Thurnwald

Between 1913 and 1915, the Austro‐German anthropologist Richard Thurnwald explored the Sepik area with the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde expedition. In the last months of his stay, he worked with two Banaro informants and later on published his famous study on that society. Eighty five years after, the only anthropological reference on the Banaro is still his own articles. Bernard Juillerat spent four months among the Banaro in 1989, discussing with the people Thurnwald's analyses on the social structure and the mundu partnership. A book was published in French in 1993. This article is a short abstract of the book, where the author discusses Thurnwald's interpretations and gives ethnographic material on men's house ritual and initiation. Some more anthropological information is given on the transformations of Banaro society in the meantime.