Human nature: The perspective from sociobiology

Edward O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975. ix + 697 pp. Illustrations, figures, tables, glossary, bibliography and index. $20.00     

The post‐politics of transport: establishing a new meeting ground for transport politics

This paper brings together two disparate but critical bodies of literature about contemporary citizen participation in the Australian city: transport politics and post‐politics. The argument is advanced that state and citizen actor relations—as they exist in the governance and management of Australian urban transport—have taken on characteristics of post‐politics. By conceiving of citizen participation in this manner, new ways of understanding it are generated and it is possible to appreciate how such participation is shaped by state actors both across time and in response to the politicisation of transport proposals. The paper illustrates the extent to which citizen engagement has become a new focal point in transport politics, particularly given citizens' capacities to politicise proposals and transport trajectories. It achieves such ends by drawing upon key‐informant interviews conducted between 2013 and 2016 with public transport advocates, select resident groups, and local and state level planning officials from Melbourne, Australia.     

A new era and new themes in Italian politics: The case of Padania

Abstract

By calling for the independence of Padania from the rest of Italy, the Lega Nord has recently drawn a great deal of attention to itself. In support of this campaign the Lega has actively introduced mythical and Utopian models onto the Italian political scene, combining a degree of cultural innovation with a certain political adventurism. This article focuses on these elements, beginning with the events of the autumn of 1996 when the Lega organized a ‘grande festa’ along the banks and in the towns of the River Po aimed at marking the birth of the new nation of Padania. The principal events of the festival were dominated by the many performances of the League's founder and leader, Umberto Bossi, whose speeches were full of pseudo‐religious or pseudo‐prophetic elements. Though the festival ended in Venice with a unilateral declaration of independence by the Lega and its followers in the north, it did not lead to any immediate political consequences. Nevertheless, the situation in Padania is marked by a complex mixture of identities. The Lega has not just introduced new methods of political opposition, it has also brought many subjects (local cultures, regionalism, the right to self‐determination) into the Italian political debate. Furthermore, it has used the language of the sacred and of ‘origins’ to create new characters, new calendars and new sacred sites.     

The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation – as in the context of colonial era evictions – there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of ‘sites of memory’, which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern ‘memory’, suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and ‘being first’. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory.     

Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this article we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and ‘real’ politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined.     

Networks of connectivity,territorial fragmentation,uneven development: The new politics of city-regionalism

Over the past decade much has been written about the centrality of city-regions to accounts of economic success. But despite a rich and varied literature highlighting the importance of city-centric capitalism, the concept of the city-region remains ambiguous. Defined in economic terms, all too often what is missing from these accounts is how city-regions are constructed politically, and the processes by which they are rendered visible spaces. While recent interventions have done much to advance debates on the former, this paper explores the struggle to define, delimit and designate city-regions through recent endeavours to construct a spatial map of city-regions in England. The aim is to demonstrate how the processes by which city-regions are constructed politically are the mediated outcome of trans-regional economic flows and political claims to territory. The paper concludes by relating these findings to ongoing debates around state, space and scalar geographies, and speculates what they might mean for the future of city-regional debate.     

The Paris Agreement and the new logic of international climate politics

This article reviews and assesses the outcome of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP‐21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris in December 2015. It argues that the Paris Agreement breaks new ground in international climate policy, by acknowledging the primacy of domestic politics in climate change and allowing countries to set their own level of ambition for climate change mitigation. It creates a framework for making voluntary pledges that can be compared and reviewed internationally, in the hope that global ambition can be increased through a process of ‘naming and shaming’. By sidestepping distributional conflicts, the Paris Agreement manages to remove one of the biggest barriers to international climate cooperation. It recognizes that none of the major powers can be forced into drastic emissions cuts. However, instead of leaving mitigation efforts to an entirely bottom‐up logic, it embeds country pledges in an international system of climate accountability and a ‘ratchet mechanism’, thus offering the chance of more durable international cooperation. At the same time, it is far from clear whether the treaty can actually deliver on the urgent need to de‐carbonize the global economy. The past record of climate policies suggests that governments have a tendency to express lofty aspirations but avoid tough decisions. For the Paris Agreement to make a difference, the new logic of ‘pledge and review’ will need to mobilize international and domestic pressure and generate political momentum behind more substantial climate policies worldwide. It matters, therefore, whether the Paris Agreement's new approach can be made to work.     

Thinking through positionality in post-socialist politics: Researching contemporary social movements in Ukraine

ABSTRACT

This article argues that heterogeneity among leftist political activists in Ukraine creates new spaces for investigation of social movements in post-socialist spaces. It suggests that the researcher’s positionality impacts how this diversity is seen, interpreted, and analyzed. Drawing from scholarship on engaged anthropology and ethnographic research during the 2013–2014 Euromaidan mobilizations, I show how fragmentation among leftists had a dual influence, sometimes encouraging leftists to move beyond difference to avoid alienation, and other times creating greater fractures that limited the creation of alternative social projects.     

Language and politics: Investigations of language and speech by social and cultural anthropologists

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. vii + 305 pp. including index. $44.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

Merlan, Francesca and Alan Rumsey. Ku Waru: Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; xvii + 387 pp. including appendices, notes, references, and index. $59.50 cloth.     

Saudi Arabia: The politics of education

Since 11 September Saudi Arabia's religious education system and its underlying ideology have been accused of contributing to anti–western sentiments and of providing fertile ground for Islamic extremism. While recognizing the economic necessity for educational reform, many Saudis have come out to defend their school system and officials adamantly reject any link between their curriculum and extremism. This article looks at the extent to which the Saudi education system has been shaped and used by religious, political and socio–economic forces and the factors that are undermining the current system. It also examines the content of the message propagated in the kingdom's schools and abroad and to what extent it may encourage anti–western sentiments.     

Micronesia: The politics of the colonized

Carl Heine. Micronesia at the Crossroads: A Reappraisal of the Micronesian Political Dilemma. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1974. xvi + 210 pp. Notes, appendices, bibliography, and index. $10.00 (cloth); $2.95 (paper).

Daniel T. Hughes and Sherwood G. Lingenfelter, eds. Political Development in Micronesia. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974. 333 pp. Tables, charts, references, and index. $15.00.