Preliminary Investigations of Two Shipwreck Sites in Cahuita National Park,Costa Rica

Recent underwater archaeological investigations in Costa Rica focused on two sites as potential candidates for Danish West Indies slave ships wrecked in 1710. Historical research suggests a landmark wrecking event associated with a large infusion of Africans, many who remained in Central America. This paper is the first interim report of two fieldwork seasons combining field methods, research, and preliminary interpretation of the findings with voyage history. Context within the broader theme of slave‐ship archaeology and Costa Rica Caribbean landscape is addressed. An integral part of the initiative is community memory, stewardship, and education.     

Narratives of nationalism in Eritrea: research and revisionism*

Abstract. Eritrean politics is increasingly captured in competing narratives of nationalism. ‘Official’ narratives emphasize Eritrea's purported stability, orderliness, and uniqueness. This discourse defends and supports the current government's policies. In contrast, recent research challenges those policies, and contributes to a nationalist counter‐narrative. This article seeks to investigate the discursive power of conventional narratives and the implications of new research for accounts of state and nation‐building in Eritrea. The Eritrean case – one of the newest states in the world – intersects with and informs a number of broader debates on nationalism and nation‐building: the impact of globalization, secessionism, and war as well as the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism. The penetration of state and nation‐building projects into every sector of Eritrean life means that all social research is deeply politicised. Journalists and researchers have long been key players in the contested process of conceptualising Eritrean nation‐hood, and this continues in the post‐liberation period. Research thus both buttresses and challenges official discourses, even where it is not explicitly framed in terms of nationalism.     

Environmental Issues and Policies in Costa Rica

Despite its widely publicized efforts in environmental conservation, Costa Rica continues to experience severe deforestation due to entrenched deforestation interests in the country. These interests are created by existing legislation which unintentionally favors deforestation, and by the longstanding nonapplication of positive legislation. Costa Rica's newest strategy involves the mobilization of a broad-bayed conservation constituency through environmental education and the development of a "conservation area" strategy which helps distribute responsibilities and benefits of conservation among populations adjacent to protected areas.     

The role of women in payment for environmental services programs in Osa,Costa Rica

Costa Rica was the first country in the world to implement a nation-wide payment for environmental services (a.k.a. ‘payment for ecosystem services’), or PES, system in 1996. This research investigates the role of women in PES programs in Costa Rica’s Osa peninsula in response to the current dearth of such gendered research on this topic. Osa, one of the least-developed regions of the country, is still heavily forested and replete with properties under PES contracts which are aimed at forest conservation. Extended, structured interviews of 80 landowners in Osa (40 women and 40 men) culled both quantitative and qualitative information about PES participation, environmental perceptions, and both economic and conservation goals. Salient results were, first, that women see current levels of PES funding as more helpful and useful than do men. Second, women much more often perceive themselves as the sole entity responsible for protecting the environment. Third, women more commonly than men listed ‘helping the environment and animals’ as a personal benefit of their PES participation, while men more commonly focused on financial rewards. Last, according to the study herein, women in PES households currently display less decision-making power than those in non-PES households. This dynamic is analyzed through the lens of patriarchal hierarchies as well as women’s mitigation of those hierarchies through the deployment of ideology and agency. Based on these general findings, the researcher recommends that FONAFIFO, the government agency in charge of PES payments, take specific steps to increase PES funding to female-headed households.     

Local Community Characteristics and Cooperation for Shared Green Reputation

This article examines how basic socioeconomic and political factors are associated with higher levels of cooperation to garner a local community's shared green reputation. We analyze panel data on participation efforts in a collective voluntary environmental program, the Ecological Blue Flag Program, by the entire population of beach communities in Costa Rica between 2001 and 2009. Collective voluntary environmental programs are relatively new and aim to improve environmental performance and shared “green” reputation through joint participation and certification of multisector groups comprising businesses, governmental institutions, and nongovernmental organizations. Our results indicate that higher levels of within‐community cooperation for shared green reputation are more likely in seashore localities with lower income inequality and/or a higher number of businesses. These findings run counter to research suggesting these same characteristics are associated with lower levels of cooperation in the management of common pool natural resources such as fisheries and forests. We also find that within‐community cooperation is positively correlated with a greater proportion of expatriates from industrialized countries and/or with higher levels of democratic political participation.     

“Riding the rip”: an experiential and integrated human–physical geography curriculum in Costa Rica

Integrating research into short-term study abroad programs is challenging because of language, fieldwork logistics, and traditional learning models based on passive classroom experiences. Experiential learning often makes use of research as experience, but relatively few examples integrate human and physical geography. Here, we describe an experiential and integrated human–physical undergraduate geography curriculum in Costa Rica. We combine rip current morphodynamics, beach-user surveys, and cultural landscape in a 3-week program in Costa Rica. Emotions associated with the direct and indirect experience of “riding the rip” positively influenced the cognitive domain of student learning.     

The Narrative Uses of Evidence

When scientific evidence is used in policy controversies, it is always embedded in narrative stories. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is an empirical framework used to study the role of narratives in public policy. While the NPF has considered the relationship between evidence and narratives from different angles, it has not used a consistent approach in examining how evidence is embedded in narratives. This article develops a categorization of narrative uses of evidence. A narrative use of evidence is defined by the different roles that evidence plays in the plot of a narrative depending on which narrative element is addressed by a given piece of evidence. To distinguish different narrative uses of evidence, the article examines how competing coalitions use the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study in Swiss direct‐democratic campaigns on school policy. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of newspaper articles and governmental documents show how evidence may relate to all main narrative elements and may play different roles in the plot of a narrative. The findings demonstrate significant differences in the narrative uses of PISA between coalitions related to the story types and narrative strategies that each coalition uses. Finally, the implications for future NPF research are discussed.     

Forest crisis narratives: Illegal logging,datafication and the conservation frontier in the Romanian Carpathian Mountains

Environmental crisis narratives escalate around the world. Their production and consequences demand scholarly attention. Drawing on the analytical tools of political ecology and highlighting long-term historical developments, this article examines the shift to a new narrative of conservation in forestry, which displaces older structures of state forest management. In particular, we explore the emergence and unfolding of a crisis narrative of illegal logging, which escalated in Romania in the last thirty years. Based on long-term research of digital sources, interviews and fieldwork, we analyze the contents of this narrative, the way it produced heroes and villains, and its entanglements with processes of datafication, criminalization, and the surge of forest violence. We argue that (1) the genealogies of the forest crisis narrative can be understood in relation to frontier-specific processes of deregulation and re-territorialization, which generate acute struggles for forest control and legitimacy; (2) the narrative of illegal logging unravells as a media spectacle surrounding the production of data by a plurality of state and non-state actors (3) in the attempts to curtail illegal logging, the emphasis on law, surveillance and criminalization posits forest conservation one step short of militarization, fuelling the trends for global environmental law enforcement and securitization of conservation.     

STORY MAKES HISTORY,THEORY MAKES STORY: DEVELOPING RÜSEN'S HISTORIK IN LOGICAL AND SEMIOTIC DIRECTIONS

This essay will argue that the traditional opposition between narrative and theory in historical sciences is dissolved if we conceive of narratives as theoretical devices for understanding events in time through special concepts that abridge typical sequences of events. I shall stress, in the context of the Historical Knowledge Epistemological Square (HKES) that emerged with the scientization of history, that history is always narrative, story has a theoretical ground of itself, and scientific histories address the need for a conceptual progression in ever‐improved narratives. This will lead to identification of three major theoretical levels in historical stories: naming, plotting (or emplotment), and formalizing. We revisit Jörn Rüsen's theory of history as the best starting point, and explore to what extent it could be developed by (i) taking a deeper look into narratological knowledge, and (ii) reanalyzing logically the conceptual strata in order to bridge the overrated Forschung/Darstellung (research/exposition) divide. The corollary: we should consider (scientific) historical writing as the last step of historical research, not as the next step after research is over. This thesis will drive us to a reconsideration of the German Historik regarding the problem of interpretation and exposition. Far from alienating history from science, narrative links history positively to anthropology and biology. The crossing of our triad name‐plot‐model with Rüsen's four theoretical levels (categories‐types‐concepts‐names) points to the feasibility of expanding Rüsen's Historik in logical and semiotic directions. Story makes history, theory makes story, and historical reason may proceed.     

Recent Work on U.S. Relations with Costa Rica

Kyle Longley. The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the US during the Rise of José Figueres
Aviva Chomsky. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1920     

THE COUNTED TIME: TECHNICAL TEMPORALITIES AND THEIR CHALLENGES TO HISTORY

One of the main debates regarding historical representation within digital media concerns narrative, particularly the difficulty in articulating it. Digital technologies are usually presented as opposed to linear, written narratives, which is of consequence to historical writing. Despite the many merits of scholarly approaches that try to circumvent this difficulty, the lack of theoretical understanding of the categories implied in such discussions is noticeable. To counter this, this article addresses the relationship between time, technics, and narrative. I contend that the challenges of crafting narratives in digital media conceal a problem pertaining to the relationship between time and technics. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's work on narrative, Jimena Canales's studies of the history of science, Wolfgang Ernst's and Yuk Hui's discussions of technical temporality, and Bernard Stiegler's understanding of the relationship between time and technics, I argue that it is the temporality imbued in the workings of technical objects (such as computers) that renders them averse to narrative. In making this argument, I employ the notion of “counted time” (in contrast to Ricoeur's “narrative time”) to denote a temporal mode that, despite its intersections with social, human temporality, is alien to narrative.     

Ruptures and continuities in nationhood narratives: reconstructing the nation through history textbooks in Serbia and Croatia

While the (mis) use of history to fuel particular constructions of the nation is well‐documented in the literature, the ways in which nationhood narratives and national ideologies evolve and transform over time are rarely explored. When ruptures – such as state failure or civil war – occur, interpretations of history and nationhood narratives cannot be completely rewritten. Rather, they need to follow up upon previous, established versions, relying on anchoring motives that offer a minimum level of continuity. Relying on a systematic analysis of over forty years of history revisionism in Serbia and Croatia (1974 to 2017), I demonstrate the discursive ways in which nationhood narratives evolved over time and space: from the dismantling of the former common Socialist narrative, replacement with new ethno‐national narratives, the bumpy transformations through the democratic transitions, to the gradual consolidation into the ‘new’ reconstructed nationhood narratives prevailing in the two countries today.     

Multinational Corporations and Patterns of Local Knowledge Transfer in Costa Rican High‐Tech Industries

Over recent decades, governments in industrializing countries have promoted policies to attract foreign investors, anticipating the benefits of technology transfer to host economies. During the 1990s, Costa Rica adopted an industrialization strategy based on attracting high‐tech multinational companies (MNCs). Using an original survey of a sample of high‐tech MNC subsidiaries, this article shows that the new wave of efficiency‐seeking subsidiaries tend not to transfer knowledge to domestic firms even when they establish backward linkages with them. Instead, most of the knowledge transfer occurs between high‐tech foreign subsidiaries. This has clear policy implications for host country governments.     

Salt Water Application of the Flotation Technique

Abstract

This paper reports on a successful experimentation with salt water flotation in conjunction with pre-Columbian research on the northwestern Pacific coast of Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. Mechanical results are indicated, and the application of the technique by archaeologists faced with limitations of fresh water, but abundance of salt water, is encouraged.     

Othering Pastoralists,State Violence,and the Remaking of Boundaries in Tanzania’s Militarised Wildlife Conservation Sector

This paper examines the ways in which Tanzanian conservation authorities utilise biodiversity “extinction narratives” in order to legitimise the use of violence in redrawing protected areas’ boundaries. Militarisation and violence in conservation have often been associated with the “war on poaching”. Drawing on the history of conservation and violence in Tanzania, and using an empirical case from Loliondo, the paper suggests that violence in conservation may be legitimised when based on extinction narratives and a claim that more exclusive spaces are urgently needed to protect biodiversity. It argues that the emerging militarisation and use of violence in Tanzania can be associated with both global biodiversity extinction and local neo-Malthusian narratives, which recently have regained predominance. When combined with “othering” of groups of pastoralists by portraying them as foreign “invaders”, such associations legitimise extensions of state control over contested land by any means available, including violence.     

Gendering the History of Women's Healthcare

This essay examines the genesis and continuing influence of certain core narratives in the history of western women's healthcare. Some derive from first‐wave feminism's search for models of female medical practice, an agenda that paid little attention to historical context. Second‐wave feminism, identifying a rift between pre‐modern and modern times in terms of women's medical practices, saw the pre‐modern European female healer as an exceptionally knowledgeable empiricist, uniquely responsible for women's healthcare and (particularly because of her knowledge of mechanisms to limit fertility) a victim of male persecution. Aspects of this second narrative continue subtly to effect scholarly discourse and research agendas on the history of healthcare both by and for women. This essay argues that, by seeing medical knowledge as a cultural product – something that is not static but continually re‐created and sometimes contested – we can create an epistemology of how such knowledge is gendered in its genesis, dissemination and implementation. Non‐western narratives drawn from history and medical anthropology are employed to show both the larger impact of the western feminist narratives and ways to reframe them.     

Communicating Climate Change: Are Stories Better than “Just the Facts”?

Postpositive policy scholarship has long asserted the importance of narratives—or stories—in shaping public policy through public opinion. In part, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) was developed to empirically test this assertion. To assess the relationship between policy narratives and public opinion, NPF posits several causal mechanisms including narrative transportation. Narrative transportation is a measure used to assess the extent to which individuals exposed to a story are “transported” into that story. NPF hypothesizes that as narrative transportation increases the reader of the story will (i) have more positive affect for characters within the story; and (ii) will find the story more persuasive. Using an online experiment involving a nationally representative sample of over 1,700 respondents, this research tests narrative transportation hypotheses by exposing subjects to one of three Cultural Theory narratives about climate change, as well as a control list of scientifically agreed upon facts. While findings do not support that narratives are any more transportive than fact lists in terms of directly persuading respondents to accept specific climate change policies, the data do show that narrative transportation positively influences affect for hero characters, which extant research demonstrates indirectly influences the persuasiveness of a story.     

Dimensions of Structural Adjustment: Gender and Age in the Costa Rican Labour Market

In a restructuring world economy, Costa Rica has been substantially more successful than other Central American countries in changing the composition of its exports and regaining prosperity. Given debates about the socioeconomic impact of the country's structural adjustment policies, this article explores changes in the gender and age dimensions of Costa Rica's labour market in the period 1979-91. On balance, what occurred in Costa Rica was a modest degree of increased and reorganized labour-market inequality by gender and age, as well as by social class. Key comparative Central American questions concern national variation in the magnitude of labour-market change during this period and its cyclical or secular components, as well as their interplay with the sectoral, spatial and social dimensions of such change.     

Cultural policy as mythical narrative

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we argue that policy assumptions are shaped by mythical narratives carrying underlying beliefs and values. Drawing on narrative studies, organisational theory and Gramsci’s cultural hegemony theory, we examine how sense-making narratives create consensus, how they imply causation and individual agency, and finally how narratives fragment to reveal alternatives to hegemonic ‘common sense’ assumptions. Applying this framework to cultural policy we examine the place of mythic, sense-making narratives in the historical development of foundational national cultural policies in the UK and Mexico – respectively, narratives of ‘the civilising mission’ and ‘social transformation’. We then consider narrative emplotment and individualisation underpinning assumptions about individual creativity in the UK creative industries policy. Finally, we address the postmodern turn in narrative studies, showing how fragmented, polysemous narratives fracture cultural policy into ‘personalised truths’ and give voice to other, counter-hegemonic perspectives. We conclude by proposing an agenda for narrative research in cultural policy.