A new synthesis: Resituating approaches to the evolution of human behaviour

Most anthropologists would agree that humans are simultaneously historical, biological, behavioral, and social. However, many researchers retain a relatively dualistic paradigm dividing anthropological questions into biological and/or social aspects. Many practitioners of Neo-Darwinian perspectives prioritize natural selection in all explanations of human evolution. Many other anthropologists refuse to acknowledge a significant role for biological features and biological histories in human action, sensation, and engagement. Both perspectives are misplaced. Incorporating emerging perspectives in evolutionary theory into the broader anthropological discourse may help discard simplistic dualisms and resituate our assessments of the evolution of human behavior. In this essay I review three major emergent themes in evolutionary theory; Multi-Inheritance Systems Theory, Developmental Systems Theory, and Niche Construction. I suggest, with one brief example, that placing these elements in transaction with other perspectives in anthropology might enhance the possibilities of assessing human evolution and behavior.     

Imagining Otherwise: Autism,Neuroaesthetics and Contemporary Performance

Abstract

Perspectives on the phenomenology of the autistic experience are presented with particular reference to the imagination in autism and what may be conceptualized as ‘neurodivergent aesthetics’. Drawing upon a research project that explored the potential of drama as an ‘intervention’ in autism, an attempt is made to de-mythologize the condition by challenging stereotypes and by suggesting that the multimodalities of performance offer an appropriate space for ‘encounters’ with autistic states of being while also questioning the dualisms which distinguish between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic.     

The philosophical systems of Francesco Patrizi and Henry More

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a comparison of the philosophical systems of Francesco Patrizi and Henry More. The point, however, is not to demonstrate Patrizi’s influence on More but rather to see how, with respect to some particular subjects, they both tried to offer a modern interpretation of Neoplatonism. The main axis of the analysis follows the topics of space, light, and soul. While to More, light is of merely marginal interest, it is demonstrated that space and soul are of crucial importance and play a similar role in both authors’ systems. They function as intermediary entities that link the higher and the lower reality and form a sort of canvas upon which the material world unfolds. Yet, in comparison with Patrizi, More’s system is both constrained by a much stricter, dualistic classification and at the same time veers dangerously close to immanentism and pantheism (which More tries to avoid).     

A boat perspective: local geographic knowledge of fish harvesters in Change Islands,Newfoundland

People whose livelihoods depend on the natural environment have detailed knowledge of the lands and waters surrounding their communities. This paper presents research on the traditional geographic knowledge of fish harvesters in Change Islands, Newfoundland. Our findings, based on “kitchen table mapping” and other ethnographic methods, demonstrate that residents of coastal communities have extensive geographic knowledge associated with a way of life centred on fishing. This knowledge is reflected in a “namescape” that includes hundreds of toponyms that are not present on existing maps and that reflect meaningful connections with local history and cultural heritage. Fish harvesters also have distinctive ways of conceptualizing the landscape and the seascape, which is reflected in the geographic terminology they use. Overall, their way of looking at the environment, in contrast to the bird's-eye perspective that prevails in western cartography, can be characterized as a “boat perspective”. Their geographic knowledge has practical value for improving existing cartographic information and developing sustainable resource use strategies. At a broader level, their distinctive ways of interpreting the “earthscape” provide alternative ways of understanding space and place, and can help us identify our assumptions about how we define geographic features and represent them on maps.     

Establishing Development Orthodoxy: Negotiating Masculinities in the Water Sector

Despite important work in development studies on the ‘male bias in the development process’, it is generally recognized that gender and development analyses have been slow to engage with masculinities. Focusing attention on the nexus between identity and globalizing development discourses, this article explores the relationship between masculinities and development through an analysis of the gendering of water paradigms. By analysing the example of the recent Cochabamba water wars in Bolivia, and placing them in historical context, the author explores how gendered representations and language are used to downplay and upgrade particular understandings of modernity as they relate to water management, and examines the mechanisms through which specific gendered identities become associated with the most successful versions of ‘modern’ development.     

Gifts and Rights: Cautionary Notes on Community Self-help in Thailand

ABSTRACT A pervasive assumption in the critical literature and practice of development has been that capitalism and state-building has undermined relatively autonomous village communities in which there were equalizing institutions of mutual help or gift-giving. These assumptions tend to retain the dualisms of modernization theories by reversing them. The author argues that we should instead challenge these dualisms, and look for complexity and contradictions within both the past and the present. He then draws on a study in Thailand to show how the ‘village’ was a product of state-building, and how in the past the idiom of ‘helping’ constituted relations of domination and extraction as well as more egalitarian relations of mutual help. The use of the language of the gift confers power on the giver; since the 1930s, state officials have appropriated and transformed the language of ‘helping’ to coerce villagers into working on ‘development’ projects. Until the 1970s, villagers described ‘development’ as coerced serf labour, but since then, they have struggled with mixed results to redefine development as their right to participate in the national and global product. The author finishes by arguing that, in the context of the current global crisis of accumulation, we should reclaim rural development as a democratic right, opposing neoliberal attempts to redefine it as a gift which government and development agencies can discontinue at their will.     

Producing the military urban(s): Interoperability,space-making,and epistemic distinctions between military services in urban operations

Urban wars represent one – perhaps the – phenomenon in which war and cities take particular form in and through each other. With the epistemics of this reciprocal relationship being less studied, this article brings together the discourses on urban war and military interoperability respectively. Both discourses emphasise the question of knowledge. A shared geographic knowledge held by the service branches involved in a joint operation is considered key for interoperability to arise. In the urban wars discourse, the need and difficulty of ‘knowing’ the urban are stressed. However, we know less about whether military services involved in a joint urban operation produce distinct geographic knowledges and, if so, with what effects. With inspiration from critical scholarship on military geographies and from works on the history and geography of knowledge, this article develops a conceptual framework to target the mutually constitutive relationship between military epistemics and urban space in urban war. In it, I make a twofold argument, illustrated with the help of empirical examples from two Israeli joint urban military operations. First, the type of geographic knowledge that military ground and air forces produce as they seek to ‘make known’ particular urban spaces differs due to the services' distinct situatedness and relative distance to the urban environment. The produced types of military geographic knowledge, moreover, do not imply different perspectives on the urban as a pre-existing entity as much as they bring – in distinct fashions – the urban into being.     

The unavoidable salience of gender: notes from Australian childcare work

This article explores the gendering of work in Australian childcare settings from a post-gender perspective. Much early childhood research focuses on encouraging men into the field, seeing their presence as beneficial to the perceived worth of childcare work. Such research ignores how women’s gendered experiences, as the overwhelming majority of the workforce, are already shaping the field, creating an image of this work apparently unpalatable to most men. I show how gendered relations have a profound impact, even in mono-gendered spaces like childcare, to the continuing disadvantage of women. Workers caught within binary understandings of gender appear to draw on normative gendered discourses to understand the social and economic positioning of the field, rather than more emancipatory framings. This article argues that perspectives that actively question biomedical understandings of gender can be useful in understanding and challenging the gendering of particular societal spaces, such as childcare services.     

Militarisation as diffusion: the politics of gender,space and the everyday

Drawing together the work of five feminist scholars whose research spans diverse sociopolitical contexts, this themed section questions militarisation as a fixed condition. Using feminist methodologies to explore the spatialised networks and social mechanisms through which militarisation is sustained and resisted, ‘gendering’ militarisation reveals a complex politics of diffusion at work in a range of everyday power relations. However, diffusion acts not as a unidirectional movement across a border, but as the very contingency which makes militarisation – and transformation – possible. Through connecting the empirical and theoretical work on militarisation with feminist geographies, the authors in this collection highlight the influence of military thinking and institutions, not as static structures, but instead as productive sites.     

Enclosing difference and disruption: assemblage,heterotopia and the cruise ship

The cruise ship is as much a process as an object. Indeed, while the ship appears stable in its material and affective form, this state is maintained only through the interventions of a vast array of human and non-human agencies. The cascading affects flowing from these interactions allow for alternative sociomaterial orders to be established through the suspension and splintering of fixed notions of time and space. This paper brings the theories of heterotopia and assemblage together, through a speculative realist ontology, to explore these temporal and spatial discontinuities, and the way they can create a sense of enclosure amongst passengers on-board. This theoretical approach is utilized to examine articulations of the cruise ship in the self-solicited blog entries of passengers that demonstrate both the mutable and emergent qualities of the ship and the way in which its seeming enclosure is subject to constant disruption. Rather than a static reading of the ship as a heterotopic ‘other space’, we propose that these spatial configurations are vulnerable to entropic forces and unruly agencies that frame the cruise ship as an emerging, rather than realized object, affording it the potential to enact alternative sociomaterial orders.     

Urban heritage ‘space’ under neoliberal development: a tale of a Jordanian plaza

What happens when urban heritage spaces within developing countries, such as Jordan, are subject to touristic development funded by international bodies, such as the World Bank? This question is explored theoretically and practically by considering a popular local plaza in the secondary Jordanian city of Jerash that has been subject to three tourism development projects funded by the World Bank. The study, which incorporates and critiques the discourse of neoliberalism within urban heritage development studies, seeks to analyse the World Bank projects and, more specifically, how they have defined, approached and produced outcomes in the Jerash plaza and its context. In so doing, the study triangulates the analysis with accounts by local respondents that identify major drawbacks in the World Bank approach, particularly its emphasis on conventional ‘readings’ of urban space that highlight universal values and histories, while neglecting and marginalising local values and understandings. The triangulation offers attentive ‘readings’ of the plaza as a place understood and experienced by a people. The challenge is to break with the neoliberal paradigm that dominates urban heritage development programmes (and their associated West–East dualisms and top-down approaches) by presenting local sociocultural and economic contexts as assets to enrich development projects, rather than obstacles to be ‘fixed’ and ‘fitted’ for tourism.     

Following Suit: Men,Masculinity and Gendered Practices in the Clothing Trade in Leeds,England, 1890–1940

This paper explores the processes by which the majority of British men came to wear a suit for most occasions during the first part of the twentieth century. It examines the nature of the product and emphasises the gendered experience of making and buying suits. Using the Leeds tailoring trade as a case study, it concludes that the rise of the suit can be attributed to the gendering of production – whereby the intensification of low–paid female labour sustained profitability – and to the gendering of consumption, in which the masculinity of the shopping environment was crucial.     

Independent creative subcultures and why they matter

Independent creative subcultures, in their various hybrids of music, theatre, art, and new and old media, are the primordial soup of cultural evolution. They have the capacity for a highly definitive influence on their participants – catalysing the transition from consumer to producer for instance – often conferring much broader cultural and social benefit. Creative subcultures make continuing, well-documented, contributions to established city cultures for relatively low outlay. Indie creative activities in particular do not make much money and they do not cost much to set-up. They tend to cluster in areas characterised by low rents and non-residential uses such as retail and industrial areas, but as third wave gentrification reaches into the dark pockets of many cities, cheap rental properties are becoming scarce. This article uses time-series maps of inner Melbourne to show a pattern of tighter and tighter clustering of indie cultural activities as alternative spaces disappear. It looks at where they are going and why, considers the implications of this pattern for the ‘creative city’, and suggests some policy initiatives to help maintain and nurture independent creative scenes. As Melbourne’s live music scene is particularly vulnerable to displacement from increasingly dense and contested inner-urban space, the article focuses on interventions relating to music venues.     

Makers of the west: National identity and occidentalism in the work of Fukuzawa yukichi and Ziya Gökalp

This article draws on the work of the Japanese Westerniser and nationalist Fukuzawa Yukichi and the Turkish nationalist and critical proponent of Westernisation, Ziya Gökalp, in order to understand the development and deployment of the idea of the West. It is shown that the relation between the ‘non‐West’ and West is not staged simply or purely in the form of a dualistic opposition by these men. Indeed, both my case studies evince the centrality of third or fourth categories that complicate but also sustain the stereotyping of the West. In particular, both Fukuzawa and Gokalp deploy a form of orientalism in which Asia is cast as a separate and primitive realm, to be distinguished from both the West and their own nations. The article engages its findings with recent post‐colonial debates on Asian occidentalism.     

The Egyptian “book of the two ways”

Abstract

Science and cartography have had an intimate history which has not been simply the creation of ever more accurate scientific maps but one in which science, cartography and the state have co‐produced the knowledge space that provides the conditions for the possibility of modern science and cartography. The central cartographic process is the assemblage of local knowledges and, as such, is a particular form of the assembly processes fundamental to science. The first attempts by the state to create a space within which to assemble cartographic knowledge were at the Casa da Mina and the Casa de la Contratación, and hence they can be described as the first scientific institutions in Europe. Their failure to create a knowledge space can be attributed to the nature of the portolan charts. The triangulation of France and the linking of the Greenwich and Paris Observatories established the kind of knowledge space that now constitutes the dominant form within which modem science and cartography are produced. However, resistance to the hegemony of modern scientific knowledge space remains possible through finding alternative ways of assembling local knowledge.     

'Heart' and 'Wing', Nation and Diaspora: Gendered discourses in Singapore's regionalisation process

In this article the authors offer an analysis of Singapore's state-vaunted 'go-regional' policy as a case study to illustrate the argument that not only are the 'nation-state' and 'diaspora' structurally interdependent and embedded in the discursive frame of each other, but also that the way they interlock is shaped by particular gender ideologies and relations. In the same way as the state articulates nationalism by appealing to men and women as gendered subjects, the appropriation of transnational space as part of the regionalisation drive serves to extend and elaborate 'genderic modes of discourse'. Beyond state discourse, the authors examine individual and family strategies in straddling the gap between 'nation' and 'diaspora', between being at 'home' and 'away'. In arguing that the 'go-regional' policy is a pervasively masculine construction, the authors give specific attention to the way gender divisions of labour are transnationalised and further entrenched, the gendering of diasporic workplaces, and the construction of women-in-diaspora as 'moral wives'. The arguments are grounded mainly in research material garnered from in-depth interviews with Singaporean economic migrants (and non-migrants) to China.     

Occupational genders and gendered occupations: the case of water provisioning in Maputo,Mozambique

Taking issue with how associations between technical prowess or entrepreneurship and masculinity tend to be taken for granted or are seen as stemming from natural or intrinsic gender differences, over the last two decades feminist scholars have developed theoretical approaches to understand the gendering of professions and abilities as the performative outcome of particular cultures and histories. We build on these insights to explore how associations between masculinities, technology and entrepreneurship shape ideas and practices of small-scale water provision in Maputo. Our findings show how activities (i.e. technical craftsmanship, hard physical work) or abilities (i.e. risk-taking, innovativeness) regarded as masculine tend to be considered the defining features of the profession. This shapes how men and women make sense of and talk about their work, each of them tactically emphasizing and performing those aspects best fitting their gender. Our detailed documentation of men’s and women’s everyday involvements in water provisioning challenges the existence of sharp boundaries and distinctions between genders and professional responsibilities. It shows that water provisioning requires many other types of work and skills and male and female household members collaborate and share their work. The strong normative-cultural associations between gender and water provisioning lead to a distinct under-recognition of women’s importance as water providers. We conclude that strategies to effectively support small-scale water businesses while creating more space and power for women involved in the business require the explicit recognition and re-conceptualization of water provisioning as a household business.     

Pro‐Poor Modes of Technical Integration into the Global Econom

Recent evidence indicates that globalization based on technical advances in information technology is creating a dualistic situation in the world economy, whereby the benefits tend to accrue to a narrow group of relatively affluent countries, while the majority lag behind. The purpose of this article is to suggest a framework within which to assess an alternative, pro‐poor form of technical integration into the global economy — in other words, a form of globalization that benefits the poor as well as the rich. The article focuses particularly on the role that can be played by NGOs, aid donors and national governments in this endeavour.     

GENDERED SPACES ON TRIAL: THE INFLUENCE OF REGIONAL GENDER CONTRACTS ON IN‐MIGRATION OF WOMEN TO RURAL NORWAY

While the Nordic literature on rural migration and gender relations has usually focused on the push effects of a patriarchal or traditional gender culture on out‐migration of women, this article centres on the conjoint way in which regional gender contracts and female in‐migration shape one another. On the basis of survey data of women who migrated into Valdres, a rural area in Norway, as well as interview material, three ideal types of rural gender contracts are identified: traditional, modern and alternative. It is further demonstrated that women living by a traditional gender contract are more often attracted to Valdres than women living by modern and alternative gender contracts, and seemingly also tend to stay for a longer period of time. With the help of Halfacree's model of rural space, it is argued that the in‐migration of women serves just as much to sustain the region's traditional gender contract as to challenge it.     

资本循环视角下的城市空间结构演变机制研究——以海珠区为例

资本是城市化的内生动力,基于大卫·哈维资本三循环理论,本文在对1949年以来中国宏观资本运动与空间发展关系演绎的基础上,以海珠区为实证研究对象,粗略展示了海珠区从初级循环工业吸纳国内资本,到90年代中后期全球资本推动初级循环与次级循环共同增量发展,再到2010年后初级循环资本减量,二、三级循环资本增量的过程,相伴经历从城郊工业点到中心“卧城”,再到生态型中央创新区的城市功能转变。最后强调在中国资本城市化后半程中,权力机构要注重利用比较优势,引导资本进入三级循环,调动城市发展主体积极性,提升城市品质与服务能力,平衡资本逐利本性与空间正义,促进空间可持续发展。