Recollecting bones: the remains of German-Australian colonial entanglements

This article critically engages with the different politics of memory involved in debates over the restitution of Indigenous Australian ancestral remains stolen by colonial actors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought to Berlin in the name of science. The debates crystallise how deeply divided German scientific discourses still are over the question of whether the historical and moral obligations of colonial injustice should be accepted or whether researchers should continue to profess scientific ‘disinterest’. The debates also reveal an almost unanimous disavowal of Indigenous Australian knowledges and mnemonic conceptions across all camps. The bitter ironies of this disavowal become evident when Indigenous Australian quests for the remains of their ancestral dead lost in the limbo of German scientific collections are juxtaposed with white Australian (fictional) quests for the remains of Ludwig Leichhardt, lost in the Australian interior.     

Study and restudy of curated skeletal collections in bioarchaeology: A perspective on the UK and the implications for future curation of human remains

This paper considers the bioarchaeological study and restudy of human skeletal remains in museums and other institutions that curate human remains from archaeological sites. Papers published from 1990 to 2009 in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Journal of Paleopathology, American Journal of Physical Anthropology and International Journal of Osteoarchaeology were considered and contributions dealing with skeletal remains from UK archaeological sites were assessed. There were 258 papers published that matched these criteria and 352 instances when a skeletal collection had been analysed. Seventy‐nine per cent of the papers were based on skeletal samples curated in five geographic areas, London, Bradford, Portsmouth, Canterbury and York; the two sites that were most used were those of Wharram Percy, North Yorkshire, curated in Portmouth at English Heritage, and Christ Church, Spitalfields, curated at the Natural History Museum, London. Reasons for this concentration of research are suggested. It is recommended that the ‘use load’ should be better and more evenly spread around skeletal samples in other geographic areas of the UK in order that knowledge is not limited just to a few skeletal collections, and that a centralised database of skeletal collections curated by different institutions would contribute to this aim. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Selling archaeology and anthropology: early medieval artefacts at the Expositions universelles and the Wiener Weltausstellung, 1867–1900

The archaeological and anthropological exhibits included in the four Expositions universelles held in Paris between 1867 and 1900 and the Wiener Weltausstellung in the Austro‐Hungarian capital in 1873, contributed to the commercialization of antiquarianism and granted international attention to the amateur practitioners of these emerging disciplines. Displays of archaeological artefacts and human remains from the migration period and the early Middle Ages, juxtaposed with more exotic ‘primitive’ art, permitted organizers to broaden the aesthetic sensibilities of fairgoers and promote the acquisition of native antiquities. Exhibiting private collections of early medieval objects likewise justified nineteenth‐century concepts of French and ‘pan‐Germanic’ identity by linking them to iconic artefacts and romanticizing the barbarity of this distant epoch.     

At Once Human and Not Human: Law,Gender and Historical Becoming in Colonial Egypt

This article explores two approaches to the gendered human that occupied the historical stage of colonial Egypt. The first was juridical, the second was Islamic and mystical. Elaborating on the first, ‘juridical humanity’, this article probes the constitutive force of modern law in cementing the human as its teleology as well as the colonial operations of this force. Fashioning itself as an answer to the question ‘who is the human?’, juridical humanity took on particular salience in relation to women while engendering disciplinary operations: the humanising powers of colonial law instituted a system of bondage between the law and the woman‐human. The mystical articulation, on the other hand, offered a competing vision for the human, one that constituted an answer to the question ‘where is the human?’, thereby making impossible the unleashing of colonial humanising powers.     

Resilience unpacked – framing of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘adaptability’ in long-term flood risk management strategies for London and Rotterdam

Resilience is held as a promising concept to produce a paradigm shift from traditional flood control to an integration of flood risk management and spatial planning. Central ideas to the resilience narrative are that ‘nothing is certain except uncertainty itself’ and ‘adaptability’ is key to ‘governing the unknown’. However, this terminology is far from clear, yet increasingly used, which raises the question how it is made sense of in practice. To answer this question, we examine two long-term flood risk management strategies in the London and Rotterdam region with a policy framing perspective (i.e. the English Thames Estuary 2100 Plan and the Dutch Delta Programme). In both strategies, uncertainties are a key concern, leading to adaptive strategic plans. Reconstructing the framing processes shows that the English adopted a ‘scientific pragmatism’ frame and the Dutch a ‘joint fact-finding’ frame. While this led to different governance approaches, there are also striking parallels. Both cases use established methods such as scenario planning and monitoring to ‘manage’ uncertainties. Similarly to previous turns in flood risk management, the resilience narrative seems to be accommodated in a technical-rational way, resulting in policy strategies that are maintaining the status quo rather than bringing about a paradigm shift.     

Place,space and odyssey: Exploring the future of early medieval sculpture,Rosemarkie, Inverness-shire

Abstract

The world today is often described as ‘postmodern’ - or, recently, post-postmodern. The question is, can postmodern ideas help to explain the many inconsistencies and logical binds in which museums find themselves entangled at the start of the 21st century? The postmodern is set in contrast with the Modern project, with which museums are closely associated. Superstition and disorder were swept aside, in theory at least, by scientific evidence and orderly arrangement, promoting a stable social hierarchy. In the West, the rational, scientific mindset became the dominant way of explaining the world. Museums are deeply implicated in the Modern, as instruments for cataloguing and characterizing first the natural world and, later, the world of invention, design and technology. Can museums, as ‘modern’ institutions, survive in the postmodern age? The museum's salvation could, it is argued, lie in its collections. Museums could shrug off their insistence on exhibitions as their major function: their ‘modern’ face. Instead they could move towards being providers of a service to open up the collections themselves and the knowledge and information about them, rather than guarding them as a private treasure.     

Archaeological Collections, Government Warehouses, and Anxious Moderns: The Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory

This paper focuses on archaeological curation repositories and their role as more than mere storage facilities. Archaeological collections are increasingly marshaled to confront anxieties about a seemingly ‘vanishing past’ and to arrest its disappearance. In Maryland, the state has invested heavily in a ‘state-of-the-art’ facility to protect and study archaeological collections in its custody. The facility has become the proxy for the collections and a form of cultural property itself, becoming part of the ongoing process that serves to recast this portion of the state as a place rooted in the past.     

The Schillers of the suburbs – creativity and mediated sociality

Theories around the cultural geography of creativity have given new life, in recent years, to negative perceptions of the suburbs as ‘isolated’. These theories have emphasised the importance of ‘clusters’, ‘precincts’, ‘incubators’ and ‘hubs’, suggesting that even in the era of the Internet, creativity requires an immediacy of social interaction, which can only be found where there is social concentration. The paper brings these theories into question through a long historical perspective on the relation between creativity and ‘mediated sociality’. Drawing on the work of Elias, it suggests some surprising parallels between the position of German artists and intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and suburban creative practitioners today. The former were in many respects ‘isolated’, relatively dependent on mediated sociality, and yet they produced a major historical flowering of creative activity. The example prompts us to think more sympathetically and optimistically about the creative potential of contemporary suburbia.     

Cultures of Border Control: Schengen & the Evolution of European Frontiers

This paper traces, and is the traces of, a collective project to render a neighbourhood queer. It is a project that emerges from queer social relations. Academic research and knowledge generation are approached collaboratively by working with queer-identified residents from west-central neighbourhoods in Toronto, Canada who volunteered with the Queer West ShOUT Youth Program. Within the context of two participant-facilitated discussion events, we discursively and artistically investigate queer world-making in the neighbourhood of West Queen West. Through collective mental mapping and photovoice renderings we interpret the queering of urban space as a queer utopian impulse. We critically examine the ‘concrete utopia’ of Queer West Village and question its resonance in the lives of ShOUT volunteers. Theoretically inspired by Muñoz, our ‘a/r/tographic’ mode of inquiry and critical praxis are a rendering of ‘queer futurity.’ We draw on our past to critique our lived present so as to imagine future potentialities. We do so in order to argue that it is vital that the queerness we individually and collectively strive for at the spatial scale of the neighbourhood, such as the process of place-making itself, is grounded in material experience yet remains provisional and an ideality that motivates us.     

Reimagining blockchain in a pluriversal world: Digital land governance in the Global South and the metaverse

Blockchain technologies are increasingly live-tested in experiments aimed at improving governance in a growing range of activities. A key question often lost amongst these efforts is whether such projects redistribute wealth and power, and, if so, in which ways. Examining the case of blockchain-based land governance, this contribution explores the tensions between ambitious visions and their actual scales of implementation around the redistributional promises of distributed ledger technologies. Bringing together the concepts of ‘imaginaries’ and ‘infrastructures’, we analyse land governance blockchainization emerging in the Global South and the metaverse. Identifying a contrast between imaginaries ‘scaling up’ redistributive promises yet tending to materialize in ‘scaled-down’ forms, we argue for more sustained attention to pluriversal perspectives that foreground local concerns and diverse voices.     

The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’

After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on critical geopolitics does both. This paper analyzes critical geopoliticians' concern with this question in the present historical moment and probes the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics and beyond. Empirically, this paper explores these theoretical tensions within ‘critical geopolitics’ by tracing the disparate fates of two young men, both child soldiers at the time of their capture. ‘Child soldier’ is an unstable category subject to geopolitical valence and stigma during the ‘war on terror’. The deployment of extra-legal tactics and spaces of violence, such as those faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, point to the rise of biopolitics combined with geopolitics, illustrating the intersection of sovereignty and governmentality as important political fodder for critical geopolitics two decades after its inception. The stories of Canadian Omar Khadr, one of the youngest prisoners at Guantanamo and the only citizen of a Western state still held there, and Ismael Beah, a rehabilitated soldier who fought as a boy from Sierra Leone, illustrate too how geographical imagination strongly shapes access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of ‘child soldier’ in particular.     

Repaying the gift of life: self-help,organ transfer and the debt of care

A total of 2,552 organs from deceased donors were transplanted in the UK in 2009, yet more than 1,000 people die each year waiting for an organ transplant. The metaphor of the ‘gift of life’ remains the rubric under which increasing the availability of organs for transplant is commonly organised. Like all gifts, the ‘gift of life’ must be reciprocated. Reviewing the advice given by, and for, transplant recipients in self-help and autobiographical literature aimed at those waiting for or who have just received a new organ we argue that reciprocity is circumscribed through projects of ‘care’ articulated at a range of scales including the organ, the self, the donor and the transplant community itself. We argue that the scarcity of organs available for transplant is used to compel recipients into adopting practices of self-care, to embodying the promise of the gift of life and to articulate a set of ethical responses to the new geography of embodiment that emerge from the movement of organs from one body and their transplantation into another.     

Homecoming or tourism? Diaspora tourism experience of second-generation immigrants

Diaspora tourism is often considered a form of ‘homecoming,’ but for the children of immigrants who are born in the new country, the question remains as to whether they perceive their parents’ homeland as ‘home’ or destination. Moreover, advancements in transportation and communication technologies allow contemporary immigrants to maintain transnational ties to their homeland, which in turn may affect the nature of diaspora tourism. The purpose of this study is to understand the lived experience of second-generation immigrants when they travel to their ancestral homeland, and explore the extent to which second-generation transnationalism shapes their diaspora tourism experiences. Using a phenomenological approach, 26 second-generation Chinese-Americans who had the experience of traveling in China were interviewed. Four themes were identified from semi-structured interviews: language and appearance, search for authenticity, family history, and sense of ‘home.’ Proficiency in their parental language was found to be a main cause of negative experiences, yet occasionally a source of pride and attachment. Their search for authentic experiences was not unlike other tourists, while familial obligations sometimes limited their experience. Traveling back to the homeland not only allowed them to understand their parents and family history, but also reflect upon their life through experiencing contemporary China. Finally, as the transnational attachment of second-generation immigrants was not rooted in a specific locale, they could feel connected to the homeland without actually visiting their family's place of origin. Findings contribute to transnationalism and diaspora tourism literature by comparing first- and second-generation immigrants and identifying the difference between contemporary transmigrants and classic diaspora groups with regard to their diaspora tourism experience.     

Schomburgk’s Chook: the entangled South Australian collections of a German naturalist

Focusing on the politics of museums, collections and the untold stories of the scientific ‘specimens’ that travelled between Germany and Australia, this article reconstructs the historical, interpersonal and geopolitical contexts that made it possible for the stuffed skin of an Australian malleefowl to become part of the collections of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. The author enquires into the kinds of contexts that are habitually considered irrelevant when a specimen of natural history is treated as an object of taxonomic information only. In case of this particular specimen human and non-human history become entangled in ways that link the fate of this one small Australian bird to the German revolutionary generation of 1848, to Germany’s nineteenth-century colonial aspirations, to settler–Indigenous relations, to the cruel realities that underpinned the production of scientific knowledge in colonial Australia, and to a present-day interest in reconstructing Indigenous knowledges.     

How Does Theology Go Public? Rethinking the Debate between David Tracy and George Lindbeck

Abstract

The possibilities for taking theological ethics ‘public’ have taken on added significance amidst debates over the nature of moral norms. If realist theological ethics can find a public voice, it will enhance the prospects for interreligious ethical collaboration and the place of theology in it. A key question remains whether particular contexts of religious symbols render them meaningful only within communities of ‘origin’, or particularity actually enables broadly compelling meaning or a public voice for theology. At issue in the Tracy-Lindbeck debate are their understandings of ‘public’, their responses to philosophical anti-foundationalism, and their theological presuppositions. While postliberal emphases on the distinctiveness of the Christian community and attention to the ecclesial community complement Tracy's emphases on dialogue and coherence, Tracy's recent methods provide more adequate responses to the challenges posed by postmodernism.     

Detailed protocol for an accurate non-destructive direct dating of tooth enamel fragment using Electron Spin Resonance

In the context of human evolution, fossil remains are too valuable to be destroyed and any alteration should be kept to a minimum. The newly developed protocol on fossil fragments has open the gate for ‘virtually’ non-destructive ESR (Electron Spin Resonance) direct dating of human remains. The method allows the separation of unstable and interfering signals that were responsible for large dose underestimation. While a complete investigation of the ESR signal remains a complex task and requires numerous hours of manipulations, a rapid dose assessment protocol can be achieve without compromising the accuracy nor the integrity of the sample. The new protocol should be used for future dating regardless of the possibility of measuring powder.     

Budgie smuggling or doing bird? Human-animal interactions in carceral space: prison(er) animals as abject and subject

Carceral geography, whilst in dialogue with many aspects of theory-building in contemporary human geography, including notions of affect, mobility and embodiment, has yet to meaningfully engage with animal geographies to consider the nonhuman dimension of carceral experience. Likewise, criminological scholarship of human-animal carceral co-presence has yet to progress far beyond the consideration of animals as mere ‘signifiers’ of human endeavour and meaning. Further, the study of prison animals has thus far considered only those nonhumans intentionally present in carceral space, such as therapeutic animals, eliding completely those considered ‘vermin’. This paper broadens the scope of extant scholarship, considering the parallels between the discourses of the ‘rehabilitation’ both of prisoners and prison animals during incarceration, and of both the prisoner and the prison animal as abject.     

The oldest human remains from the Beagle Channel region,Tierra del Fuego

The biohistory of the human peopling of the Fuegian Archipelago and the processes of biocultural adaptation and microdifferentiation of the ethnohistorical ‘canoe’ (‘sea nomad’) and ‘foot’ natives are poorly known. Here we report the oldest human remains of a ‘sea nomad’ native discovered so far in the Beagle Channel region. The specimen consists of a deciduous molar from the site of Imiwaia I, dated to 5870 ± 145 years BP. The microwear pattern indicates the consumption of hard food processed by long chewing cycles. The histomorphometric analysis shows the presence of at least three episodes of stress between 8 and 10.5 months after birth, and an unusually thin neonatal line, suggesting a mechanically non‐stressing birth event. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.