Local Media and Experts: Sources of Environmental Policy Initiation?

Research on the process of policy change often involves a direct or indirect analysis of the roles of policy entrepreneurs and the mass media. In Colorado, beginning in 1998, twelve communities decided to obtain water rights for recreational in-channel purposes such as kayaking and whitewater rafting. These water rights stirred political controversy within some communities in Colorado related to spending public money, appropriate uses of water, and the role of recreation in local economies. Using a comparative case study research method, this research analyzes the role that policy entrepreneurs and local media coverage of recreational water rights played in initiating policy change in local communities. The most critical finding from this study is that in communities where citizens acted as policy entrepreneurs there was more controversy, less positive media coverage, and more media coverage early in the process. This case contradicts the assumption that local media coverage helps to highlight policy problems within communities. It supports the idea that experts wield higher levels of influence than citizens in promoting policy agendas.     

Introduction: The Materiality of Traces and Legacies

This Special Issue presents issues in contemporary archaeological theory and practice as influenced by the work of H. Martin Wobst. Wobst came to study in the U.S. nearly 50 years ago and has contributed to many changes in the theory and practice of archaeology since then. Though the papers cover a wide range of topics they share common interests in seeing materiality as constitutive of culture, archaeologists as participants in the present as well as observers of the past, and an interest in transcending traditional definitions of archaeological research.     

“The Cockroaches of Canada”: French‐Canada,Immigration and Nationalism,Anti‐Catholicism in English‐Canada, 1905–1929

This article examines the central influence of anti‐Catholicism upon English‐Canadian nationalism in the first third of the twentieth century. Anti‐Catholicism provided an existing rhetorical and ideological tradition and framework within which public figures, intellectuals, Protestant church leaders and other Canadians communicated their diverse visions of an ideal Canada. The study of anti‐Catholicism problematises the rigid separation that many scholars have posited between a conservative ethnic nationalism and a progressive civic nationalism. Often times these very civic values were inextricable from a context of Britishness. In addition, anti‐Catholicism was not simply about theological differences between Protestants and Catholics. Instead this theological thread often intersected with the perceived socio‐political problems that Catholics and Catholicism posed. Hostility to Catholicism was not limited only to fraternal organisations such as the Orange Order; indeed the importance of anti‐Catholicism as a component of Canadian nationalism lies in its presence across the political and intellectual spectrum. Catholicism was perceived to inculcate values antithetical to British traditions of freedom and democracy.     

The quest for coordinates in space and time

Hall, Edward T. The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1984. 250 pp. including appendices, glossary, bibliography, and index. $15.95 cloth; $5.50 paper.

Pinxten, Rik, Ingrid van Dooren, and Frank Harvey. Anthropology of Space: Explorations into the Natural Philosophy and Semantics of the Navajo. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. xi + 240 pp. including appendices, bibliography, and name and subject indices. $32.50 cloth.     

The National Sample from the 1851 Census of Great Britain an Interim Report on Methods and Progress

Abstract

In the last years, the use of geographical information systems has been common in many historical and geographical studies. Perhaps one of the least known applications is network analysis, a series of functions related to hydrology and mobility. Since 1994, researchers have used network analyses to understand costs and time expenditure in transportation in Roman times, with the aim of modeling commercial routes. Archaeological objects were employed to confirm those commercial distributions whose quantities were related basically to transport costs. The present articles go far beyond and attempt to understand decisions in building a transport network based on time series. It seems that not all Roman decisions in transport infrastructure were due to economic reasons; some parts of Roman roads were built basically for political reasons and affected later developments.     

Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?

In April 2011, a landmark hearing before the High Court in London found that the British government had a case to answer concerning abuse and torture allegedly carried out by British officials in Kenya during the Mau Mau counter-insurgency. Prior to the hearing, it was revealed that the British government had removed some 1,500 ‘sensitive’ government files from Kenya at independence, many of these relating to alleged abuses carried our during the Emergency of the 1950s. This discovery then led directly to the revelation of a further tranche of 8,800 historical files relating to the decolonisation of 36 other former British colonies. This article explains the nature of the claims of torture and abuse made in the Kenya case in the High Court, and then describes the new evidence in the recently disclosed documents. The concluding section then discusses the Kenya case and the implications of the larger discovery of the ‘lost’ British Empire archive.     

White natures: Sydney's Royal Agricultural Show in post-humanist perspective

Few events perform so ritualistically the triumphal narrative of human ingenuity and agency over the natural world, as the metropolitan displays of produce and machinery known as agricultural shows. The Royal Agricultural Show held in Sydney (Australia) is a case in point. Since the 1890s those liminal forms, of Herefords, hay, harvesters and the like that spill over the categories we think of as culture and nature, have been annually assembled. In the showground, they were made to stand as testimony to the successful march of 'civilization' to the colony of New South Wales – with civilization conceived, in European and humanist terms, as a spatialized progression out of an animal-baseline in nature, through an agrarian garden, to the evolved space of the City. This was the trajectory that had long since been presumed to mark out the life of humanity from all other life-forms that simply lived . Rather than reinscribe the privilege of that partial perspective, I use the New South Wales agricultural society and its Sydney show's 'white natures' to think across the referential categories of humanity and nature. By critically juxtaposing the Show's hybrid things with its dramatizations of human invention and ingenuity, the article opens cracks in the normativities of civilization that shaped the conviction of 'the human' as the being who transcends the merely natural. In so doing, the article also offers a fresh line of critique of those pernicious hierarchies that have, and continue to assign, premodern people and livelihoods to an anterior developmental space.