Jenseits von Afrika – Neue entwicklungspolitische Ideen für den DVAG

Dipl.-Geograph Dr. Andreas Spaeth ist seit Herbst 2001 Vorstandsvorsitzender des DVAG. Mit dem Wechsel an der Verbandsspitze hat sich auch sonst einiges ge?ndert: Mehrere Vorstandsposten wurden neu besetzt, ein neuer Arbeitskreis ins Leben gerufen. Die Gesch?fte des Verbandes betreibt jetzt die Firma lat/lon in Bonn. Andreas Spaeth, der seit fast 25 Jahren in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit aktiv ist, verbrachte einen gro?en Teil seines Berufslebens im asiatischen und afrikanischen Ausland. Allein neun Jahre davon lebte und arbeitete er mit seiner Familie in Kenia. Mit Dipl.-Geographin Ute Bauer sprach er über seine beruflichen Erfahrungen in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit und über seine Vorstellungen zur Zukunft des DVAG . Correspondence to:Andreas Spaeth     

From Byzantine to post-Byzantine art: the painting technique of St Stephen's wall paintings at Meteora,Greece

The old katholikon of St Stephen's monastery at the Meteora (site of the most important complex of monasteries in Greece after Mount Athos) is decorated with wall paintings that date from the beginning of 17th century. In terms of style, the artistic ensemble is altogether characteristic of the period. The painting technique has been examined by means of μRaman and μFTIR spectroscopies, gas chromatography–mass spectroscopy (GC/MS), optical microscopy (OM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).     

Cooperative Housing and Social Cohesion: The Role of Linking Social Capital

Abstract

The article examines the role of housing cooperatives for social cohesion in the city by introducing linking social capital which grasps the vertical dimension of social capital. Housing cooperatives represent a crucial intermediate level between residents and urban housing policy, thus providing opportunity structures for bottom-linked citizen participation. Drawing on the case of Vienna, a large-scale household survey and interviews with key informants provide empirical evidence on the importance of a form of social capital which links actors at different levels in the spatial hierarchy: residents, housing managers and political decision-makers. The findings add to our understanding of the opportunities and problems with resident participation in a policy field structured by multi-level governance. Our two-level analysis shows that the dominant model of governance, top-down as well as neoliberal, has structurally limited the room for participatory practices in cooperative housing. Nevertheless, we argue that professional housing cooperatives have a potential to give residents a voice beyond the neighbourhood. Their strong linkages with public decision-makers at different scales can help leverage ideas and resources of residents.     

Early Cambodian gold and silver from Prohear: composition,trace elements and gilding

Rescue excavations in Prohear, southeast Cambodia, recently saved the last untouched graves of one of the richest prehistoric sites in Southeast Asia. Many Iron Age burials dating from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD contained gold and silver ornaments so far unknown from archaeological contexts together with indications for the presence of an immigrated elite. A first selection of 59 objects were analysed by LA-ICP-MS to obtain detailed information about the composition, as well as minor and trace elements. The majority of the ornaments consist of electrum and auriferous silver with low copper concentrations, and two main groups indicating different alluvial gold sources can be distinguished by different concentrations of Pt, Ir, Bi and different Pd/Pt ratios, one group being related to rich burials with non-local features. The SEM and EDX analyses of four objects revealed two different gilding techniques observed for the first time in Southeast Asian artefacts: foil-fusion gilding, related to special Ag–Au–(Cu)–Sn alloys containing up to 4% tin, and depletion gilding.     

Organic Geochemical Evidence for Pine Tar Production in Middle Eastern Sweden During the Roman Iron Age

Several funnel-shaped features of unknown function were discovered at excavations related to a new stretch of the highway E4 in middle Sweden during 2002–2003. These features could be sub classed into two categories: large funnel-shaped pits dated to 600–1100 AD (Vendel period – Viking Age) and small funnel-shaped pits dated to 240–540 AD (late Roman Iron Age – Migration period) respectively. Soil samples were analysed for diterpenoids derived from abietic acid (mainly retene, abietic acid, dehydroabietic acid and methyl dehydroabietate) by Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) in order to test the hypothesis that the features might be connected to pine tar manufacture. For comparison, samples from historically known pine tar and charcoal production features were analysed. The resinous fraction in the larger funnel-shaped features were very similar to those of the historical pine tar and charcoal production features, while the composition in the small funnel-shaped pits was dominated by retene and methyl dehydroabietate. The biomarker, methyl dehydroabietate, could be identified in several of the soil samples from the funnel-shaped pits. We suggest that both of these features have been used for pine tar production, which makes the smaller funnel-shaped features the oldest known tar production features in Europe.     

Crisis,urgency and the problem of discernment

Crises proliferate. Not just as labels but as the actual state of affairs, of impasse, ruination and breakdown. As an anthropologist working on Syria with extensive fieldwork inside the country before the uprising of 2011, and later with ongoing fieldwork in Lebanon, Jordan and with exiled Syrians in Europe, I find it safe to say that crisis is polyvalent. Crisis is slow and urgent as it moves with Syrians in time and across locations. This piece argues that we need urgent engagement with slow forms of crisis and slow engagement with calls to urgency. This calls for an exercise in discernment, which takes urgency and claims it as a diagnostic for ethnographic exploration.     

Different repetitions: Anthropological engagements with figures of return,recurrence and redundancy

ABSTRACT

It is a central contention of this special issue that an anthropological engagement with repetition has the capacity to open up fertile fields of comparative ethnographic and historical work. In this introduction, we link our approach to past anthropological and philosophical works, connecting for instance to discussions of historiography, rhythm, scale, and the characterization of experience. We move on to consider the present and future uses of the concept of repetition, providing five ‘dimensions’ that we consider helpful in exploring its nuances as well as its potentialities. These dimensions we designate as matters of production, medium, anticipation, consequence and scale. Each might be recognized within the discourse of informants or ethnographers or both. What they are intended to do is to provide an operational framework through which to anatomize processes of repetition as observable in whichever ‘field’ we are investigating.     

Repetition and uncanny temporalities: Armenians and the recurrence of genocide in the Levant

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a meditation on how memory and repetition are played out when experienced as both a historical event and an ongoing and returning possibility. Amongst the Armenian community in Lebanon repetition takes on a particular salience in the form of a haunting from the foundational genocide of 1915, a genocide that in recent years has been brought back with the events in Syria where family and kin have faced severe hardships, random killings, and destruction of entire villages. In this paper I over various fieldworks in Lebanon return to the incident of the cleansing of Kessab, an important Armenian village in Syria, and how such an event in today’s Syria points to past, present, and future forms of haunting but also the reconfiguration of affect. The same event draws different landscapes of the imagination, landscapes of fear, haunting, return, but also of resilience and responsibility in the meeting with the time to come.