Valkeapää's Use of Photographs in Beaivi áhčážan: Indigenous Counter-History versus Documentation in the Age of Photography

This article examines the photographic material of the Sámi cultural mobilizer Nils-Aslak Valkeapää's Beaivi áh?á?an (The Sun, My Father), published in 1988, with theoretical perspectives from anti- and postcolonial studies. The analysis focuses on how Valkeapää's use of photographs involves that the colonial past is examined from the vantage point of the anti-colonial present of the 1980s. Valkeapää's re-contextualization of photographs from ethnographic collections assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a book he called a family album of the Sámi is discussed as an example of Sámi counter-history that is part of the decolonization process. When analysed with perspectives from anti- and postcolonial studies, the documentation of the way of life of the Sámi people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exemplifies a practice which has constructed the Sámi as the others of modern society. The article discusses how the construction of the Sámi as the others of modernity is deconstructed and challenged in present-day indigenous identity politics.     

Impediments to a human rights-based approach to heritage conservation: the case of Bagan,Myanmar

The recognition of human rights at stake in and around World Heritage sites has led to an increased interest in the adoption of a human rights-based approach to heritage conservation. This approach is understood to address issues of social justice and enable a more sustainable form of heritage conservation. However, research at the historic and religious site Bagan in Myanmar shows various conceptual, practical and political hurdles that need to be addressed before this approach can effectively be adopted. Challenges can be found on local, national and regional scales and include the interpretation of cultural rights and conflicting rights, the contentiousness of human rights language and the lack of capacity to hold violators accountable. These impediments are relevant beyond Myanmar and demonstrate that the effectiveness of a human rights-based approach to heritage conservation is highly context-dependent.     

Lessons from Australia: Persia Campbell and the International Afterlives of Federation-Era Welfarism

This article uses the career of Australian-born economist and United Nations lobbyist Persia Campbell (1898–1974) to track the influence of Federation-era Australian welfarism into the postwar international sphere. I argue that Campbell, a pioneer of American consumer economics and an influential commentator on international development, derived her lifelong preoccupation with consumer welfare and living standards from a youthful immersion in Australian economic thought. Although she lived abroad from 1929, her worldview was indelibly shaped by this early training. Campbell’s example therefore points to the international afterlives of Australia’s foundational welfarism, and offers an Australian corrective to a development historiography dominated by the United States.     

LOCAL FOOD,URBANIZATION, AND TRANSPORT‐RELATED GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS

We argue that “buying local” does not necessarily reduce transport‐related greenhouse gas emissions, even if production technologies and yields are homogeneous in space. We develop a partial‐equilibrium model of rural‐urban systems where the spatial distribution of food production within and between regions is endogenous. We exhibit cases where locating some food production in the least‐urbanized regions results in lower emissions and higher welfare than if all regions are self‐sufficient. The optimal spatial allocation of food production does not exclude the possibility that some regions should be self‐sufficient, provided that their urban population sizes are neither too large nor too small.     

Taming Surface Water in Pre-Islamic Southeast Arabia: Archaeological,Geoarchaeological, and Chronological Evidence of Runoff Water Channeling in Masāfī (UAE)

In semi-arid to arid environments, water is the most constraining resource for agricultural communities. In Southeast Arabia (Sultanate of Oman and United Arab Emirates), the demographic growth and the increase of sites at the beginning of the Iron Age II (1100–600 b.c.) is generally attributed to the development of groundwater harvesting techniques, and more precisely to qanāt technology. While only little is known on the origin of this technology, even less is known about other hydraulic techniques, which could have been used as a complementary source of water. An irrigation system, recently discovered near an Iron Age settlement in the oasis of Masāfī (UAE) was studied thanks to the combination of various methods—archaeology, geoarchaeology/micromorphology, spatial analysis, and chronology—which have allowed us to identify the technological development of small-scale runoff farming and to link this practice to social as well as environmental issues.