Degradation of Archaeological Remains by Shipworm

The marine borer, known as shipworm, has long been known for their degradation of wooden constructions in the marine environment. This review presents the results from a variety of experiments conducted at the National Museum of Denmark throughout the past five years dealing with the in situ preservation of maritime archaeological artefacts in light of the threat from shipworm. The aim of the research has been to improve methods and analyses for conducting experiments with shipworm, and to better our understanding of their attack pattern and how to stop an active attack in situ.     

A better impact factor: Anthropology and climate change

This guest editorial asks how anthropologists might position themselves in relation to climate change.     

The Anansi position (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

At least since the left‐wing critique of positivism and the radical student movement some decades ago, it has been a fairly widespread view that anthropology and the other social sciences should be engaged. Habermas even wrote, in 1968, that the social sciences have an intrinsic ‘emancipatory knowledge interest’. This article is sympathetic to this view, but argues that an engaged anthropology is at its most efficacious when it refuses to take part in a polarized discourse with fixed positions. Instead, anthropological interventions in the broader public sphere should take on the role of Anansi, the trickster of West African folklore, whose unpredictable and surprising moves enable him to confound and defeat far more powerful adversaries. Using examples largely from the Norwegian public sphere, where anthropologists are visible and active, it is shown how anthropology can simultaneously be both destabilizing, subversive, critical and liberating, precisely when the anthropologist takes on the liminal trickster role; neither fully inside nor fully outside.     

Perennial crisis and the loss of flexibility

Crisis interrupts routine in unwelcome ways with an uncertain outcome. The Greek word krisis (κρíσις), which is etymologically close to criterion and criticism, was occasionally used in relation to social ailments. However, more often, it was used to refer to a medical condition characterized by a high fever. A critical condition in English and other European languages refers to a similar situation. Two possible outcomes were envisioned in ancient Greece: you died or you recovered. In the contemporary world, the term ‘crisis’ can be of limited relevance since crisis is endemic and chronic in one or several domains virtually everywhere. There are two general causes for this: accelerated, runaway globalization generates unpredictable, unintentional side effects; and different parts of a lifeworld change at different speeds, leading to disjunctures and destabilization. Perhaps volatility is a more appropriate term.