Contested heritages and cultural tourism

The fascination with death and disaster has encouraged the development of distinctive tourism markets, the rediscovery of sites and places of past conflict and all accompanied with uneasy narratives about what they mean and how they should be consumed. The increasingly stratified tourist economy and the interplay between demand and supply has also stimulated a complex set of ontological, socio-political and indifferent responses as places and interests compete to project often selective or stylised claims for recognition. This paper reviews the experiences of tourists visiting Derry/Londonderry, the UK’s first City of Culture and how they make sense of the competing interpretations of the past in museums, rituals and artefacts. The 17thC walled city, the city of violence and the post-conflict renaissance city are spatially and socially reproduced but rarely connect with each other to help make sense of the past for the present and critically, for the future. The paper concludes that the discursive content promised by the City of Culture was a missed opportunity to debate these places and events and critically, the problematized and reified narratives they each project.     

Osteological and paleodietary investigation of burials from Cova de la Pastora,Alicante, Spain

We present results of osteological and isotopic analyses of human remains from Cova de la Pastora (Alcoi, Alicante, Spain) and discuss the implications in light of a new sequence of radiocarbon dates indicating that the cave was used as a burial site in the Late Neolithic (ca. 3800–3000 cal BC), Chalcolithic (ca. 3000–2500 cal BC), Bell Beaker Transition (Horizonte Campaniforme Transicional - HCT; ca. 2500–2200 cal BC) and the Bronze Age (ca. 2200–1500 cal BC). Similarities in stable isotopic values of C and N indicate little variation in subsistence between men and women, and a similar nutritional base from the Late Neolithic to the Bronze Age. This pattern of stability is augmented by evidence of trauma and disease found on numerous skulls in the collection. Since no clear associations of specific grave goods with certain individuals based on sex or age could be determined, the only suggestion of social inequality lies in the burial practice itself, where certain individuals were interred in caves while others were not.     

Dominant,damaged, disappeared: imagining war through videogame bodies

ABSTRACT

Like other pop-cultural forms, videogames commonly reify militarist representations of warfare as straightforward, precise, and moral by obscuring conflict's embodied messiness. But videogames do not just reflect militarist interests in their content; they are materially, symbiotically entangled with militarist interests. Recognising this intimate connection, and the phenomenon of virtuous warfare that results, this paper takes videogames seriously as material cultural artefacts. This paper draws on feminist IR, critical military studies, and game studies to explore three categories of bodies, and their gendered logics, produced by virtualised warfare: the hypermasculine, technologised soldier; the oft-ignored broken bodies of the soldier and game developer; and the obfuscated civilian. Together, this analysis argues that the consumption and production of videogames benefits certain parties, in ways that are reproduced and sustained through the production and obfuscation of bodies. Such entanglements have real consequences for how war, and its popular culture production, is understood and imagined.