Ethnic Land Rights in Western Ghana: Landlord–Stranger Relations in the Democratic Era

In Citizen and Subject (1996), Mahmood Mamdani denounced the ‘bifurcated nature’ of the African state which, in his account, imposed ethnic hierarchy and chiefly despotism on rural dwellers while reserving democratic citizenship for the urban minority. Have twenty years of ‘decentralized democracy’ in many countries washed away these distinctions? This article takes up this issue in an analysis of the politics of land allocation and landlord–stranger relations in Western Ghana. An analysis of historical trajectories, and our own field observations and interviews in two Western Region districts, suggest that at the local level, the bifurcated character of political authority that was identified by Mamdani persists in the domain of economic rights. The record also shows that state policies and institutions, rather than working to chip away at ethnic hierarchy and chiefly authority, work at least in part to reproduce these features of the local political economy. In both non‐democratic and democratic eras, Ghana's central government has played an important role in shoring up chiefly and ethnic privilege in the land domain. These local hierarchies influence the practical meaning of democracy and economic liberalization for rural citizens, and should be explored more systematically in future studies of democratic and electoral politics in Ghana and elsewhere.     

"TEEB begins now": a virtual moment in the production of natural capital

This article uses theories of virtualism to analyse the role of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project in the production of natural capital. Presented at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the project seeks to redress the ‘economic invisibility of nature’ by quantifying the value of ecosystems and biodiversity. This endeavour to put an economic value on ecosystems makes nature legible by abstracting it from social and ecological contexts and making it subject to, and productive of, new market devices. In reducing the complexity of ecological dynamics to idealized categories TEEB is driven by economic ideas and idealism, and, in claiming to be a quantitative force for morality, is engaged in the production of practices designed to conform the ‘real’ to the virtual. By rendering a ‘valued’ nature legible for key audiences, TEEB has mobilized a critical mass of support including modellers, policy makers and bankers. We argue that TEEB's rhetoric of crisis and value aligns capitalism with a new kind of ecological modernization in which ‘the market’ and market devices serve as key mechanisms to conform the real and the virtual. Using the case of TEEB, and drawing on data collected at COP10, we illustrate the importance of international meetings as key points where idealized models of biodiversity protection emerge, circulate and are negotiated, and as sites where actors are aligned and articulated with these idealized models in ways that begin further processes of conforming the real with the virtual and the realization of ‘natural capital’.     

Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) as a paleothermometer: otolith oxygen isotope reconstruction

Stable isotope studies are increasingly important for understanding past environmental and cultural developments along the North Pacific Rim. In this paper, we present methods for using Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) otoliths as a paleothermometer using a case study from Kodiak Island, Alaska. The results of this study indicate that Pacific cod otoliths record variable paleoenvironmental conditions during the Little Ice Age. The broad distribution of Pacific cod and success in using the otoliths as a paleothermometer makes this method widely applicable to researchers working throughout the northern Pacific Rim.     

Buffalo hunting and the feral frontier of Australia's Northern Territory

There is now a growing interest in new approaches to examine the construction and significance of Western frontier landscapes. This paper adds to this new scholarship by examining how labour relations associated with buffalo hunting in Australia's North were also race relations which became embedded in the production and representations of this landscape as a feral region of the outback frontier. Drawing on a range of archival, secondary and oral sources, the paper outlines the myriad of human–buffalo and cross-cultural interactions that revolved around the shooting of buffalo within an erratic industry between the early 1890s and the mid-1950s. The analysis emphasizes that insecure efforts of officials and settlers to authorize, re-work or hide buffalo hunting interactions were linked with a wider debate on the type of people and animals who could colonize this region. It is from these ‘feral’ landscapes and histories, the paper argues, where a multiple of definitions and significance of frontier experiences can be found.

La chasse au buffle et les avant-postes féraux du Northern Territory de l'Australie

De nouvelles méthodes qui sont employées pour étudier la construction et la signification des paysages frontaliers occidentaux présentent aujourd'hui un intérêt croissant. Le présent article vise à enrichir ces travaux savants par l'examen des façons dont les relations au travail associé à la chasse au buffle ont aussi été des relations interraciales qui ont fait partie intégrante de la production et des représentations de ce paysage comme région férale de l'intérieur du pays inexploré. L'article s'appuie sur de nombreuses sources d'archives, secondaires et orales et présente une vue d'ensemble de la myriade d'interactions transculturelles et homme-buffle qui caractérisaient la chasse au buffle durant la période marquée d'irrégularités allant des années 1890 jusqu'au milieu des années 1950. L'analyse permet de souligner les efforts ténus de la part des officiers et colonisateurs pour rendre légitime, retravailler ou masquer les interactions de la chasse au buffle qui étaient liés, en effet, à un débat plus important sur le genre de personnes et d'animaux qui pouvaient coloniser cette région. L'article conclue que dans ces histoires et paysages «féraux» se retrouvent une quantité innombrable de définitions et de sens découlant des expériences vécues aux avant-postes.

Title in spanish

Hay un interés cada vez mayor en nuevos enfoques para examinar la construcción y la importancia de los paisajes fronterizos occidentales. Este papel contribuye a este nuevo estudio por examinar cómo las relaciones laborales asociadas con la caza de búfalo en el norte de Australia eran también relaciones raciales que se arraigaron en la producción y las representaciones de este paisaje como una región salvaje de la frontera del ‘outback’. Haciendo uso de información de archivos y fuentes secundarias y orales, el papel detalla la miríada de interacciones entre humanos y búfalos y tras varias culturas que giraban alrededor de la caza de búfalo dentro de una industria irregular entre 1890 y 1950. El análisis enfatiza que los esfuerzos inseguros de funcionarios y pobladores para autorizar, adaptar u ocultar las interacciones en la caza de búfalo se vinculaban con un debate más amplio sobre qué tipo de persona y animal se permitía a colonizar esta región. El papel sugiere que son en éstos historias y paisajes ‘salvajes’ donde se encuentran las múltiples definiciones y la importancia de las experiencias fronterizas.     

Grieving home

Drawing on the growing areas of research on emotional embodiment, this paper develops an understanding of the spatiality of grief as central to the discussion of young people's experiences of homelessness. In the context of my engagement with young homeless people in inner-city Sydney, I explore grief as central in shaping young people's everyday body–place relations. I argue that grief over often brutal past homes continues to haunt young people and impact on the ways in which they relate to place, including the place of their own body. I explore young people's displacement and grief-stricken forms of inhabitation as well and their discovery of ‘therapeutic’ places which allow the re-formation of more positive relations to place and self. I argue that while it is understood that grief and trauma are key causes of homelessness amongst young people, grief is rarely explored as an embodied practice, or as a key factor which continues to underpin trajectories of homelessness after initial exits from home.     

Fitting in: the embodied politics of race in Seattle's desegregated schools

By considering the performative dimensions of racial identity construction, this paper joins recent calls to more fully incorporate the materiality of the body into geographical treatments of race (McKittrick 2000; Nash 2003; Saldanha 2006). Through an analysis of school desegregation in Seattle, Washington, this analysis investigates the ways in which students of different racial backgrounds negotiated the multiracial environments at their schools. Specifically, I examine how students' racial identities are worked through embodied practices as both conscious and unconscious attempts to fit into particular social realms. Drawing on performativity theory, I show how students actively mobilized their bodies to negotiate belongings that were ostensibly foreclosed by the primacy of phenotype. This paper suggests that by focusing on the active work that the body does in the social construction of race we can better theorize the ways in which racial categories are both reproduced and destabilized through everyday life.     

Creative industries in a European Capital of Culture

This article examines the articulation of the benefits associated with staging the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) in Liverpool, England in 2008. It is argued that relevant policy documents, and policy discourses more generally, propose a strong influential role for the operations of the ECoC upon the creative industries. Such a strong relationship, however, is difficult to evidence either at a discursive level or from the attitudes expressed by those working within the creative industries locally. The idea that the ECoC can promote broadly ‘creative’ activity is thus posited as being merely one aspect of the ECoC’s major goal of attempted city rebranding, rather than anything more substantive; nevertheless the articulation of ‘success’ of the ECoC in this regard seems entrenched.     

Dendrochronological Dating and Provenancing of Timbers from the Arade 1 Shipwreck,Portugal

As part of a larger project promoting the development of historical dendrochronology in the Iberian Peninsula, ship‐timbers from the Arade 1 wreck (mostly planking and framing elements), stored at the DANS/IGESPAR in Lisbon, were examined. Of these, 52 samples were identified as deciduous oak (Quercus subg. quercus) and two as chestnut (Castanea sativa). Of 24 timbers selected for dendrochronological research, 23 could be dated, placing the origin of the wood in western France and the felling of trees between AD 1579 and 1583. Their homogeneity suggests they are part of the original construction, which probably took place shortly after AD 1583. © 2012 The Authors     

Tempi of Change: When Soloists don’t play Together. Arrhythmia in ‘Continuous’ Change

This contribution is centered on the question of tempi of change and the possibility of defining ternary scales of changes in a long archaeological sequence, which could match F. Braudel’s interpretative framework. Although I had recently considered a ternary scale of change to be a satisfactory framework even for a single category of artifacts, further analyses for this volume, on a longer time scale, revealed it as an intellectual construct that entirely depends on the choice of criteria. In addition, observed arrhythmia in change between two sets of data from the Franchthi Cave (Greece), chipped stone assemblages and ornaments, demonstrate the difficulty of defining global phases of change within a continuous sequence. In turn, this raises the fundamental problem of the choice of proxies used to define the prehistoric cultural entities whose transformations we seek to understand.     

The Order of Sima Chengzhen and Wang Ziqiao: An Inquiry into the History of Shangqing Daoism in the Tiantai Mountains

Though small,this work is important for the study of Taoist history.It throws a better light on one of its major representatives,Sima Chengzhen 司马承祯(647-735),12th patriarch of the Shangqing 上清 tradition,a blooming Taoist school under the Tang (618-907).Ute Engelhardt had certainly already studied him notably with her translation of one of his principal texts on the breath technics;Livia Kohn too has worked on one of his short texts on meditation and Paul Kroll has written several articles on his poetry.But Thomas Jülch brings a new vision of this Taoist and his essential role on the legitimation of imperial power with the moving of the Shangqing tradition center to the Tiantai Mountains 天台山.