Tracing British cultural policy domains: contexts,collaborations and constituencies

This paper draws on a larger research project that investigates the networks and institutions shaping cultural policy across national, international and supranational contexts. Taking Britain as its touchstone, it identifies and maps some of the operational relations between culture, governance and nation shaping the development and orientation of contemporary cultural policy. It thus highlights key formal and informal domestic relationships and contexts within which Britain's local, regional and national cultural policy initiatives are situated. The British context – in which England figures strongly for historical, political and demographic reasons, and so draws a corresponding resistance across other constituents of nation – is shown to be both internally differentiated along various lines, and also embedded in the larger sphere of the European Union that redraws the boundaries of cultural policy and governance. In tracing the contours and interrogating the constitutive elements of Britain's domains of cultural policy, we seek to provide a foundation for understanding the intersections and influences that exist between fields of cultural governance, and their interdependence and fluidity.     

The Essence of Vula’a Historical Consciousness

This paper explores some of the issues evoked in recent attempts by the Vula’a people of south eastern Papua New Guinea to document their history. Drawing on ethnographic research and Heideggerian philosophy it investigates the complex of myth, history and Christianity manifest in their representations of the past. The Vula’a lifeworld accommodates what might commonly be perceived as contradictions—multiple versions of significant local stories, and an acceptance of Christianity without the forfeiture of pre‐Christian cosmology. I suggest that if we are to understand this lifeworld we must move beyond simple distinctions between history and myth, truth and falsity. Western ideas about truth and rationality are thus questioned in light of Vula’a experience. I propose we see myth as a mode of being and, consequently, as a form of truth. This is not, though, the truth of Western science, of proof and explanation. In Heidegger’s terms it is “essential” and therefore beyond the realm of provability.     

The 19th‐Century Akko Tower Wreck,Israel: a summary of the first two excavation seasons

The shipwreck designated as the Akko Tower Wreck lies at the entrance of Akko harbour, Israel, 35 m north of the Tower of Flies, in 4.4 m of water. Following two seasons (2012 and 2013) of underwater excavation, it is suggested that it is the remains of a merchant brig of 200 tons, dated to the first half of the 19th century, and built under the influence of the French shipbuilding tradition in an established shipyard. The full story of the ship and its place in the maritime history of Akko, however, remains an enigma.     

The Family Behind the Farm: Race and the Affective Geographies of Manitoba Pork Production

As increasing toxicity of Manitoba lakes garners public concern, the environmental impacts of pork producers have come under scrutiny. In this context, the Manitoba Pork Council launched The Family Behind the Farm, a series of advertisements and testimonials featuring pork producers and their families. We examine how this campaign operates affectively to distance the family farm from industrial pork production. Building upon geographical literature theorizing the relationship between race and affect, we argue that the campaign mobilizes pride in the family farm through heteronormative and racialized affects of intimacy, tradition, and intergenerational continuity. In the process, not only is pork production made innocent, but the family farm, and rural Manitoba itself, is reproduced as a white, heteronormative space with an innocent past and secure future. By analyzing this specific case, the paper demonstrates the role of the heteronormative family in reproducing affective geographies of whiteness.     

Handcraft as Cultural Diplomacy: The 1968 Mexico Cultural Olympics and U.S. Participation in the International Exhibition of Popular Arts

Mexican post-revolutionary cultural institutions excelled at implementing Mexican art and popular arts as key elements in cultural diplomacy. However, while there is abundant research regarding these arts and their inclusion in international exhibitions during the first part of the twentieth century, there is little research on their role in international cultural diplomacy during the second half of that century. In the first part of this article I present a historiographical appraisal of the 1968 Mexican Cultural Olympiad and the resolutions of the “First Latin American Seminar on Popular Arts and Crafts” sponsored by UNESCO in Mexico City in 1965. In the second, I examine the case of U.S. participation in the “Exposición Internacional de Artesanías Populares” (International Exhibition of Popular Arts), which was part of the 1968 Cultural Olympiad’s programme – largely neglected by the historiography of the XIX Olympics – to explain how popular arts were made to perform as agents of cultural diplomacy in Mexico and the U.S. during the Cold War. In addition, I argue that U.S. participation in this exhibition also reveals negotiations and redefinitions of the concepts of handcraft and arte popular, and the economic and social situation of their makers in the United States.     

Major Fallacies Surrounding Stone Artifacts and Assemblages

While lithic objects can potentially inform us about past adaptations and behaviors, it is important to develop a comprehensive understanding of all of the various processes that influence what we recover from the archaeological record. We argue here that many assumptions used by archaeologists to derive behavioral inferences through the definition, conceptualization, and interpretation of both individual stone artifact forms and groups of artifacts identified as assemblages do not fit squarely with what we have learned from both ethnographic sources and analyses of archaeological materials. We discuss this in terms of two fallacies. The first is the fallacy of the “desired end product” in stone artifact manufacture, which also includes our ability to recognize such end products. The second fallacy has to do with the notions that lithic assemblages represent simple accumulations of contemporary behaviors and the degree to which the composition of the depositional units we study reliably match the kinds of activities that took place. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a comprehensive set of new methodologies and theoretical perspectives to solve these problems, our goal here is to stress the importance of rethinking some of our most basic assumptions regarding the nature of lithic objects and how they become part of the archaeological record. Such a revision is needed if we want to be able to develop research questions that can be addressed with the data we have available to us.     

The Archaeology of Commoner Social Memories and Legitimizing Histories

In recent years, archaeologists have productively exploited historical documents and monuments as evidence for social memory and the selective writing, rewriting, and silencing of history for instrumental purposes. However, for a variety of theoretical and methodological reasons, less consideration has been given to such powerful uses of the past in the past by commoners in domestic contexts. In this article, we present a case study that demonstrates how the household remains of commoners can be used as rich, direct sources of evidence for the conscious manipulation and deployment of social memory. Our case study focuses on multiple lines of evidence from burials interred under a household patio at the pre-Aztec and Aztec site of Xaltocan between C.E. 1290 and 1520. Archaeological burial data, osteological analyses, a fine-grained chronology created with Bayesian statistical modeling of radiocarbon dates, and ancient DNA analyses are combined to reconstruct the household genealogical history inscribed by residents. This history—perhaps motivated by power and claims to land—entailed selective remembering and forgetting and the rewriting of the past of life on this house mound and was enabled by material mnemonics in the form of buried bones. Interestingly, this inscribed, instrumental genealogical history may have been structured by some of the same principles and representational canons that shaped pre-Hispanic pictorial genealogies used as evidence in colonial legal disputes.     

Policy Decisionmaking Models in Practice: A Case Study of the Western Australian "Sentencing Acts"

While there is an extensive body of literature on a range of policy decisionmaking models, there is a lack of supporting case studies about the lived experiences of policymakers and the usefulness of various decisionmaking models in practice. This article examines two traditional models of decisionmaking, namely crisis theory and the rational comprehensive model, to assess their strengths and limitations in explaining the introduction of the controversial Western Australian Crime (Serious and Repeat Offenders) Sentencing Act 1992 and the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1992 (the "Sentencing Acts"). We argue that the "Sentencing Acts" cannot easily be reduced to, or explained through, a single policy analysis model, as significant aspects of policy remain hidden. Finally, we contend that to understand the emergence of the Sentencing Acts requires an approach that can account for the interconnection between structural, agenda-setting, and decisionmaking levels of analysis.