Naming,Mnemonics, and the Poetics of Knowing in Vula'a Oral Traditions

For the Vula'a people of south‐eastern Papua New Guinea names are a way of knowing that is intimately linked to a particular mode of being. The ethnography of Vula'a naming practices presented here, and an analysis of their stories – traditionally known as rikwana – suggests that names are essential in the Heideggerian sense that they bring the past, present, and future into proximity and thus may be understood as a form of historicity. In certain contexts names are also powerful because they are implicated in the kinds of transformations commonly described by anthropologists as magical. Magical names link knowing and speaking with a vital aspect of Vula'a cosmo‐ontology known as iavu (heat).     

BOOK REVIEW

This article examines the transition from cultural industries to creative industries policies in the English regions between 1980 and 2010. It argues that audio-visual policy in this period is best understood as a trajectory: the gradual, differentiated, contested, but overall coherent development of a policy discourse and corresponding institutional structure. This trajectory can be mapped onto the wider political economy of the period: the transition from social-democratic reformism to neo-liberalism at the end of the 1970s and up to the present. This process has resulted in audio-visual policy being determined to a large degree by the perceived needs of commercial interests, up to the point where regional cultural policy is virtually indistinguishable from economic policy. The transition from cultural to creative industries reflects the development of the neo-liberal state in which cultural policy has been instrumentalised within the larger project of the privatisation of public assets and the shift of relative power from labour to capital.     

Proactive Crisis-management Strategies and the Archaeological Heritage

Heritage organisations depend on public support, which presupposes a reputation for responsible custodianship, technical expertise, sound financial management and sensitivity to conflicting public expectations (e.g. conservation and public access). Public support, however, can be fickle; a reputation can be severely damaged in a few days as a result of an unexpected crisis. Heritage managers have traditionally adopted a reactive approach to crisis handling. Such approaches frequently give rise to panic-driven responses, which amplify the scale of the original crisis and lead to a breakdown of trust among stakeholders. Having explored some examples of crises in the management of the archaeological heritage, this paper concludes with a case for managers to develop proactive crisis-management strategies. The proposed framework recognises its symbiotic relationship with the disciplines of strategy and reputation management. It incorporates three key elements: the identification and evaluation of risks; procedural arrangements for operating in a disaster situation; and effective communications to ensure the continuing support of stakeholders.     

CRITICAL REFLEXIVITY AND SEXUALITY STUDIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY: SITING SEXUALITY IN RESEARCH,THEORY, ETHNOGRAPHY,AND PEDAGOGY

Feld, Steven and Basso, Keith, eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996. 293 pp. $24.95 paper. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 408 pp. $17.12 paper.     

Slavery discourse before the Restoration: The Barbary coast,Justinian's Digest,and Hobbes's political theory

Seventeenth-century natural-law philosophers participated in colonizing and slave-trading companies, yet they discussed slavery as an abstraction. This dispassionate approach is commonly explained with the “distance thesis” that the practice of slavery was at some remove from Northwest Europe. I contest the thesis, with a specific focus on pre-Restoration English discourse and Hobbes's political theory. By laying out the salient context — English experience of Barbary-coast slavery and an inherited neo-Roman intellectual frame — I argue, first, that slavery was hardly a distant phenomenon and, second, that Hobbes's discussion of slavery expressed ideas familiar in ordinary discourse. The conclusion contrasts the English neo-Roman outlook with Spanish neo-Aristotelianism.