The European Difference: Karl Heinz Bohrer's Critique of the European Project

Literary critic and essayist Karl Heinz Bohrer offers a Eurosceptic perspective on the German commitment to a united Europe. This article is a reconstruction of Bohrer's argument. It identifies two distinct critiques. The first is a somewhat prosaic observation that the differences between the national traditions of Europe are simply too great for a united Europe to be viable. The other is a more complex reflection on “European decadence”: Europeans lack the will that is required to project power, and power is a precondition for cultural achievements. Protestantism—the “Protestant mind”—plays a central role in this second critique. The two critiques are connected through Bohrer's conception of the nation-state as an entity that integrates in an agonistic way legal and cultural power.     

The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA,Pakistan

Abstract: This paper provides a critical analysis of how and why US‐led drone warfare is conducted in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. First, we provide detailed statistics on the scale and funding of US drone operations, noting a rapid acceleration of its adoption by the military. This is then situated within an overarching narrative of the logic of “targeting”. Second, we study a legal document called the “Frontier Crimes Regulation” of 1901 that defines the relationship of FATA to the rest of Pakistan as an “exceptional” place. In the third section, we argue that the drone is a political actor with a fetishized existence, and this enables it to violate sovereign Pakistani territory. In this sense, the continued violence waged by robots in Pakistan's tribal areas is a result of the deadly interaction between law and technology. The paper concludes by noting the proliferation of drones in everyday life.     

‘Discipline and Interference’: Ruskin's Political Economy,Natural Law,and the Moral Disorder of Victorian England

When Ruskin turned from art and architectural studies towards political economy in the late 1850s works such as Unto This Last, Munera Pulveris and Time and Tide met with negative critical reactions. In these works he attempted to restore to the language of Victorian political economy the moral content which, he argued, had been lost since the time of Adam Smith, under a cloak of misleading scientific terminology associated with utilitarian ‘orthodox political economy’. In doing so, he resorted to pre-Enlightenment sources of political and economic practice. His study of classical, Biblical, medieval and selected renaissance texts led him to gradually embrace older natural law arguments which contrasted sharply with the assumptions of post-Enlightenment positivist forms of natural law and science. These older and more organic natural law based understandings informed the principles by which he established his ideas on economics as well as his late social experiment, the Guild of St George. The charter and oath of the Guild illustrates how Ruskin's early upbringing in the Protestant Evangelical tradition was replaced by a more comprehensive natural law tradition of ethics.     

Memorialisation and remembrance: on strategic forgetting and the metamorphosis of psychiatric asylums into sites for tertiary educational provision

This paper builds on earlier investigations of psychiatric asylum closure by focusing on their not infrequent successor role as educational facilities. We ask two questions: what conditions underpin a transition to educational re-use, and how is former asylum use remembered and memorialised in the successor context? Through recounting and interpreting the histories of acquisition and adaptation at two sites (Carrington, Auckland and Lakeshore, Toronto), we build a narrative that suggests a variable response to the shadows cast by stigma and the vilification of asylum. We distinguish between memorialisation (material reminders on site) and remembrance (narratives of past use). Former asylum sites, we contend, are attractive for educational users for their campus-like settings, range of buildings and (now) suburban locations. For city residents and planners replacing one institutional use with another keeps the site green, brings employment, and retains semi-public access. Memorialisation is often strategically low-key and remembrance more personal and individual. The net result is a relict landscape that speaks to the transcendence of stigma despite the relatively recent demise of the asylum.     

Comments on comments

This article is a comment on: Tubridge et al., 2012. Decennial reflections on a ‘geography of heritage’ (2000). International Journal of Heritage Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2012.695038     

From Siam to New York: Jacques May and the ‘foundation’ of medical geography

The history of medical geography is marked by a search for ancestors. The story usually begins in the writing of Hippocrates before re-emerging in the works of 18th and 19th century practitioners. In recent years, historical geographers have called for the destabilising of such assertions of lineage and descent. This paper offers a reconsideration of the history of medical geography through an exploration of the often hidden connections and intersections that have helped to frame the future trajectory of the sub-discipline. More specifically, we focus on the important contribution made by Dr Jacques Meyer May and offer a complex and multi-layered account that examines the close interweaving of his work as a colonial surgeon and specialist in tropical medicine and his role as a medical geographer in the United States.     

The origins of salinity in metamorphic fluids

Evaluation of data on formation waters and metamorphic fluids sampled by drilling or preserved in fluid inclusions reveals little correlation between fluid salinity and metamorphic grade, but a strong link to original sedimentary setting. Sediments and metasediments deposited originally in shallow marine environments can contain fluids with a very wide range of salinities, but they are commonly near twice seawater salinity or higher. With increasing metamorphic grade, a very wide range of salinities may develop, with the highest levels tracking halite saturation. Oceanic and accretionary prism sequences yield low‐salinity fluids, close to seawater values, almost irrespective of metamorphic grade until extreme conditions are reached where removal of water may increase fluid salinity. The salinities of metamorphic fluids exert a fundamental control on both fluid phase equilibria and metal‐transporting capability, and appear, to a large degree, to reflect the original presence or absence of highly saline formation waters and/or evaporites in the initial sedimentary sequence.     

The application of microfossils in assessing the provenance of chalk used in the manufacture of Roman mosaics at Silchester

Microfossils recovered from chalk tesserae in mosaics from the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum, modern Silchester, southern England, are used to suggest a provenance for the source-rock. The microfossils include foraminifera characteristic of late Cretaceous (Campanian) foraminiferal biozone BGS20 (quadrata macrofaunal biozone) and foraminiferal subzone BGS21i (basal mucronata macrofaunal biozone). Calcareous nannofossil assemblages from the same tesserae are poorly preserved, preventing precise age determination, but confirm an age of Santonian to Campanian. As indurated chalk beds of this age are not normally present in the stratigraphically higher chalks of southern England, it is probable that calcretised chalk, formed by secondary calcification beneath Palaeogene rock cover, was used to manufacture the tesserae. This suggestion is supported by a comparative analysis of chalk tesserae from the Norden Roman site in Dorset. Although the provenance of the chalk in some of the Silchester tesserae can be placed only within a broad geographical area of downland in southern England, others may have originated in the Dorchester–Swanage area, some 100 km to the southwest of Silchester, or the Portsdown area of southern Hampshire. None of the tesserae have been constructed from chalk found near Silchester.