Towards a nuanced understanding of health‐supportive place using composite research methods

Chronic non‐communicable diseases comprise a major challenge for health in contemporary Australia and across the globe and, while various factors are at play, personal choices in behaviour and lifestyle are significant. The physical make‐up and ongoing management of the places where we live positively and negatively influences these lifestyle choices and subsequent health outcomes. However, responses—in research, policy, built environment design, construction, and management—frequently fail to recognise the intricacies of this people‐place‐behaviour nexus largely because those responses are highly focused and empirical. Rather, the health‐supportive environments needed to address the current chronic disease epidemic also require additional—networked, nuanced, and intuitive—understandings. Responding to that need, the study described in this paper took a comprehensive view of what constitutes a health‐supportive built environment. We detail the composite methods employed—built environment audits, interviews, and focus groups—all of which are available for use by others in similar situations. Then, using two case study examples, we reflect upon how our methodology revealed otherwise hidden aspects of the extent to which the study sites supported or hindered health‐supportive behaviours and responses. These results suggest intervention actions for policy makers and practitioners that will help them respond to the complex needs of communities in creating a health‐supportive environment.     

On Deer and Dolphins: Nage Ideas Regarding Animal Transformation

According to the Nage of eastern Indonesia, certain animals regularly transform into animals of another kind. Similar beliefs—specified here as notions of ‘contemporary zoological transformation’—have been documented for Malays and at least one other Indonesian society, as well as for the Kalam and Rofaifo of New Guinea. Referring to interpretations by ethnographers of these other societies, the paper analyses the Nage beliefs in regard to their connection with observation of zoological kinds. Attention is also given to their possible utilitarian value, connection with ethnozoological classification, and relation to similar yet distinct transformations encountered in myth and spiritual representations. Drawing on Atran's thesis (1990), it is concluded that Nage beliefs in contemporary animal transformation posit changes of essence and are in this sense counter-intuitive. At the same time, certain ontological features demonstrate that the beliefs cannot be accommodated to a category of mythological or religious representations, and that in several respects they share more in common with modern scientific thought.     

Considerations of ‘Keo’ as an ethnographic category

‘Oddly enough, in backward, antiquated Flores there was a district — keo by name — where even now it is allowed for girls to engage in intercourse any man, and the most outstanding among them — outstanding in satisfying men — are in great demand for marriage.’ (Sukarno, in C. Adams 1965: 130)     

CONSTRUCTION SACRIFICE AND HEAD-HUNTING RUMOURS IN CENTRAL FLORES (EASTERN INDONESIA): A COMPARATIVE NOTE

In a recent contribution to Oceania (59:269–79, 1989), R.A. Drake analyses a kidnapping rumour that has regularly appeared in Borneo during the last 90 or more years. According to the rumour, agents of the state require a human sacrifice, and especially a human head, to place beneath the foundation of a bridge or other modern structure that is being erected, in order to lend it durability. This rumour, Drake argues, draws crucially upon the widespread notion or practice of construction sacrifice, in combination with a tradition of head-hunting as an aspect of inter-ethnic relations which was prevalent in Borneo before the colonial era. The present paper questions aspects of Drake's thesis by discussing the occurrence of precisely the same rumour among the Nage of central Flores, a people who do not know head-hunting of the Bornean variety and who have no tradition of human sacrifice in connection with indigenous construction.     

Labour's True Man: Organised Workingmen and the Language of Manliness in the USA, 1827–1877

This essay examines the language of manliness that both marked and shaped nineteenth‐century mainstream labour activism during a formative period of craft bastardisation, class formation, and movement building. It sketches the logic and meanings of manliness embedded in labour newspapers, journals, addresses, and trade‐union proceedings from the period. The analysis recovers a persistent, complex, and problematic racialised and gendered/classed language central to skilled white workingmen's collective self‐identification. Assimilationist in thrust, it beckoned workingmen to an ambivalent double identity defined as much by manly character as by class characteristics. Thus it both facilitated and limited labour activism and class consciousness.