Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD): The ritual moment of social death

This article is an ethnographic study of individuals self‐diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in Liverpool, UK. While much research on OCD has concentrated upon superstitious belief, psychosis and anxiety provoking disorder, the article focuses upon the relationship between the familiar and the strange in ordinary life, the ‘disquieting familiar’, captured by the Freudian idea of the uncanny. It investigates how misfortune, as opposed to psychological neurosis, becomes attached to mass‐produced objects and routines – the obsessive touching of kitchen taps, the compulsive checking of bank cards – and how repetitive rituals enacted by individuals are revealing of the effort to prevent the emergence of apprehension concealed in everyday habitus and physical, concrete activity.     

‘Raging Rumors’: American Diplomats’ Reportage from Latvia and Estonia, 1938–1940

‘Raging Rumors’ examines how the Soviet invasion and annexation unfolded in Latvia and Estonia. The reportage of American diplomats documents Nazi and Soviet aggression and the loss of neutrality for Latvia and Estonia. American diplomats at post recorded what they witnessed, but also what they were told by their contacts, thus providing readers with Latvian and Estonian governmental perspectives and world views. As spectators with a front-row seat watching how the Second World War began, the American diplomats reported back to Washington. This article sheds light on what transpired in Latvia and Estonia, how Latvians and Estonians perceived of their situation, and how the US government engaged and failed to engage in the Baltic.     

An Improved Algorithm for Selecting Ground Motions to Match a Conditional Spectrum

This paper describes an algorithm to efficiently select ground motions from a database while matching a target mean, variance, and correlations of response spectral values at a range of periods. The approach improves an earlier algorithm by Jayaram et al. [2011]. Key steps in the process are to screen a ground motion database for suitable motions, statistically simulate response spectra from a target distribution, find motions whose spectra match each statistically simulated response spectrum, and then perform an optimization to further improve the consistency of the selected motions with the target distribution. These steps are discussed in detail, and the computational expense of the algorithm is evaluated. A brief example selection exercise is performed, to illustrate the type of results that can be obtained. Source code for the algorithm has been provided, along with metadata for several popular databases of recorded and simulated ground motions, which should facilitate a variety of exploratory and research studies.     

Scaling down or scaling up? Local actor decisions and the feasibility of decentralized environmental governance: a case of Páramo wetlands in Southern Ecuador

In Latin America and the Global South, policy-makers are adopting community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) principles for local governments. The idealized emphasis on ‘local’ collaborative approaches is known to neglect human geographic contexts and issues of capacity, power, and human drivers of change at larger scales. However, critiques lack empirical evidence of policy implementation decisions. How do local government and community actors choose to use decentralized environmental governance policies in relation to a threatened cultural and natural landscape across their jurisdictions? This question is explored in an ethnographic case of a high Andean wetland region in southern Ecuador by focusing on the context and micro-politics of two seemingly contradictory local government decisions: proposals to nationalize a local community protected area and to work with other local governments to construct a road across the wetlands that could threaten protected area status. When different sectors are devolved to different local actors without strong sub-state institutions for conflict management, decentralization may create incentives for conflict rather than conservation. Governance design depends on understanding how and why diverse local actors engage in boundary-spanning regional strategies, calling for additional contributions from political geographers.     

Over and under: children navigating terrain in the East Anglian fenlands

ABSTRACT

Drawing on fieldwork in three primary schools in East Cambridgeshire, UK, this paper explores children’s relationships with the places where they live, and the ways in which those relationships are mediated by play, exploration, and narrative imagination. Challenging assumptions of a ‘bubble-wrap generation’ which seem to discount the possibility that children today are able to experience the outdoor environment as a safe space with which they can build a living connection, we explored spaces which children deem particularly important in their lives. Through walks along routes planned by children, we look at how movement over the fens offered them an opportunity to express how and why particular places matter, what they see happening there, and what they expect to happen in the future. We reflect on the mutually constitutive relationship between kinship and experience of place, and argue that children’s sense of the stable and bounded landscape limits their sense of environmental variation in the fens. Yet, this exploration leads to the question: what lies under the surface of the land we move across? We therefore consider the relationship between presentism in children’s lives and the imagination of what lies underfoot.     

Evaluation of the Early Paleo-Indian zooarchaeological record as evidence of diet breadth

Early Paleo-Indians in North America are historically hypothesized to have been large-game specialists. Despite decades of research, Early Paleo-Indian diets are alternately portrayed as of either specialist or generalist. Though some suggest that these terms are not useful, debate over the nature of these diets continues. Authors who have studied Early Paleo-Indian archaeofaunas from North America have analyzed either a conservative dataset, consisting only of taxa whose remains meet criteria indicating they were part of Early Paleo-Indian diet, or a liberal dataset which includes all taxa regardless of the presence or absence of evidence that represented taxa were part of the diet. Camp sites are assumed to be more indicative of long-term, average Early Paleo-Indian diet, but single-event kill sites and multiple-event kill sites are included in analyses. Richness, evenness, and heterogeneity of mammalian taxa and of body size classes for conservative and liberal datasets show that many assemblages cannot be categorized as representing either specialist or generalist diets regardless of dataset used or diversity measure employed. Early Paleo-Indian diet breadth was diverse and in some cases more diverse than during the subsequent Archaic.     

The Bloody Skirt of Settlement: Arthur Vogan and Anti-Slavery in 1890s Australia

This article concerns Arthur Vogan's novel The Black Police, published in 1890. In his book Vogan drew upon an affective global language of suffering that combined appeals to his experience as an eyewitness of the frontier with popular stereotypes drawn from British and American abolitionist precedents. These sources included Uncle Tom's Cabin and popular newspaper commentary on Queensland frontier violence that had circulated earlier in Australia and Britain. The reception of Vogan's novel was mixed: while it reached a wide audience, it failed to prompt official action, and local and British reviewers charged him with sensationalism and ‘embellishment’. Vogan defended his work vehemently, asserting it was based on fact. Reviewers' scepticism stemmed, however, from Vogan's uneasy blend of realist narrative, grounded in eyewitness testimony, and the popular and sensational fictional and visual conventions he deployed. At the end of a period of intense frontier conflict in Queensland over the preceding three decades, Vogan's novel of protest and its ambivalent reception point to the limits of humanitarian influence within an Australian, intercolonial, and ultimately imperial framework.     

Assessing the Diversity of Mission Populations through the Comparison of Native American Residences at Mission Santa Clara de Asís

Mission establishments in Alta California and elsewhere were home to complex, pluralistic communities in which native peoples actively but differentially negotiated aspects of colonialism through daily practice and the reinterpretation of identity. To explore these issues, we compare the archaeological evidence from two different indigenous dwellings at California’s Mission Santa Clara de Asís: an adobe barracks and a native-style thatched house. In particular, we consider possible differences between the dwellings’ inhabitants in terms of relative status, ethnolinguistic affiliation, and re-articulation of indigenous traditions.