Satisfaction with Sunbelt Migration

Migration to non-metropolitan areas of high environmental amenity and low population is a lifestyle choice made by a small percentage of people on or about the age of retirement from the workforce Although the proportion of older people involved is low, their numbers are significant to host towns. An aspect of retirement migration which has received little attention by researchers in Australia is the extent to which such moves realise hoped for benefits for the migrants. This paper reports results of interviews undertaken in 1986 with 146 people who had migrated, on or about retirement, to the New South Wales north coast town of Port Macquarie. Several indicators of life and place satisfaction were used They all showed high absolute and relative levels of satisfaction. Although there was tittle dissatisfaction with the results of moves, search behaviour undertaken prior to moving and a number of personal characteristics of migrants, are analysed to explain some variance in satisfaction levels.     

Suffering,Vice, And Justice: Religious Imaginaries and Welfare Agencies in Post‐War Melbourne

Faith‐based welfare agencies vary considerably, dependent on the nature of their leadership, the inheritance of their services, and the niche that they are assigned by state policy in the mixed economy of welfare. Another dimension of their diversity can derive from the discursive structures of their faith. This article examines the theological inheritances that shaped how three key welfare agencies in post‐war Melbourne imagined what they were doing, as they drew on the diversity of teachings about the poor derived from the Catholic, Anglican, and Methodist traditions.     

USING GIS IN THE PROBABILISTIC ASSESSMENT OF EARTHQUAKE TRIGGERED LANDSLIDE HAZARDS

Summit Ridge, located in the North Santa Cruz Mountains, California, was heavily affected by landsliding during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (M_w=7.0). Widespread shallow failures, along with 17 deep-seated landslides, caused extensive damage. In order to study possible methods of assessing landslide hazard a geographical information system (GIS) was utilised. Geological, geotechnical, geomorphological and seismological data were used in a deterministic analysis using two standard earthquake slope stability models (pseudo-static and Newmark displacement). The models were used to assess the landslide potential that existed during the Loma Prieta event. It was found that, of these two models, the Newmark displacement model proved most successful at predicting the location of shallow unstable slopes. However, because both models are deterministic in nature they did not take into account any of the error and uncertainty in the input parameters. Therefore, a probabilistic Newmark displacement method of analysis was developed. This was achieved by incorporating the principles behind a recently developed probabilistic technique which utilises the pseudo-static slope stability model. The method calculates the probability that a slope will exceed a certain critical value of Newmark displacement and thus fail. The use of such an analysis resulted in a more realistic distribution of hazard when compared with the distribution of actual landslides triggered by the 1989 earthquake. Subsequent to this, the probabilistic method was used to undertake a landslide hazard assessment for Summit Ridge given a postulated earthquake located on the Northern East Bay segment of the Hayward fault.     

Bridging anthropology and its archives: an analysis from the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives

Much has been written about the need to open up archives as part of the decolonial turn and decolonizing methodologies. What does this look like in practice for anthropology? Despite increasing interest in archives and ‘the archival turn’ among anthropologists, our study at the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) found that anthropologists who use archives in their work lack familiarity with organizational principles and histories that would help them navigate and gain access to these records, as well as critique them. Beyond reporting this recent research, we posit that the disconnect between archives and anthropology is not isolated to the NAA or the US, but is pervasive in the discipline. In sharing this work, we hope to inspire other similar institutional moves and to promote archival education and scholarly engagement in anthropology and its training programmes.     

FLUORINE IN FOSSILIZED BONE AND TOOTH: DISTRIBUTION AMONG SKELETAL TISSUES

Because of differences in their physical properties, bone, tooth dentine and tooth enamel react very differently during the course of fossilization. This relationship is shown clearly in the case of diagenetic introduction of fluorine wherein bone and dentine with high permeability and small apatite crystallite size contain 2–3 times the amount of fluorine as coexisting enamel with its low permeability and large crystallites. Smaller differences in the same sense are found within bone types from the same species, and care must be used in applying fluorine content methods even among bones from the same deposit.     

Global social justice at the WTO? The role of NGOs in constructing global social contracts

Over the past decade, international non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) have been contesting the neo‐liberal economic order in international politics by campaigning for normative conditions to bring about what Richard Falk calls ‘humane governance’. However, the degree to which NGOs have contributed to the formation of global social contracts remains controversial. While NGO activists and various scholars advocate the establishment of such contracts, empirical testing of this normative argument is underdeveloped. Drawing upon this lack of empirical support, critics dismiss the global social contract concept and question the roles played by NGOs in international politics. This article addresses the controversy through a review, refinement and application of global social contract theory and an empirical study of two prominent international NGO campaigns directed at the World Trade Organization (WTO), an institution that represents a ‘hard test case’. It explores the ways in which NGOs and their networks are challenging the neo‐liberal basis of WTO agreements and contributing to the emergence of global social contracts. The article concludes that in some circumstances, NGOs have the capacity to inject social justice into international economic contracts and there is some basis for optimism regarding the formation of global social contracts involving NGOs, nation‐states and international organizations.     

HISTORY IN THE SIKH PAST1

This article offers a reading of an early eighteenth‐century Punjabi text—Gur Sobha or “The Splendor of the Guru”—as a form of historical representation, suggesting reasons for the importance of the representation of the past as history within Sikh discursive contexts. The text in question provides an account of the life, death, and teachings of the last of the ten living Sikh Gurus or teachers, Guru Gobind Singh. The article argues that the construction of history in this text is linked to the transition of the Sikh community at the death of the last living Guru whereby authority was invested in the canonical text (granth) and community (panth). As such a particular rationale for history was produced within Sikh religious thought and intellectual production around the discursive construction of the community in relation to the past and as a continuing presence. As such, the text provides an alternative to modern European forms of historical representation, while sharing some features of the “historical” as defined in that context. The essay relates this phenomenon to a broader exploration of history in South Asian contexts, to notions of historicality that are plural, and to issues particular to the intersection of history and religion. Later texts, through the middle of the nineteenth century, are briefly considered, to provide a sense of the significance of Gur Sobha within a broader, historically and religiously constituted Sikh imagination of the past.