By‐Elections and Political Change in a Local Context: The Case of the 1973 Dundee East By‐Election and the SNP

With their unpredictability and occurrence in between nationwide elections, by‐elections have attracted a degree of scholarly interest. However, this has focused almost exclusively on how the contests have affected, or failed to affect, the direction of national politics. This article seeks to, instead, explore their influence upon the locality in which they are fought. It will achieve this through an analysis of the 1973 Dundee East by‐election and its consequences for the development of the local Scottish National Party (SNP). Prior to the by‐election, the party had not been particularly strong in Dundee. Yet the contest provided a setting in which it was able to transform itself into one of the most effective Nationalist organisations in Scotland, capable of cementing an SNP MP in the constituency from 1974 until 1987, holding firm against the collapse in the party's support across the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The article will examine the extent to which this resistance to the national swing was facilitated by the legacies of the by‐election and the extent to which its wider footprint contributed towards the development of an enduring party tradition that has persisted for decades.     

Towards a Theory of Santa: Or,the Ghost of Christmas Present (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This account of the cultural phenomenon of Santa/Father Christmas draws on the polarities that attend the rituals of Santa/Christmas: secular/religious; commodity/gift; sacred/profane; material/spiritual etc., while also arguing that these dichotomies act together, rather than as simple oppositions. The account also draws on empirical work by the authors and a wider group of practitioner‐researchers on how young children construct and reason with Santa. We then discuss the threat to Santa from the audit culture, which involves an inversion of his benign characteristics in terms of suspicion and surveillance. Our conclusion is that Santa is more of a religious figure than he is often given credit for being, and is felt by ‘believers’ to be superior in terms of ‘delivery’, as current systems of accountability might put it. But he is threatened by an audit culture for which he is almost the epitome of Stranger Danger. ‘Santa’, after all, is an anagram of ‘Satan’.     

The transformational festival as a subversive toolbox for a transformed tourism: lessons from Burning Man for a COVID-19 world

Abstract

Examining transformational festivals can offer conceptual resources for a transformation of tourism into a more responsible and sustainable practice. By thinking together two usually distinct scholarly treatments of “transformation”—those of transformational tourism and those of transformational festivals—the COVID-19 pandemic can itself also be treated as a spatiotemporal threshold for the transformation of the travel industry. This approach can also help deconstruct the mechanisms that sustain deleterious aspects of tourism’s guest-host divide. As borders reopen and mobility and recreation recommences, the capacity of transformational festivals—both within and beyond their highly porous time-spaces– to transform their participants offer lessons for the blurring, if not the outright obliteration of the demarcation between guests and hosts. The creative and pro-social responses of members of one such transformational festival culture—Burning Man– to this and past crises are presented as examples for how values such as participation and civic responsibility may help people overcome shared conditions of hardship, and support more sustainable tourism practices in the post-COVID-19 world. Such subversive inter-subjective inversions may bring the recognition, in-itself, and production, for-itself, of a shared humanity of co-creators and participants in not just ephemeral, but accretive transformational social and environmental projects.     

Khat: Chewing on a bitter controversy (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

When the slender green succulent leaves of the khat tree are chewed, a mild natural amphetamine called cathinone is gradually released, and absorbed into the bloodstream through the mouth and cheek tissues. The effects, which last for several hours, include the softening of one's temper, increased gregariousness, and a piqued sexual appetite, while at the same time inhibiting hunger, anxiety, and feelings of fatigue. In the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa, where khat is autochthonous, men have been chewing it recreationally for hundreds of years. Khat chewing has recently burgeoned to a global and pointed controversy, however, featuring in academic ethnopharmacology journals, the official publications of neoliberal development organizations, and worldwide in popular news media outlets. Khat has thus received multitudinous accusations of it being: an obstacle to economic growth; a pernicious narcotic; a positive mediator of political discourse in the public sphere; a public health concern; and a barrier to national development. Of these ambiguous tensions, Klein et al. (2012: 1) say that ‘Khat provides a unique example of a herbal stimulant that is defined as an ordinary vegetable in some countries and a controlled drug in others’, fingering khat as an exemplar of a globally contested object of concern – constituting different political stakes when viewed from distinct situated perspectives – and ready prey for anthropological critique. This essay interrogates some of the divergent formulations that khat has taken across the distinct political arenas that orchestrate the ‘controversy’. Following a Latourian actor‐network approach, I argue against a universal ontology of khat, suggesting instead that khat might be more meaningfully traced and apprehended through the political work it achieves in its various contexts and situated deployments. This critical reading of khat as a ‘thing in movement’ should therefore speak to the anthropology of controversy more broadly.     

Occipital perforations in a late neolithic probable aurochs (Bos primigenius bojanus) cranium from Letchworth,Hertfordshire, UK

An example of ante‐mortem occipital perforations in the cranium of a probable aurochs (Bos primigenius) cow from a late Neolithic archaeological site at Letchworth, Hertfordshire is presented. This is the second reported occurrence thus far of cranial perforations in a wild bovid and lends support to a congenital cause of the condition in archaeological domestic cattle skulls. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.