‘The One and the Two’: Mainlanders and Saltwater People in Buka,Bougainville

ABSTRACT The paper explores the socially salient contrast between ‘mainlanders' and ‘saltwater people’ in the Buka area in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, as observed during ethnographic fieldwork in 2004–05. Buka people themselves articulate three at first sight disparate points of contrast between mainlanders and saltwater people. These concern settlement patterns, predominant subsistence activities and different degrees of ancestral knowledge. This paper explores these points and aims to specify their interconnection from the perspective provided by a fourth contrast established ethnographically, that between different modes of objectifying relations on the mainland and ‘at sea’. With a detailed investigation of the ethnographic ‘surface’ of the phenomenon, the paper aims to provide a basis for future in‐depth analyses of various aspects of the mainland‐saltwater contrast in the context of Bougainvillean politics and the sustainability of livelihoods in the area.     

Peripheralization and knowledge bases in Austria: towards a new regional typology

Scholars are increasingly interested in innovation in peripheral areas. However, research and policy documents are still often based on a traditional understanding of the core–periphery dichotomy. Here, the peripheralization discourse argues for a broader understanding and highlights the importance of economic, demographic, and political factors as well as knowledge intensity for defining core and peripheral areas. Concerning the latter, the differentiated knowledge base approach provides new insights, as it emphasizes the varying foundations for different kinds of innovations. By combining these hitherto unconnected strands of literature, this paper first develops a conceptual framework for a new regional typology, which considers both the degree of centralization/peripheralization and the prevailing knowledge base. Second, an exploratory analysis applies this framework to the 95 districts of Austria and provides first insights into peripheralization and issues of regional prosperity. The results show that there are indeed many nuances and that regions that are clearly either central or peripheral are the exception. Furthermore, peripheries come in many shades and are not uniform, as often assumed implicitly. Consequently, this paper argues that a tailor-made innovation policy for lagging regions would benefit from the incorporation of the peripheralization discourse. To conclude, it outlines directions for future research.     

Ethologists in the Kindergarten: Natural Behavior,Social Rank,and the Search for the “Innate” in Early Human Ethology (1960s-1970s)

During the 1970s, ethologists at the German Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen started a series of research projects at several regional kindergartens in search of natural predispositions in human behavior. This so-called “Kindergarten Project” became one of the pillars of research activity at the newly founded Forschungsstelle für Humanethologie (Research Center for Human Ethology) where Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and a team of researchers set out to explore new fields of research for the discipline of ethology. Taking the research project conducted by biologist Barbara Hold on ranking behavior among kindergarten children as a vantage point, this paper explores the shift in ethology from animal to human behavior which occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes how human ethologists coped with the methodological, conceptual, and ethico-political challenges which arose from crossing the human-animal divide. This article thus sheds light on the hitherto unwritten history of human ethology as it was developed at the MPI since the late 1960s.     

What Is Next for Policy Design and Social Construction Theory?1

The study of policy design has made great progress over the past decade in leading scholars to understand why the American political system produces certain kinds of designs rather than others, and the consequences that policy designs have for democracy. This article outlines the distinctive and important elements of policy design theory—the centrality of policy design, the attention to social constructions, the attention to policy consequences (or feed‐forward effects), and the integration of normative and empirical research and theory. It then suggests how policy design theory can complement other policy theories in guiding research and evaluating the conditions of U.S. democracy, and how in its own right it can be further developed and used to guide important inquiry about public policy's politics and social impacts.