The House that Poison Built: Customary Marine Property Rights and the Live Food Fish Trade in the Kei Islands,Southeast Maluku

The use of cyanide to stun and capture live food fish for export first appeared in the Philippines during the mid‐1970s. Today, this technology has spread throughout Southeast Asia and the Indo‐Pacific region, causing widespread damage to coral reef ecosystems. This study examines the local political and economic changes that have resulted since this destructive trade arrived in the Kei Archipelago of the Southeast Maluku District in Indonesia. District and provincial fisheries and law enforcement officials turn a blind eye, and evidence suggests complicity by some members of the military. Many local fishermen attempt to resist, motivated more by vestigial concepts of communal village rights and rules governing access to coral reef territories and resources, than by some intrinsic sense of environmental conservation. The article challenges the romantic predisposition of indigenous knowledge systems scholarship that characterizes local knowledge and practices as inherently eco‐friendly and socially just, and argues for closer examination of the dynamics involved when local practices and institutions are integrated into larger circuits of production and trade.     

Flexibility or exploitation? Corporate social responsibility and the perils of universalization (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

As anthropologists and other critics of capitalism turn their attention to the controversial and burgeoning corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, most focus on conflicts in community relations and environmental degradation. Few scholars have examined equally pertinent questions of labor restructuring, even though these transformations emerged at about the same time as the rise of CSR. In this article, we draw on research in two Peruvian mining communities to explore the potential contradiction between the simultaneous mandate for corporations to present themselves as responsible employers, on the one hand, and the drive to rationalize labor and reduce financial responsibility for the workforce, on the other. We suggest that for both corporate officials and some scholars, this tension remains a latent one because CSR discourses and documents generalize corporate interests as the interests of mines as a whole.     

Perceptions of Britishness

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to contribute to scholarly debate about the nature of national identity by exploring a set of empirical data relating to the complex case of Britishness. The paper considers, with reference to the findings of field-work conducted within a Pakistani community in London, what can be learnt about Britishness from the attitudes of young British Pakistanis. It is apparent that for such young people British national identity does not have a fixed content: their remarks draw attention to several different ‘boundaries of Britishness’ which operate in the popular imagination of people in Britain. These include the civic boundary, according to which citizenship is the primary criterion of nationality; the ‘racial’ boundary which defines as British those individuals believed to have British ancestry or ‘blood’; and the cultural boundary, according to which Britishness is a matter of the culture, values or lifestyle to which one adheres.     

Envisioning Future Landscapes in the Environmentally Sensitive Areas of Scotland

Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) designated under EC Structure Regulation 797/85 now cover 1.4 million ha of the Scottish countryside and are likely to make a substantial contribution to the regulation of landscape change. Visual changes to landscapes with (policy on) and without (policy off) the ESA programme in two Scottish ESA areas, Breadalbane and the Machair, are predicted through impact-assessment procedures and computer manipulation of photographic images. The methodological requirements for such predictions are outlined and substantial differences in landscape characteristics under policy on/off scenarios are revealed. Such approaches to landscape change are an essential foundation for the development of environmental cost-benefit analyses and will contribute to public consultation processes.     

Edward III’s siege of Calais: A reappraisal

In September 1346, Edward III brought his victorious army to the gates of Calais to begin a siege that over 12 months developed into the largest military operation conducted by the English on French soil during the fourteenth century. It is also perhaps the least understood campaign of Edward III’s reign, because of the loss of the army pay records. We know from chronicles that the men of Calais conducted a heroic defence of their town, and we know too that the English created and maintained an enormous logistical operation first to besiege and then to capture the port. What is little understood, however, is the scale, scope and chronology of the siege. The role played by English naval forces has received little attention, yet there is a series of pay records relating to their service which can compensate for the loss of the vadia guerre accounts and which can enrich understanding of the campaign. Using this evidence, this article reappraises the whole expedition, highlights the numbers of ships and mariners involved in the siege, and draws attention to periods of intensive military activity. Edward III’s ultimate objective was to capture, hold and use the town as a safe port of disembarkation for future invasions.