Climate Leviathan

Abstract: While there is much justifiable attention to the ecological implications of global climate change, the political implications are just as important for human well‐being and social justice. We posit a basic framework by which to understand the range of political possibilities, in light of the response of global elites to climate warming and the challenges it poses to hegemonic institutional and conceptual modes of governance and accumulation. The framework also suggests some possible means through which these responses might be thwarted, and political stakes in that construction of a new hegemony—which, to avoid suggesting we know or can yet determine the form it will take, we call “climate X”.     

The dynamics of anthropologizing‐some excursions in villages and towns

A. L. Ruffa, Ruth S. Freed, Lucie Wood Saunders, Edward C. Hansen, and Sula Benet, eds. City and Peasant: A Study in Sociocultural Dynamics. New York: New York Academy of Science, 1974. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, Volume 220, Article 6. 221 pp. Tables and references. $17.00 (cloth).     

‘The first duties of persons living in a civilized community’: the Maya, the Church, and the colonial state in southern Belize

In recent years, historical geography has been at the forefront of new scholarship on the spatiality of colonial power and its complex relations with indigenous communities. This literature shows that imperial policies – emerging through state and scientific institutions, cultural practices, and capitalist ventures – required particular ways of conceptualizing, mapping, and organizing spaces and territories which transformed the geographies of indigenous communities, livelihoods, and identities. Through a close reading of archival texts from the late 19th and early 20th century, this paper examines the spatial and political relations between three groups: the Catholic Church, the British colonial state, and the Maya communities of southern British Honduras. Differences between the Catholic Church and the British colonial state – in their aims and approach to winning hegemony over the Q'eqchi' and Mopan Maya – were accommodated and assuaged by a tacit agreement: that the Maya must be settled in permanent communities. Colonial power, in both its spiritual and statist modalities, was imminently geographical, and this geography comprised the common ground between Church and state in their approach to the Maya.     

Battles in Seattle Redux: Transnational Resistance to a Neoliberal Trade Agreement

Abstract: This paper examines the possibilities and complexities of transnationalism through an analysis of political protests organized in Seattle against the Korea–US Free Trade Agreement, arguably the most significant bilateral trade negotiations involving the US state today. By studying the political practices of the Korean farmers' movement through participant research in Seattle from 4 to 9 September 2006, and revisiting the analysis of the 1999 “battles of Seattle” in recent work by Hardt and Negri, we argue that the concept “transnationalism” is potentially applicable to activists and subaltern social groups as much as states and elites, although these groups do not transnationalize through the same practices or in the same spaces. Our analysis of the protests aims to clarify the essentially spatial nature of political articulation (in Laclau's sense) that make the transnationalization of social movements possible.     

Structural Reform in Australian Local Government

Amalgamation has always been the favoured Australian policy instrument for improving the efficiency of Local government. However, this policy consensus has flown against mounting evidence that amalgamation not only often fails to reduce costs, but also generates significant unintended negative consequences. This note considers various recent reports into Australian Local government and argues that the earlier policy consensus on the efficacy of Local council amalgamation has vanished.     

'Giant Strides' in Documentaries, 'Ascents' in Archaeology: Nautical Archaeology's Relationship with and Place within Popular Culture

This article covers 30 years of the representation of nautical archaeology on television. It criticises and positions current research, then develops an objective methodology for examining television documentaries. The relationships and similarities between television documentaries and academia and the wider professional and amateur discipline is debated. Original research, which argues for a structure that is ever-present in nautical archaeology as in popular culture and academia, is deconstructed, and the implications reviewed. A sequence of images is defined and it is demonstrated that this forms a 'unique selling-point' used by both television and the academic discipline.
© 2008 The Author