From Sorcery to Laboratory: Pandemics and Yanyuwa Experiences of Viral Vulnerability

The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted renewed attention among health professionals, Aboriginal community leaders, and social scientists to the need for culturally responsive preventative health measures and strategies. This article, a collaborative effort, involving Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola and two anthropologists with whom Yanyuwa have long associations, tracks the story of pandemics from the perspective of Aboriginal people in the Gulf region of northern Australia. It specifically orients the discussion of the current predicament of ‘viral vulnerability’ in the wake of COVID‐19, relative to other pandemics, including the Hong Kong flu in 1969 and the Spanish flu decades earlier in 1919. This discussion highlights that culturally nuanced and prescribed responses to illness and threat of illness have a long history for Yanyuwa. Yanyuwa cultural repertoires have assisted in the process of making sense of massive change, in the form of past pandemics and the onset of sickness, the threat of illness with COVID‐19 and the attribution of ‘viral vulnerability’ to this remote Aboriginal community. The aim is to centralise Yanyuwa voices in this story, as an important step in growing understandings of Aboriginal knowledge of pandemics and culturally relevant and controlled health responses and strategies for communal well‐being.     

Do more,with less: The realities of local government in rural Ontario

Over the past 30 years, the responsibilities, mandates, and activities of local governments in Ontario have undergone substantial transformations. Influenced by New Public Management, policy changes are characterized by marketization and managerialism resulting in downloading of responsibilities to local governments. This research examines the ebbs and flows of policy changes among different provincial governments since 1990 and the impacts of these policies on rural local governments in Ontario. Interviews were conducted with elected officials and senior staff in eight local governments to understand their realities. The findings demonstrate the continual policy changes led to the “do more, with less” approach currently faced by rural local governments—increased regulatory requirements, limited human and financial capacities, and small tax bases to support their activities. This experience, combined with limited fiscal levers, hinders the ability of rural local governments to address both new demands for infrastructure and existing infrastructure deficits, housing stock and affordability, and economic and workforce development strategies. The reality has necessitated local governments to seek alternative strategies to deliver programs and services through partnerships and collaboration.     

Tangible belonging and national indifference: Being German in interwar Hungary1

Building on arguments from my book Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary, this article examines the sense of ‘being German’ in Hungarian-German villages in interwar Hungary. The basic argument is that rural dwellers possessed a kind of tangible belonging (a tangible sense of being German, in this case) defined by the immediate world around them and that this tangible belonging was continually in negotiations with other constituencies trying to define Germanness, such as Reich Germans, Hungarian-German leaders, and the Hungarian state as well as other Hungarians. This article also engages with the concept of national indifference, which has become a very common catchphrase in explanations concerning belonging in East Central Europe, especially in borderland regions and on the margins of states.     

The character of creativity: Two traditions

Throughout Western history there have been two sharply differentiated beliefs about the character of creativity. However, one of these beliefs—Judaeo-Christian and neo-Platonic—has occupied such a dominant position that the very existence of the other has been obscured and ignored. Yet the evidence for this second belief is no less extensive or vivid. It has never been formulated in the same way as the first and so has never constituted a tradition as such; yet it has existed over as long a period of time and can therefore be called a tradition. Moreover, this second belief seems to bear a closer relation to the character of creativity displayed by people regarded as ‘creative’, as well as to what we have learnt about creativity in this century from psychologists. Attitudes to creativity in the modern period have generally been based on the first tradition, but the activities of creative people have borne out the validity of the second tradition. The attitudes, in other words, have been based on false expectations. To recover the lost tradition, therefore, may enable us to see more accurately what we may or may not achieve by being creative.