Hegel and the Paradox of Democratic Education

This article explores Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a work on education that responds to two democratic ideals: the ideal of individual integrity, which demands that individuals come to know the principles that animate them of their own accord, and the ideal of collectivism, which demands that individuals be at home in a shared world. While the great political works of Plato and Rousseau fasten on one of these ideals at the expense of the other, I show that Hegel’s political philosophy accepts both. The result is what I call the paradox of democratic education. Hegel solves this paradox through a three-fold pedagogical strategy which speaks to the transformational possibilities of institutions as well as more directly to the needs of the “ironic consciousness.” This strategy reveals a Hegel who calls on us to strengthen our commitment to a democratic polity through a deeper conception of the requirements of democratic education.     

Archaeology and the Late Modern State: Introduction to the Special Issue

While archaeologists have always shown great interest in the rise and fall of premodern states, they perennially show little interest in their own. This is particularly troubling because the state is the nexus of power in archaeology. In practice, virtually all archaeology is state archaeology, imbued with and emboldened by state power. It is in this light that contributors to this Special Issue of Archaeologies grapple with the archaeology–state nexus, addressing such timely issues as colonialism, capitalism, and cultural resource or heritage management (CRM/CHM). We outline here the archaeology–state nexus concept and introduce the Special Issue.     

Marijuana,Guns, Crocodiles and Submarines: Economies of Desire in the Purari Delta

Traded down the Purari River by male youth through a network of friends, kuku dipi, as marijuana is known in the Purari Delta, is consumed locally, and traded for guns it is rumoured that the American Mafia bring in submarines. The movement of kuku dipi is part of a constellation of informal trade that has emerged alongside the large‐scale logging and oil projects in the Gulf Province. These networks involve the exchange of alcohol, pornography and radios by logging ship crews for live birds, crocodile skins and other local flora and fauna. Numerous sets of speculations have arisen about the seen and unseen transactions that these exchanges are felt to entail. Focusing on aspects of kuku dipi's use and movement in the Delta, I examine some of the explanations and anxieties around this illicit commodity. Doing so provides insight into kuku dipi's social impact and illuminates how the Purari's engagement in this trade is an attempt to transcend and cope with the economic and political disparities caused by the current resource extraction projects.     

Does Policy Diffusion Need Space? Spatializing the Dynamics of Policy Diffusion

For decades, scholars in multiple disciplines have examined spatial diffusion, or the spatiotemporal properties associated with the diffusion of innovations. These properties include contagious, hierarchical, and relocation diffusion. Each of these refers to a spatial model that epitomizes how innovations spread among geographic locations. Policy diffusion, a separate but homologous research tradition, had its theoretical underpinnings in spatial diffusion. However, contemporary policy diffusion has focused largely on mechanism‐based diffusion. This article demonstrates how exploratory spatial data analysis can be used to uncover spatial policy diffusion properties. In this study, municipal smoking regulation adoptions, religious‐based initiatives, and bag ban and bag fees are examined. This study finds evidence that for each policy more than one property is occurring; therefore, this study proposes that a hybrid model best explains diffusion. This article demonstrates how examining spatial diffusion properties, in addition to diffusion mechanisms, can improve the conceptualization of diffusion theories, enhance mechanism or theory‐based specification of diffusion models, and unravel the specific regional or neighboring causal pathways linking policies between adopting jurisdictions.     

Drawing,toponymy, and linguistic pilgrimage

This article scrutinises an ongoing concern with how the naming of landscape is informed by micro personal and macro cultural narratives. The author takes the position of a toponymist and linguistic pilgrim. The perspectives identify ways of understanding the meanings of place ascribed through language and placenames, the role of intention in language documentation, and relationships between the affect of place and belonging. Drawing is melded with processes of placenaming, specifically a single fishing ground placename recorded during linguistic fieldwork in February 2008 with an elderly man on Norfolk Island, South Pacific. The argument uses drawing as a method to reveal how elicited stories can reveal the meanings of placenames and the histories of observations that inform them. The view taken questions whether the discipline of toponymy could incorporate a more involved and evolved aesthetic dimension. New ways to contextualise observations about placenaming and documentation within relevant interdisciplinary contexts such as drawing research and cartography are offered.