‘Our home,our way of life’: spiritual homelessness and the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous homelessness in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada

In this article, I examine the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous home and homelessness through a case study of increasing visible homelessness in two northern Canadian communities. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research on Indigenous homelessness in Yellowknife and Inuvik, two regional centres in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, I suggest that Indigenous experiences of homelessness are at once collective and immediate. In particular, I draw on the concept of ‘spiritual homelessness’ (Keys Young 1998) to examine the multiple scales of homelessness experienced among northern Indigenous people. Research participants highlight several key elements of rapid sociocultural change that have an enduring impact on a collective sense of home and belonging, and play integral roles in shaping the experiences of homeless Indigenous people. Social and material exclusion, breakdowns in family and community, detachment from cultural identity, intergenerational trauma and institutionalisation are all woven throughout the personal narratives of homelessness articulated by research participants. I argue that the alleviation of Indigenous homelessness in the NWT depends on a decolonising agenda that specifically addresses contemporary colonial geographies and their expressions in the key institutions in Indigenous peoples' lives.     

‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’: Anthropology and Matriarchy in H. Rider Haggard's She

This essay examines the nineteenth-century debate about an imagined matriarchal past, arguing that it raised significant questions about gender and history. It scrutinizes the interdisciplinary nature of the debate, demonstrating that anthropology and literature intersected in a fraught investigation of ‘mother-rule’. The essay contends that H. Rider Haggard's novel She (1887) engages in complex ways with anthropological visions of a matriarchal past. The work of the major matriarchal theorists, J. J. Bachofen, J. F. McLennan, John Lubbock, and L. H. Morgan, often seen as triumphalist accounts of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, was beset by tensions about gender, power, and temporality, caught between evolutionary meliorism and nostalgia, between a defence of patriarchy and recognition of cultural variability. Haggard's She, the essay argues, exposes and deepens the tensions at the heart of the anthropological narrative. Critics have conventionally read She as a matriarchal dystopia, yet the novel offers an ambivalent dramatization of matriarchy, and is attracted as well as repelled by the matriarchal past embodied in the white African queen Ayesha and her people, the Amahagger. More than a femme fatale, Ayesha is sorceress and scientist, harbinger of life and of death; even her violence unsettles assumptions about gender and power. Haggard's evocation of the Amahaggers’ marriage practices works to question the anthropologists’ hierarchical cultural evolutionism, moving towards an appreciation of plural cultures. The narrative's insistence on cyclical temporalities also disrupts a linear narrative of progress from matriarchy to patriarchy, conveying the potent attractions of a resurgent female past.     

The EU integrated urban development policy: managing complex processes in dynamic places

One of the European Union’s 2014–2020 cohesion policy’s new aims is to promote integrated urban development strategies that enhance sustainable urban development. Following the emergence of the integrated urban development policy, city policies in EU show a trend in that direction but overall changes towards a sustainable integrated urban development are limited. One of the major problems for planners and implementing actors seems to be the management of complexity, which originates in three sources: the policy, the planning and implementation processes as well as the implementation place. The paper elaborates on the question: what is triple complexity and how can planning and implementing actors of the EU integrated sustainable urban development policy manage it? The paper suggests the use of a place-oriented theory and proposes a theory-guided ex-durante (ongoing) evaluation called Place Scan. I assume that the method can support planners and implementing actors to manage complexity and to improve quality of ex-durante evaluations.     

Mastering the Arctic marine environment: organizational practices of Pomor hunting expeditions to Svalbard (Spitsbergen) in the eighteenth century

We consider the foundations of the widely recognized reputation of the Pomors as experts in dealing with the severe and unpredictable marine environment of the White and Barents Seas. Our research focuses on the history of Russian exploitation of Spitsbergen. Though these kinds of activities occupied only 1% of maritime shipping in the Russian North, the history of exploitation of this Arctic archipelago is contextualized within the history of the Russian North and the lives of its people. Thus, it provides an informative model for general understanding of the methods and structures Pomors used to control the marine environment. The paper is based on newly discovered documents that allowed us to analyse the social and property status of organizers and participants in Spitsbergen hunting. We also consider practices linked to trip organization and supply. We argue that an understanding of Spitsbergen hunting management reveals the general principals of Pomor mastery of the Arctic environment. Flexibility and decentralization of economic activities permitted peasants of the Russian North to demonstrate stable and positive economic results under severe conditions. This could easily have been perceived as a special ability to live in the Arctic.     

Introduction: Women's Rights as Human Rights: Global Contestations over the Longue Durée

This short essay introduces the forum on ‛Women's Rights as Human Rights: Global Contestations over the Longue Durée’. It briefly outlines the state of the field, a new agenda for research in the area and the topics of the articles in the forum. The forum derives from a symposium on the same topic sponsored by Gender & History and held at the University of Sheffield in spring 2022.