PERCEPTIONS OF AND RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCENE FLOODING OF THE NORTH SEA LOWLANDS

This paper explores how the drastic landscape changes that took place in the North Sea basin during the Holocene affected the lives of those dwelling in that area. Previous contributions to the discussion of the Holocene inundation of the North Sea have tended to concentrate on the timings. This paper discusses the ways people could have perceived and responded to these events, emphasizing that climate change should not be viewed apart from social factors. It is also argued that sea-level rise was not something externally imposed on communities but an integral part of their world.     

Chile,October and November 2019: ‘Feel’ and field-work in times of crisis

One of the most important social upheavals in Chile since the end of the dictatorship started in October 2019, and continued until the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020. The event affected the ethnographic fieldwork that we, four anthropologists, were conducting at that time. This article draws on the recognition that, while being in different geographical locations, our respective experiences involve similar affects. Drawing on feminist epistemology, we have utilized these emotional experiences as a methodological tool to spark curiosity and open up a space for reconsidering fieldwork as ‘feel-work’. Our respective positioning, in terms of national and emotional feelings of belonging as well as physical location, created affective dissonances that raised uneasiness while at the same time opening up a productive space to think about fieldwork as an experience of ‘out-of-place’ bodies and ‘out-of-place’ feelings.     

'Democratizing' Consumerism?: Coalescing constructions of subjugation in the consumer landscape

Charges of sexism and the destruction of nature in the social construction of the built environment are not new. But the notion has been sporadically forwarded that the consumer landscape represents a democratizing environment within the traditional social hierarchy premised on class, gender, and ethnicity/race. The consumer landscape is presumed to accomplish this by allowing the individual consumer the freedom to construct self-identity through the process of consumption. It is the premise of this paper that this contention is incorrect. In fact, what is of interest is the way sexism and the subjugation of nature are integrated and commodified in the consumer landscape, and why they coalesce and reinforce each other so effectively. This process can be observed in the social construction of Texas's second most visited tourist attraction located in downtown San Antonio. In the social construction of the Paseo del Rio \[River Walk] it can be seen how the presentation of gender subjugation (closely linked with nature and race) is a necessary component in the construction of a successful and socially stratified consumer landscape. Far from being democratizing, in this landscape the consumer is socialized according to traditional notions of cultural power.