Mass violence,trauma, and their children

This article concerns the social construction of collective memory particularly with regard to the social remembering of mass violence and trauma. How do individual memories of mass violence which are often idiosyncratic, nonverbal, and embodied coalesce and crystallize into coherent narratives shared by a group. The books reviewed here demonstrate that there are both discursive means of remembering and non-discursive means of remembering. Social memories can take narrative and textual form or they can take performative and ritual form. How does the non-discursive interact with the discursive and do these interactions depend upon varying social, political, and cultural circumstances? An encompassing theoretical issue is addressed in this literature concerning the adequacy of sociological and anthropological models in the elucidation of trauma memory vs. psychological models which place emphasis on the individual. Subsumed within this question is an inquiry into the adequacies and inadequacies of Western clinical models, such as the PTSD model, in explaining trauma due to mass violence, and the opposition frequently noted among survivors between silence and verbalization. Numerous ethnographic examples are considered in this article but particular attention is paid to the Nazi, Cambodian, and Rwandan genocides.     

Partnership Networks for Urban Development: How Structure is Shaped by Risk

In delivering public policy, governments worldwide increasingly partner with diverse sets of stakeholders. This spreads commercial risk, but particularly where agendas diverge, introduces new risks related to trust in relationships. The “risk hypothesis” distinguishes between networks for “cooperation” problems, where partners have high individual payoffs for uncooperative behaviors, and “coordination” problems, where partners subscribe to a common goal and uncooperative behaviors are less rewarding. We used mixed‐methods to study networks of local and state government, developers, and consultants that center on joint‐venture partnerships for developing new urban, residential projects. Statistical network methods showed that within the mix of partners involved in development projects, only state governments displayed structural patterns associated with solving “cooperation” problems (rather than coordination). In other words, the patterns of state government interactions showed they are most exposed to risky relationships. In contrast to the state governments’ apparent exposure to risk, qualitative data showed they are not only well trusted but also overall the partnership networks reported very low levels of conflict. By exploring the distribution of “cooperation” and “coordination,” we identified which stakeholders perceived most risk. In our case, how the state governments’ structure interactions in response to risky relationships leads to an overall network characterized by trust.     

The Theory of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Theory: the Art of Alfred Gell

ABSTRACT Gell's Art and Agency that aimed to articulate the first anthropological theory of art has achieved a near‐cult status among the academic community. Departing from previous semiological and aesthetic approaches, this theory takes it that art is a form of instrumental action, the canonical efficacy of which lies in its power to function as a cognitive trap and to captivate the spectator's mind. In this article it is argued that Gell's theory is not as novel as it is claimed; that it fails to define the specific field of art; and that by excluding the aesthetic properties of art objects, it discards ethnographical data nonetheless necessary for understanding the agency of art in Melanesian local cultures. At a meta‐level, Gell assigned to his theory the same captivating purpose as he did to art, and this probably explains the seductive fascination that his work continues to exert.     

Investigating perceptions of antisocial behaviour and neighbourhood ethnic heterogeneity in the British Crime Survey

There is much concern in the UK about the effects on community cohesion of antisocial behaviour, but to date relatively little is known about the geography of such behaviour: for what sort of people, and in what sort of places, are high levels of antisocial behaviour a problem? What are the links, if any, between such behaviour and local socio-economic conditions, and how do such perceptions relate to local crime rates? Using data from the British Crime Survey and other secondary datasets, we develop and extend previous work that has investigated links between individual socio-economic characteristics, neighbourhood characteristics and individual perceptions of antisocial behaviour. A multilevel modelling approach is used to ensure that individual- and area-level effects are not conflated. Secondly we extend the substantive knowledge surrounding the relationship between neighbourhood ethnic heterogeneity and individual perceptions of antisocial behaviour. In so doing, we challenge recent contentions that heterogeneity is associated with declining social cohesion and trust. We conclude that at a small-area scale for England, the primary area-level determinants of high levels of antisocial behaviour lie in material circumstances, and that ethnic heterogeneity has no discernible effect on perceptions of antisocial behaviour.     

General practice access in regional and remote Australia for ageing populations

Identifying and removing access barriers to the timely provision of comprehensive health care is increasingly important for the wellbeing of Australia's rapidly ageing and frail populations, particularly those in non‐metropolitan settings. This study has examined if current general practice (GP) locations in non‐metropolitan South Australia (SA) and Western Australia (WA) are geographically accessible to the rapidly growing frail and prefrail populations known to have a high level of health service use and reduced mobility. Geospatial analysis linking 60‐kilometre GP service catchments, 2016 population counts, and 2027 population projections has estimated that the size of the frail and prefrail population that live outside these GP service catchments will double, reaching 7,800 people by 2027. The maldistribution of GP locations was most evident in WA. As regional and remote populations continue to age, the challenge of health service provision, including geographic access to care, must be resolved to ensure that populations in these areas have the best opportunity to age well. Geospatial methods linking service and demographic information, such as the approach used in this analysis, can aid in planning the equitable provision of health care for older Australians.     

Outsourcing the Business of Development: The Rise of For-profit Consultancies in the UK Aid Sector

While much attention has been paid to the ways in which the private sector is now embedded within the field of development, one group of actors — for-profit development consultancies and contractors, or service providers — has received relatively little attention. This article analyses the growing role of for-profit consultancies and contractors in British aid delivery, which has been driven by two key trends: first, the outsourcing of managerial, audit and knowledge-management functions as part of efforts to bring private sector approaches and skills into public spending on aid; and second, the reconfiguration of aid spending towards markets and the private sector, and away from locally embedded, state-focused aid programming. The authors argue that both trends were launched under New Labour in the early 2000s, and super-charged under successive Conservative governments. The resulting entanglement means that the policies and practices of the UK government's aid agencies, and the interests and forms of for-profit service providers, are increasingly mutually constitutive. Amongst other implications, this shift acts to displace traditional forms of contestation and accountability of aid delivery.     

Citizen participation,community resilience and crisis-management policy

This article presents two arguments. The first relates to the relevance of citizen participation vis-à-vis the design and implementation of public policy. More specifically, the article empirically demonstrates how a model of community decentralisation can have a number of practical benefits for crisis-management policy. The second argument relates to a question that has come to characterise studies of citizen participation in public policy. Why is it that there is so much rhetoric in support of participation but so little action in terms of the day-to-day realities of policy implementation? We place this question in a crisis-management context so that we might ask: why is it that crisis-management systems built around the principles of community resilience continue to fail on these very grounds? We find our answer to this question in state-centric governance settings which devolve authority, but do not relinquish it.

本文提出两个观点。第一个观点涉及公民参与对于公共政策设计和实施的意义。具体地说,本文用实证的方法说明社区分权模式如何对危机管理政策产生一系列实际效益。第二个观点涉及公民参与公共政策的问题：为什么对公民参与口头上不吝支持,而日常政策的实施上却不见动静？这个问题可以放在危机管理的语境中重新提问：为什么围绕着社区弹性原则的危机管理体系仍以这样的理由失效？我们的答案是：以政府为中心的治理环境虽然转移但并未放弃权威。     

Single-Degree-of-Freedom Characterization of Multi-Phase Passive Control Systems

A Multi-phase Passive Control System (MPCS) combines two passive control devices in order to offset the individual weaknesses and enhance structural performance, allowing the structure to respond effectively to varying levels of loading. Previous work involving a nine-story frame demonstrated the effectiveness of MPCSs but the fundamental understanding of the system was lacking. In order to more clearly understand the behavior and identify important parameters and parameter interactions, a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) non-linear dynamic study was performed. The results offer significant insight towards developing structural systems adaptable to multi-objective performance-based design procedures that meet higher performance standards than for ductility-based design.     

New light on the personal identification of a skeleton of a member of Sir John Franklin’s last expedition to the Arctic, 1845

In 1845, an expedition, commanded by Sir John Franklin, set out to try and discover the north-west passage. All 129 men on this ill-fated voyage perished. Over the years, skeletal remains associated with the final throes of the expedition have been located on and near King William Island, Nunavut, in the Canadian arctic. In general, even a tentative personal identification for these remains has proved impossible. An exception is some skeletal remains that were recovered in 1869 and brought back to England and interred beneath the memorial to the Franklin expedition in Greenwich. In the 19th century, these were tentatively identified as of one of HMS Erebus’s lieutenants, Henry Le Vesconte, a conclusion that has been widely accepted in studies of the Franklin voyage. Renovations to the monument in 2009 provided an opportunity for scientific examination of the remains, and to re-evaluate the personal identification made nearly 140 years before. The current work, which is the first modern scientific analysis of a fairly complete skeleton associated with the Franklin voyage, describes the remains and the artefacts interred with them, discusses the pathological conditions present, and evaluates the personal identification using osteological techniques and isotope geochemistry. Results indicate that the remains are of an adult male of European ancestry. Although some writers have suggested that scurvy or tuberculosis may have been important causes of morbidity and mortality on the Franklin expedition, osteological analysis and, in the case of tuberculosis, DNA analysis, provided no evidence for their presence in these remains. Isotopic studies indicate that the personal identification as Le Vesconte is unlikely to be correct. From the isotopic results and forensic facial reconstruction, HDS Goodsir, an assistant surgeon on the expedition, appears a more likely identification, but the results do not allow a firm conclusion.