The Untold Heritage Value and Significance of Replicas

This article focuses on the fraught questions surrounding replicas and their use in heritage contexts, drawing on an in-depth qualitative study of a historic replica, the 1970 concrete St John’s Cross, Iona. We examine how replicas ‘work’ and unravel the part that social relations, place, and materiality play in the production and negotiation of their authenticity. The research shows that replicas are important objects in their own right, acquiring value, authenticity, and aura. The ‘life’ of a replica generates networks of relationships between people, places, and things, including the original historic object. While the underlying human stories of creativity, skill, and craftsmanship are rendered invisible when replicas are treated as mere surrogates, we argue that these ‘life-stories’ should be incorporated into future conservation, management and interpretation. The article spells out practical advice and guidance for heritage professionals who find themselves dealing with replicas.     

If you are not one of them you feel out of place: understanding divisions in a Northern Irish town

This paper examines and reflects on the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking devices as a method to understand and analyse young people’s everyday movement in Northern Ireland, a divided society emerging from conflict. The paper also seeks to contribute to the extensive body of literature which already exists on young people’s geographies and movements within the Northern Ireland context. We highlight how the use of GPS together with more traditional methods gives us considerable insights of movements of young people in Northern Ireland and sheds light on the communal divisions in one town in Northern Ireland, Coleraine. We argue that the use of a GPS methodology significantly adds to the understanding of young people’s movements and geographies, particularly in a post-conflict context where notions of place and territory have particular significance.     

Kaparlgoo Blue: On the Adoption of Laundry Blue Pigment into the Visual Culture of Western Arnhem Land,Australia

International Journal of Historical Archaeology - It has been argued that laundry blue (whitener) was introduced into western Arnhem Land in the second half of the 1920s by missionaries, where it...     

Social relations on stage: Witnesses in classical Athens

The study of witness testimony raises questions which are fundamental for the student of other cultures, whether past or contemporary. What are the standards expected of a reliable informant and how is reliability to be recognised? How is reliable knowledge about the past established?

The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of witnesses in classical Athenian lawcourts both for its epistemological implications — what does it tell us about Athenian ideas of ‘expert witnesses’, of reliability, of truthfulness and bias — and for the information it gives us about Athenian society and court practice. What kind of men did Athenian litigants select to act as witnesses for them, and what effect did they hope their witnesses’ testimonies would have on the jury?

If we start out from the assumption of modern courts that witnesses are called to ‘establish the facts of the case’ we shall misunderstand the Athenian data. What witnesses actually testified often was not very important: their testimonies might be insignificant, irrelevant or repetitive. To understand their role it is necessary to see them as minor characters in a drama, whose presence provides the backdrop against which the litigant wishes his own actions and character to be seen. Respectable witnesses — officials, members of the ‘professions’, reputable politicians — establish his own respectability. The support of neighbours, associates and kin shows that those who know the milieu in which the dispute arose are on the litigant's side. Denigration Of the opponent's witnesses, kin and associates presents him as a vicious and unreliable character. In the construction of a character‐portrait in court witnesses had an important role to play.     

Journeys of resilience: the emotional geographies of refugee women

This article considers the emotional geographies of a highly vulnerable demographic: refugee women. As a marginalised and ontologically fragile group, refugees have developed rich and perceptive insight on space and place, by developing a critical vigilance that reflects forward and back on their life journeys, real and metaphorical. Through participation in a psycho-educational course designed by the author, nine women produced their own images of resilience, in creative exercises that provided ‘landmarks’ of recognition for other participants. Via participation in this temporary ‘community of practice’, therefore, another journey was taken; this article will also consider the epistemology of that itinerary using interdisciplinary insights from geography, cultural studies, cognitive behavioural therapy and gender studies.