Negotiated Agreements,Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industry in the Salar de Atacama,Chile: When Is an Agreement More than a Contract?

While acknowledging advances in legal recognition of Indigenous rights, much of the research literature positions negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and corporations simply as ‘neoliberal technology’ that gives the appearance of Indigenous consent while allowing exploitation to continue. This analysis is flawed in considering agreements as discrete, stand-alone phenomena. It ignores the possibility that Indigenous peoples may use agreements as part of broader strategies to achieve control over extractive industry activity and to secure a share of ‘development’ benefits — strategies that involve selective engagement with the state. This article supports its argument by locating an agreement between the Chilean lithium mining company, Albemarle, and the Council of Atacameño Peoples within a broad and sustained strategy by Atacameño people to address the negative impacts of mining in the Salar de Atacama, Chile, while securing its economic benefits. This strategy includes using the agreement to voice Atacameño territorial claims and environmental concerns to the state, and to insist that the state lives up to its responsibilities. The analysis leads to a fuller appreciation of the agency exercised by Indigenous peoples in dealing with the sustained expansion of extractive activity on their territories, and a more nuanced understanding of negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and mining corporations and between Indigenous people and the state.     

When History Hurts

Book reviewed in this article:
Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction     

Scotty Martin's Jadmi Junba: a Song Series from the Kimberley Region of Northwest Australia1

Barwick (1990) finds that, in Central Australian performance, whilst text and melody in isolation are relatively fixed, ‘there is immense variability in their combination, which is accomplished by what may be crudely characterised as a process of expansion and contraction of the melody to accommodate texts of different lengths’ (Barwick 1990:61). Following musicological examinations by both Barwick (Barwick 1989, 1990 and 1995) and Keogh (Keogh 1995) which focus on identifying principles that underlie this process of expansion and contraction, the paper presented here looks at songs of the junba genre, composed and performed by Ngarinyin elder, Scotty Martin, in the North central Kimberley. In addition, it is suggested in this paper that the style of musicological analysis developed by Barwick and Keogh has relevance beyond the discipline of musical analysis, as its results allow the analyst and reader to begin to trace relationships between creative processes active in the moment of performance with ‘patterns and rules’ evident in other aspects of the music‐makers' ways of being in the world.     

Archaeology of middle Pleistocene lacustrine and spring paleoenvironments in the Kapthurin Formation,Kenya

A number of key events occur in Africa during the middle Pleistocene including the disappearance of the Acheulian, the appearance of the Middle Stone Age, and the emergence of modern Homo sapiens. However, little is known about either the fossil or behavioral record for this critical time period. Excavation was undertaken at two middle Pleistocene archaeological sites, GnJh 42 and GnJh 50. These sites are located in close proximity to a large fresh water spring, a focal point on the landscape that supported a diverse plant and animal community. The lithic assemblages are dominated by flakes and cores, and lack all formal tools. However, the oldest evidence for systematic blade production can be found at these sites, indicating that important technological innovations were appearing at this time. Tendency to focus on the presence or absence of formal tools, means that assemblages of this age, lacking diagnostic artifacts, are typically subsumed within the Acheulian technocomplex. This practice disguises actual patterns of innovation and technological evolution. It is critical not to overlook this, as small-scale technological innovation allowed for more behavioral flexibility in response to rapid environmental change in a arid, mosaic environment.     

Sensory geographies and defamiliarisation: migrant women encounter Brighton Beach

This article’s starting point is a sensory, reflexive walk taken on Brighton seafront and beach, by fourteen migrant women and some of their children. It goes on to open up a wider discussion about the cultural politics and affective resonances, for refugees and migrants, of beaches. By discussing their sensory experiences of the beach, we begin to understand their ‘ostranenie’, or defamiliarisation, of making the familiar strange. We also see how evocative such sense-making can be, as the women compare their past lives to this, perceiving their lifeworld through a filter of migrancy.

The article goes onto discuss the broader cultural symbolism of beaches, which are a site of contestation over national values, boundaries and belonging. As well as discussing sensory methodology in this article, and explaining the locale of Brighton Beach itself, it concludes with some wider thinking of the cultural politics of beach spaces and migrant perceptions.     

Future Non-Analogue Climates for Scotland’s Temperate Rainforest

Temperate rainforest is restricted to a globally rare set of climatic conditions. Scotland has among the best remaining examples of intact temperate rainforest in Europe, characterised ecologically by a unique assemblage of epiphytic bryophytes and lichens. Given climatic control on rainforest distribution and ecology, climate change is a probable risk to Scotland’s rainforest. This study investigated climate change impacts for 20 target sites, classified based on (i) bioclimatic conditions, and (ii) epiphytic diversity, into contrasting rainforest and more continental (non-rainforest) examples. Space-for-time matching identified climate analogues within the European conservation forest network, which at present have a climate similar to that expected of the target sites during the 2080s (WorldClim datasets). The results show that 2080s analogues for sites in more continental north-eastern Scotland occur in Wales and southern England. However, Scottish rainforest sites were their own ‘best analogues’ through to the 2080s, despite the fact that their climate is projected to change significantly; they had no suitable future analogue within Europe’s conservation forest network. These contrasting regional patterns highlight the need for a flexible approach to species conservation during climate change, including a strategy to cope with ecological uncertainty in Scotland’s zone of oceanic rainforest.