Selling Conflict Heritage through Tourism in Peacetime Northern Ireland: Transforming Conflict or Exacerbating Difference?

The paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 and the ensuing peace negotiations brought to a close some three decades of ethno‐nationalist violence in Northern Ireland. The conflict, colloquially termed the Troubles, cost almost 3,700 lives, and bequeathed both a tangible and intangible heritage of division and hurt. This paper considers the commodification of physical conflict ‘heritage’ such as military installations, memorials and street murals through an examination of various tourism initiatives. Such initiatives have been employed by a number of agents ranging from local councils and tourist boards to small community groups and ex‐prisoner organisations. While ‘official’ agencies recognise the economic potential of this form of heritage, community‐based groups often view the sites and symbols of the conflict as vehicles through which to propagate political perspectives. Those sold by the latter, in particular, are often supported by government bodies that fund such forms of tourism under the auspices of ‘conflict transformation’, a strategy that is aimed at transforming the nature of the conflict through fostering self‐understanding within disputant communities. I participated in a number of these tours over the course of six months in 2005/2006.     

Fractured Media: Challenging the Dimensions of Archaeology’s Typical Visual Modes of Engagement

As new media technologies increasingly populate our toolkits, questions arise about whether archaeologists are yet even competent users of orthodox media. Prior to engaging with emerging tools, this paper takes one step back to probe the subtexts of traditional two-dimensional archaeological images. Of interest is whether the many implications of these images can be made poignant via personally manipulating and imposing upon their form and function. Influenced by the work of various playwrights, artists, anthropologists, cultural theorists, and archaeologists, this paper examines what is legitimate in our practices of picturing the past, and what it means to explicitly—perhaps illicitly—interfere with typical archaeological visuals. Via tentative experiments with assorted maps, photos and illustrations, I endeavour to turn these orthodox modes of engagement into more defiant tools of discovery and critique. Ultimately, my objective is to disrupt convention and prompt archaeologists to confront and respond to themselves (and their responsibilities to others) in their everyday interactions with media.     

Rocks are heavy: transport costs and Paleoarchaic quarry behavior in the Great Basin

Central place foraging models are used to investigate assemblage variability at two Paleoarchaic (terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene) dacite quarries in the central and eastern Great Basin. Our analyses focus specifically on biface reduction and how varying degrees of reduction relate to the costs of transporting the resulting products upon departing the quarry. Our results suggest that when the distance to be traveled to a residential base is great, reduction will proceed further at the quarry than if the residential base is fairly close. Further, a residential site assemblage will consist of bifaces at later stages of reduction than its associated quarry.     

Property,Authority and Citizenship: Land Claims,Politics and the Dynamics of Social Division in West Africa

In the contemporary African context of rising competition and anxiety over access to land, neoliberal policy interventions designed to clarify property rights, broaden political participation and increase official accountability have frequently provoked rather than alleviated social and political conflict. Comparing case histories of local struggles over land and authority in selected rural areas in Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Bénin, this paper argues that in situations where access to land has been linked historically to claims on authority and social belonging, pressures to privatize or clarify ownership have intensified debates over citizenship and governance as well as over land claims per se. Ensuing struggles over land and entitlement have intersected with national as well as local economic and political dynamics, reinforcing ‘traditional’ hierarchies, contributing to the proliferation of formal and informal governing agents and institutions, and frequently disrupting or subverting open governance and sustainable resource use, rather than helping to create conditions for sustainable development and democratization.     

Commemorating dead ‘men’: gendering the past and present in post-conflict Northern Ireland

War is instrumental in shaping and negotiating gender identities. But what role does peace play in dispelling or affirming the gender order in post-conflict contexts? Building on a burgeoning international literature on representative landscapes and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Northern Ireland between 2003 and 2006, this article explores the peacetime commemoration of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ in order to explore the nuances of gender. Tellingly, the memorial landscapes cultivated since the inception of the paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 privilege male interpretations of the past (and, therefore, present). Gender parity, despite being enshrined within the 1998 Belfast Agreement which sought to draw a line under almost three decades of ethno-nationalist violence, remains an elusive utopia, as memorials continue to propagate specific roles for men and women in the ‘national project’. As the masculine ideologies of Irish Nationalism/Republicanism and British Unionism/Loyalism inscribe their respective disputant pasts into the streetscape, the narratives of women have been blurred and disrupted, begging the question: what role can they play in the future?     

Local Indicator of Spatial Agglomeration between Newly Opened Outlets and Existing Competitors on a Street Network

Distance from competitors is a key factor in retail site selection and profitability. To understand the locational tendency that each newly opened outlet locates close to or far from existing competitors in a target area, a specific method is needed. Hence, this study aims first to develop a statistical method to discover the local spatial associations between newly opened and existing point-like outlets on a street network. We achieve this objective by extending the network local cross K function. The second objective is to evaluate the practicality of the proposed method by applying it to restaurants in a trendy district in Tokyo. Specifically, this study focuses on answering two questions: first, whether each newly opened restaurant is closely located to existing ones or not and, second, whether each existing restaurant attracts newly opened restaurants or not. The results show that the method is useful for revealing the location tendencies of retail outlets toward competitors.     

Young people and drinking in Italy: the good side of familism

Abstract

Since the 1990s, young people’s drinking has been a matter of public concern, attracting considerable media attention that has contributed to spreading the alarm. The purpose of this article is to dispel some stereotypes about youth drinking in Italy, by putting it in an international perspective and explaining some of the key factors that have contributed so far to limiting the spread of at-risk alcohol consumption when compared to other countries. Among these factors, the persistence of social values that emphasize family ties and the sharing of informal norms between adults and young people seem to play a prominent role. However, both the spread of increasingly individualistic values at a global level, and the growing complexity of transitions to adulthood could lead to changes in consumption patterns among Italian youth in the near future and increase risky behaviours.     

Seeing,Iranian Style: Women and Collective Vision in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin

This paper examines the relationship between remediation and intertextuality in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin (2008), arguing that the act of absorbing and transforming other texts and media within one film creates new conditions for collective vision within the post-revolutionary Iranian discourse of visuality. Focusing on the faces of 114 actresses as they watch a film adaptation of the story of “Khosrow and Shirin,” Kiarostami challenges the post-revolutionary modesty laws and their emphasis on not looking at women and at avoiding a spectator–image relationship based on the fulfillment of the desiring male gaze. By making women the spectators, the film suggests that there is no collective vision without women's vision.