Participation and Power: Poor People's Engagement with India's Employment Assurance Scheme

‘Participation’ has become an essential part of good developmental practice for Southern governments, NGOs and international agencies alike. In this article we reflect critically on this shift by investigating how a ‘participatory’ development programme — India's Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS) — intersects with poor people's existing social networks. By placing the formalized process of participation in the EAS within the context of these varied and uneven village–level relationships, we raise a number of important issues for participatory development practice. We note the importance of local power brokers and the heterogeneity of ‘grassroots’ (dis)empowerment, and question ideas of power reversals used within the participatory development literature.     

The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe

Apparitions were the subject of fierce theological and philosophical debate in the period after the Reformation. But these controversies also raised issues fundamental to the nature and organization of human vision. They crossed and recrossed the boundaries between religion and the science and psychology of optics. Apparitions, after all, are things that appear, and spectres are things that are seen. Before they could mean anything to anyone they had to be correctly identified as phenomena. Their religious role, whether Protestant or Catholic, presupposed a perceptual judgement — essentially visual in character — about just what they were. During the early modern period this judgement — this visual identification — became vastly more complex and contentious than ever before, certainly much more so than in the case of medieval ghosts. The sceptics, natural magicians, and atheists turned apparitions into optical tricks played by nature or human artifice; the religious controversialists and demonologists thought that demons might also be responsible. This essay argues that the debate that ensued, irrespective of the confessional allegiances of the protagonists, was the occasion for some of the most sustained and sophisticated of the early modern arguments about truth and illusion in the visual world.     

Mitochondrial DNA from 3000-year old chickens at the Teouma site,Vanuatu

Chickens were part of the Lapita cultural complex, transported into and through the Pacific by prehistoric colonists; as such they can be used as a proxy for tracking prehistoric migration and interaction. The Lapita site of Teouma in Vanuatu is well known for the recovery of complete dentate stamped pots and a cemetery containing the largest collection of Lapita period skeletons ever found. Chicken bones recovered from these excavations provide the first ancient DNA sequences from any commensal organism directly associated with a Lapita context. The ancient mtDNA sequences obtained from two Teouma chicken bones are compared with previously published archaeologically derived ancient DNA sequences to extend our understanding of the spread of chickens in Pacific prehistory. The results also show that the haplogroup E signature was present in very early populations of chickens transported into Remote Oceania. This study also adds to the suite of available data relating to isotopic signatures for commensal animals during the early settlement of Vanuatu and may reveal a different diet for Teouma chickens than those from other early prehistoric assemblages in the Pacific.     

Lapita subsistence strategies and food consumption patterns in the community of Teouma (Efate,Vanuatu)

The subsistence strategies of the Lapita populations (3100–2800 BP), the first colonisers of the pristine environments of the islands of Eastern Melanesia and Western Polynesia, have been a matter of ongoing debate for decades. Opinions have ranged between the two extremes of Lapita colonisers being either characterised as highly mobile foragers to fully horticultural communities. To further address the question, this paper presents stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic data obtained from analyses of human and animal collagen samples from the site of Teouma (Efate, Vanuatu) dated to between c. 3000–2500 BP. The isotopic signatures obtained from 28 samples (23 human and 5 animal), interpreted in combination with isotopic information from several coastal and insular environments, suggest a diet primarily made up of terrestrially derived animal protein with lesser contributions from vegetable produce and inshore marine species. Comparisons linking the isotopic data gleaned from the Teouma individuals and Lapita subsistence patterns reconstructed through archaeozoological and archaeobotanical remains support the hypothesis of a mixed economy, that included terrestrial foraging, inshore marine exploitation and a low level of food production for at least some of the earliest Lapita colonists in Vanuatu.     

Benevolent and Benign? Using Environmental Justice to Investigate Waste‐related Impacts of Ecotourism in Destination Communities

Abstract:  We contribute to the diversification of environmental justice (EJ) by using it to frame ecotourism-related solid waste management problems. Ecotourism is a service industry portrayed as benevolent (providing benefits), and benign (reducing negative impacts). We propose four characteristics shared by ecotourism-based communities in the Global South and communities struggling with more conventional EJ conflicts. We apply these characteristics to the solid waste crisis in Tortuguero, Costa Rica, a renowned ecotourism destination. First, we show that, despite their general absences from the EJ literature, service industries such as tourism and hospitality can create environmental injustices that disproportionately impact certain types of communities. Second, we highlight the roles of location and socio-economic marginality in siting ecotourism development, in complicating related environmental impact management, and in limiting local abilities to respond to environmental management shortcomings. Third, we provide an example of opportunities to introduce EJ concepts and theory into the study of tourism.     

“Dissemination as Intervention”: Building Local HIV Competence through the Report Back of Research Findings to a South African Rural Community

Abstract: What ethical obligations do researchers have to research informants in marginalised communities in serious distress? Our “dissemination as intervention” exercise reported research findings back to a South African rural community—using a dialogical approach which sought to strengthen participants’ confidence and ability to respond more effectively to HIV/AIDS. Nine workshops were conducted with 121 people. Workshops provided opportunities for participants to start developing critical understandings of the possibilities and limitations of their responses to HIV/AIDS, understandings which constitute a necessary (though obviously not sufficient) condition for further action. Workshops alerted participants to the valuable role played by local HIV/AIDS volunteers, facilitating reflection on how local people might better support the volunteers. These discussions served as the impetus for the establishment of a three‐year community‐led intervention to further these goals.     

Pre-Clovis in Texas? A critical assessment of the “Buttermilk Creek Complex”

Lithic artifacts from the lowest strata of the Debra L. Friedkin site, located on Buttermilk Creek in central Texas, have been interpreted as an undisturbed pre-Clovis assemblage (Waters et al., 2011a). Stone tools and debitage were recovered from sediments stratified just below diagnostic Clovis artifacts and dated by OSL to between 13.2 and >15.5 cal kya. Invoking commonly observed cultural and natural site formation processes, we offer an alternative explanation of the “Buttermilk Creek Complex” as a Clovis assemblage in secondary association with the dated sediments.