Thirty years of science studies: knowledge,society and the political

This article explores the last 30 years of science studies. It presents what the author takes to be some of the main questions raised in this field, the solutions most of its practitioners advocated, and what informed their intellectual and political attitudes. It tries to place the social studies of knowledge in a broader perspective, linking it to parallel changes in anthropology, sociology and history, and it questions its relations to social change on the one hand, and to the political on the other. It closes with a critique of some, often dominant, attitudes in the STS field.     

Technology and Global Politics: The Modern Experiences of Bertrand Russell and John H. Herz

As questions of technology and world government are returning to the agenda of International Relations (IR), there is a risk that technology is approached in a simple, instrumentalist manner. Beginning from an overview of the overwhelmingly instrumental approaches to technology lodged in the dominant traditions of IR, the article revisits the post-war decades when scholars thought profoundly about the impact of technology on global politics. Combining the history of (international) political thought, IR theory, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) the article examines the relationship between technology and politics, authority, and liberty in the thought of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and John H. Herz (1908–2005), which leads to the unearthing of a sophisticated and complex set of ideas. Particularly during the nuclear revolution, these figures developed global visions in which the interrelations among technology, security, democracy, sustainability, and freedom were critical. Russell and Herz's approaches to technology and (global) politics are insightful and relevant for IR's attempt to re-engage with technology: by anticipating contemporary critical and reflexive approaches to technology, they can help bridge the fields of IR and STS and open new avenues for research. The Large Technical Systems (LTS) approach within STS is used to exemplify this possibility.     

Heritage Noire: truth,history, and colonial anxiety in The Blair Witch Project

When watching the film The Blair Witch Project we seem to be witnessing through its clumsy, apparently uncrafted footage the unmediated documentation of 'reality' as it occurs. This article argues that the carefully crafted deceit of The Blair Witch Project may be understood as part of a subversive 'public history' project that uses modern history's own scientific motifs and methodologies against itself and challenges its basic tenets. If positive myths of the past are structured into what we tend to call heritage, i.e. shared narratives affirming a positive sense of self and region or nation, then this paper argues that The Blair Witch Project takes the same notion and subverts it, giving its chosen audience a dark and unsettling sense of its own history.     

俄罗斯的亚太战略与政策探析

俄罗斯作为苏联解体后的当然继承国,成为当今世界政治经济格局多极化发展趋势中重要的一极。目前俄罗斯承袭了苏联后期的亚太战略,并在某种程度上使其有所发展。本文在分析苏联后期实施亚太战略与政策的基础上,着重探讨了俄罗斯目前实施亚太政治经济战略的新东方政策与措施,并对其远东同亚太各国的经济联系的近期态势进行了实证分析;论述了中俄关系对实施其亚太战略的重要性;指出中俄建立面向21世纪的战略协作伙伴关系完全符合两国各自的地缘经济利益。     

Covert Control? Indigenous Agency in Edward Winslow Gifford’s Fijian Archaeological Expedition of 1947

ABSTRACT

The story of University of California archaeologist Edward Winslow Gifford’s 1947 Fijian fieldwork has been told up to now as a classic piece of colonial fieldwork with aims and direction dictated by the foreign specialist. But examination of the extensive Gifford archive held in the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and its Hearst Museum and a bit of ‘reading against the grain’ reveal a quite different story. Indigenous agency played a major, probably even decisive, role in how the expedition unfolded. The value of archival research into the history of archaeology, and particularly its contribution to the teaching of archaeological practice today, is significant in revealing ‘hidden histories’ that make a difference.     

Framing social rebalancing,national identity,and victimhood in Kanaky/New Caledonia

New Caledonia is an island territory located in the French South Pacific. In 2018, the first of three referenda on the island’s sovereignty will occur. Over the next decade, inhabitants of this territory will decide whether to become fully sovereign, maintain their dependence on France, or enter into an independent-association relationship with another state. Through a series of interviews with prominent New Caledonian politicians and secondary sources, this article explores how definitions of victimhood and national identity construction shape the notion of rebalancing. Both loyalist and nationalist politicians argue that the current social inequalities between New Caledonian communities require targeted policies intended to re-balance the populations. Politicians use these victim narratives and national identities to construct imagined communities that advocate for the inclusive or exclusive application of the right to self-determination.     

Ecological Contingency Accounts for Earliest Seagoing in the Western Pacific Ocean

Seagoing at 1 mya to Flores, and sea gaps of >50 km crossed by 47 kya to Sahul, are evidence of earlier maritime migration in the western Pacific than anywhere else. Current opinion attributes the latter to the influence of anatomically modern human cultural complexity on seagoing technology and practice, together with the impetus of serial resource depression. It is argued here that seagoing was unusually advantaged in the western Pacific by a fortuitous conjunction of the warmest seas with a ready availability of large-diameter bamboo that occurred as natural rafts, and which could also be constructed into rafts large enough to transport viable colonizing groups from island to island across Wallacea to Sahul. The geography of Wallacea allowed migration solely by drifting, and exploratory landscape learning might have produced landfalls on Sahul sooner than is implied by subsistence forcing of mobility. Seagoing by drifting raft was much harder from Sahul to the east because of the virtual absence of large-diameter bamboo and longer distance to fewer or small islands; colonization occurred much later.     

Pacific Coconut: Comestible,Comfort and Commodity

ABSTRACT

As the title implies this special issue concentrates on the coconut in its older usages and its transformation into commodities. The coconut has many histories, with specific intersections with each Pacific island society, indeed each community and family. This brief introduction seeks to give an overview of its penetration into the lives and societies at several levels, from small clans to major companies, from growers to governments, all implicated along the commodity chain. In spite of the coconut’s ubiquity, the historiography has never addressed it fully but taken it rather as a given, one player in capitalism in the region, yet in fact, for over a hundred years, it was the star product upon which many governments and people across the tropical Pacific depended for income. We hope that some aspects of the coconut’s complexity and meaning are brought to light in the following new contributions to its history.     

A Better Savage than the Savages: Thor Heyerdahl's Early Ethnographical Attempts and their Importance for the Development of the ‘Kon-Tiki Theory’

ABSTRACT

In this paper Thor Heyerdahl's early attempts at ethnography and his first contact with Polynesian archaeology are discussed. It is argued that Heyerdahl, prior to his first Pacific expedition to the Marquesas Islands in 1937, carried with him a romanticized perception of the Polynesian people, imagining them to be the last living ‘natural men’. This perception was shattered during his expedition, and the disappointing contrast between the imagined reality and the lived reality led Heyerdahl to separate the contemporary Polynesian population from the Polynesian archaeological record. It is further argued that this separation between contemporary Polynesians and the Polynesian archaeological record would form the foundation for the dual migration wave hypothesis Heyerdahl later launched with his ‘Kon-Tiki theory’.     

New Insights into the Provenance of the Obsidian Fragments of the Island of Ustica (Palermo,Sicily)

In this study we applied a multidisciplinary approach, coupling geophysical and geochemical measurements, to unveil the provenance of 170 obsidian flakes, collected on the volcanic island of Ustica (Sicily). On this island there are some prehistoric settlements dated from the Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age. Despite not having geological outcrops of obsidian rocks, the countryside of Ustica is rich in fragments of this volcanic glass, imported from other source areas. The study of obsidian findings was carried out first through visual observations and density measurements. At least two different obsidian families have been distinguished, probably imported from Lipari and Pantelleria islands. Analysing the magnetic properties of the samples, these two main sources were confirmed, but the possibility of other provenances was inferred. Finally, we characterized the geochemical signature of the Ustica obsidians by performing microchemical analyses through electron microprobe (EMPA) and laser ablation (LA–ICP–MS). The results were compared with literature data, confirming the presence of the Lipari and Pantelleria sources (Sicily) and indicating for the first time in this part of Italy a third provenance from Palmarola island (Latium). Our results shed new light on the commercial exchanges in the peri‐Tyrrhenian area during the prehistoric age.