Native American Women in a Contemporary World

Most scholarly literature of Native American peoples and cultures focuses on the ill effects that colonialism has had on their societies and cultures. However, recent scholarship explores the creative adaptations that Native Americans have made to modern life. There is also more research on the lives of women. Finally, current research is often conducted as a collaborative venture, with the scholars/editors giving up some of their power and authority to their Native American collaborators. This review discusses two recent books, Grandmother's Grandchild and Blood and Voice, that reflect this new scholarship.     

The Prehistory of the Tibetan Plateau to the Seventh Century A.D.: Perspectives and Research from China and the West Since 1950

Until recently, there has been no sense of a Tibetan prehistory. Beginning in the 1970s, however, Chinese archaeologists began to systematically explore the plateau, and began to draw an outline of the deep Tibetan past. The pace of research accelerated rapidly in the 1990s, which brought this outline into sharper focus. This paper reviews what is known of Tibetan prehistory until the seventh century A.D., when the Tibetan empire was established. Topics covered in this paper include a consideration of the antiquity of a human presence upon the plateau, changing adaptive strategies following the end of the glacial epoch, the advent of the Neolithic, and the emergence of social and political complexity. Despite significant advances in our knowledge of the Tibetan past, much work remains to be done before models of process can be examined in any detail.     

Human ecological niches and ranges during the LGM in Europe derived from an application of eco-cultural niche modeling

We apply eco-cultural niche modeling (ECNM), an heuristic approach adapted from the biodiversity sciences, to identify habitable portions of the European territory for Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), circumscribe potential geographic extents of the Solutrean and Epigravettian technocomplexes, evaluate environmental and adaptive factors that influenced their distributions, and discuss this method's potential to illuminate past human–environment interaction. Our ECNM approach employed the Genetic Algorithm for Rule-Set Prediction (GARP) and used as input a combination of archaeological and geographic data, in conjunction with high-resolution paleoclimatic simulations for this time frame. The archaeological data consist of geographic coordinates of sites dated by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry to the LGM and attributed to the Solutrean and Epigravettian technocomplexes. The areas predicted by ECNM consistently outline the northern boundary of human presence at 22,000–20,000 cal BP. This boundary is mainly determined by climatic constraints and corresponds well to known southern limits of periglacial environments and permafrost conditions during the LGM. Differences between predicted ecological niches and known ranges of the Solutrean and Epigravettian technocomplexes are interpreted as Solutrean populations being adapted to colder and more humid environments and as reflecting influences of ecological risk on geographic distributions of cultures.     

Mobile Adaptation and Sticky Experiments: Circulating Best Practices and Lessons Learned in Climate Change Adaptation

This article engages with the recent geographical literature on policy mobilities in order to examine how the World Bank mobilizes climate change adaptation 'best practices'. Drawing from the relational case study of the Kiribati Adaptation Project and the Community Resilience to Climate Change and Disaster Risk in Solomon Islands Project, the article explores the complex and intensive work required for mobilizing lessons and practices. The analytical work required in building the Kiribati Adaptation Project as a World Bank success story and policy model worthy of replication in new sites is demonstrated. However, heeding calls within the policy mobilities literature to avoid fetishizing mobility and attending to the contradictions between global flows and local institutional specificity, the article finds limited evidence of replication in noted sites of emulation. Instead, there is compulsive citation, publication, and circulation of experiences and successes within the World Bank, which operates to build internal and external legitimacy.     

Australia's national climate: learning to adapt?

Pride in Australia's extreme climate has long been a part of Australia's national identity. Today, climate continues to be enrolled in a range of nationalistic projects, including the (re)development of climate science and other responses to climate change. In this paper, we outline some of the contours of the ‘Australian national climate’, claims to know it, and four idealised responses to it: bounce back, dismissal, endurance, and migration. We argue that the deeply cultural framing of climate in Australia—in particular, Australians' emphasis on the climate's inherent variability and unknowability, and their own historical adaptability—is being exploited by the federal government and hampering climate change mitigation nationally.     

Evaluating Comanagement for Social‐Ecological Fit: Indigenous Priorities and Agency Mandates for Pacific Walrus

Governance arrangements such as comanagement are regarded by many as promising arenas for effective natural resource management. However, measuring comanagement's success at achieving conservation goals has been equivocal. Our research evaluates the lack of conclusive outcomes through a critical consideration of how different goals and values inherent in comanagement affect the institutional (or policy) diagnostic of “fit.” More narrowly, sustaining natural resources requires that management policies foster fit between the scales of sociopolitical processes governing resource use and the scales of ecological processes regulating a resource. Without a process that encourages such harmonization, theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that comanagement regimes are unlikely to accomplish long‐term conservation goals. We use a case study of walrus comanagement under the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act to demonstrate that when the formal institutions preconditioning comanagement do not develop out of a deliberative process among comanagement partners, two major problems can arise: (i) Policy institutions mismatch ecological and social processes relevant to resources and communities; and (ii) data to assess the fit of institutions and support learning is more difficult to acquire. In our case study, both these factors constrain the ability of comanagement to foster walrus conservation or support the capacity of Native Alaskans to adapt to contemporary social and environmental conditions. Our research concludes that to achieve marine mammal conservation, previous institutional arrangements framing comanagement that are predicated on static conceptions of people and ecosystems must be redesigned to provide better policy fit across local to international priorities. To do so requires opening up deliberative spaces, where Western science and priorities are confronted with indigenous perspectives. However, the benefit of enhancing deliberation carries risks and costs related to trade‐offs between the values of democratic process, and protections for both wildlife species and indigenous groups.     

Climate change perceptions and responses in Scotland's ski industry

The negative impacts of climate change for the ski industry have been well documented. However, research has largely focused on key ski markets in North America and Continental Europe. The study presented in this paper addresses climate change perceptions and responses in the more marginal ski destination of Scotland. Using a qualitative, interpretivist methodology, this paper contributes through a local-scale, single-site study of a ski area where technical adaptations are not utilised and which therefore relies on business responses to climate change. Findings suggest that while local weather is perceived to be a large and unmanageable risk to the industry, and a downward trend is identified in terms of snow reliability, these risks are not perceived to be connected to the wider anthropogenic climate change discourse. Waiting for knowledge to increase before taking adaptive action appears to be the most popular business strategy; however, autonomous adaptation is taking place in the form of business diversification, which mitigates against risks including, but not limited to, climate change. This paper concludes that experiences and perceptions of climate change will be highly localised and as a result so too will adaptive behaviours. Marginal ski destinations such as Scotland will be facing a range of non-climatic impacts which will contribute to their contextual vulnerability to climate change and capacity to adapt.     

加拿大中国移民创业模式新探

论文在有关加拿大中国移民最新研究成果基础上,从移民经济适应行为的视角,对移民群体特征及其所面临的机会进行了分析阐述,并提出了一个移民自主创业的分析模型。该模型将移民自主创业行为区分为四种模式,即族裔经济、一般企业、海归企业和跨国创业。随着市场环境、母国政策及企业自身发展水平的不断变化,移民企业家的经济活动可能表现为在几种模式之间的过渡或跃迁。对移民经济行为的研究,需要突破传统的族裔经济的视野,把移民的经济参与放在一个社会经济日益开放、国际社区间联系日益紧密的大背景下加以考虑。     

Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster Resilience

This paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community‐based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts. Garrison life has been shaped by the confluence of political economic, cultural, geopolitical force relations, which creates a hyper‐adaptive life that exceeds the techniques and rationalities of neoliberal disaster resilience. I draw on autonomist Marxist and Deleuzian readings of biopolitics to identify a new subject of disaster politics that I call, after Deleuze and Guattari, “adaptation machines”, decentralized apparatuses of capture that are parasitically reliant on the population's immanent adaptive capacities. The concept of adaptation machines enables us to envision resilience politics as a struggle over how to appropriate vulnerable peoples’ world‐forming constituent power.     

Archaeological Investigations in the Harbours of Burgaz,Turkey: 2011–2015 field seasons

Between 2011 and 2015 archaeological fieldwork was conducted in the Archaic through Late Antique harbours associated with Burgaz on the Datça Peninsula in south‐west Turkey. This work focused on survey and documentation of built features associated with the four harbours, limited stratigraphic excavation, and identification of shipwrecks and seafaring activity outside the harbours. The results offer new insights into the growth, expansion, and eventual abandonment of the port complex, its development alongside the urban settlement, and its changing maritime dynamics in light of economic shifts across the peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean.