Digging and destruction: artifact collecting as meaningful social practice

Collected sites are commonly seen as places requiring expert intervention to ‘save the past’ from destruction by artifact collectors and looters. Despite engaging directly with the physical effects of collecting and vandalism, little attention is given to the meanings of these actions and the contributions they make to the stories told about sites or the past more broadly. Professional archaeologists often position their engagement with site destruction as heritage ‘salvage’ and regard collecting as lacking any value in contemporary society. Repositioning collecting as meaningful social practice and heritage action raises the question: in failing to understand legal or illegal collecting as significant to heritage, have archaeologists contributed to the erasure of acts that aim to work out identities, memories and senses of place, and contribute to an individual’s or group’s sense of ontological security? This question is explored through a case study from the New England region of North America where archaeologists have allied with Native American and other stakeholders to advocate for heritage protection by taking an anti-looting/collecting stance. We explore alternatives to this position that engage directly with forms of collecting as meaningful social practices that are largely erased in site narratives.     

Made in Italy (by the Chinese): migration and the rebirth of textiles and apparel

People around the world are on the move and settling in new, unexpected places. In Prato, Italy, Chinese immigrants now run most of the city's textiles-apparel companies and even subcontract for such leading designers as Giorgio Armani and Dolce & Gabbana. Italian products once made by Italian workers are now increasingly made by the Chinese! I argue that this development resulted from dramatic macro-level policy shifts that created an opportunity for an uncanny synchronicity between the Chinese business approach and the demands of Italy's local, family-based, small-batch production environment. Despite fierce competition, outmoded policies and social friction, the Chinese have adapted to their new home and made significant contributions to an increasingly multiethnic and multicultural Italy.     

Critical voices from adolescent ‘shape shifters’ – accessing portraits in ‘Becoming Educated’

What young people have to say about schooling can be most revealing, particularly when they expose and challenge the injustices and logic of school policies and practices. This paper captures voices from secondary school students from a school in Victoria, Australia, as part of a research project called Becoming Educated. The paper explores a particular geography of youth around the notion of ‘shape shifter’ as it relates to young people's education in two ways: first, in understanding the changing roles and identities of students as observers of, and participants in, education policies and practices; and second, as a way of interpreting the intent of those who ‘shape’ new ideas and policies to create a kind of ‘temporary alteration of outside appearances for the purpose of deception’ [Merchant, B. 1995. “Current Educational Reform: ‘Shape-shifting’ or Genuine Improvements in the Quality of Teaching and Learning?” Educational Theory 45 (2, Spring): 251–268]. The latter has a particularly significant impact on the former, and this paradox is not one that goes unnoticed by young people.     

张家川马家塬战国墓地M21墓葬中铁器表面纺织残留物的鉴定

马家塬战国墓地是研究西戎文化以及秦戎文化交流的重要考古遗址。在M21墓葬发现了一些附着于铁器表面的矿化纺织品残片。这些矿物外壳保留了比较完整的纺织品形态,是研究早期纺织技术的宝贵资料。为此,本研究采用扫描电子显微镜(SEM)和高效液相色谱-质谱联用技术(HPLC-MS)对矿物纺织品残片的纤维原料进行了鉴定与分析:1)矿物外壳内部的纤维空洞结构形态与桑蚕丝的纤维形态特征相同;2)样品中检出了3组蚕丝蛋白的特征多肽片段。研究结果表明,M21墓葬中的纺织品残片的原料为蚕丝纤维(Bombyx mori)。丝绸的发现表明中原的丝绸成品或者纤维原料已经进入西戎地区,西戎与中原文明的交流更加密切。使用丝绸包裹铁器则表明西戎文化已经受到了一些中原风俗的影响。这一发现填补了马家塬遗址中纺织品研究的空白,不仅为研究秦戎地区的织造工艺和文化交流提供了重要资料,也为矿化纺织遗存中的桑蚕丝残留的鉴定提供了技术支持。     

Australia’s anti-Islam right in their own words. Text as data analysis of social media content

In recent years, far-right organisations have formed in response to what they believe to be the threat from the rise of Islam in Australia. Parallel movements have spawned an extensive literature internationally. In this study I investigate this movement in Australia using automated text analysis of all public posts from two of the most popular Australian anti-Islam groups on social media. This approach complements traditional polling methods by offering access to large samples of the spontaneously generated opinions, allowing subjects to speak in their own words. My analysis finds evidence that concerns about terrorism and the perceived political threat from Islam are paramount in these groups’ discussion of Muslims. I conclude by discussing the implications for counter-messaging strategies.     

Re-assembling the memorial landscape: the politics of walking tours in Taipei

This article argues that the memorial landscape is a dynamically composed assemblage of heterogeneous elements, and that the guided walking tour is a practical tactic through which discourses and materials might be re-assembled and thus re-signified. Guided walking tours therefore epitomise the relational rethinking of memorial landscapes, or quasi-heritage, in everyday urban life. Based on three case studies in Taipei, Taiwan, we discuss how memorial landscapes featuring the urban underclass and civil resistance might be strategically re-assembled. We explore to what extent the bodily practices, narratives, and reconfiguration of space have produced new memorialised landscapes. We conclude that guided walking tours are a form of social intervention that can reframe our understanding of memorialization or quasi-heritagization, especially in the urban arena where heterogeneous values increasingly compete.     

Performing the national territory: The geography of national‐day celebrations

The nation is a relatively abstract imagined community that is visualised through a variety of symbols as well as communicative and performative practices. In this paper, we explore how the national territory, one of the foundations of the nation‐state, is performed on national‐day celebrations and brings the nation into being. Drawing on ethnographic research on national days in Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, we show how the state's internal administrative divisions and ethnic differences are at once made explicit but also subordinated to the nation. Moreover, we show how in such celebrations, potentially disruptive or competing affiliations such as ethnicity and regional loyalties are re‐imagined. Both the rotation of the central celebration and its replication all over the national territory carry the nation into the regions and integrate the regions into the nation‐state. The ‘co‐memoration’ turns participants and spectators from locals into national compatriots and thus not only performs nationality but also performs the relationship among nation, state and citizen, set within a particular territory.     

Small and slow is beautiful: well-being, ‘socially connective retail’ and the independent bookshop

Despite the loss of much-loved bricks and mortar retailers, little has been said about how shopping contributes to well-being. Yet notions of social connectivity and cultural participation figure increasingly in attempts to define social well-being. Using ethnography at a cooperative, independent bookshop, observations at bookshop events and 30 bookseller interviews, and analysis of the diversity and geographies of UK-wide independent bookshops, this paper finds that independent booksellers must now be ‘skilled capitalists’, requiring an increasing array of skills and resources and a commercial disposition in order to survive in a highly competitive market that favours fast, high volume selling. Analysis of bookshop locations shows that high-street book shopping choice is restricting as numbers and variety of bookshops decrease, with a troubling rise in ‘independent bookshop deserts’. The paper argues that compared to other book retailers, independent bookshops are unparalleled in their ability to produce well-being: providing a socially valuable ‘socially connective retail’ that is present, participatory and particular.     

Parents of global youth: contesting debt and belonging

In the United States, recently arrived migrant youth encounter competing media and institutional discourses that cast them as dependents who have been rendered ‘left behind,’ ‘on their own,’ or ‘unaccompanied’ by their parents. A corresponding narrative emerges in which young migrants’ parents are framed as abusive, neglectful, and ignorant. Combined, these portrayals may garner specialized services and contribute to success in the legal realm. At the same time, however, they fail to recognize and even imperil the intimate intergenerational networks that facilitate transnational migration. In this article, we trace the homogenizing power of public discourses on young people and their families across two diverse ethnographic contexts, that of Chinese and Guatemalan migration. Focusing in particular on narratives of debt and belonging, we argue that the pervasive pathologization of migrant youths’ parents diminishes and contorts valued relationships over time. It correspondingly demands broader efforts to historicize and to contextualize youth mobility.