The Archaeology of El Niño Events and Other “Natural” Disasters

Archaeological research on disasters has increased substantially since Sheets's 1980 review of the topic, and with heightened media coverage and funding for the study of such events, archaeological interest will continue to grow. This paper examines how prehistorians have incorporated disasters into their research since 1980, using the literature on El Niño as an illustrative case, and assesses this work in relation to geographical approaches to disaster as well as concepts that have been developed within the new ecologies.     

大数据背景下国内人文地理研究进展与方法审视

通过梳理人文地理领域杂志近年大数据文章解释其与大数据应用的关系，强调其应用给人文地理学研究带来机遇和挑战：①大数据作为研究方法，不能代替传统人文地理研究范式，而是对现研究方法的补充。大数据和小数据需对话交流；②大数据本身是一种话语权，嵌入人文地理研究系统。保证人文地理学多样性，避免过度依赖大数据，需在批判角度审视和运用；③需关注大数据对于人文地理学研究方法和思想的影响；④运用大数据解读地理和空间过程复杂性的同时，应看到大数据应用对公共服务的潜力，思考其结果如何更好的服务社会。     

Disparity Despite Diversity: Social Injustice in New York City's Urban Agriculture System

Many studies have documented the benefits of urban agriculture, including increased food access, job creation, educational opportunities, and green space. A focus on its social benefits has fed an association of urban agriculture with social justice, yet there is a distinction between alleviating symptoms of injustice (such as disparate access to food or environmental amenities) and disrupting structures that underlie them. Despite its positive impacts, urban agriculture systems may reinforce inequities that practitioners and supporters aim to address. This paper reports findings from a 2‐year study of urban agriculture in New York City, which found race‐ and class‐based disparities among practitioners citywide. Using the lens of critical race theory, it argues that a failure to examine urban agriculture's role in either supporting or dismantling unjust structures may perpetuate an inequitable system. The paper concludes with recommendations for urban agriculture supporters and scholars to help advance social justice at structural levels.     

展览物件意义建构的若干研究方法述评

意义建构既是展览研究的一个主题,也是研究物件意义的一种思维方法,它强调物件的意义是建构的而非给定的.在涉及意义建构主题的具体研究方法中,符号学分析强调展览是意义建构的网络;心理学分析重视观众的心理过程在意义建构中的作用;互动模式分析提出诸种要素互动过程中观众的核心作用;现象学分析突出个人生活世界的维度;认知过程分析聚焦...     

Polylinear incursions and autochthonous adaptations: Neolithisation and sustainable sedentarisation of the Arabian Peninsula

This contribution’s broad and in parts essayistic approach to Arabia’s Neolithic is less a discussion of findings than an explicit advocacy for future holistic research strategies. Based on the contribution’s meta-theoretical inputs, it suggests two sets of theses to be tested by the hitherto gained fragmentary information and future research on Arabia’s Neolithic. It aims to encourage an “emancipation” of Arabia’s early to mid-Holocene research from conceptions developed outside its regions, and to identify the Neolithic elements and developments of the Arabian lands by distinguishing incursions from primarily autochthonous and/or autonomous adaptations in their own right. It is suggested that productive lifeways are considered to be the only crucial parameter to testify a Neolithic status. In our view this is the case, provokingly enough, for the productive foraging management of natural resources which attests surplus and pre-planning strategies and contacts with established Neolithic socio-economies. Polylinear incursions and autochthonous adaptations are discussed as the two poles between which early to mid-Holocene developments in Arabia took place. A set of basic and a set of trajectory hypotheses on Arabia’s neolithisation and finally sustainable sedentarisation (reliance on oases economies) is presented, offered as a possible framework for future multi-/ transdisciplinary research.     

Towards transnational feminist queer methodologies

This article introduces the possibilities of transnational feminist queer research as seeking to conceptualise the transnational as a methodology composed of a series of flows that can augment feminist and queer research. Transnational feminist queer methodologies can contest long-standing configurations of power between researcher and researched, subject and object, academics and activists across places, typically those which are embedded in the hierarchies of the Global North/Global South. Beginning with charting our roots in, and routes through, the diverse arenas of transnational, feminist, participatory and queer methodologies, the article uses a transcribed and edited conversation between members of the Liveable Lives research team in Kolkata and Brighton, to start an exploration of transnational feminist queer methodologies. Understanding the difficult, yet constructive moments of collaborative work and dialogue, we argue for engagements with the multiplicities of ‘many-many’ lives that recognise local specificities, and the complexities of lives within transnational research, avoiding creating a currency of comparison between places. We seek to work toward methodologies that take seriously the politics of place, namely by creating research that answers the same question in different places, using methods that are created in context and may not be ‘comparable’. Using a dialogue across the boundaries of activism/academia, as well as across geographical locations, the article contends that there are potentials, as well as challenges, in thinking ourselves through transnational research praxis. This seeks complexities and spatial nuances within as well as between places.     

Ruy Cinatti,the French–Portuguese mission and the construct of East Timor as an ethnographic site*

The French–Portuguese Ethnological Mission to Portuguese Timor (1966/1969) financed by French and Portuguese research bodies and initially directed by Louis Berthe was the first mission that conducted lengthy and thorough ethnographic research in East Timor vernaculars and with East Timorese communities. Using personal and scientific archives, printed and oral sources, this article analyses the mission’s background, the role of Ruy Cinatti (a Portuguese poet, former colonial official in Timor and anthropologist trained in Oxford) in its launch, and its political and scientific context. The mission, undertaken during the Portuguese late colonial period and subject to the Portuguese authorities’ approval and surveillance, marked East Timor as a site of anthropological inquiry into the Anthropology of European tradition produced in Southeast Asia, affiliated to post-war structuralism. This case study throws light on individual agency, Portugal’s shortcomings in modern anthropology training, the international competition for Portuguese Timor as part of the Indonesian “field of ethnological study” and the transnational connections in its construction in the era of decolonization.     

Re-examining the Australian public's attitude to military casualties: post-heroic or defeat-phobic?

Australia, like most other developed democracies, is often alleged to suffer from ‘casualty phobia’. The perception that the Australian public will not tolerate casualties in foreign conflicts has shaped the decisions of both civilian and military policy makers. Measures taken to protect Australian forces from casualties may, for instance, also serve to increase the risk to civilians in the country to which they are deployed. The USA underwent a similar debate some years ago. Innovative public opinion research techniques—especially ‘survey experiments’ which allow researchers to establish causal relationships by consciously manipulating one variable while holding others constant—have established that the American public are not reflexively casualty-phobic and that the impact of casualties on public opinion can be outweighed by other factors, such as the public's confidence in the mission's overall success. In this article, the author replicates one of the key survey experiments from the US debate, suitably adapted to Australian conditions, with a nationally representative sample of Australian voters. The author finds that the same pattern holds in Australia as in the USA: casualties do lower public support for a given mission, but the mission's chances of success matter more.     

Constituencies of conflict and opportunity: Land rights,narratives and collective action in Darfur

Grievance-based narratives are a primary component of civil wars. While present among the general population affected by conflict, the variants held by the segment of the population most proximate to the armed factions – constituencies – play a primary role in the development and conduct of a conflict. Such narratives can coalesce around specific volatile issues and enable non-combatant constituencies to participate in the conflict through the use of specific 'legalities' or legal precepts. These legalities facilitate the engagement of sets of collective action that are opposed to those derived by constituencies of the opposing side. However such constituencies and their narratives are also where potential opportunity resides for peace-building, both during and subsequent to hostilities. This article looks at the case of Darfur to examine these ingredients, with a focus on land rights as the volatile set of issues around which narratives have developed. In Darfur, opposed narratives which maintain how and why groups claim and deserve access to land and territory, and how groups were unjustly displaced or excluded from lands (and hence power), became solidified and acted upon prior to the conflict to become a primary driver in the current war. In certain cases however narrative change has led to interaction between members of opposed constituencies for the purpose of exploring cooperative arrangements.     

曹仲达与“曹家样”研究

本文重新研究曹仲达与“曹家样”,考订了曹氏的生卒年及其可考的生平,认为他有着由南(朝)入北(朝)的经历。本文从画史所载曹氏师承入手,发现代表南梁新画风的张僧繇和来自中亚西域的塞特(壮)勤是其师承的重要来源,从而进一步探讨了“曹家样”的形成问题,认为“曹家样”是南、北二源以及其他复杂的社会、宗教、文化身份认同等因素共同作用的结果。本文还对长时段、大范围内相关的图像遗存进行考察,重新勾勒了“曹家样”的面貌。在对这一具体问题研究的基础上,作者提倡在后现代之后风格史研究的一种可能与方向——厚背景研究法。