Indigenous myths and nation building in Latin America

In Latin America, ethnicity is equated with indigenity. It is an objective of this article to review the legacy of Anthony Smith regarding the vitality of the ethnic past and the myth of origin, as the core of his theory of nationalism based on the weight of ethnocentrism. To this end, we address two routes, the use of the ethnic past and ethnicity by nationalists and founders of the state and, how indigenous intellectuals, on the other, have found a reinvention of their identities through various myths of Amerindian origin. Ethnic myths and the use of the ethnic past have been accepted, denied or rejected by nationalists, while indigenous peoples adhere to their own myths or seek to reinvent them. Mythical information is a component of identity but also requires institutions to disseminate such information among the group.     

Introducing inclusive tourism

ABSTACT

Tourism is often understood and experienced as an exclusive activity. In supporting the concept of inclusive tourism, this volume seeks to counter that tendency by seeking out ways in which those who are typically marginalized by, or excluded from tourism can be brought into the industry in ways that directly benefit them, or that they can gain more control over tourism. This introduction to the special issue first presents a conceptual article that defines the concept of inclusive tourism and discusses seven different elements, which may constitute lines of inquiry in investigations of tourism's inclusiveness. It then presents five empirical articles that illustrate some of the ways in which an inclusive tourism approach might inform discussion of the potentials and limitations for tourism to generate wider social and economic benefits. The examples provided are from a wide range of geographical contexts, from Cambodia to Australia, Sweden, Turkey and Spain. Inclusive tourism is offered here as both an analytical concept and an aspirational ideal. We do not ever envisage minimum standards for inclusive tourism. We rather hope that there will be a restless quest to find ways to include new actors and new places in tourism on terms that are equitable and sustainable.     

An Assessment of the Role of an Open Shelter in Reducing Soiling and Microbial Growth on the Archaeological Site of the Bishop’s Palace,Witney, England

Two sets of twelve Portland limestone tablets were attached to carousels outside and under the open, lightweight shelter at Bishop’s Palace (Witney, England) for 18 months to assess the influence of shelters on soiling and microbiological growth on stone. At the start, and at 6-month intervals, tablets were analysed using microscopy (optical and SEM), colour measurement (spectrophotometry), weight change measurement and salt content determination (ion chromatography). Concentrations of NO₂ and SO₂ were also monitored for a month using diffusion tubes. In addition, results were compared with those obtained by the UK National Materials Exposure Programme (NMEP) on chemical weathering rates. Differences in soiling and biological growth on sheltered and unsheltered samples, and their influence on limestone decay were established. The shelter is likely to reduce biological growth by modifying the micro-environmental conditions. However, it may also exacerbate dust deposition, which might increase decay rates in the long-term.     

Stalin’s humanitarian government: class,child homelessness and state security in a historical perspective (1930s–40s)

Informed by Didier Fassin’s concept of humanitarian government, this article reveals a distinct pattern of secret care provisions imposed under Stalin by the secret police and its successor agencies (NKVD, MVD) first to the peasant children displaced by class war and the famine of 1932–33, and then to the children made homeless by the Great Terror and the 1940s’ national deportations. The article also identifies the under-researched reception centres as crucial sites for both administering emergency assistance and establishing the social classification necessary to apply these discriminatory measures. Affected by the decreasing faith in their possible socialist rehabilitation and lack of any official display of compassion, these children’s lives appeared even less worthy of saving in the course of major emergencies. These findings challenge the official Soviet view of the existence of a universal childhood worth protecting, which guided the first socialist country’s intervention to save other children nationally and internationally.     

Views,use and reception of visualisations of development proposals impacting cultural heritage

Visualisations of land-use projects have become an important part of the planning process. Using a survey of heritage professionals’ attitudes towards visualisations as a starting point, this article addresses tensions between the expressed usefulness of visualisations and critical attitudes towards the lack of ‘objectivity’ of visual representation and the risk of manipulation for strategic purposes. Moving from the survey, the article discusses how visual representations of development proposals became part of a Norwegian public dispute over the expansion of a shopping centre in a historic town. Furthermore, our aim is to introduce a social semiotic approach for analysing visualisations at historic sites. Finally, we discuss some theoretical implications of negotiating visualisations, with emphasis on the recent debate about representational and non-representational theories in heritage studies.     

The Abstraction of Care: What Work Counts?

Nurses provide essential health care labor, but their work, a mix of caregiving and clinical expertise, is often undervalued and unacknowledged by health care administrators and the policies and practices that govern health care more broadly. Based on interviews with nurses working in the New York metropolitan area and through pairing feminist political economy with literature on abstraction and politics of the possible, I show that the ways in which nurses’ work is measured creates a value hierarchy of tasks. Examining various tools of measurement, I argue that methods for measuring work are rooted in an historical and continuous hierarchy of what counts as work and what has value. For nurses, these processes obscure the essential care work they perform. I argue that bringing an explicit politics of social reproduction to the politics of measuring and accounting for work makes visible necessary and often‐obscured tasks, spaces, and social relations.     

Do Minorities Trust Less? Understanding Differences in Social Trust among Canada’s Major Ethno-Racial Groups

Using data from Canada’s General Social Survey, this article assesses ethno-racial differences in social trust. Bivariate findings reveal that the three most culturally distinctive minorities—visible minorities, the French, and Indigenous Peoples—exhibit the lowest trust of all groups. Multivariate analyses show that controls for “ethno-cultural markers” (religion, language, immigration status), socioeconomic influences (education, income), and social engagement indicators (voluntary association activity, ethnic diversity of friendships) explain the lower trust between the French and, less so, among visible minorities. Socioeconomic factors partly account for lower trust among Indigenous Peoples, but they still express comparatively low social trust even with controls. The article discusses how interpretations focusing on “social distance” and “social boundaries” processes help in understanding social trust differences across Canada’s major ethno-racial communities.     

Migrants,inequalities and social research in the 1920s: The story of Two Portuguese Communities in New England

In this article, I analyse the production and reception of a 1923 social monograph on migrant communities in New England and in doing so: (1) outline an archaeology of the social sciences in the U.S., by analysing aspects of their development, dynamics, institutional politics and research agendas; (2) discuss the tensions between social, racial and cultural interpretations of inequalities in the political economy of the 1920s; (3) analyse the pervasiveness of racialist thinking in science, society and politics, its impact in the hierarchization of groups for purposes of border control, and how the targeted groups responded to it.     

Primitive Liberals and Pirate Tribes: Black-Flag Radicalism and the Kibbo Kift

ABSTRACT

The Age of Catastrophe (1914–1945) has long been considered a crisis of liberalism. As a political platform and moralistic worldview, the hollowness of liberalism’s promise was exposed when total war struck at the heart of Europe, undermining its presumption of imperial hegemony over much of the world. What emerged in its wake, amid the swells of irremediable nationalisms, is the subject of this article. Blinded by the fog of war and bright lights of modernity, historians often fail to catch the glimpses of alternative aspirations, which escaped the age’s ruptures so as to reinvent and redeem humanity from the depths of its bloody past. Against a backdrop of neglected case studies from Britain and elsewhere – from the Luddites to the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift – this article seeks to show how the spectre of death inspired new ideals of youth and civility that rejected the arrogance of imperial masculinity and industrialised oppression, turning instead to visions of global kinship that were socialist and anarchic, romantic and utopian, primitive and piratical.