Growing up in a tourist destination: negotiating space,identity and belonging

There is little research on children’s experiences of growing up in a popular tourist destination, where place and space are contested with visitors, migrants and temporary residents. Existing literature on young people’s experiences of their socio-spatial surroundings has focused predominantly on the rural/urban dichotomy, often neglecting to explore how identity and belonging are negotiated in complex community contexts such as tourist destinations. This paper reports on recent research that suggests that young people’s experiences of growing up in such an environment are nuanced and diverse, with their rich narratives disrupting socially constructed distinctions between the rural and the urban, merging experiences from both worlds.     

Crimes against cultural heritage in Timbuktu

On 3 March 2016, Ahmad al‐Faqi al‐Mahdi sat in a courtroom at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and became the first person to be prosecuted for the destruction of cultural sites as a war crime. In this article, the author argues that it is no coincidence that the first case the ICC has brought to justice involves a UNESCO World Heritage site. She charts the history of the relationship between Mali and UNESCO and the history of Islam in Mali. Through taking a historical perspective, current events can be seen as part of an ongoing ‘conversation’ about the future of the country. The ICC trial also has wider ramifications for the anthropological study of material culture and cultural heritage as it resists a plural understanding of people’s entanglement with sites and objects and demands instead a return to certainty.     

Mourned Choices and Grievable Lives: The Anti‐Abortion Movement's Influence in Defining the Abortion Experience in Australia Since the 1960s

This article provides a genealogy of foetocentric grief, an emotion that permeates accounts of abortion in Australia across multiple discursive sites. Foetocentric grief represents women as indelibly mourning their ‘unborn children’ after abortion. The emotion first came to prominence in anti‐abortion activism of the mid‐1980s. Focus on the purported consequences of abortion for women enabled anti‐abortionists to respond to charges that they were unsympathetic towards women who have abortions. Foetocentric grief also transcribes the primary claim of the anti‐abortion movement – that abortion entails a mother's destruction of her unborn child – onto the very experience of abortion. Since the mid‐1980s, foetocentric grief has moved outside the anti‐abortion movement to dominate accounts of the abortion experience in the print media as well as, surprisingly, mainstream pro‐choice activism. This article maps the convergence of these trends and examines the political and regulatory effects of foetocentric grief. It argues that foetocentric grief is a culturally enforced emotion that discursively recuperates the figure of the aborting woman to normative regimes of pregnancy and femininity, where pregnant women are envisaged as already mothers to autonomous foetal‐subjects.     

A geography of residents' worry about the disruptive effects of contaminated sites

While the links between contaminated sites and adverse effects on human health and well‐being are being increasingly recognised, some argue that the magnitude of the health problem is inadequately addressed because it is largely invisible. Health geographies literature has sought to highlight this invisibility by focusing on the link between contaminated sites and health. This study adds to health geographies by presenting unique insights into the geography of residents' worry about the disruptive effect of environmental contamination on health and well‐being. It analyses a sample of residents (n = 485) living near 13 contaminated sites across Australia. Ordinal logistic regression analysis of closed‐format survey questions was combined with coding of open‐ended survey questions to reveal the geography of residents' worry about contamination from nearby sites. First, the study explores some of the main relationships between residents, their environs, and contaminants from nearby source sites, which determines their levels of worry: residents' demographics, residents' proximity to sites, contaminant boundaries and borders, and type of contaminant. Second, the study investigates how worry affects residents' health and well‐being, ranging from effects on their personal functioning through to their sense of ontological security, which depends in part upon their perceptions of contaminants' impacts. Despite having identified a range of diverse and negative effects of worry about contamination on residents, we found that worry for contamination can also prompt coping strategies and problem‐solving, reinforcing the need for more research on this subject.     

Sex work and exclusion in the tourist districts of Salvador,Brazil

Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, in the Northeastern region of Brazil, is composed of racialized, gendered, and sexualized spaces in which certain people are welcome, while others are marginalized and excluded. Praça da Sé, in the Centro Histórico, is a major site of both the local commercial sex industry and the tourist industry in Salvador. With their public visibility in sites heavily frequented by tourists, sex workers in Salvador reveal how sexuality is public, politically contested, economically charged, and, most significantly, racialized. If, as Tom Boellstorff argues, ‘globalization resignifies the meaning of place rather than making place irrelevant’ (2007, 23), how does one then study racialized sexualities in the context of the globalized tourism industry? How do class, space, and race influence practices of sex work and sex tourism in Salvador? This article offers a critical analysis of racialized sexualities in the study of the sexual economies of tourism in Salvador. I conceptualize Salvador as a ‘site of desire’ (Manderson and Jolly 1997) where issues of socioeconomic inequality, racism, and sexism coexist alongside celebratory affirmations of Afro-Brazilian cultural production in Salvador. This article explores how the touristic cityscape of Salvador is divided into carefully demarcated zones where class and race are crucial factors in determining who ‘belongs’ and who is ‘out of place.’     

REVIEW

The Ra Expeditions. By Thor Heyerdahl. (First Published 1971) Penguin Books, Vic. Revised edition 1972. Pp. 372. Price Aust. $2.10.     

First Trials to Set Up a Microwave Reflectometric Tool for the Survey of Historic Timber Structures

Timber structures can be degraded during their life both by structural problems and by biological degradation factors like fungi and insects. The occurrence of those biodegradation agents could lead to a loss of their structural integrity, in the absence of appropriate maintenance. An early assessment of the decay is even more important when the wooden structures are part of historical buildings, in the interest of conservation of cultural heritage.

This article presents an application of microwave reflectometry for the in situ evaluation of timber structures. The measurement system allows detecting anomalies inside the material in a non-destructive and non-invasive manner.

The reflection coefficient is measured by means of a vector network analyzer (VNA) using a double-ridge antenna which transmits the continuous-wave (CW) microwave signal and receives the signal reflected by the material under investigation.

Measurements on laboratory models demonstrated the feasibility of the method. Results obtained on timber beam sections, compared with the findings of traditional investigation methodologies, demonstrate the potentiality of microwave reflectometry, suggesting its possible usefulness during the diagnostic phase as a non-invasive tool for preliminary screening.     

Writing Gender into History and History in Gender: Creating A Nation and Australian Historiography

This paper reflects on the impact of gender in the writing of history by considering the reception of Creating A Nation, the first gendered history of Australia. It argues that while there has emerged an impressive volume of feminist history and with it has come an important acceptance of women's historical experience, the reception of ‘gender’ within the historical profession has paradoxically been ambivalent and ambiguous. This is the case because of an unease about feminist theory and its relevance to history. There also remains a prevailing belief that a gendered neutral historical place exists, to which historians can retreat.