PLACE AND SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE: SOME LESSONS AND REFLECTIONS*

The “localities debate,” stimulated by the Economic and Social Research Council's “Changing Urban and Regional Systems” initiative, was conducted in the pages of Antipode and Society and Space at a length that showed scant regard for emerging environmental sensitivities. Much of it involved politically contentious claims and increasingly exhausted theory; it resolved very little and in that sense was little more than a storm in a pretty familiar pudding basin. A later flirtation with postmodernism simply pushed aside questions of explanation while raising the political stakes as celebration of the differences between places became the order of the day. Nonetheless, important issues emerge from or relate to that debate, and we draw on our experiences to comment on three of them: (i) agents, structures, the production of space and the material bases of place: some issues of theory; (ii) the production of places, people's attachment to place, and place-based political strategies: some issues of practice; (iii) localities, postmodernism and the difference that place makes: is the regressive turn to postmodernism as approach avoidable?     

1500 Years of Pottery: Neutron Activation Analysis of Northern Chilean Domestic Ceramics from Caleta Vitor and Clay Samples from Nearby Valley,Coast and Highland Contexts

This paper presents the findings arising from neutron activation analysis (NAA) of northern Chilean domestic ceramic samples from Caleta Vitor (n = 38) and clay samples (n = 15) from nearby valley, coast and highland contexts. This study presents the first NAA data set of ceramics spanning a temporal period of 1500 years (c.2000 to c.476 bp ) from the Vitor Valley as well as the first attempt to use NAA to characterize potential clay sources in the region. On the basis of this study, we argue that the majority of domestic ceramics from Caleta Vitor share compositional similarities with clay samples collected from nearby valleys, allowing us to infer that the Caleta Vitor populations primarily procured their clay for domestic ceramics from local sources throughout a 1500‐year period. Thus, despite the fact that there were inter‐regional interactions during this period that included the influence of powerful Andean polities, it would appear that domestic ceramics continued to be produced locally, and by implication it can be argued that such interactions did not substantially affect this sphere of material culture production. Further, the apparent continuities in domestic ceramic production allow us to reflect on local decision‐making processes throughout the cultural phases considered in this research.     

Liberal Government and the Practical History of Anthropology

This paper explores the implications of Foucault's perspective of liberal government for approaches to the practical history of anthropology. It also draws on assemblage theory to consider the changing relations between field, museum and university in relation to a range of early twentieth-century anthropological practices. These focus mainly on the development of the Boasian paradigm in the USA during the inter-war years and on the anthropological practices clustered around the Musée de l'Homme in the 1930s. Key steps in the argument focus on the role of what Foucault called “transactional realities” in mediating the practical applications of anthropology in colonial contexts and in “anthropology at home” projects. Special consideration is also given to the increasingly archival properties of anthropological collections in the early twentieth century and the consequences of this for anthropology's relations to practices of governing.