From Sorcery to Laboratory: Pandemics and Yanyuwa Experiences of Viral Vulnerability

The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted renewed attention among health professionals, Aboriginal community leaders, and social scientists to the need for culturally responsive preventative health measures and strategies. This article, a collaborative effort, involving Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola and two anthropologists with whom Yanyuwa have long associations, tracks the story of pandemics from the perspective of Aboriginal people in the Gulf region of northern Australia. It specifically orients the discussion of the current predicament of ‘viral vulnerability’ in the wake of COVID‐19, relative to other pandemics, including the Hong Kong flu in 1969 and the Spanish flu decades earlier in 1919. This discussion highlights that culturally nuanced and prescribed responses to illness and threat of illness have a long history for Yanyuwa. Yanyuwa cultural repertoires have assisted in the process of making sense of massive change, in the form of past pandemics and the onset of sickness, the threat of illness with COVID‐19 and the attribution of ‘viral vulnerability’ to this remote Aboriginal community. The aim is to centralise Yanyuwa voices in this story, as an important step in growing understandings of Aboriginal knowledge of pandemics and culturally relevant and controlled health responses and strategies for communal well‐being.     

Managing the world: conceptions of imperial rule between republicanism and technocracy

The article examines a technocratic vision of empire arising in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its implications for the theorization of empires, the legitimation of large-scale political orders, and their spatial imagination. The role of the Roman model for the British in the decades after 1870 as a resource of policy advice, legitimation, and identity-building serves as a case study for analyzing the role of historical precedence for imperial elites. This analysis opens the perspective onto a notion of empire that significantly differs from the one discussed in recent debates on liberalism and empire: British political actors and observers delineate a concept of empire that is not universalist, but heterogeneous, hierarchical, and technocratic.     

Gender performances as spatial acts: (fe)male Thai migrant sex workers in Denmark

The objective of this article is to investigate how Thai migrant sex workers in Denmark understand normative heterosexuality and femininity/masculinity as they are reproduced in the Danish sex industry. To do so I analyse the ways that gender plays a part in sex work and the ways in which sex work plays a significant role in how Thai migrant sex workers understand their gendered subject positions in the spaces away from their sex work. Whether Thai migrant sex workers become intelligible gendered subjects depends on different spaces. Based on two case stories I focus on the space of domesticity, the space of sexual consumption and the quasi-public space of leisure.