As Basket and Papu: Making Manus Social Fabric

Between 2012 and 2019, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, hosted Australia's offshore detention centre for asylum seekers and refugees, known as the Regional Processing Centre (RPC). This paper analyses some of the social impacts of the RPC on Lorengau town, the urban centre of Manus, through the analytical lens of the Manus idiom, as basket (Tok Pisin). Materially this refers to the everyday Manus basket whilst metaphorically, it refers to an individual's or community's social, cultural, political and economic base. First, I examine asylum seekers and refugees as a social category that emerged during this period when they were referred to as papu by locals. Papu is an honorific kinship term for grandfather or elder man; for men who are symbols for family identity, social belonging, and rights to land. Second, I examine the changing materiality of Lorengau's markets as indicative of wider societal transformations and dissonance brought about by the RPC. My ethnographic data are based on long term involvement in Manus, including three recent visits to Lorengau in 2017, 2018, and 2019 where I studied the social impacts and the changing social practices of Manus people in response to the RPC.     

Book Reviews

Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes. M. Castells and P. Hall. London, Routledge, 1994, x + 275 pp, £45.00 hb, ISBN 0 415 10014 3, £14.99 pk, ISBN 0 415 10015 1 pb.

Transport and Communications Innovation in Europe. G. Giannopoulos and A. Gillespie (Eds). London, Belhaven Press, 1993, xii + 369 pp, £42.00 hb, ISBN 1 85293 269 4.

The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. F. Fisher and J. Forester (Eds). London, UCL Press, 1993, 327pp, £14.95, pb, ISBN 1 85728 183 7.

Regional Development in the 1990s. The British Isles in Transition. P. Townroe and R. Martin (Eds). London, Jessica Kingsley Publishers and Regional Studies Association, 330pp, £22.50 pb, ISBN 1 85302 139 3.

Urban Land and Property Markets in France. R. Acosta and V. Renard. London, University College Press, 1993, 166pp, £40.00 hb, ISBN 1 85728 050 4.     

GRAVITY MODEL APPLICATIONS IN HEALTH PLANNING: ANALYSIS OF AN URBAN HOSPITAL MARKET*

ABSTRACT. In this paper a gravity model is formulated to model a hospital patient flow system. Both spatial and nonspatial measures of separation are used to estimate the model. Travel time was found to provide improved fits over linear distance in modeling patient flow behavior. Transformations of travel time (square root and log) were found to improve model performance further. Model diagnostics suggested additional spatial separation measurw, separation measure parameters demonstrated stability over time. The model is used to forecast the effects of health care financing reform and hospital closure on patient flows in an urban hospital market. Universal health coverage was found to dramatically improve access to hospital services for lower income patient populations. Hospitals at risk for closure were forecast to receive increased patient flows. Medical school hospitals are expected to lose patients after implementation of health reform, with important implications for graduate medical education. Hospital closures were shown to have negative effects on access to services in poor neighborhoods, but relatively little effect on access in the system as a whole.     

Uneven Urbanisation: Connecting Flows of Water to Flows of Labour and Capital Through Jakarta's Flood Infrastructure

This article analyses processes of uneven urbanisation by looking at flood infrastructure. Combining the conceptual frameworks of uneven development with the political ecology of urbanisation, we use flood infrastructure as a methodological device to trace the processes through which unevenness occurs within, but also far beyond, the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. We do this to show how the development of flood infrastructure in Jakarta is shaped by the logic of capitalism through mutually implicated tendencies of socionatural differentiation and equalisation. These processes render waters, resources and labour as similar across places and times to produce different spaces for different populations, within and beyond city boundaries. This theorisation reveals how the urban inequalities (re)produced by flood infrastructure are intimately linked to inequalities (re)produced through the urbanisation of the non‐city.     

‘I call the people.’ Church bells in fourteenth-century Catalunya

Bells were an inescapable part of fourteenth-century urban life. They signalled the hours of the day and times for prayers; they warned of tempests and enemy armies; they heralded masses, funerals, and deaths. The pealing of bells brought men, women, and children together, choreographing communal behaviour in time and space. Bells echoed the vox Domini, calling out the deaths of holy men and women, celebrating the working of miracles. The ubiquitous presence of bells reflected the omnipresence of God in the medieval world. Their echoes transformed private moments into collective experiences, elevating the mundane into the miraculous. Scholars have rarely examined the religious aspects of bells, looking instead at their more practical side, especially their utilisation as markers of time and the allegedly concurrent rise of mercantile culture. This article approaches bells from the viewpoints of those men and women who heard them and wanted them rung. Focusing on sources from Christian clerics, we see that medieval men rang the bells with clear, but many possible, purposes in mind. By marking time and prayers, Christian church bells helped to create and facilitate communities within dioceses, spurring and choreographing their actions. During funerals, bells broadcast private moments, giving them communal significance. The transformative, creative function of bells is clearest in their role in miracles. In Manresa, the vision experienced by a few became a community affair when the church bells gathered the people; the bells transformed an ordinary day into one where the people, as a community, received divine favour. Finally, with the deaths of holy persons, the tolling of bells transformed private, even anonymous deaths, into moments of wonder as God’s hand touched the world.The pealing of bells defined Christian communities in the Mediterranean and, at the same time as rulers and elites throughout the region were seeking to control minority groups, those same groups were seeking to exercise control over the sounds within their own communities. Through the pealing of bells, churchmen across Catalunya sought to direct the thoughts and prayers of their listeners. When the Christian clerics of Catalunya rang their churches’ bells, they had specific aims in mind, yet, as the evidence demonstrates, the pealing of the bells never meant just one thing. This article demonstrates that there is much more to understanding medieval bells than knowing ‘for whom the bell tolls’; we have to look at the listeners as much as the ringers in order to understand their cultural significance in medieval Europe. This article is a first step in how such a study could be begun.     

Prehistoric land use and hydrology: a multi-scalar spatial analysis in central Arizona

Human land-use strategies involving the management of rainfall and runoff to promote crop production are found throughout the world. This paper presents a functional assessment using hydrological modeling with modern high-resolution LiDAR datasets and contextual archaeological site data to study prehistoric agriculture. The focus is on rock alignments created by the Hohokam culture in the semi-arid environment of the US Southwest. By incorporating a multi-scalar GIS study for terrain analysis at a regional, community, and site scale, the complex interactions between the prehistoric sites, features and the environment are revealed. The results of these analyses on digital elevation models (DEMs) gave insight to the past functionality of such agricultural features within the cultivated landscapes. The results included:1) The agricultural features were suitably placed for the collection of rainfall and runoff.2) The features were reducing the volume of water flowing through the area to prevent flooding and crop destruction and promoting soil infiltration.This shows the complexity and innovation of prehistoric societies living in marginal environments and how their adaptation to such environments was necessary to sustain their populations.     

Australia’s Colombo Plans,old and new: international students as foreign relations

This article draws on recent research and policy developments to make a case for considering international students as an important component of Australian foreign relations. It links historical and contemporary Australian experiences of international students, especially in the Colombo Plan and New Colombo Plan, to the field of public diplomacy, and sets an agenda for further research in this direction. It highlights the need to recover student voices and to be sensitive to the emergence of everyday or ‘vernacular’ internationalism, as a phenomenon of international students visiting, traveling and otherwise encountering different groups of Australians. It suggests a need to take up anew this form of inquiry for both earlier postwar student experiences and the post-1980s period, in which international students’ voices are frequently silenced by debates over commodification, funding needs, and neo-liberal economics.     

BOSERUP BACKWARDS? AGRICULTURAL INTENSIFICATION AS ‘ITS OWN DRIVING FORCE’ IN THE MBULU HIGHLANDS,TANZANIA

Why do farmers intensify their agricultural practices? Recent revisions of African environmental historiographies have greatly enriched our understanding of human–environmental interactions. To simply point at poor farming practices as the main cause of deforestation, desertification and other processes of land degradation is, for example, no longer possible. The contemporary analytical focus is instead on the complex and often unpredictable set of causal relations between societal, ecological and climatic factors. In the literature on agricultural intensification, conventionally defined driving forces, such as population pressure and market demand, remain important explanatory factors despite a growing body of research that suggests more dynamic scenarios of agricultural development and landscape change. This article reports on a case where the common‐sense logic of population pressure theory has dominated the historical narrative of a local process of agricultural intensification among an agro‐pastoral people in north‐central Tanzania. By way of a ‘detailed participatory landscape analyses’ a more complex and dynamic historical process of intensification is suggested, in which the landscape and the process of agricultural intensification itself are in focus. It is concluded that the accumulation of landesque capital has been incremental in character, and that the process of agricultural intensification in the study area has largely been its own driving force based on self‐reinforcing processes of change, and not a consequence of land scarcity and population pressure. This result demonstrates the possibility and usefulness of reversing the Bose‐rupian argument in analyses of agricultural intensification.