Shame and the Embodiment of Boundaries

ABSTRACT Attention to the debilitating feelings of unease, discomfort and anxiety which are the concomitants of everyday encounters and negotiations of Kooris at the mainstream interface brings an appreciation for the lived experience of the colonised minority and throws into relief complex struggles over meaning, manners, personal values, social allegiance and cultural survival. This paper focuses on the habituation and strategic deployment of shame at the racial divide. Koori subjectivities, bodily dispositions and emotional registers are found to be informed both by traditional orientations and by the hegemonic ends of the dominant order.     

The violence of spectacle: Statist schemes to green the desert and constructing Astana and Ashgabat as urban oases

Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have been home to the most impressive urban development projects in the entire post-Soviet world. Their capitals, Astana and Ashgabat, now boast uniquely monumental architecture and local leaders have invested heavily in ‘green belt’ projects to surround the cities with lush vegetation, as well as developing green and water-laden public spaces. In doing so, elites have drawn on Soviet-era ‘garden city’ idealism, as well as more recent environmental sustainability narratives. Yet these schemes are anything but sustainable. Unfolding on the arid Central Asian steppe, they depend on heavy irrigation, with water diverted from rivers that already fail to meet regional demands. Employing a comparative approach, I ask why and with what effect state planners have sought to craft Astana and Ashgabat as spectacularly green ‘urban oases,’ when their local climates should defy the logic of sustainability. In so doing, I consider urban greening in the two countries as part of a wider phenomenon of statist schemes to green the desert, which have a long and diverse history. Extending the literature on desert greening, I argue that the structural violence they manifest and perpetuate is best understood by attending to how they operate as a form of spectacle.     

The comfort of the river: understanding the affective geographies of angling waterscapes in young people’s coping practices

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on ethnographic research with angling intervention programmes working with ‘disaffected’ young people in the UK to demonstrate how young people use the affective geographies of waterscapes to regulate their feelings and escape stressful lives. But rather than interpret the restorative or therapeutic quality of waterscapes as the consequence of (passive) immersion into green/blue spaces, we argue that ‘comfort’ is derived from an ongoing, active engagement with(in) the world. Drawing on works influenced by phenomenological theories and relational understandings of the more-than-human world, we illustrate how the affectual qualities of waterscapes are continually ‘woven’ into being through the material and embodied practices of young anglers. However, understanding why waterscapes ‘matter’ to young people also requires accounting for those assemblages originating in the past that shape these co-experienced worlds.     

Identité sociale et engagement politique: Les anoblis de Napoléon Ier face au bonapartisme (1814–70)

En 1808, Napoléon 1^er crée une nouvelle noblesse vouée à servir son régime et ses héritiers. Entre 1814 et 1870, la plupart de ces aristocrates abandonnent la cause bonapartiste afin de préserver leurs titres et leurs intérêts. L'identité de la noblesse napoléonienne se brise ainsi rapidement. Et si bien des anoblis se rallient finalement à Louis‐Napoléon après le coup d'Etat de 1851, la renaissance impériale ne permet pas pour autant une reconstitution de l'unité initiale du groupe.     

Engagement in a Public Forum: Knowledge,Action, and Cosmopolitanism

Facing challenges to the civic purpose of higher education, some scholars and administrators turn to the rhetoric of engagement. Simultaneously, the political philosophy of cosmopolitanism has gained intellectual favor, advocating openness to the lived experiences of distant others. We articulate linkages between these two discourses in an extended case study, finding that a cosmopolitan ethos of engagement in a rural context can improve (1) understanding among people ordinarily separated by spatialized social‐ecological differences, (2) prospects for longer term environmental sustainability, and (3) the visionary potential of collaborative inquiry. Despite globalization of food systems and neoliberal shifts in fishery management, an annual fisheries forum facilitates coalitions that overcome dichotomies between technocratic and local knowledge, extending benefits to fishing communities, academia, and public policy. Iterative and loosely structured capacity building expands informally through affective processes of recognition and care, as decentralized leadership supports collective mobilization toward alternate futures.     

An exploration of character traits and linear measurements for sexing mountain gazelle (Gazella gazella) skeletons

The skeletal elements of mountain gazelle (Gazella gazella) have proven difficult to sex with statistical confidence due to wide overlap in the body size of the two sexes. We studied a sample of 53 modern mountain gazelle skeletons to determine which character traits and metric measurements best predict sex. The success of the character traits was determined using blind tests while the metrics were examined using discriminant function analysis. The most useful elements include the previously identified horn core, pubis and atlas, but also some new bone portions that preserve well in the archaeological record (e.g., distal tibia, distal metacarpal and metatarsal, and second phalanx). Surprisingly, two elements commonly used in sexing analyses (distal humerus and astragalus) were not among the most effective elements. Although cutting points and discriminant functions for sexing gazelle bone portions are presented here, they do not account for potential body size change and thus are not suited for direct application to archaeological assemblages. Instead, we provide guidelines for application to archaeological gazelle assemblages, most importantly a regression analysis that considers the sex ratios obtained from multiple measurements to predict the sex ratio of archaeological gazelle populations.