Green Growth and the Balance-of-payments Constraint

The notion of green growth emphasizes environmental and climate policies that make economic activities more sustainable while contributing to higher growth. In developing countries, the ability of such policies to help solve the most pressing economic challenges is essential for green growth to be a viable concept. Notably, current account deficits, foreign exchange shortage and external debt accumulation are serious obstacles to economic development. The analysis in this article therefore approaches green growth from a new perspective. With a focus on energy, the article estimates the impact of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy on the balance-of-payments constrained growth of energy-importing developing and emerging economies. It assumes that their current economic structure otherwise remains the same. Since renewable energy production is more efficient than fossil fuel combustion and reduces import dependence, the energy transition increases the annual balance-of-payments constrained growth rate of the selected countries by up to 2.5 percentage points on average in a scenario from the present until 2050. This means that policies in favour of renewable energy allow those countries to grow faster without accumulating foreign debt or even triggering currency crises. Consequently, staying with the current fossil fuel-based energy system implies missing a significant potential for growth and development.     

Experimental Boat and Ship Archaeology: Principles and Methods

The need for experiments to study physical aspects of craft of the past is stated, as well as the necessity for them to have clear aims and to follow the established principles of scientific enquiry. These principles are discussed in this joint paper by ten maritime archaeologists and others, together with methods and some points of management critical to their application in this field.     

The Refusal of Holy Engagement: How Man‐making Can Fail

ABSTRACT Among Aboriginal Countrymen of the Darwin hinterland, a youth can be ceremonially circumcised only to emerge from the ceremony physically altered but unchanged in himself. Man‐making can thus fail. To explain both the possibility and the consequences of crashing failure, the analyst attends to: (1) politics attendant on the maturation of males, (2) the relationship between the failed rite and the total structure for the performance of all ‘Men's Business’; and (most importantly) (3) the relationships between Dreamings and humans as players in the socio‐religious formation (a concept derived from application of the Thomas theorem) in which there is human engagement with the holy. Argument establishes that (in logic) ontology precedes structure because the structure for holy engagement is built to accommodate prior constructions of both the human person and the personified Power that is a Dreaming.     

Ichnofacies of the Stairway Sandstone fish-fossil beds (Middle Ordovician,Northern Territory,Australia)

The Stairway Sandstone is a 30–560 m thick succession of Middle Ordovician siliciclastic sedimentary rocks within the Amadeus Basin of central Australia, deposited in the epeiric Larapintine Sea of northern peri-Gondwana. The Stairway Sandstone is significant as one of only two known Gondwanan successions to yield articulated arandaspid (pteraspidomorph agnathan) fish. Herein we use the ichnology of the Stairway Sandstone to reveal insights into the shallow marine habitat of these early vertebrates, and compare it with that of other known pteraspidomorph-bearing localities from across Gondwana. The Stairway Sandstone contains a diverse Ordovician ichnofauna including 22 ichnotaxa of Arenicolites, Arthrophycus, Asterosoma, Cruziana, Didymaulichnus, Diplichnites, Diplocraterion, ?Gordia, Lockeia, Monocraterion, Monomorphichnus, Phycodes, Planolites, Rusophycus, Skolithos and Uchirites. These ichnofauna provide a well-preserved example of a typical Ordovician epeiric sea assemblage, recording the diverse ethologies of tracemakers in a very shallow marine environment of flashy sediment accumulation and regularly shifting sandy substrates. New conodont data refine the age of the Stairway Sandstone to the early Darriwilian, with ichnostratigraphic implications for the Cruziana rugosa group and Arthrophycus alleghaniensis.     

Looter of the Dreamings: Xavier Herbert and the Taking of Kaijek's Newsong Story

In his novels and stories of the Australian frontier, Xavier Herbert distances himself from anthropologists whom he resents because they have professional licence to act as looters of the Dreamings. Yet, as ‘artist’, Herbert is unable to admit the extent to which his own story‐forms are taken from Aboriginal productions. In those writings completed after Capricornia and before he finally turns to compose Poorfella my Country, he keeps much of his borrowing secret and his deceptions lead both to a guilty preoccupation with looting as a theme and to the production of stories with missing middles. (Interventions of the Dreamings are left out of the printed versions.) While he acts as cultural broker, honest broking is impeded by Herbert's Romantic self‐vision (portrait of the ‘creative artist’ as a young dog) and by the universalisation that denies cultural difference spuriously to assert the unity of human artistic experience in its stead. I show how Herbert's authorial practise makes him the very semblance of the anthropologist. He, likewise, is a looter of the Dreamings.     

Doing business in Macedonia: Greek problems in British perspective (1912–1921)

British financial concerns in Greek Macedonia in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars were four: the status of the port and the city of Salonica after the partition of its hinterland and under Greek law; the regular conduct of trade; the sufficient provisioning of the allied expeditionary forces (from the fall of 1915 onwards) under the auspices of the Greek Provisional Government of Eleftherios Venizelos; and business, not necessarily related directly to the war effort. None of these cares was an isolated target nor were they the consequent stages of a single plan. They were simply aspects of a global financial interest which aimed to restore British influence in the region as well as to safeguard the spoils of victory against Bulgaria. After considerable difficulties in the region, foreign interest failed to take the shape of British investments. Moreover, the inability of the Greek state to provide sufficiently for the development of the Macedonian economy and the integration of its society led to diplomatic confrontations with its neighbours.     

Irruptions of the Dreamings in Post‐Colonial Australia

This essay is written round four ‘funny stories’ from Northern Australia. Metamorphosis instigated by a Dreaming is central to all four stories and this is why the stories are counted as ‘funny,’ and received with glee. The analysis illuminates a topic that has been attracting attention in recent contributions to Aboriginal ethnography: how Dreamings irrupt into contemporary histories and act in ways that have political significance, contesting whitefella paradigms and re‐asserting the world‐view of the original Australians.     

A Frightened Hunting Ground: Epic Emotions and Landholding in the Western Reaches of Australia's Top End

A general theory of epic emotions is proposed. After providing terms to frame discussion, the author considers Aboriginal discourses of landed association to yield an account of the significance accorded to emotions by Aborigines during events that are attendant on situations of ultimate reference. The necessary association of specified emotions with culturally defined situations of ultimate reference is held to be a defining quality of emotions of the epic kind. In the Aboriginal case, the cultural register of emotions is brief to the point that recognised emotions are all epic emotions. Such emphasis on elemental forms has implications for the study of the development of social institutions. It is suggested that, world-wide, the words for inner states proliferate only when two conditions are fulfilled. The two loosely related variables are: (i) increments in social scale and (ii) the invention of ontologies of the divided self.     

The Alexei Obrescoff Case: The Levantine Backstage of British Mediation in the Russo-Turkish War (1768–74)

In 1954 M. S. Anderson, considering the impediments prohibiting a successful British mediation between Catherine II and Mustafa III, judged that Ambassador John Murray and Whitehall were carried away because they could not see the complex picture of Eastern diplomacy. In this paper, it will be argued that the Ambassador's miscalculated optimism and the hastiness of London were due to a neglected factor: the imprisonment of the Russian Resident at Constantinople, Alexei Obrescoff. The Resident, an in-law of the Abbotts, Factors of the Levant Company and Murray's personal friend, entrusted him with his infant children on the eve of his detainment. This trust was an asset that Murray hoped to exploit in the forthcoming international race to undertake the mediation, if only he could free his friend. London hoped this appeal to the Ottomans would please the Russians, but mediation slipped out of Murray's hands. The Abbotts assisted the Prussians and the Austrians to reunite the Obrescoff family and thus gained them the advantage. Embittered, Murray was dragged into a passionate but unsuccessful clash with the Abbotts which emphasised both the importance of Levantine networks in the exercise of ‘Oriental’ diplomacy and his unsuitability for the particular post.     

On Self and Licensed Solitude: ‘That very private fella,me.’

ABSTRACT This essay is written to show that a liminal, in‐between space of withdrawal and dilly‐dally disassociation can harbour a special station of the self. Further, I propose that incumbency of this station is, from time to time, essential. Life lived always and only in group‐dependant association would be insupportable. My case is made with reference to Aborigines of northern Australia who say that they ‘run’ together in mobs. Nonetheless, I see this essay as a culturally specific contribution to a general category for investigation — the sociology of licensed solitude. As it happens, my illustrative case has licensed solitude functioning sometimes and additionally as retreat or hermitage — that station of withdrawal into which a person enters when turning away from fellow‐humans to seek inspiration from a Power. I compare the licensed solitude of the Aboriginal Countrymen with that of the academic who requires solitude as a station for that free interplay of primary and secondary imagination which sometimes may produce the anthropological sublime.