Promoting multiculturalism and tolerance: Expanding the meaning of “unity through diversity” in the United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has sought to establish a national identity among its nationals since its inception in 1971. Contrary to the pessimism in its first few years, the UAE was able to create a national identity among its nationals despite their initially differing loyalties. The UAE has now embarked on a phase of creating a new national identity that includes non-nationals, encompassing migrants and expats. This study argues that this new identity aims to include, at least discursively, non-nationals, presenting them as an integral part of society. It should be noted that this new identity does not seek to standardize or assimilate the whole population, in contrast to the first identity, which aimed to standardize the nationals. Its primary aim is rather to express its appreciation of the migrant population through the notions of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism, while also preventing complaints from the nationals. This study analyses the ways of including non-nationals in a new national identity through national gatherings (national days), institutional activities (heritage festivals, cultural gatherings, cultural center visits and activities), media analyses (state-sponsored media), and foreign policy initiatives that emerged (or presented) due to domestic diversity, such as Pope's visit.     

Gender,race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy

This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.     

Enacting Experimental Alternative Spaces

This paper analyses the experimental nature of alternative spaces and the affective, emotional and embodied experience their enactment generates. In so doing, it grounds the analysis on the intentional community of Damanhur (Italy), as an example of experimental spaces. Scholarship concerning intentional communities draws on utopian studies that consider them as utopian laboratories. More recently, non‐representational approaches have emphasised the processual nature of utopias, yet studies have overlooked the experimental nature of these alternative spaces. Drawing upon in‐depth ethnographic data, this paper engages with community experimentations that took place in Damanhur for residents and visitors. It illustrates how utopian enactment is experimental and thus, disordering, unsettling and creative. Moreover, I argue that experimentations are not limited to unsettling the social structure of the community and, when studying the enactment of alternative spaces, emphasis should also be on their capacity to affect the individual.     

Eine gelernte Lebensweise: Figurationen des Gelehrtenlebens zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit

A Learned Way of Life: Figurations of Scholarly Life between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. – With the erosion of professors' obligatory celibacy in northwestern European universities of the high Middle Ages, scholars found themselves facing the task of redefining their mode of life and establishing a new type of families, combining social reproduction and the transmission of academic knowledge, and adopting daily habits and dispositions which would allow them to lead the life of the mind within crowded family households without the collective discipline and material infrastructure provided by communal institutions, such as colleges. Building on the author's earlier work, the paper sketches a synthetic view of the major elements of the scholars' emerging way of life, arguing that this transformation provides a unique opportunity for studying how a way of life takes shape, being explicitly discussed and experimented with. Shaping a rational, or rather systematically rationalized way of life, it is argued, is a major contribution of the scientific tradition to making modern cultures.     

Toiling in the Vale of Tears: Everyday Life and Resistance in South Uist, Outer Hebrides, 1760-1860

Following the 1745 rebellion, agrarian capitalism rapidly transformed subsistence practices in the Outer Hebrides. Landowners increased rents, enclosed common lands, and replaced crofters and cattle with sheep-ranges. Population growth, the demise of the kelp industry, and crop failures compounded the problems of the peasantry. Widespread emigration commenced in the 1770s and peaked in the 1850s, when entire communities were exiled to British North America—the so-called Highland Clearances. This article traces the development of agrarian capitalism on the Isle of South Uist, explores the agricultural improvements undertaken by successive landlords, and considers modes of resistance adopted by the island's population.     

Auditory Exostoses in Pre‐Hispanic Populations of the Lower Paraná Wetlands,Argentina

Auditory exostosis (AE) has been characterised from the medical and anthropological perspectives as an adaptive biological response to repeated immersion in cold water as well as exposure to cold environmental temperatures and wind chill. At the archaeological level, the highest prevalence has been found in societies living in coastal environments in areas located at 30–45° north or south latitude with a subsistence pattern based on fishing and mollusc gathering. The region of the lower Paraná River wetlands in Argentina is an area dissected by multiple rivers, streams, and lakes, especially in the Paraná delta near Buenos Aires where these features create a landscape composed of many islands. A variety of archaeological analyses performed on faunal remains, stone tools, bone, and ceramic artefacts are consistent with the interpretation that towards the end of the late Holocene (2000–700 BP), this region was inhabited by hunter–gatherer populations with a subsistence pattern based mainly on fishing and hunting along with the gathering of molluscs. In this work, we present an analysis of 176 crania of individuals recovered from 21 archaeological sites in the region. Results indicate the presence of AE in 6.25% of the cases, with all of these corresponding to adult male individuals. This moderate prevalence coincides with the expected levels for populations where contact with water is frequent in regions located at 30–45° latitude. The absence of female individuals showing evidence of AE allows us to suggest a possible sex‐based division of labour. We hope that this work can contribute to ongoing discussion of the economic and social aspects that characterised pre‐Hispanic life in the study area, while also expanding the available information on AE at the worldwide level. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“Catching the Yellow Ghost”: A Case Study of Popular Religious Activities and Social Transformation in Rural North China

This article studies the relationship between local society and social change in rural north China from the late Qing dynasty to the People’s Republic of China period through the activity of “Zhuo huanggui” (literally, “Catching the Yellow Ghost”). “Catching the Yellow Ghost” is a ritual activity in Guyi village, Wu’an county, Hebei province. According to villagers there, “Catching the Yellow Ghost” has been celebrated since the late Qing dynasty. However, due to political pressures in the 1950s, it was not until the 1980s that “Catching the Yellow Ghost” began to be revitalized. Since that time, “Catching the Yellow Ghost” has gained rapid popularity and fame in north China. Through the lens of the “Catching the Yellow Ghost” ritual, this article explores social transformation in China from the late 19th to the early 21st century. By analyzing the continuity and discontinuity of “Catching the Yellow Ghost,” this article offers a new understanding of the relationship between local society and social change in rural north China.     

Beyond the everyday? Rethinking place meanings in tourism

ABSTRACT

Existing tourism scholarship on place meanings seems to retain an underlying assumption of a contradiction between tourist places and the mundane world. In contrast, this paper contends that the production of the meanings of tourist places is also closely related to everyday life. To make its case, it interrogates the creation of meanings of two scenic sites of Tianya Haijiao and Nanshan in Sanya, a famous coastal destination in southern China. Although both scenic sites have been recently developed, their significance stems from historical and cultural meanings in traditional Chinese culture, which are frequently communicated in people's daily conversations and practices. Besides, the meanings of the tourist sites are neither fixed by legitimate discourses nor dominated by tourism publicity; they are continuously shaped by wider socio-spatial events in mundane societies and re-interpreted through tourism mobilities in accordance with tourists’ everyday concerns. This paper echoes the ‘new mobilities turn’ in tourism studies and contributes to the discussions of the mundaneness of tourist places.     

明清以降漓江上游地区的人类活动与环境变迁研究

漓江沙洲的形成,是自然环境和人类活动交互影响的结果。明清以降,外来人口不断进入漓江上游地区从事农业垦殖活动。垦殖活动在改造了上游山区自然环境的同时,其产生的泥沙在雨水作用下进入漓江,促进了桂林段漓江沙洲的发育,并改变了桂林段漓江河床的面貌。岸上居民也开始由岸上洲,这是漓江流域人地关系的重要变化。