Ethnic segregation in Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s

This article argues that assimilationist theory (seen as a specific instance of process theory) had a profound impact on immigration studies in the United States from the 1920s into the 1960s, but that this mode of conceptualization has been subsequently challenged theoretically by developments in social history. Specifically, exegetical evidence is offered for viewing the challenge as hinging on a reconceptualization of the meaning of culture and the role of social actors in creating their own history. The case is made by examining in depth two exemplars of immigration research published in different time‐periods: for the assimilationist model, W. I. Thomas et al.’s Old World Traits Transplanted, and from the new social history, John Bodnar's The Transplanted. To illustrate the impact of assimilationist thought on scholarship for nearly a half century, analyses are provided of a select number of ‘classic’ studies written between the respective appearances of the two aforementioned books.     

Property as sovereignty in micro: the state/property nexus and the Cyprus Problem

This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereignty in micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of ‘community’ offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's ‘communal’ character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek-Cypriot or Turkish-Cypriot constitutional communities of the Republic. Focusing on the moral and political claims that ensue from this premise, I show how refugee Cypriots encounter and rearticulate the state in a variety of institutions as they lay claims to property (periousia) – their own or others’. Consequently, I argue that thinking through ‘community’ contributes to understandings of the linkage between property and statecraft (what I call the state/property nexus). In turn, this allows us to better comprehend statehood in post-conflict domains.     

Research Implications of Science-Informed,Value-Based Decision Making

In ‘Hard’ science, scientists correctly operate as the ‘guardians of certainty,’ using hypothesis testing formulations and value judgements about error rates and time discounting that make classical inferential methods appropriate. But these methods can neither generate most of the inputs needed by decision makers in their time frame, nor generate them in a form that allows them to be integrated into the decision in an analytically coherent and transparent way. The need for transparent accountability in public decision making under uncertainty and value conflict means the analytical coherence provided by the stochastic Bayesian decision analytic approach, drawing on the outputs of Bayesian science, is needed. If scientific researchers are to play the rôle they should be playing in informing value-based decision making, they need to see themselves also as ‘guardians of uncertainty,’ ensuring that the best possible current posterior distributions on relevant parameters are made available for decision making, irrespective of the state of the certainty-seeking research. The paper distinguishes the actors employing different technologies in terms of the focus of the technology (knowledge, values, choice); the ‘home base’ mode of their activity on the cognitive continuum of varying analysis-to-intuition ratios; and the underlying value judgements of the activity (especially error loss functions and time discount rates). Those who propose any principle of decision making other than the banal ‘Best Principle,’ including the ‘Precautionary Principle,’ are properly interpreted as advocates seeking to have their own value judgements and preferences regarding mode location apply. The task for accountable decision makers, and their supporting technologists, is to determine the best course of action under the universal conditions of uncertainty and value difference/conflict.     

The artist Carl Abrahams and the cosmopolitan work of centring and peripheralizing the self⋆

The article looks at the work and life of Jamaican artist and ‘citizen of the world’ Carl Abrahams. Responding to Gell's argument that art should be thought of as a ‘technology of enchantment’, and to a wider approach that seeks to explain art by reference to cultural context, the article takes Abrahams's own Weltkenntnis, or world‐knowledge, as its focus. The Weltkenntnis of an artist, or indeed any person, is often at odds both with their surrounding cultural situation and the technical means they have to express themselves. It is never entirely possible to reduce a particular form of self‐expression either to the wider worldview or to a particular set of technical effects. The article explores the conceptual tensions involved in Abrahams's claims to be a cosmopolitan artist and his work of centring and peripheralizing himself in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica.     

Policy actors' narrative constructions of migrants' integration in Malmö and Bologna

Governments have policies explicitly directed at the integration of migrants. This article addresses how policymakers and politicians privilege certain constructions of the social relationship between migrants and the majority society (expressed through narratives of ‘integration’), while making it seem as if they were presenting facts in their policies. These constructions provide the justifications for adopting a direction in policy-making over other alternatives. This article sets to analyse comparatively how policy actors in two urban contexts construct migrants' integration through policy narratives and how, within this, they evaluate migrants as ‘integrated’ and ‘non-integrated’. Through narrative analysis, the article sheds light on how migrants are positioned by political institutions within the normative order of the society in which they live. Furthermore, it shows that local policy-making is shaped by national citizenship regimes, models of steering, welfare regimes and stories about the nation and its people.     

Is Rukun Dead? Ethnographic Interpretations of Social Change and Javanese Culture

Within the ethnography of Indonesia in general and Java in particular, the Javanese notion of rukun, the appearance of harmony and helpfulness, has frequently been interpreted as referring not only to social harmony, but also to economic egalitarianism. Hence ‘traditional’ Javanese economic practices such as open harvests, the distribution of harvest shares and the use of the finger-knife in rice harvesting have been seen as explicable by reference to rukun. Changes in harvesting practices with the introduction of ‘modern’ techniques, such as the use of contract labourers, have been depicted as signalling the death of rukun, both as an economic practice and as a cultural value. This article argues that such a view of social change in Java is theoretically and empirically flawed. Rukun is not a practice but rather a central ideological concept through which Javanese contextualise and apprehend their lives, their aspirations, their motivations and their social relations. In this sense, the ‘traditional’ notion of rukun is equally applicable to contemporary Java, and contemporary Javanese are just as likely to interpret the ‘modern’ world in terms of rukun.     

A personal narrative of particular things: Tevau (feather money) from Santa Cruz,Solomon Islands

In October 2006, Salome Samou, from Santa Cruz Island, Solomon Islands, visited the British Museum, London, to see the collections from her home island. This paper presents her response to the tevau in the collection (frequently referred to as ‘feather money’). Tevau are objects of prestige and value, formerly used in a regional network of exchange. They were especially important in bridewealth payments, but have not been used on Santa Cruz Island since the 1980s. Today, Samou wants to revive their use, a re‐introduction that reflects a linkage of tevau and their manufacture to contemporary ideas of social identity. This paper explores Samou’s interaction with the tevau in the collection, including past interpretations of their use. For Samou, the process of viewing the tevau produced a narrative that embraced personal memories as well as challenged perspectives on past cultural and social practices. I discuss how these particular objects materialise transformed, and transforming, regimes of value.     

Follow the money: international donors,external homelands and their effect on Romani media and advocacy

ABSTRACT

While Roma are both Europe’s largest minority, there is no “homeland” state that claims to guard their interest. The lack of “an external national homeland” [Brubaker, R. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] to watchdog and safeguard their rights has a particular effect on how Roma engage as political actors and subjects. International donors/foundations have assumed the role of “external homeland”. This article explores the effect that donors’ funding priorities have on Romani advocacy – specifically Romani journalism. Drawing upon multi-sited fieldwork in five countries, extensive document analysis, and interviews, Idemonstrate that the change in Romani media content over the past two decades reflects the shift in funders’ priorities, particularly in relation to the European project. “The Roma” become a tool for donors and European institutions to build a “European” identity while Romani-led advocacy becomes increasingly marganilized.     

Understanding Power in Indigenous Protected Areas: the Case of the Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Parks

This article draws on concepts of power from political ecology and political sociology to describe the ways that the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation (a Canadian indigenous people) have attempted to realize their goals under the broad rubric of their Tribal Parks initiative. Like some other Indigenous peoples’ and Community Conserved territories and Areas (ICCAs), the Tribal Parks example features de facto legal pluralism, lack of clear tenure and/or legal recognition, oppositional and/or cooperative relationships with other actors, and situations where local actors are influenced by intersecting global discourses on conservation and indigenous rights and culture. Globally, ICCAs are a form of protected area and are potentially critical in terms of meeting ambitious global protected area targets as well in addressing issues related to the rights and well-being of indigenous peoples. As such, understanding the ‘customary law or other effective means’, or the dynamics of power through which indigenous groups are able (or not) to realize their protected area goals is of global significance. This article illuminates the contours of power through two specific Tribal Parks case studies: the first involves contestations over industrial logging, while the second focuses on the establishment and implementation of what came to be called an ‘ecosystem services fee’ paid by ecotourism outfitters operating within a Tribal Park. Results highlight that the Tla-o-qui-aht have drawn power from different sources and exercised it by different means including turning to the Courts in a context of legal uncertainty, protest and direct action coupled with appeals to public opinion, developing and drawing on relationships with both local and non-local interests, and by strategically ‘tapping into’ prominent discourses.     

Methodological and contextual factors in the Dawkins/Gould dispute over evolutionary progress

Biologists Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould have recently extended their decades-old disagreements about evolution to the issue of the nature and reality of evolutionary progress. According to Gould, ‘progress’ is a noxious notion that deserves to be expunged from evolutionary biology. In Dawkins' view, on the other hand, progress is one of the most important, pervasive and inevitable aspects of evolution. Simple appeals to ‘the evidence’ are clearly insufficient to resolve this disagreement, since it is precisely the interpretation of the evidence that is in dispute. Scientific controversies in general, and the Dawkins/Gould dispute over evolutionary progress in particular, are worth examining in some detail because doing so sheds light on the interconnected roles of methodological and contextual factors in the formation, articulation and defense of scientific claims. My aim in this paper is to clarify the structure of the Dawkins/Gould dispute by analyzing it in terms of a tri-level model of scientific controversies, involving ‘top-level’ substantive disagreements, ‘middle-level’ methodological differences, and ‘bottom-level’ differences in historical and social factors. This simple three-tiered model is sufficiently abstract to have more general applicability to other scientific controversies.     

On fun and freedom: young women's moral learning in Indonesian Islamic boarding schools

This article analyses the role of fun and freedom in the moral learning of young women students in two Indonesian Islamic boarding schools. Recent debates about Islam and ethical subject formation have centred on the assumed tension between Islam and freedom. I examine decisions about television viewing and dress to illustrate both the flexibility and fixity of moral values and evaluation in girls’ lives. I argue that anthropologists of morality and Islam should take seriously moments of fun as important instances for ‘moral ludus’ or ‘moral play’ – the testing, shifting, and reshaping of the boundaries of moral behaviours that involve balancing the demands of various social fields and the larger ethical community in which a person is embedded. I suggest that these moments be viewed not as ruptures or instances of hypocrisy but as everyday occurrences of embedded agency in the lives of piety-minded individuals.     

‘It's not how it was’: the Chilean diaspora's changing landscape of belonging

Abstract

The increasingly diverse character of London's multicultural landscape has shaped how migrants interact with(in) the different spaces of the city. This process entails both settled and incoming migrants' participation in place-making; a mutual imbrication that might promote the long-settled migrants' evocation of a lost terrain. This article unpacks that process by looking at the Latin American social football scene of South London, specifically a space known as la cancha (the pitch). This was founded by Chilean political refugees during the 1970s and it has incorporated Latin American ‘economic’ migrants and ‘local’ Britons through time. Starting from the evocation of a lost ‘golden age’ of la cancha, the paper unpacks this space's contested, complex and changing nature. It presents diaspora space, community and belonging as lived processes. Through this depiction, the assumptions of homogeneous and isolated migrant communities are challenged, as are the diaspora's nostalgic claims that also emerge from them.     

Constitutional change in Fiji: The apparatus of justification

The discriminatory racial and other non‐democratic provisions which feature in the new constitution of the ‘Sovereign Democratic Republic of Fiji’ have been justified by the regime, at least superficially, on the grounds that they are essential for the protection and enhancement of indigenous Fijian rights and interests. This justification is underscored by two further related, claims which serve to promote the view that western democratic principles and practices are unsuitable to Fiji's political environment. First, the nature of Fiji's plural society is said to constitute a prima facie barrier to the peaceful conduct of western‐style democratic politics. Secondly, it is claimed that the 1970 Constitution of Fiji represented the imposition of essentially alien values on a pre‐existing ‘traditional’, and more legitimate, political framework. The purpose of this article is to evaluate these claims and to demonstrate that the new constitution is, in most respects, an instrument of Fijian chiefly domination.     

Settler indigeneity and the eradication of the non‐native: self‐determination and biosecurity in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas)

This article analyses how settlers of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) construct themselves as ‘natives’ through environmental management. Taking a multispecies ethnographic and historical approach to studying the Falkland Islanders’ self‐determination claim, I explore a series of ecological practices that demonstrate how some nonhumans become institutionalized into systems of racial and colonial classification whereas others appear natural. I show how agroindustrial and technoscientific value systems categorize human and nonhuman cohabitants according to degrees of political, economic, and ecological status through particular periods in the Falklands: from the eradication of ‘native pests’ (1833‐1982) to defence against ‘alien invaders’ (1982‐present). Towards a conclusion, I analyse how Islanders have begun to uproot their own ecological imperial past through removal of British‐introduced ‘invasive’ species and native habitat restoration. The article argues that attention to how settlers colonize with natives contributes significantly to a critical multispecies anthropology with broader implications for debates on ethnogenesis and indigeneity.     

Spectres of Seppo: the afterlives of Finland's nuclear waste experts

This article examines how Finland's nuclear waste repository safety assessment experts summoned memories of Seppo: a deceased colleague whose ‘spectre’ was said to still ‘haunt’ their workplace. First, it tracks how Seppo appeared in predecessor parables: cautionary tales told about his death, which conveyed value judgements about how experts ought to act, engage, and aspire. Second, it explores how Seppo's long-time ‘right-hand man’ Gustav still felt haunted by his colleague's affective intensities, scientific vision, and sharp tongue. This led Gustav to prod his workmates to reconsider how they modelled Finland's ecosystems many millennia into the future. Studying this ethnographically revealed how traces of Seppo's past life infused living experts with emotions, opened them to alternative futures, and spurred them to rethink their professional values. This article concludes by introducing expert afterlives as a temporal, epistemic, and affective nexus that can shape how technocratic projects are organized and how expert knowledge is made.     

A critical note on ‘exclusive recognition’

Cenk Saracoglu conceptualizes the antipathy towards Kurdish migrants manifesting in certain cities of Turkey since the early 2000s as ‘exclusive recognition’ in his article ‘“Exclusive recognition”: the new dimensions of the question of ethnicity and nationalism in Turkey’ published in Ethnic and Racial Studies 32(4). According to the author, these recent developments represent ‘a historically specific ethnicization process’ and its sources cannot be found directly and only in historical discourses and policy of mainstream Turkish nationalism. In this note, I contradict the author's claims by asserting that the recent manifestations of anti-Kurdish sentiments are an extension of the ongoing policies of Turkish national identity based on Turkish nationalism.     

Politics of Presence at the Urban Margins. Emplacement as a Performative Force Among Migrant-Settlers in Chile*

ABSTRACT

Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Arica, a northern Chilean city, this paper addresses the process of ‘emplacement from the margins’ as a performative force in which materialities, affective dimensions and claims are tied together. It analyses how migrants become settlers in unauthorised camps on the fringes of Arica. I argue that in this process a ‘politics of presence’ emerges, intimately imbricated in the material constitution of these settlements. I explore the potential of such politics to break the ‘sensible’ order and open the possibility for ignored actors to become present as legitimate urban interlocutors. I discuss aspects of what Kathleen Stewart describes as ‘ordinary things that matter’ because they shimmer precariously, such as the dynamic contingency derived from the building procedures commonly used in unauthorised camps.     

Framing the Loss of Solace: Issues and Challenges in Researching Indigenous Compensation Claims

The 2016 judgment in the ‘Timber Creek’ compensation case (Griffiths v Northern Territory of Australia (no. 3) (2016) FCA 900) signals an end to an era of extinguishment-related injustice and inequality, representing, as it does, the first litigated Federal Court award of compensation for the loss or impairment of rights and interests, under the 1993 Native Title Act. In this paper, I explore some of the methodological challenges and conceptual issues confronting anthropologists involved in researching compensation claims. In drawing upon my experience in researching two such claims, I discuss how the issues of gender, resource development, environmental transformation, the Stolen Generation, and the history of Indigenous-European relations in remote and rural Australia impact upon investigations into the loss or diminution of traditional attachments to land. In conceptualising this loss of connection, I discuss material relating to the ‘anthropology of emotions’, and I point to some of the obstacles encountered when talking about emotions cross-culturally. In conclusion, I explore research undertaken into the social and psychological impacts of ecosystem distress, loss of place, and environmental change, and I posit the value of Glenn Albrecht’s concept of ‘solastalgia’ (2005. “Solastalgia, a New Concept in Human Health and Identity.” Philosophy Activism Nature 3: 41–44) in framing research into the loss of solace, and in expanding upon the legal notion of this loss as ‘inconvenience’ and ‘injured feelings’.     

The formal definition of the environment of an animal

The article describes the first step in the formalization of the theory of animal ecology developed by H.G. Andrewartha, L.C. Birch, T.O. Browning, D.A. Maelzer and their students. The classification of the environment given by H.G. Andrewartha in Introduction to the Study of Animal Populations (1971) is formalized, with the exclusion of the component ‘weather’. In addition, the notion due to D. A. Maelzer that certain objects ‘only modified the value of some resource or other component of environment’ is also formalized and extended. The class of malentities is enlarged to include the case of an animal eating a poisonous animal. This enlarged class includes some animals formally classified as ‘aggressors’. Symbiosis is also discussed.