The perils of payoff: corruption as a threat to global biodiversity

Corruption is a worldwide phenomenon, particularly in many developing countries, which contain a large proportion of global biodiversity. Most alarming, from a biodiversity-conservation perspective, is the frequent corruption of government officials who manage valuable natural resources, such as timber, oil and precious minerals. A recent study by Joyotee Smith and colleagues describes rampant corruption in the timber industry of Indonesia, and shifts in the prevalence of different types of corruption as the country has become destabilized politically. By placing corruption into a conceptual framework, Smith et al. provide important insights into how developing nations and their natural resources can be besieged by corruption.     

Swimming in and out of Focus: Second Contact,Vietnamese Migrant Others and Australian Selves

Anthropologists and others have always used the Other to define themselves. Using Michael Taussig's idea of ‘second contact’, I argue that this is inappropriate and that the imagined borders between us and them in relationships between Vietnamese and other Australians are less than stable, continually losing their polarity and swimming in and out of focus. In light of the Vietnamese migrant case, I argue that similar ethnographic research projects cannot rely on stable boundaries between the host and the migrant community to organise explanations. Rather than simply registering ‘cultural contacts’, we have to engage the interplay between the strange and the familiar in specific contexts. Furthermore, my reading of Vietnamese migrant identity obliges us to listen to Vietnamese Australian voices as they attempt to respond to the fluctuating interstices of an intercultural borderland. This implies the mutual anthropological interrogation of both self and other.     

Manikin‐Ship: Value‐added relatedness in Vietnamese museums, 1996–2005

Objects are telling of identity and difference, through possession, exchange, and display, but this dynamic must be historicised and socially situated. In this article, I focus on the signification of ethnicity in Vietnamese museums, particularly on an apparent distinction between historically ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ matter. The earliest displays responded to the previous hegemony of French colonial significations. Subsequent national exhibits consistently enable Vietnam through assemblies of objects and images, but suggest—when examined over time—fundamentally different configurations of the nation, ethnicity, gender, and historicity. Object assemblies, where a centrepiece signifies the surrounding objects, indicate repeated prospecting for new social assemblages, most recently situating Vietnam in post‐Cold War networks through the Southeast Asian kinship implied in the nation’s ethnic diversity.     

Transitions in Taste in Vietnam and the Diaspora

This paper argues that food and styles of eating have become the predominant markers of social change for the Vietnamese in both Vietnam and in the diaspora. In post‐socialist Vietnam the transition to a market economy has allowed for a huge growth in the number of restaurants and cafés, and in the north, a return to an earlier style of cooking. The intense interest and emphasis on food as embodied pleasure has meant that it has come to stand for the transition away from a heavily state‐controlled economy. The new configurations of family and friendship are being framed by newly available ways of ‘eating out’, which are both a means of social display and distinction as well as an indicator of the tensions between reform and festivity within an authoritarian nation‐state struggling to define itself in a globalising world. At the same time as food in Vietnam is undergoing rapid transformation so too has the Vietnamese diaspora generationally changed its eating patterns. Although there has been a focus in the literature on food in the diaspora that emphasises the nostalgic and recuperative elements of ‘migrant food’, I argue that food is the prime mechanism of intercultural engagement for each diasporic generation. For older Vietnamese, Vietnamese restaurants and barbecues have been the sites of interplay between cultural ‘tradition’ and innovation, and between Australianness and Vietnameseness, and these interstitial places continue to be important for younger Vietnamese. Within this established framework of cross‐cultural interaction, for Vietnamese youth, the social settings of ‘ethnic food’, eaten at home and shared with family, have been grafted onto a sociality of eating fast food. This melding together of both invention and convention, of transgression and ordinariness provides the background against which young people from migrant backgrounds are reinvigorating the social spaces of food consumption and in the process both re‐enchanting and destabilising the notion of migrant food.     

Defining immigrant newcomers in new destinations: symbolic boundaries in Williamsburg,Virginia

Abstract

This article examines media representations of immigration in Williamsburg, Virginia, a ‘new immigrant destination’ in the USA. Through a content analysis of coverage in Williamsburg's local newspaper, we explore how reporters, columnists and readers draw on nationally and internationally circulating discourses to produce public interpretations of immigration issues and construct symbolic boundaries between and among in-groups and ‘others’ in the community. ‘National boundaries drawn locally’ captures how media actors use nationally recognizable frames to interpret local issues and define the parameters of community and national belonging. ‘Localized symbolic boundaries’ take their meanings from place-based, cultural understandings, specific economic conditions and demographics in the local setting. Newspaper discussions in Williamsburg distinguish between ‘deserving’ foreign student workers (primarily from Eastern Europe and Asia) and ‘undeserving’, racialized, Latino ‘others’. Our analysis advances theories of boundary construction and holds implications for the politics of belonging more generally in other immigrant-receiving contexts.     

Continental mapping of forest ecosystem functions reveals a high but unrealised potential for forest multifunctionality

Humans require multiple services from ecosystems, but it is largely unknown whether trade‐offs between ecosystem functions prevent the realisation of high ecosystem multifunctionality across spatial scales. Here, we combined a comprehensive dataset (28 ecosystem functions measured on 209 forest plots) with a forest inventory dataset (105,316 plots) to extrapolate and map relationships between various ecosystem multifunctionality measures across Europe. These multifunctionality measures reflected different management objectives, related to timber production, climate regulation and biodiversity conservation/recreation. We found that trade‐offs among them were rare across Europe, at both local and continental scales. This suggests a high potential for ‘win‐win’ forest management strategies, where overall multifunctionality is maximised. However, across sites, multifunctionality was on average 45.8‐49.8% below maximum levels and not necessarily highest in protected areas. Therefore, using one of the most comprehensive assessments so far, our study suggests a high but largely unrealised potential for management to promote multifunctional forests.     

Multiple nostalgias: the fabric of heritage in Luang Prabang (Lao PDR)

This article explores the workings of nostalgia as a major driving force in heritage‐making. Based on my fieldwork in Luang Prabang, an ancient royal town of northern Laos which became a UNESCO Listed World Heritage Site in 1995, I propose that it is necessary to disentangle the multiple nostalgic attachments which lie behind the often‐mentioned label ‘nostalgia’ from those which are not necessarily nostalgic. I explore the various engagements of diverse actors with nostalgia, and how these engagements, rooted in personal experiences, intersect with specific postures towards time, history, heritage, development, and culture. Secondly, my aim is to highlight the performative aspects of nostalgia in the fabric of heritage. I argue that, by attempting to preserve spaces, practices, and objects, UNESCO experts and national civil servants effectively transform them. Far from stopping transmission and culture mechanisms, patrimonial recognition creates aesthetic forms, historical narratives, politics of transmission, and, more generally, social configurations. I delve into the processes through which Luang Prabang has been turned into a heritage scene and a tourist attraction, and I contend that such transformation is rendered possible by the concatenation of UNESCO projects, cosmopolitan gentrification, tourism development, and state programmes.     

Social mobility of ethnic minority students in Laos

Idealistically speaking, schools are engines for upward social mobility. Education for ethnic minorities in Laos was set up to achieve nationalist, political, economic and sociocultural goals of ‘equity’ and ‘equality’. It was hoped that education would shift ethnic minorities from a lifestyle based on superstitious beliefs to a modern one, so that they could participate and enjoy ‘equality’ through educational equity. The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of how equality as a promise in education has impacted on students’ upward mobility, particularly the political discourse of the ‘big man’. This paper explores social mobility provided by national education for ethnic minorities through boarding schooling. It finds that such education has yet to reposition ethnic minorities into the ethnic Lao sociocultural hierarchy. As a result, regardless of their educational success, students are still ranked as ‘ethnic minorities’ and as being ‘poor’ in the eyes of urban students, middle class and rich students, and the ethnic Lao elite.     

The impact of a legal trade in farmed tigers on consumer preferences for tiger bone glue – Evidence from a choice experiment in Vietnam

Demand for tiger parts and products has fuelled the poaching of wild tigers. As the supply of wild tigers has become scarce, tiger farming has emerged as an alternative source and proliferated in several Asian countries with unclear implications of a legalized trade in farmed tigers on wild tiger demand. We conducted a choice experiment with 228 Vietnamese tiger bone glue consumers investigating their preferences and trade-offs for different attributes of their purchase choice, including legality, source, purity, and price. We calculated consumers' willingness to pay for each attribute level under the current trade ban and in a hypothetical legal trade. Consumers preferred and were willing to pay more for wild than farmed tiger glue and a higher proportion of tiger bone in the glue. Consumers also preferred legal over illegal sufficiently for most to switch from illegal wild to legal farmed tiger. Hence, a legal trade will shift preferences significantly towards farmed tiger glue from legal sources but will not eradicate demand for wild tigers, likely leading to the parallel operation of legal and illegal markets. We discuss the implications of the results for conserving wild tigers through efforts to manage demand in Vietnam.     

‘Pho’ Phai and faux phais: The market for fakes and the appropriation of a Vietnamese national symbol

When Hanoi's favorite painter Bui Xuan Phai died in 1988, he became a legend in Vietnamese art circles. He was known as much for his paintings of ‘Old’ Hanoi streets ‐ earning him the nickname of Pho'Phai or ‘street’ Phai‐ as for his frequent visits to the underground cafes where banned writers spent their evenings drinking and philosophizing. As the Vietnamese economy improved in the early 1990s, a clientele for his paintings began to develop among Westerners visiting Hanoi. Gradually, it became increasingly clear that most of the paintings on the market attributed to Phai were in fact forgeries. This article will discuss the expectations of Westerners and their interest in an ‘authentic’ Vietnamese painting and its contrast to Vietnamese visions of their city in decay. The article illustrates how opposite notions of ‘authenticity’ and history define the cultural production of taste and alter perceptions about art and the ‘Orient.’     

Conservation Heroes Versus Environmental Villains: Perceiving Elephants in Caprivi,Namibia

This article investigates the impact of transnational environmental organizations on rural people involved in conservation by exploring the impacts of the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES) ivory trade ban on Namibia’s elephant conservation policy. This case study examines how rural African people are put into categories of ‘conservation heroes’ or ‘environmental villains’ by local conservation practitioners, government officials in Namibia and transnational conservation actors. Findings indicate that the approach of state officials and conservation organizations (CO) results in incomplete representations of both rural African people and the cultural importance these people attach to elephants. The article concludes that current environmental narratives associated with rural African people have been used as powerful ‘tools of persuasion’ at the state and international level to support and legitimate conservation policy and resource use in relation to the concerns of transnational environmental actors to the exclusion of rural African people.     

Seeking signs of transparency: audit,materiality, and monuments to active citizenship in New Delhi

In New Delhi, the Chief Information Commissioner has ordered that municipal councillors should ‘proactively disclose’ details of the amounts spent on public works via Hindi-language noticeboards displayed in every city ward. As ‘appropriate’ technology designed to reach out to the common people, the noticeboards are part of an ongoing technomoral project to develop and democratize citizen engagement with urban governance. An audit of the noticeboards carried out by Information Commission officials and ‘right to information’ activists reveals that many are badly positioned or assembled from inappropriate materials. As such, they are judged to be unreliable actants in the project to prefigure a more open and transparent city administration. A focus on the materiality and temporal orientation of the noticeboards, however, reveals them to be productive in other ways. We come to understand the noticeboards as monuments to earlier projects of active citizenship and as ongoing sites of contest or collaboration between actors concerned with their audit and remediation.     

Illegal wildlife trade in the Himalayan region of China

The Himalayan region of China, with its rich biodiversity, used to be important for hunting and collecting of medicinal plants. In the past decades, conservation attitudes and legislation for wildlife conservation have developed rapidly in China. Increasing numbers of species are listed in the state protection list and local protection lists. In the Himalayan region, the area of natural reserves is high accounting for 70% of total area of natural reserves in China. However, wildlife in Himalayan region is suffering from illegal hunting and trade even after China has enforced the China Wildlife Protection Law (CWPL). The illegal wildlife trade and smuggling across Sino-neighbouring country borders and illegal wildlife trade related to domestic use flourish in the region. Although domestic illegal trade has declined in the past ten years, international illegal trade and smuggling continue, and are even expanding, thereby threatening survival of many endangered species such as the Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsoni), Giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) and Saker Falcon (Falco cherrug). Illegal wildlife trade in the region is attributed to four factors. First, the CWPL is still imperfect, especially concerning illegal trade and smuggling across borders. Second, CWPL is not fully enforced. Third, infrastructure in many nature reserves is undeveloped and human resources are lacking. Fourth, protection is hampered by differences in the laws of neighbouring countries, differences in penalties and in degrees of protection. Furthermore, national legislation is often not fully enforced in areas that are inhabited mainly by tribal and minority communities.     

Beyond Chinese groupism: Chinese Australians between assimilation,multiculturalism and diaspora

This essay argues that the tension between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is not contingent, but structurally embedded in the workings of the contemporary nation state. Through an analysis of ‘the Chinese’ in ‘Australia’ it aims to demonstrate that seemingly unambiguous concepts such as assimilation (the ethnic is absorbed by the national), multiculturalism (the ethnic coexists with the national) and diaspora (the ethnic transcends the national) cannot capture the diverse difficulties, ambivalences and failures of identification, belonging and political agency experienced by Chinese Australians. A more satisfactory analysis requires a questioning of the groupness of ‘the Chinese’ (as well as ‘the Australians’) and overcoming conceptual groupism (Brubaker): the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life. Instead a more processual and flexible understanding is proposed, where the relationship between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is one of constant evolution and mutual entanglement.     

Controversy,Islam and politics: an exploration of the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ affair through the eyes of British Muslim elites

In September 2012, a video entitled ‘Innocence of Muslims’ was uploaded to YouTube. The fourteen-minute clip featured actors playing the Prophet Muhammad, his companions and wives, and while production values were amateurish, aided by airings on Egyptian national television and others elsewhere, the video went viral. Recalling the Rushdie affair two decades beforehand, angry protests took place across the world. In the UK, the response from Muslims was markedly different. This article traces the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ affair from the eyes of those involved in formal Muslim-governmental relations. It explores what the new controversy tells us about the representation of Muslim communities in the process of political engagement since the Rushdie affair. It considers the experiential disconnect that exists between Muslim and political actors in contemporary Britain before exploring three important political factors – the cultural, representational and geopolitical – that influence and impact upon Muslim–governmental relations.     

Seen by the state: Bureaucracy,visibility and governmentality in a Papua New Guinean hospital

Drawing on ethnographic material from a government hospital in Papua New Guinea (PNG), this paper examines the relationship between power and visibility in two kinds of bureaucratic practice: hospital managers’ performance of institutional ‘transparency’ and patients’ careful management of their government health documents. In both examples, people engage with bureaucratic and biomedical technologies of visibility to entice governing actors to see and enter into a relationship with them. Against dominant Foucauldian theories of power‐vision, the article shows that, in the institutional crevices of a ‘weak state’, bureaucratic technologies operate as relational technologies that elicit affective motivations rather than as disciplinary technologies that transform the self.     

State formation,social hierarchies,and ethnic dynamics: a case from upland Laos

State formation below the national scale remains under-researched. In this article, the reconstitution of the local history of an upland region of Laos – Sepon – reveals a process of state formation from a territorial margin. Contrary to James C. Scott’s thesis on state-evading peoples, members of a local ethnic minority population – the Phuthai – have been part of the making of the state over centuries. In addition to the material aspects of state-making, this article explores its intangible components that are often neglected in analyses of state formation. This wider lens is particularly applied to the Communist state-making efforts in Sepon during the American-Vietnam War. These have had the unintended consequence of producing a new class that replicates age-old social hierarchies and have resulted in Sepon, and probably other upland areas of contemporary Laos, being more socially inequitable than the Communist Revolution intended.