Negotiating belonging: plants,people, and indigeneity in northern Australia

This article focuses on human‐plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non‐Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human‐plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other‐than‐human relations in a more‐than‐human world.     

The spirit of the gift,the price of potency: a Maussian model of the Southeast Asian state of Luwu

This rereading of Mauss's The gift shifts the focus of discussion from the Maori hau to another example: tanoana (potency) among the Toraja (To Pamona) of Central Sulawesi. This potency animates an exchange with (human) gods that is at once gift and purchase (maoli). By tracing the intersection of this Maussian literature with that on the animist foundation of the Southeast Asian state, I analyse the nature of potent gifts that serve as a form of social currency in a ‘spiritual economy’ tying centre with (Toraja) periphery in the kingdom of Luwu. This ‘money’, imbued with royal potency, is a medium for the payment of debt only and not a medium of exchange, which gives ‘purchases’ made with it the characteristics of a ‘gift’ and also an opportunity to extract tribute. The Maussian analysis of the blurring of person and thing, and of persons and spirits, thus offers new insight into the nature of political power in the Southeast Asian state.     

‘Cats give funerals to rats’: making the dead modern with lament

This article compares funeral laments in a Tibeto‐Burman‐speaking community in Yunnan, China, from two periods: the early 1990s, after ritual revitalization was thoroughly underway, and 2011, after this community had come into more intimate contact with the modernity‐obsessed cultures of urban and semi‐urban China. Laments fashion grief in a public setting by conceptualizing the dead and their relations with the living in vivid poetic language. Laments from the early 1990s described these relations as a circuit of suffering, in which children returned a debt of suffering they owed their parents after the latter's deaths. By 2011, innovative lamenters had reorientated their understanding of suffering to be personal, internal, and intimate. The dead became more ‘modern’, allowing the living, defined largely by their relations with the dead, to participate in ‘modernized’ forms of authentic, sincere emotional expression.     

Liberalism and racism: an ‘elective affinity’?

This appraisal of David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín's Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas argues that there is no ‘elective affinity’ between liberalism and racism, which is the core argument of the book. The notion of ‘elective affinity’, which the authors borrow from Max Weber, requires a structural homology between the ‘electively’ related elements that just does not exist in this case. The relationship between both is entirely contingent, ‘racism’ being a doctrine of inter-group relations while ‘liberalism’ is a doctrine of intra-group relations, with no consideration of how the boundaries of the group are constituted.     

Diurnal activity patterns of Harwood’s Spurfowl Pternistis harwoodi in relation to habitat types and climatic conditions in the Central Highlands of Ethiopia

Harwood’s Spurfowl Pternistis harwoodi is an endemic bird of Ethiopia. Globally, it is categorised as Vulnerable. Habitat loss and hunting are the major conservation threats to the species. This study investigated the activity patterns of Harwood’s Spurfowl in relation to biophysical variables in the Central Highlands of Ethiopia. A species focal sampling method was applied to quantify the time budget of the target species during the dry and wet seasons of 2016. The time spent by the species on various activity patterns were significantly different (p < 0.05). The mean proportion of time utilised by the species for ‘calling’, ‘feeding’, ‘preening’ and ‘resting’ activities based on habitat types and seasons were also statistically different (p < 0.05). Except for ‘resting’, most activity patterns showed bimodal patterns with peaks during the early morning and late in the afternoon. The number of Harwood’s Spurfowl (birds per hour per square metre) detected was higher during the cooler wet season. The highest bird counts occurred during low temperature, low wind speed and high relative humidity in the early morning and late afternoon. The species was recorded most in the scrubland habitat where human disturbance was low. Thus, this habitat should be conserved and managed to sustain the population.     

Effect of Nitrogen and Powdery Mildew on the Yield Formation of Two Winter Barley Cultivars1

In field experiments the effect of powdery mildew on the yield formation of two barley cultivars ‘Catinka’ (partially resistant) and ‘Tapir’ (susceptible) was investigated in relation to three levels of nitrogen fertilization (40, 90, 150 kg N/ha). Nitrogen increased especially the single ear yield of cv.‘Catinka’, whereas cv.‘Tapir’ showed symptoms of N oversupply. Infection density of Erysiphe graminis hordei also increased with increased nitrogen supply, although it decreased transiently, at the highest N level for cv.‘Tapir’. In general, cv.‘Catinka’ was less tolerant to infections with E. graminis than cv.‘Tapir’, but yield response of both cultivars to powdery mildew (17, 11 and 8 % and 12, 16, and 12 % yield losses for cv.,‘Catinka’ and ‘Tapir’. respectively) showed cultivar × nitrogen interrelationships. Starch and protein contents of grains indicated differences in the intensity of detrimental effects caused by powdery mildew limiting the formation of carbohydrates and/or the translocation processes. Regression analysis demonstrated a closer correlation of yield losses with the photosynthetically active leaf area (r =+0.96 and +0.93 for ‘Catinka’ and ‘Tapir’) than with disease intensity (r =−0.32 and −0.85). Theinte,rpretation of disease/yield loss relations and the detrimental effect of powdery mildew are discussed with reference to plant resistance, remaining green leaf area, the availability of nutrients, to ‘sink and source’ conditions and to the occurrence of,additional environmental stresses.     

The Imagined Child: Ambiguity and Agency in Australian Intercountry Adoption

The adoption by Australian couples of children from ‘overseas’ involves claborate processes of bureaucratic assessment, approval and ‘parent education’. This paper explores adults' notions of ‘child’(ren) from ‘overseas’, which help shape and constitute such social processes, not only with couples seeking to adopt, but also with those cultural brokers who assess, regulate and ‘educate’ couples pursuing adoption, such as social workers and psychologists. The ways in which the adoptive ‘child’ is imagined and anticipated by counsellors and would‐be parents alike are explored through ethnographic data from South Australia. However, the proclivities of prospective adoptive parents to imagine their child‐to‐be are attenuated by certain social knowledge in relation to countries of origin. This leads to an exploration of ambiguities and tensions between the intercountry adoptive child as a tabula rasa and as a culturally and historically constituted person. The significance of ambiguities and contradictions for the child's agency and identities is highlighted, within the context of certain social policies around adoption. The chronological age of the child at the time of ‘allocation’ to its adoptive parents is considered as constituting a cultural fulcrum, upon which the identity and situational significance of the ‘origins’ of the child are deemed to subsequently turn.     

Bazar,Big Kites and Other Boys' Things: Distinctions of Gender and Tradition in Balinese Youth Culture

Balinese society is undergoing rapid change, but remains discursively situated in a ‘timeless’ ethos of cultural tradition. This tension can be observed in relation to the cultural activities of the island's young people, particularly the young men. The staging of bazar (neighbourhood fundraising parties), the making of ogoh‐ogoh (giant papier‐mâché effigies to mark Nyepi, the Balinese New Year) and the competitive flying of oversize kites are–despite their sometimes contentious reception from older generations—popularly dubbed as ‘traditional’ expressions of Balinese youth culture. This recourse to tradition must be viewed in relation to two pervasive discourses: that of adat (customary law) and ajeg (a new protectionist ethos in the discourse on Balinese cultural identity). This paper argues that in contemporary urban Bali, male youth culture finds its most visible expressions in relation to the abiding standards of established public ritual and the equally abiding gender divisions that serve to guarantee the reproduction of ‘traditional’ social life. Rather than fighting aggressively against the grown‐up norm, these expressions replicate the public culture of the adult world—while drawing on global and national youth styles—and strive towards the expression of a specifically ‘Balinese’ youth culture.     

Making the Baruya great again: From glorified great men to modern suffering subjects?

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal ‘Great Man’ people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists’ drive to document and empathise with “suffering subjects”, I suggest that being ‘left behind’ and ‘forgotten’ is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of ‘making great men.’ Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being ‘last place’ (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being ‘the greatest people’ of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to ‘be great’ reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a ‘suffering slot’, the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship.     

A single‐stranded conformational polymorphism (SSCP)‐derived quantitative variable to monitor the virulence of a Barley yellow dwarf virus‐PAV (BYDV‐PAV) isolate during adaptation to the TC14 resistant wheat line

A standardized single‐stranded conformational polymorphism (SSCP) procedure is proposed as an alternative to the time‐consuming biological characterization of Barley yellow dwarf virus‐PAV (BYDV‐PAV) isolates. Using this procedure, six of 21 overlapping regions used to scan the viral genome gave patterns specific to ‘4E’ (avirulent) or ‘4T’ (‘4E’‐derived virulent) isolates. The calibration of samples and integration of SSCP patterns corresponding to the nucleotide region 1482–2023 allowed the estimation of P_T values that reflect the proportions of a ‘4T’‐specific band. Analysis of the biological (area under the pathogen progress curve) and molecular (P_T) data suggested a positive linear relation between these variables. Moreover, sequence analysis of the nucleotide region 1482–2023 highlighted the presence of a nucleotide polymorphism (C/A₁₈₃₅) which can be considered as a candidate for virus–host interactions linked to the monitored virulence. According to these parameters, P_T values associated with ‘4E’‐ and ‘4T’‐derived populations show that: (i) long‐term infection of a BYDV‐PAV isolate on the ‘TC14’ resistant host leads to the fixation of virulent individuals in viral populations; and (ii) the introduction of susceptible hosts in successive ‘TC14’ infections results in the maintenance of low virulence of the populations. Thus, the presented study demonstrates that SSCP is a useful tool for monitoring viral populations during the host adaptation process. The described impact of host alternation provides new opportunities for the use of the ‘TC14’ resistance source in BYDV‐resistant breeding programmes. This study is part of the global effort made by the scientific community to propose sustainable alternatives to the chemical control of this viral disease.     

Historicising the Cosmogony: Naming the Asala Perahara in Buddhist Sri Lanka

This article offers a novel interpretation of Sri Lanka's great ceremonial procession for the Buddha, the Asala Perahara. By conceptualizing the name, ‘Asala’ as a chronotope (Bakhtin 1981), and giving emphasis to its authorisation by Buddhist monks, the interpretation reveals that this ritual commemorates the origins of Buddhism in relation to the island of Sri Lanka, thus constituting it as a unique ‘quality space’ (Fernandez 1986) for its Buddhist inhabitants. The interpretation demonstrates that the distinction between mythic time and everyday time, as espoused by Lévi-Strauss (1972) is not only arbitrary, but spurious in this context. Furthermore, contra Seneviratne (1978), it shows that far from being an anachronism in contemporary society, the Asala Perahara in fact enacts its cosmic premise and is politically powerful precisely because it defines reality in religious terms.     

The aesthetics of ‘time reckoning’: a Guna chromatic history★

This is a study of time and aesthetics through an ethnographic analysis of an indigenous visual system. Looking at historical changes in women's clothing and village patterns among Guna people (Panama), the article shows that images and artefacts are key to shedding light on indigenous historicities. Core visual and material processes encapsulate and manifest biographical and group time. By the same token, such processes provide a privileged perspective to consider how present-day social relations are the product of long-term historical transformations. The analysis draws on the relatively overlooked notion of ‘chromatism’ developed by Lévi-Strauss and subsequently elaborated by Lima as ‘chromatic sociality’. It proposes that ‘chromatism’ is an indigenous category that allows for reckoning with the passing of time and the shifting circumstances of history.     

David Graeber's Wunderkammer,Debt: The First 5 000 Years

Graeber’s Debt: The First 5 000 Years has generated extensive commentary in the popular press and has captured the imagination of both activists at the barricades and investment fund managers in the City of London. Everyone is captivated by his critique of the myth of primitive barter. Yet it is a puzzle that a core element of his argument—the myth of primordial debt—has been largely overlooked. This review seeks to redress this oversight and in the process to suggest that Graeber’s emphasis on violence and enslavement, while compelling, is limited by his quest for origins. Feminist anthropology taught us to set aside the question, ‘when did “it” begin’ and instead open up to other questions, beyond the limits and biases the quest for origins presupposes. One wishes Graeber had entered the wonder cabinet he constructed in this book, rather than use it to ground a teleology.     

Phenotypic Stability of Mixtures – Relations Between the Stability Parameters of a Mixture and Its Components

For each of the two stability parameters (‘regression coefficient’ and ‘sum of squared deviations from the regression’) of the common regression approach (= regression of the yield of population i in environment j on the environmental index of this evironment j which often has been estimated by the mean of all tested populations in this environment j) the phenotypic stability of a mixture and it's components have been analysed theoretically. It can be shown that in practical applications (for example: variety testing) the regression coefficient of a mixture often can be sufficiently approximated by the arithmetic mean of the regression coefficients of the components grown singly. This simple relation between a mixture and it's components don't hold for the second stability parameter ‘sum of squared deviations from the regression’. The exact relation has been deduced and useful and clear approximations are discussed. All the theoretical results are demonstrated and applied using the well-known experimental barley data of Sandfaer (1970).     

Ghar ki tension: domesticity and distress in India's aspiring middle class

Tension is a polysemic term used across South Asia to describe the strains and scrapes of life, like ‘worry’ or ‘stress’ in Euro-American discourse. Yet in the formerly agro-pastoralist and upwardly mobile Gaddi community of Himalayan India, it is used by women with the qualifying ghar ki – ‘household’ – to indicate a deeper disruption to bodily humours, intimate relations, and household materiality. This article takes ghar ki tension, with a particular focus on the layered qualifier ghar, as a window into the precarity of middle-class domestic life as it is experienced in the bodies of the women who pursue it. Rather than focusing on the communicative functions of women's distress within the household, this article looks to the relational, affective, and material ways in which women see their bodies and houses as mutually constituted and disrupted. This approach reveals how women's domestic labour is both a source of dignity and a burden. This burden is experienced in ghar ki tension, in bodily symptoms of overheating, and visits from supernatural beings. This article suggests that ghar ki tension might offer a novel way of looking at distress as the psychic and embodied cost of upward social mobility beyond the Gaddi context.     

Male-like females, mimicry and transvestism in butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae)

Abstract. When a butterfly species has a polymorphic female, with one of the forms closely resembling the male, it is customary to suppose that this form is ancestral, and that the ‘odd’ forms have arisen later. R. I. Vane-Wright, on the other hand, has suggested that in some species the male-like form may be a ‘transvestite’ female, the ancestral form of the female having been strikingly unlike the male. As later-derived forms are usually, but not always, genetically dominant to ancestral forms, we can make some choice between these hypotheses by discovering the dominance relations of the male-like and the ‘odd’ forms of the female. In the mimetic Papilio aegeus the male-like form is shown to be recessive to the ‘odd’ (mimetic) form, as has essentially been the case in all other butterflies so far investigated. Papilio phorcas is now shown to be the exception: the ‘odd’ (non-mimetic) form is recessive to the male-like form. We conclude that usually the male-like form is ancestral, but that P.phorcas may be an authentic example of ‘transvestism’, or the ‘transfer’ of male epigamic colour to the female of the species. The yellow, male-like pattern of the mimetic Papilio dardanus may be dominant or recessive to the mimetic forms according to the genetic background: largely recessive in Madagascar, and southern and western Africa, dominant to most forms in Ethiopia, and probably dominant to one mimetic form but recessive to the others in Kenya. All female dardanus patterns, both mimetic and yellow, are strongly dominant to both female phorcas patterns in P. dardanus × P. phorcas hybrids (P. ‘nandina’). The simplest explanation of this situation is that the male-like pattern of dardanus is ancestral, and that dominance has become locally reversed in Ethiopia. The dominance relations, and the sex- or autosomal-linkage of two forms can be determined without pedigree-breeding, simply by observing a few offspring each from a large number of wild-caught females.     

Adaptations by macroalgae to low carbon availability. I. A buffer system in Ascophyllum nodosum, associated with photosynthesis

Abstract The exchange of CO₂, H⁺ and O₂ between seawater and the intertidal brown macroalga Ascophyllum nodosum (L.) Le Jolis were measured in a flowthrough system. While the algae were kept in darkness, seawater with artificially increased alkalinity and pH at 9.85, was alternated with ‘normal’ seawater at pH 8.0. A proton buffering system, with capacity to release and reabsorb about 20 μmol protons per gram alga (fresh weight) was revealed. As the algae were returned to the ‘normal’ seawater, the kinetics of proton reabsorbtion indicated that a proton uptake was gradually induced. This proton uptake, which was not connected to ion exchange in the cell wall, reached its maximum after 12 h. If subjected to high alkalinity seawater in the light, A. Nodosum for a certain period of time was capable of carrying out O, evolution in excess of the import of inorganic carbon. This ‘photosynthetic buffering capacity’ amounted to about 17 μmol O; per gram alga. Besides depending on a buffer of photorcducible substances, this ‘photosynthetic buffering capacity’ appeared to be functionally connected with the proton buffer. The time course for the discharge of the ‘photosynthetic buffer system’ and for the reabsorbtion of protons into the proton buffer (about 6h for 90× of the capacity at a temperature of 6°C) suggests that the ‘photosynthetic buffer system’ has a functional importance in the adaptation of A. nodosum to intertidal regions. The function of the buffer system is discussed in relation to the crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM)-like characteristics recently shown for the intertidal brown algal family Fucaceae.     

The cosmopolitics of flow and healing in north‐central Timor‐Leste

In north central Timor‐Leste, multi‐sensory ecological engagement is deeply entangled with conceptualisations of and approaches to people’s wellbeing. How people understand human health and wellbeing is closely related to how they understand nature or more particularly human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. Working through complex cosmopolitics and activated through cross‐temporal more‐than‐human ‘mutualities of being’, kinship networks are attuned to relational flows between ‘bodies’ and things. Rather than concentrating on the disjunctions created by the differences in the natures of beings or their ritual separation, this paper examines how relational flows between such ‘bodies’ and things open up cosmopolitical spaces for the creation and negotiation of intergenerational wellbeing.     

Doing the City from the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Urban Marginality*

ABSTRACT

This special issue focuses on urban marginality in diverse contexts across the world (Africa, Latin America, Arab States and Europe) and proposes anthropological perspectives on contemporary urbanity that take into account the complexity of the social positions of those city dwellers that are on the margins. Three aspects of urban margins come to the fore. First, urbanites respond to increasing marginalisation through the production of alternative meanings and narratives about the city. While grand, powerful narratives may present cities as ‘divided’, ‘dual’ or ‘conflicted’, urban dwellers may carve out symbolic space through discourses of the non-spectacular and non-political, emerging out of lived space. Second, the cuts and frictions constituting urban margins do not only limit urban dwellers capacities, but can also provide spaces of agentic possibilities. As it is well known, the absence of state control can be turned by versatile urbanites into opportunities of the ‘informal’ economy. Third, urban dwellers engage in manifold practices that connect and entangle their marginalised position with spaces of power and resources. Through their practices urban margins become a relation to, not a disconnection from the ‘centre’. In this special issue we understand ‘urban margins’ not as essence or entities, but as forms of relations between urban dwellers shaped by processes of political, economic, spatial and social marginalisation. Seen in this way, urban margins constitute a perspective on the urban: a lens to entice comparisons of urban agency in the world of cities [Robinson, J. 2011. “Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (1): 1–23. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00982.x]].     

Prefigured Features: A view from the New Guinea Highlands

Stimulated by a conference on Portraiture and the Problematics of Representation, which aimed to address portraiture as a set of cultural practices under the rubric of ‘any body-representation that stands for an individual’, in this paper I ask some questions raised by materials from Papua New Guinea. I begin with an investigation of the notion of individuation in relation to the heads which are taken in Asmat and Marind-Anim headhunting. I argue that if anyone's individuality is represented by a captured head it is that of the new owner, not his deceased victim. I then turn to Hagen feather plaques and suggest that they are best understood as assemblages of material resulting from mobilising relations, and hence not as portraits embodying notions of likeness.