The Social Life of Rights: ‘Gender Antagonism’, Modernity and Raet in Vanuatu

In the northern Vanuatu town of Luganville a small group of men have responded to social and legal changes engendered by women's rights activists by forming a male support group called ‘Violence Against Men’. Members of this ‘backlash’ movement argue that the insidious promotion of Western‐style ‘women's rights’ is leading to discrimination against men in divorce proceedings, child custody battles, and in domestic violence and rape cases. They directly oppose recent and ongoing legal changes aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, such as Domestic Violence Protection Court Orders, and the repeatedly tabled (but long‐delayed) ‘Family Protection Bill’. Such interventions, they argue, undermine Vanuatu's ‘natural’kastom and Christian patriarchal gender order and, in doing so, pose a serious threat to the socio‐economic productivity of the nation‐state. For other men, however, rather than opposing women's rights activism, such challenges have raised questions about how men might successfully negotiate their identities in ways that are sensitive to contemporary issues of gender equality without undermining existing paradigms. Thus, this paper addresses the value accorded to universalism and relativism in gender activism in Vanuatu, and especially in terms of the linked discourses of kastom, church and modernity. It therefore explores gender relations in terms of the contemporary entanglement of indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, and in doing so argues that the contextual analysis of ‘rights’ should consider the specific historical, political and socio‐cultural circumstances in which they are put to use.     

Disaster as Opportunity? Cyclone Pam and the Transmission of Cultural Heritage

ABSTRACT

Culture, by its very nature, is always at risk of change – whether through transformation, destruction or redefinition. So how might culture be said to be particularly at risk in the context of ‘natural’ disasters, and how are disasters ‘naturalised’ or incorporated under the terms of different cultural regimes? An earlier focus on the impacts to built or tangible heritage is increasingly being balanced by a concern for the transformations wrought by disasters in the intangible heritage of communities. Through the recent event of Cyclone Pam in 2015, and a case study of the World Heritage site of Chief Roi Mata’s Domain (CRMD), we explore the ways in which repetitive natural hazards have shaped culture and tangible and intangible forms of heritage in Vanuatu. We focus in particular on the issue of cultural transmission at CRMD and its relationship to natural hazards through the device of a ‘disaster biography’. Risk can also carry with it the prospect of opportunity, and our paper seeks to understand how opportunity might be present in post-disaster reworkings of culture and heritage.     

Omarakana revisited,or ‘do dual organizations exist?’ in the Trobriands

Omarakana is arguably the most renowned village in the Trobriand and anthropological worlds. It is the very centre and wellspring of the North Kiriwinan universe and thus a sacred site, serving as the home of the Tabalu chiefly paramountcy. For us anthropologists, it is ground zero for our field methodology, thanks to Malinowski's pioneering research, and probably Melanesia's most hierarchical polity. Ironically, though, very little is actually known ethnographically about Omarakana's spatial layout. In this article I seek to compensate for that deficiency, arguing that Omarakana's seemingly concentric contours encode transformations of indigenous symbolism involving recurrent metaphors drawn from at least three conjoined semantic contexts of wide distribution across the Austronesian sphere and beyond: the double bisection of ‘male’ versus ‘female’; the botanical imagery of ‘base’, ‘body’, ‘tip’, and ‘fruit’; and various elements of ‘canoe’ symbolism. This alternative view of Omarakana's spatio‐temporal plan sheds new light on various additional dimensions of Trobriand sociality and cosmology while elaborating classic and contemporary anthropological theories of dualism.     

Frictions as opportunity: mobilizing for Arab-Bedouin ethnic rights in Israel

The question of how to advance justice for indigenous or marginalized ethnic groups leads to the heart of a polarized debate. We find a widely diffused ‘right to culture’ stance on one hand and a critical, constructivist one on the other. By taking up Tsing's metaphor of ‘zones of friction’, (2005) this article follows the way in which voices and imaginations about Bedouin culture and rights are produced in the conflict over a piece of land in the Negev desert, which is contested between the Israeli authorities and Bedouin representatives. As an imagined inhabitant of the area, ordinary citizens such as Mustafa are fashioned by activists and political tourists in highly culturalist or romanticized ways – images that are distant from the shifting self-representations of Mustafa himself. This case shows how the current emphasis on the ‘right to culture’ creates both new sites of contestation and new spaces for collective action.     

Nobody Likes Dichotomies (But Sometimes You Need Them)

Environmental anthropologists attempt to accommodate social justice while seeking to reconcile more-than-human relations and responsibilities towards their habitats. This article acknowledges areas of tension between local livelihoods and international conservation efforts, between indigenous peoples and wildlife, between traditional lifeways and development, and finally between different types of ethical assumptions that underlie anthropological advocacy. A number of dichotomies that are inherent in these tensions are discussed. With regard to the ecocentric/anthropocentric dichotomy, I argue that while human and environmental interests are sometimes intertwined, ecocentrism is necessary if non-humans are to be protected outside of utilitarian interests. With regard to the ‘neoliberal conservation/local communities’ dichotomy, I argue that blaming conservation for the violation of social justice depoliticises the issue of ecological injustice. Through a critical discussion of these dichotomies, this article examines the role of environmental anthropology in addressing today’s pressing environmental issues, particularly the loss of biodiversity, with respect to the ‘conservation’ of communities and that of protected areas.     

Masters of hybridity: how activists reconstructed Nepali society

This article discusses the changes that activists have brought to Nepali society in relation to two key elements of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (ANT): (1) its account of modernity and (2) its radical downplaying of human agency. ANT, contrary to the way it tends to be understood, deserves to be seen, at least in Latour's treatment, as a major theory of modernity. As such, it is important and enlightening, even though its attack on human agency – at least when discussing activism – is unhelpful. On this point Ian Hacking's notion of ‘making up people’ provides a better guide. The main example explored is the new kinds of ethnic identity that have achieved state recognition and become politically influential in Nepal over the last thirty years. The case of one ethnic and religious activist, Dr Keshabman Shakya, is used to illustrate the argument. Based on notions of human rights, rather similar processes of ‘making up people’ have also occurred with other minority groups, most strikingly in the case of the ‘third gender’, a context in which Nepal is famously ‘progressive’ compared to other nation-states in the region.     

Spirits of Uncertainty: Eventologies of Nature on China’s Frontiers

ABSTRACT

Studies of the environmental spirit world have been pursuing two main lines of inquiry: (1) that indigenous claims on ecological thought, including beliefs in chthonic spirits and mountain deities, are the outcome of a global process of abstraction and the commoditisation of nature which acts as technology of governmentality for the production of discursive formations through which neoliberal environmental subjectivities can emerge and (2) that the pitfalls of the nature/culture dualism can be avoided by giving priority to nonhuman subjectivities and positing sociologies of nature as subordinate to ontologies of the self-other divide or action-orienting cosmologies of local ‘nature’. The contributors of this collection engage with the spirit worlds and other invisible agents that constitute the everyday landscape of a number of ethnic groups in western China. While declining to engage with the notion of animism or subscribing to totalising ‘cosmologies’, the authors prefer to extract the eventfulness of haphazard and radically uncertain interactions with spirits or wondrous signs apt to be transformed into marvels and rumours. The ethnographies presented in this collection reveal an eventology of spirit worlds and landscape on China’s borderlands, an inquiry that – unlike history – does not study ‘events’ as such but the relation between what is deemed to be an event, a surprise, or a manifestation of wonder and what is deemed to be the innate, natural, ordinary, everyday life.     

Settler Postcolonial Ecologies and Native Species Regeneration on Banks Peninsula,Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT

The 2050 Ecological Vision for Banks Peninsula, New Zealand is ‘to create an environment in which the community values, protects and cares for the biodiversity, landscape and special character of Banks Peninsula’. Its aspirational goals point to the peninsula conservation trust’s vision for success on the moral horizons of land and place. These horizons stretch visually from the volcanic crater ridgelines to the outer coastal bays and the sea beyond. Temporally they span 175 years of cultural encounters of peoples and biota, and reveal community-based strategies designed to support thriving biodiversity on land that has been used primarily for production. This article draws on the event, textual and interview data as well as fieldwork conducted in 2015 during the 175th anniversary of organised European settlement. Settler pasts and presents are negotiated in natural heritage preservation through the restoration of native flora and fauna in natural areas and protected connectivity corridors. A settler postcolonial ecology for these hill country lands is committed to the simultaneous conservation of biological and cultural diversity in which indigenous flora and fauna, landscapes and people, are irreversibly hybridised, and endemic species become constitutive of a postcolonial national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand.     

Nationalism remixed? The politics of cultural flows between the South Asian diaspora and ‘homeland’

This article examines ‘Asian electronic music’, a generally progressive diasporic South Asian scene which fuses electronic dance music beats with instruments/sounds traditionally associated with the subcontinent, and how it became embedded into ‘majoritarian’ Indian nationalism. In India, the music's perceived ‘fusion’ aesthetic became emblematic of an emergent India which was economically prosperous while ‘respecting’ its cultural heritage. Using the case of an album which remixed India's national song, Vande Mataram, this article explores the convergences and divergences between Asian electronic musicians in Delhi and Hindu nationalists. The article concludes that the musicians in Delhi did not lend to Hindu nationalism. However, they perhaps gave secular Indian nationalism a ‘cool’ gloss. Ultimately, the production and consumption of Asian electronic music in Delhi raises significant questions regarding the scene's relationship to Indian nationalisms.     

Are Bush Fires and Drought ‘Natural Disasters’? The Naturalisation of Politics and Politicisation of Nature in New Caledonia

ABSTRACT

Based on long-term doctoral fieldwork on bush fires in New Caledonia, this paper aims to explore the double assumption that bush fires were shaped as a public issue through specific categorisations of human and natural elements, and that this work resulted in negative outcomes as far as the environment is concerned. This paper will address the question of mediation between human agency (colonial history, population distribution and development choices) and the production of ‘bush fires’ as an event category and as a ‘public problem’ calling for a policy solution. More specifically it will address the validity of the definition of bush fires as a ‘disaster’. While this phenomenon is both a discursive creation rooted in colonial imagination and a consciously forgotten strategy used by administrators and settlers to control land and dominate indigenous people, its growing importance today is related to the emergence of environmental concerns. However, one must not forget other issues obscured by the smoke of bush fires, namely a declining cattle farming sector and its lasting environmental impacts on drought (also considered a ‘natural disaster’ in New Caledonia by inhabitants, local administrations and scientists) and biodiversity loss. Addressing this issue leads to more general questions about the manner in which policy-makers, naturalists and environmentalists conceptualise and morally address environmental (natural and man-made) phenomena through time in a colonial/postcolonial setting.     

Anthropology,Politics and the Changing World of Aboriginal Australians

Essentialism has become a fundament of Aboriginal activism in modern Australia, with the result that informed, first-hand empirical observations of anthropologists who chronicle the deterioration of life in many Australian Aboriginal communities tend not to be taken seriously simply because their authors are not ethnically ‘Aboriginal’. This problem has contributed to a relative absence of analysis of the economic history of Aboriginal Australians, fostering instead an approach that prioritises the political and cultural rights of indigenous people above the kinds of life-enhancing circumstances that are necessary for them to participate in the economy and create wealth. This kind of essentialism has also resulted in a disregard for the rights of indigenous people as individuals, rather than as communities seeking self-determination, especially with regard to the rights of women and children. The work of Professor Ronald M. Berndt and Dr Catherine Berndt should serve as an example for today's anthropologists in encouraging broader expert participation in debates on indigenous disadvantage, despite the threat of admonishment or criticism by Aboriginal rights activists wielding the weapon of racial priority or essentialism.     

中国自然保护地体系分类研究

建设自然保护地体系是为子孙后代保留生物多样性资源与自然遗产最有效的途径。自1956年我国建立第一个自然保护区以来,已建设形成覆盖森林、草地、湿地、海洋、荒漠各类生态系统,珍稀濒危动植物物种和种质资源,自然遗迹和自然景观,以及水源保护等各类自然保护地。但由于缺乏自然保护地体系的顶层设计,各类保护地面临功能区分不清晰、空间重叠、管理成效不高等问题。建设以国家公园为主体的自然保护地体系的部署,为理顺我国保护地体系,明确各类保护地的功能定位提供了难得的机会。在分析我国现有自然保护地类型,并参考国际自然保护地体系分类经验的基础上,探讨了我国保护地体系分类,建议将我国自然保护地分为5大类,第I类为自然保护区,第Ⅱ类为国家公园,第Ⅲ类为自然公园,第Ⅳ类为物种与种质资源保护区,第Ⅴ类为生态功能保护区,并分析了各类自然保护地的功能定位和管理目标,以期为自然保护地体系规划建设提供参考。完善我国自然保护地体系分类,根据各类保护地的特点,创新保护地建设政策与机制,加大政府对自然保护地建设力度的同时,发挥全社会力量建设自然保护地,我国自然保护地建设将大有可为。     

Encountering nature through fieldwork: expert knowledge,modes of reasoning,and local creativity

The concept of ‘relation’ has been central to the anthropological reworking of the nature/culture and nature/society dichotomies. However, ecology is relational in a way that has often been ignored or dismissed in contemporary socio‐cultural anthropology. This article shows that there is more to ethnoecology than an ethnocentric form of analysis representing other people's understandings of the natural world through the prejudiced lens of Western scientific classifications. Three ‘fieldwork on fieldwork’ experiments involving encounters between natural scientists and indigenous communities in Amazonian Ecuador and Southern Guyana are discussed to illustrate the heterogeneity of human knowledge, the role of expert knowledge in intercultural communication, and the need to differentiate ecological reasoning from moral reasoning.     

Nature,Work and ‘the Environment’: Contesting Sentiments and Identities in the Southwest of Western Australia

Contesting discourses about natural resource development present a rich arena for ethnographic investigation. This paper focuses on interviews with environmental activists and forest industry defenders to document a struggle over the meaning of land, work and nature in the southwest of Western Australia. While Green activists condemn what they regard as crimes against nature, this moral challenge to rural communities from urban-based environmentalism is inverted by those working in the industry, such that local cultural practices are celebrated in the face of what is seen as emotional and non-scientific rhetoric. Conflicts about resource development are thus driven in significant respects by identity politics. The paper argues for the importance of cultural analysis, focused particularly on concepts of identity and ‘place’, in the study of contesting moral claims about what should be done with ‘the environment’.     

Freshwater biodiversity: importance, threats, status and conservation challenges

Freshwater biodiversity is the over‐riding conservation priority during the International Decade for Action ‐‘Water for Life’ ‐ 2005 to 2015. Fresh water makes up only 0.01% of the World's water and approximately 0.8 % of the Earth's surface, yet this tiny fraction of global water supports at least 100 000 species out of approximately 1.8 million ‐ almost 6% of all described species. Inland waters and freshwater biodiversity constitute a valuable natural resource, in economic, cultural, aesthetic, scientific and educational terms. Their conservation and management are critical to the interests of all humans, nations and governments. Yet this precious heritage is in crisis. Fresh waters are experiencing declines in biodiversity far greater than those in the most affected terrestrial ecosystems, and if trends in human demands for water remain unaltered and species losses continue at current rates, the opportunity to conserve much of the remaining biodiversity in fresh water will vanish before the ‘Water for Life’ decade ends in 2015. Why is this so, and what is being done about it? This article explores the special features of freshwater habitats and the biodiversity they support that makes them especially vulnerable to human activities. We document threats to global freshwater biodiversity under five headings: overexploitation; water pollution; flow modification; destruction or degradation of habitat; and invasion by exotic species. Their combined and interacting influences have resulted in population declines and range reduction of freshwater biodiversity worldwide. Conservation of biodiversity is complicated by the landscape position of rivers and wetlands as ‘receivers’ of land‐use effluents, and the problems posed by endemism and thus non‐substitutability. In addition, in many parts of the world, fresh water is subject to severe competition among multiple human stakeholders. Protection of freshwater biodiversity is perhaps the ultimate conservation challenge because it is influenced by the upstream drainage network, the surrounding land, the riparian zone, and ‐ in the case of migrating aquatic fauna ‐ downstream reaches. Such prerequisites are hardly ever met. Immediate action is needed where opportunities exist to set aside intact lake and river ecosystems within large protected areas. For most of the global land surface, trade‐offs between conservation of freshwater biodiversity and human use of ecosystem goods and services are necessary. We advocate continuing attempts to check species loss but, in many situations, urge adoption of a compromise position of management for biodiversity conservation, ecosystem functioning and resilience, and human livelihoods in order to provide a viable long‐term basis for freshwater conservation. Recognition of this need will require adoption of a new paradigm for biodiversity protection and freshwater ecosystem management ‐ one that has been appropriately termed ‘reconciliation ecology’.     

Symbols of Substance: Bimin-Kuskusmin Models of Procreation,Death, and Personhood

The Bimin-Kuskusmin of the West Sepik interior of Papua New Guinea elaborate a complex folk theory of procreation that becomes the ‘natural’ foundation of some ideologically significant constructions of the individual, the person, gender, and societal continuity. Drawing on certain aspects of Weiner's model of reproduction and regeneration, symbols of substance and insubstantial ‘spirit’ that form this ‘natural’ foundation of the Bimin-Kuskusmin ideology of birth, death, and rebirth are explored in contexts of rites of passage that mark the course of the life-cycle from conception to death and ancestorhood. The key symbols of this cultural ideology are the enduring substances of bone, bone marrow, and finiik spirit, which are the basis of reckoning the cyclical regeneration of clan categories.     

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.