Malariological and sociological significance of ‘tanka’ and ‘beri’ in the Thar Desert, Western Rajasthan, India

Both ‘tanka’ and ‘beri’, the well-like structures made for storing drinking water fetched from distant places or superficially charged from the runoff water of the monsoon rains, are considered integral components of rural communities in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan State in north-western India.A. stephensi, the confirmed malaria vector in desert regions, breeds in these structures predominantly.     

‘The law is not for the poor’: Land,law and eviction in Luanda

This article investigates how an existing two‐tiered land tenure system creates a hybrid space that blurs, and essentially questions and problematizes the boundaries of the formal/informal divide as presented within Angolan political and legal discourses. It showcases how urban formality and informality exist alongside each other in Luanda and how people take recourse to both formal and informal channels in attempts to secure housing, land tenure and livelihoods in the city. Through case studies, the article describes how small‐scale farmers in Luanda's northern municipality of Cacuaco lost their lands to urban development in 2009–10 and the ensuing circumstances in which formal rights and informal land tenure became intermeshed and ambiguous. As the case studies illustrate, a gap exists between the legal code and practice on the ground. This gap is represented in how Angola's postconflict land strategy, with its forced evictions and demolitions of houses and neighbourhoods, often with little or no compensation, is at odds with the Angolan Land Law, which states that land may only be expropriated by the state or local authorities for specific public use and must be justly compensated.     

A ‘mathematical’ spider living on gravel plains of the Namib Desert

In certain areas of the Namib gravel plains a new Ariadna sp. was discovered. It rims its vertical burrow with a stone circle, made on average of seven quartz stones. Some mathematical relationships between hole diameter, stone sizes and weight, and animal size were studied. A correlation was found, and stone selection by this spider postulated. Different hypotheses on the adaptive value of stone circle are suggested.     

‘They are stealing my island’: Residents’ opinions on foreign investment in the residential tourism industry in Tamarin,Mauritius

The small nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, once a poor sugar plantation island, has successfully diversified and expanded its economy since independence, by attracting foreign investment in manufacturing and modern service industries. Tourism is a major part of the ‘Mauritian Miracle’; in recent years residential tourism—attracting wealthy foreigners to take up semi‐permanent residence—has become a growth industry transforming coastal areas like Tamarin. Based on in‐depth interviews among 17 residents of Tamarin, this paper looks at how local people perceive the changes residential tourism is causing in the local area. It appears that while the majority is positive about economic changes like more jobs and income opportunities, and to some extent about improvements in infrastructure and services, there are growing misgivings about some of the social impacts. Notably, the increasing scarcity of land and rising house prices are making it impossible for growing numbers of local people to afford a place to live, resulting in growing squatter settlements in the area. Such growing social disparities challenge the Mauritian development model and may undermine its stability. These undesirable effects call for careful management of tourism development, incorporation of sustainability standards and attention to the position of major stakeholder groups, such as local residents.     

Comment on ‘Clinoform quantification for assessing the effects of external forcing on continental margin development’

The application of geometric modeling to shelf‐margin stratigraphy has the potential to constrain interpretations of external forcings on margin development. Here we apply such a model to the Ebro margin in order to complement the analysis of Kertznus & Kneller (2009) . Our results suggest that increased mass wasting in the Pleistocene was unlikely to have been a factor in the observed long‐term shelf‐edge trajectory, and that the trajectory can be explained by the interaction of sediment flux, relative sea‐level rise, and basin shape.     

LATE‐GLACIAL GLACIER EVENTS IN SOUTHERNMOST SOUTH AMERICA: A BLEND OF ‘NORTHERN’ AND 'SOUTHERN’ HEMISPHERIC CLIMATIC SIGNALS?

ABSTRACT. This paper examines new geomorphological, chronological and modelling data on glacier fluctuations in southernmost South America in latitudes 46–55°S during the last glacial–interglacial transition. Establishing leads and lags between the northern and southern hemispheres and between southern mid‐latitudes and Antarctica is key to an appreciation of the mechanisms and resilience of global climate. This is particularly important in the southern hemisphere where there is a paucity of empirical data. The overall structure of the last glacial cycle in Patagonia has a northern hemisphere signal. Glaciers reached or approached their Last Glacial Maxima on two or more occasions at 25–23 ka (calendar) and there was a third less extensive advance at 17.5 ka. Deglaciation occurred in two steps at 17.5 ka and at 11.4 ka. This structure is the same as that recognized in the northern hemisphere and taking place in spite of glacier advances occurring at a time of high southern hemisphere summer insolation and deglaciation at a time of decreasing summer insolation. The implication is that at orbital time scales the‘northern’ signal dominates any southern hemisphere signal. During deglaciation, at a millennial scale, the glacier fluctuations mirror an antiphase 'southern’ climatic signal as revealed in Antarctic ice cores. There is a glacier advance coincident with the Antarctic Cold Reversal at 15.3–12.2 ka. Furthermore, deglaciation begins in the middle of the Younger Dryas. The implication is that, during the last glacial–interglacial transition, southernmost South America was under the influence of sea surface temperatures, sea ice and southern westerlies responding to conditions in the 'southern’ Antarctic domain. Such asynchrony may reflect a situation whereby, during deglaciation, the world is more sensitized to fluctuations in the oceanic thermohaline circulation, perhaps related to the bipolar seesaw, than at orbital timescales.     

Regulating migration to Australia and back to the Philippines: Applying a ‘diaspora strategies’ framework

This paper examines circular labour migration between Australia and the Philippines by bringing Australian immigration policies and Philippine diaspora strategies under the same analytical framework. An extensive Philippine bureaucracy regulates migrants at each stage of the circular migration cycle, and as a sending state it has an interest in migrants staying temporarily in host countries such as Australia. The requirement to return home at the end of an overseas work contract compels migrants to remain attached to the sending state, their homeland, and return subsequently. However, Australia is allowing a route for temporary migrants to apply for permanent residency while in the host country. This has implications for sending states that rely on migrant ties to the homeland. The paper argues that analysing the intersections between the themes of migration, development and diaspora strategies reveals the multiple meanings of temporariness during migration and in migration studies. It questions whether associating temporariness with precariousness and marginalization is an accurate representation of the complex conditions underpinning circular labour migration.     

Strategic coupling in ‘next wave cities’: Local institutional actors and the offshore service sector in the Philippines

The outsourcing and offshoring of services to developing countries has created new opportunities for economic development for countries in the global South. This paper looks at the scope for agency of local institutional actors in the investment attraction of business process outsourcing companies. Drawing on empirical work from the Philippines, an analysis of the process of integrating lower‐tier cities into global service production networks is presented. Specifically, the roles of local institutional actors in facilitating FDI attraction and strategically coupling local assets with the needs of multinational service corporations are discussed. Two contrasting cases, the cities of Baguio and Bacolod, show that considerable scope for intervention rests with local institutional actors. The findings have implications for policymaking and research concerned with the newest phase of outsourcing and offshoring in developing countries.     

Temporality of disasters: The politics of women's livelihoods ‘after’ the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka

The devastation caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka is represented as a ‘natural disaster’. Yet, the tsunami did not occur in a sociopolitical and historical vacuum. How people responded to the tsunami, the challenges of and attitudes to relocation and post‐tsunami livelihoods, were/are shaped by uneven development, social exclusion and ethnonationalist war. All these responses are embedded in structures of gender, caste, class, and ethnicity. The tsunami, thus, brought to the forefront preexisting inequalities, showing up complexities in the temporality of disasters. Drawn from fieldwork in two coastal areas in the Southern and Eastern provinces, this paper shows how gendered structures within the local political economy influenced the ways that institutional actors as well as the displaced communities and women initially devised livelihood strategies. These reactions show how place matters as much as preexisting gendered political economy conditions and reveal the complex ways in which women continue to mediate and negotiate everyday responses in the aftermath of a ‘natural’ disaster.     

‘Ageing out of place’: Experiences of resettlement and belonging among older Bhutanese refugees in New Zealand

Previous research has suggested that older refugees are particularly vulnerable to the stresses of resettlement in developed countries. However, to date the voices of older refugees have largely been missing from the body of refugee resettlement research. Using in‐depth interviews and thematic analysis, this paper explores the personal resettlement experiences of three former refugee elders from the Bhutanese community in Palmerston North. The findings suggest that culture, religion and social connections are of vital importance to the well‐being of these Bhutanese elders and their ability to foster a sense of self and place in a foreign land.     

‘Development’, resistance and the geographies of affect in Oecussi: Timor‐Leste's Special Economic Zone (ZEESM)

In 2013, it was announced that Timor‐Leste's Oecussi enclave would become the site of a special economic zone. Arid, and inhabited mostly by semi‐subsistence farmers from West Timor's Meto ethno‐linguistic group, the plan entails remaking the enclave as an industrial, transport and tourism hub. To facilitate this, in mid‐2015 the authorities began the process of clearing hundreds of indigenous gardens and homes from land slated for mega‐projects intended to make the region attractive to foreign investors. In this paper, I describe how, for many Meto, land tends to be experienced as a spiritually mediated ‘geography of affect’ (Lea & Woodward, 2010) in which questions of place, belonging, spirituality and personal fortune cannot easily be divided, a reality that raises questions about the suitability of the plan's vision of globalized and investment driven ‘development’. Drawing on Scott, I argue that in Oecussi, spirits associated with the land are not apolitical, but are sometimes perceived as acting to protect locals against powerful outsiders – a characteristically Meto ‘weapon of the weak’ that is in keeping with their previous encounters with colonial regimes.     

‘The forest is our inheritance’: An introduction to Semai Orang Asli place‐naming and belonging in the Bukit Tapah Forest Reserve

The forest realm of the Gòòl‐War watershed of southeast Perak, Malaysia holds much socio‐cultural significance to the Semai Orang Asli communities living along these rivers. Notwithstanding its present‐day location within the Bukit Tapah Forest Reserve, the forest continues to be where Semai conceptions of history and lore are encoded in the geographical particulars of the landscape. A thriving forest‐dependent lifestyle maintains and transmits Semai place knowledge, observed in this research through people's command of ancestral place‐names. This paper provides an introduction to Semai toponymy and considers the implications of indigenous place‐names on the protection of indigenous homelands and ways of life.