Three Management Challenges for Protection of Aboriginal Cultural Heritage in a Tasmanian Multiple-use Conservation Area

Protected areas that are created to safeguard environmental values such as Indigenous culturescapes may in fact significantly fail in this task. This study concerns such an instance in far north-west Tasmania, where the government adopted a multiple-use resource conservation-development management model for the Arthur–Pieman Conservation Area (APCA). The model offers protection of cultural heritage values whilst permitting numerous community recreational and commercial uses. One particular objective is to protect ‘an extraordinary richness of Aboriginal cultural heritage’ in one of Earth's great archaeological regions (DPIWE, Arthur–Pieman Conservation Area Management Plan, 2002, p. iii). Yet under the auspices of multiple use, Aborigine and others report unremitting damage and loss of ancestral values. To examine how this is so in an actively managed protected area, perceptions of 16 environmental professionals and local residents engaged in APCA planning and management are used to identify three major challenges for appropriate custodianship of the Aboriginal cultural landscape: Aboriginal–Eurocentric conflicts; limited community governance capacities; and deficient regulatory provisions. It is concluded that APCA multiple-use management of heritage conservation is ineffectual and that an alternative governance model is required urgently. The management challenges examined here offer insights for problematic Indigenous cultural heritage conservation in other jurisdictions of Australia and elsewhere.     

THE A.D. 1300 EVENT IN THE PACIFIC BASIN*

ABSTRACT. Around a.d. 1300 the entire Pacific Basin (continental Pacific Rim and oceanic Pacific Islands) was affected by comparatively rapid cooling and sea‐level fall, and possibly increased storminess, that caused massive and enduring changes to Pacific environments and societies. For most Pacific societies, adapted to the warmer, drier, and more stable climates of the preceding Medieval Climate Anomaly (a.d. 750–1250), the effects of this A.D. 1300 Event were profoundly disruptive, largely because of the reduction in food resources available in coastal zones attributable to the 70–80‐centimeter sea‐level fall. This disruption was manifested by the outbreak of persistent conflict, shifts in settlements from coasts to refugia inland or on unoccupied offshore islands, changes in subsistence strategies, and an abrupt end to long‐distance cross‐ocean interaction during the ensuing Little Ice Age (a.d. 1350–1800). The A.D. 1300 Event provides a good example of the disruptive potential for human societies of abrupt, short‐lived climate changes.     

ISLANDS AS PLACES OF BEING AND BELONGING*

ABSTRACT. Islands, traditionally important units of research and analysis in ethnographic research, have come to be viewed as a problematic unit of analysis, as anthropologists have realized the close integration of island societies within the wider world. This article argues that islands are still useful and fruitful foci of research, if their particular character is explored from an islandic point of view. Through life‐story interviews conducted in three large, dispersed families of Caribbean origin, the article demonstrates that islands may be usefully conceptualized as sociocultural constructs that constitute important anchoring points as well as sources of identification for migrants and their descendants.     

Natural and imposed injustices: the challenges in implementing 'fair' flood risk management policy in England

This paper examines the challenges facing English flood risk management (FRM) policy and practice when considering fair decision-making processes and outcomes at a range of spatial scales. It is recognised that flooding is not fair per se : the inherent natural spatial inequality of flood frequency and extent, plus the legacy of differential system interventions, being the cause. But, drawing on the three social justice models – procedural equality, Rawls' maximin rule and maximum utility – the authors examine the fairness principles currently employed in FRM decision-making. This is achieved, firstly, in relation to the distribution of taxpayer's money for FRM at the national, regional and local levels and, secondly, for non-structural strategies – most notably those of insurance, flood warnings and awareness raising, land use control, home owner adaptation and emergency management. A case study of the Lower Thames catchment illustrates the challenges facing decision-makers in 'real life': how those strategies which appear to be most technically and economically effective fall far short of being fair from either a vulnerability or equality perspective. The paper concludes that if we are to manage flood risk somewhat more fairly then a move in the direction of government funding of nationally consistent non-structural strategies, in conjunction with lower investment decision thresholds for other local-level FRM options, appears to offer a greater contribution to equality and vulnerability-based social justice principles than the status quo.     

城市营业性文化娱乐场所的空间结构研究

文化场所以及营业性娱乐场所是城市居民日常生活休闲娱乐行为的主要场所。营业性文化娱乐场所的产生和发展,不仅使人们的休闲、娱乐需求向更高层次迈进,而且也成为衡量城市社会-生活空间质量的重要方面。本文从城市社会学、城市地理学等多学科的研究方法角度,概括国内外学者对营业性文化娱乐场所的研究现状、研究内容以及其在城市中的空间分布区位的规律性进行了尝试性的探讨。     

Seismic test of a full‐scale model of a five‐storey stone pagoda

A moderate size earthquake of magnitude 5 occurred at Whagae‐Myun, Hadong‐Gun, Kyongsangnam‐Do, Korea on 4 July 1936. It caused severe damage to the buildings and other structures in Sang‐Gye‐Sa, a famous and beautiful Buddhist temple. A five‐storey stone pagoda was standing in front of Keumdang, the main building. The top component of the pagoda was tipped over and fell down to the ground during the earthquake. In order to have a quantitative estimate of the intensity of the earthquake, a full‐scale model was constructed through a rigorous verification process. The completed model was mounted on a shaking table and subjected to two kinds of dynamic test: exploratory test and fragility test. The exploratory test was performed with low intensity shaking. In the fragility test, the failure modes of the model were investigated while increasing the shaking intensity. The construction details of the model are described and test procedures are reported. Important relations between failure modes and characteristics of ground motion were obtained from the tests. The intensity of the 1936 earthquake was estimated from the examination of test results. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The world is sound? Geography, musicology and British-Asian soundscapes

This paper contributes to recent geographical engagements with sound and music by exploring the benefits of a geographical approach conversant with musicological and ethnomusicological tools and agendas within a specific political and empirical context: British-Asian cultural politics and contemporary dance music. Doing so, it suggests, sheds new light on an existing body of anthropological and cultural studies literature that critically highlights the commodification of exotica in this type of dance music. The paper shows how analysing the spatial politics of British-Asian musicality evokes the dynamic complexities around identity, belonging and the geographies of British popular culture and British-ness generated through this mode of cultural production.     

Neoliberalism and environmental justice in the United States environmental protection agency: Translating policy into managerial practice in hazardous waste remediation

In response to the failings of the aggressive neoliberalism of the Reagan era, the Clinton administration sought new ways to promote and deepen the neoliberal project. One of its strategies was to develop “neocommunitarian” programs to support political empowerment and economic self-sufficiency in marginalized communities. Its environmental justice policy became an important vehicle for delivering these programs. This paper examines ways in which one regional office of the US Environmental Protection Agency translated the Clinton administration's environmental justice policy into practical guidelines for its managers. It investigates how these guidelines affected the work of personnel in the EPA's program to clean up hazardous waste sites. It asks how the Clinton administration's approach to environmental justice--emphasizing data analysis, managed public participation, and economic opportunity--helped both to deepen the neoliberal project and to transform the geography of risk and remediation. Although the EPA was unable to “normalize” the environmental justice community--to make it a standardized target for the Clinton administration's empowerment programs--its environmental justice policy both contributed to subtle changes in the distribution of hazardous waste risk and made the delivery of neocommunitarian programs an important part of the work of remedial personnel.     

European conquest, Indian subjection and the conflicts of colonization: Brazil in the early modern era

This paper discusses the questions that emerged from the contact established by Europeans and Indians during the early modern era in what is today Brazil. It aims at demonstrating that dual structuralist models, which overemphasize material arguments of economic expansion and place conquerors and conquered in opposite ends, fail to grasp the rich cultural history embedded in the encounters that took place in that period. Colonization was a multifarious process that involved dealing with incompatible world views and often resulted in a complex history of temporary alliances, of conflict and strife, of negotiation and dialogue. The conquest and appropriation of the Brazilian territory, and the questions that they provoked, did not always put Europeans and Indians one against the other: not rarely, colonization demanded that the Europeans allied themselves to the natives against other Europeans, and that the natives allied themselves to Europeans against other natives. Even the control of the colony by the mother country should not be understood as a top-down movement, for metropolitan policies did not always have the expected answer from the colony or had differentiated social and spatial impacts there. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Primitivism and the other. History of art and cultural geography

The article advocates an articulation of cultural geography and art history, and in this perspective focuses on the analysis of the primitivist movement and particularly on Gauguin's work and personal itinerary. Primitivism introduced artefacts of ‘primitive’ people into the history of Western art and signalled a change in the relationship between the West and the ‘Other’ and ‘Elsewhere’. This reversal of values has a major geographical dimension. Primitivism manifests the contradiction-rife colonial ideology, but can also challenge colonization. Tourism, which is, in the case of Tahiti, directly linked to Gauguin and to his myth, inherited a lot from primitivism, in terms of hopes and ambiguities. Conversely, primitivism casts light on geographical features of these places, instituted as ‘Elsewheres‘ by the West, and visited, even transformed by painters, colonizers and tourists. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.