Paper short abstract

Different migrations of population from one region of the country to another, from the country side to the city and backwards, due to the politics of the communist regime of population homogenization, nowadays the migrations to (but not only to) the Western Europe, have created countless one-generation family.

Paper long abstract

The contemporary Romanian urban society itself is the result of population homogenization politics and often leaves behind in the trains the strong smell of the bags stuffed with onion, meat and potatoes "from home". In most cases, for more than 40 years, the sons and daughters, regardless of age, will bring from the town with almost empty groceries (basic food being rationalized) only symbolic gifts, bread or some sweets "from town" and they will bring back from their visit supplies as much as they can carry. The obsession of heavy baggage, illustrated by the expression "not to leave from me with empty hands", this circuit of aliments, a true strategy in the subsistence economy, consolidated on a very well articulated ritual, still follows us.

We witness today the confrontation between the traditional family model, which gathers cyclically or pyramidally on several generations power, influence and money and the pioneer's model, belonging to the ones taken from the country side to the (university or industrial) city. They are the ones who exchanged the land for the salary, the late being used for accumulating goods and consolidating identities.

Now, unemployed, or retired without a reasonable economy, they found themselves useless in the world that they built. Creeping an incomplete existence, they acquired the status of "venetic" (unwanted alien).

Our study follows the transfer of the property along this migration complex, after, which crossed three regimes: monarchy, communist dictatorship, democracy.

Paper short abstract

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Paper long abstract

This presentation departs from the observation that Buginese resource tenure regulations have failed to ensure sustainable use of resources in the delta of the Mahakam River. Over the last two decades, deforestation and extensive shrimp farming have caused sedimentation and pollution as well as a sharp decline in shrimp pond productivity. Declining shrimp harvests now increase social tensions and are becoming a particular concern of local people who moved to the region to profit from the high shrimp prices following a boom in shrimp sales following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. The shrimp rush has created a volatile situation with previously relatively worthless land now privately owned with the single purpose of producing a high-value portable resource. In that situation there are few, if any, relations between people and the natural world that may be classified as reciprocal. The use of the natural environment for sustaining the livelihood of a growing amount of people whose hunger for modern wealth is mounting can hardly be sustained. In my presentation I analyze the failure of Buginese resource tenure regulations in terms of its distance to nature and spirits, increasing antagonism between older settlers and newcomers, mounting individualism, and declining trust in customary regulations. Many feel that there is an urgent need for the kind of legal certainty that one should expect from the state. The absence of such a responsive state protracts a tradition of frontier culture bringing about specific acts of owning and appropriating land and water resources.

Paper short abstract

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Paper long abstract

This presentation departs from the observation that Indonesian state tenure arrangements have failed to ensure sustainable use of natural resources in the delta of Mahakam River. This failure may be examined either from ecological, economic or social points of view. Perhaps most significant are the effects of a shrimp rush that was largely market-driven with short-term economic motives and concurrent population growth and the introduction of a new technology. Another factor that is important but largely overlooked in analyses of the shrimp frontier in the delta is the failure of state or government laws and policies. On paper these laws and regulations often contradict each other. In practice, legal implementation and legal enforcement are effectively absent. The 1999 decentralization of central state power has made the implementation and enforcement of laws and regulations even more problematic because central and local government began to debate about who has responsibility to protect the state mangrove forest in the delta. Disguising behind the argument that shrimp production has boosted the local economy, government officers prefer to keep supporting the shrimp pond owners while knowing that they operate within an area that is designated as state mangrove forest in which no such economic activity is allowed to take place. At the same time, pressured by local interests, sub-district officers legitimized the property rights of the shrimp ponds owners. Next a district and appellate state court legalized the illegal status of property rights in the delta. In my presentation I identify and analyze state laws and regulations and the ways in which bureaucrats and judges interpret, implement, and enforce those laws and regulations. This will allow me to specify the failures of state tenure arrangements and possible future improvements.

Paper short abstract

Jesuit frontier missions in Brazil and Paraguay promote native and mixed communities that ultimately clash with colonial interests yet offer cross-cultural forms that redefine indigenes and colonists. How do recent colonial studies interpret cross-cultural agents and related issues of appropriation?

Paper long abstract

Since the Quincentenaries of Columbus' 1492 and Cabral's 1500 encounters with America and Brazil, various scholars have advanced significant revisions of the established models of European conquest, conversion, and colonisation. In particular, recent studies have emphasised deeper exchanges of cultural models so that certain types of settlement are seen as complex forms of mixed traditions. One such case involves the famous Jesuit reductions along the frontiers of Brazil, which have long been the subject of pious propaganda and critical controversy. What recent approaches to these missions highlight is the need to redefine the nature of cross-cultural forms, deconstruct mission myths, and reevaluate intermediary roles. Key examples reveal cross-cultural understandings of 'marginal' native settlements and 'autonomous' communities, whose justification and representation continously change as they come into growing conflict with missionary projects and colonial expansion. Who 'owns' the native convert communities? Although missionaries claim to promote native autonomy, when church and state contend for control of the frontier missions, utopian models of mixed communities are sacrificed to pragmatic colonial interests. However, cross-cultural forms and roles that integrate native contributions do survive in frontier settlements themselves during and after the dissolution of Jesuit reductions.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the burgeoning industry and practice of medical tourism in the context of India, exploring the growing tensions and complexities surrounding the transnational flows of individuals seeking health services across the globe.

Paper long abstract

Medical tourism links two areas that have long inspired the anthropological imagination; however it also underscores new trends and patterns of power and inequality emerging across the globe. Widely promoted as 'First World Care at Third World Prices', it has been estimated that medical tourism as a global trade is worth US$60 billion. Although promoted as a rational economic development strategy for countries such as India, beyond the burgeoning sanitary corporate hospitals advertised as 'islands of excellence' are populations facing critical health issues that are unable to access this level of treatment. Additionally, government subsidies, public-private partnerships and the establishment of medical visas to facilitate the entry of medical tourists into India bring about questions of ownership of the corporate hospitals catering to the medical tourists, the health professionals often siphoned from the public-system and, more widely, health services themselves.

From international trade agreements through to national and state policies, the economic impetus for Third World countries with the capacity to cater for health-seeking travellers is increasing. The demand creating this industry is premised upon deteriorating social and economic equity within health systems abroad such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Consequently, this paper questions whether medical tourism is a physical manifestation of the increasing gaps in equity between the poor and the non-poor, transversing borders, where those with stronger foreign exchange currencies can still gain access to care, albeit through the further entrenchment and widening of inequity.

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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the motives of European men (Gringos) who come to Brazil to consume colonial, pre-modern fantasies of patriarchy and carnivalesque sex, and looks at the performative strategies of the subaltern Brazilian women in search of global mobility who can identify, appropriate, perform, and market these fantasies of the sexualized Brazilian Mulata while also appropriating different forms of black-feminist cultural critique.

Paper long abstract

By focusing on what I term the ‘transatlantic cultural economy of desire’, through the sexual interaction of gringos and mulatas in Brazil, I look at how the legacy of colonialism and the cultural and economic dynamics of late-capitalism mediate the desire for and the performance of “carnivalesque” sexualities between different global actors who are disempowered by different aspects of postmodernity and postcoloniality.

Here, the term “carnivalesque” is used neither as the classical Bakhtinian notion of “grotesque” nor strictly in the commodified eroticized sense of the Brazilian carnival, but hints at something in-between: an image and praxis of the body that remains pre-modern and collective (and hence untainted by the sexual restrictions that emerge with the modernist fragmentation into different bodies) and is also intensely exoticized by the discursive apparatuses of colonialism.

I examine on the one hand, the motives of disillusioned gringos who, arching under the weight of competitive capitalism in their own countries, come to seek power and prestige through sex and patriarchy in what they imagine to be a “masculinist paradise” (Gregory, 2003); from the other side of Atlantic, in turn, I explore the strategies of the women of colour who seek to escape their place at the bottom of the Brazilian racial pyramid by strategically emphasizing certain aspects of their ‘blackness’ and performing the fantasies of sexualized mulatas the gringos have come to consume.

In this global market of sex and performance, I pay particular attention not only to the strategic (and compulsive) appropriation of different cultural, racial and sexual colonial stereotypes by the gringos and mulatas seeking different forms of liberation, but also to their appropriation of different forms of cultural discourse and cultural critique.

Thus, I closely examine the gringos’ critique of post-feminist late-capitalism, and the “mulatas’” appropriation of Black-feminist discourse and body-praxis. By looking at these appropriations (both genuine and strategic), then, I begin to sketch the outline of contradictory but complimentary vernacular critiques of (post)modernity articulated by mostly subaltern global actors who are attempting to carve alternative niches through North-South cultural flows.

Paper short abstract

This paper explores accusations of rape in the internet based social networking environment, Second Life. Examining discourses surrounding rape accusations, without the distraction of a penis-in-vagina act, enables a fresh approach to the relationship between consent and the gendered appropriation and control of public spaces.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores accusations of rape in the internet based social networking environment, Second Life (SL), drawing on case studies and blogger responses. Worldwide, adults participant in SL by creating 'avatars', or digital-representations of themselves, and use a keyboard to control their movements and social engagement with other citizens in a digital world modelled on urban leisure spaces. As in Real Life (RL), social engagement in SL involves power dynamics; accusations of rape are not uncommon. An investigation of rape accusations in the absence of a penis-in-vagina act reveals discoursive similarities with Real Life (RL) rape accusations, including the argument that it is the responsibility of females who do not wish to be harassed or assaulted to avoid particular public spaces, and that failing to do so constitutes tacit consent. The very notion of 'online rape' prompts passionate debate around the ontological status of such acts. Some argue that the mediated corporeal experience of participating in SL is more emotionally intense than in RL, and that experiencing simulated rape can result in psychological trauma akin to RL rape. Many argue that entering SL requires consent and therefore all encounters must be considered consensual; people who do not like the sexualised encounters possible in SL should alter their future use of the space, restricting their avatars to 'safe' regions, or leaving SL altogether. Examining discourses surrounding rape accusations, without the distraction of verifying a penis-in-vagina act, enables a fresh approach to the relationship between consent and the gendered appropriation public spaces.

Paper short abstract

In recent years , there has been a move for Australian humanitarian disaster relief to become professionalised. We investigate best use of individual and organisational experiences of Australians in disasters to improve the effectiveness of the Australian health sector humanitarian response in the future.

Paper long abstract

In recent years humanitarian disaster relief has moved away from historically ad hoc approaches to a more professional response. Many Australians have participated in disaster response, both within the Asia-Pacific region and further afield. In Australia there has been a great impetus by the public for humanitarian reasons, and by the Australian government for additional strategic reasons, to play a significant role in regional disaster responses, especially within the health sector. Previously, research in this area has focused on technical guidelines for the provision of emergency relief, including in the health sector. Much less work has focused on the capabilities of those who provide the relief, including individual skills mix and personal characteristics. In our research we investigate how we can best use the individual and organisational experiences of Australians in disasters and humanitarian emergencies to improve the effectiveness of the Australian health sector humanitarian response in the future. We address issues such as the particular skills needed to improve relief worker efficiency in health aspects of disasters and aim to compile a list of individual characteristics and desirable skills for prospective relief workers to inform recruitment of workers for international disaster situations in the health sector. We also aim to devise an information dissemination strategy for lessons learnt regarding effectiveness and desirable skills at individual and organizational levels concerning health aspects of disasters. In this paper we present preliminary results of interviews with Australian humanitarian workers who have responded to disasters within the last 5 years.

Paper short abstract

'The Dolphin and the sextant': Traditional knowledge and modernity in Polynesian navigation, explores the tensions between the varied navigational practices of Europeans and Polynesians in the Pacific.

Paper long abstract

This paper provides an introductory account of the differing ontologies of Polynesian and European navigation techniques in the Pacific. The subject of the contrast between traditional knowledge and modernity is examined from the perspectives of humanistic and scientific navigational techniques used in the Pacific in the Eighteenth Century. Commentary is also made on the problems of knowledge accessibility and transmission and the difficulties of inter-cultural representation of navigational knowledge.

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Paper short abstract

The present paper will provide a critical history of Die Samoa Inseln, which were first published in 1902-3, but soon became an oceanic-ethnological classic.

Paper long abstract

The two volume monographs Die Samoa Inseln were first published in 1902-3. They are generally referred to as a major and highly comprehensive treatment of Samoan genealogy. Written by Dr. Augustin Krämer (1865-1941), a German Navy surgeon and ethnologist, these monographs are not only used by anthropologists and Pacific scholars alike, but also create the basis for claims at the Land and Title Court in Samoa. Their increasing use has been facilitated by an English translation, which was published in the 1990s.

This paper will explore the history of these volumes which were Krämer's first major ethnographic publication and saw his interest shift from natural science towards ethnology. Special attention will be given to Krämer's fieldwork in Samoa which he began during a naval cruise in 1893-5 and intensified during a second Oceanic voyage from 1897-9. The paper will consider Krämer's relationships with Samoans and the fieldwork methods he developed. Although Die Samoa Inseln remains an ethnological classic, it also characterises the nexus between European anthropological discourses and field experience at the beginning of the twentieth century.