bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘We don't do dots ‐ ours is lines’ — Asserting a Barkindji Style
Authors: Gibson Lorraine
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT This paper offers an ethnographic exploration of the assertion of a ‘Barkindji style’ art: why this matters and to whom it matters. Focusing particularly on the Darling River area of Wilcannia and on the period from the 1980s to the present, the increasing interest in art‐making by local Aboriginal people is considered. Through a dialogue with artists, artworks, and others, the work examines the changing form, design and content of art and the role of art in defining ideas of Barkindji Aboriginal culture and tradition. Invocations by key cultural brokers to produce work that is seen to ‘belong to us’ is explored in terms of the cultural, political, and personal work that this involves; particularly as this intersects with ideas of artistic freedoms versus artistic direction by cultural brokers. The paper discusses the personal considerations and tensions that come to bear in the processes connected with production of art and its making. In so doing, this paper engages with, and extends, the work of Tacon et al. (2003), Cooper (1994), Kleinert (1994) and Morphy (2001) as this pertains to art ‘styles’ and material culture from what is widely referred to as south‐eastern Australia.
Resisting RAMSI: Intervention, Identity and Symbolism in Solomon Islands
Authors: Allen Matthew G
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT The Australian‐led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) continues to enjoy high levels of approval amongst Solomon Islanders. However, this approval belies the existence of a minority, but nevertheless important, dissenting perspective, one which has mostly emanated from Malaitan quarters. How are we to interpret Malaitan expressions of opposition to RAMSI? While these dissenting voices can, in part, be seen through a lens of legal and economic rationality, Malaitan opposition to RAMSI must be properly located within a deeper tradition of Malaitan resistance to the imposition of alien and centralised authority. Malaitans have responded to the RAMSI intervention by invoking kastom as a symbol of difference, unity and resistance, just as they have done in the past. It is argued that resistance to RAMSI must be (re)interpreted as having fundamentally cultural and historical underpinnings. Resisting RAMSI is as much about asserting culture and identity as it is about money and power. This argument is drawn out through an historically contextualised analysis of contemporary articulations of Malaitan resistance. The voices examined come from the public statements of prominent Malaitans, the published manifesto of the Malaita Ma'asina Forum, and interviews with former members of the Malaita Eagle Force.
Keeping the Network out of view: Mining, Distinctions and Exclusion in Melanesia
Authors: Bainton Nicholas A.
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT This paper examines the ‘property effects’ surrounding competition over access to mining benefits in Papua New Guinea. Under conditions of rapid social change engendered by large scale resource extraction, Lihirian islanders have increasingly recalibrated their social networks, manifest through shifting notions of sociality and obligation, and ownership strategies that seek to limit other people's claims to wealth. These local changes are paralleled by larger and more paradoxical processes: although the state uses the mining project to consolidate itself, Lihirians have consistently challenged the state through their attempts to appropriate the mine for their own ends. By keeping the multiple layers of their social networks out of view, Lihirians deny the connections that can provide others with access to benefits. In considering the strategic responses to the inequalities, discontents and inconsistencies of life in modern Papua New Guinea, it becomes apparent that questions of property are simultaneously questions about identity and belonging.
Frontier Journeys. Fore Experiences on the Kuru Patrols.
Authors: Beasley A. N.
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT This paper explores the narratives of a group of Fore men recruited as youngsters to assist a succession of scientists to investigate kuru. Against a backdrop of European intrusion, the narrators recall their motivations to assist the scientists and describe their experiences on patrol. Reflecting on the hazards, challenges and adventures faced, these narratives draw attention to the extent to which the kuru scientists depended on their Fore assistants. However, while identifying many of their experiences as highlights of their youth, the narratives also uncover a negative undercurrent of disappointment and bitterness over unrealised youthful aspirations.
Review Forum
Authors: Beasley Annette , Lepani Katherine , Lindenbaum Shirley , Spark Ceridwen , Anderson Warwick
Published: January 2013

The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. By Warwick Anderson.
Queensland Aborigines, Multiple Realities and the Social Sources of Suffering: Psychiatry and Moral Regions of Being: Part 1
Authors: Cox Leonie
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACTThis two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico‐religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal ‘other’ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio‐political realities. I conclude that the residents' narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream ‘commonsense’ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.
Names as Markers and Makers of Contested Identity: on Social Groups in the New Guinea Islands
Authors: Martin Keir
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between naming practices and social groups in the context of a land dispute at Matupit village, Papua New Guinea. Roy Wagner's famous paper on the nature of social groups in the New Guinea Highlands is taken as a starting point for analysis. In Wagner's didactic exposition a stark contrast is drawn between Daribi people for whom names elicit distinctions and outsiders who imagine names describe fixed social groups. At Matupit however, the contrast is more clearly between different groups of villagers who have an interest in different kinds of presentation of the relationship between names and social group formation. Some have a greater interest than others in asserting a more descriptive relationship of names to groups and it is argued that this is, at least in part, related to wider political economic tendencies, in particular a tendency to view land as an economic resource, mirrored in other contexts throughout Papua New Guinea.
Contextual Translation — Concepts and Practices among the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea1
Authors: Bergendorff Steen
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT The use of indigenous terms in descriptions of non‐Western peoples has been debated since Bohannnan and Gluckman argued about this issue. This controversy has recently been resuscitated in debates about the work of Stephen and Jones. Stephen has suggested that we use literal meanings to understand local Mekeo positions and practices, while Jones finds that the terms ‘chiefs’ and ‘sorcerers’ are now so ‘technicalised’ that they serve as better equivalents for discussing local phenomena. By contrast, the argument in this article is that concepts taken from one cultural system cannot be unequivocally used to name practices in other systems and that literal meanings should be interpreted in the context of an entire cultural system. Official positions of authority, for instance, constitute prototypes of the conceptual universe that govern meaning in a given place, and hence their roles and names may not be directly translatable between systems.
‘Traditional’ Healers, Speaking and Motivation in Vava'u, Tonga: Explaining Syncretism and Addressing Health Policy
Authors: Poltorak Mike
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACTBilateral health system development in Tonga is implicated in a misrepresentation of ‘traditional’ healing that has serious implications for the provision of health care. It has strengthened the tendency to homogenise and stereotype a diverse body of healers in counter distinction with biomedicine. The diversity of and syncretism in non‐biomedical local healing practice is little appreciated in policy debates. Addressing the epistemological, social and linguistic context of syncretism in terms sensitive to healers' concerns and conceptualisations is vital to build on the pre‐existing collaborations between health professionals and a diverse body of healers in a country that has experienced a marked shift from communicable to non‐communicable disorders. This paper examines the diversity and syncretism of five of the most popular ‘spirit’ healers in Vava'u, Tonga in terms suggested by healers themselves using the Tongan concept and value oftauhi vaha'a(to evoke and intensify relatedness) as an analytic tool. The creativity implied in healers' socially constitutive use of language with ancestors, relatives, patients, churches and the hospital questions the value of any notion of traditionality and suggests considerable grounds for collaboration.
The Refusal of Holy Engagement: How Man‐making Can Fail
Authors: Sansom Basil
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT Among Aboriginal Countrymen of the Darwin hinterland, a youth can be ceremonially circumcised only to emerge from the ceremony physically altered but unchanged in himself. Man‐making can thus fail. To explain both the possibility and the consequences of crashing failure, the analyst attends to: (1) politics attendant on the maturation of males, (2) the relationship between the failed rite and the total structure for the performance of all ‘Men's Business’; and (most importantly) (3) the relationships between Dreamings and humans as players in the socio‐religious formation (a concept derived from application of the Thomas theorem) in which there is human engagement with the holy. Argument establishes that (in logic) ontology precedes structure because the structure for holy engagement is built to accommodate prior constructions of both the human person and the personified Power that is a Dreaming.
The Theory of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Theory: the Art of Alfred Gell
Authors: Derlon Brigitte , Jeudy‐Ballini Monique
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACTGell'sArt and Agencythat aimed to articulate the first anthropological theory of art has achieved a near‐cult status among the academic community. Departing from previous semiological and aesthetic approaches, this theory takes it that art is a form of instrumental action, the canonical efficacy of which lies in its power to function as a cognitive trap and to captivate the spectator's mind. In this article it is argued that Gell's theory is not as novel as it is claimed; that it fails to define the specific field of art; and that by excluding the aesthetic properties of art objects, it discards ethnographical data nonetheless necessary for understanding the agency of art in Melanesian local cultures. At a meta‐level, Gell assigned to his theory the same captivating purpose as he did to art, and this probably explains the seductive fascination that his work continues to exert.
Making a Life: Getting Ahead, and Getting a Living in Aboriginal New South Wales
Authors: Gibson Lorraine
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT This paper offers an ethnographically grounded examination of the intersections between work, employment and identity for Indigenous people living in a country town in far western New South Wales, Australia. It argues that work, employment and labour are locally deployed categories that meet mainstream discourse in a precarious fashion and, that this disjunction has clear material and ideological repercussions. For most Aboriginal people in Wilcannia, you are who you are, not by virtue of what you have ‘become’ in any economic, professional or educational sense. Who you are is not a becoming, it is established at birth. These genealogical forms of being through kinship see a construction of self which in many ways is at variance to the standard ‘autonomous self‐regulating individual’ (Sennett 1998:215). This sense of self, for most, is not determined by engagement in the capitalist division of labour; indeed, the greater the engagement in the capitalist economy, the more problematic and fraught a sense of self and of belonging can become.
We Branded Ourselves Long Ago: Intangible Cultural Property and Commodification of Fijian Firewalking
Authors: Pigliasco Guido Carlo
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACTThe Fijian firewalking ceremony (vilavilairevo), traditionally performed only by members of the Sawau people on the island of Beqa, is a prime example of a propitiation ritual that has become commodified to suit the requirements of tourism. The Sawau ‘gift’ of walking on white‐hot stones introduces another dimension of the gift practice. Although gifts and commodities are often treated as ideal‐type opposites, and a tradition of Melanesian scholarship has focused attention on the inalienability of gifts, I argue that the self‐consciously traditional firewalking practice of Beqa Island, Fiji, is an inalienablesui generiscommodity that becomes effective by ‘branding’ Fijian concepts of different places' distinct custodianships. Over the last two centuries, the gift of firewalking has transmuted itself into a sociocultural tool that has consistently indigenized the power of the foreign. The gift of firewalking has allowed its custodians to locally sustain their community, to gain a reach and respect across the nation and beyond, and to intensify the group's social sentiment and social capital.
In the Long ‘Run’: Kanak Stockmen, the Cattle Frontier and Colonial Power Relations in New Caledonia, 1870–1988
Authors: Muckle Adrian , Trépied Benoît
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT For more than a century, from the 1870s to the 1980s, stockmen were important intermediaries and figures of power and influence in the construction, maintenance and renewal of the colonial order in New Caledonia. Social relations between Kanak and settlers working in the cattle ‘runs’ permitted a unique form of mobility spanning the frontier. The relations developed between chiefs and cattle farmers are central to the processes by which certain administrative chieftaincies emerged in the late‐nineteenth century, and by which Kanak entered the ‘political’ sphere in the second half of the twentieth century. With reference to the locality of Koné, this article traces the political alliances fashioned between Kanak stockmen and their employers in the context of colonisation, rebellion, evangelisation, post‐war political emancipation, local development and, finally, the struggle between supporters and opponents of independence in the 1980s.
Kinship, Organisations and ‘wannabes’: Aboriginal Identity Negotiation in South‐western Sydney
Authors: Yamanouchi Yuriko
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ambiguous and dynamic nature of Aboriginal identity in south‐western Sydney. While for most of the Aboriginal people in rural and remote areas, identity has been primarily a matter of kinship ties associated with their perceived place of origin, Aboriginal people often recognize each other as Aboriginal by sharing and recognizing certain ‘Aboriginal’ cultural mores and traits. These two principles of identity are flexible enough to be extended to those who are not raised in an Aboriginal family environment; one meeting with their Aboriginal family is a minimum requirement. In south‐western Sydney, where organizations dealing with Aboriginal issues provide ways of connecting Aboriginal people from various backgrounds, in line with the government's homogenized notion of Aboriginality, Aboriginal people from Aboriginal family environments encounter those who cannot even meet this compromised criterion. Their presence gives rise to tension and conflict revolving around the concept of Aboriginality. Aboriginal cultural values that emphasize actual engagement provide ways of overcoming such dilemmas. Through common participation in the activities of the aforesaid organisations, Aboriginal people in south‐western Sydney develop a new sense of ‘Aboriginality’, which embraces those who cannot claim kinship ties.
Policing the Holy Nation: The State and Righteous Violence in Vanuatu
Authors: Rio Knut M.
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACTIn Vanuatu, the police force has in recent years been strengthened by foreign government aid. AusAid and NZAid are heavily involved inside the police force, seeking to create ‘good governance’ and to shape Vanuatu's national developments. However, these measures also coincide with some other unexpected developments. Recent cases of violence, and especially of sorcery, have led the police to intervene in a quest for moral order. Police are becoming part of the articulation of new occult understandings of wealth and power. These developments are traced back partly to the history of colonial governance and the idea of righteous violence, but also to current restructurings of the Vanuatu state and growing Christian conceptions of Vanuatu as a holy nation.
Visiting Tieke Kāainga: the Authenticity of a Maori Welcome
Authors: Levine Hal
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT Whanganui National Park is one of New Zealand's leading tourist attractions. Tieke Kainga (Tieke settlement) is a Department of Conservation camp site in the middle reaches of the river that was occupied in the mid‐1990s by members of Tamahaki an indigenous group who claim that the land was taken from them illegally. Although a modus vivendi currently exists whereby the Department and Maori group co manage the site, Tamahaki's struggle for exclusive ownership of it continues. Part of the strategy they adopted to solidify their claim involves welcoming tourists and government officials to Tieke Kāinga in a manner that accords with Maori tradition. Such welcomes establish dramatically that Tamahaki own Tieke and that the guests formally acknowledge by their participation in the performance that they are visitors. This paper questions the authenticity of the welcomes performed there and concludes that they are real for good reason. Authentic Maori welcomes solidify Tamahaki's occupation of Tieke and broadcast the morality of their claim to the site.
‘The One and the Two’: Mainlanders and Saltwater People in Buka, Bougainville
Authors: Schneider Katharina
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT The paper explores the socially salient contrast between ‘mainlanders' and ‘saltwater people’ in the Buka area in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, as observed during ethnographic fieldwork in 2004–05. Buka people themselves articulate three at first sight disparate points of contrast between mainlanders and saltwater people. These concern settlement patterns, predominant subsistence activities and different degrees of ancestral knowledge. This paper explores these points and aims to specify their interconnection from the perspective provided by a fourth contrast established ethnographically, that between different modes of objectifying relations on the mainland and ‘at sea’. With a detailed investigation of the ethnographic ‘surface’ of the phenomenon, the paper aims to provide a basis for future in‐depth analyses of various aspects of the mainland‐saltwater contrast in the context of Bougainvillean politics and the sustainability of livelihoods in the area.
The Flow of Milk: Nursing Prescriptions, Clanship and Locality in Nage Society1
Authors: Forth Gregory
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACTThe Nage people of eastern Indonesia prescribe several plant foods believed to initiate the flow of a new mother's milk. Nage assert that a woman should follow the galactogogue prescribed by her husband's clan, thus connecting the practice with a segmentary social organization in what can be seen as the inverse of Nage plant totemism. A review of actual usage, however, shows that many clans share the same nursing foods and that galactogenic practice reveals regional patterns, thus raising questions of why Nage associate nursing prescriptions with preferentially patrilineal clans rather than locality. It is then shown how statements about the prescriptions form part of a tension between patrifiliation and matrifiliation in this basically ambilineal society. As a way of connecting fathers physically as well as socially to recognized offspring, the analysis further demonstrates how ideas about galactogogues are comparable to usages habitually included under the anthropological rubric of ‘couvade’. It also provides a context in which to consider why ‘participants’ views’ of their society may diverge noticeably from ethnographically observable practice.
History as Sacrifice: The Polynesian Iconoclasm
Authors: Sissons Jeffrey
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACTThe Polynesian iconoclasm comprised a series of destructive episodes in which god‐images were rendered powerless and temples and associated structures were successively burned or torn down in Eastern Polynesia. Beginning in Tahiti and neighbouring Mo'orea in 1815, it spread rapidly to other Society Islands, the Austral Islands and the Southern Cook Islands. In this article I suggest that the willingness of Polynesian leaders to follow Tahitian precedence in destroying or unwrapping their god images can be partially explained by the fact that they saw themselves as participants in a large‐scale sacrifice, the common objective of which was the acquisition of greatermanaand the consequent revitalisation of their societies. In making this argument I engage with anthropological theories that address relationships between sacrifice and historical transformation. I conclude by proposing that the Polynesian iconoclasm was a form of rituopraxis comprising regionally specific improvisations upon a general ritual schema.
Shame and the Embodiment of Boundaries
Authors: Kwok Natalie
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT Attention to the debilitating feelings of unease, discomfort and anxiety which are the concomitants of everyday encounters and negotiations of Kooris at the mainstream interface brings an appreciation for the lived experience of the colonised minority and throws into relief complex struggles over meaning, manners, personal values, social allegiance and cultural survival. This paper focuses on the habituation and strategic deployment of shame at the racial divide. Koori subjectivities, bodily dispositions and emotional registers are found to be informed both by traditional orientations and by the hegemonic ends of the dominant order.
‘Keeping up the Culture’: Gunai Engagements with Tourism
Authors: Kleinert Sylvia
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT This paper intervenes in the hidden history of Aboriginal art in south eastern Australia. I argue that for Aboriginal people living in the assimilation era engagement with tourism represented an important means of cultural survival. Working across anthropology and art history this paper focuses on the boomerangs and other artefacts produced by Gunai in Gippsland, Victoria for their own use and for exchange with tourists. The findings from this paper show that, far from being a sign of commodification and a capitulation to capitalism, this cultural production was carried out in opposition to authorities who viewed it as potentially disruptive and counter to assimilation policies. It was this history of cultural practice which contributed to the resurgence of Koorie culture in the 1970s and 1980s.
Returned to Sender: Some Predicaments of Re‐indigenisation
Authors: Beckett Jeremy
Published: January 2013

ABSTRACT It is some 40 years since Australia officially re‐indigenised its Aborigines, at the same time giving rise to cultures of indigenism in the community at large. For those who lived in the closely settled areas, re‐indigenisation entails a new positioning vis‐à‐vis what can be recovered of traditional practices and places, but also vis‐a‐vis non‐indigenous people involved in indigenism. The paper recounts the response of one such indigenous group to the possibility of learning secrets that had long been known to white people, but not to them.
Consultancy, Neo‐Liberal Conservatism and the Politics of Anti‐Politics
Authors: Lattas Andrew
Published: January 2013

What a lot of nonsense about the ANU and Australian universities in general (sites of neoliberal thought indeed?!) I find it odd that people who have willingly spent their professional lives and made careers in Australian universities suddenly want to bite the hand that is (still) feeding them! (Finlayson, J. 14 December 2010, AASNet email post)
Politics and Headhunting among the Formosan Sejiq: Ethnohistorical Perspectives
Authors: Simon Scott
Published: January 2013

Memories of headhunting, and ritual re‐enactments of those former violent practices, are still politically meaningful in contemporary Oceania and Southeast Asia. The case of the Sejiq of Taiwan illustrates how such practices were transformed and eventually terminated as a result of colonialism and the incorporation of formerly stateless peoples into new political institutions. Headhunting was once an expression of the sacred law of Gaya, as both a reinforcement of territorial boundaries and a way of settling legal disputes within communities. It expressed tensions in a ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’ by which some men tried to consolidate political power, but were usually deterred by a strong egalitarian ethos. During the period of Japanese administration (1895–1945), new technologies made headhunting more efficient, but it became more difficult for this formerly egalitarian people to avoid the political coercion of would‐be leaders. Contradictions between headhunting as the implementation of Gaya and headhunting as a consolidation of political power — itself viewed as a violation of that Law — eventually led to the abandonment of headhunting. Local leaders found new ways to seek political power, including in the ritual re‐enactment of the very same practices used by their ancestors, but continue to be resisted by ordinary people with an egalitarian ethos.
The Process of Kinship in the Paternal/Fraternal House of the Austronesian‐speaking Amis of Taiwan
Authors: Yeh Shu‐Ling
Published: January 2013

In this essay, I will describe the traditional social organisation of the Amis peoples of Taiwan which previous ethnographers have portrayed as consisting of a matrilineal clan‐based system conjoined with a residential‐based male age‐set/grade system. Following David Schneider's critique of ‘kinship’ cross‐culturally and the ‘new kinship studies' which his work inspired, I will attempt a reinterpretation of overall Amis social organisation as instead a total kinship‐based system comprised of a paternal/fraternal system which integrates and encompasses the multiplicity of maternal‐focused houses constitutive of village communities. Rather than being a system composed of kinship and non‐kinship parts, I argue that Amis social organisation is comprehensively kinship‐based. Moreover, I shall describe how through paternal/fraternal relations generated by rites of male initiation and rebirth this overall integration of diverse matrifocal units is achieved. In the first section, I will describe the structure of the paternal/fraternal initiatory system. In the following section, I will draw upon the major anthropological theories of initiation including rites of passage and the literature on sacrifice to describe numerous aspects of initiation activities, showing how the classificatory father‐son and elder‐younger‐brother relations between and within the initiation sets are explicitly represented by the concepts and practices of the Amis.
Experimental Publics: Activist Culture and Political Intelligibility of Climate Change Action in the Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia
Authors: Connor Linda H.
Published: January 2013

The ethnographic study of Western environmental activism opens up the prospect of studying subjectivities formed in opposition to dominant Western ideas and values, and yet encapsulated within Western societies and democratic polities. One of the directions in which it points the anthropologist, which is pursued in this article, is towards the study of the political lifeworlds of activists, their self‐identity as citizens and their embeddedness in the wider society. Environmental politics can be an emergent activity in citizens' lives, as expressed in John Dewey's concept of ‘the public’ as citizens who organise themselves to address the adverse consequences of situations that they experience in common (Dewey 1991[1927]). This paper focuses on a middle ground of social action between habitual daily practice, and the domain of institutional politics: groups of people in small voluntary organisations in the heavily coal‐mined Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia, who are moved to collective action to address the threatening aspects of anthropogenic climate change. Action group members variously articulate their reflexive understandings of the structural contradictions of environmentalism in corporate capitalist societies where values of consumerism and processes of individualization corrode collective concerns of citizenship‐based politics. These understandings inform activists' personal motivations, values and ideals for a ‘climate movement’, diverse modes of political action and striving for wider political intelligibility.
The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court
Authors: Fitz‐Henry Erin
Published: January 2013

In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'
The Symbolic Politics of Belonging and Community in Peri‐urban Environmental Disputes: the Traveston Crossing Dam in Queensland, Australia
Authors: de Rijke Kim
Published: January 2013

This paper examines a recent dispute generated by the Queensland State Government proposal to build the Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River in southeast Queensland, Australia. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which interrelated issues of belonging, community identity, and social diversity were negotiated during the anti‐dam campaign. As an unusual alliance of farmers, environmentalists, urban retirees, some Aboriginal people and others, it takes a view of the anti‐Traveston Crossing Dam campaign as a fluid network of people and approaches the notion of community identity as the symbolic construction of similarity. Locally specific, the paper describes pertinent aspects of community politics in the context of rural socioeconomic change, and the mobilisation of heritage. With regard to local senses of belonging, it also discusses the involvement of Aboriginal people during the campaign. More broadly then, this paper attempts to make an ethnographic contribution to the study of environmental disputes and the politics of alliance in peri‐urban areas of settler‐descendant societies such as Australia.
Developing an Environmentally Friendly Engineering Ethic: A Course for Undergraduate Engineering Students
Authors: Catalano George D.
Published: January 2013

An undergraduate course designed to develop a new, environmentally‐friendly, engineering ethic is described. The various components of the course are: individual and societal values clarification, the current state of the environment, critical and creative thinking skills development and conflict resolution. For each component, the rationale is given along with activities and evaluation of the unit.
Profile of a Nurturing College Professor
Authors: Haddock Jorge
Published: January 2013

This paper describes a college professor who believes that being a good role model involves more than being professionally competent. It is argued that professors can improve the quality of teaching by becoming more sensitive to the students' needs and by understanding and appreciating their individuality. The paper discusses the role of the professor in creating an environment where the students feel comfortable being themselves and enjoy the whole experience of learning. In this environment students can feel that they are important, that their needs are important, and that other people experience joy in helping them get their needs met. It is also argued that when the teacher is able to focus on assisting the students in meeting their needs, the teacher's needs get met. To conclude, the author presents a personal reflection on his own experiences as an engineering student and professor.
Undergraduate Astronautics Initiatives at San Jose State University
Authors: Hunter Jeanine M. , Desautel Dick D.
Published: January 2013

A balance betwen topics in aeronautics and astronautics was sought as an Aerospace Engineering Department was established at San Jose State University in 1987. This goal has resulted in a uniquely‐composed curriculum and laboratory development initiatives. Discussed in this article are the essential elements of the astronautics curriculum: the senior‐level Spacecraft Design course, an unusual aerospace sensor laboratory, as well as astronautics hardware experiment stations under development. Also discussed is the departments working relationship with local industry in terms of student employment; guest lecturers and consultants; and grants and equipment donations.
Use of the Kolb Learning Cycle and the 4MAT System in Engineering Education
Authors: Harb John N. , Durrant S. Olani , Terry Ronald E.
Published: January 2013

The purpose of this paper is to examine a method for the application of learning style theory to engineering education. Research has shown that students learn in a variety of different ways, and that each student has a preferred style of learning. Teaching effectiveness may be enhanced by teaching to each of the preferred styles at least a portion of the time. The application of learning style theory in this paper is based on the work of Kolb who identified four principal learning styles or types. The process of teaching to each of the four learning styles is referred to as “teaching through the cycle.” The learning cycle consists of four quadrants, each of which is associated with a particular learning style or preference. This paper defines specific objectives for each of the four learning quadrants. In addition, activities which can be used to accomplish these objectives are presented and discussed. Sample lesson plans have also been included in order to illustrate application of the learning cycle to the teaching of specific engineering topics.
Choosing the Ph.D. Path: A Multi‐Criteria Model for Career Decisions
Authors: Mills Nancy L. , McCright Paul R.
Published: January 2013

A interactive, multi‐criteria decision model was developed using Criterium software to help students assess alternative career paths: undertaking graduate study leading to an engineering doctoral degree and an academic career versus pursuing a career as an engineer in industry. The use of the model enables consideration of multiple factors, which may represent conflicting objectives and which have different measures of value (quantitative and qualitative) and different levels of importance to the decision. The model should assist its users in more carefully and thoroughly evaluating the criteria that affect career choices. We hope that its use may also help reduce the impending shortage of engineering faculty by encouraging more students to consider careers as engineering professors.
Personal and Professional Enrichment: Humanities in the Engineering Curriculum
Authors: Arms Valarie Meliotes
Published: January 2013

The Drexel E4 approach to engineering education has evolved from emphases on teamwork and course integration to include an emphasis on faculty development through the Personal and Professional Enrichment component. One of the four components of the curriculum which are described elsewhere, the Personal and Professional Enrichment Program, encompasses a short orientation course and the year long Humanities sequence. The orientation course, taught by all the team members, provides a forum for faculty as well as students to discuss personal and educational goals. It also provides faculty with a social arena which has become important in developing and maintaining the strong sense of community the team shares. The faculty have profited from talking about themselves as individuals, as much as the students who have discovered professionals as role models—concerned citizens and parents, and lifelong learners. Students are introduced to engineering as a profession that requires not only technological skills but also an awareness of ethics, of the need for lifelong learning, and of the importance of Humanities. It is important to note that the technical faculty teach the introductory course and thus themselves attest to the value of humanistic concerns throughout the entire program. Continuing the integration of goals as well as subjects, the Humanities curriculum includes the traditional sequence in reading, writing, and research skills with an emphasis on technical writing, visuals and oral presentation skills. Meritorious texts are chosen to highlight humanistic concerns about the impact of technology so that students recognize the engineers' obligation to the world we all share. By enhancing communication skills, developing an awareness of audience and expanding their imagination, students gain confidence in expressing creative and responsible attempts at solving engineering problems.
Performance Prediction and Enhancement in an Introductory Physics Course for Engineers
Authors: Thomas Edward W.
Published: January 2013

Performance in an introductory physics course for engineers is examined. Class performance is compared with the results of a diagnostic test taken at the start of a course and with performance in preceding classes. The best predictor of performance is found to be prior achievement; the diagnostic tests of basic skills is a poor predictor. It was demonstrated that repeated execution of a particular physics word problem leads to enhanced success and decreased failure; failure decreases by approximately 50% at each exposure. But the improved success on a particular word problem does not translate to a generally improved performance on all problems of its type. An intervention strategy based on repeated performance of “skills” problems does however translate into improved class performance and results in a 30 % decrease in the number of students who achieve unacceptable grades.
The Entry‐Level Engineer: Problems in Transition from Student to Professional
Authors: Katz Susan M.
Published: January 2013

When students enter the workforce, they must make a transition from an academic to a professional role. This study, based on interviews with professional engineers in supervisory roles, suggests that many basic skills required in the workplace, including the ability to work on a team and to communicate with one's peers and supervisors, are missing or insufficiently developed in recent college graduates. Many employers have programs to overcome these deficiencies, but we should also consider what we as educators can do to better prepare students for their future roles, and what students themselves can do to ease the transition.
Introducing Breadth and Depth in the Humanities and Social Sciences into an Engineering Student's General Education Curriculum
Authors: Blewett Peter
Published: January 2013

Engineering curricula can include the breadth and depth in the humanities and social sciences that both ABET and sound educational theory require if the general education program is organized into lower and upper divisions distributed over four years. Then during the last two years, small clusters of upper level courses built around agreed‐upon themes and requirements can offer students some elective choice while providing coherence among the courses. Thus an institution can develop an alternative to both restrictive, required CORES and loose area‐distribution curricula. Furthermore, by involving them in the planning, construction, implementation and governance of the clusters, faculty from outside engineering disciplines, will be engaged in the curriculum instead of being only employed in it.
Humanities for Undergraduate Engineers: A Rich Paradox
Authors: Andrews John K. , McBride Guy T. , Sloan E. Dendy
Published: January 2013

We present a freshman seminar entitled “Paradoxes of the Human Condition,” aimed at the integration of humanistic concerns into the daily lives of engineers and scientists. The philosophy, pedagogical basis, and preliminary evaluation are given for this course, which examines four paradoxes: the heroic paradox, the paradox of freedom and necessity, the paradox of absolute and relative, and the paradox of life and death. The course is discussed in the context of an interdisciplinary program, the Honors Program in Public Affairs for Engineers.
Applied Aerodynamics Experience for Secondary Science Teachers and Students
Authors: Abbitt John D. , Carroll Bruce F.
Published: January 2013

The Department of Aerospace Engineering, Mechanics & Engineering Science at the University of Florida in conjunction with the School Board of Alachua County, Florida has embarked on a four‐year project of university‐secondary school collaboration designed to enhance mathematics and science instruction in secondary school classrooms. The goals are to provide teachers with a fundamental knowledge of flight sciences as well as stimulate interest among students, particularly women and minorities, toward careers in engineering, mathematics, and science. In the first year, all thirteen of the county's eighth grade physical science teachers and their 1200 students participated. The activities included a three‐day college level seminar for the teachers, several weeks of classroom instruction for all the students, and an airport field trip for a subgroup of about 400 students that included an orientation flight in a Cessna 172 aircraft. The project brought together large numbers of middle school students, teachers, undergraduate and graduate engineering students, school administrators, and university engineering faculty. In Year 2, we are expanding our coverage and improving our minority outreach by offering the program to additional counties and the Florida Comprehensive State Center for Minorities. We are also introducing a program to recruit undergraduate minority engineering students for teaching careers by teaming these students with middle school teacher “mentors”, and having them work with teachers in the classroom.
Drexel's E4 Program: A Different Professional Experience for Engineering Students and Faculty
Authors: Quinn Robert G.
Published: January 2013

Abstract

In 1988, Drexel began a project which involves a comprehensive restructuring of the lower division engineering curriculum. The program provides an early introduction to the central body of knowledge forming the fabric of engineering, the unifying rather than parochial aspects of engineering, experimental methods, the computer as a flexible, powerful professional and intellectual tool, the importance of personal communications skills, and the imperative for continuous, vigorous, life‐long learning. The subject matter is organized in four major components replacing and/or integrating material in thirty‐seven existing courses in the traditional curriculum. The theme of all activities is a central focus on the students as emerging professional engineers and the faculty as their mentors from the very beginning of their education.

To date, 500 students and 50 faculty have participated in the project. Preliminary results of evaluations are encouraging. Retention rates and achievement levels are high. Performance tests indicate that most students develop excellent levels of computer and laboratory skills. Their written and oral presentations demonstrate achievement of superior levels of communication skills. Personal interviews and evaluations indicate that student response is quite positive and they place a high value on faculty participation in a team effort. Both faculty and students indicate that this different experience has given them an insight into the importance and scope of the engineering profession and a sense that its practice can be exciting, rewarding and enjoyable.
Student/Professor Ethics In Engineering Academia
Authors: Hanson Adrian T. , McCarthy William , Paur Karen
Published: January 2013

Abstract

This paper considers the components which constitute a safe, ethical academic environment in which students can explore the intricacies of engineering technology and engineering science. The concerns of the undergraduate and the graduate student are presented and contrasted, from both the perspective of the student and the faculty.