People experience disasters very differently. Conflicts about a »correct« interpretation of the risks might arise. The side-by-side of different truths lead to people seeing mismanagement and disinformation. The volcanic crisis of El Hierro shows how rivalling interpretations amongst affected islanders, the media, sciences, and disaster response institutions cause great social tensions and scepticism towards scientific information. Thus, to fully understand disaster risk, the focus must shift to the rifts between established convictions and the individuals' creativity to overcome them, taking into account their embeddedness in various fields of practice, each with their own rationales and ruptures.
Outrageous Seas is about that time, and about the harrowing, almost mythic, experience of shipwreck, near-shipwreck, and survival in waters off Newfoundland.
2023 was a year of consequence, at home and across the world. For Australia, the year was dominated by the Voice to Parliament, shifting security challenges, and the plight of everyday Australians grappling with a housing crisis, inflation and economic uncertainty. Globally we saw continuing war in Ukraine and deadly new conflict in Israel, ethical considerations of artificial intelligence and devastating reports on climate change. Working together, The Conversation's academics and journalists covered these issues and more, providing evidence-based research to help guide policy-makers and everyday Australians to make informed decisions at a pivotal time. This is a record of their work on the frontlines in this year of consequential decisions. Contributors include: Marcia Langton Frank Bongiorno Matthew Sussex Brian Schmidt Richard Denniss Emma Beckett Peter Martin Kevin Brophy Carol Lefevre Sally Young John Maynard Emma Shortis David Lindenmayer Sandra Phillips Jim Stanford Foreword by Michelle Grattan.
This is the long awaited, revised and illustrated edition of Kings of Disaster, the study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan that is in many ways a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victimary role of the king as compared with that of enemy. Kings of Disaster so proposes an uninvolved solution to the vexed problem of regicide.
This masterpiece of scholarship and compression, the second edition of The African Experience, covers the entire span of human history across the African continent, from the earliest emergence of hominids in eastern and southern Africa up to the present day. Drawing on more than forty years of teaching and research, Professor Oliver arranges the book thematically, beginning with the human colonization of the different regions of Africa, the origins of food production, and the formation of African languages.The achievements of Ancient Egypt are placed in context with the developments in the rest of the continent, and the spread of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - "peoples of the book." The tradition of urban settlement is traced, especially in western Africa, as well as the emergence of large and complex societies formed by the interaction of pastoralists and cultivators in eastern and southern Africa.The extent and nature of slavery in Africa is fully discussed, together with the external slave trade and the caravan trade in precolonial times. This leads to an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of African political systems and why, from the early nineteenth century onwards, these systems were unable to withstand political pressure from abroad and the ensuing colonization. The colonial partition of Africa saw the rapid amalgamation of small units, through which considerable modernization was achieved at the expense of the indigenous structures and through the exploitation of the African peoples. Later chapters describe the birth of modern African nation-states, at a time of widespread belief in state planning - now being questioned as the political elites of black Africa begin to review their single-party systems. This new edition sees a number of revisions, including a new chapter on the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War left Africa free at last to try to solve its own problems.
I the Supreme imagines a dialogue between the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator known as Dr. Francia and Policarpo Patiño, his secretary and only companion. The opening pages present a sign that they had found nailed to the wall of a cathedral, purportedly written by Dr. Francia himself and ordering the execution of all of his servants upon his death. This sign is quickly revealed to be a forgery, which takes leader and secretary into a larger discussion about the nature of truth: “In the light of what Your Eminence says, even the truth appears to be a lie.” Their conversation broadens into an epic journey of the mind, stretching across the colonial history of their nation, filled with surrealist imagery, labyrinthine turns, and footnotes supplied by a mysterious “compiler.” A towering achievement from a foundational author of modern Latin American literature, I the Supreme is a darkly comic, deeply moving meditation on power and its abuse—and on the role of language in making and unmaking whole worlds.
"The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril," wrote Winston Churchill in his monumental history of World War Two. Churchill's fears were well-placed-the casualty rate in the Atlantic was higher than in any other theater of the entire war. The enemy was always and constantly there and waiting, lying just over the horizon or lurking beneath the waves. In many ways, the Atlantic shipping lanes, where U-boats preyed on American ships, were the true front of the war. England's very survival depended on assistance from the United States, much of which was transported across the ocean by boat. The shipping lanes thus became the main target of German naval operations between 1940 and 1945. The Battle of the Atlantic and the men who fought it were therefore crucial to both sides. Had Germany succeeded in cutting off the supply of American ships, England might not have held out. Yet had Churchill siphoned reinforcements to the naval effort earlier, thousands of lives might have been preserved. The battle consisted of not one but hundreds of battles, ranging from hours to days in duration, and forcing both sides into constant innovation and nightmarish second-guessing, trying desperately to gain the advantage of every encounter. Any changes to the events of this series of battles, and the outcome of the war-as well as the future of Europe and the world-would have been dramatically different. Jonathan Dimbleby's The Battle of the Atlantic offers a detailed and immersive account of this campaign, placing it within the context of the war as a whole. Dimbleby delves into the politics on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the role of Bletchley Park and the complex and dynamic relationship between America and England. He uses contemporary diaries and letters from leaders and sailors to chilling effect, evoking the lives and experiences of those who fought the longest battle of World War Two. This is the definitive account of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.
Whether driven by developments in plant science, bio-philosophy, or broader societal dynamics, plants have to respond to a litany of environmental, social, and economic challenges. This collection explores the `work' that plants do in contemporary capitalism, examining how vegetal life is enrolled in processes of value creation, social reproduction, and capital accumulation. Bringing together insights from geography, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, the contributors contend that attention to the diverse capacities and agencies of plants can both enrich understandings of capitalist economies, and also catalyze new forms of resistance to their logics.
