Journals at the University of Arizona
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The Customs and Fashions of the Turks: Historiographical Trends and a Possible Hypothesis Based on Historical Context
No full textThis paper examines the secondary English-language scholarship on Dutch artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst's frieze, The Customs and Fashions of the Turks. By examining the scholarship on this woodcut series, this paper points out the trends and lacunae regarding the artist and his work. In addition to summarizing historical trends related to Coecke and the frieze, I also posit a possible hypothesis based on the scenes of a circumcision procession and Suleyman's procession through the Hippodrome. By placing these scenes into their proper historical context, I argue that it is possible that Coecke was alluding to Suleyman's son's circumcision festivities in 1530, shortly after his siege of Vienna against the Hapsburgs, in order to secure tapestry commissions and/or to gain favor with the Sultan
Democratizar la bioseguridad en territorios con diversidad biocultural: la apuesta por una alianza de saberes en México
No full textEl siguiente artículo trata sobre las limitaciones al control ciudadano y comunitario impuestas por el gobierno mexicano sobre la bioseguridad y las políticas de biotecnología, así como las resistencias y propuestas creativas emprendidas por campesinos, indígenas, científicos y activistas preocupados por la expansión de los cultivos de soya y maíz genéticamente modificados. Lejos de retomar una perspectiva que opone saberes locales no -académicos a conocimiento científico, nuestra perspectiva enfatiza la alianza de saberes y aprendizajes entre múltiples actores que conforman la sociedad civil que abogan por un bio-control más democrático y anclado, a nivel local, en aquellos territorios caracterizados por su variedad y riqueza en flora, fauna y modos de vida. A partir de información etnográfica recabada durante la realización de biomonitoreos en Oaxaca y Campeche entre el 2000 y el 2018, se destacan las contribuciones que campesinos e indígenas pueden hacer, desde su saber territorial, a la democratización de la bioseguridad concebida, esta última, en términos más amplios que los meramente establecidos por ley. Se reflexiona además sobre los retos y oportunidades que suponen los biomonitoreos ciudadanos y las controversias que estos suscitan.Palabras clave: Bioseguridad, alianza de saberes, territorios biodiversos, biomonitoreos ciudadanos, transgénicos, resistencia socia
Observation Effect in Ecological Momentary Assessments: A Study of Sun Protection Practices
No full textDaily diaries and ecological momentary assessments are plagued by the assessment itself becoming an intervention, known as the observation effect. Bayesian hierarchical level modeling is a technique to analyze repeated measures or multiple outcomes. In a study of twice-daily self-reporting of sun protection behavior among high-risk individuals, we investigate observation effects, agreement between retrospectively self-reported reminder effect and observation effect, differential observation effects, and consistency of behaviors. Participants who retrospectively reported no reminder effect showed a decrease in protective behaviors over time, whereas those who reported they were reminded showed sustained use. Advantages of the Bayesian methodology are demonstrated for assessing consistency of behaviors. Although we cannot observe prior behavior, we theorize that individuals experience an initial elevation at the onset of observation, though this unobserved increase is only sustained for a subset who later attribute this sustained behavior to a reminder effect. Implications for study designs with repeated observations are discussed
Claiming and re-claiming the Ayeyarwady Delta, time and again: the case of Nyaungdone Island, Myanmar
No full textSince 2011 and the transition to civilian government, Myanmar and the Ayeyarwady Delta in particular are witnessing swift and dramatic changes in the modalities of access and use of natural resources. Drawing from political ecology, and on the basis of ethnographic work conducted in Yeinek village tract in the Nyaungdone Township of the Ayeyarwady Delta, this article places recent resources dynamics in a historical perspective. Rather than seeing natural resources as a 'given', we see them as resulting from socially embedded strategies of resource-making. These strategies contribute to a constant redefinition of the "resource-frontier" the delta has historically been for multiple actors. Notably, we show how land for rice cultivation, and water for capture fisheries and aquaculture, have been made into key resources over time, often in an exclusionary way. Post-2011 land and fishery reforms are the most recent examples of resource-making dynamics; they have certainly triggered significant resource re-allocation, but existing cross-scale patronage networks still largely shape how this takes place in practice. Finally, in this deltaic environment where resources are part water, part land, part rice, part fish, and the legitimacy of one's claims often hinges on proving prior use of a specific resource, it is the nature of the resource to be reallocated that is contested. In the newly politicized context of Myanmar, resources and institutional fluidity is in itself a frontier to navigate.Keywords: Ayeyarwady Delta; Myanmar; fisheries; land; resource making; frontier; exclusio
Combined and uneven energy transitions: reactive decarbonization in Cuba and Venezuela
No full textMounting impacts of climate change have increased calls for a planetary energy transition, usually understood as the decarbonization of the global economy. All too often, however, these calls rely on technological or legislative measures, betraying an apolitical understanding of climate change and insufficient appreciation for the uneven global distribution of safety, risk, and power. Through an examination of recent events in Cuba and Venezuela, this article asks how prevailing calls for energy transitions to post-carbon futures reflect the combined and uneven present, replicating the inequalities of late carbon capitalism. By considering the 'Special Period in Times of Peace' in Cuba, as the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union was known, and Venezuela's overlapping crises since 2014 as energy transitions, this article highlights difficulties along the path to more sustainable and just futures. It also calls to attention the intensely social, but potentially incomplete and reversible, nature of energy transitions.Keywords: Energy transitions, Cuba, Venezuela, Special Period, extractivism, decarbonizatio
From the Virocene to the Lovecene epoch: multispecies justice as critical praxis for Virocene disruptions and vulnerabilities
No full textIn the Virocene epoch, global pandemics such as COVID-19 disrupt the world order organized by capitalism and racial privilege, making clear the unsustainability of 'normal' ways of organizing society and nature. Despite its failure to address these disruptions, the existing capitalist-racist system attempts to reproduce itself, posing greater risks of disease, inequalities, and injustice to the most vulnerable human and nonhuman populations. The Virocene epoch makes these workings visible, and challenges both hegemonic and counterhegemonic ways of organizing human–nature relations. Political ecology requires new emancipatory theoretical-political strategies firmly grounded in a theory of justice that embodies social and ecological rights in order to imaginatively produce new ways to counter such social and ecological crises arising from the global process of capitalism and viral activities. To this end, political ecology must develop a universal perspective on the justice-rights-power nexus with an explicit moral basis to enhance its emancipatory praxis against the globalizing challenges of the Virocene, without reproducing existing vulnerabilities and without dismissing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives in the name of otherness, difference, universalism or sameness. In this article, I reconfigure the justice-rights-power nexus to dismantle oppression and injustice in pursuit of regenerative solutions. I chart an alternate 'multispecies theory of justice' building upon love as an embodiment of the moral foundations for critical multispecies justice praxis, which produces another world of diverse, interconnected communities committed to social and ecological wellbeing. The 'Lovecene' is an aspirational planetary-order shaped by multispecies (human and non-human) equality and justice that transcends the anthropocentricism of current periodizations of planetary-level social and economic change. It attempts to overcome the limitations of many political-ecological theories of justice centered on notions of 'right order', 'fairness', 'distribution', and 'opportunities and capabilities', thereby successfully addressing the sociological and ecological vulnerabilities of the Virocene.Key Words: Virocene; political economy of health; capitalism; racism, vulnerability, pandemi
Divergent memories and visions of the future in conflicts over mining development
No full textConflicts over extractive development often center around predicting future profits and economic growth, and estimating industrial pollution. How these projections are understood and seen as legitimate and trustworthy depends on social actors' environmental imaginaries and timescapes. Thus, I examine the temporal and cultural dynamics of natural resource politics, particularly how affective connections to the past and future mobilize support and opposition to new mining. I use the case of proposed copper mines in the rural Minnesota Iron Range region to explore the different environmental imaginaries and timescapes that mining opponents and proponents use to understand the potential socio-environmental impacts, and to legitimate their positions. Proponents, including long-time and working class Iron Range residents and mining corporations, view the region as an industrial landscape built by mining and hope new proposals will renew the past to create a prosperous future. Meanwhile, environmental groups who oppose mining view the region through an environmental imaginary based on outdoor recreation, and draw on collective memories of family and youth trips to understand new extractive projects as a rupture to their vision of the future. I show that resource extraction is understood through temporalities that differ across intersections of class and region, and that emotional meanings of the past and visions of the future animate contemporary political action.Keywords: Resource extraction, mining, environmental imaginaries, timescapes, collective memory, environmental politics, emotion
Unfolding nomadism? A feminist political ecology of sedentarization in the Attappady Hills, Kerala
No full textThe landscape of the Attappady Hills in the Nilgiri range of Kerala, South India, is home to several Adivasis or indigenous peoples and settler communities, and has had intermittent cycles of agrarian crisis and sufficiency, according to colonial accounts from the early 20th century. Since the 1970s, rapid sedentarization of hunting-gathering communities, expanding capitalist markets, conservation projects, and sizable development interventions have contributed to agrarian and nutritional distress. There is a simultaneous process of adopting capitalist market forms and holding on to communal structures, along with manifestations of patriarchy, and resistance through gender struggles within the household and through community mobilization. Adivasis in the region seem to be undergoing processes of being simultaneously alienated from the forest and rediscovering connections to their land and the non-human world. By highlighting the material aspects with relational ecological ties and patriarchal manifestations with rural women's movements, this article proposes the relevance of nomadic movement in interpreting gender and environment subjectivities that have a bearing on these communities' future foodscapes and the rest of their landscape. We point to a continuous process of becoming, a 'feminist politics of the earth' in this landscape and extend the gender-nature debate beyond dualisms and liminality by highlighting fluid dialectical processes within a feminist political ecology framework.Keywords: Agrarian transitions; sedentarization; feminist political ecology; nomadic theory
Sustainable development frictions: lifestyle migration on the coast of Jalisco, Mexico
No full textAbstractThe concept of sustainability is materialized differently in luxury ecotourism development and in locally-directed community development initiatives. I examine the diverse environmental ideologies at play in these two distinct incarnations of "sustainable development" on the southern Jalisco, Mexico coast; first, in La Manzanilla, a community inhabited by a proportionately large population of leisure consumption-driven lifestyle migrants, then to the north, in elite ecotourism enclaves and a community displaced by a wealthy developer. I suggest these divergent development incarnations may be understood by expanding the concept of lifestyle migration to include a broader range of enactments of home, from different class perspectives. Global environmental ideologies and lifestyle migrant capital play a fundamental but not the only role in local sustainable development. I suggest global influences and local initiatives are creating a productive friction, reassembling global environmental knowledge and tourism imaginaries to suit local agendas. While there is no consensus on what sustainable development should look like in La Manzanilla, the intersection of initiatives is producing locally-directed development that contrasts with the erasure of local agendas happening in elite costal developments nearby.Keywords: sustainable development, friction, environmental ideology, tourism, lifestyle migratio
A perfect storm: embodied workers, emplaced corporations, and delayed reflexivity in a Canadian 'Risk Society'
No full textAt the turn of the 21st century, an occupational disease epidemic began to unfold in Sarnia, Ontario, home to the petrochemical complex known as Canada's 'Chemical Valley.' Given the long latency periods for these diseases, the hazardous exposures that produced them would have occurred over a period of decades during the latter 20th century. This suggests a paradox: what accounts for unionized Canadian men working for decades in conditions that posed such grave risks to their health? Or, put in terms of Ulrich Beck's compelling and influential model: given that Chemical Valley during the second half of the 20th century constituted a quintessential "risk society" of the modern West, where were the forces of "political reflexivity" – resistance leading to change – typically provoked by the excesses of such societies? In this article, I seek to resolve this paradox with a political ecology approach that focuses on workers' embodied experience in the micro-environment of their workplace and community, as well as on the material and social emplacement of petrochemical facilities in the region. The analysis reveals a 'perfect storm' of converging ecological, cultural, political, and economic conditions that allowed local corporations to achieve extraordinary power. Consequently, even as activism for occupational and environmental justice was effecting change in similar industrial centers throughout Ontario and the Great Lakes region, these changes failed to take hold in Chemical Valley. The article concludes by suggesting that those 20th century power dynamics have continued into the 21st century, where reflexivity delayed might well have atrophied into reflexivity denied.Keywords: embodiment, emplacement, risk society, petrochemical corporations, industrial workers, Canada, Great Lakes regio