Roads to Maralinga

Landscape Review, 2000

THE PAP E R ANAL Y S ES cartographies of nuclearism and colonial-native relations in terms of the exclusions in nuclear testing maps. It considers maps from French and British nuclear tests at Mururoa in the South Pacific and Maralinga in Australia. The paper argues that these maps rely on older Euro-American cartographic and narrative traditions of imagining empty and deserted territories in order to advance political arguments for the displacement and deterritorialisation of native peoples who occupy nuclear testing areas. Such official government nuclear cartography reproduces a colonial narrative of native abandonment. The explicit spatial expansionism of nuclear testing maps emphasises that control of place is the crux of the struggle for an anti-nuclear narrative strategy.

This article is a methodological examination situated within a larger multisited project on the formation and regulation of communities of sex workers in Yokohama, Japan, and Vancouver, Canada, in historical and social discourse. Tracing the fragmented and elliptical histories of these communities, we are attentive to the potential for walking, and specifically walking tours, as an ethnographic method, a mode of historical engagement, and a means to reflect on our unfolding and shifting space–body relationships as we move across spaces of inquiry with varying levels of ease/tension. We seek to understand walking tours as a means and method to critically engage the histories that we seek to uncover and the absences we face in our attempts to uncover them—not only the social relations that constitute and are constituted by the space but also our own relationship to current communities that exist in the space—and the ways our lifeworld entanglements interfere with and give shape to our research endeavors. We problematize academic tendecies to situate lifeworld entanglements as secondary or superfluous to the research process. By tactically spatializing our personal experiences in a series of endnoted digressions, we make strange academic writing conventions of appropriate form and content.

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2018

The article analyzes the role of the documentary form in building pronuclear narratives around the Indian nuclear project. It situates the nuclear films made by two state institutions, Films Division of India (Films Division) and Vigyan Prasar, as part of a network of expert statements, documentary assertions, and state violence that bring into being a pronuclear reality. Through the insights gained from my practice­based enquiry, which led to the production and circulation of a film titled Nuclear Hallucinations, I argue that the certainty of the pronouncements of such documentaries can be unsettled by approaching them as a tamasha. I rely on the multiple connotations of the word tamasha in the South Asian context and its ability to turn solemn assertions into a matter of entertainment or a joke. This vantage point of tamasha vis­à­vis the Indian nuclear project builds upon the strategies of antinuclear documentaries that resist the epistemological violence of pronuclear assertions. In this article, I explore the role of comic modes and irony in forming sites of tamasha to create trouble within the narratives that position nonviolent antinuclear protestors as " antinational " elements. The article also expands on how the point of view of tamasha can engender new solidarities, which can resist the violence of the Indian nuclear project by forming new configurations of possibilities.

International Journal of Tourism Cities

Purpose Little is known about the overall meaning of the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ) from the visitors’ point of view. Conceptualizing the zone as a storyscape and its narratives as intangible heritage resources, this study aims to investigate the visitors’ engagement with these resources and the resulting articulations from the engagements as translated into verbal and visual storytelling. Design/methodology/approach Participant observation and participant generated images in combination with in-depth interviews with different types of tourists were conducted. This paper uses the photographs chosen by the interviewees themselves as a photo essay to explore the evocation of stories through narrative engagement. Findings Through participant-oriented research, this study identified three dominant storytelling themes through which visitors focus their understanding of the CEZ. Visitors’ narrative engagements and visual storytelling co-produce the site and entail fluid and even confl...

Forty years ago Clifford Geertz published a signature essay that began with an account of a Moroccan sheep raid that had been constructed by weaving together three different frames of interpretation: Jewish, Berber, and French. In somewhat parallel fashion, when busloads of people today travel together on guided tours to memorialized sites of past atrocities, these “journeys of return” are also loaded with multiple meanings for the participants. Unlike the multilingual characters in Geertz’s scenario, however, today’s co-travelers, even those coming from the same country, may be oblivious to the way that their personal ethnic and racial backgrounds highlight and filter what they notice and miss in these Holocaust study tours. This paper will examine an event that occurred on one such journey: a trip by150 college students to three former Nazi death camps in Poland. On the bus trip back to the hotel after a particularly wrenching excursion to Majdanek, a student, in an attempt to relieve tension after a half hour of stunned collective silence, attempted to share what she thought was a humorous anecdote. The story she told, however, involved a racial undercurrent that she herself did not recognize, though a few other students certainly did. As fallout from this incident grew, and meetings were held that evening to discuss it, emotions escalated. The entire event, contextualized within a study tour designed to cultivate knowledge of genocidal oppression and tolerance for ethnic differences, begs for an anthropological analysis of the workings of irony and privilege.

2018

This thesis contains no material that has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. To the best of the author's knowledge, it contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made in the text.

Western Journal of Communication, 1997

Images of “home” and “field” pervade discourse about nuclear weapons. These images create inter‐related symbolic realms in which nuclear operations are variously promoted, accomodated, and resisted. In analyzing a series of personal and fieldwork narratives, this essay explores various configurations of these images in both official and critical nuclear discourses. It argues that the discursive fields of national‐strategic and critical‐ethnographic operations are mapped and conducted over domestic sites. The existence and oppositional power of these sites are typically repressed, however, in order to maintain the authority of professional nuclear discourses. Revising the relationship between Home and Field potentially transforms the existing practices of both nuclear hegemony and progressive nuclear criticism

Simoni, V. and S. McCabe 2008. From Ethnographers to Tourists and Back Again: On Positioning Issues in the Anthropology of Tourism. Civilisations: Revue internationale d’anthropologie et de sciences humaines 57 (1-2): 173-189.

In this article we discuss the positioning of ethnographers in anthropological research on tourism, and the wider implications in terms of meaningful collection and interpretation of fieldwork data. Our reflections emerge from researches in two different touristic contexts: from detailed, enduring participant observation of informal encounters between locals and tourists in Cuba, to the intermittent, snap-shot participant observation at a mass participation football game held over two days each year in the UK. The focus of our discussion will be on the ways in which we were both primarily framed (one as a local person returning 'home' and the other as a tourist outsider) by the subjects of our research, and on the dynamics and subsequent tensions arising out of attempts to breach and negotiate these tropes, to manoeuvre between shifting standpoints and subjectivities. We consider the kinds of relationships we could establish with our informants and how these (often transient) relationships give us access to differing realities and interpretations. We discuss how these issues restrained/enabled our research, while also raising some ethical dilemmas related to covertness/overtness, reciprocity, and competing obligations towards our informants.

2018

L’istituzione del Forum Malinowski per l’Etnografia e l’Antropologia in Sud Tirolo fornisce un’ottima opportunita alla rivista della principale associazione antropologica italiana per riconsiderare il significato dell’etnografia, cosi come intrapresa da Malinowski, in diversi campi di studio, in antropologia e oltre. Uno di questi campi e l’antropologia storica, e la storia stessa nel piu ampio senso del termine. Questo articolo cerca di esplorare come l’eredita malinowskiana nel lavoro di campo etnografico potrebbe essere attivata ed elaborata in maniera utile e produttiva nei campi della storia e dell’antropologia storica. A questo scopo, la prima sezione del testo delinea come la nozione di un lavoro di campo empirico, sviluppata da Malinowski, fosse aperta a tutti i tipi d’indagine comparativa interdisciplinare. Alla fine, questi andranno a includere anche la storia, nonostante il risaputo ammonimento iniziale di Malinowski (Firth 2002). La seconda sezione entra nei dettagli del...