Juan Francisco Salazar

Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics

In this exciting interdisciplinary collection, scholars, activists, and media producers explore the emergence of Indigenous media: forms of media expression conceptualized, produced, and created by Indigenous peoples around the globe. Whether discussing Maori cinema in New Zealand or activist community radio in Colombia, the contributors describe how native peoples use both traditional and new media to combat discrimination, advocate for resources and rights, and preserve their cultures, languages, and aesthetic traditions. By representing themselves in a variety of media, Indigenous peoples are also challenging misleading mainstream and official state narratives, forging international solidarity movements, and bringing human rights violations to international attention. Global Indigenous Media addresses Indigenous self-representation across many media forms, including feature film, documentary, animation, video art, television and radio, the Internet, digital archiving, and journalism. The volume’s sixteen essays reflect the dynamism of Indigenous media-making around the world. One contributor examines animated films for children produced by Indigenous-owned companies in the United States and Canada. Another explains how Indigenous media producers in Burma (Myanmar) work with NGOs and outsiders against the country’s brutal regime. Still another considers how the Ticuna Indians of Brazil are positioning themselves in relation to the international community as they collaborate in creating a CD-ROM about Ticuna knowledge and rituals. In the volume’s closing essay, Faye Ginsburg points out some of the problematic assumptions about globalization, media, and culture underlying the term “digital age” and claims that the age has arrived. Together the essays reveal the crucial role of Indigenous media in contemporary media at every level: local, regional, national, and international. Contributors : Lisa Brooten, Kathleen Buddle, Cache Collective, Michael Christie, Amalia Cordova, Galina Diatchkova, Priscila Faulhaber, Louis Forline, Jennifer Gauthier, Faye Ginsburg, Alexandra Halkin, Joanna Hearne, Ruth McElroy, Mario A. Murillo, Sari Pietikainen, Juan Francisco Salazar, Laurel Smith, Michelle Stewart, Pamela Wilson

Activismo indígena en América Latina: estrategias para una construcciín cultural de las tecnologías de información y comunlcaClon

Abstract En este artículo me interesa mostrar a través de una serie de ejemplos, lamanera en que el renovado activismo indígena de la ultima década enAmérica Latina se ha manifestado en forma clave en la crecienteapropiación de medios de comunicación y tecnologías de información. Estefenómeno de apropiación es un proceso diverso y complejo, en don dediferentes tecnologías y códigos audiovisuales son adecuados a las lógicasindigenas. En términos teóricos, se propone que las formas alternativas deentender y utilizar los medios, enfocadas más al proceso que al productofinal, explicarían la manera en que los medios y tecnologías son construidosculturalmente. En este sentido, el articulo trata sobre los procesosemergentes de convergencia indígena en América Latina, en especial enrelación con los nuevos discursos de autodeterminación política,reconocimiento cultural y étnico. El énfasis está puesto en cómo estosdiscursos se yen mediados a partir de la apropiación y aplicación detecnologías de información y comunicación. El marco de referencia estádado por dos procesos complejos, sin duda diferentes, a la vez quesimultáneos y convergentes. Por un lade 10 que algunos han llamado laemergencia indígena en América Latina durante la ultima década y losprocesos asociados de etnogénesis; y por otro lado, la notable y disparintegración tecnológica de ciertas esferas económicas y socialeslatinoamericanas. De esta forma y a través de ejemplos concretos, semuestra por un lado el papel mediador, y en muchas ocasionescontradictorio, que las nuevas tecnologías digitales juegan en laconformación de nuevas formas de solidaridad social a nivellocal, nacionaly transnacional, y por otro lado, la manera en que los nuevos medios puedenentenderse como herramientas estratégicas de activismo cultural.

Nationalism in Today’s Antarctic

Whilst nationalism is a recognised force globally, its framing is predicated on experience in conventionally occupied parts of the world. The familiar image of angry young men waving Kalashnikovs means that the idea that nationalism might be at play in Antarctica has to overcome much instinctive resistance, as well as the tactical opposition of the keepers of the present Antarctic political arrangements. The limited consideration of nationalism in Antarctica has generally been confined to the past, particularly “Heroic-Era” and 1930s–1940s expeditions. This article addresses the formations of nationalism in the Antarctic present. Antarctic nationalism need not present in the same shape as nationalisms elsewhere to justify being called nationalism. Here it occurs in a virtual or mediated form, remote from the conventional metropolitan territories of the states and interests concerned. The key aspect of Antarctic nationalism is its contemporary form and intensity. We argue that given the historic difficulties of Antarctic activities, and the geopolitical constraints of the Cold War, it has only been since the end of that Cold War that a more muscular nationalism has been able to flourish in Antarctica. Our assessment is that there at least 11 bases upon which Antarctic nationalism might arise: (i) formally declared claims to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica; (ii) relative proximity of Antarctica to one’s metropolitan territory; (iii) historic and institutional associations with Antarctica; (iv) social and cultural associations; (v) regional or global hegemonic inclinations; (vi) alleged need in relation to resources; (vii) contested uses or practices in Antarctica; (viii) carry-over from intense antipathies outside Antarctica; (ix) national pride in, and mobilisation through, national Antarctic programmes; (x) infrastructure and logistics arrangements; or (xi) denial or constraint of access by one’s strategic competitors or opponents. In practice of course, these are likely to be manifested in combination. The risks inherent in Antarctic nationalism are the risks inherent in unrestrained nationalism anywhere, compounded by its already weak juridical situation. In Antarctica, the intersection of nationalism with resources poses a particular challenge to the regional order and its commitments to shareable public goods such as scientific research and environmental protection.

Geographies of place-making in Antarctica: an ethnographic approach

The article implements an ethnographic perspective to explore new modes of engaging with the geopolitics of place in Antarctica. It does so by entertaining the idea that a youth science education initiative undertaken every year in Chile is exemplary of distinctive forms of soft power, where cultural diplomacy plays a significant role alongside scientific practices and international cooperation in the Antarctic. Drawing on critical socio-spatial approaches to conceptualising place and the practices of place-making, the article scales down [or sideways] the discussion of Antarctic geopolitics to an ethnographic account of embodied and situated everyday practices in Fildes Peninsula, King George Island. Visual ethnographic work was undertaken during two short field seasons in 2012 and 2013 at Julio Escudero Station (Chile) and surrounding areas comprising a cluster of national scientific stations. The work was undertaken as part of the annual School Antarctic Expedition (EAE in Spanish), a programme arranged and organized by the Chilean Antarctic Institute (INACH). Employing the EAE as a methodological strategy and integrating interludes of ethnographic writing, the article argues that this activity, while still promoting national interests, enacts as a particular mode of cultural mediation, moving past propaganda models and top-down discourses of sovereignty, while endeavouring to promote science into wider publics and foster intercultural dialogue in the Antarctic as an indispensable aspect of Antarctic everyday life. The article concludes by venturing into how the effects of an ethnography of Antarctic place can be then scaled up to signal that attention to the “banal geopolitics” of everyday life in Antarctica can be relevant in providing fresh perspectives on large-scale (national and global) debates in polar geopolitics and could be taken more into account in emerging debates about the future challenges in Antarctica.

Inhabiting the Antarctic

Abstract In recent years, the Antarctic has become a fitting space for anthropological analysis and ethnographic research as human activities intensify and populations increasingly make themselves at home in Antarctica. The processes demand a deepening of inquiry into what kinds of socialities, subjectivities, material cultures, intangible heritage and cultural practices are emerging there. In this article, we provide accounts of how people dwelling in Antarctic research stations and settlements to argue that habitation in Antarctic settlements is lived and intentional, built by simultaneously from top-down governmental practices and bottom-up improvisations of everyday Antarctic life. Thus, through an ethnographic attentiveness to Antarctic places, place-making, dwelling, and inhabitation, we aim to further the methodological agenda of empirically mapping mobile and world-spanning connections in ways that allow us to move considerations of Antarctica from the realm of abstract space to inhabited space.

Antarctica and Outer Space: relational trajectories

This issue of The Polar Journal is coming out at the waning of a tumultuous year in world politics, still early into an already turbulent Trump administration that has seen the US pull out of the Paris Agreement and UNESCO. It was a year that in any case is perhaps best captured by the World Meteorological Organisation’s report,1 which states that we have surpassed our understanding of our changing climate and have stepped into new “uncharted territory”. Uncharted territory is certainly a useful analogy for describing a new stage of corporate and state endeavours towards a new era in off-Earth exploration.2 It was in 2017 that NASA discovered a record number of exoplanets located in circumstellar human habitability zones to a sun; Australia announced the creation of a new national space agency; Ghana launched its first satellite; SpaceX successfully launched its twelfth Commercial Resupply Services mission; and China turned an important page in establishing its intent to become the new main player in space exploration. In relation to this last point, in May 2017 during the concluding day of the fortieth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in Beijing, China confirmed its plans to build its fifth scientific research station in Antarctica and that it is prepared to considerably step up its investments there. These investments are dwarfed by the Xi Jinping administration’s massive investment in China’s space programme and in advanced technology sectors such as robotics and artificial intelligence. Antarctica and Outer Space will no doubt test China’s capacity as a global leader in the next few decades.3 This Special Issue on Antarctica and Outer Space is materialising alongside a series of important anniversaries that speak of the intricate relational trajectories of the polar regions and Outer Space. Among the most significant of these events are the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) on July 1, 1957 and the tenth anniversary of the last International Polar Year in 2007; the sixtieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the first artificial Earth satellite launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit; and the fiftieth anniversary of the signing and entering into force of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, commonly referred to as the Outer Space Treaty, in 1967. Hence, the rationale behind the idea of this Special Issue was to mark these anniversaries with a selection of new work from the humanities, social sciences, planetary sciences and arts. It is commonly agreed that the Space Age began sixty years ago with the Soviet Union launching Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957, an event that Hanna Arendt famously described in her chef d’oeuvre, The Human Condition, as “second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom”.4 The launch of Sputnik 1 took place as the 1957–58 IGY was just underway, during a period when many scientists were complaining that more was known about Outer Space than

Caught between nationalism and internationalism: replicating histories of Antarctica in Hobart

Abstract In December 2013, a replica of ‘Mawson’s Hut’ (a historic structure in Antarctica) joined a growing list of polar tourist attractions in the Australian city of Hobart, Tasmania. Initially promoted as the city’s ‘latest tourist hotspot,’ the ‘replica museum’ quickly took its place in Hobart’s newly redeveloped waterfront, reinforcing the city’s identity as an ‘Antarctic Gateway’. The hut forms part of a heritage cluster, an urban assemblage that weaves together the local and national, the past and present, the familiar and remote. In this article, we examine the replica hut in relation to the complex temporal and spatial relations that give it meaning, and to which it gives meaning. Our focus is the hut as a point of convergence between memory, material culture and the histories – and possible futures – of nationalism and internationalism. We argue that the replica hut, as a key site of Hobart’s Antarctic heritage tourism industry, reproduces and prioritises domestic readings of exploration and colonisation over a reading of Antarctic engagement as a transnational endeavour. However, like other ‘gateway city’ heritage sites, it has the potential for aligning with a larger trend in international heritage conservation and heritage diplomacy, that of prioritising narratives of the past that weave together transnational connections and associations.

IntroductionFamiliarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien

A growing number of researchers in the social sciences and the environmental humanities have begun to focus on the wider universe and how it is apprehended by modern cosmology. Today the extraterrestrial has become part of the remit of anthropologists, philosophers, historians, geographers, scholars in science and technology studies, and artistic researchers, among others. And there is an emerging consensus that astronomers and other natural scientists—contrary to a common prejudice—are never simply depicting or describing the cosmos “just as it is.” Their research is always characterized by a specific aesthetic style and by a particular “cosmic imagination,” as some have called it. Scientific knowledge of the universe is based on skilled judgments rather than on direct, unmediated perception. It is science, but it is also an art. This special section focuses on two at first sight contradictory aspects of this cosmic imagination. On the one hand, there is a distinctive move toward viewing the extraterrestrial in familiar terms and comprehending it by means of conceptual frameworks that we, earthlings, are accustomed to. On the other hand, there is a tendency to understand our own planet in unfamiliar terms, especially in astrobiology, where so-called analog sites and “extreme environments” provide clues about alien planets. (Text from authors’ abstract)

Digital Storytelling Antarctica

Abstract Over the past two decades, and not unlike other Southern Ocean rim countries, Chile has experienced a series of fundamental changes in its engagement with the Antarctic. This article provides an exploration into how these changes are shaping the formation of new local and national Antarctic social imaginaries. Through an account of a digital storytelling project carried out in the Antarctic Peninsula in 2012 and 2013 with young Chilean students, the article first examines cultural production processes at play in the configuration of a contemporary Antarctic national imaginary in Chile, arguing that such processes operate through a set of overlapping symbolic and material arrangements. Second, it reflects on how a performative focus on the experiences of young people doing science in Antarctica provides an innovative shift for understanding digital storytelling not only in terms of media democracy, but also rethinking its expediency as a novel mode of science diplomacy and democratisation of science. Third, and in framing the creative engagement process, the article considers the importance of bringing attention to thinking about globalism from the southern hemisphere in the context of the increasing significance that the Antarctic region holds for Southern Ocean rim countries. Highlighting the challenge of developing science–citizens interfaces, the article concludes by suggesting that we consider the complex entanglements between geopolitics, science and citizenship in a broader setting if we are to acknowledge that citizens’ engagement with critical scientific debates and decisions that affect their futures is today more pertinent than ever.

Antarctic futures: human engagement with the Antarctic environment

can be learned here. In this respect, the editors’ assertion that the experiences of Australia and Canada, as two “middle powers”, constitute a “valuable lens” through which to study polar ocean governance, is correct. It could be pointed out, however, that this is just one lens, dominated by perspectives from countries whose polar interest is mainly in one of the Polar Regions. It would have been interesting indeed to see contributions from academics in countries with more bipolar interests in this context. The accounts of the status of the environment in these regions are those of social scientists and lawyers, not always entirely accurate or up to date. A proper discussion of geography in the introduction would have lent support to the chapters on the Arctic in particular. Better maps would have served the reader well – Ted McDorman’s excellent discussion of Canada–US issues in the Arctic Ocean, for example, would have been even better if accompanied by a detailed map of the region he discusses. The volume ends abruptly, without a final chapter summarizing the findings and views that are advanced. This is a missed opportunity – the volume contains material that invites such an exposition. Also, a discussion of the governance of the polar oceans in a more global perspective is something that this reader finds wanting. The stage is set for the next steps in the Australia–Canada ACORN cooperation.