Sally Babidge

Bodily Connections and Practising Relatedness: Aboriginal Family and Funerals in Rural North Queensland

[Extract] This paper is based on fieldwork with Aboriginal people in Charters Towers, a rural town in northern Queensland in Australia. It concerns Aboriginal funerals, which are one of the most important events by which rural Aboriginal people in northern Queensland revitalise kinship relations. The paper examines the ways in which kinship and notions of belonging are embodied at funerals in the performance and practice of relationships, which in turn re-create notions of ‘family’ through an exploration of the co-constitution of family and the deceased.

Making media work in space: an interdisciplinary perspective on media and communication requirements for current and future space communities

As humans expand into space communities will form. These have already begun to form in small ways, such as long-duration missions on the International Space Station and the space shuttle, and small-scale tourist excursions into space. Social, behavioural and communications data emerging from such existing communities in space suggest that the physically-bounded, work-oriented and traditionally male-dominated nature of these extremely remote groups present specific problems for the resident astronauts, groups of them viewed as ‘communities’, and their associated groups who remain on Earth, including mission controllers, management and astronauts’ families. Notionally feminine group attributes such as adaptive competence, social adaptation skills and social sensitivity will be crucial to the viability of space communities and in the absence of gender equity, ‘staying in touch’ by means of ‘news from home’ becomes more important than ever. A template of news and media forms and technologies is suggested to service those needs and enhance the social viability of future terraforming activities.

Failing forward: A case study in neoliberalism and abandonment in Calama

Neoliberalism’s failings as a social order are a commonplace in the critical social sciences, and lately such critique has even been ventured from within the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. How has such a problematic form of capitalism both sustained criticism and flourished? Chilean neoliberalism might tell us something of how neoliberal forms weather critique to sustain elite power and significant social inequality, that is, how neoliberalism ‘fails forward’? We examine a case study in the Chilean mining city of Calama where a series of communal strikes and the authorities’ response demonstrate the resilience of neoliberalism and its significant failures that citizens experience as abandonment.

RITUALIDAD Y EXTRACTIVISMO: LA LIMPIA DE CANALES Y LAS DISPUTAS POR EL AGUA EN EL SALAR DE ATACAMA-NORTE DE CHILE

En un contexto de progresiva privatizacion del agua llevadaadelante por el regimen militar en Chile a partir del Codigo deAguas de 1981, analizamos las disputas por el agua entre comunidadesatacamenas del sur del salar de Atacama en el norte deChile y las mineras, con las cuales ellas confrontan pero tambiennegocian significados y valores. Desde una perspectiva etnograficay retomando los aportes de la ecologia politica, la antropologiade la naturaleza y los recientes trabajos sobre extractivismo,observamos las relaciones y tensiones entre significados cosmologicos,economicos y politicos del agua. Mapeando las recientescontestaciones por el agua, nos centramos en la “limpia de canales”en las comunidades atacamenas de Camar y Peine, como unritual multivalente y plurivocal, donde la complejidad de factorespoliticos, culturales y economicos se configuran en un entramadocentral de las relaciones sociales del agua.

Where the river ends: contested indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta, by Shaylih Muehlmann

gious texts, ideas, teachings, symbols, and discourses used by local Christian fighters and Muslim militias to support their violent acts during the communal riots. What or which Biblical/Christian or Qur’anic/Islamic narratives that were employed and produced by local religious groups to support violence and vengeance. While arguing religious contributions of violence, the book also does not discuss religious potentials for peacemaking and reconciliation. In the conflict settings where religion plays its important part, ‘religious ambiguity’ always takes place. This is to say that while religion can be used or misused by ‘religious extremists’ to heighten and sustain their violent deeds, it can also be productively utilised by ‘religious peacemakers’ to boost reconciliatory and peacebuilding endeavours. Even during the course of violence, religious actors tend to use ambivalent, complex, plural religious resources for different purposes, whether to support and intensify tensions and violence or to endorse intergroup harmony and peace. The biggest challenge for a researcher of a ‘religious conflict’, which Duncan missed, is how to engage with these particular religious groupings— the radicals and peacemakers—and excavate their understandings and interpretations on the role of religion for social relations during and after the violence. As well, more importantly, a researcher of a religious conflict needs to pay attention to the shifting phenomena of local religious actors in the conflict settings: from a radical to a peace activist, for instance. The book regrettably does not highlight this issue. Despite these lacunae, however, the book is no doubt a welcome edition for the studies of religious conflict and conciliation, not only in North Maluku or Indonesia but also in other parts of the world that are plagued by interreligious tensions. Where the river ends: contested indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta, by Shaylih Muehlmann. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2013, 220pp., figures, notes, references, index. ISBN 978-0-82235445-1 (paperback).