Post-photographic presences, or how to wear a digital cloak

This article explores some of the tensions that digital processing introduces to our understanding of photography by focusing on digital images of a Māori cloak from New Zealand held in the UCL Ethnography Collections. The complex, energetic/electrical networks established not only by digital communication technologies but also between Māori people and their taonga (treasured possessions) expand the understanding of both photographic indexicality and Runia’s definition of presence. The wairua, or spiritual energies, channelled in Māori relationships as they are transmitted through important cultural treasures creates a profound experience of co-presence in which objects are understood as simultaneous links to the past, present and future. The article argues that the experience of co-presence in both Māori engagements with important museum objects and the experience of networked digital communications technologies (including digital photographs) allows us to develop an expanded understanding of provenance, or where objects come from (and who they belong to) in museums

Curating the Crowd: Social Media and the Choreography of Affective Experience

The advent of social media and the ever more sophisticated functionality of our mobile phones have had a profound effect on the way we view and record events. This is particularly true for large gatherings of people. Haidy Geismar, Professor of Anthropology at University College London, explains how it was once possible to ‘choreograph’ an audience, but nowadays the audience choreographs itself, with thousands of simultaneous viewpoints that are disseminated in multiple, personal yet often public ways

Landfill and Health, a Municipal Concern or, Telling it Like it Was

Land reclamation in port cities is a worldwide phenomenon that clearly represents economic considerations and, often, intensifying urbanization. Analysis of the fill matrix of two New York City sites suggests that the imposition of municipal controls may be one facet of the urbanizing process documented in the archaeological record. Differences between the fill from the 175 Water Street site, an East River block filled in the 18th century, and Site 1 of the Washington Street Urban Renewal Area adjacent to the Hudson River, an early 19th-century fill site, are best explained by the introduction of city ordinances to regulate land reclamation activities. The historical record, which documents a growing concern with mounting health problems, provides a rationale for these controls

Drawing it out

The fieldwork sketches of Arthur Bernard Deacon, made in Vanuatu in 1926-27, give us insight into the early methodologies of social anthropology and into the role of images in anthropological ways of thinking. Here I develop a perspective on field sketches that explores them not only as visual mediations of the fieldworker's subjectivity, but also as genre pieces that indicate very particular forms of training in "how to see." I draw out the visual conventions, ways of thinking and seeing, that underscore the different strategies that Deacon used in his drawing

Resisting settler-colonial property relations? The WAI 262 claim and report in Aotearoa New Zealand

This paper gives a brief survey of the WAI 262 claim, and the Tribunal Report, in Aotearoa New Zealand. Colloquially known as the Native or Indigenous Flora and Fauna Claim, WAI 262 was the first whole of government claim to the Waitangi Tribunal, requiring a commission of enquiry to investigate how New Zealand constitutes intellectual and cultural property regimes in relation to Māori peoples across the spectrum of governance, from arts and cultural production to medical research, language, and broadcasting. I give a brief summary of the claim and report, but focus primarily on the ways in which languages of cultural difference and incommensurability are mediated within this quasi-legal framework. I argue that rather than presenting ontologically incompatible frames of ‘culture’, which is ultimately disempowering for indigenous people in the context of the settler-colony, indigenous alterity is a strategy to assert and reorganize the foundations of sovereignty. The strategic relationship between governance, sovereignty, and property regimes has become a zone of contestation and indigenous cultural production

Model-based comparison of organ at risk protection between VMAT and robustly optimised IMPT plans

The comparison between intensity-modulated proton therapy (IMPT) and volume-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) plans, based on models of normal tissue complication probabilities (NTCP), can support the choice of radiation modality. IMPT irradiation plans for 50 patients with head and neck tumours originally treated with photon therapy have been robustly optimised against density and setup uncertainties. The dose distribution has been calculated with a Monte Carlo (MC) algorithm. The comparison of the plans was based on dose-volume parameters in organs at risk (OARs) and NTCP-calculations for xerostomia, sticky saliva, dysphagia and tube feeding using Langendijk's model-based approach. While the dose distribution in the target volumes is similar, the IMPT plans show better protection of OARs. Therefore, it is not the high dose confirmation that constitutes the advantage of protons, but it is the reduction of the mid-to-low dose levels compared to photons. This work investigates to what extent the advantages of proton radiation are beneficial for the patient's post-therapeutic quality of life (QoL). As a result, approximately one third of the patients examined benefit significantly from proton therapy with regard to possible late side effects. Clinical data is needed to confirm the model-based calculations

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism, Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular