European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA): 10th Biennial Conference 2008 Ljubljana, Slovenia

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A Town on the Move: The narrative-redressive phase of social drama in a contemporary political setting

The setting for our ethnographic research is Padua (Padova) a middle-sized northern Italian town well known for its ancient University and its basilica of Saint Anthony, Il Santo. In 1998 the municipality of Padua counted only 5,600 migrants, primarily from Nigeria, the Philippines and Morocco; by 2008 this number had quadrupled, comprising in large part people from Eastern Europe and the Balkans in search of work in Padua’s lively tertiary and service sectors. In this context, we query whether Turner’s concept of ‘social drama’ is an applicable model for exploring questions such as whether migrants have provoked a crisis that is upsetting the status quo in the region; whether such crisis is recognizable in the public sphere and, if so, how it is manifested and how it may be  overcome. Above all, is Turner’s model capable of unveiling the sense of what is occurring in our towns, in our neighbourhoods, in the tens of public speeches of the actors involved, both migrants and hosts? These are, in sum, the questions around which our work has been revolving in the past years, and to which we have attempted to provide an answer, here and elsewhere. Keywords: migrants, Italian town, city change, Turner’s redressive phas

Political movement or performative group? History, objectives, method of femen

«Difendere con i seni nudi l’uguaglianza sociale e sessuale nel mondo» è il manifesto programmatico di Femen, movimento di attiviste che lottano attraverso mezzi non convenzionali –esposizione del corpo femminile nella sfera pubblica come strategia di protesta– contro il potere maschile espresso nel patriarcato, nella politica, nella religione. Con femministe e non di tutte le latitudini schierate contro di loro –incluse quelle della nativa Ucraina– e con i mass media pronti a documentare e a diffondere ogni loro uscita in strada, le Femen sono un fenomeno del nostro tempo su cui vale la pena di soffermarsi; al di là della loro visibilità, infatti, costituiscono materiale di riflessione. Nelle pagine che seguono abbiamo scelto di guardare Femen attraverso due possibili lenti analitiche –politica e performativa– non necessariamente escludenti tra loro.«Defending with bare breasts social and sexual equality in the world» is the manifesto of Femen, movement of women activists who struggle against male power –espressed by patriarchy, politics and religion– by exposing their body in the public sphere as a strategy of protest. With feminists of all over fielded against them –including those of native Ukraine– and the mass-media eager to document and disseminate each street protest, Femen is a phenomenon of our times which offers us food for thought. In the following pages, we intend to look at Femen through the political and the performative lens, two possible and not necessarily mutually excluding analytical perspectives

Cibo e rifugiati nella citt\ue0 capitolina, tra pratiche di emergenza e tentativi di agentivit\ue0

Il saggio verte sulle pratiche legate alla cottura e alla distribuzione del cibo in due esperienze d\u2019accoglienza rivolte a rifugiati e a richiedenti asilo nella periferia di Roma. Il primo caso riguarda un modello di ospitalita\u300 dal basso conosciuto come Baobab; il secondo riguarda un\u2019esperienza gestita dai gesuiti, nota come mensa del Centro Astalli. Due principali domande guideranno il nostro lavoro: qual e\u300 il senso del cibo per attivisti e volontari nei due esempi considerati? In che modo pratiche legate al cibo sono in grado di creare spazi di comunicazione e di riflessivita\u300 tra rifugiati e settori della societa\u300 ospitante? L\u2019approccio generale adottato in questo saggio non pone l\u2019accento tanto sulle difficolta\u300 sperimentate da attivisti, volontari e rifugiati, che sono una costante della loro interazione quotidiana, quanto sulle modalita\u300 creative nell\u2019affrontarle. In quest\u2019ottica, si suggerisce che entrambi i casi di studio potrebbero trovare nel concetto di agentivita\u300 uno strumento capace di rendere visibili dinamiche che altrimenti rimarrebbero sottaciute

Understanding spatial variability of methane fluxes in Arctic wetlands through footprint modelling

The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the global mean. This warming could further stimulate methane (CH4) emissions from northern wetlands and enhance the greenhouse impact of this region. Arctic wetlands are extremely heterogeneous in terms of geochemistry, vegetation, microtopography, and hydrology, and therefore CH4 fluxes can differ dramatically within the metre scale. Eddy covariance (EC) is one of the most useful methods for estimating CH4 fluxes in remote areas over long periods of time. However, when the areas sampled by these EC towers (i.e. tower footprints) are by definition very heterogeneous, due to encompassing a variety of environmental conditions and vegetation types, modelling environmental controls of CH4 emissions becomes even more challenging, confounding efforts to reduce uncertainty in baseline CH4 emissions from these landscapes. In this study, we evaluated the effect of footprint variability on CH4 fluxes from two EC towers located in wetlands on the North Slope of Alaska. The local domain of each of these sites contains well developed polygonal tundra as well as a drained thermokarst lake basin. We found that the spatiotemporal variability of the footprint, has a significant influence on the observed CH4 fluxes, contributing between 3% and 33% of the variance, depending on site, time period, and modelling method. Multiple indices were used to define spatial heterogeneity, and their explanatory power varied depending on site and season. Overall, the normalised difference water index had the most consistent explanatory power on CH4 fluxes, though generally only when used in concert with at least one other spatial index. The spatial bias (defined here as the difference between the mean for the 0.36 km2 domain around the tower and the footprint-weighted mean) was between mid51mid% and mid18mid% depending on the index. This study highlights the need for footprint modelling to infer the representativeness of the carbon fluxes measured by EC towers in these highly heterogeneous tundra ecosystems, and the need to evaluate spatial variability when upscaling EC site-level data to a larger domain

Upscaling CH4 Fluxes Using High-Resolution Imagery in Arctic Tundra Ecosystems

© 2017 by the author. Arctic tundra ecosystems are a major source of methane (CH 4 ), the variability of which is affected by local environmental and climatic factors, such as water table depth, microtopography, and the spatial heterogeneity of the vegetation communities present. There is a disconnect between the measurement scales for CH 4 fluxes, which can be measured with chambers at one-meter resolution and eddy covariance towers at 100-1000 m, whereas model estimates are typically made at the ~100 km scale. Therefore, it is critical to upscale site level measurements to the larger scale for model comparison. As vegetation has a critical role in explaining the variability of CH 4 fluxes across the tundra landscape, we tested whether remotely-sensed maps of vegetation could be used to upscale fluxes to larger scales. The objectives of this study are to compare four different methods for mapping and two methods for upscaling plot-level CH 4 emissions to the measurements from EC towers. We show that linear discriminant analysis (LDA) provides the most accurate representation of the tundra vegetation within the EC tower footprints (classification accuracies of between 65% and 88%). The upscaled CH 4 emissions using the areal fraction of the vegetation communities showed a positive correlation (between 0.57 and 0.81) with EC tower measurements, irrespective of the mapping method. The area-weighted footprint model outperformed the simple area-weighted method, achieving a correlation of 0.88 when using the vegetation map produced with the LDA classifier. These results suggest that the high spatial heterogeneity of the tundra vegetation has a strong impact on the flux, and variation indicates the potential impact of environmental or climatic parameters on the fluxes. Nonetheless, assimilating remotely-sensed vegetation maps of tundra in a footprint model was successful in upscaling fluxes across scales

Deltaic and Coastal Sediments as Recorders of Mediterranean Regional Climate and Human Impact Over the Past Three Millennia

This work was financially supported by the MISTRALS/PaleoMex program and by the Project of Strategic Interest NextData PNR 2011–2013 (www. nextdataproject.it). Lionel Savignan is thanked for his participation in the biomarker analysis. Radiocarbon datings for core KESC9-14 have been funded by Institut Carnot Ifremer-EDROME (grant A0811101). We also thank the Holocene North-Atlantic Gyres and Mediterranean Overturning dynamic through Climate Changes (HAMOC) project for financial support. The biomarker data presented here are available in the supporting information.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The chemical evolution of Omega Centauri's progenitor system

Chemical evolution models are presented for the anomalous globular cluster Omega Centauri. After demonstrating that the chemical features of Omega Cen can not be reproduced in the framework of the closed-box self-enrichment scenario, we discuss a model in which this cluster is the remnant of a dwarf spheroidal galaxy evolved in isolation and then swallowed by the Milky Way. Both infall of primordial matter and metal-enriched gas outflows have to be considered in order to reproduce the stellar metallicity distribution function, the age-metallicity relation and several abundance ratios. Yet, as long as an ordinary stellar mass function and standard stellar yields are assumed, we fail by far to get the enormous helium enhancement required to explain the blue main sequence (and, perhaps, the extreme horizontal branch) stellar data. Rotating models of massive stars producing stellar winds with large helium excesses at low metallicities have been put forward as promising candidates to solve the `helium enigma' of Omega Cen (Maeder & Meynet, 2006, A&A, 448, L37). However, we show that for any reasonable choice of the initial mass function the helium-to-metal enrichment of the integrated stellar population is unavoidably much lower than 70 and conclude that the issue of the helium enhancement in Omega Cen still waits for a satisfactory explanation. We briefly speculate upon possible solutions.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures; accepted for publication in MNRA

Deltaic and Coastal Sediments as Recorders of Mediterranean Regional Climate and Human Impact Over the Past Three Millennia

International audienc

Observation of Hadronic W Decays in t-tbar Events with the Collider Detector at Fermilab

We observe hadronic W decays in t-tbar -> W (-> l nu) + >= 4 jet events using a 109 pb-1 data sample of p-pbar collisions at sqrt{s} = 1.8 TeV collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). A peak in the dijet invariant mass distribution is obtained that is consistent with W decay and inconsistent with the background prediction by 3.3 standard deviations. From this peak we measure the W mass to be 77.2 +- 4.6 (stat+syst) GeV/c^2. This result demonstrates the presence of two W bosons in t-tbar candidates in the W (-> l nu) + >= 4 jet channel.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PR