The destruction of heritage: rock art in the Burrup Peninsula

The destruction of rock art in the Burrup Peninsula, performed by several mammoth industries strategically located in the Peninsula since the 1960s, allows me to analyse the concept of heritage within a global history of art and find meaning in the difficult task of interpreting rock art. The Burrup Peninsula not only hosts the largest rock art site in the world, but also one of the largest deposits of natural gas, iron ore and salt. As a consequence, the land (sacred to the Indigenous people), becomes extremely important in order to sustain the booming economy of Australia. In this difficult negotiation between heritage and progress the rock art is embedded with new meanings and the heritage becomes ephemeral. Failing to include the site in the World Heritage Site list created by UNESCO, the roles of identity and memory are contested by the two groups represented on each side of the debate: on one hand, the Aboriginal Traditional owners and the archaeologists; on the other, the Australian government and the cultural establishment that denies the rock art an aesthetic significance by considering it “primitive” and “archaic”. The debate becomes even more pertinent after realizing that the Australian government has flagged other buildings and natural parks as World Heritage Sites, while the rock art in the Burrup Peninsula is catalogued as national, but not World, Heritage. As a result, the concept of heritage can be defined on several levels: local, regional, national and international.

Mol, science, religion and narrative identity

Significantly influencing the sociological study of religion, Hans Mol developed ideas of identity which remain thought-provoking for analyses of how religion operates within contemporary societies. Sacred Selves, Sacred Settings brings current social-religious topics into sharp focus: international scholars analyse, challenge, and apply Mol’s theoretical assertions. This book introduces the unique story of Hans Mol, who survived Nazi imprisonment and proceeded to brush shoulders with formidable intellectuals of the twentieth century, such as Robert Merton, Talcott Parsons, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Offering a fresh perspective on popular subjects such as secularization, pluralism, and the place of religion in the public sphere, this book sets case studies within an intellectual biography which describes Mol’s key influences and reveals the continuing import of Hans Mol’s work applied to recent data and within a contemporary context.

Bali Aga cultural landscape challenges: conserving the Balinese traditional landscape for future Balinese indigenous villages (Bali Aga) and communities

The research investigated Balinese harmony to landscape in Indigenous villages (Bali Aga) and communities through case study, on-site evaluation, observation, and interviews. The research concluded three points: influences of Majapahit Era; traditional regulation roles; and obligated to maintain and conserve of sacred, middle and impure areas in cultural landscape practices.

The ghosts of ravished Armenias: pastiches of genocide

Ravished Armenia – an eight-reel, eighty-five-minute, silent dramatized film based on actual events – first screened in New York City in 1919. It was primarily for the purposes of fundraising. Aurora Mardiganian was a survivor of the Genocide and played the lead role in this film. However, the entire full-length feature film was thought lost until recently, when a twenty- minute segment of the film was found in Armenia. Following the separate discovery in Yerevan in 1994, the twenty-minute segment was incorporated into two new films (although both used the same footage). Even though both films are distinct in their notions of filmic representation, memory and the sacred memorialization of the Genocide, it is no oversight that one rendering is titled Ravished Armenia in order to pay homage to the original film and the Genocide. The second rendering, titled Credo, aims to separate itself from the initial film.

Points of equilibrium: religious beliefs and economic development policy

Eighty per cent of the world's population professes religious belief. Such beliefs provide precepts on how individuals should conduct their private lives and (often) how society should be organized. Given there are 2.1 billion Christians worldwide and 1.3 billion Muslims, understanding the religious approach to social life based on sacred texts and social teachings of Christianity and Islam has a strong relevance to those interested in implementing international economic development policies. This paper argues that religion can thus play a positive role in development and specifically support development economic policies at the international level. The purpose of this paper is not to present a fully formed development economic policy, but rather to identify teachings of the world's two largest religions – such as preferencing the poor, minimizing inequality and having the economy serve wider realms of society – that directly speak to how sustainable economic development is understood within these faith traditions and how these teachings could scaffold and support and international policy frameworks aimed to achieve sustainable economic development. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Reading and performing abjection: Staging Joyce, A professional reflection

As one who has mounted theatrical Bloomsdays since 1994,' I well understand that the issue of Joyces radicalism on the subject of the body is a recurring crux for dramaturg, director and actors, not so much on moral grounds, as on the grounds of playability and sometimes taste. It is one thing to read with a startled chuckle a febrile passage which transgresses norms, or to enjoy hyperbole in context, but embodied enactment is an entirely different matter, because the limits of what Joyce was prepared to essay in fiction are so extreme, so strangely and transgressively unfamiliar, despite the passing of close to a century since publication. It is the difference between reading in private and reading a staged and necessarily embodied and visual event that is the focus of this article. What performing Joyces bodies has revealed to me is his particular, unsentimental and secular take on bodies as both comic and sublime, even sacred - concepts that are rarely yoked together. Resisting the impulse to sanitise Joyce and censor him takes one into the territory of outrageous, often non-naturalistic, comedy, but also into a paradoxical notion of the body as sacred, and the gendered body as potentially subversive, via the by-ways of theatricality, censorship and taste.