Islands: Nature and Culture

Islands are contradictory places: they can be remote, mysterious spots, or lively centres of holiday revelry. They are associated alternately with escape, imprisonment, holiday and exile, and their exotic, otherworldly beauty has inspired artists and writers across the centuries. Islands have been sites of immense political, creative and scientific importance from Charles Darwin's enlightening voyage to the Gálapagos Islands, which resulted in his groundbreaking theory of evolution, to the moat-encased prisons incarcerating the world's most dangerous convicts.
Despite the common view of islands as earthly paradises, their often small size means they have restricted resources and limited opportunities for their inhabitants to thrive. In response, islanders have welcomed or sternly rejected, the fresh opportunities offered by turning their homes into tourist destinations. For people seeking beautiful landscapes, solitude or exciting adventure, islands are the most popular holiday spots in the world. They entice the rich and famous, and their allure has provided refuge and inspiration for artists and writers, from Paul Gauguin in Tahiti to George Orwell on Jura in the Hebrides, and general visitors alike.
Filled with illustrations, Islands is a comprehensive exploration of the geographical and cultural aspects of island life – their habitations and environments, their permanent residents and vast transitional populace, their colonial history and their enduring appeal to people around then world.

‘Studies on the fishery and culture prospects of mud crabs (Genus Scylla de Haan) along the Kerala coast

Kerala has been one of the leading maritime states in India for the exploitation and export of mud crabs (Raj, 1992). Many brackishwater systems like the Ashtamudi lake, Vembanad lake, Cochin backwaters and Korapuzha estuary are well known for their rich population of mud crabs. Realizing the imperative need to build up a strong scientific base for proper management and conservation of the resource and also to develop proper technologiesfor seed production and farming of mud crabs, a detailed study was undertaken on the mud crabs of Kerala coast and the results are described in the thesis. The thesis is presented in four chapters

Why Implementing History and Philosophy in School Science Education is a Challenge: An Analysis of Obstacles

Teaching and learning with history and philosophy of science (HPS) has been, and continues to be, supported by science educators. While science education standards documents in many countries also stress the importance of teaching and learning with HPS, the approach still suffers from ineffective implementation in school science teaching. In order to better understand this problem, an analysis of the obstacles of implementing HPS into classrooms was undertaken. The obstacles taken into account were structured in four groups: 1. culture of teaching physics, 2. teachers` skills, epistemological and didactical attitudes and beliefs, 3. institutional framework of science teaching, and 4. textbooks as fundamental didactical support. Implications for more effective implementation of HPS are presented, taking the social nature of educational systems into account.

Mid-Holocene Climate and Culture Change in the South Central Ande

This chapter reviews the history of study and the current status of Mid-Holocene climatic and cultural change in the South Central Andes, which host a wide range of different habitats from Pacific coastal areas up to extremely harsh cold and dry environments of the high mountain plateau, the altiplano or the puna. Paleoenvironmental information reveals high amplitude and rapid changes in effective moisture during the Holocene period and, consequently, dramatically changing environmental conditions. Therefore, this area is suitable to study the response of hunting and gathering societies to environmental changes, because the smallest variations in the climatic conditions have large impacts on resources and the living space of humans. This chapter analyzes environmental and paleoclimatic information from lake sediments, ice cores, pollen profiles, and geomorphic processes and relates these with the cultural and geographic settlement patterns of human occupation in the different habitats in the area of southern Peru, southwest Bolivia, northwest Argentina, and north Chile and puts in perspective of the early and late Holocene to present a representative range of environmental and cultural changes. It has been found that the largest changes took place around 9000 cal yr BP when the humid early Holocene conditions were replaced by extremely arid but highly variable climatic conditions. These resulted in a marked decrease of human occupation, “ecological refuges,” increased mobility, and an orientation toward habitats with relatively stable resources (such as the coast, the puna seca, and “ecological refuges”).

THE FANNED FLAMES OF DISCONTENT: A SOLIDARITY-INSPIRED HISTORY OF THE IDENTITY/IDEOLOGY, CULTURAL HISTORY, AND RHETORICAL STRATEGIES OF THE WOBBLIES DURING THE 1916 MINNESOTA IRON ORE STRIKE

Rooted in critical scholarship this dissertation is an interdisciplinary study, which contends that having a history is a basic human right. Advocating a newly conceived and termed, Solidarity-inspired History framework/practice perspective, the dissertation argues for and then delivers a restorative voice to working-class historical actors during the 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike. Utilizing an interdisciplinary methodological framework the dissertation combines research methods from the Humanities and the Social Sciences to form a working-class history that is a corrective to standardized studies of labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Oftentimes class interests and power relationships determine the dominant perspectives or voices established in history and disregard people and organizations that run counter to, or in the face of, customary or traditional American themes of patriotism, the Protestant work ethic, adherence to capitalist dogma, or United States exceptionalism. This dissertation counteracts these traditional narratives with a unique, perhaps even revolutionary, examination of the 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike. The intention of this dissertation's critical perspective is to poke, prod, and prompt academics, historians, and the general public to rethink, and then think again, about the place of those who have been dislocated from or altogether forgotten, misplaced, or underrepresented in the historical record. Thus, the purpose of the dissertation is to give voice to historical actors in the dismembered past. Historical actors who have run counter to traditional American narratives often have their body of "evidence" disjointed or completely dislocated from the story of our nation. This type of disremembering creates an artificial recollection of our collective past, which de-articulates past struggles from contemporary groups seeking solidarity and social justice in the present. Class-conscious actors, immigrants, women, the GLBTQ community, and people of color have the right to be remembered on their own terms using primary sources and resources they produced. Therefore, similar to the Wobblies industrial union and its rank-and-file, this dissertation seeks to fan the flames of discontented historical memory by offering a working-class perspective of the 1916 Strike that seeks to interpret the actions, events, people, and places of the strike anew, thus restoring the voices of these marginalized historical actors.

Crania aegyptiaca; or, Observations on Egyptian ethnography, derived from anatomy, history and the monuments.

Microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich., University Microfilms [n.d.] (American culture series, Reel 231.3)

Folk-medicine : a chapter in the history of culture /

Includes index.

Wishing for political dominance: Representations of history and community in 'Queer Theory'

Suggests that one's sense of one's self and one's sexuality may also have a close relationship to non-fiction texts about gay and lesbian cultures. Reliance of people's sense of being gay on literary representations; Popularity and authority of the book "Queer Theory," by Annamarie Jagose; Disagreements that characterize lesbian and gay historiography in Australia.

A sociocultural analysis of language learning: New forms of literacy practices in a language and culture awareness programme

This paper reports on a sociocultural study conducted in a Catholic primary school in the Australian outback and provides insights into how policy related to Languages Other Than English (LOTE) programmes is implemented in a specific location and interwoven within the literacy practices of children, parents and teachers. A case study that tracked a Year Four student's learning and development during a Language and Culture Awareness Programme is discussed within a discourse of cultural and linguistic practices. Significant aspects of the student's learning related to a phenomenon called multi-tiered scaffolding temporarily disrupted the established literacy practices in the school community. Implications of the research for second-language teaching and learning in Australian primary schools are elaborated.

Beauty and the market: Actress postcards and their senders in early twentieth century Australia

A hundred years ago the international craze for picture postcards distributed millions of images of popular stage actresses around the world. The cards were bought, sent, and collected by many whose contact with live theatre was sometimes minimal. Veronica Kelly's study of some of these cards sent in Australia indicates the increasing reach of theatrical images and celebrity brought about by the distribution mechanisms of industrial mass modernity. The specific social purposes and contexts of the senders are revealed by cross-reading the images themselves with the private messages on the backs, suggesting that, once outside the industrial framing of theatre or the dramatic one of specific roles, the actress operated as a multiply signifying icon within mass culture – with the desires and consumer power of women major factors in the consumption of the glamour actress card. A study of the typical visual rhetoric of these postcards indicates the authorized modes of femininity being constructed by the major postcard publishers whose products were distributed to theatre fans and non-theatregoers alike through the post. Veronica Kelly is working on a project dealing with commercial managements and stars in early twentieth-century Australian theatre. She teaches in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, is co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies, and author of databases and articles dealing with colonial and contemporary Australian theatre history and dramatic criticism. Her books include The Theatre of Louis Nowra (1998) and the collection Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (1998).