Showing papers in "Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation in 2014"

Abstract: Based upon fieldwork in Italy and the USA, the authors present work-in-progress insights into solidarity economies, and in particular alternative food networks, as a form of active citizenship that could re-orient the current debate on responsible innovation.

Abstract: Access to clean water and adequate sanitation has been a challenging issue in Kpakungu. Due to the unavailability of clean water sources and poor sanitation most of the inhabitants of Kpakungu are threaten with the spread of diseases such as diarrhoea and cholera and this has led to the degenerating situation of Kpakungu. Assessing the problems of water supply and sanitation in Kpakungu area of Minna, Niger State using GIS (Geographic Information System) is aimed at providing access to adequate portable water supply and a better sanitation through the use of research and advocacy. This is achieved by identifying the pattern of access to public water supply and sanitation in Kpakungu and the creation of a database of the existing water source and their yield was determined to enhance planning. This research involved the use of both primary and secondary data to achieve a thorough assessment of the problems of poor water supply and sanitation in the study area. It was discovered that the problems of poor water supply and sanitation often leave most women and children on queues for several hours and those that cannot endure are forced to travel long miles in search for alternative source of water, which may not be fit for drinking. In the light of this, mothers are prevented from domestic work and most children are kept away from school. At the end of the research water and sanitation blue print for the study area was designed and a proposal was sent to relevant government agencies and ministries for the provision of more sources of potable water in the community. In this regard, Public Private Dialogue (PPD) was initiated and adequate follow up process was made until the aim of the research was achieved.

Abstract: The architecture in a supermodern city has no sense of the place where it is located. This paper discusses how schizophrenia and distraction, through walking, respond to supermodernity by referring to how three dislocated subjects, Fumiya Takemura, Aiichiro Fukuhara and Fai in Tokyo and Hong Kong, are respectively depicted in the novel, Adrift in Tokyo written by Fujita Yoshinaga in 1999, with a film adaptation by Satoshi Miki (2007), and the film To Live and Die in Mongkok directed by Wong Jing in 2009. It suggests that Hong Kong is more supermodern than Tokyo. After his release from prison, Fai in To Live and Die in Mongkok finds that Mongkok is a completely different place from the one in which he used to live. The living conditions are no better than those in the prison. He hallucinates about the past. Adrift in Tokyo can be read as a story about walking. Fukuhara, a debt collector, killed his wife; before surrendering to the police, he orders his debtor, Takemura, to walk with him in Tokyo in order to re-experience the walks he enjoyed with his wife. If Takemura agrees, the debt can be paid off. This paper discusses how the repressed heterogeneous time and place can be approached by walking in a way that the rhythm of life can be (re-)experienced; in other words, when the body moves forward physically, the past appears as specter haunting the walker. This paper discusses how Adrift in Tokyo and To Live and Die in Mongkok read cities in distractive and schizophrenic ways. In the film version of Adrift in Tokyo, Takemura’s failed relationship with his father may unconsciously drive him to walk with Fukuhara. The novel may imply that the lost relationship with his mother drives him to walk. The film and the novel both address a kind of locality which should be inseparable from the birth parents. To Live and Die in Mongkok suggests that supermodernity kills mother and father. The Father-son relationship disappears at the very beginning of the film; the mother-son relationship has been segregated by prison (Fai’s mother, who has been “imprisoned” in Mongkok, a supermodern “prison”, is disconnected from her son who is imprisoned in Stanley, a real prison) and, in the end, by life and death. To Fai, walking is not possible, and, hence, a father-son relationship cannot be “cosplayed”, as Takemura and Fukuhara do. They can “play” as father and son in the ordinary Tokyo. A supermodern Mongkok suggests that an unwalkable city is a prison, a brothel and a madhouse; Adrift in Tokyo suggests that a walkable city is a cosplay arena for wandering, for approaching a lost relationship nurtured in locality since birth.

Abstract: The article explores different cultural perceptions of food in relation to the environment. ‘Farmers’ and ‘ecologists’ are often actors of contrasting ecologics: antithetic visions of the environment, as rural landscape or wilderness, define the right or ban of people to get access to the natural resources as commons in order to produce livelihood. Taking the Chipko andolan, movement that hugs (for the strategy of hugging trees in order to prevent them from being cut), as focus for my anthropological analysis, I consider the process of cultural transformation of the peasant protest, born in the Indian Himalayas in the 70’s, into an ecologists myth for urban and western audience. The achieved visibility of Chipko on a global stage has become a translation of the people’s requests for the decentralization of forest management into a conservationist claim to protect trees. Beginning with my fieldwork in Tehri Garhwal (Uttarakhand), I have tried to bring the Chipko back to the Himalayan taskscape (Ingold T. 1992) to the everyday relations of the farmers with an environment which not easy to tame. On the other hand, I analysed the rhetorical strategies used by some Chipko’s spokesmen and that has allowed the appropriation of the movement by the ecologist imaginary. The ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are at the very heart of what the movement has become; a continuous interaction between the two that has shaped the actuality of Himalayan landscape.