Authentic housing, authentic culture?: transforming a village into a 'tourist site' in Manggarai, eastern Indonesia

Since the publication of MacCannell’s The tourist (1976), the issue of ‘authenticity’ has been at the centre of tourism studies. Whilst early analysts broadly agreed with MacCannell’s thesis that tourism, by turning culture into a commodity, replaced real with ‘staged’ authenticity (ibid, 91-107), more recent work has shown ‘an increased awareness of the social construction and invention of both tradition and authenticity’ (Wood, 1992: 57). That is, authenticity is increasingly seen as a socially constructed concept, with criteria for judgement of ‘the authentic’ varying greatly between different actors. In addition, analysts are moving away from rather naive considerations of the ‘impact’ of tourism on pristine, pre-tourist culture, to an appreciation that not only does tourism create a ‘space for discussion’ of tradition (see both Adams and Picard, this issue), but that its ‘impact’ is always bound up with local cultural politics (Wood, 1992: 67-8). In this paper, I describe an Indonesian tourism project – the ‘discovery’ of an apparently ‘untouched’ village and its remodelling into a ‘tourist site’ – in which issues of ‘authenticity’ played a central part. As I shall show, both concepts of authenticity and perceptions of what objects, practices or other aspects of culture should be the focus of talk about authenticity varied between state officials, ambitious young men, ritual elders and other villagers. Not only does the project I describe have implications for pan-Indonesian discourses on ‘culture’ and ‘ethnicity’, it also raises issues concerning the ways in which local people distinguish between different kinds of visitors, and how ‘tourism’ can have a profound impact on local perceptions of place and identity, even in the absence of large numbers of visitors

Health Inequalities and People with Learning Disabilities in the UK

This briefing paper will assist Primary, Acute and Specialist NHS Trusts in fulfilling their responsibilities. In this report we summarise the most recent evidence from the UK on the health status of people with learning disabilities and the determinants of the health inequalities they face. Later in the autumn, IHaL will be producing a briefing for GP Commissioning Consortia and PCTs on practical commissioning actions to help address the issues identified in this report

Distributed data fusion algorithms for inertial network systems

New approaches to the development of data fusion algorithms for inertial network systems are described. The aim of this development is to increase the accuracy of estimates of inertial state vectors in all the network nodes, including the navigation states, and also to improve the fault tolerance of inertial network systems. An analysis of distributed inertial sensing models is presented and new distributed data fusion algorithms are developed for inertial network systems. The distributed data fusion algorithm comprises two steps: inertial measurement fusion and state fusion. The inertial measurement fusion allows each node to assimilate all the inertial measurements from an inertial network system, which can improve the performance of inertial sensor failure detection and isolation algorithms by providing more information. The state fusion further increases the accuracy and enhances the integrity of the local inertial states and navigation state estimates. The simulation results show that the two-step fusion procedure overcomes the disadvantages of traditional inertial sensor alignment procedures. The slave inertial nodes can be accurately aligned to the master node

Contested statelessness in Sabah, Malaysia: irregularity and the politics of recognition

UNHCR’s current #IBelong campaign presents stateless people as uniquely excluded, emphasising the need for legal solutions to their situation. Such approaches to statelessness sidestep both the complexities of lived experience, and the wider politics of state recognition. In response, this article utilises ethnographic data from Sabah, Malaysia, and theorisations of the grey areas between citizenship and statelessness, to argue for the fundamental connection between statelessness and irregularity. Such a connection is central to understanding both the everyday lives of potentially stateless people, and Sabah’s public discourse on statelessness as a mirage obscuring the problems of ‘illegals’ and ‘street children’

Impossible children: illegality and excluded belonging among children of migrants in Sabah, East Malaysia

This article makes a case for attending to the specificities of child illegality in migrant contexts. This is not simply because children have been left out of previous accounts, but also because their status as minors makes both their citizenship and their illegality different to that of adults. The analysis is based on research with children born to migrants in the state of Sabah, East Malaysia. I argue that such children are configured as Sabah’s impossible children, and that this configuration influences their experiences of illegality and exclusion in distinctive ways. From a young age, children are aware of document ‘checking’ raids and, as ‘foreigners’, are unable to attend Malaysian schools. However, informal documents from learning centres, as well as age and contingent circumstances, may give them a temporary, ‘liminal’ legality. Finally, given that irregular migrants experience both exclusion and inclusion in a host nation, the article describes children’s urban forms of belonging. These forms of inclusion demonstrate children’s engagement with Sabah as a home, as against their political construction as an impossible problem

Руководство по применению внутриматочных контрацептивов

ВНУТРИМАТОЧНЫЕ УСТРОЙСТВАКОНТРАЦЕПТИВНЫЕ СРЕДСТВА ЖЕНСКИ

Connected Women: How Mobile Can Support Women's Economic and Social Empowerment

This report explores how mobile services provided by Vodafone and the Vodafone Foundation are enabling women to seize new opportunities and improve their lives. Accenture Sustainability Services were commissioned to conduct research on the services and to assess their potential social and economic impact if they were widely available across Vodafone's markets by 2020. It showcases the projects and the work of those involved and also poses the question -- what would the benefit to women and to society at large be if projects such as these were taken to scale and achieved an industrialscale of growth? This reflects the Foundation's commitment not solely to the development of pilots but rather the Trustees' ambition to see projects which lead to transformational change. In order to understand this more deeply, the Report looks at the benefits for women and society and providessome financial modelling for how the engagement of commercial players could achieve industrial, sustainable growth in these areas. Accenture has provided the modelling and, given the public benefit and understanding which the report seeks to generate, these are shared openly for all in the mobile industry to understand and share. It is the Trustees' hope that the collaboration with Oxford University and Accenture in the delivery of this Report will stimulate not only the expansion of existing charitable programmes but will also seed other philanthropic, social enterprise or commercial initiatives