Cover caption(s)
A Greenpeace activist dressed as Justice protests in front of the Japanese embassy in Buenos Aires. She draws attention to the trial of Toru Suzuki and Junichi Sato, two Greenpeace activists seeking to expose corruption in the Japanese whale meat industry, who are being prosecuted in the Japanese courts for theft and trespass, in a trial that has continued since 2008.
Back in 1993, Arne Kalland analyzed the notable success of the Western environmental movement, Greenpeace in particular, in mobilizing public opinion against continued whaling in the northern hemisphere. The key to this success, Kalland argued, lay in the environmentalists’ construction of the ‘superwhale’, an imaginary, mythic creation which displayed numerous positive qualities with which people could closely identify. Environmentalist thinking has now become intertwined with the discourse of animal rights, including the claim that whales are special to the extent that they are entitled to legal rights on a somewhat similar basis to human beings. In this image, the script on the dress, the Japanese emblem of the rising sun, the blindfold and the scales of justice unbalanced by Japanese-caught whale meat all work to signify that the Japanese are entirely out of step with such progressive ideas.
In this issue, Adrian Peace argues that the conflicting attitudes of Japan and Australia to whales and on the practice of whaling stem from diverging cultural and historical factors – the most basic among which is that, whilst Australians construe whales as awesome mammals, the Japanese perceive them as mere fish.
Back cover: Football in Africa
On 11 June 2010, all eyes will turn to Johannesburg, South Africa, for the start of the 19th FIFA World Cup. The month-long tournament is one of the world’s biggest sporting events, and this year will involve 32 teams from all over the world, attracting a worldwide audience of over 3 billion people and involving commercial agreements worth more than US $21 billion. Significantly, this is also the first time the competition has been held on the African continent.
On the eve of the tournament, Richard Vokes reflects on the history and meaning of ‘the beautiful game’ in Africa, on the basis of a case study from southwestern Uganda. Football was introduced to Uganda by early European missionaries, and later gained in popularity as a result of the patronage it received from first colonial, and later post-colonial, state enterprises. However, the game’s current mass appeal is a more recent phenomenon, due in large part to the media reforms introduced in Uganda after 1986, and the advent of satellite broadcasting technology.
Vokes examines the nature of this new fandom, and of the media environments which have generated it. He argues that whilst certain features of the current craze – in particular, its peculiar fascination for specifically English football – can be seen as an outcome of spectatorship, this does not mean that the phenomenon is superficial. On the contrary, the new interest in football in Uganda has frequently produced unexpected, and in some ways quite profound, social effects.
In his editorial Keith Hart uses the occasion of the World Cup to reflect on South Africa’s significance for the world, as both the most developed African nation and the chief victim of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Contents
Keith Hart 1
South Africa, the world and AIDS
Jonathan Marks 3
Science, samples and people
Adrian Peace 5
The whaling war: Conflicting cultural perspectives
Richard Vokes 10
Arsenal in Bugamba: The rise of English Premier League football in Uganda
Keir Martin 16
Robert McNamara and the limits of ‘bean counting’
Jessica Smith and Frederico Helfgott 20
Flexibility or exploitation? Corporate social responsibility and the perils of universalization
Narrative
Hillary Haldane and David Crawford 24
What Lula lacks: Grappling with the discourse of autism at home and in the field
Comment
Samantha Hurn 27
What’s in a name? Anthrozoology, human-animal studies, animal studies or…?
Obituary
Paul Sillitoe 28
Eric Sunderland: 1930-2010
NEWS 29 CALENDAR 30 CLASSIFIED 31
