When ‘Nature’ first made its appearance in the cultural history of the West, it was an idea set apart from ‘Culture’. It had connotations of female capriciousness that carried on earlier notions of a female nature, but it had a still stronger derogatory and destructive implication, as historians of science know well. Strangely, today, even ‘nature’, let alone ‘mother nature’, is an archaic idea writes ALISON CADDICK
Why was Rupert Murdoch chosen to give the 2008 ABC Boyer Lectures? After all, Murdoch’s Media Empire allows ample opportunity for him to air his views. Even the most wide-eyed liberal would be hard pressed to argue that more Rupert leads to more diversity on the airwaves writes SIMON COOPER
Climate change is usually treated merely as a phenomenon that requires technical change: lifestyle modifications, limited costs and new policies. The question of ‘What is to be done’ is pursued within the terms of the society that we have; not only is large-scale social change off the agenda, the type of society that we have is not brought into the foreground. The question of the social conditions of environmental destruction is hardly ever raised argues JOHN HINKSON
EDITORIAL The possibility of neo-liberalism becoming a basis for a new approach to Indigenous policy has been gaining momentum for some time now, especially through the advocacy of Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson. But advocating the neo-liberal way of life as a basis for an Indigenous future is seriously flawed writes JOHN HINKSON
ESSAY From the ‘War on Terror’ to Malaya and Pakistan the language of ‘emergency’ has been used to suspend legal principles. Closer to home, legislation enacted in August 2007 has profoundly changed the treatment of large numbers of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory in Australia argues DESMOND MANDERSON
ESSAY Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory refuses to recognize any kind of qualitative difference in kind between, for example, face-to-face communication and extended forms of virtual communication, or that there is no ontological distinction that might be found in the difference between gift and commodity exchange argues SIMON COOPER
