Front and Back Covers, Volume 29, Number 1. February 2013

Front and back cover caption, volume 29 issue 1 Front cover Desert Melon (2012) by Christian Thompson. Courtesy of the artist, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, and Michael Reid Gallery, Berlin. ‘Over the course of 2011–12, the acclaimed Australian Aboriginal artist Christian Thompson made several research visits to view historic photographs of Aboriginal people at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. The experience of working with this collection has been an emotional and yet productive one for Thompson and a very welcome innovative collaboration from the museum's perspective. Although not explicitly quoted in the work made as a result of this engagement, both the experience of looking at the historical images, the modes of representation they carry, and the painful histories they hold, can be understood as lying at the heart of the work. Rather than directly invoking or re‐presenting historic imagery, Thompson has chosen to take the history of photographic representation of Aboriginal people as a starting point for the spiritual repatriation of the archive through the redemptive process of self‐portraiture. Importantly, this process has not involved drawing on those historical markers of entity which are so prevalent in ethnographic imagery, but rather his own fluid and evolving transcultural identity, as well as biographical markers of another recent identity, that of an Oxford student in formal dress. Although archival imagery is a key inspiration in Thompson's work generally, he is also inspired by contemporary fashion, film, and music. It is this playful mixing of genres and reference points that not only makes Thompson's approach distinctive, it also resonates historically with the blending of scientific and popular genres in the archival imagery with which he has engaged.” From the catalogue essay ‘Spiritual repatriation and the archive’ in Christian Thompson's We bury our own by Christopher Morton (Curator of Photograph and Manuscript Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum) published to accompany the exhibition held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 2012. Christian Thompson will be contributing to ‘The Future of Ethnographic Museums’ conference in Oxford in July 2013 with a performance piece inspired by the Australian Aboriginal collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Back cover GUN CONTROL Men browsing handguns on display at a gun show in the US. The recent mass shooting, in which six members of staff and 20 six‐year olds were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, has put gun control back on the US political agenda. However, the National Rifle Association (NRA) insists any restriction on gun ownership equates to a loss of liberties supposedly guaranteed by the second amendment to the US constitution at a time when only single‐shot guns were available. Debate surrounding this issue has now taken an ominous turn, with death threats against journalists who made the identities and addresses of gun owners already in the public domain more easily navigable. In a reading of history that resembles Hollywood, the NRA compares Obama to Hitler. However, it uses intimidation and propaganda to stifle rational debate on this issue, which is very much in the public interest. Furthermore, along with the gun industry, it benefits financially from increased gun sales which disproportionately affect the poor and the black. This issue's guest editorial asks what anthropology has to say about the issue of gun control. This is followed by a statement from the American Anthropological Association calling for research on the relationship between gun use and public health. Public funding for such research in the US has been blocked until now by powerful lobbyists.