The Irish question and the concept ‘identity’ in the 1980s1

ABSTRACT. This article critically investigates the social construction of ‘identity talk’ in relation to the Irish Question in the 1980s. Our contention is that the utilisation of ‘identity’ imagined people as bounded groups in a particular way – as the two traditions or communities in Northern Ireland – and that this way of imagining people was deployed against ‘will’‐based conceptions of politics. The first part of the article places the emergence of ‘identity’ as a concept in its historical context and suggests four phases in the use of ‘identity’. The second part focuses on ‘identity’ as a concept and locates its emergence within the meta‐conflict regarding Northern Ireland. The article concludes by reflecting on Brubaker and Cooper's (2000) analysis of ‘identity’ as a category of analysis in light of our case study of ‘identity’ as a category of practice regarding the Irish Question.     

The Indian State in a Liberalizing Landscape

There has been much discussion recently on the ‘great Indian land grab’, that is, the acquisition of productive land by the government, and the handing over of this land to large‐scale industry. What do these ongoing land transfers tell us about the nature of the state? This article builds a picture of the state in a liberalizing landscape based on empirical evidence. It outlines the role of the state in Kutch during a transfer of 30 km² of forest and coastal land to a cement manufacturing and exporting operation ‘Karkhana Ltd.’ (pseudonym). Karkhana's experience does not evince a state in withdrawal. Nor do we witness a regulatory state that watches a changing economy from the legal and coercive sidelines. Instead, the case study is able to reinforce heterodox perspectives that place the state at the centre of India's new economy as a close ally of big capital. Taking these views forward, the author suggests that the state's role in this alliance is that of a normative legitimator of liberalization, a buffer in the contentious politics of land, and an institutional promoter of and manoeuvrer through the new land regime. A multifaceted state is indispensable to India's liberalizing landscape.     

Deliberative democracy and the Tasmanian forest peace process

Decades of contention regarding Tasmania's forests have been accompanied by several attempts for peace. Most recently the ‘forest peace process’ culminated in the 2012 Tasmanian Forest Agreement (TFA). We evaluate the peace process that led to the TFA, and its subsequent dismantling, from the perspective of deliberative democracy, which promises to achieve democratically legitimate outcomes in the toughest conflicts. Using normative criteria to evaluate the deliberative democratic quality of the process, our analysis shows that trades-offs were needed, and not all normative criteria could be achieved equally and simultaneously. Despite its shortcomings, and short-lived life, the peace process illustrates the possibility of achieving meta-consensus in deep value conflicts, and the crucial role of this consensus for sustaining deliberation.     

'Homo Sacer' out of left field: communist "slime" as bare life in 1930s and Second World War Sweden

This article maps ways in which radical left‐wing politics in 1930s and Second World War Sweden were conceived in medico‐biological and eugenic terms that expressed strong dehumanizing sentiments. The article engages Agamben's and Foucault's thinking on ‘biopolitics’ and ‘biopower’, and extensively exemplifies dehumanizing discourse as deployed by leading Social Democratic politicians, leading figures of government within the police and military, as well as by editors of both right‐wing and Social Democratic press. Ways in which individuals labelled ‘Communists’ were spatially managed in terms of extensive surveillance, registration, detainment planning and forms of incarceration are addressed. I further discuss state measures that may be seen as elements of a state of exception, some measures implemented against ‘Communists’, and others against individuals deemed to have undesirable characteristics seen to be hereditary. In employing Agamben's notion of ‘inoperosity’ in a discussion of a state paradigm of social productivity, eugenic measures in the building of the Swedish welfare state are then related to the dehumanizing framing of ‘Communists’. In conclusion, conditions for regaining a place in the body politic are briefly addressed. The article's focus on ways in which the ethnic and racial same was dehumanized within a democracy on political grounds results from a conscious effort to complement studies of dehumanization as related to colonialism, dictatorial regimes as well as identity politics.     

Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Eighteenth‐century England is, for many scholars, the time and place where modern domesticity was invented; the point at which ‘home’ became a key concept sustained by new literary imaginings and new social practices. But as gendered individuals, and certainly compared to women, men are notable for their absence in accounts of the eighteenth‐century domestic interior. In this essay, I examine the relationship between constructs of masculinity and meanings of home. During the eighteenth century, ‘home’ came to mean more than one's dwelling; it became a multi‐faceted state of being, encompassing the emotional, physical, moral and spatial. Masculinity intersected with domesticity at all levels and stages in its development. The nature of men's engagements with home were understood through a model of ‘oeconomy’, which brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's activities. Indeed, this essay proposes that attention to how this multi‐faceted eighteenth‐century ‘home’ was made in relation to masculinity shifts our understanding of home as a private and feminine space opposed to an ‘outside’ and public world.     

How Does Theology Go Public? Rethinking the Debate between David Tracy and George Lindbeck

Abstract

The possibilities for taking theological ethics ‘public’ have taken on added significance amidst debates over the nature of moral norms. If realist theological ethics can find a public voice, it will enhance the prospects for interreligious ethical collaboration and the place of theology in it. A key question remains whether particular contexts of religious symbols render them meaningful only within communities of ‘origin’, or particularity actually enables broadly compelling meaning or a public voice for theology. At issue in the Tracy-Lindbeck debate are their understandings of ‘public’, their responses to philosophical anti-foundationalism, and their theological presuppositions. While postliberal emphases on the distinctiveness of the Christian community and attention to the ecclesial community complement Tracy's emphases on dialogue and coherence, Tracy's recent methods provide more adequate responses to the challenges posed by postmodernism.     

An Exceptional Response? Security,Development and Civil Society in Spanish Policy after 11‐M

This article considers the ways in which Spanish state institutions responded to the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004 in the context of the global ‘War on Terror’. It examines three inter‐related arenas of Spanish policy after 9/11 in which security and civil society are invoked in ways that impact upon the country's development agenda toward its southern Mediterranean partners. The first relates to Spain's external relations with its North African neighbours, and in particular the place of migration in shaping these relations over the last decade. The second concerns Spain's political relations with the representative organizations of its own Muslim populations. A third area of analysis pertains to the juridical‐institutional reactions of the state to the 11 March attacks: how have public authorities and civil society been affected and refashioned in the face of jihadist terrorism on the peninsula? The author argues that in each of these domains, the post‐9/11 context generally, and the 11 March attacks in particular, have elicited a securitization of civil society, which has in turn been associated with the country's international relations and domestic politics. Such securitization, however, has only been partially successful, thus vindicating the continuation of ‘politics as usual’ among Spain's state officials and its civil society.     

Machiavelli against Method: Paul Feyerabend's Anti-Rationalism and Machiavellian Political ‘Science’

Contemporary scholars seeking to advance the study of political phenomena identify their inquiry as a ‘science' that attains success through rigorous method. Thus the ‘methodological anarchism' of Paul Feyerabend's philosophy of science might seem an inauspicious place to find a fruitful disciplinary vision. Nonetheless, it echoes a longstanding conception of the ‘science' of politics articulated by Niccolò Machiavelli. Looking to Feyerabend, we propose to surmount the impasse between Machiavelli's account of politics and the demands of modern science and recover his contribution to the scientific study of politics. In doing so, Machiavelli illustrates the potential of a Feyerabendian political science.     

Josephus' description of the Essenes illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls

The essay analyses the notion of ‘purity’ in the early writings of Walter Benjamin, focusing more specifically on three essays written around the crucial year 1921: ‘Critique of Violence’, ‘The Task of the Translator’, and ‘Goethe's Elective Affinities’. In these essays, ‘purity’ appears in the notions of ‘pure means’, ‘pure violence’, ‘pure language’, and, indirectly, the ‘expressionless’. The essay argues, on the one hand, that the ‘purity’ of these concepts is one and the same notion, and, on the other, that it is strongly indebted to, if not a by-product of, Kant's theorisation of the moral act. In order to make this claim, the essay analyses Benjamin's intense engagement with Kant's writings in the 1910s and early 1920s: ‘purity’ is a category strongly connoted within the philosophical tradition in which the young Benjamin moved his first steps, namely Kantian transcendental criticism. The essay argues that the notion of ‘purity’ in Benjamin, though deployed outside and often against Kant's theorisation and that of his followers, and moreover influenced by different and diverse philosophical suggestions, retains a strong Kantian tone, especially in reference to its moral and ethical aspects. Whereas Benjamin rejects Kant's model of cognition based on the ‘purity’ of the universal laws of reason, and thus also Kant's theorisation of purity as simply non empirical and a priori, he models nonetheless his politics and aesthetics around suggestions that arise directly from Kant's theorisation of the moral act and of the sublime, and uses a very Kantian vocabulary of negative determinations construed with the privatives-los and -frei (motiv-frei, zweck-los, gewalt-los, ausdrucks-los, intention-frei, etc). The essay explores thus the connections that link ‘pure means’, ‘pure language’ and ‘pure violence’ to one another and to the Kantian tradition.     

Unpacking the ‘Joint’ in Joint Forest Management

This article examines the concept of ‘jointness’ in India’s Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme, understood as an engagement between the state (in this case the Forest Department) and people organized into ‘communities’, with NGOs, where available, acting as the interface. By examining the commonalities between older examples of joint or co‐management of resources and current practices of joint forest management, the article challenges the notion that ‘jointness’ is a new feature of forest policy, or that it represents a resurgence of civil society against the state. Further, insofar as the basic agenda of the programme is pre‐determined, it cannot be considered very participatory in nature. None the less, within the limited degree of choice that JFM allows, there is a new and joint construction of needs.     

‘Hustlers vs dynasties’: Confronting patrimonial capitalism in Kenya's 2022 elections

During Kenya's 2022 presidential race, William Samoei Ruto, the country's ex-Deputy President, successfully leveraged his ‘Hustler Nation’ campaign to clinch victory. This campaign played on the struggles of the informal economy labourers, pledging a ‘hustler’ government dedicated to their cause. However, Ruto's campaign also utilized rhetoric against the deeply rooted ‘dynasties’ of Kenya's patrimonial capitalism, exploiting widespread dissatisfaction with the political and economic dominance of the Kenyatta family, including the incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta. Throughout the campaign, voters debated the acceptable extent of wealth held by the country's affluent families and the potential of such wealth to manipulate democratic politics. This concise article unpacks the moral undertones of Kenyan disillusionment with Kenyatta supremacy, calling for reinvigorated anthropological scrutiny of the confrontations against modern patrimonial capital and the emerging resistances framed in the discourse of economic justice.     

North Africa's Spain: peripheral national identities and the nation‐state as neo‐empire

When ethno‐cultural heterogeneity exists and thrives within a nation‐state, social tension and ethno‐nationalist sentiments are not considered surprising. Yet in many nation‐states, various native‐born communities have diverse and potentially contradictory national identities without the desire for self‐determination. In this paper, I explore the circumstances in which ethno‐culturally distinct, peripheral communities may develop variants of the dominant national identity – ensuring that they remain excluded from the national narrative – yet remain part of the nation‐state. To do so, I conduct a comparative analysis of the native‐born Muslim communities in Spain's two North African exclaves. I find that most Muslims are Spanish citizens yet understandings of ‘Spanish‐ness’ appear to vary between the exclaves. I use these findings to propose further steps for refining current conceptualisations of the nation‐state, in an effort to better understand cases in which variations in the dominant national identity exist, but without ethno‐nationalist sentiments.     

‘Working for’ and ‘Working’ among Western Arrernte in Central Australia1

This article discusses some conflicts between kin‐ and market‐based society as they are reflected in the lives of Western Arrernte in and around Ntaria (Hermannsburg). Both political economy and cultural analysis provide accounts of concomitant ‘problems about work’ and training initiatives in remote communities. Neither brings together, however, the issues of economic marginalisation and a history of cultural difference with its own transformations. This discussion takes its departure from the Arrernte's attempts to reconcile kinship service (‘working for’) and paid employment (‘working’) in everyday practice. It demonstrates that this attempt is part of broader change concerning the ways in which hunter‐gatherer people in Australia have been compelled to adapt to a world of cash and commodities, and waged employment. In this discussion, the focus is on remote indigenous Australians today.     

Going for Wombat — Transformations in Wirangu and the Scotdesco Community on the Far West Coast of South Australia

ABSTRACT Becoming an object of touristic interest is only one of a series of ways that Aboriginality is being transformed in contemporary Australia, as the space opens up for individuals and groups to reposition themselves as Aborigines within the nation, with a distinctive culture in various forms. The nation's appetite for Aboriginal ‘culture’, within desirable limits (Povinelli 2002) and energised by a sentimental politics (Cowlishaw 2010), continues to grow. There is, however, a destructive flip side to the politics of difference being played out within Aboriginal societies. This is evidenced by the many battles for access to or control of ‘cultural’ resources for their commercial benefits or collective survival value. In many places communities or groups are faced with the terrible choice of distinction or extinction (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009). That is, they must find, and make alienable, something distinctive about themselves or face collective extinction. How one Aboriginal community is responding to these threats and challenges is the subject of this paper. This paper also adds to the growing literature on ethno‐commercialisation by focusing on the central role of language in these processes.     

Neither ‘America’ nor ‘Québec’: constructing the Canadian multicultural nation

ABSTRACT. Although researchers have deconstructed the myth of stark social differences between the various North American sub‐societies, an assimilating American melting pot and an ethnically oppressive monocultural Québec are still popular representations within Canadian majority discourses, such as the English‐language mainstream media and parts of academia. In this paper, I argue that images of ‘America’ and ‘Québec’ play important roles for the multicultural reconstruction of Canadian nationhood. Examining selected op‐ed articles from two Toronto‐based mainstream newspapers during the 1990s, I develop and exemplify a theoretical understanding of how national identities are constituted and transformed within inter‐ and intra‐national relations of power and alterity. I pay special attention to the particularisation of Canada through the confrontation with American nationhood, the ambiguities of recognising the distinctiveness of Québec inside Canada, and the consequences of projecting Québec's supposedly ‘ethnic’ nationalism outside the boundaries of Canadianness.     

Romantic Scotland,tragic England,ambiguous Britain: constructions of ‘the Empire’ in post‐devolution national accounting

ABSTRACT. This article compares the ways in which references to ‘the (British) Empire’ were constructed and used in interview accounts of national identity and domestic politics in Scotland and in England. In Scotland, spontaneous accounts of Empire were typically formulated in conjunction with nationalist moral meta‐narratives. Respondents variously inferred heroic national character from Scotland's role in Empire, or cast Scottish history as an enduring struggle between progressive forces of nationalism and atavistic forces of Anglo‐British colonialism. The construct of Britishness was often seen to derive from, and to be synonymous with, the history of Empire. In England, the Empire story tended to be framed within anti‐nationalist meta‐narratives. Imperialism was generally understood to represent a product of excessive nationalism, and tales of Empire were used to draw exemplary moral lessons concerning the deficiencies of Anglo‐British national character and of the catastrophic consequences of the pursuit of national self‐interest more generally. The existence of Britain, and the construct of Britishness, were generally understood to both predate and postdate the history of Empire.     

'Help! The Poles are coming': Narrating a contemporary moral panic

In the years and months prior to the May 2004 enlargement of the European Union, transitional periods of two to possibly seven years were imposed upon free movement of labour for immigrant workers from new (Eastern European) member states by a majority of ‘old’ member states. This article aims to scrutinize fear of mass migration from new member states by examining where (ir)rationality and political opportunism meet in the perception of this particular flow of labour migration as a cause for contemporary moral panic. To this purpose, the article starts with embedding the notion of fear of mass migration in literature on moral panics, risk society and the ‘othering’ of economic migrants as strangers and folk devils. By means of a case study narrative of the decision‐making process on the free movement issue in the Netherlands, it is subsequently demonstrated that ‘politics of fear’ are deeply rooted in the uncontrollability of mobilities of an unknown magnitude and an uncertain impact on, for instance, domestic labour markets. Beyond rationalizable concerns of job loss, however, labour migrants from new member states are also feared as threats to borders of morality and identity in Western European societies. The narrative's results are placed within a wider context of current boundary drawings with regard to migration in the enlarging European Union.     

The politics of ‘forgetting’ as poetics of belonging: between Greek self‐narration and reappraisal (Michaniona, 2000/3)

ABSTRACT. The repressive mechanisms of collective memory have received due attention in the social sciences, with scholars examining the ethics of remembering and forgetting and their political implications. This study focuses on episodes that took place in a Northern Greek town in 2000 and 2003, when an Albanian student was twice denied the right to hold the Greek flag during a commemorative national parade. It is argued that this line of action against the student, representative of Greek attitudes towards immigrants in Greece, asserted the locality's participation in the Greek ‘imagined community’. This was made possible through a process of ‘forgetting’ the locality's history and the analogies this presents with the experience of contemporary immigration. Questioning the ethical implications of this collective decision, the article links regional micro‐politics to nationalist discourses that originate in the European project itself.     

The Politics of Disciplining Water Rights

This article examines how the legal systems of Andean countries have dealt with the region's huge plurality of local water rights, and how official policies to ‘recognize’ local rights and identities harbour increasingly subtle politics of codification, confinement and disciplining. The autonomy and diversity of local water rights are a major hindrance for water companies, elites and formal rule‐enforcers, since State and market institutions require a predictable, uniform playing field. Complex local rights orders are seen as irrational, ill‐defined and disordered. Officialdom cannot simply ignore or oppress the ‘unruliness and disobedience’ of local rights systems: rather it ‘incorporates’ local normative orders that have the capacity to adequately respond to context‐based needs. This article examines a number of evolving, overlapping legal domination strategies, such as the ‘marrying’ of local and official legal systems in ways that do not challenge the legal and power hierarchy; and reviews the ways in which official regulation and legal strategies deny or take into consideration local water rights repertoires, and the politics of recognition that these entail. Post‐colonial recognition policies are not simply responses to demands by subjugated groups for greater autonomy. Rather, they facilitate the water bureaucracy's political control and help neoliberal sectors to incorporate local water users’ rights and organizations into the market system — even though many communities refuse to accept these policies of recognition and politics of containment.