South–South? Culture Talk and Labour Relations at a Chinese‐owned Factory in Hungary

In 2011, a large Hungarian chemical factory was acquired by a Chinese competitor. The resulting encounter between Chinese managers and Hungarian staff — which took place in the context of a harsh retrenchment that has curtailed the powers of organized labour in Hungary — highlights the inadequacy of dichotomies such as North/South, East/West and socialist/capitalist. As with other corporate acquisitions in Europe, Chinese managers expected to ‘learn’ from ‘advanced Western management practices’; instead, they found what they interpreted as a backward, ‘socialist’ work culture in need of modernization. For their part, Hungarian staff feared the imposition of a culturally inappropriate ‘Asian labour discipline’, but have come to see at least some of the changes as part of a necessary modernization. ‘Asian’, ‘European’, ‘Western’ and ‘socialist’ are floating signifiers used by both Chinese and Hungarian staff at the factory in various, often contradictory ways to justify management choices, staff resistance or individual preferences. As a result of their analysis, the authors suggest that discussions about the impact of Chinese investment on labour practices should recognize a wider range of contexts, including the presence of precarious socioeconomic environments within the so‐called ‘advanced economies’.     

Political utopia or Potemkin village? Italian travellers to the Soviet Union in the early Cold War

Situated on the border between the capitalist West and Communist East, and with the largest Communist party in Western Europe, Italy found itself at the centre of global ideological struggles in the early Cold War years. A number of Italian writers and intellectuals who had joined the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) during the Resistance had hoped that the party would play a central role in the post-war reconstruction of Italy and were attracted to the Soviet Union as an example of Communism in action. This article centres on accounts of journeys to the USSR by Sibilla Aleramo, Renata Viganò and Italo Calvino. It will argue that although their writings portray a largely positive vision of the USSR, they should not be dismissed as naive, or worse, disingenuous travellers whose willingness to embrace Soviet-style Communism was based on a wholescale rejection of Western society and its values (see P. Hollander’s 1998 [1981] work, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society). Rather, the article shows how their accounts of the USSR shed light on the writers’ relationship with the PCI and argues that the views expressed in the travelogues emerge from the writers’ personal experiences of war and resistance, a fervent desire to position themselves as anti-Fascist intellectuals, and their concerns regarding the direction that Italian politics was taking at a pivotal moment in the nation’s history.     

3. DECENTERED IDENTITIES: THE CASE OF THE ROMANTICS

Natalie Zemon Davis's work has decentered the identities of her subjects as part of seeing their complexity. This essay, inspired by Davis's rich thought and scholarship, looks at the ways in which the Romantics in the arts decentered their thought and practices away from the West. Their decentering involved serious study of non‐Western thought and its incorporation into their art, and the regular use of opium to shape their creative works. One borrowed theme was transcendence to a higher mode of existence, often through sexual union with a woman. So influential did Romantic tropes, themes, and images derived from outside the West become that they persisted in Western culture long after the Romantics themselves had lost interest in the body of non‐Western culture from which they drew. Examples include the work of Samuel Coleridge, Walter Scott, Hector Berlioz, the Schlegel brothers, Caroline Günderode, Sidney Owenson, and others.     

Trafficking borders

This article offers an empirically informed conceptualisation of trafficking borders as spaces of restriction and negotiation, contingently produced, encountered, and escaped along the mobility routes of the targets of trafficking discourse. The concept of trafficking borders advances critical literature that considers anti-trafficking measures a vehicle of state-authorised bordering practices by demonstrating social and political spaces where the trafficking discourse coalesces several discourses, institutions, and practices as borders. The article draws on participatory action research conducted in Nepal to demonstrate the presence of borders in spaces such as households, communities, government offices, Indo-Nepal state borders, emigration detention and deportation centres, and airports. These spaces contribute to the critical understanding of locations where anti-trafficking measures curtail the rights, mobility, and choices of prospective migrant workers. Prioritising research participants’ experiences of encounters with trafficking borders, the article underscores that borders are the central experience of migrant workers which they must escape to actualise their labour migration projects. The conceptualisation further attempts to position the emigration regime as an important site of theorisation and activism and demands a thorough consideration of the diverse struggles of the labour migrants before they arrive at their labour relations in the immigration regime.     

Keeping migrants at the margins. Governing through ambiguity and the politics of discretion in the post-2015 EUropean migration and border regime

This article deals with the roles of ambiguity and discretion in the governing of migration and how they contribute to the marginalisation of migrants at the borders of EUrope. Building on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in Sicily, it connects legal-institutional ambiguities of two recent policy interventions in the field of migration governance in Italy – the Security Decree-Law and the Hotspot Approach – to the discretionary practices by public officials tasked with their implementation. By theoretically and empirically tracing the co-constitutive relationship of ambiguity and discretion, the article draws on and contributes to recent inquiries into grey areas of governance, particularly in the field of (critical) border regime studies. Based on two distinct cases, it analyses how ambiguity and discretionary local practices are related both to each other and to the contemporary fragmentary reconfiguration processes of the EUropean Migration and Border Regime, and shows how they intersect to form spatio-juridical grey areas that foster the spatial and social marginalisation of migrants in EUrope.     

Colonial Refractions of a Malakulan Chief

During the early 20th century, Western adventurers sought encounters with and images of Pacific people to entertain white audiences. But they were often reliant on resident European missionaries to facilitate their access to the glamorous Other. Missionaries were themselves also creators of Indigenous representations intended for Western consumption, to raise support for their enterprise. This paper examines the uneasy relationship between these groups by bringing together archival resources from disparate disciplines – colonial-era adventure-travelogue and mission history – to uncover an unacknowledged relationship between the American film-maker and photographer Martin Johnson and Australian Seventh-day Adventist missionaries in Vanuatu between 1917 and 1920. My focus is a Big Nambas village on Malakula, Vanuatu, which found itself the nexus of conflicting colonial gazes. Representations of its headman Nihapat, refracted through the lenses of a travelogue-adventurer and the narratives of missionaries, highlight Indigenous agency as he and his people contended with their predicament under colonialism.     

De-personifying Collaert's Four Continents: European descriptions of continental diversity, 1585–1625

Adriaen Collaert's personifications of the four continents are typical examples of how continents and their respective cultures were represented in the art and literature of Europe in the early-modern period. For example, Asia is the exotic double to Europe, possessing an ‘otherness’ upon which European identity has been juxtaposed. Such personifications of continents and broader tropes of ‘the other’ and ‘the exotic’ have greatly influenced the historiography of the idea of Europe. However, the creation of art and literature characterised by these tropes reflects only part of the European understanding of the wider world. This article will explore how travellers – such as missionaries, merchants and ambassadors – in Europe's encounters with non-European societies presented a complex picture of the world sought to offer practical guidance and knowledge. How travellers’ accounts and personifications interacted is important for understanding the European experience of other continents. In considering how travellers presented their knowledge of continents, it is possible to analyse both how early-modern Europeans viewed other continents and question how useful artistic representation of ‘other’ continents are for understanding how they viewed their own.     

Competing models of nationalism: an analysis of memorial ceremonies in schools

ABSTRACT. By analysing school memorial ceremonies in Israel, this article demonstrates how dominant groups in Israeli society (upper‐ and middle‐class, secular, educated Jews of European origin) exploit their historical monopoly over the Israeli warrior ethos in order to retreat from their unconditional commitment to the state and the military, which stands at the very core of traditional ‘heroic nationalism’. Nonetheless, despite their withdrawal from the military ethos, analysis of the school ceremonies shows that rather than distancing themselves from the national collective, they are promoting a different kind of nationalism – one that I term ‘traumatic nationalism’. This model departs from the warrior ethos and places mourning and a feeling of victimhood at its centre. Thus, through the arena of education, the dominant groups – which mark out the global as their sphere of action – promote a model of nationalism that meets the demands of the post‐national discourse.     

Towards fully automated investing? How venture capitalists are making the economic future old-fashioned

Finance is increasingly datafied and automated. Anthropologists (and sociologists) have worked towards a nuanced understanding of how investing remains social and driven by people despite this observable development. My research with venture capitalists – equity investors in technology startups behind companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and so on – shows a more extreme case. They are still investing the ‘old-school’ way, driven exclusively by Keynesian animal spirits of gut feeling, herding and Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). This resistance to datafication is in their own best interest as it allows them to reproduce themselves as an elite industry and the economic inequality in the startups they fund.     

Monarchism,an Emerging Canadian Identity,and the 1866 British North American Trade Mission to the West Indies and Brazil

In 1865, the colonies of eastern British North America created a joint commission to investigate the possibility of reciprocal trade agreements with other parts of the Western hemisphere. In early 1866, the commissioners visited the West Indies and the Empire of Brazil, where they met officials and business leaders. No actual tariff agreements resulted from the commissioners’ travels, the main concrete result of the 1866 trade mission being the establishment of a direct steamship service between Canada and the West Indies. The study of contemporary discussions of the trade mission deepens our understanding of the history of relations between the British West Indies and British North America in the aftermath of emancipation and the end of the ‘Old Colonial System’. Moreover, these discussions reveal different elements of an emerging Canadian identity. Discourse of Britishness influenced the 1866 trade mission, but so did a sense of affinity linking Canada to the other monarchical territories in the Western hemisphere, such as the Empire of Brazil. For their part, some contemporaries in the West Indies welcomed the Canadian trade initiative because they wished for a counterweight to the growing influence of the United States in the region. The article also presents new information about British policy towards Latin America, particularly Mexico and Brazil, as well as British commercial diplomacy more generally. The article is based on materials in archives in the United Kingdom and Canada as well as a range of printed primary sources.     

Military Orders Between Territorialization and Periphery from the 12th to the 16th Century

Military orders have historically played a key role in defining borders, both in a mental sense, by favouring an awareness of alterity in the most peripheral territories (Christians against Muslims and Christians against Pagans), and also in more direct ways, as owners of land in these territories. This article¹ discusses both the influence, in the broadest sense, of territory and periphery upon the medieval military orders, and the relationship between the crown and the military orders. It will be done through a comparative historical analysis of two cases: Portugal and Denmark in the 12th–16th centuries. Both countries were placed at the periphery of the Western world in the Middle Ages, and they were both active agents in the Crusading movement.     

National Alcohol in Hungary’s Reform Era: Wine,Spirits, and the Patriotic Imagination

Abstract

Hungarian elites saw wine consumption as a matter of national pride. The glorification of wine, and particularly of the luxury vintage Tokaji, reflected the economic interest and social customs of the Hungarian aristocracy, whose members tended to see themselves as the Hungarian nation. When liberal reformers began rationalizing the wine sector for mass production and export in the early nineteenth century, wine patriotism also became merged with the economic nationalism of Hungary’s Reform Era. Hungarian wine patriotism involved the denigration of alcoholic beverages other than wine, such as beer and spirits, since Hungarian public opinion associated these other alcoholic beverages with non-Magyar minorities in the Kingdom of Hungary, such as Slovaks, Croats, Germans, or Jews. Hungarian wine patriotism thus also illustrates the rise of Magyar chauvinism, anticipating ethnic conflict in the Kingdom of Hungary.     

Between two cities: Jewish women and exogamous marriage in medieval Catalonia

In the marriage strategies of medieval Catalan Jews, the economic security of women came second to the economic goals of families. Exogamous marriages – marriages between the Jewish communities of two different cities – exacerbated the vulnerability of Jewish wives, widows and divorcées, due in large part to restrictions on women’s travel. Women who moved in order to marry experienced greater difficulty in managing financial resources and lost access to kinship networks. When women married men from other cities, at best they found themselves unable to take advantage of the connections created by their marriages. At worst, they risked financial loss if their husbands absconded to other cities with their dowries. Five case studies drawn from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catalan notarial registers reveal some of the ways in which exogamous marriages disadvantaged Jewish women. The extreme case of exogamy delineates the boundaries of possibility for Jewish women in the medieval Western Mediterranean.     

Working Borders: The Contexts of Copán Archaeology

The work of archaeologists and the knowledge they produce both help create, and are conditioned by, a variety of kinds of borders, including political, academic, and cultural. In this article I review a series of borders that shape and determine the social conditions in which archaeology at the well-known site of Copán in western Honduras takes place and takes on meaning. I argue that the histories of these borders, their construction, and their crossings reveal structural tensions in the overlapping registers of academia, public history and popular discourse, in which archaeological knowledge circulates. These histories must be consciously interrogated in order to be negotiated. I suggest that by becoming fluent in the cultural conversations ongoing in a place, archaeologists are best able to begin productive collaborations and make informed choices about how they participate in the border-making processes of their work.     

Autobiography and women's travel writings in nineteenth‐century France: Journeys through self‐representation

This analysis of nineteenth‐century travel literature by French and francophone women examines the various mechanisms and strategies at play in women's struggle with self‐representation within the genre of travel writing. Through the works of three women travellers, Henriette d'Angeville, Adèle Hommaire de Hell and Carla Serena, four main voices are identified as representing the plurality of self‐images women writers create in their texts: conventional autobiographical voices where they present themselves in a stereotypically feminine manner; conventional ‘neutral’ scientific voices where they take on the traditionally masculine task of science writing, thus erasing the autobiographical; differentiated scientific voices where they valorize a (private) sphere of knowledge dependent upon their personal experiences and valorized as such; and finally, differentiated autobiographical voices which undermine constraining representations of women by placing them in the valued public sphere. As a result, travel writing becomes a most important medium for women: it questions the traditional limits placed upon their writings and ways of being and allows for a complex feminine subject to emerge (often indirectly) from the texts. Such a process leads to the questioning of gender constructions as a whole.     

Princely longing for Europe: Constantine II Brâncoveanu's Mogoşoaia Palace (1702) and the creation of a European identity

Trapped among the Austrian, Russian and Ottoman empires, the reign of Constantin II Brancoveanu, Prince of Wallachia, was a constant balancing act between the West and the East. To further his political and cultural ambitions, Constantin initiated and supported an artistic movement, known today as the Brancovenesc style, of which his residence, the Mogosoaia Palace, stands as a prime example. The architecture and ornamentation of the palace makes use of elements from both Eastern – Byzantine and Ottoman – and Western – Renaissance and Baroque – European artistic traditions, merging them into an organic whole. The aim of this article is to explore the artistic strategies employed throughout the palace by arguing that they explicitly, as well as implicitly, construct an inclusive European identity. Starting from the premise that the palace acted as a place of cultural encounter between the East and West, the analysis will focus on how the decoration implies a space of transition through subjects such as metamorphosis and the double-headed eagle. Also, the importance given to spaces such as the entrance foyer and loggia suggests their role as critical spaces evoking the ambiguous concept of the parergon, which in turn challenges the emerging Enlightenment idea of the West as properEurope and the East as not quite Europe.     

Geographies of unease: Witchcraft and boundary construction in an African borderland

African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities. Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for businesspeople, but it can also engender anxieties around the unchecked spread of insecurity, disease and economic exploitation.Understanding this ambiguous construction of borders in the minds of their inhabitants requires us, we argue, to look beyond statist or globalizing discourses and to appreciate the moral economies of borderlands, and how they have been discursively and epistemologically negotiated over time. Narratives around witchcraft and the occult represent, we argue, a novel and revealing lens through which to do so and our study draws on years of fieldwork and archival research to underline how cartographies of witchcraft in this region are, and have long been, entangled with the construction of state political geographies, internal as well as international.     

Raising the question: articulating the Dutch identity crisis through public debate

In place of a ‘tolerant no more’ narrative, this article proposes a different conception of nationalism's re‐articulation in the Dutch context. The salience of nationhood in public and political life, particularly concerning issues of immigration, religion and diversity, is not reconstructed as a backlash against a purported multiculturalism. Instead, attention is given to a re‐articulation of the very notion of nationhood. A long‐term historical move away from characterology is assessed and applied in understanding the emergence of a national‐identity discourse. This discourse not merely embellishes talk of Dutchness with new terms, but indicates – so the articles aim to demonstrate – a different conception of nationhood all together. Apart from what the nation is – about which very little disagreement took place – discussions formed about how Dutchness was imagined and to what extent people themselves were able to form a national image. The emergence of national‐identity discourse is empirically reconstructed. Not only is it made clear how a logic of popularity begins to be reiterated across a variety of positionings, but public debate and dissensus acquire a new significance and performativity in the process.     

The space between: globalization,liminal spaces and personal relations in rural Costa Rica

Globalization facilitates the movement of people, goods, ideologies and even diseases across borders and into local communities. This article explores the liminal space created by tourism in the rural Costa Rican community of Monteverde as a site where the movement of people, especially Western women (women from the global North), intersects, contests and even reinforces existing heteropatriarchal ideologies. Theories from feminist geography and anthropology provide a lens for understanding and interpreting how Western women and local residents (both male and female) perceive, construct and interact with each other. We argue that ‘liminality’ or the sense of being ‘betwixt and between’ – physically, socially and ideologically – allows Western women a space to both challenge the hegemony of heteropatriarchal ideology and reconstitute it in their sexual relationships with local men. We also explore the implications that sexual relationships between Western women and local men have for local women. We stress the urgency to understand and articulate the nature of these sexual relationships in light of the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic.     

From crisis to creative critique: the early twenty-first century Mediterranean crossing on stage and screen in works by Teatro delle Albe and Andrea Segre

The article analyses the 2010 play Rumore di Acque [Noise in the Waters] by the Teatro delle Albe and Andrea Segre’s 2014 docufilm Come il peso dell’acqua [Like the Weight of Water] as creative responses to the Mediterranean migrant crisis. In challenging the frozen representation and rhetoric of public reporting and discourse, characterized by recurring images of boats accompanied by the number of arriving or dead migrants, both works propose a critical reading of the migration phenomenon through a focus on individual stories. As the play and the docufilm themselves cross a sea of genres and expressive tools, they also place the migrant at the centre of an interrogation of national paradigms and Western societies. They ultimately call into question the exclusionary politics and policies of the contemporary world and identify in the empathy towards the human quest for freedom and recognition a lively engine of the early twenty-first-century global community, so profoundly marked by movement and displacement.