Memory,Forgetting and the New Tribes Mission in West New Britain

In this paper, I use ethnography from the Kaliai area to explore the social and political relationships which underpin memory and forgetting. I analyse the relationships of hegemony and resistance which are inscribed and articulated in a context of missionising where villagers and missionaries enter into an uneasy alliance to control what should be remembered so that people emerge as particular kinds of subjects. In exploring the social and political organisation of memory, this paper does not treat memory and forgetting as opposites, for people are also taught how to forget. Indeed they are caught in the paradox of always needing to remember that they have to always try to forget. Here the need to forget has the paradoxical effect of keeping alive the content of what must be forgotten. In a strange sort of way the need to forget sustains the need to remember what must be forgotten. I explore the political implications of these paradoxes and ambiguities for sustaining a place outside European hegemony whilst still inscribed in it.     

Telephones,Cameras and Technology in West New Britain Cargo Cults

In this paper, I explore the creative practices of cargo cult followers in the Kaliai bush of West New Britain. I focus on how rural villagers reworked their experiences of meaning and sociality through their appropriations of western technology. In particular, bush Kaliai cult followers frequently used telephones and cameras in idiosyncratic ways that mapped out anew and redisclosed the spaces occupied by a racialised human existence. Through their novel use of western technology, cult followers struggled to resituate and overcome the new distances and cleavages of modernity by unearthing other ways of being white that came from their customary past and ancestral homelands.     

Logging,Violence and Pleasure: Neoliberalism,Civil Society and Corporate Governance in West New Britain

ABSTRACT The postcolonial world of Melanesia is made up of diverse experiments, which combine modern and customary technologies of power into new hybrid assemblages. In the 1990s, there occurred a proliferation of landowner companies in rural New Britain. This happened in a context of neoliberalism where the state divested itself of many functions and services by allocating these to a supposedly more efficient private sector. In the Kaliai area, this new economic partnership between state and capital gave rise to more militarised forms of policing, which sought to protect logging by a large Malaysian company from growing local unrest. Supplementing these coercive state actions were private strategies, which used sorcery to intimidate opponents to logging as well as rivals within the landowner company. Opponents were bought off and alliances created through using customary exchange relations as well as through modern gifts of money, western goods and commoditised pleasures.     

The sacred elephant in the room: Ganesha cults in Chiang Mai,Thailand

In recent years, Thai society has been portrayed as increasingly fractured along class, political and cultural lines. Meanwhile, a variety of religious cults have gathered devotees by promoting their practices as a means to ameliorate precarity or secure the future. Ganesha, the Hindu god of new beginnings and remover of obstacles, while long incorporated into and worshipped within Thai Buddhism, has recently increased in popularity. Through the study of two Ganesha‐focused institutions in Chiang Mai province, this article will explore how this Hindu god's meaning is constructed within the religious marketplace as well as how and why people are increasingly turning to Ganesha for certain worldly problems. As the article will show, there is a new, syncretic form of re‐enchantment taking place in Ganesha worship in Chiang Mai, which seeks to give people the tools to negotiate meaning and identity in a fractious political economy.     

James X: A reflection on rape,race, and redemption

In this narrative, the author reflects on the circumstances surrounding a rape attempt on her during the civil rights struggle in 1968.     

New approaches to deterrence in Britain, France, and the United States

The three western nuclear powers have in recent years been more preoccupied with threats from regional powers armed with weapons of mass destruction than with potential major power threats. London, Paris, and Washington have each substantially reduced their deployed nuclear forces and sharply cut back their range of delivery systems since the end of the Cold War in 1989‐1991. While each has manifested greater interest in non‐nuclear capabilities for deterrence, each has attempted, with varying degrees of clarity, to define options for limited nuclear use. All three have articulated their nuclear employment threats within a conceptual framework intended to promote deterrence. Despite the differences in their approaches and circumstances, the three western nuclear powers are grappling with tough and, to some extent, unanswered questions: what threat will deter? To what extent have the grounds for confidence in deterrence been diminished? To what extent has it been prudent to scale back deployed nuclear capabilities and redefine threats of nuclear retaliation? To what extent would limited nuclear options enhance deterrence and simplify nuclear employment decisions? What level of confidence should be placed in the full array of deterrence and containment measures? To what extent is deterrence national policy, and to what extent is it Alliance policy?     

The New Militia: War,Politics and Gender in 1750s Britain

This article explores the role of gender in the debates around the creation of a ‘New Militia’ at the beginning of the Seven Years War. The humiliating military defeats of 1756 had precipitated a cultural crisis that focused upon gender distinctions, as the ‘effeminacy’ of men and the ‘boldness’ of women threatened to collapse the social order. In this context, militia service was presented as a cure for the nation's moral, social, political and sexual ills. This article therefore examines a range of textual and visual sources in order to suggest that certain mid‐Georgian political worldviews were fundamentally gendered, since they were predicated upon martial masculine virtues of the citizenry.     

'Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette': Reflections on the Emergence of Post-colonial Britain

In this article the specifically domestic and cultural propertiesof British decolonization are explored. It is suggested thatthe very category of ‘post-colonial Britain’ invitesus to think in these terms. Conventionally, the question ofthe domestic consequences of decolonization is thought in termsof the native white population of Britain. This article turnsattention to the role of the black migrants resident in themetropolis during the years of decolonization: most especially,to the role of West Indians. By a reading of the West IndianGazette it is proposed that the West Indian migrant played anactive role in the organization of a specifically anti-colonialculture—providing the means by which white Britons, too,could come to terms with the end of Empire.