Kamula Accounts of Rambo and the State of Papua New Guinea

This paper contributes to the ethnography of masculinity and the media in PNG. I outline some changes in Kamula men's understandings of masculinity as they are registered in accounts of conflicts between state security services, the Kamula, Rambo and other actors. Outlining this history shows how Kamula men are increasingly entangled in forms of state power and violence that are partially defined by new myths of masculinity expressed in Melanesian readings of Rambo. The paper describes how some of the power effects linked to Rambo are transferred to Kamula men. I argue that in their accounts of Rambo the Kamula are also exploring different models of sovereignty and state power.     

‘White Skins‘, ‘Real People’ and ‘Chinese’ in Some Spatial Transformations of the Western Province,PNG1

To understand more fully contemporary forms of colonialism in PNG I argue we need to move our analysis beyond local narratives of encounters with Europeans to include narratives about non-Europeans. Through a consideration of Kamula accounts of Europeans, especially missionaries, and Chinese I show how the Kamula model two quite different experiences of colonialism. In one, local people are able to transform Europeans into analogues of themselves and in the other, currently more associated with the Chinese, the emphasis is on difference, rather than on commonalities. These interrelated representations of two distinct kinds of colonialists are, in part, complex signifiers of national, and especially local, concerns about ‘development’ based on logging. I outline how these accounts of Europeans and Chinese express the different forms of power which are currently deployed to transform space in the Western Province. I conclude by speculating that to understand these powers adequately we may need to follow Latour and Callon and extend our analysis of colonialism to include non-human agents.     

The Politics of Incorporation: Masculinity,Spatiality and Modernity among the Ngaing of Papua New Guinea

In this paper I argue that the way in which masculinity and spatiality are reconstituted among the Ngaing men of Madang Province (Papua New Guinea) is pivotally implicated in how they articulate their ongoing claim to incorporation in modernity. The manner in which they strive for progress is indicative of identifications coupling Christianity and whiteness with the hope of redemption from a condition of blackness, inferiority and marginality. With the help of recent discourses and secret ritual practices, in which Christian components combine with local cultural patterns, the men make clear that indigenous participation in modernity is prefigured on the inside of external manifestations of body and space. This discursive and ritual empowerment of the men rests on a culturally specific construction of the inside and the outside in which the knowledge, power and mobility possessed by whites are construed as an integral part of the local world.     

Degraded towns in Poland as cultural heritage

This paper discusses how the concept of cultural heritage is currently used in relation to the so-called degraded towns (i.e. deprived of their urban status) in Poland. It shows the role of heritagisation in the process of restitution of urban status, and addresses the effects of the ongoing revitalisation of degraded towns in order to restore their lost urban glory. I argue that the Polish understanding of urbanity is ambiguous, muddling formality with cultural connotations. I address how such convolution both rewrites history and affects modernity by the imposition of values and foreclosures. I also discuss how alterations to the built environment made in the name of cultural heritage (revitalisation) are often conducted with disregard to identity, authenticity and historical hybridity, and how the introduction of ‘history’ into a modern arena affects the local society. I conclude that considering degraded towns as a special form of cultural heritage is a new construction, where coupling of the disconnected dimensions of the Polish understanding of urbanity becomes even more apparent. I stress that this field is neither sufficiently differentiated nor problematised, and that cultural heritage relating to degraded towns is often taken for granted.     

NOSTALGIA AND (PRE-)MODERNITY

This article argues that, in the fourteenth century, there was a wave of nostalgia that was provoked by extreme structural change: this was a moment of demographic catastrophe (with famine and plague), endemic warfare, economic fluctuation, intensified urbanization, and intellectual and spiritual novelties. Yet scholars from a range of disciplines have assumed that nostalgia and modernity are intimately connected. Given these framings of nostalgia as a modern phenomenon, this article seeks to explore the implications of premodern nostalgia. It begins by setting out the arguments for the intertwining of nostalgia and modernity. Some have argued that modernity brings a sense of rupture and that this produces nostalgia. Others, relatedly, have argued that modernity seems to speed up our experience of time and that this produces a nostalgia for a slower-paced and more predictable past. I juxtapose these arguments with evidence of fourteenth-century outpourings of nostalgia across a range of contexts in England, Italy, and France. I analyze examples of nostalgia in political contexts (both radical and reactionary), nostalgia for apparently lost economic orders, nostalgia for a lost set of chivalric values, and nostalgia for disrupted social orders. I then suggest that these fourteenth-century manifestations of nostalgia were actually produced by precisely the features of the period that are usually deemed to be exclusive to modernity: it was rapid, rupturing structural change that provoked nostalgic regret. Nostalgia, then, would seem to indicate that there are features of the fourteenth century that might be deemed modern. However, rather than simply trying to therefore push back the moment of the birth of modernity, I argue that nostalgia is indicative of the problems of periodization. The presence of nostalgia across epochs—these echoes across the webs of time—suggest that lines of periodization, birthing moments, need to be treated with extreme caution. And it is appropriate that such a reminder should come from a phenomenon such as nostalgia, which is, after all, about resonances and echoes across time—resonances that are amplified, distorted, whispered even, but that all challenge and complicate any straightforward sense of either linear or cyclical time.     

Malay women as discerning viewers: Asian soap operas,consumer culture and negotiating modernity

This article examines how Malay women in remote Malaysian villages engage with images of transnational modernity shown in popular soap operas imported from other Asian countries. While the government promoted these Asian soap operas at first as appropriate vehicles for the cultural project of modernising the mindsets and attitudes of the masses, authorities have now expressed some discomfort and ambivalence about the excessive representation of consumer culture in these soaps, which they fear will compromise the cultural values of Malay women. However, I argue that Malay women are discerning viewers who are able to critically negotiate the images of consumer culture in these soaps without necessarily ignoring their cultural values or social responsibilities. This debate about whether these soaps broaden the mindsets of Malay women viewers or teach them degenerate values of consumerist culture is part of an ongoing contestation over the cultural ramifications of modernity in Malaysia. This television genre of Asian soaps can be conceptualised as a site for negotiating modernity, where Malay women derive pleasure from the consumerist modernity depicted in the Asian soap operas while remaining mindful of the strictures posed by local culture.     

Gendered water spaces: a study of the transition from wells to handpumps in Mozambique

In many parts of rural Africa, women and children spend a lot of time collecting water. In the development literature, the water collection task is portrayed as oppressive, arduous, and disliked by women. Eliminating this activity from women's lives is believed to empower them, yet there has been little research investigating what actually happens at the water source or how women themselves perceive the time spent there. This research is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in five rural communities in the northern province of Nampula, Mozambique. Over this year, handpumps were constructed in communities where people previously collected water from distant shallow wells and rivers. This article compares the social interactions and activities between the customary water sites and the handpump through the lens of gendered space. The customary water sites are controlled by women and highly valued for their social attributes. While clean water is more accessible at the handpumps, men often regulate access to the technology and social activities are limited. This article contributes to feminist geography and political ecology by showing how differences in the materiality of water spaces interact with local norms to shape social interactions and gendered subjectivities, and how, in turn, men and women contribute to the production and meaning of these spaces. I argue that the handpumps open up new spaces for men and women to negotiate gender roles and (re)define their associations with modernity and development.     

The chimera of national identity

ABSTRACT. In both popular discourse and many academic works, the existence of national identity is largely taken as given. Although researchers disagree on whether national identities are modern or perennial, and how best to gauge the intensity of identification with a particular nation, there is near unanimity on the view that national identities are real and perceptible entities. In contrast to this view I argue not only that there was no national identity before modernity but also that there is little empirical evidence for the existence of national identities in the modern age either. While it is obvious that many individuals show great affinity for their nations and often express sincere devotion to the ‘national cause’, none of these are reliable indicators of the existence of a durable, continuous, stable and monolithic entity called ‘national identity’. To fully understand the character of popular mobilisation in modernity it is paramount to refocus our attention from the slippery and non‐analytical idiom of ‘identity’ towards well‐established sociological concepts such as ‘ideology’ and ‘solidarity’. In particular, the central object of this research becomes the processes through which large‐scale social organisations successfully transform earnest micro‐solidarity into an all‐encompassing nationalist ideology.     

Security,secularism and gender: the Turkish military’s security discourse in relation to political Islam

This article examines the sexual and corporeal constructions of risk within the security discourses of the Turkish military in response to the rise of political Islam and Islamist identities in Turkey. I look at the Turkish military as the self-proclaimed guardian of the secular Republic, which, until recently, has actively configured political Islam as a risk to national security and ingrained such risk onto the body of the headscarved woman. My analysis covers a time frame from 1980s to late 2000s when the military issued memorandums and public statements against the rise of political Islam and pursued a belligerent campaign to erase ‘Islamist’ identities both from civilian politics and its own structure. The military implemented security regulations and dress codes to detect the ‘Islamist’ military personnel who are most conspicuously identified with the dress style of the women in their families. I explore these security regulations through women’s everyday and personal experiences in relation to their dress, headscarf style and comportment in military spaces and try to understand how ‘Islamism’ is constructed as a security threat in sexually and corporeally specific ways. I demonstrate how secularism is constructed, and needs to be protected, on the basis of a particular regime of gender and sexuality at the merger of traditional gender norms and secular Western modernity.     

Classy Kids and Down-at-Heel Intellectuals: Status Aspiration and Blind Spots in the Contemporary Ethnography of Iran

This article reviews the ways in which class, status, social mobility and their cultural ramifications have been considered (or failed to be considered) in recent ethnographic studies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It argues against the trend of privileging “resistance” to an oppressive state as a theoretical frame for documenting social phenomena in Iran: lifestyles and consumption patterns cannot be interpreted merely as signs of political rebellion because they are endowed with symbolic value as status attributes in a society whose class configurations are shifting. I present a number of sources and concepts that help to rethink these phenomena, and show how the experience of Afghan refugees living on the margins of Iranian cities illuminates both the opportunities and constraints created by the Islamic Republic's uneasy mix of political Islam, populism and neoliberalism. A focus on aspiration to upward mobility becomes a useful analytical lens that allows us to sidestep reductive dichotomies such as tradition/modernity or religion/secularism that are in practice blurred by its very pursuit.     

CLAIMING PLACE: THE PRODUCTION OF YOUNG MEN'S STREET MEETING PLACES IN ACCRA, GHANA

This article discusses the social significance of the street to young men through a case study of their street meeting places, 'the bases' in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on field research in a suburb of Accra, the paper explores how such meeting places are produced, claimed and defended. The aim is to contribute to discussions of the relationship between the marginalization of young men in Africa, the appropriation of street space and the production of youth identities. The article illuminates how bases are produced in an urban landscape characterized by rapid change, in which young men are excluded from meaningful work and influence, and tend to be represented as a problem. Describing how these meeting places are interpreted both from the outside and from within, the article illustrates the heterogeneous character of such places and the multiple meanings ascribed to them. While hordes of young men hanging out on the street tend to be viewed by the surrounding world as either potentially dangerous or as a sign of marginalization and immobility, the paper stresses that for the young men themselves, these places are also full of motion and serve to orient their lives socially and materially.     

Gender relations in Bedouin communities in Israel: local government as a site of ambivalent modernity

In this article, we examine the perceptions towards women and gender relations maintained by male, local authority officials within two Bedouin towns in Israel. As such, the current research lies at the intersection of local politics, gender, space and culture. We argue that analysis of these perspectives provides insights into the ambivalent nature of modernity: into the tension between the desire to preserve the traditional role of women in maintaining the family, and the recognition of the powerful potential of women to act as agents of change. Based on an analysis of personal interviews, the study traces the ways in which both power and vulnerability impact the attitudes and perspectives of these men officials. By applying narrative analysis, gendered power structures are examined within Bedouin society in the context of the local authority – zooming in on the narratives provided by the male authority officials. The findings reveal that the officials maintain a series of ambivalent and conflictual attitudes towards the role of women. Bearing in mind their potential impact on the quality of women's daily lives in local public spaces, it seems vitally important to account for the entire matrix of tensions and vulnerabilities that impact the municipal policy instruments at their disposal. The findings are relevant beyond the Bedouin communities in Israel and may serve as a platform for a wider discussion of the dilemmas of minority women in rapidly changing cultural environments, and ambivalent modernity.     

‘A separate people’? Some directions for comparative research on medieval women

Research to date has often positioned women of minority cultures as a separate group. They were, in many cases, twice removed — both from the men in their communities and from the majority communities within which they lived. This essay discusses the benefits of including these women, both as separate groups and as part of cross cultural comparison and points to the possible contribution of such studies. In the three parts of this article I propose different strategies for studying minority and majority women using examples from the sources on Jews in medieval Europe. In the first section, the article explores how to learn from similarities and differences between majority and minority practices, focusing on wet-nursing practices and medical care. The second part of the article proposes examining how ordinary people themselves perceived the ‘religiousness’ of certain everyday practices and set their own boundaries to what they were and were not willing to do. In this case, I suggest that more attention be paid to the way medieval women (and men) turned daily actions into religious proclamations and how in some cases they involved members of other religions in what seem to be internal affairs. This, in turn, leads to a final, larger comparative question taken up in the final part of the article: how do the larger trajectories of transformations in women's roles and rights compare across different religious cultural traditions.     

Esse servitutis omnis impatientem/Man is impatient of all servitude: Human Dignity as a Path to Modernity in Ficino and Pico della Mirandola?

Abstract

The notion of human dignity stands at the core of contemporary debates on rights, politics, and ethics. Many scholars consider the Renaissance discourse on dignity as one of its main contributions to the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. This article examines the role of human dignity in the philosophies of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In their works human dignity relates both to freedom and to a Neo-Platonic ontology, which raises the question of how they reconcile these two possibly contradictory elements. I show that starting from the insight that human beings are “naturally” free and able to make right choices, Ficino and Pico argue that human dignity consists in the ability of humans to understand what is good and to act accordingly. I thus defend the thesis that their conception of human dignity is not modern because it liberates human beings from the “history of being” but rather because it paves the way for their liberation to become rational beings.     

Migrant masculinities: Bangladeshi men in Singapore's labour force

Although there is a growing body of scholars who have examined the reproduction and experiences of masculinities, research on the experiences of migrant men remains relatively limited. While I continue to draw upon insights from these scholars of both migration and gender, my data show that there remains considerable potential to contribute to this research field, in particular, analysing the reproduction of masculinity through a class lens. Drawing upon migrants' own narratives and notions of class by Bourdieu, I examine how Bangladeshi men make sense of their labour migration to Singapore, particularly after they fall out of work. Their responses are not only based upon instrumental calculation, but are also powerfully shaped by a complex set of normative gendered formations that can further constrain them.     

Gender,Risk and Micro‐financial Subjectivities

Abstract: This article analyses the gendered contradictions of microfinance's celebrated “double bottom line” of social and financial impact. The example of microfinance is used to illustrate the gendered and colonial constructions of “risk” and “responsibility” that underpin neoliberalism and its gendered paradoxes. After revisiting the discursive critique of these terms, I draw on how indigenous women participating in a microfinance institution in Bolivia describe their experience to suggest how gendered ideas of risk and responsibility are framing their negotiation of and resistance to the market. While the gendered and colonial construction of risk creates dynamics that perpetuate indigenous women's exclusion from the market, the terms of the resistance and use of the intervention also challenge feminist critiques of neoliberal governmentality developed mostly with reference to advanced modernity and welfare regimes.     

‘A separate people’? Some directions for comparative research on medieval women

Research to date has often positioned women of minority cultures as a separate group. They were, in many cases, twice removed — both from the men in their communities and from the majority communities within which they lived. This essay discusses the benefits of including these women, both as separate groups and as part of cross cultural comparison and points to the possible contribution of such studies. In the three parts of this article I propose different strategies for studying minority and majority women using examples from the sources on Jews in medieval Europe. In the first section, the article explores how to learn from similarities and differences between majority and minority practices, focusing on wet-nursing practices and medical care. The second part of the article proposes examining how ordinary people themselves perceived the ‘religiousness’ of certain everyday practices and set their own boundaries to what they were and were not willing to do. In this case, I suggest that more attention be paid to the way medieval women (and men) turned daily actions into religious proclamations and how in some cases they involved members of other religions in what seem to be internal affairs. This, in turn, leads to a final, larger comparative question taken up in the final part of the article: how do the larger trajectories of transformations in women's roles and rights compare across different religious cultural traditions.     

日本近世大名家训中的武家政治思想

近世日本是建立在武力统治和身份统治基础上的封建家族国家,虽然其以中国的儒学为统治思想,但是统治阶级始终坚持尚武为立国之本,把尚武习武看成是执政者和有教养者的重要标志,认为在治世能保持尚武精神的武士才是真武士。关于君臣关系,在“家”观念支配下,他们认为君臣关系是建立在同一家族共同体基础上的,家臣与主君同样对家的延续兴亡负有责任。他们的忠君观念具有家族主义和集团主义色彩,具有超越主君个人而把家国作为忠诚对象的特征。近世武士阶级在中国儒学的影响下,能够自觉地从治国安民这一政治角度考虑百姓的生活,并且达到“为国家人民立君”这样的政治高度。     

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.