The Weaponising of Women's Bodies in the Wars of Reform and French Intervention in Mexico, 1857–67

Acts of violence in war not only have individual effects on bodies, but they also have a social, collective impact on the social body. While recent works have recovered the participation of women in the War for Independence and the 1910 Revolution in Mexico, the role their bodies played in wartime has not been examined. Focusing on the decade of war between 1857 and 1867, which influenced the consolidation of national sovereignty and identity, this article explores how, while women's bodies can be targets themselves, they also can be transformed into weapons aimed at other targets. Consequently, their bodies were ‘weaponised’ and aimed at: women as individuals punished for transgressions, real or imagined, of traditional gender roles; at men, to damage or destroy their masculine honour, their failure to protect their women and the integrity of their families; and last, the survival of their vision of the nation (either Liberal or Conservative), or even the honour and survival of the nation itself in the case of a foreign intervention. However, which bodies were targeted, and how, depended on the intersection of gender, class, race, ethnicity, political identity and nationality.     

“Britain's Spiritual Life: How Can It Be Deepened?”: Seebohm Rowntree,Russell Lavers,and the “Crisis of Belief”, ca. 1946–54

This article examines the response of two social investigators in the early post-World War II period to the apparent secularization of British society. It explains how an unpublished survey that the two men carried out, along with the work of other Christian and non-Christian commentators in this period, expressed the hope that religious influences would be strengthened through secular institutions, including communal organizations, workplaces, and the military. A revival of Christian belief, in some form, was seen as a bulwark against communism in the context of the Cold War in which the Soviet regime was seen to present a threat to the "Christian civilization" of the West. The "spiritual life of the nation" was synonymous with the "national character," and for the information and opinion on which their study was based, Seebohm Rowntree and Russell Lavers turned to those who they believed were in a position to influence the "national character."     

Fences, Boats and Teas: Engendering Patient Lives at Peel Island Lazaret

Within institutions, a separate social world comes into existence. Gender is a crucial shaper of relations in this new world, defining status, relationships to others and personal identity. Understanding the gendered conditions of, and responses to, institutional care is an important social contribution of historical archaeology to contemporary society. Research on the Peel Island Lazaret in Moreton Bay, Queensland, uses a model for engendering archaeology, with modifications pertinent to historical archaeology. Analysis builds on the work of others who have investigated the ways in which men and women of the confined and confining classes experienced institutions and interacted with each other. This study also extends beyond these approaches in exploring the areas of “interpersonal agency” and relationship building, and the ways in which disadvantage minimization was mediated by the structuring principle of gender.     

Swahili women since the nineteenth century: theoretical and empirical considerations on gender and identity construction

This paper provides an analysis and update on the theoretical discussion about the link between gender and identity and uses a group of Swahili women in eastern Africa as an example of how this link works in practice. The first part of the study provides a brief overview of gender theory related to the terms "gender" and "identity." It is noted that gender is only one aspect of identity and that the concept of gender has undergone important changes such as the reconceptualization of the terms "sex" and "gender." The second part of the study synthesizes the experiences of Swahili women in the 19th century when the convergence of gender and class was very important. The status of Muslim women is reviewed, and it is noted that even influential women practiced purdah and that all Swahili women experienced discrimination, which inhibited their opportunities for socioeconomic mobility. Slavery and concubinage were widespread during this period, and the participation of Islamic women in spirit possession cults was a way for women to express themselves culturally. The separation of men and women in Swahili culture led to the development of two distinct subcultures, which excluded women from most aspects of public life. The third part of the study looks at the experiences of Swahili women since the 19th century both during and after the colonial period. It is shown that continuity exists in trends observed over a period of 200 years. For example, the mobility of Swahili women remains limited by Islam, but women do exert influence behind the scenes. It is concluded that the socioeconomic status of Swahili woman has been shaped more by complex forces such as class, ethnic, religious, and geographic area than by the oppression of Islam and colonialism. This study indicates that gender cannot be studied in isolation from other salient variables affecting identity.     

A Response to Tomás Halík

Abstract

The Churches were significant players in the debate surrounding what has been called Britain's "lost opportunity" in the 1940s and 50s to play a leading role in building a united Europe. This article focuses on Christian theological and historical assumptions about humanity as a universal community, the nation and the Church. It examines Christian discourse about the political dimension of these communities and the part that Christianity as a belief system should ideally play between them. It then outlines the "Christendom" narrative, which represented medieval Europe as a model for the future of Europe, as a partial realization of the ideal alignment of power and culture, which in its decay was the cause of international crisis. Finally, some of the points of tension between Christendom, British national identity, and a united Europe among Christians are discussed.     

History lessons for gender equality from the Zambian Copperbelt, 1900–1990

This article explores the historical causes and consequences of gender divisions of labour in the Zambian Copperbelt. Male breadwinner and female housewife stereotypes appear to have emerged as a product of imported Christian ideologies, colonial–capitalist concerns and an economic climate that largely enabled men to financially provide for their families. Reliant upon husbands for status and economic support, many urban women had little conjugal bargaining power. Gender divisions of labour also meant that people lacked first-hand evidence of women’s equal competence in employment and politics, who they thus often underrated and overlooked. Such perceptions seem to have perpetuated women’s exclusion from prestigious positions – a pattern sustained by macro-economic circumstances in the early decades of Independence. Compliance with the gender status inequalities promoted in pre-marital traditional initiation thus became necessary to marital and economic security, as well as respectability, which was not previously the case. While there were exceptions to these trends, the historical record illustrates the interplay between patterns of resource access, internalised gender stereotypes and cultural expectations.     

The white essential subject: race,ethnicity, and the Irish in post-war Britain

This article focuses on the history of Irish migrants in Birmingham in an attempt to enhance historical understanding of race, ethnicity and ‘whiteness’ in post-war Britain. To do so, it will look at two Birmingham histories: the Young Christian Workers’ Association’s report on the Welfare of Irish migrants in 1951, and anti-Irish violence in the aftermath of the Birmingham Pub Bombings of 1974. It will consider the extent to which Irish immigrants were victims of racism, what this meant in terms of discrimination and identity, and, in particular, how Irish experiences corresponded to that of black and Asian migrants.     

Nation,Ethnicity, and Canada in Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Viking Heart

This article argues that expressions of national identity in twentieth-century Euro-Canadian literature often conceive of the nation as existing in both ethnic and ostensibly pluralist, immigration-based models, and that the former is frequently valorized over the latter, resulting in the implicit legitimation of settler colonialism. It does so by examining a few major theorizations of nationalism—constructivism, ethno-symbolism, and ethnonationalism—and suggesting that literary critics’ frequent adherence to the constructivism of Benedict Anderson can sometimes obscure the aforementioned dynamic. Finally, this article reads Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Viking Heart (1923) as a text that renders in all its contradiction the problem of ethnicity and nation in Canada, arguing that Salverson combines (but does not synthesize) the twin forces of ethnicity and liberal pluralism that make up the Euro-Canadian imagination’s split conception of the nation.     

Shadows on the landscape: an inquiry into the value of some Australian places

In 1922, Australian places connected with a solar eclipse were of world‐historical significance as they were associated with empirical confirmation of Einstein's general theory of relativity. They also formed a major part of Australian national consciousness, although they have since reverted to lost geographies. An exploration of Australian reception of eclipse science leads to questions of official heritage construction and stereotypical national identity. An argument is presented for the importance of intangible heritage at national, communal, and individual levels. At the complex intersection between memory and identity, place value is investigated within wider social‐political formations with emphasis on participation across perceived boundaries of social class, gender, and ethnicity, including the valuable role of Aboriginal peoples.     

“Let Me Come to Tell You”: Loide Shikongo,the King,and Poetic License in Colonial Ovamboland

In this paper, I explore cultural discourse, gender and the subjectivities of local people on the frontier of empire in mid‐20th century southern Africa. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial “Ovamboland”), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated. The narrative of a remarkable woman’s life and her poetry is told to understand how gender in relation to other forms of identity was constructed in different cultural discourses. I argue that both the Christian mission’s cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration’s efforts to masculinise the “native” political authority gendered Owambo elite women whose identities had previously included “gender” only as a rather contingent component. The example of Loide Shikongo, however, also shows that many Owambo continued to pursue heterogeneous, and sometimes ambiguous, strategies in their claims to Christian models of modernity.     

Tales from the Other Side of the Bridge: YMCA Manhood,Social Class and Social Reform in Turn‐of‐the‐Twentieth‐Century Philadelphia

This article examines the interplay of gender and class ideologies at University House, a settlement house run by University of Pennsylvania Christian Association students in Philadelphia. University House exemplified a pioneering national movement to inculcate social responsibility in college youth. As an initiative sponsored by a campus Christian Association that joined a national YMCA movement to evangelise college campuses, the settlement had a unique agenda. The settlement's advocates intended to reform the neighbourhood's working‐class Irish Catholic boys, but also to forge character and manhood in the students who worked there. Moreover, settlement leaders and volunteers preached a brand of manhood steeped in the rhetoric of evangelical Protestantism, an ideal that guided their actions among city boys. Though their publicly stated mission was to make men of city youths, they turned manhood into a tool for preserving class distinctions and cementing their own place among the country's educated élite. Meanwhile, they modified their own definitions of manhood through the practice of social reform.     

Defining the nation: Recent historiography and Irish nationalism

This article considers problems raised in recent historical scholarship concerning the definition of Irish national identity. Catholicism's growing importance in this identity is shown by comparing the eighteenth century United Irishmen, who combined secular and sectarian republicanism, the romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century Young Ireland movement, and the almost exclusively Catholic Irish Republican Army of this century. However, this Catholic, Gaelic, separatist identity excluded Protestant, non‐Gaelic and unionist Irish people. The author concludes by rejecting the notion of ‘an immemorial Irish nation, unfolding holistically through the centuries’, to stress discontinuities over time and the wider geographical setting of the British Isles.     

Using the Concept of Ethnicity in Defining Philistine Identity in the Iron Age

ABSTRACT

Normally the discussion about Philistine identity vis-à-vis Isra-elite identity moves on a macro basis: On one side the Philistines, and on the other the Israelites. Little attention has been paid to the related concept of “scale and social organization.” If we try to find a background for the macro definitions: Israelites, Philistines, we move on an imaginary level. It is a kind of literary concept nourished among the elite—never more than a few percent of any ancient society. The realities of ancient Palestine in the Iron Age were different. First of all nationality was an unknown concept, and any idea of ethnicity related to the issue of nationality (as in Avraham Faust's recent book on Israelite origins) is irrelevant. Second, there were, as argued by, among others Mario Liverani, no national borders in Antiquity. Borders were fiscal delimitations: Who paid tax to whom? Third, ethnicity follows the group, and a certain person may change identity as he moves through differ-ent groups. In a society of such small extent as ancient Palestine, each villager would have an identity defined by his village as against the members of the neighboring community—ethnicity cannot be separated from identity—and villagers living in one area will have a distinct consciousness of being differ-ent from those who live “on the other side of the river.” “National” identity, when the idea of ethnicity includes all people living within the fiscal borders of an ancient state, would hardly ever be called upon, except when the elite wanted to defend its privileges—its right to obtain taxes—against intruders. Thus the concept of a Philistine—Israelite controversy based on different ide-as about ethnicity is no more than a projection of modern ideas about the na-tional state which came into being two hundred years ago.     

The Form and Function of Poverty: Examining National Identity through Public Housing Architecture

Abstract

Lawrence J. Vale tells us that “grand symbolic state buildings need to be understood in terms of the political and cultural contexts that helped to bring them into being,” ¹ 1. Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. and that these buildings can help us understand our national identity. But all buildings are part of a broader political and cultural context. Even unimpressive state-funded buildings express meaning about the politics, power, and priorities of a nation. Because these buildings are not purposefully symbolic, their symbolism has the potential to provide a less contrived—though perhaps less appealing—portrayal of the nation in which they are built. Public housing provides an example of this idea. Public housing in the United States is latent with negative meanings that are reinforced and perpetuated by its architecture, siting, and design. This article examines three historical and iconic public housing communities and analyzes the meanings of these spaces through Goodman's four frames of reference—denotation, exemplification, metaphorical expression, and mediated reference—to determine what these spaces, as architecture, say about the American national identity and our relationship with public housing.     

Identity and social solidarity: an ignored connection. A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations

The article comments on the ongoing de‐Europeanisation and re‐nationalisation of Europe from a historical perspective. The article argues that the building of national community from the 1870s onwards focused on the problem of social integration where the development of emotional feelings of belonging and solidarity was linked to the building of institutions for social politics in mutually reinforcing dynamics. The social question emerged in the wake of the spread of industrial capitalism. Its role is underexplored in the study of the building of national and European communities. The social question draws attention to the institutional capacity of nation states rather than nations based on emotions. Nationalism did not only mean the building of friend‐ enemy distinctions through ethnicity but also national socialism as a conservative reform strategy against class struggle socialism. This contention between two approaches to the problem of social integration moulded together national communities through emotions and institutions without deploying the concept of identity. The article outlines this development, culminating in the (West) European welfare states as nation– states in the strong sense of the merger of these two terms, and how it came to an end in the 1970s when a reverse development began towards social disintegration at the end accompanied by accelerating nationalism and xenophobia. The identity concept was mobilised in 1973 as a tool in the European integration project to compensate for the erosion of social institutions by means of emotions. It was taken over and politicised from having been a technical term in mathematics and psychoanalysis. The politicisation of the identity concept was an indication of a deep identity crisis in Europe and its nations. The identity therapy failed, and the identity crisis remains, accompanied by an ever louder nationalistic and xenophobic vocabulary. Emotions replace institutions. The methodological focus of the article is on the semantics around key concepts such as social politics, solidarity and identity in their historical context as forward‐looking and action‐oriented concepts in the construction of community. This approach with a focus on past futures is an alternative to the application of the retrospective analytical concepts of ethnic and civic nationalism outlining present pasts.     

Bodies (and Spaces) do Matter: The limits of performativity

This article explores the insights and limitations within geography of Judith Butler's concept of 'performativity'. As a processual, non-foundational approach to identity, many feminist and post-structuralist geographers have incorporated performativity into their work on the intersections between gender, sexuality, ethnicity, space and place. Yet few have explicitly undertaken a close and critical reading of Butler's theory. The author argues that performativity ontologically assumes an abstracted subject (i.e. abstracted as a subject position in a given discourse) and thus provides no space for theorizing conscious reflexivity, negotiation or agency in the doing of identity. Butler posits a subject abstracted from personal, lived experience as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness. Uncritically transcribing this abstracted subject into geography limits how we can conceptualize the linkages between emerging identities, social change and spatially-embedded, intentional human practice. A more thoughtful and nuanced use of performativity would allow geographers to map how concrete subjects (individual or collective) do identity in relation to various discursive processes (e.g. those that constitute race, class, sexuality and gender), to other subjects, and to layers of institutions and practices.     

Making difference: conflict over Irish identity in the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade

The controversy surrounding the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade suggests that Irish ethnicity in the United States is still an important site of identity formation and fragmentation. In this paper I examine the New York City parades between 1990 and 2001 where a conflict has developed between the organizers of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, who want a place in the parade but have been denied entrance. The identity politics that surround the St. Patrick’s Day parade controversy suggest that for diasporic communities, ethnic and national identities are highly contested and that boundaries—some hard and fast, others more permeable—are constructed along any number of axes. For the construction of Irish identity in New York City within-group identity is disputed across a number of these axes with the most important difference being sexual identity, particularly when it is being performed in a public space.     

Mapping the nation: street names and Arab‐Palestinian identity: three case studies

The naming of streets is part of the ongoing process of mapping the boundaries of the nation. This article examines three sets of Arab‐Palestinian street names – pre‐1948 Haifa and Jerusalem and post‐1948 Umm el Fahm – as locally constructed ‘texts of identity’ in the historical and political context of their official creation. The investigation aims at charting the ideological orientations represented and the political messages entailed in these three different textual manifestations of Arab‐Palestinian national identity. The analysis focuses on notions of historical and cultural heritage as expressed in the choice of street names. Finally, it offers an interpretative evaluation of this process, placing it within broader ideological and historical contexts.     

Regional History and Ethnic Identity in the Hub of New Guinea: the Emergence of the Min1

Recent approaches to the ethnography of Papua New Guinea stress the historicity of local cultures and their encompassment in larger fields of relations. In this paper I consider the historical and cultural background to the emergence of the ‘Min’ as a novel ethnic designation among the Mountain Ok peoples of the Fly-Sepik headwaters. While Min identity draws much of its impetus from responses to mining operations and resistance to provincial governments, it is also clear that it grows out of a complex interaction between pre-existing cultural identities, a history of colonial administration and Christian evangelism. Emerging at the intersection of local and global processes, Min identity constitutes a regionalization of ethnicity which has led to agitation for the creation of a Min province, producing a movement that may outlive its immediate political aims.     

Some remarks on ethnicity in medieval archaeology

Recent critiques of the culture‐historical approach to ethnicity have denounced the idea that archaeological cultures are ‘actors’ on the historical stage, playing the role that known individuals or groups have in documentary history. But the critique has gone as far as to claim that, because archaeologists supposedly have no access to the meaning of cultural traditions, medieval ethnicity cannot be studied by archeological means. Ethnicity should be banned from all discussions, if medieval archaeology is to make any progress in the future. The paper examines the theoretical malaise at the root of this scepticism verging on nihilism. The understanding of the archaeological record not as an imprint, but as a text allows for much learning about meaning in the past. Symbols, style and power are the key concepts that currently guide anthropological research on ethnicity as a ‘social construction of primordiality’. As several archaeological examples show, medieval ethnicity was a form of social mobilization used in order to reach certain political goals. Ethnic identity was built upon some pre‐existing cultural identity, in a prototypic manner.