Recovering a ‘Subjugated History’: Disability and the Institution in the Industrial City

The paper explores physically disabled people’s experiences of institutions in the industrial city, focusing on the case of nineteenth-century Melbourne. Here ‘institutions’ refers to the panoply of public, semi-public, private and charitable places that were established in industrial cities to house, and frequently confine, a diverse estate of poor, ill, elderly, disabled and otherwise socially dependent persons. The aim of this paper is to retrace the institutional experiences of disabled people in nineteenth-century Melbourne, with a view to explaining the role of the institution within a broader ‘social space of disability’in the industrial city. In particular, the analysis seeks to identify the type of institutions that disabled people were admitted to, including places of confinement such as gaols. The paper also explores how disabled people coped with the ‘duty to attend the asylum‘ (after Foucault) that weighed heavily on socially marginalised people in the industrial city.     

NRM Regions in Australia: the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’

This paper identifies external factors affecting the capacity of Australia's now‐formalised 56 regional natural resource management (NRM) bodies and their community‐based Boards to meet planning and management responsibilities. It demonstrates that little is known about the basic capacity‐related characteristics of NRM regions, despite the lengthy and elaborate process of regionalism that Australia has embarked upon, with its associated and substantial devolution of responsibilities and resources. A suite of indicators is used to develop an ‘exploratory’ capacity typology of NRM regions. The ten regional ‘types’ identified are found to attract varying budget allocations under the Natural Heritage Trust Extension and National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. There are indications that State and regional interests within and outside NRM can significantly influence the distribution of resources. An examination of resources allocated to capacity‐building activities shows significant differences between regions in the scale of resources allocated (0–96% of total budget). The paper argues the case for intervention to reduce the gap between ‘have’ and ‘have not’ regions, and for further exploration of disparities in the allocation of resources to capacity‐building activities. Clarification is needed of the extent to which capacity‐building activities adequately target regional NRM bodies and their Boards.     

Against Nostalgia: Place and Memory in Myles Lalor's ‘Oral History’

Western thought tends to see aboriginal identity as dependent upon a particularistic ubiety. Myles Lalor, a New South Wales Aborigine, proposes another kind of identity which recognises that for his generation the tie between place and people is liable to be ruptured, but asserts that wherever there are Aboriginal people there are other places to be Aboriginal. Lalor presents his refusal of nostalgia in the form of an autobiography which articulates memories through a sense of his own agency.     

Uncommon Ground: The ‘Poverty of History’ in Common Property Discourse

It would not be a great exaggeration to say that scholars of environmental conservation and conflict have re‐discovered the institutional foundations of social and economic life. At the heart of this ‘renaissance’ is the belief that property and property relations have a strong bearing on how people use, manage and abuse natural resource systems, and that institutional arrangements based on the creation and management of common property can have positive impacts on resource use and conservation. Two bodies of thought compete for a voice in this literature. One, which aims to resolve Hardin's tragedy of the commons, is primarily concerned with the problem of encouraging collective action to conserve resources that are both depletable and unregulated. A second, influenced by notions of moral economy and entitlement, deals with the problem of creating and sustaining resource access for poor and vulnerable groups in society. This article argues that the literature on common property has become divided between a body of scholarship that uses deductive models of individual decision‐making and rational choice to explain the ways in which different types of property rights arrangements emerge and change over time, and one whose questions, aims and methods are more modest, and historically‐specific. It then aims to understand this evolution by situating the mainstream common property discourse in the wider intellectual trend of positivism, methodological individualism and formal modelling that has come to dominate social science in the United States. In so doing, it attempts to unravel the political and ideological foundations of what has come to be a dominant mode of understanding environmental problems, and solutions to these problems.     

Neither ‘New Melanesian History’ nor ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’: Recovering Emplaced Matrilineages in Southeast Solomon Islands

ABSTRACT For two decades, Melanesianists have sought to reconcile what Robert Foster (1995) termed the ‘New Melanesian History’ and the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’. The former describes historically oriented studies that critique representations of Melanesian custom as recent objectifications of strategically positioned discourses and practices. The latter describes culturally oriented, particularist studies that characterize Melanesian sociality as an undifferentiated plane of being without integral a priori units; on every scale, human agency must individuate persons and collectivities by means of ‘fraction’, ‘de‐conception’, and ‘decomposition’. In this article I present data from Solomon Islands that resist analysis in terms of an unqualified both/and synthesis of these orientations. Specifically, I argue that articulations of matrilineal connections to land among the Arosi of Makira are neither merely postcolonial reifications of custom nor historically conditioned ‘depluralizations’ from an always pre‐constituted social pleroma. Through historically situated case studies, I show how Arosi land disputes both reproduce and revalue matrilineally defined categories, each understood as the humanized continuation of an autonomous primordial essence. Recognition of the continuing importance of these categories among Arosi highlights what the New Melanesian Ethnography has obscured: that some Melanesians confront a historically transforming problem of how pre‐existent parts fit together to make up social totalities.     

Women's Property,Women's Agency in China's ‘New Enclosure Movement’: Evidence from Zhejiang

Who gets what, why and how, when Chinese villagers' land is enclosed? Focusing specifically on changes in women's property rights and drawing on data from Zhejiang province, this article shows that state, village and household institutions interact to produce significant gender disparities in both the compensation paid to expropriated villagers and the registration of ownership of household assets. Yet it would be incorrect to conclude that, dispossessed, women thereby lack agency. Analysis of women's responses to expropriation suggests that by selectively deploying laws, rules and norms in different settings, women are influencing not only compensation distribution, but also the terms under which the state compensates villagers for their expropriation and the gender relations in which property is embedded.     

‘Balkan Mentality’: History,Legend, Imagination

Abstract. In this article I attempt to do two things. First I consider in what sense it could be reasonable to talk of a ‘Balkan mentality’, shared across national divisions by all peoples in Southeastern Europe. I argue among other things that nationalism and its impact on culture and scholarship has been a major stumbling block for the conceptualisation of a shared ‘Balkan mentality’. Secondly, I go on to examine one possible context in which a shared mentality could be said to have existed among the Orthodox Christians in the Balkans. I suggest that such a context could be located in the pre-nationalist Balkan society of the eighteenth century, a period in which the region was politically united by Ottoman rule. To illustrate the content of the mental outlook shared by the Balkan Orthodox in the eighteenth century I examine the autobiographical writings of three major authors, one writing in Greek (Caisarios Depontes), one in Bulgarian (Sofroni Vra?anski) and one in Serbian (Matija Nenadovi?). I identify the shared mental elements reflected in their texts and point out how the transition to a national self-conception taking place at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Balkans, marked the end of this shared ‘Balkan mentality’. The study is thus an exploration in the ‘prehistory’, as it were, of nationalism in the Balkans, an exploration which also looks at the symbolic origins nationalism in the region as reflected in the texts of two of the three authors.     

‘Patriotic Femininity’: Women's Morals and Men's Morale During the Second World War

The Second World War was a period which witnessed struggles for the definitions of appropriate ‘patriotic’ feminine identities and behaviours as much as it placed demands on men and their masculinities. The disruption to normality led to a heightened sense of heterosexuality. There were contests for the definition of femininity, contests which contradicted the centrality of discourses constructing domesticity and passivity. The way history has been constructed the heroic myths of the Second World War are male, thus there is a need for other kinds of critical knowledge to provide an understanding of women's lives and another, feminine, kind of heroism.     

Recategorizing ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Property in Ghana

In the course of political struggle in northern Ghana, the classification of land and resources has shifted between the two ‘master categories’ of public and private. Despite the fact that master categories may be wholly inadequate in accounting for the actual complexity of property objects, social units and rights, they are not divorced from the agency of people who have something at stake. Laws, rules and by‐laws are referred to as important markers and fashion the local political struggles over the rights to and control over resources. This article offers a general account of conflicts and the recategorization of resources in the property system of small‐scale irrigation. It examines the logics and positioning of the different stakeholders, and discusses how different levels of public policy have provided opportunities for such changes. A case study presents the opportunity to examine the details of a particular controversy demonstrating the social and political powers involved in the recategorization of property.     

‘The Men Have Come’: Gender and Militarisation in Kampala, 1966–86

This article explores the gender implications of the militarisation of the Mengo neighbourhood of Kampala. It analyses how the hyper‐militarisation under post‐colonial regimes, particularly those of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, marked a significant gender reversal. The military presence in Mengo emasculated civilian men, who were attacked and abused by soldiers, and led women to assume the roles of ‘protectors’ who safeguarded men, children and their homes. Women volunteered for the most dangerous tasks at the household and community levels and faced constant dangers, including rape, violence and other forms of abuse. Using oral histories collected from the residents in Mengo in 2014, I examine this reconfiguration of gender roles and its reverberations in contemporary Mengo. Interviews with the women and men from Kampala describe the various ways women protected people and spaces and at the same time stress men's vulnerability. This article therefore challenges popular conceptions of women as weak and vulnerable and in need of men's protection in militarised situations.