The ‘Dividual Androgyne’ and Me: a Personal Affair

In the 25 years since Marilyn Strathern published The Gender of the Gift (1988) its signature concepts of the ‘dividual androgyne’ and ‘sociality’ have received almost no criticism in the anthropological literature and are now widely accepted as true. The ‘dividual’ is considered to be ‘a new, non‐unitary model of embodiment and … one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20^th Century’ despite the fact that it erases affect, agency, identity and other essential features of human beings (Lipset 2008). The present critique of Strathern's concept of the androgynous ‘dividual’ challenges its legitimacy as a Melanesian or any other ‘premodern’ form of personhood and suggests that it expresses the wish of academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to locate an indigenous model for androgyny and to characterise patriarchy, misogyny and sexual segregation as peculiarly Western. The article explores aspects of Gimi myth, ritual and exchange which Strathern claims helped her to formulate the concept of the ‘dividual’ (especially those surrounding men's sacred bamboo flutes) and concludes that she mistook a virulently anti‐female ideology – including a fantasy in which men may subsume or incorporate certain aspects of female anatomy – for benign accommodation between the sexes. The ‘dividual’ does not correspond to social reality among the Gimi and paradoxically affirms Lévi‐Strauss' classic demonstration in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that ‘the gender of the gift’ is invariably female.     

Piot,Personhood, Place and Mobility in Lihir,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper is an exploration of the nature of personhood through the medium of the concept of piot in the Lihir islands, Papua New Guinea. Piot is an embodied experience in response to the movement of others in space. When people leave or arrive at a place and spend the night, others in the area feel unwell. Piot is thus one aspect of the relations between persons. I suggest that ideas of relational personhood are inadequate to fully comprehend piot, and, following LiPuma (1998) and Clay (1986) rather than Strathern (1988), argue that persons in Lihir are more than just relational beings who always act with others in mind. Piot is predicated on the dual themes of fixed sociality and mobility that are important in Lihir as elsewhere in Melanesia (cf Eves 1998; Patterson 2002). Through piot, persons comment on and sanction the movement of others, yet this mobility still occurs.     

Book Reviews

Letters from the Dust Bowl by Caroline Henderson Alvin O. Turner (Ed.), 2001 Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press 320 pp., $34.90 hardback ISBN 0-8061-33-3 hardback The American ‘Dust Bowl’ landscape of the 1930s has been etched into the global imagination through powerful narratives: Farm Security Administration photography (1935-43), Per Loretz's film, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, historians such as Donald Worster (1979) have constructed their own narratives of this time and place. Caroline Henderson's Letters from the Dust Bowl, edited by Alvin O. Turner, provides a counterpoint, in the form of a first-hand account and a woman's voice, to the news stories, government propaganda, and historians' analyses that construct our understanding of the Dust Bowl. Henderson's letters reveal not only the ‘real’ experience of living in that place during a particularly difficult time, but also the ‘before’ and ‘after’–what led these individuals to the Great Plains and what became of them afterward. Educated at Mt Holyoke, Caroline Henderson ventured out onto the panhandle of Oklahoma to homestead in 1907 as a single woman, who ‘hungered and thirsted for something away from it all and for the out-of-doors’ (p. 33). She met her future husband Will when she hired a crew to dig a well on her land. Letters from the Dust Bowl captures Caroline's transformation from an idealistic young woman to a woman ‘worn by years of struggle with land and life’. Caroline's ‘letters’ are an amalgamation of letters to family and friends, and letters and essays written for publications such as the Atlantic Monthly. Letters begins with Henderson's optimism and delight in both life and landscape. Caroline's early writings capture the excitement of homesteading, of marriage, of being a young mother. Her writings eventually shift from purely personal letters to family and friends to being a source of additional income. Drought and failed crops led Caroline to begin writing for publication in 1913; her first published article was on her first years homesteading. She became a regular contributor to Ladies' World magazine, as their ‘Homestead Lady’, until its demise in 1918.     

Business from the cesspit. Investigations into the socio-economic network of the Van Lidth de Jeude family (1701–78) in Tiel,the Netherlands,on the basis of shellac letter-seals from a cesspit

Abstract

Small red objects were found during the excavation of an 18th-century cesspit in the town of Tiel in the Netherlands. These red flakes proved to be shellac seals from letters. Archaeological and historical evidence show that the upper-class family of Van Lidth de Jeude lived in the mansion at the time the refuse was discarded. Coats of arms were depicted on the seals impressed by seal matrices or signet rings. As they were attached to letters, they represent the mail sent to the family. Heraldic and historical investigation led to the identification of about 40 persons and families who corresponded with the Van Lidth de Jeudes. Three socio-economic groups were recognized: an official network of, for example, mayors of other towns in the State of Guelders; within the Tieler- and Bommelerwaard region; and family and relatives. A fourth group consists of official and semi-official contacts in the town of Utrecht. Because family, relations, marital status and gender can be distinguished from the shape and composition of the personal coats of arms, these seals throw light on the nature of the family correspondence. They reveal what may have been a gender-based network between the Van Lidth de Jeude ladies and their female relatives in other towns.     

‘A Still Ecstasy of Freedom and Enjoyment’: Walking the City in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

This article situates Charlotte Brontë’s writing within the context of mid-nineteenth-century discourses of gender and travel, and posits that Brontë contributes to the discursive construct of the flâneuse through her writing about women walking the city in her letters from Belgium and in the novel Villette (1853). Through a critical framework drawing together literary historicism on women in the Victorian city and mobility theories of embodied and sensory movement, the analysis reveals how Brontë foregrounds the experience of the body in her writing of women walking, and uses this as a mode through which to explore gendered discourses of mobility, and especially women’s urban walking. It argues that Brontë offers a new model of female urban spectatorship which privileges the body of the flâneuse as the prime site of knowing the city; this positively reconfigures the possibilities for autonomy and agency that urban walking affords, while at the same time making the body a site through which ambivalence about women’s mobility is expressed. The article reveals Charlotte Brontë to be a writer actively engaged with discourses of mobility and modernity that have been overlooked in her work, and situates Brontë as a significant contributor to debates about women and the city. It advances literary histories of city walking by locating Villette as a key participant within the field, and contributes to Brontë studies by revealing new perspectives on the significance of women’s travel in her works.     

The Context of the Stewart–Prevost Correspondence

Summary

The correspondence in this issue of History of European Ideas has not previously been published. It is the surviving part of the epistolary exchange between Dugald Stewart and the Genevan professor and man of letters Pierre Prevost (1751–1839) from the 1790s to the 1820s. To this are added several closely connected letters to and from their associates. This correspondence is striking evidence of the republic of letters continuing to flourish in the aftermath of the French Revolution, illustrating the transmission of works, the role of go-betweens, the provision of letters of introduction and the formation of intellectual and personal alliances. Not least, the letters tell us much about the ideas of those involved, and about the formation, development, and relation of these ideas to published works. This is particularly significant for Stewart, most of whose letters and papers are lost.     

The Legacy of Bernard Narokobi and the Melanesian Way

ABSTRACT

This special issue on the life and legacy of Bernard Narokobi documents and contextualizes Narokobi's life and thought. A central figure in Papua New Guinea's transition from Australian territory to independent nation, Narokobi was a jurist, philosopher, and poet who is best remembered for making ‘the Melanesian Way’ an important theme – if not the guiding ideological principle – in the discourse of independence in Papua New Guinea. In looking closely at Narokobi's biography, the collection also contributes to a growing body of work on political life writing in the Pacific. The collection speaks to Narokobi's role as a theorist of Oceanic modernity more broadly, one who deserves a place alongside two other important philosophers of Pacific independence, Epeli Hau‘ofa and Jean-Marie Tjibaou, as one of the main visionaries of Pacific decolonization and Oceanic modernity of the post-war period.     

Noble Traditions and Christian Principles: The Integral Spirituality of Bernard Narokobi

ABSTRACT

This article describes some of the major events in the Catholic Church in Papua New Guinea (PNG) following the Second Vatican Council, the ‘self study’ of the church in PNG in the 1970s, and the General Assembly of 2003–4. An outcome of the self study was the establishment of a national Catholic council in which Bernard Narokobi played a significant role. The article continues with a reflection on how Narokobi’s promotion of Melanesian spirituality finds links with a Catholic theology of grace and sacrament and how these two contribute to his understanding of the dual pillars of the PNG Constitution with its noble traditions and Christian principles coming together in the ideal of integral human development. The article lays out different ways Bernard Narokobi was formally involved with the church over his lifetime and how his bringing together of Melanesian experience and Christian faith provided a model for the integral liberation he envisaged and expressed – both in his work in the church and in the National Goals and Directive Principles of the PNG Constitution.     

Poetic Theology: Paul and Form

ABSTRACT

The article offers a reading of the letters of Paul in relation to their interpretation by a number of figures – Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou. It traces the persistence of an economy of terms in Paul, in relation to the part and the whole, death and life, spirit and the flesh, and others, to argue that this economy morphs and transforms itself in the modern world, imparting and imposing a sociality of living and dying, a coercive distribution and withholding of violence in colonization, on a global scale. And this paper argues, at the same time, that the economy of terms Paul’s letters advance is interrupted, that it comes undone, and that, in this coming undone, the theological becomes poetic – that the letters if Paul teach us to read what may be called “poetic theology.”     

Lucy Hutchinson,Lucretius and Soteriological Materialism

Abstract

This article examines Lucy Hutchinson's pervasive materialism, arguing that her use of corporeal imagery – in part shaped by her early translation of Lucretius – contributes to the soteriological purposes of her later works in multiple ways. Criticism on Hutchinson has tended to divorce the materialist imagery of her translation from the Calvinistic themes of her other writings. I argue, however, for the lasting presence of a materialism constructed from the vocabularies of Lucretian Epicureanism, Neoplatonism and John Owen. Focusing especially on the poem Order and Disorder and Hutchinson's theological tract to her daughter, I show how she uses materialism as a “means” to achieving assurance and grace. I suggest that these various responses to physical experience are part of Hutchinson's enduring investigation into the ontology of “Order” and “Disorder”, and her quest for stable spiritual being.     

Out of ‘Common Humanity’: Humanitarianism,Compassion and Efforts in Australia to Assist Jewish Refugees in the 1930s

In June 1935, Edith Roll, a thirteen-year-old from Vienna, wrote to her Australian pen-pal, Jean Doig, aged ten. This correspondence was tragically short-lived. Edith Roll’s family was swept up in the murder and destruction of Jews in Europe. The efforts of Jean’s parents – the respected country doctor, Keith Doig, and his wife, Louie – who attempted but failed to assist Edith and her family, her father, Jakob Roll, her mother Emilie and brother Fritz, are examined in this article. To disregard their efforts as tangential to the history of refugees because they were unsuccessful means we miss an opportunity to explore the historically situated notions of compassion and empathy that can be at the centre of these endeavours. Drawing on personal letters rather than the views of government officials, this article examines the Doig family efforts and what inspired them, arguing that these are a vital part of the complex story of refugee and migration history.     

Poison and romance: Oscar Wilde and the strange case of Edith Thompson

Oscar Wilde considered crime and sin no impediment to art or culture, as the case of the poisoner-artist-critic Thomas Wainewright (1794–1847) allowed him to demonstrate. English society of the time, as George Orwell famously declared, was as fascinated by poisoning as was Wilde. One of Orwell's cases was that of Edith Thompson who, along with her young lover, was convicted in 1922 in London of conspiracy to murder her husband whom it was alleged she had tried to poison. She and her lover were hanged in early 1923. Thompson's preoccupation with poison was entangled with her preoccupation with popular romance fiction of the day which she read copiously and discussed perceptively with her lover in the letters that helped to convict her. Her favourite novelist was Robert Hichens, the acquaintance, imitator and caricaturist of Wilde. She quoted Hichens's novel Bella Donna (1909) in letters to her lover, including on the practical matter of poison, which helped convince the jury of her guilt. Her trial, like Wilde's trials – all involving sexual transgression – raised the difficult question of whether literature could poison and influence for the worse its readers or whether it lay outside both morality and the world of action. Moreover, were Thompson's own letters literature and fantasy or were they oblique discussions of practical intent, including the intent to murder? As in the case of Wilde, a larger question supervened. In part through her reading, in part through her own experience, Edith came to believe, even before the murder, that freedom is an illusion, fate an inescapable reality.     

Calls for educating girls in the Third World: futurity,girls and the ‘Third World Woman’

In this article I examine three calls for Western support for girls' education in the ‘developing world’. Using transnational feminist theory and discourse analysis I look at three examples of these calls; Three Cups of Tea, ‘Because I Am a Girl’ and the United National Girls Education Initiative. I suggest that what Mohanty (1988) terms the ‘Third World Woman’ – a homogeneous, static image of women in the third world – is the spectre used to motivate Western support. Through representations of girls, Western viewers/readers are hailed to invest in order to save the girl-child from the haunting ‘Third World Woman’. The girl-child, through her particularity as a girl, her future womanhood as motherhood and her neoliberal potential, becomes presented as emblems of a better future with the investment of Westerners.     

The experience and the idea of war in the writings of Simone Weil and Marguerite Duras

Abstract

This article considers the works of Simone Weil and Marguerite Duras as witnesses and narrators of the events of the Second World War. Their two perspectives offer a first, original reflection by women intellectuals on war and violence based on direct involvement. Simone Weil construed her idea of ‘force’ from her first-hand experience of the Spanish Civil War and her participation in the French Resistance, in London. Marguerite Duras offered her personal testimony of war violence (in the French Resistance, in France) intertwining fiction and reality, wavering together autobiography and invention. Duras, in the contrary, tried to represent the unrepresentable by connecting her personal to a collective trauma.     

From the Grassroots: Bernard Narokobi and the Making of Papua New Guinea's Constitution

ABSTRACT

Bernard Narokobi's concept of the Melanesian Way was influenced by a variety of factors, including his own childhood in the village, his religion, and the understandings of the people around him. He also drew inspiration from his exposure to the views and opinions of the many Papua New Guineans who contributed to the work of the Constitutional Planning Committee (CPC) between 1972 and 1975 when he served as a consultant to the committee. He shared the belief in a specifically ‘Melanesian’ way of social organization and cosmological understanding with the others who took part in the CPC's work, most prominently its de facto chairman, Father John Momis. With Momis he drew on the people's contributions to formulate PNG's National Goals and Directive Principles, which, at least in part, embody Narokobi's understanding of what it is to be Melanesian.     

Singing about the Land among the Biangai

This paper examines Biangai (Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea) expressions and transformations of environmental imaginaries through women's mourning songs (yongo ingi) and the songs of string bands. Biangai personhood, once intimately connected to garden lands and trees, hunting and forest paths, is increasingly influenced by global capitalism. Through their songs, they betray an increased tension between acting as an individual person and acting in terms of kin based relationality. While yongo ingi still memorialize the social spaces and land rights of the deceased, they also express conflicts in Biangai engagement with gold mining. Biangai string bands emerged just prior to Papua New Guinea's Independence in 1975, with the first band recording and releasing a national cassette in 1982. Dominated by young men, they depict the intersection of local music with a Melanesian modernity composed of compensation payments, gold mining, love, travel, and marketing. Both yongo ingi and string bands inform each other and provide insight into how local music engages images of both global economy and global ecology. By examining the uses, meanings, and performative contexts of these songs, this paper contributes to our understanding of the role of such expressive forms in connecting persons and their environment.     

Being Mesolithic in Life and Death

Fifty years ago, approaches to Mesolithic identity were limited to ideas of ‘Man the Hunter’ and ‘Woman the Gatherer’, while evidence of non-normative practice was ascribed to ‘shamans’ and to ‘ritual’, and that was that. As post-processual critiques have touched Mesolithic studies, however, this has changed. In the first decade of the 21st century a strong body of work on Mesolithic identity in life, as well as death, has enabled us to think beyond modern Western categories to interpret identity in the Mesolithic. These studies have addressed the nature of personhood and relational identities, the body, and the relationship between human and other-than-human persons. Our paper reviews these changing approaches, offering a series of case studies from a range of different sites that illustrate how identity is formed and transformed through engagements with landscapes, materials, and both living and dead persons. These are then developed to advocate an assemblage approach to identity in the Mesolithic.     

Teresa's experiences

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine the notion of personal experience in relation to mysticism. I observe that St. Teresa of Jesus includes both her ordinary and extraordinary experiences in her writings on prayer, and I argue that these experiences are essential to her theology.     

Ukraine’s national integration before and after 2014. Shifting ‘East–West’ polarization line and strengthening political community

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the question of Ukraine’s societal polarization along the East-West line and the state of cohesion and endurance of its political community. In both political and academic discourses, Ukraine is often characterized as a country split between Western and Eastern regional and societal parts belonging to some wider geopolitical and cultural entities. Moreover, the recent upheavals in the life of the country – Euromaidan Revolution, illegal annexation of Crimea and Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas – have actualized the allegations about Ukraine as a feeble state structure on the brink of disintegration and collapse. The findings in this study challenge both of these claims and it is argued that Ukraine is not a deeply divided or failed state. In practice, the East-West political polarization line is not clearly defined, but to the extent that it does surface in the political and electoral contests, this line has been moving from west to east since the early 1990s. The shifting of the polarization line implies that political and cultural identities in Ukraine are not fixed and, at the same time, reflects a strengthening cohesion of Ukraine’s political and cultural space. These findings are confirmed by the improved and ever-increasing convergence of Ukrainian society following the Euromaidan and Russian military aggression.