‘Unfortunate Objects’: London's Unmarried Mothers in the Eighteenth Century

Unmarried mothers in eighteenth‐century London captivated the public imagination in unprecedented ways. Using the petitions for admission into London's Foundling hospital, this article argues that unmarried mothers did not have to conform to a model of female sexual passivity, of ‘respectable illegitimacy’, in order to receive charitable relief in the eighteenth‐century metropolis. The governors of the Foundling Hospital could be indiscriminate in the petitions that they passed. This did not mean, however, that petitioners were unaware of how best to represent their case in their attempts to find a home for their child. But throughout the eighteenth century, ‘proper objects of charity’ included petitioners with many different stories to tell. These were determined by the concerns and questions of the Foundling Hospital's authorities and were not unproblematic representations of poor women's mental maps, but this piece emphasises that the circumstances of their lives rarely required embellishment to convince others of their necessity. Economic need rather than shame was the all‐important criterion in the admission of a child into the Foundling Hospital. Women's accounts of their lives provided overwhelming evidence that they, rather than the fathers of their babies, were the ‘unfortunate sex’, but they were neither hopeless nor without desire. The language of the petitions was intimately related to the everyday lives of London's poor. What framed most of the accounts presented by petitioners was not seduction, shame or secrecy but misfortune.     

James A. Smith's The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite

Abstract

This brief essay provides a few particulars about Michael Polanyi's life, showing how his philosophical interests and ideas are deeply grounded in his own experience as a European who lived through much of the twentieth century. It introduces the four essays on Polanyi's political thought that follow.     

Violence on bodies: Space,social reproduction and intersectionality

Abstract

Social categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, caste, and class have been analyzed by feminist geographers, who collectively argue that as individuals we experience and live the effects of these social categories simultaneously. Violence as a result of living these categories is not specific to certain spaces or contexts. Nor can violence be imagined as only social – it is also political, economic and institutional. Silvia Federici’s work can assist feminist geographers in understanding how this violence plays out in various contexts. Federici's detailed archival searches and empirical analyses of bodies and reproduction show parallels with contemporary forms of direct and structural violence of the state, patriarchy, and capitalism through unequal power relations and unequal life chances. Refining the scarce scholarly acknowledgement of women (and men) who are exploitable or labeled as irrational and vulnerable, and of human and non-human populations that have been relegated to the realm of surplus and expendable bodies – explain how the organization of capital facilitates and, indeed, relies on violence. In support of this argument, the authors in this collection seek pathways within Federici’s ground-breaking works Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero, which could enrich existing works in the discipline. The contributors reflect on how these particular books have been pivotal to feminist thought generally and their own research, analysis, and pedagogical practice specifically. Through their disparate studies the contributors have intertwined the geographies of structural, institutional, and/or state-sponsored violence with themes arising in Federici’s work.     

Bridewealth a Pardon: New Relationships and Restoration of Good Daughters

Bridewealth is recognized as vital in the reproduction and reconfiguration of Pacific environments and women play an integral role in this process. In contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG), bridewealth is reconfigured by kin to acknowledge the considered actions of women as they enter into relationships with men. This paper will explore how women's choices impact and influence their experience of these exchanges and determine the role of women and their kin as they undertake these practices. Here I aim to understand how the social relatedness that frames bridewealth exchanges enables the practices of bridewealth to be used as a tool for recognition of women's choices, autonomy and personhood. Although women enter into relationships without initial kin approval, bridewealth practices converge ultimately with a women's autonomous choice of husband. Wardlow suggests (2006:86) 'bridewealth confers value and dignity on female gender', and going beyond her observation, I show that bridewealth has been useful in achieving this in regard to managing and supporting social, kin and affinal relationships. This article will explore two cases, to identify what each tells us about women's ability to act in ways that are beneficial to them and important to kin. I show how moral evaluations frame (pasin) and recognize (luksave) kin and social relationships that ultimately constitute their personhood.     

Female Migration and Urban Labour Markets in Tianjin

The spontaneous, large-scale population movement from the countryside to the cities witnessed in China since the early 1980s has drawn increasing attention in academic circles. However, research has tended to focus on quantitative macro-level data collection and interpretation rather than on the experiences of those involved in the migratory process. Using qualitative research methods, this article presents the experiences and perceptions of the Chinese rural female migrants as narrated by themselves. It attempts to identify by this means the major forces behind rural women's out-migration and the institutional changes and structural barriers that have shaped women's lives and experiences in the migratory process. The author argues that women are actors and agents in this unprecedented economic and social transformation. Through their active engagement in the urban labour market, female migrants have challenged both the traditionally defined gender roles and the spatial and socio-economic boundaries that have been structurally designated to them. Their actions may catalyse a radical rearrangement of the social, political and sexual orders.     

Italian politics: no improvement in sight

Abstract

The victory of the center left in the April 2006 elections was the product of a small numerical majority that has been translated into a slim parliamentary majority in the Senate. However, the difficulties of Prodi's government have deeper roots. This article explores the structural factors of Italy's never ending political and institutional transitions, both in the political and in the social sphere. Electoral and institutional reforms may help, but the crisis runs deeper because it also affects the authorities, their origin, their quality, their performance and the political community, its fragmentation and its anti-political beliefs.     

‘ALL HIS WAYS ARE THOSE OF AN IDIOT’: THE ADMISSION,TREATMENT OF AND SOCIAL REACTION TO TWO ‘IDIOT’ CHILDREN OF THE NORTHAMPTON PAUPER LUNATIC ASYLUM, 1877–1883

Abstract

This article attempts to provide a case study of the patient case notes of two boys admitted to the Northampton Lunatic Asylum in the late 1870s. This case study is intended to provide a flavour of the asylum experience for two boys; John Wenborn aged 6 and Charles Luddington, aged 7, both deemed idiots and both removed to the county asylum. Although, the focus on two individuals provides a narrow case study their experiences will provide a window through which to analyse much broader themes such as, the changing social relationships taking place in Victorian Northamptonshire and the impact of the family in securing admission to a pauper lunatic asylum. This analysis will be set against a backdrop of the discussion of the practical uses of the asylum in the late nineteenth century and perceptions of the asylum within the community. This article will examine the mechanisms used to deal with children deemed unfit for ‘normal’ society, the experience and treatment of the children while residents of the asylum and the social response towards insane children within the wider community.     

The temptations of William Pascoe Crook: An experience of cultural difference in the Marquesas, 1797—1798

Abstract

The missionary William Pascoe Crook was the first European to make an extended residence in the Marquesas. He failed to make a single convert in the two years he was there but instead risked a ‘conversion’ of sorts in everyday compromises between fitting in with, and preserving his independence from, a way of life he found to be abhorrent. This paper reconstructs the quality of Crook's experience during his sojourn in the Marquesas and reflects on the ethnographic ‘Account of the Marquesas Islands’ compiled on his return to London in 1799. It emphasises the processes by which Crook came to a partial understanding of tapu and the role of mimicry in his adaptation to lapu as a force that will make sense of him, but that he himself does not comprehend. The paper relates Crook's experience of cultural difference to problems in the anthropological concept of culture.     

Presidential Impeachment and Institutional Dynamics in the Iran-Contra Affair and the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal

This paper analyzes institutional dynamics affecting Congress's impeachment decisions regarding the Iran-Contra Affair and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. While other scholars have explained the Clinton impeachment by pointing to differences in the nature of the scandals–a decoupling of public opinion from legislative action, increasing partisanship, and a new media regime–these explanations overlook the nature of impeachment as an institutional confrontation, governed by institutional choices and dynamics. Taking an institutional approach, we argue that congressional decisions were strongly affected by the institutional arrangements adopted by Congress to handle the scandals' investigations. In brief, the earlier strategic approaches of party leaders and the congressional investigatory approach restrained inclinations to impeach President Reagan, while later ones promoted President Clinton's impeachment. More broadly, this analysis demonstrates the important interaction between institutional choices and party leaders' powers and strategies in affecting congressional action.     

An archaeology of poverty: architectural innovation and pauper experience at Madeley Union Workhouse,Shropshire

Abstract

One of the world’s most important industrial heritage sites, Ironbridge Gorge has been the focus of numerous archaeological investigations into the area’s early, innovative industrialization. The region’s important contribution to the development of institutional architecture and early social care has not been explored. An archaeological study of Madeley Union Workhouse exposes the complexity of the evolving ideologies surrounding pauperism in the late 19th century. This article broadens our understanding of Ironbridge by analysing the region’s response to poverty and the New Poor Law, and considers the impact of institutional architecture on pauper identity and experience.     

Intimacy and angst in the field

This article explores the paradoxes of angst and intimacy in ‘the field.’ One aim of feminist research is to attend to overlooked day-to-day practices through which difference and power work. Yet, this focus on intimate and submerged experience is also risky, potentially asking that people share their most intimate experiences with the researcher. How does such attention to the personal lives of others intersect with ethical demands and postcolonial critiques of representation? A desire to understand the submerged life of the geopolitical in women's day-to-day life in India's Ladakh region has driven my research on the politics of marriage and contraceptive choices. Taken by a feminist approach to the geopolitical, I sought out the ways that intimate life was inflected by territorial struggles, without adequately comprehending either the promise or the risks of making intimacy and the body a subject of research. This work was complicated and enriched by my status as a foreigner married into a local family, which provides a not-quite-outsider positionality. This article reflects on the role of intimacy in fieldwork in two senses: doing research on intimacy, and navigating intimacies in and after the field. I argue that intimate fieldwork is full of both promise and peril for feminist researchers. I call then for careful engagement with such topics, and for a rethinking of the boundaries of the field as they relate to the researcher, who carries these boundaries in his or her own body when navigating social relations in the field.     

Speaking the Truth to the Power of the Presidency

Abstract

Instead of focusing on what characteristics the next president of the United States should have, we need to focus on the institutional realities of the presidency. Those realities consistently reflect a system dedicated to maintaining the dominance of the United States through economic and military power, and maintaining the ruling elite's control of economic and political power in this country. Persons committed to the practice of the Gospel, especially in solidarity with the poor, must name, confront and resist those institutional and cultural realities. This truth-telling can take many forms, such as life in community with the poor, public speaking, preaching, writing, demonstrations, civil disobedience, and some involvement in electoral politics. All of these will be informed by a realism that struggles faithfully without placing undue hope on presidential politics.     

THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL AND ITS TOKEN SYSTEM

Abstract

The governors of the Foundling Hospital, from its foundation in 1741, set up a system of tokens to act as identifiers that would allow families to have their children returned to them. An inventory of admissions records revealed an extraordinary variety of objects used as tokens and showed that children were generally sent adequately provided with identifiers; the hospital made good any deficiencies. The purpose of tokens as identifiers has been properly demonstrated and confirmed through the records of over 500 children whose families did petition for their return. The identities of these individuals and families have been uncovered as has the surprisingly short time many children stayed with the institution. It shows the robustness of the system the governors built around the tokens and how it worked to bring some parents and children together again. The tenacity of purpose on the parental side is a strand which runs through the stories.     

Managing mass migration after the war: The case of Sarajevo’s unification in 1996

This study analyses the immediate consequences of the transition from war to peace in Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia–Herzegovina. It focuses on the management of a tense security situation related to the postwar unification of the city, which was divided between warring belligerents during the Bosnian conflict. Firstly, it shows how ethno-nationalist leaders' visions and practices of ethnic homogenization continued after the end of the war as the result of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA). The principal tool of their postwar ‘ethnic engineering’ endeavour was to maintain and generate an atmosphere of fear, based on anticipated discrimination, maltreatment, and persecution from former belligerents. Secondly, this study explores how experienced wartime violence and related transformations in personal identities and social positioning activated latent boundaries between groups and made individuals more disposed to forms of group identification. As a result, the mass migration of people out and into Sarajevo strengthened the grip over the territories assigned to former adversaries by the DPA. This article argues that studying the mutually constitutive roles of the elite's ethnic engineering as well as ordinary people's experiences is necessary to understand how organised wartime violence transformed into structural, institutional, and other less visible forms during the postwar period. Ethno-nationalists’ discourses and points of view demonstrate how wartime violence channelled the postwar lives of Sarajevo's residents into a desired spatio-political arrangement.     

The art of science at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory: The rhetoric of aesthetics and humanism in the national laboratory system in the late 1960s

This paper examines how rhetoric shaped the early history of the National Accelerator Laboratory. In a situation defined by a contentious site search and shrinking budgets for research, Robert Wilson crafted an institutional identity for the NAL that emphasized both aesthetic and scientific experience. The paper addresses the circumstances of the laboratory's founding, the "audiences" important to its success, and the ways in which the physical environment and management structure--framed by Wilson's vision of a scientific utopia--reorganized existing perceptions of physics within a humanistic framework intended to distinguish the NAL from its predecessors in the National Laboratory system.     

‘Moving on’? Exploring the geographies of retirement adjustment amongst farming couples

Retirement is a life transition that has been relatively underexplored by geographers. In particular, mirroring other areas of academic and policy research, studies on retirement transitions and post-retirement experiences have been relatively sparse. Drawing on case studies from research in Hampshire and West Sussex (UK), this paper considers the challenges and issues surrounding the occupational cessation and retirement relocation of former farming couples. Utilising in-depth interviews, the paper explores how work-life histories may serve to intricately shape the geographies of retirement. It is seen that whilst family farming provided a shared occupation for couples, the respective gender(ed) roles and associated positionings in relation to farming served to differentially shape respective partner's experiences of, and adjustment to, retirement. In focusing on post-retirement experiences, the paper advocates a more temporally relational understanding of the geographies of older age which recognises how past places and identities are drawn upon in developing a sense of physical, social and autobiographical insideness in retirement spaces.     

Transformative landscapes: liminality and visitors’ emotional experiences at German memorial sites

Abstract

The atrocities of Nazi Germany included the radical transformation of natural landscapes. At Ravensbrück (Brandenburg), a lakeside setting became the site of the largest women’s concentration camp in Germany, processing approximately 159,000 inmates until 1945. Similarly, at Flossenbürg (Bavaria), a picturesque valley in the Oberpfälzer Wald housed a large concentration camp with approximately 100,000 inmates over seven years and a granite quarry to support Hitler’s extensive construction programme. After the war, part of Ravensbrück became a Soviet Army base, while large sections of Flossenbürg were removed to make way for a new housing and industrial development. Along with other former camps (particularly Auschwitz-Birkenau), parts of these landscapes were developed into memorial sites that aim to provide a liminal experience for visitors – a ‘rite of passage’. In attempting to regain a sense of place that evokes the trauma of the past, the landscapes of the memorial sites of Ravensbrück and Flossenbürg were recently altered to resemble their appearance in 1945. For visitors, however, the aesthetic experience of these landscapes lies in stark contrast to the narrative they encounter at both sites; they are surprised to see signs of life, objecting to modernisation at Ravensbrück or the existence of a supermarket next to the memorial site in Flossenbürg. This paper examines the transformative processes of these landscapes and explores how their liminality is constructed, experienced and challenged. Through empirical visitor research conducted at both sites, it provides a critical evaluation of the narrative given to visitors and suggests how these important sites can offer a more engaging ‘rite of passage’.     

Bishop Bickersteth’s Visitation Returns for the Archdeaconry of Craven,Diocese of Ripon, 1858

Abstract

In 1868, an article in the Yorkshire Post about the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum drew attention to Yorkshire's pivotal role in the history of mental health care. It was because of this history, it was claimed, that Yorkshiremen had a special interest in the treatment of the insane. The purpose of this paper is to explore critically this assumption in light of the recent work on the Poor Law's relationship with the asylum. The growth and development of two asylums in the neighbouring North and West Ridings of Yorkshire will be compared and contrasted. The first part of the paper offers a brief explanation of Yorkshire's pivotal role in the history of the institutional approach to the problems of mental health and the growth of institutions in the counties. Central to the paper will be an examination of how each county responded to the differing demands on its resources and how this impacted on the nature of care at each institution. Ultimately, this paper aims to show how Poor Law finances contributed significantly to the development of each institution.