The Meanings of Lesbianism in Post-War America

I had been a closet gay before I got married, about 1948, which means I had a relationship with a woman, and I'd been in love with her but I thought I was the only person in the world. There was no others in the world. I had never read a gay book. I didn't even know the word ‘gay’… I didn't know the word ‘lesbian’… And I really believe that women used to dress mannish simply to get you to know who they were … In those days it was very important.¹     

What Is and Isn't in a Name

Although I remain sympathetic to the narrative behind the notion of “History of Knowledge,” I argue against redrawing the disciplinary boundaries around “knowledge,” as opposed to retaining the term “science.” This is not because I think there is no place for a “history of knowledge,” and not because I am concerned that such a redrawing of disciplinary boundaries would open the floodgates of “anything goes.” Rather, I am doubtful that problems of demarcation and exclusion can be resolved solely by changing a name. I draw on my personal experience as an East Asianist to suggest that the challenges I faced trying to fit into the community of historians of science and technology would not have been solved by renaming the discipline. At the same time, I also argue that changes can and do happen without a change of name. And finally, I maintain that the word “science” has important connotations that we do not want to give up.     

The Lund Project on Women's Autobiographies and Diaries in Sweden

Old volume, I do love you. For me—who cannot speak—it's a relief to be able to write. And to no one else than you can I write about things I am ashamed of, things I would like to tear out of my mind, if only I could. But I can't … The only means is to analyse.     

The map drawings of Aegidius Tschudi (1505–1572)

‘On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: “We don't show churches on our maps.” Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. “That is a museum,” he said, “not what we call a ‘living church.’ It is only ‘living churches’ we don't show.”

It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps.’

E. F. Schumacher, ‘On philosophical maps,’ A guide for the perplexed (New York, 1977).     

A LIFE AND DEATH DECISION: THE INFLUENCE OF TRENDS IN FERTILITY,NUPTIALITY AND FAMILY ECONOMIES ON VOLUNTARY ENLISTMENT IN SCOTLAND,AUGUST 1914 TO DECEMBER 1915

Abstract

This article examines the influence of nuptiality and fertility patterns, and family economic strategies, on county variations in the percentage of Scottish men who voluntarily enlisted in the British Army in I9I4-I5. It relies partly on new quantitative methods, which employs the untapped War Office Memorandum of Compulsory Service [MCS] of I9I5. The MCS details the percentage of men that enlisted in British counties, and its variations for Scottish counties are cross-referenced with local demographic and economic data in a multivariate analysis. The quantitative data is then compared with reports, letters and editorials regarding voluntary enlistment in seventeen different newspapers (sixteen Scottish, and The Times) in I9I4 and I9I5. The investigation shows to what extent voluntary enlistment trends related to conditions, especially fertility trends, which pre-dated the war. It further reveals how decisions about family standards of living, made men hesitate to enlist. The article thereby further qualifies the use of ‘patriotism’ as an explanation for voluntary enlistment and the response to war in I9I4.     

Watching Wall Street: A global earthquake

When the liquidity crisis in the United States reached fever pitch in early October 2008, I began to keep a weekly journal to see if I could make sense of the event. I continued the diary for three weeks but sent it every seven days to Anthropology Today. In the journal, I used local or US expressions for the events and inserted some of my reactions as a participant - observer. I did not survey the effects of the crisis on other countries or compare their experiences to those in the US. Little did I expect that anthropology would help clarify what happened in those 21 days, but it did. I found themes from postmodernism to spheres of value, and some anthropological ideas for other ways to manage the mess.     

Researching ‘gay Cape Town’ finding value-added queerness

An initiative to market Cape Town as a premier gay and lesbian tourist destination has steadily gathered steam over the last decade. I set out to study this phenomenon thereby adding to conversations about the normalization and globalization of queerness. Rather than straightforwardly presenting my findings, however, this paper considers queer theorizing as an inductive process by detailing the answers I did not find in the field and the questions I did. Based on my close readings of queer theory, I went looking for resistance and therefore queerness in the normalized space of ‘gay Cape Town’. I was disappointed. But I did not instead find outright capitulation. Rather, in this process of queer's commodification, I found anxieties, cracks and fissures beneath a veneer of assured mainstreaming. I found an undetermined process that did not represent either ‘un-African-ness’ or ‘global queer homogeneity’ or ‘African-ness’ and ‘local queer heterogeneity’. I found not an un-queering through commodification, but a queer commodity struggling to gain a foothold in a nation in which the terrain for gay and lesbian politics has drastically changed in such a way that the market cannot be ignored. To grapple with these findings, I argue for a more ambivalent approach to queer theorizing.     

Tribute to John Paul Stevens

Justice Stevens is supposed to be older than I am, but the evidence is mixed. I remember one morning back in June of 2009, for example, when he and I happened to get to work at just the same time. I was in a suit, but John was still in tennis shorts, after one of his four weekly singles matches at 7:00 a.m. (He usually arrived in civvies.) I asked him, how’d the game go. There was a little victory leap. “I really beat him.” John's a player.     

THE END OF AMERICA: THE BEGINNING OF CANADA -A REPLY TO THE COMMENTARY

I presented 'The End of America: The Beginning of Canada' as a speculative piece of geographical interpretation. Judging by the length of the foregoing commentary and the number of written responses I have personally received, it is evident that my speculations have aroused considerable interest. I welcome the opportunity to clarify my argument. Rather than replying point by point to all the issues raised in the commentary, I will focus my remarks on what I take to be the central objection.     

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED: REFLECTIONS ON A CAREER IN GEOGRAPHY

'The Road Not Taken'
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -I took the road less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.     

1. NARRATIVE EXPLANATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS

In this paper I look at narrative as a mode of explanation and at various ways in which the explanatory value of narrative has been criticized. I begin with the roots of narrative explanation in everyday action, experience, and discourse, illustrating it with the help of a simple example. I try to show how narrative explanation is transformed and complicated by circumstances that take us beyond the everyday into such realms as jurisprudence, journalism, and history. I give an account of why narrative explanation normally satisfies us, and how or in what sense it actually explains. Then I consider how narrative is challenged and rejected as a mode of explanation in many scientific and other contexts and why attempts are made to replace it with something else. I try to evaluate the nature and sources of these challenges, and I describe this controversy over narrative against the historical background of its emergence. My paper ends with a pragmatic defense of narrative explanation against these challenges.     

A Review of African Eve Effect

I find this an intriguing paper. However I am not sure whether I agree with its main tenets, or whether I consider them to be as important as its author pretends them to be. It makes for interesting reading in the way in which it covers known terrain in new shoes, and starts from unusual perspectives.     

Loglinear Residual Tests of Moran's I Autocorrelation and their Applications to Kentucky Breast Cancer Data

This article bridges the permutation test of Moran's I to the residuals of a loglinear model under the asymptotic normality assumption. It provides the versions of Moran's I based on Pearson residuals ( I _PR) and deviance residuals ( I _DR) so that they can be used to test for spatial clustering while at the same time account for potential covariates and heterogeneous population sizes. Our simulations showed that both I _PR and I _DR are effective to account for heterogeneous population sizes. The tests based on I _PR and I _DR are applied to a set of log-rate models for early-stage and late-stage breast cancer with socioeconomic and access-to-care data in Kentucky. The results showed that socioeconomic and access-to-care variables can sufficiently explain spatial clustering of early-stage breast carcinomas, but these factors cannot explain that for the late stage. For this reason, we used local spatial association terms and located four late-stage breast cancer clusters that could not be explained. The results also confirmed our expectation that a high screening level would be associated with a high incidence rate of early-stage disease, which in turn would reduce late-stage incidence rates.     

Comment on ‘A Bayesian approach to ageing perinatal skeletal material from archaeological sites: implications for the evidence for infanticide in Roman Britain’ by R.L. Gowland and A.T. Chamberlain

In 1993, I published a paper noting that the age distribution of perinatal infants for some Romano-British sites did not conform to a natural mortality pattern but rather showed a pronounced peak at a gestational age corresponding approximately to a full term infant. I interpreted this as suggestive of infanticide, given that the deed is generally carried out immediately after birth. Gowland and Chamberlain have recently published in this journal (J. Archaeol. Sci. 29 (2002) 677) a reconsideration of the problem of Roman infanticide in which they suggest that the peak I observed in the Romano-British perinatal age at death distribution may have been an artefact of the particular ageing technique I used, and they hence call into question the evidence for Roman infanticide. In this comment I argue that their work is seriously flawed and, using a re-analysis of my 1993 data, I demonstrate that the perinatal peak I observed in the Romano-British age distribution is a robust result that supports an interpretation of infanticide.     

Old Turkic Oracle Books

Professor Wilhelm

When I began research on this topic some months ago, I had expected to find many obvious influences of the I Ching on the Turkic works. As you will see, the results were quite different; nonetheless, I hope you will find my short study interesting and enjoyable.     

Quebec and Canada at the Crossroads: A Nation within a Nation

Abstract. I argue first that there are many different concepts of the nation, and advocate a certain conceptual pluralism. I also argue that a population as a whole cannot constitute a nation unless it has a certain national consciousness. I then show that we must adopt a fundamental principle of tolerance. I also try to attend to the complexities of the relations between Quebec and Canada, and argue that different populations represent themselves as nations in different ways and with different concepts. 1 show that Quebec constitutes a nation within a nation. I then wonder what it would mean for Canadians to accept a Quebec nation. Finally, I try to explain why a very large proportion of the population of Quebec has increasingly been favourable to sovereignty, and favourable to making a partnership proposal to Canada.     

ON HANDLING URBAN INFORMALITY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

In this article I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realized. Using illustrative cases of top–down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the “disorder” and spatial “unruliness” of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be “converted”, dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio‐economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub‐Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible.     

The theatricality of eating in the life of St. Francis of Assisi

I examine the role of food, eating, and meals in the life of St. Francis of Assisi. I observe that his experience significantly differs from that of the female fasting saints. I show that his concern lies with the justifiability of eating, and that food is associated with dramatic lessons that instruct or chastise others. I argue that, like Christ, Francis uses food and eating to teach, to share a message, or to accept outsiders.