Enduring Colonial Grammars of Self: Infrastructure,Coloniality, Ethnicity

Building on critical geographical scholarship on racialism and coloniality reiterated through infrastructure systems, this article explores how inherently colonial constructs of ethnicity-as-identity—as sub-genres of humanity and further biopolitical differentiation of Blackness—are reworked through contemporary mega-infrastructures. Focusing on the development of Lamu Port in Kenya, it analyses how infrastructures entrench pre-existing symbolic and material divisions between ostensibly different ethnic groups and how they perceive themselves within Kenya's body politic. Doing this, the article demonstrates how mega-infrastructures actively reproduce the sub-genres of humanity that were set in motion during the colonial period as categories inscribing the racialised, constitutive otherness to Whiteness. The coloniality of power, therefore, endures, reverberating through infrastructures into materialities of the present and the everyday of peoples who continue to rely on colonial grammars of sub-humanisation to maintain a sense of self in the world of not their own making.     

Self-Citation in Archaeology: Age, Gender, Prestige, and the Self

Citation analyses in archaeology have detected prestige tactics, shifts in research agendas, and patterns of gender differentiation. This paper focuses on self-citation in archaeology and systematically analyzes the factors that affect rates of self-citation. Self-citation rates in archaeology are significantly higher than in socio-cultural anthropology but are average for a social science with interdisciplinary ties to the physical sciences. Self-citation correlates weakly with the gender of the citing author and the geographic and thematic focus of research, but correlates strongly with the age of the author. Additional analyses reveal partial evidence for the use of self-citation as a prestige tactic. The paper concludes with a discussion of citations to writers close to the author (mentors, friends).     

Witnessing Whittaker Chambers: Communism,McCarthyism and the Confessional Self

ABSTRACT

Hobbes left a complicated legacy for the English Whigs. They thought that his Leviathan was all too powerful, but they found other elements in his thought more appealing – mostly his anticlericalism. Still, the precise relationship between Hobbes and the Whigs has remained underexplored, while some still argue that Hobbes was simply too much of an absolutist for the Whigs to rely on his political ideas. This article attempts to show that Hobbes was, in fact, recruited by proto- and early Whigs for their causes. It shows how Hobbesian ideas were used in the toleration debates of the 1660s and 1670s, and even in debates on human reason and liberty of conscience. Then it demonstrates how similar Hobbesian principles, and even phrases, were used subsequently in the formative years of Whiggism from the 1680s to the 1720s, by thinkers who were worried, as Hobbes was, about the political aspirations of the Church. By collecting a series of prominent thinkers who are associated with Whiggism and who engaged with Hobbes in various ways – including Buckingham, Marvell, Cavendish, Warren, Blount, Tindal, Trenchard and Gordon – this article shows that Hobbes was employed systematically in the service of Whig causes, such as limited toleration, civil religion and an opposition to religious persecution.     

Displacing Barthes: Self,Other and the Anxiety of Theory

This article explores the relationship between the other and the writing self in three of Barthes's works and shows how the anxious and changeable state of the ‘je’ unsettles conceptions of ‘theory’ and its analytical object. Barthes attempts to conceptualise cultural otherness in Mythologies, L'Empire des signes and Incidents, and, on one level, his fantasies of encounter serve to displace or unground the writing ‘self’. On another level, however, the theorist's persona in these works turns out to be disorientated and unnerved by these displacements, and he couples his jubilant self-dissolution with a longing for a sense of origin or ground. Barthes as a result remains undecided about his positioning within his own discourse, and his works demonstrate the necessary interpenetration of theories of alterity with the contradictory subjective and affective desires of the writing self. The aim of the piece is ultimately to argue that, for its very flaws and inconsistencies, Barthes's writing about otherness may help us to understand the challenges and deficiencies of postcolonial conceptions of cultural difference.     

Violence,Social Differentiation and the Self

The article considers aspects of violence in everyday life among the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands. It briefly compares the role of violence in bureaucratically and juridically mediated forms with self-help and social regulation in Aboriginal societies, focussing on the expressive or performative aspects of violence in everyday interaction. Myers' discussion of violence among the Pintubi posits a dialectical polarity of relatedness and differentiation, corresponding with the affective poles of compassion and anger. This is compared with Sansom's account of semi-ritualized forms of violence in Aboriginal fringe-camp life, where a point of commonality in Myers' and Sansom's approaches is found: this consists of the attunement of action, of violence, self-violence and destructiveness to the witnessing public. In Tiwi life too, conflict is dynamically shaped by actors' attempts to impinge upon, to seek to arouse and in some cases to manipulate, compassion or concern in the witnessing group as defence or as a form of moral attack. Open, dramatic ‘appealing’ violence, often in the form of a more or less controlled loss of self-control, seeks to parry indirect interpersonal tension and antagonism, to reassert or restore social distance and protect or privilege important relationships from intrusive demands. However, these violent appeals in rhetorical threat, in self-violence, destructiveness or sometimes in dramatic suicidal gestures also invariably indicate extreme personal difficulty displaced into open forms of confrontation. The article proposes that the generative moment of violence for social differentiation be sought in an examination of dynamic interrelationships between individual life-history, inner group processes and their articulation with external social forms.     

Self,Consciousness and Agency in The Egoist

This article re-reads representations of the self and agency in George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) by drawing new connections between the novel and Victorian psychological theory. Critical discussions of The Egoist and psychological themes have rightly stressed the many ways in which, in Meredith’s novel, impersonal forces, biological, physiological and ideological, threaten to obliterate any notion of the self as discrete and autonomous. Yet Meredith maintains a strong ethical investment in individual agency. Comparing metaphors of fluidity, used to describe the self and consciousness in Meredith’s text, with similar images taken from the work of G. H. Lewes and James Sully, I argue that Meredith presents the self’s plasticity as crucial to its individuation and potential autonomy, even while that same plasticity also underlines the self’s vulnerability to social and ideological forces which threaten its independence. Clara’s individuality and agency take on distinctive political significance by challenging oppressive gender norms. Yet the vulnerabilities and bewildering complexities of individual subjective life, expressed in Meredith’s extravagant extensions of psychological metaphors, mean that any one self’s moves towards greater freedom must be fraught with uncertainty. The final part of the essay draws new connections between the psychological imagery that I have been exploring and Meredith’s engagement with human evolution. Clara’s individuation and capacity for autonomous action give the lie to Willoughby’s pseudo-Darwinian schematisation of her identity, yet the relationship between self and evolution remains a serious and complex issue in the novel.     

The Translation of the Unseen Self: Fortunatus,Mercury and The Wishing-Hat

This article examines the popular early German prose text Fortunatus both as folktale and as mercantile myth, concentrating on the hitherto critically neglected Wishing-Hat, which is regarded in this essay as a descendant of the Petasus of Mercury. In the original Fortunatus text dating from 1509, there are many points of contact centred in the Hat, such as its appearance, the themes of speed, secrecy, invisibility, theft, and commerce, between Fortunatus and Mercury. The manner in which these themes were developed in subsequent German revisions of Fortunatus and in seventeenth-century English translations and adaptations of the text is discussed. From embodiment of knowledge to a signifier of multipresence, from being a representation of travel to an accessory to raptorial attack, the uses and meanings of the Wishing-Hat are seen to be many and varied.     

Self,Health, and Gender: Complementary and alternative medicine in the British mass media

The growth of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the West entails complex geographies of health, identity and knowledge. Debates about why people are attracted to CAM highlight the importance of consumer agency and increasing access to health care information. The article explores a key space within which information on CAM is produced and negotiated: health and lifestyle magazines. Drawing upon interviews with the editors of eight British titles, the article outlines three ways in which CAM is discursively framed: as a pragmatic medical tool kit brought to bear on the diseased body; as a means of achieving 'total well-being' in everyday metropolitan space; and as a central pillar of an alternative lifestyle. The final section of the article considers how editors understand and address their predominantly female readerships, with an emphasis on how CAM is articulated within an ostensibly emancipatory project of self-responsibility and personal empowerment against the ambivalent backdrop of consumer culture.     

自我的觉醒:彼特拉克与现代性

自布克哈特在《意大利文艺复兴时期的文化》中首次提出彼特拉克是"第一个现代人"后,引发学术界关于彼特拉克是"现代人"抑或中世纪人的激烈争论。身处中世纪与文艺复兴新旧交替以及"现代人"与旧有传统矛盾的历史时期,作为文艺复兴之父的彼特拉克首当其冲地经历了这场巨变。在经历青年、中年和老年的三场觉醒后,彼特拉克意识到自己需要摆脱过去与未来之纠缠,在新旧的断裂带中寻找突破时间限制的夹缝,让自己的作品在时间的洪流中保持永恒的鲜活。     

Self and others

ABSTRACT

What is the relation between self-knowledge and knowledge of others? And how do we develop an understanding of others and ourselves? In this paper, I will argue that our sense of self is thoroughly social even though self-knowledge is not based on the same kind of evidence as knowledge of others. Moreover, I will suggest that we need to distinguish between different kinds of self- and other-understanding: some are based on procedural knowledge or knowing-how and involve an implicit representation of self or other, while others involve conceptual abilities. I will conclude with some considerations regarding the role of the second-person perspective in structuring the development of the concept of ourselves and others as persons.     

Self and space,resistance and discipline: a Foucauldian reading of George Orwell's 1984

The novel 1984, George Orwell's nightmarish vision of totalitarianism published after the Second World War, remains relevant in the twenty‐first century. Orwell's concerns regarding the abuse of power, the denial of self, and the eradication of both past and future continue to resonate in contemporary discussions of politics and society. Geographers, however, have directed minimal attention to the spatiality embedded within 1984. Accordingly, in this paper I examine the theoretical implications of space, resistance and discipline as manifest in the novel. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault, I detail how the spatial and temporal control of everyday activities serves to discipline spaces within a totalitarian society. Moreover, I suggest that 1984 illustrates how the production of knowledge through the act of writing may forge spaces of resistance within disciplined spaces. This paper contributes, therefore, in two areas, these being resistance geographies and fictive geographies.     

Sexing the Self: Geographies of engagement and encounter

Geographic research on the construction of sexual identity takes inspiration from two main sources. The first is the post-structural literature that suggests sexual subjects are sutured to identities created in the realms of discourse. The second is a psychoanalytical tradition concerned with the desires and disgusts experienced by sexual subjects as they seek to reconcile their inner selves with the outside world. In this paper an attempt is made to combine these contrasting perspectives by exploring the way sexualities are negotiated by individuals as they encounter a world that is both real and imagined. The utility of this approach is illustrated with reference to the author's research on sex work, which demonstrates that the making of sexual identities involves a dynamic relation between Self and Other--a relation that is subsequently encoded in representations of space. The paper concludes that the making of sexual identities can only be understood by examining the ways that representation and experience entwine in specific places to create sexual identities that are fractured, contested and always becoming.