"It is God who Speaks in the Thunder . . .": Mediating Ontologies of Faith and Fear in Aboriginal Christianity>

The connection between Christianity and the ancestral law of Aboriginal culture has generated considerable debate within Australian Christianity. I explore the intersubjective flow between faith and fear emergent within these two systems and show how external influences have impacted ruptures of ontological thought and experience. These ruptures have both emerged from and shaped social and political change for Yolngu from Galiwin'ku in north-east Arnhem Land. I examine a range of discourses of religious rupture and argue that Christian influences have, at different times, variously competed with, moulded, and naturalized Yolngu ancestral understanding, leading to a surveillance of the social, spiritual, and political relationship between the Gospel and Culture by Yolngu Christians.     

The Process of Kinship in the Paternal/Fraternal House of the Austronesian‐speaking Amis of Taiwan

In this essay, I will describe the traditional social organisation of the Amis peoples of Taiwan which previous ethnographers have portrayed as consisting of a matrilineal clan‐based system conjoined with a residential‐based male age‐set/grade system. Following David Schneider's critique of ‘kinship’ cross‐culturally and the ‘new kinship studies' which his work inspired, I will attempt a reinterpretation of overall Amis social organisation as instead a total kinship‐based system comprised of a paternal/fraternal system which integrates and encompasses the multiplicity of maternal‐focused houses constitutive of village communities. Rather than being a system composed of kinship and non‐kinship parts, I argue that Amis social organisation is comprehensively kinship‐based. Moreover, I shall describe how through paternal/fraternal relations generated by rites of male initiation and rebirth this overall integration of diverse matrifocal units is achieved. In the first section, I will describe the structure of the paternal/fraternal initiatory system. In the following section, I will draw upon the major anthropological theories of initiation including rites of passage and the literature on sacrifice to describe numerous aspects of initiation activities, showing how the classificatory father‐son and elder‐younger‐brother relations between and within the initiation sets are explicitly represented by the concepts and practices of the Amis.     

Carrying the Cross,Caring for Kin: The Everyday Life of Charismatic Christianity in Remote Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT In this paper, I address the important yet under‐examined role of charismatic Protestant Christianity in the reconfiguring of personhood and social relations in the remote Yolngu settlement of Galiwin'ku. I focus in particular on the ways in which this form of Christianity, locally articulated, brings together indigenous concepts of personhood with those introduced by the market, the state, and evangelism to produce what I refer to as Christian individuality and Christian relatedness. These dialectical tendencies in postcolonial settlement life call attention to the ways Yolngu converts use their Christian practices both to continue kin‐based moralities in the present and to engage (if selectively) modern individualism. This paper addresses post‐colonial conditions where demands of state institutions and modern governance interact with changing ideas of personhood and sociality. It contributes to the growing anthropological literature on Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.     

宋代的宗族祠堂、祭祀及其它

The Song Dynasty is the most important period in Chinese history in terms of the establishment of a new type of clan system. During the Song, Chinese social organization, at the grass-roots level, experienced a fundamental change. In the wake of the late-Tang collapse of the local power system, it was necessary for the Song to replace the ancestral lineage structure and develop a new system to adapt itself to the new circumstances brought on by drastic changes in its economy. Song Confucians played a vital part in the changes. Not only did they gradually solve the theoretical problems of the new type of clan organization, but they also developed many feasible and standard models. Eventually this model would gain even wider acceptance after the Yuan Dynasty with the rise of Neo-Confucianism. Thus, ancestral halls, serving as the major centers for the new clan activities, became prevalent among common people. Translated from Anhui Shifan Daxue Xuebao 安徽师范大学学报 (Journal of Anhui Normal University), 2006, (3): 322–327 This paper is part of a National Social Science Fund project, Research on Chinese Folklore History (Song and Yuan Volume, You Biao, ed.)     

Ancient Greek Myth in Angelos Sikelianos

Abstract

In the introduction to Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems, the translators speak of Sikelianos's ‘mythological attitude … toward life’ and of his conception of myth not so much ‘as a rhetorical or metaphorical device but as a spontaneous creation of the human soul directed toward the revelation of a hidden spiritual life’, in short, of mythology as a kind of religion closely related to Schelling's perception of the function of myth. These remarks, written originally some years ago, may have their just proportion of truth, but in keeping with most introductory remarks, they strike me as rather too general, rather too undiscriminating when one brings them face to face with Sikelianos's practice at different moments of his career. I want to try to be more discriminating by considering the role of myth – specifically ancient Greek myth – in the poet's work both early and late in his career. I think it is a changing role, perhaps not in his fundamental association of gods with a contemporary landscape and his revelation of those mysteries that lie hidden in our everyday lives, but in the mode of this association and this revelation, and in the depth of their poetic significance.     

The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation – as in the context of colonial era evictions – there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of ‘sites of memory’, which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern ‘memory’, suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and ‘being first’. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory.     

论神话意象意蕴衍生的基本类型

神话意象的意蕴衍生可分为整体性意蕴衍生和个体性意蕴衍生两种基本类型。整体性意蕴衍生是神话意象与特定历史情境相结合的结果,体现出社会群体的认知、情趣和理想;个体性意蕴衍生既有单个神话意象意蕴发生衍生的情况,也有作为个体的哲学家、文学家和艺术家等对神话意象进行再创作进而形成的意蕴衍生情况。这两种类型相互交织、共同发展,构成了神话意象意蕴衍生的基本模式。     

20世纪九十年代以来《庄子》神话研究综述简

《庄子》中存在着大量的神话材料,自王国维开启以神话眼光看《庄子》的先河后,鲁迅、郎擎霄、闻一多、茅盾、顾颉刚等许多学者开始关注《庄子》与神话的关系,并取得了一定的成绩。进入新时期后,对《庄子》神话的研究进入了一个更深更全面的阶段,鉴于此,有必要对研究成果进行一番梳理,有利于推动《庄子》神话研究的发展。《庄子》神话研究成果主要集中在神话与寓言研究、神话原型和意象研究、神话思维研究、神仙思想研究。     

Geographical Imaginations and Spaces of Political Engagement: Examples from the Indian Alliance

This paper is concerned with the various ways in which geographical imaginations are inflected in politics. It draws on examples from a three‐way partnership of civil society organisations based in Mumbai, India. This movement seeks to reconfigure the governance of anti‐poverty strategies by placing "poor people" at the centre of its activities. The partnership, which refers to itself as the Alliance , is involved in the mobilisation and creation of a range of alternative geographical imaginations that are inflected in the production of new spaces of political engagement. By exploring two of the Alliance's strategies—enumerations and exhibitions—I will illustrate some of the ways in which these alternative geographical imaginations feature in the creation of spaces of political engagement. These strategies involve the practical demonstration of the capacities of the poor to donors and states, and reflect a particular conception of the poor and social change.
The spaces of political engagement formed in part through the Alliance's work depend significantly on a commitment to non‐party alignment, an approach that has received criticism from NGOs and commentators involved with urban poverty. I will argue that the Alliance represents a broad development alternative—rather than a form of alternative development—which nonetheless is making substantial progress in the politics of citizenship in Mumbai.     

In the Shell of the Old: Anarchist Geographies of Territorialisation

Abstract: This paper applies an anarchist approach to ongoing debates on the politics, nature and function of territory. Recent work in geography has problematised dominant modes of territory, but has stopped short of a systematic critique of how statist spatial imaginations and practices reproduce and perpetuate the dominance of both capitalism and authority in society. In this paper, I deploy anarchist thought and practice to argue that territory must be viewed as a processual and contested product of social relations. This is linked to the notion of prefiguration; a distinctive concept in anarchist thought and practice embedding envisioned future modes of social organisation into the present. Using examples from fieldwork with anarchist‐inspired groups, I explore anarchist prefigurative politics as a means to re‐imagine how practices of territorialisation and bordering might be deployed as part of a broader project of social transformation.     

Shadows of Song: Exploring Research and Performance Strategies in Yolngu Women's Crying‐songs

This paper provides an argument that research on women's crying‐songs in north east Arnhem Land can be effectively analysed as a series of shadow‐dances between the researcher, the singer and the performance context. Within this framework, it explores the processes of transmission and reception of a selection of crying‐song texts from one of the most highly regarded female performers in the region. As singing is a powerful force in the making of Yolngu social, spiritual and political life, music making is shown to play a crucial role in authorizing, describing, teaching and controlling social and ancestral knowledge between men and women and by extension the place of the researcher within the community. Through the regulation of knowledge the making and remaking of the singer and researcher is danced out in a web of mutuality, reciprocity and obligation in which processes of ‘strategic formation’ and ‘strategic location’ emerge. Thus, one woman's melodies of mourning are shown to be a musical gift exchange of various shadow‐dances between learning, receiving, performing and mutually engaging in Yolngu ways of knowing and coming‐to‐know.     

‘Stuffed if I know!’: Reflections on post‐modern feminist social research

This paper tells the tale of a social research project which has been situated within and shaped by the flux of current feminist debates. In particular it addresses the challenges posed by post‐modern theory to feminist social research which hinge on the status of women as an identity. If we are to accept that there is no unity, centre or actuality to discover for women, what is feminist research about? What might be the effects of researching women in mining towns as though such a group were a natural, self‐evident and coherent category? In this paper I explore the politics of situating a research project on women with respect to the discursive terrain already mapped out. I rethink action research methods in the light of post‐modern politics and research practice, and I argue that social research can play a role in discursive destabilisation and in the creation and promotion of alternative discourses of gendered subjects.     

A Space and Time for a Generation to React: The Gattjirrk Cultural Festival in Milingimbi

This article deals with the annually held Gattjirrk Cultural Festival organised in Milingimbi, a Yolngu community in Northeast Arnhem Land, and has the objective of analysing its socio‐cultural and political meaning. Although this event is considered an amusement (wakal), it nevertheless constitutes an arena to negotiate postcolonial realities in which Yolngu people are forced to live. Focusing on the organisers' overall frame of ‘sharing culture’ and youths' interpretations of hip‐hop dances as ‘performative tactics’, I suggest that the Milingimbi Festival creates a space in which generational perspectives within the community as well as the tension between Yolngu people and the non‐indigenous (balanda) world may be displayed and mediated. While the Festival has been mainly conceived as a space for encountering and ‘sharing culture’ with other groups and people both within the community and with the balanda world, it is also seized as an opportunity by young people to generate new ways to engage with and challenge others. By weaving together elements of Yolngu heritage and pop culture, I argue that fun or burlesque dances (wakal bunngul) are ‘tactics of cultural remix’ that through laughter and irony demand a witnessing: a mutual recognition, engagement, and responsibility to participate and to respond. It is thus in their own ways that these performances produce new connections and relationships bringing together old and young, Yolngu and balanda in an effective although fleeting encounter.     

宗族社会与地域文明——以安徽贵池南山刘氏宗族为例

明清民国时期,安徽贵池南山刘氏宗族是一个典型的聚族而居、族有祠、宗有谱的宗族社会,宗族建设所馈留的文化遗存较为丰富,体现在古墟落、祠堂、民居及文化建设的典籍和艺术珍品等方面,反映出中国传统宗族社会聚落一方、营建一方的一般态势,也折射出宗族社会与地域文明的内在关联。     

清宫萨满祭祀的仪式与神话研究

本文通过对清宫萨满祭祀仪式与满族天宫大战神话的关联分析,论述了满洲中心观的神话学依据,并进一步考察乾隆年间清王朝自身对清宫萨满祭祀与中国上古以来的仪式体系之关系的解释,以说明使得满洲中心观得以成立的宫廷化进程,同时也将自身纳入到了华夏文明的历史与结构当中。     

Human rights politics and scaled performances of memory: conflicts among the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina

This paper builds on the geographies of commemoration literature extending the scope of inquiry to consider the scaled performances through which the politics of memory unfold. I focus on an analysis of conflicts over the creation of memorial landscapes that emerge from the intricate ways in which representations of the past and the everyday politics of social movements intersect. The paper analyses the competing politics of memory of two groups of Madres de Plaza de Mayo (mothers of people who ‘disappeared’ during Argentina's Dirty War). Their strategies underscore geographic dimensions of the politics of memory as the Madres clash over how to appropriately place memory in the landscape. While one group emphasizes making visible the events of the past to promote transmission of memory and to remember those who disappeared, the other group focuses on re‐interpreting symbols about the past in an attempt to encourage future activism. Such conflicting strategies manifest spatially in a variety of ways, ranging from the creation of physical markers in the built environment to the performance of collective rituals that centre on activists' bodies as sites for either commemoration of the past or future activism. The Madres' conflicts highlight how different spatialities contribute to validate or condemn competing politics of commemoration.     

A Clan‐Based Society of South Greece and its Militarization After the Second World War: Some Characteristics of Violence and the Construction of Habitus in the South Peloponnese

This paper presents some basic characteristics of the subculture of local society in the southern Peloponnese in Greece during the twentieth century. In particular, it examines the basic anthropological and social elements that formed the character of the members of the local society in Mani during the early part of the century, by emphasizing (i) the clan structure of the particular society, and (ii) the militarization of Mani as a strategy for mediation in local social relations.

The paper then analyses the way in which these basic social characteristics were interwoven with the dynamics of the political situation during the twentieth century (the Second World War, the occupation of Greece by Italian and German forces, and the Greek Civil War) by exploring the cultural habitus of the left‐wing and the right‐wing political networks in the region. Finally, it refers to the dialectics of the dynamic relationship between a clan‐based local society and the political events of the late 1940s, by means of some observations on the local social institution of the vendetta.     

论白马藏族神话的主要类型和述说特征——以陇南为中心

白马藏族神话,就是用口头白马语为载体,以耳听、心记的方式向后传承留存至今的本族神话作品,主要类型有:创世神话、人源神话、神灵神话、英雄神话等。经考察发现,白马藏族神话最为发达的是英雄神话,其中的代表作《阿尼嘎萨》流传千余年,长达十余万言,堪比蒙、藏等族的《格萨尔》,展现了白马藏族民间故事和口传活态文化的最高成就,值得学界重视。白马藏族神话表现出独到的述说特征:整体表现为口头传承过程由"信以为真"向信众逐步散失的转变与题材的不规则演化,述说体系虽零散杂乱且缺乏整一严谨性,但又有其独特之处。     

Protest Cycle,Political Violence and Social Movements in the Basque Country

A close look at the groups, organisations and social movements among which a terrorist organisation seeks refuge and support, will provide a fundamental and strategic view of its evolution. By means of the concept of a protest cycle, I analyse the relationship between political violence and social movements in the Basque Country. With the help of Tarrow's fundamental variables in the political structure, to which I have added the degree of consciousness‐raising and mobilisation in civil society, I aim to study the protest cycle of ETA's violence from its social origins at the start of the 1960s, through its consolidation in the 1970s, to its decline from the mid‐1980s onwards. The idea I will defend is that political violence should be seen as a form of collective action directed towards a mobilisation of society, and that its vicissitudes depend on the structure of interactions set up between the armed organisation, social movements and civil society.     

From Babylon to Christianity: William Foxwell Albright on Myth,Folklore, and Christian Origins

The American Orientalist William F. Albright (1891–1971) is remembered as a leading voice of twentieth‐century “biblical archaeology,” a field that aimed to demonstrate empirically the Hebrew Bible's substantial historicity. Less well known is Albright's research on Christian backgrounds, which by contrast reflected modernist theology's scepticism about the gospel narratives' literal truth. Drawing ideas from the “Pan‐Babylonian” school of biblical criticism, Albright invoked the influence of ancient Near Eastern myth and folklore on the Christ story, this being the culminating theme of his magnum opus From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940). Originally Albright believed that this mythological interpretation would reestablish Christianity's intellectual credibility in the twentieth century and thus help revive New Testament theology. Yet in the latter part of his career he omitted the mythological thesis from his writings, apparently having concluded that it was harmful to orthodox Christian faith.