Gothic history and historical ethnography

It is difficult, for an Austrian, to pass judgement on the Goths. Anyone concerned with the history of the Goths must be resigned to being misunderstood, falsely praised, or rejected. This is hardly surprising, since the subject is so heavily laden with the ideological burden of an age-old tradition of identification with this people. It is almost impossible to separate Gothic history from the emotions aroused by the process once termed “The decline and fall of the Roman Empire”, and which is not yet universally known as “The transformation of the Roman world”.     

Gothic history and historical ethnography

It is difficult, for an Austrian, to pass judgement on the Goths. Anyone concerned with the history of the Goths must be resigned to being misunderstood, falsely praised, or rejected. This is hardly surprising, since the subject is so heavily laden with the ideological burden of an age-old tradition of identification with this people. It is almost impossible to separate Gothic history from the emotions aroused by the process once termed “The decline and fall of the Roman Empire”, and which is not yet universally known as “The transformation of the Roman world”.     

Environmental violence and crises of legitimacy in New Caledonia

This paper addresses the question of what factors besides resource abundance or scarcity play crucial roles in conditioning resource-related violent conflict, by investigating the responses of residents of villages near a mining project in New Caledonia to Rhéébù Nùù, an indigenous environmental protest group. An overlooked and yet crucial factor in local support for Rhéébù Nùù was a lack of faith in the government and, more fundamentally, in the democratic system through which representatives were elected. Instead, villagers put their faith in a revitalization of customary authority. Thus, environmental violence is not driven simply by resource abundance or scarcity; in this instance, it masked a crisis of political legitimacy, grounded in a history of opposition to the colonial power. This leads to the paper's second question: What constitutes a basis for political legitimacy, and how is this legitimacy – and its contestation – mediated by socio-cultural concerns? This study suggests that legitimacy requires the achievement of three elements: representation of people's interests, coherence with cultural identity, and popular acceptance of methods used to exert power. The protest group was more successful at achieving these elements of legitimacy, and thus the support of the local residents, than was either the government or the mining company. However, not all community members felt that Rhéébù Nùù indeed had the support of customary authority, and many disagreed with the group's violent tactics. Thus, protest groups may be subject to the same criteria of legitimacy as the governments or other bodies that they oppose.     

Rethinking ethnography: A study in public anthropology

This editorial calls for an alternative approach to writing ethnographies. Instead of treating a group as a cultural whole to make writing about it easier, the author emphasizes the importance of understanding the intracultural diversity that exists within that group. In addition, he asks ethnographers to step away from a framework which places them as the primary interpreters of a group. Instead, he calls for more dialogic, multicentric narratives, that allow the people they study (as well as their readers) to compose their own empowering narratives about the group. Intracultural diversity ensures there is not one true account, but many.     

Fugitives and ethnography in Priscus of Panium

Abstract

Because the historical writings of Priscus of Panium survive only in fragments, we regrettably lack knowledge of the full complexity of this fifth century historian's concerns. Widely cited in Byzantine sources, the greatest part of Priscus’ work is found in the Excerpta de Legationibus, which was compiled from ancient texts by the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos in the middle of the tenth century as part of an encyclopedic collation of educational and practical information. The Excerpta, which dealt with international relations, found much of interest in Priscus, whose history included a detailed account of the struggle between the Romans and Attila the Hun. Of particular value is Priscus' first-hand account of an embassy to Attila in 449 to discuss the exchange of fugitives and other matters. On this journey Priscus served as an assistant to Maximinus, the leader of the diplomatic mission sent from Constantinople. Envoys to foreign lands regularly included in their reports detailed observations of the societies they visited, and in this tradition the fragments preserved in the Excerpta constitute an invaluable source of information about Hunnic life as well as diplomatic matters. Priscus later reworked his acute observations of the Huns made on the embassy and mixed them with other information in the larger framework of his historical treatise, adapting part of his diplomatic intelligence report to the needs of a different sort of literary enterprise. We cannot know with any certainty the thematic architectonics of this historical work, but its fragments make it clear that Priscus' treatment of the relations between Rome and the Empire of the Huns and his development of cultural issues implicit in those relations were more subtle than the tenth century editors' focus on diplomatics might suggest.     

An historical geography of liberty: Lancashire and the Inebriates Acts

This paper examines the Inebriates Acts of 1879 and 1898 which facilitated the formal provision of institutional care for inebriates. The Acts' permissive character produced an uneven geography of provision of institutions that meant that inebriate treatment varied markedly across the counties and county boroughs of England and Wales. The vast majority of those committed under the Acts were women. Using two exemplary case studies from Lancashire, a private retreat created under the 1879 Act and a council run reformatory created under the 1898 Act, the paper considers how debates about liberty and control shaped the regulation of problem drunkards. It shows that geography was as important as class, religion, and gender in determining who was subjected to regulation. The paper argues that the failure to reform inebriates helped the recoding of inebriety within a broader discourse of mental deficiency that encouraged the permanent segregation of problem populations.     

The meaning of historical terms and concepts: New studies on begriffsgeschichte

A contribution to the liberalism-republicanism debate from a political historian's point of view, this essay focuses on Britain in the mid-Victorian period—arguably the golden age of modern liberalism. The first part argues that the writings and political ideas of the leading liberal thinkers were imbued with ‘neo-roman’ values, including participatory citizenship, civic virtue and concern for the common good. The second part discusses the dissemination of ‘neo-roman’ ideas among the rank and file of the Liberal party, focusing on popular celebrations of the right to bear arms. The essay concludes that, despite the methodological claims of some scholars, the liberalism-republicanism debate has tended to ignore the context within which ideas and traditions were developed by their leading interpreters. Moreover, it argues that if we really are interested in the context of political thought we must go beyond traditional concerns with the ‘canonical’ texts and look at its social environment.     

‘Trouble in Paradise“: The perception of New Caledonia in the Australian Press

Australian perceptions of the South Pacific are largely shaped by promotional tourist reports. Australian press coverage of violent conflict in New Caledonia erupting late in 1984, during the Kanak struggle for independence, produced a very different image of one part of the region. The Australian media coverage focused on violent events, used evocative language and dramatic headlines and stressed the threat that violence posed for Australian tourism. In subsequent months tourist numbers slumped and never regained earlier peak levels while press coverage dwindled as violent events became fewer. In New Caledonia the conservative press argued that biased Australian media coverage had encouraged local economic collapse to enable Australia to exert greater hegemony in the region and that the nationalist movement was merely a socialist or terrorist minority and that nationalist sentiments were stirred up by overseas media interest. Inevitable media distortion, through oversimplification in a complex socio-economic context and the lack of continuous coverage, did contribute to a biased perception, whose legacy remained beyond the duration of the period of violence.     

The Political Order and Corporal Coercion in Kanak Societies of the Past (New Caledonia)

Till the mid-19th century, in Kanak institutions in north central Grande Terre (New Caledonia), chiefs received their titles from the ‘masters of the land’. To add material and symbolic power to their preeminent position, they received human sacrifices, as one of their kinspeople offered his/her body; and they waged warfare outside the chiefdom. Their fame was proportional to control over human bodies. Based on historical sources and ethnographic information gathered in the field, the effort is made to see how these precolonial cannibalistic practices fit into political systems. A comparison is made between Kanak chiefs and Melanesian big men and great men.     

An alternative approach to zoning in France: Typology,historical character and development control

The paper describes an approach to development control taken in France, bringing together the zoning system of planning and geographical and architectural studies of urban form. The approach addresses a number of issues, in particular the maintenance of the historical and regional character of towns, often eroded under systems of land‐use zoning. The principles and methods of the approach are set out and its application is illustrated by an example, illuminating both the approach and the context in which it was realized.