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.     

New Caledonia Remains French for Now: The Referendum of 4 November 2018

New Caledonia’s 4 November 2018 referendum confronted voters with a divisive choice between independence and continuation of the status quo. It did not offer another potential option of ‘associated independence’, though that had been extensively discussed in the 1980s and rejected by loyalists because it entailed too much independence and by Kanak because there was too much association. This paper reviews the referendum outcome, and examines the controversies about the make-up of the special electorate for that contest and the electoral roll for provincial and French national elections. It argues that 30 years of dialogue about decolonization have not succeeded in reaching agreement on a consensual future and that there is a risk that the political map of New Caledonia remains frozen. What is needed is not further institutional reform or so-called ‘internal decolonization’ but a crossed interethnic majority in Congress, and a halt to French efforts to strengthen the anti-independence demographic and electoral majority.     

Exposure: a postcolonial turn in urban ethnography

A diary kept during the development of Sugar, a commission of the Liverpool Capital of Culture Festival (2006–2007), was the occasion of an autoethnography. This essay reflects on the triangulation made between the architecture of slavery, contemporary discourses of ‘youth culture’ and the dissolution of the representational frame as thematics or topics liquefied into the repressed topology of the city; a direct analogy is made between the famous but inaccessible Williamson tunnels and the creative unconscious of a post-representationalist dramaturgical practice. The ghost volumetrics of this history are cathected into a movement form, assimilable to the kinetics of hip-hop culture; a new topologically identified community was felt to emerge that performed Sugar largely in the sense of channelling its concerns back into cultural traces continuously in informal production. The relationship between peripatetic dramaturg and peripherally located creative youth mapped an urban dérive quite different from that cultivated by the Situationists, a secret tracking or collaboration that linked urban ethnography to a decolonising dramaturgy.     

Framing social rebalancing,national identity,and victimhood in Kanaky/New Caledonia

New Caledonia is an island territory located in the French South Pacific. In 2018, the first of three referenda on the island’s sovereignty will occur. Over the next decade, inhabitants of this territory will decide whether to become fully sovereign, maintain their dependence on France, or enter into an independent-association relationship with another state. Through a series of interviews with prominent New Caledonian politicians and secondary sources, this article explores how definitions of victimhood and national identity construction shape the notion of rebalancing. Both loyalist and nationalist politicians argue that the current social inequalities between New Caledonian communities require targeted policies intended to re-balance the populations. Politicians use these victim narratives and national identities to construct imagined communities that advocate for the inclusive or exclusive application of the right to self-determination.     

The Limits of Influence: Australia and the Future of New Caledonia, 1975 to 1988

From the late 1970s Australian governments (led in turn by Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke) expected New Caledonia to become independent. France responded with suspicion. From 1983, however, reformist governments in Australia and France took apparently converging views. But tensions rose because of unrest in New Caledonia and conflict over French nuclear testing. Australia’s limited capacity to influence developments waned further in 1986 when Jacques Chirac became French prime minister and countered the Kanak nationalist movement. Foreign Minister Bill Hayden favoured moderating Australia’s position, but the issue became moot in mid-1988 when the rival forces in New Caledonia agreed to the truce embodied in the Matignon Accords. The different approaches of the Fraser and Hawke governments reflected philosophical differences, the personal stance of key players, influences from their political movements, and the challenges of changing circumstances. Decades later, with a referendum due by November 2018, Australia’s approach is likely to be cautious.     

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.     

Hebrews and phoenicians: An ancient historical image and its usage

The modern nation-state is the most common, and so far the most stable, vehicle for modern democracy. The case of Zionism offers a unique opportunity for inquiring into this connection since mainstream Zionism consciously founded its institutions on the premise that democracy and the national state are mutually dependent. Moreover, ever since the early days of Zionism, opposing plans to separate the two—a non-democratic national state and a non-national democratic state—have been, and still are, hotly debated. This article surveys the origins of these ideas and argues that, both politically and theoretically, neither the party of non-democratic nationalism nor the party of non-national democracy offers a viable or even coherent plan. It would seem that non-national democracy will subvert democracy as well as nationalism, and non-democratic nationalism will undermine the national as well as the democratic character of the state.     

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.