‘Tomorrow comes when tomorrow comes’: Managing Aboriginal Health within an Ontology of Life‐as‐Contingent

ABSTRACT The authors have worked in Australian Aboriginal communities within the Wiradjuri area of central‐western New South Wales. Examining what appear to be distinctive Aboriginal approaches to time, we argue that these stem not from a different notion of time as such but, rather, from the relationship between the social and the self which places a distinctive value on the use and management of time. One way to access the dynamic between time and self is to realise that life is understood as fluid and contingent rather than predictable. This continually subverts the idea that time is measurable and controllable; that life is lived within domesticated sedentary space; and that planning ahead and self‐discipline are virtues. Yet these are notions central to practices associated with contemporary health care. A majority of health care providers, whether Aboriginal or not, are trained in the Australian mainstream health system and may consequently underestimate the implications of different ways in which a person acts on the temporal/spatial dimensions of her life, and how this influences ways in which she manages time in relation to her health and well‐being. Temporal concepts, such as ‘planning’, ‘discipline’, ‘future’, ‘boredom’, or ‘patience’, as well as that of the ‘long‐term’ with regard to managing illness or money, interact with the ways in which Aboriginal people experience themselves as ill or in need of health care, influencing how they act on medical advice. We argue that the key to understanding the use of time lies not in the concept of time per se but in what is involved in developing a responsive social self when the time/space dimensions of the day to day are informed by a fluid and thus contingent ontology of that day to day.     

‘Fighting from the fields’: developing the British ‘National Farm’ in the Second World War

The Second World War had a profound impact on British Agriculture, with state intervention at an unprecedented level cementing the idea of a ‘National Farm’ in both the popular and the governmental psyche. Critical attention has recently begun to refocus on this period, adding to the somewhat celebratory meta-narratives written in the official histories. Drawing from the practice of micro-historical research and recent work in geography that seeks to understand the production of the landscape ‘from within’, this paper explores how ‘small stories’ can afford an appreciation of the ‘complications of everyday existence’ and bring greater depth, nuance and understanding to these ‘larger’ historical events and their influence on the British countryside. Utilising oral histories from farms in Devon (UK), the paper explores the micro-geographies which shaped as well as destabilised the national farm message as it was translated into the local context.     

‘Divided Within Itself’: The Parliamentary Labour ‘Right’ and the Demise of Post‐War Revisionist Social Democracy in the 1970s

The article seeks to identify a neglected dimension of the ‘crisis’ and schism of British social democracy in the 1970s from within the ranks of the parliamentary Labour ‘right’ itself. Accounts of the so‐called ‘Labour right’ and its influential revisionist social democratic tradition have emphasized its generic cohesion and uniformity over contextual analysis of its inherent intellectual, ideological and political range and diversity. The article seeks to evaluate differential responses of Labour's ‘right‐wing’ and revisionist tendency as its loosely cohesive framework of Keynesian social democracy imploded in the 1970s, as a means of demonstrating its relative incoherence and fragmentation. The ‘crisis of social democracy’ revealed much more starkly its complex, heterogeneous character, irremediably ‘divided within itself’ over a range of critical political and policy themes and the basis of social democratic political philosophy itself. The article argues that it was its own wider political fragmentation and ideological introspection in the face of the ‘crisis’ of its historic ‘belief system’ which led to the fracture of Labour's ‘dominant coalition’ and the rupture of British social democracy.     

‘White Skins‘, ‘Real People’ and ‘Chinese’ in Some Spatial Transformations of the Western Province,PNG1

To understand more fully contemporary forms of colonialism in PNG I argue we need to move our analysis beyond local narratives of encounters with Europeans to include narratives about non-Europeans. Through a consideration of Kamula accounts of Europeans, especially missionaries, and Chinese I show how the Kamula model two quite different experiences of colonialism. In one, local people are able to transform Europeans into analogues of themselves and in the other, currently more associated with the Chinese, the emphasis is on difference, rather than on commonalities. These interrelated representations of two distinct kinds of colonialists are, in part, complex signifiers of national, and especially local, concerns about ‘development’ based on logging. I outline how these accounts of Europeans and Chinese express the different forms of power which are currently deployed to transform space in the Western Province. I conclude by speculating that to understand these powers adequately we may need to follow Latour and Callon and extend our analysis of colonialism to include non-human agents.     

Gifts from the Other Side: Thresholds of Hospitality and Morality in an Eastern Indonesian Town

The town of Labuan Bajo in Western Flores, Eastern Indonesia has experienced rapid changes in the past decade, primarily associated with the development of tourism. This paper engages with the ideas of Jacques Derrida on hospitality and sovereignty, to explore the shifting landscapes of hospitality in this Manggaraian town. His musings on ‘the question of the foreigner’, the ‘conditions’ of hospitality, and the idea of the threshold are used to capture the way that hospitality is experienced as a struggle, as a contradiction, as an ‘aporia’.     

The ‘Global’ versus the ‘Local’: Cognitive Processes of Kin Determination in Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT Morgan and his informants' interpretation of Australian social categories as ‘marriage classes’ has survived in Dumont's (and Viveiros de Castro's) distinction of a ‘local’ (Dravidian systems) and a ‘global’ (Australian systems) formula. This paper explains that the ‘global formula’ is neither a necessary nor an applied device in Australian kin category determination, even when genealogical memory is short and when there is a non‐limitation of range in the extension of categories. Instead, a heuristic model, which is called the relational triangle, is proposed. This model depicts the procedure through which Australian people pragmatically determine and extend kin categories. Moreover, it also offers a visualisation of the cognitive schema and processes framing discourse and behaviour in relation to kinship and draws some parallels with Greenberg's hypotheses on markedness in kinship classes.     

‘We are the new Jews!’ and ‘The Jewish Lobby’ – antisemitism and the construction of a national identity by the Austrian Freedom Party

In this article I will analyse the role of antisemitism for the construction of a national identity and an exclusive national in‐group in the discourse of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). The analysis will show that this discourse of the FPÖ, one of the most successful extreme right‐wing parties in Europe, utilises various forms of Holocaust inversion and victim perpetrator reversal in order to delegitimise political opponents. The analysis of these incidents and of the legitimising strategies used by the FPÖ when criticised involves discussing the increasing abstraction of the codes characteristic of latent antisemitism and forms of post‐Nazi antisemitism. I will focus on how the FPÖ's use of the term Holocaust and other terms referring to Nazi atrocities against the Jews corresponds to a universalisation of the term Holocaust in social constellations that are permeated by the culture industry.     

Nationalism,economic crisis and ‘realistic revolution’ in 1980s Mexico*

ABSTRACT. This article examines how the Mexican state drew upon nationalist discourse for legitimacy following the 1982 debt crisis. The analytical framework situates Mexico within the context of Latin American nationalism and explores the structural and conjunctural factors that contributed to the endurance and effectiveness of Mexican revolutionary nationalism as a hegemonic nationalist discourse. Historical commemorations during the Miguel de la Madrid administration (1982–88) are then examined to show how the state evoked nationalist motifs as it dealt with economic crisis, pressure from the USA, domestic political opposition and the implementation of neoliberal reforms. The relative effectiveness of sometimes counterintuitive appeals to nationalist legitimacy is found to be neither wholly ‘rational’ nor ‘irrational’, in this case having its basis in a history of elite and popular negotiation through the revolutionary nationalist framework, the continuity of the post‐revolutionary Partido de la Revolución Institutional (PRI) state model and the lack of a viable competing paradigm.     

The Unusual Case of ‘Mrs Sherlock’. Memoir,Identity and the ‘Real’ Woman Private Detective in Twentieth–Century Britain

Despite a huge popular and literary interest in detective fiction and an extensive academic literature on the history of policing, there have been very few studies of the history of private detectives/investigators. The work of women investigators has proved to be even more marginal. Histories of women and work have tended, for obvious reasons, to concentrate on mainstream industries, occupations and professions rather than the unusual or the unique. Focusing on the memoirs of Annette Kerner, published in the early 1950s, this article examines the range of opportunities that investigation created in the first half of the twentieth century, analysing the interaction of professional, gender and class identities. It highlights, firstly, women's ‘professional’ commitment to an exciting and challenging area of work, exploring their relationships with other occupational groups including women police. Second, it considers how disguise and masquerade presented opportunities for urban exploration and the crossing of traditional boundaries of gender and class. Investigative work developed, historically, at the same time as detective fiction and it has been deeply affected by fictional portrayals. The cultural mantle of ‘the female Sherlock Holmes’ was a hard inheritance to shake off and it suffused women's public presentations of themselves.     

Penetrating the ‘black‐box’ of ‘remembrance day’ playlist: bereavement and the induction mechanisms of glocalization – a study in cultural sociology

This article examines the musical repertoire broadcast on Israeli state radio stations on Remembrance Day. Commencing with the first Remembrance Day, Israeli radio stations have refrained from broadcasting songs that do not contribute to the glorification of the military mythology or failure to reinforce the consensual perception of national loss. In view of globalization – it might be assumed that Remembrance Day songs would undergo changes in tune with the times. From a musical point of view, new songs that belong to what Regev and Seroussi classify as ‘globalizing Israel’ penetrated into the nationalist arena. But, following Inglehart and Baker, these songs, despite their seemingly secular façade, remain limited hegemonic enclosures organized around the core of founding values. Apparently, this is an example of the process of glocalization of culture. The article seeks answers to the strategies employed to accommodate these new songs to the traditional ideology of the classical Remembrance Day songs and examines whether the mechanisms of legitimacy that enable the inclusion of new voices on Remembrance Day, can be identified. We argue that their choice is not arbitrary and that they illustrate the manner by which voluntary cultural entrepreneurs (musical editors) are co‐opted in the postnational condition.     

‘Like man and wife’: clerics’ concubines in the diocese of Barcelona

Clerical concubinage was a persistent problem throughout the Middle Ages, but scholars have largely ignored the historical experience of the women involved. Parish visitation records from the early fourteenth-century diocese of Barcelona reveal a wealth of information about these women. Although their lives were in part circumscribed by an inherently gendered legal category, their day-to-day lives and interactions with other members of their communities depended on more than their legal status, and were in fact as diverse as those of women in legitimate marital unions.     

‘Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style,Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

This essay examines a 1968–9 campaign by Tanzania’s ruling party Youth League to outlaw mini–skirts and other ‘indecent’ fashions as ‘decadent’ affronts to Tanzanian ‘national culture’. It situates the intense, public debate on the campaign both in terms of the state’s contested national cultural project, and in relation to intersecting anxieties about shifts in women’s work and mobility in urban space, and the politics of sex in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Arguing that ‘the city’ ndash; both as an imagined space and as the site of particular, gendered social struggles – is central to understanding the campaign, the essay charts attempts by the ban’s opponents to fashion viable personas and notes the limits of these attempts.     

Making time: ‘Living floors’, ‘palimpsests’ and site formation processes – A perspective from the open-air Lower Paleolithic site of Revadim Quarry, Israel

The recognition of the dynamic role of site formation processes led archaeologists to recognize a behavioral dichotomy between ‘living floors’ and palimpsests’, Yet the archaeological proxies of ‘living floor’ and ‘palimpsest’ were never defined formally, and therefore have been used variably. We use archaeological criteria mentioned in the archaeological literature to model types of formation processes. The case study of the Lower Paleolithic open-air site of Revadim Quarry, Israel is used to test the model. Two types of palimpsests, differing in the rate of accumulation and thus in their effects on the anthropogenic remains, were discerned. Based on these results we review some other Lower Paleolithic instances. A sliding scale of formation processes provides a much needed middle ground between the scales of coarse, time-averaged formation processes and short, “near real-life” behavioral episodes and is an appropriate archaeological frame of reference.     

‘If You Find Out Who Her Father is I Would Be Interested to Know’ The Kwermin in an Eastern Min Context

In this paper the peripheral position of the Kwermin in the Min regional context is discussed through a focus on two gift‐presentations, those of bridewealth and those presented to fully initiated men at the end of their initiatory process. The items of the traditional bridewealth gifts are discussed as well as the debate that emerged, after the discontinuation of this traditional presentation, whether Kwermin should take up the large bridewealth payments introduced from the highland Bimin or go back to an earlier custom of sister‐exchange (abu) between clans without great emphasis on bridewealth. However, it is suggested that the present day monetary claims, without their actual payment, may eventually serve to strengthen the previous practice of abu. The gifts presented following full initiation are referred to as Afek's pubic hair and it is shown how these presentations can be understood as being Afek, or essential aspects of this highland's originating ancestor, creating novices as true men who are then presented to Afek in a way similar to the way wives are presented to husbands. It is suggested that such presentation of man to ancestress partly explains patriarchal Kwermin men's reluctance to fully accept highland ideology, preferring to maintain their allegiance with the cultural hero of the lower mountains and the lowlands, Webnok.     

Nationalism or ‘Tribalism’: The Evolution of Cape Afrikaner Ethnic Consciousness in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract. This article seeks to explore the evolution of the ethnic consciousness of the Afrikaners in the Cape Colony at an initial and crucial stage. The colonial Cape Afrikaners are treated as a core community, distinguished from Afrikaner communities in other states in South Africa. It is argued that their collective consciousness was shaped primarily by their core colonial experience rather than by their ethnocultural commonality with the other diaspora Afrikaner communities. Having been socialised into the British colonial state, they have evolved a collective consciousness premised on neither ethnic self-determination nor ethnic exclusiveness. Correspondingly, their political outlook incorporated both British imperialism and Cape white multi-culturalism. They were mobilised ethnically to secure their share in the spoils of the British colonial state rather than to attain ethno-nationalist goals.