Introduction: New Directions in the History of Missionsin Africa

This short article introduces a selection of papers originally presented at the conference, "Africans Meeting Missionaries: Rethinking Colonial Encounters," held at the University of Minnesota in May 1997. Until quite recently much of the scholarship on missions in Africa tended to reproduce early eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images of the colossal, all-powerful missionary. Whether celebrated as an heroic, civilizing agent in mission accounts or branded as a cultural imperialist in nationalist-era scholarship, the European missionary remained an actor scarcely soiled by the cultural commerce of the people on whom he worked. In short, African religious or political initiatives were seldom taken seriously. The papers which make up this collection give voice to and extend current debates surrounding the contested history (and future) of the missionary enterprise in Africa.     

The Event in John Latham and Bob Cobbing

ABSTRACT

This article documents some examples of the event-responsive poetry of the British poet Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) and compares it to the unique theory of the event structure developed by British sculptural and conceptual artist John Latham (1921–2006). It establishes points of intersection between their practices, and particularly at the level of aesthetics where very little comparative work exists. While both men are best known for their experimental 1960s work (Cobbing in relation to sound and concrete poetry, and Latham in relation to conceptual art) this article focusses on their earlier work as being preparatory to their later, more developed practice. Artistic affinities are contextualized in relation to World War II, the dialectic of romantic and classical art, and the institution of welfare-capitalism. How poet and artist both visually represented time (drawing on scientific discourses to do so) is further identified as a link between their practices.     

‘Making Change’ in the memorial landscape to the Dakota–US War of 1862: remembrance,healing and justice through affective participation in the Dakota Commemorative March (DCM)

The Dakota–US War of 1862 led to the removal and exile of Dakota people from their ancestral homeland. Integral to this process was the forced march of 1,700 women, children and elders from the Lower Sioux Agency to Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Despite the siting of numerous memorials related to the war and its aftermath, few mark the forced march and its legacies. Since 2002, however, the seven-day Dakota Commemorative March (DCM) has been held biennially to remember and honour Dakota ancestors on the original forced march. Following a brief overview of extant place-based memorials at sites along its path, we draw on documentary sources to explore the significance of the DCM as a distinctive Dakota intervention in the commemorative landscape. Through a process we call ‘affective participation’ – an intense bodily, emotive and transformative engagement in an event – participants on the DCM not only seek to remember but also strive towards healing and justice in the present and the future. Our hope is to expand the focus of current geographical work on discrete site-based memorials to consider the social- and cultural-geographical significance of alternative (particularly Native) forms and scales of commemoration.     

Herbert Heaton and Five Principles of The Yorkshire Coal-miners

Abstract

'Herbert Heaton and Five Principles of the Yorkshire Coal-Miners'. Herbert Heaton, born in 1890, was the son of a Yorkshire coal-miner. He obtained his schooling with scholarships from the age of twelve, including an undergraduate career at the University of Leeds. He went on to become a leading economic historian. He taught on three Continents, spending the last thirty years of his career at the University of Minnesota in the United States. His father was not only a coal-miner, but also a lay preacher in the Primitive Methodist Church and active in the governance of his local co-operative. Heaton wrote and lectured about five principles he had learned and adopted as his own, growing up in the Yorkshire coalfields. The five principles reflect how many coal-miners before 1914 believed economic and social justice could be achieved. While the miners changed their beliefs after 1918, Heaton, who never lived in Britain after 1914, retained the Yorkshire principles of his youth.     

Transformational versus transactional styles of cabinet leadership in Australian politics

Burns's classic study of leadership distinguished two types of leader. Transformational leaders are visionaries who are able to persuade followers to transcend their own self‐interest for the sake of a larger good. Transactional leaders, on the other hand, base their relationships with followers on an exchange, such as jobs for votes. The transformational/transactional model of leadership has been adapted by Bass for use in organisations. However, Burns's analysis focuses on what may be termed macro‐level leadership of entire states or organisations, whereas Bass's approach is used to study micro‐level leadership where there is ongoing direct interaction between leader and followers. This paper examines the cabinet leadership styles of four Australian political leaders: Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, John Cain and Joh Bjelke‐Petersen. Cabinet ministers who served under these leaders were asked to complete a questionnaire rating the leadership behaviours they experienced. The results are compared with the evidence on leadership style presented in biographical accounts.     

Book reviews

Abstract

On 29 April 1933 Cavafy died in Alexandria, the city in which he was born. There is some reason for satisfaction in this. Visitors to his apartment on the second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius knew how self-contained Cavafy's small and familiar world in Alexandria was. Rue Lepsius was home for the last twenty-six years of Cavafy's life: ‘Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church [St. Savvas's] which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.’ The first floor of 10 Rue Lepsius never catered to Cavafy's flesh, but the church forgave his sins, and he died in the hospital. He could have died in an hospital in Athens where he had gone the year before for treatment of cancer of the throat. He stayed there for a time at the Hûtel Cosmopolite, and from Kifissiá he found the sight of Hymettos and the mountains to the north ‘boring’. He returned home to die, ‘an Alexandrian of the Alexandrians’, an epitaph he very nearly composed for himself.     

The role of culture and community in frontier prairie farming

Frederick Jackson Turner described the American frontier as the great democratizer, a place where people from diverse backgrounds came together, shook off the shackles of their former cultures and blended into the American nation. Detailed study of nineteenth-century rural settlement in the Upper Middle West reveals a more complex picture. A marked spatial clustering of groups from the same country, province and even parish is readily observed. Often these groups were bound together in a close-knit community through the agency of a common church. This paper traces through four decades the farming behaviour and economic fortunes of several such groups who settled on the prairie of Kandiyohi County, Minnesota. The findings indicate that the ethnic community, especially where it consisted of people from a relatively restricted district in the old country, did help to make the frontier experience of its people rather different from that of their neighbours.     

A Spatial Prior for Bayesian Vector Autoregressive Models

In this paper we develop a Bayesian prior motivated by cross-sectional spatial autoregressive models for use in time-series vector autoregressive forecasting involving spatial variables. We compare forecast accuracy of the proposed spatial prior to that from a vector autoregressive model relying on the Minnesota prior and find a significant improvement. In addition to a spatially motivated prior variance as in LeSage and Pan (1995) we develop a set of prior means based on spatial contiguity. A Theil-Goldberger estimator may be used for the proposed model making it easy to implement.     

2. NOSTALGIA AND THE TURBULENCE OF TIMES

The concept of nostalgia has an invaluable advantage: In contrast to other cultural concepts, it has an exact date of birth. It was in 1688 when the medic Johannes Hofer published a thesis in which he described an illness he termed with the neologism “nostalgia.” But instead of following the academic and larger cultural discourses that evolved from this starting point until the present, the question that deserves some attention is which temporal setting goes along with the concept of nostalgia. Most of the experts on nostalgia as a sickness during the last three and a half centuries did not diagnose themselves but others, quite often patients from rural areas who had to leave home to work abroad, where they became nostalgic. With this diagnosis these experts also established a certain time‐model, because they separated a “modern” time‐model of irreversibility from a “nostalgic” time‐model of reversibility. If we take a closer look at the nostalgia diagnosis and its consequences, we might also gain some ideas for our thinking about the theory of history.     

Global cultural flows and the routes of identity: the imagined worlds of Celtic FC

In the study of sports and society, there has often been an excessive focus placed on the roots (i.e. origins) of collective identity. Drawing on Appadurai's [Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press] concept of ‘imagined worlds,’ this paper explores five global cultural flows and their influences on the diverse identities of Celtic Football Club supporters. While the historical ‘roots’ of these socially constructed identity attachments are important to understand, this article suggests that the ‘routes,’ or where these identities are being performed, maintained, and renegotiated on an everyday bases, provide a more complete understanding of collective identities in today's globalized world. Ultimately, this article highlights the reasons why people from around the world support a football team from Glasgow, Scotland by clearly demonstrating that the motivations that go into their decision are not as simple as one might initially imagine and are relentlessly renegotiated across both time and space.     

To Piss in or Piss Out: Gerrard Winstanley and the Radical's Dilemma

Abstract

‘Are we called to be prophets or pragmatists? Voices crying in the wilderness, or whisperers in the corridors of power?’ Radicals in every generation have to face the question. Gerrard Winstanley, ‘True Leveller’ leader and Christian communist, faced it in the English revolution of 1649. Was he a Utopian prophet or an early practitioner of critical engagement? ‘He was sometimes one, sometimes the other, and often both at the same time. As such, he speaks to our postmodern condition, where pragmatism is the life of all.’     

Manifestations of Contradiction: Lakes within the Production/Consumption Dialectic

Much emphasis within Marxist political ecology has focused on the social production of nature. Less attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which an emergent, material nature is an actor in the dialectic of its own appropriation. This paper examines the attempt to capitalize, under simultaneous processes of production and consumption, two proximate yet different Minnesota lakes. Lakes Elysian and Frances represent biophysical nature as process. Yet, their contrasting apparent states of permanence emerge from their dynamic relationships with agriculture, further affecting residential construction on their shores and lake association politics. Information collected from lakes surveys conducted by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and personal interviews with lakes association members provide insight into relational processes that influence the appearance of these lakes. Using this investigation, efforts can be made to resist discourses and practices that reify the existence of “green” lakes as inevitable. It is suggested, then, that a new politics of lakes management should be mediated that is less dependent upon their capitalization.     

A Faithful Interpreter? Li Zibiao and the 1793 Macartney Embassy to China

Abstract

This paper is about the interpreter of the first British embassy to China. Li Zibiao was a Chinese Catholic priest who Lord Macartney recruited in Europe and brought with him to China. This account of his participation in the embassy aims to help us understand the role of the interpreter in intercultural negotiations in the late 18th century. Interpreting is something we tend to think of as invisible, but in these negotiations, where only a single interpreter was present, the interpreter had significant power. In effect, he acted as a mediator, shuttling between the two parties to enable each to accept the positions of the other so that the negotiations could come to a more or less successful conclusion. This position of power meant that the interpreter’s own institutional and personal interests could also be important to the negotiations. Thus loyalty was crucial to how interpreting worked. Li’s achievement during the negotiations was to create a situation where both Lord Macartney and the Qing officials were willing to accept him as a mediator and where he survived to tell the tale.     

Geisteswissenschaften in the Third Reich: Some Reflections

Professor Hans Reiss left Germany on 22 August 1939, ‘cuttingit rather fine’, as he puts it, for Ireland, where hestudied and subsequently taught at Trinity College Dublin. Helater held teaching posts at the London School of Economicsand Queen Mary College, London, and was professor at McGillUniversity and the University of Bristol. Professor Reiss haspublished twelve books and editions and over seventy articlesthat range widely across the fields of German literature, culturalhistory and political thought. In this historiographical review,he discusses recent research on the conduct of German literaryscholars during the Third Reich.     

Conferences

Conferences reviewed:
David G., Anderson, Post-socialisms in the Russian North: International workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, 8-9 November 2000
Simon, Coleman and Bob, Simpson, Anthropology and Education (1): Resisting Bureaucracy—Anthropology Inside Out, Durham, 8 September 2000
David, Mills, Anthropology and Education (2:) Broadening Anthropology—Pre-University Anthropology Forum, 2 December 2000     

Books Received

Abstract

YEARS FROM NOW, historians seeking a barometer of the decline in popular support for the Iraq War need only read Bob Woodward's trilogy on the George W. Bush administration's foreign policy. The first volume, Bush at War, which exanfines the planning for the war in Afghanistan in 200l, borders at times on the hagiographical.¹ The sequel, Plan of Attack, which examines the military and diplomatic approach to war in Iraq in 2oo3, is more reserved. Bush himself receives even-handed treatment, but many of his subordinates, in particular the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, are severely criticized. Woodward's disillusionment is complete by the summer of 2oo6, when he published the dfird and final volume, State of Denial, which details the failures of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and shows no sign of the patriotism that coloured the earlier work. Bush at War, written with the smoke from 9/11 wafting in the airs could praise because it does not focus on Iraq: few objected to the means used and the ends pursued in Afghanistan. But Plan of Attack and State of Denial seek to explain a manifestly unpopular war.¹     

西藏美术馆变身拉萨新地标

Back at where he started 44 years ago,63-year-old Lobsang Dorje was a bit emotional.In front of the huge grey buildings,he stopped for a long time.He pointed at the towering grey cylindrical building, "Built in 1986,the wet-process kiln production line could produce 100,000 tons annually.It had been in operation until 201 1.Before my retirement,I was the assistant plant manager here."     

Lucien Basch: Ancient wrecks and the archaeology of ships A comment

The material we have today indicates that shell building was known and practised in the Mediterranean in classical antiquity. Comparative material shows that the‘intermediate stages’between shell and skeleton shipbuilding are in most, or all, cases shell building with some skeleton influence. The date when‘the skeleton idea’first struck a boatbuilder is not established. There are indications that this happened in the Mediterranean. No definite proof of skeleton work is found in the Mediterranean earlier than the Yassi Ada wreck, where a bottom shell may have been equipped with a skeleton on which topsides were built. The shell-skeleton division is a working tool for research on shipbuilding history, and should be used critically. The wrecks from Blackfriars I and New Guy's House indicate a kind of skeleton approach to shipbuilding in northern Europe (Marsden, 1967). If the 'skeleton idea’existed in the Mediterranean in classical antiquity, especially in warships, proof will turn up sooner or later. In the meantime, publishers of shipwrecks should take into consideration that we know very little, and that all details count. Field work on the existing tradition in the Mediterranean should be pursued. The lesson learned in Scandinavia is that the archaeologist may theorize as much as he wants, but the boat-builders will be able to give definite answers, if he takes the trouble to ask them, and watch them at work.