Anthropology, ‘Native Schooling’ and Maori: the Politics of ‘Cultural Adaptation’ Policies

This paper examines three policies of ‘cultural adaptation’ formulated in colonial contexts in the 1920s and 1930s — that of the British Colonial Office for education in Africa, that of the New Zealand Native Schools and that of Maori leaders. While clearly inter-related, these policies were developed and promoted by their respective proponents to serve widely different political goals. Particularly significant is the role played by anthropology in that context. Proponents of all three policies looked to anthropologists for insights and scientific validation of their political agendas. Anthropologists, in turn, not only accepted this role but, particularly in the case of the British Colonial education policy, actively claimed it, involving themselves in the processes of colonial control.     

When Governance Gets Going: Certifying ‘Better Cotton’ and ‘Better Sugarcane’

As many new certification systems for commodities have been established over the past decade, scholars have devoted sustained attention to the ways that these multi‐stakeholder governance initiatives have transformed the industries in which they were launched. With a few notable exceptions, studies in this area have continued to focus on the development and impacts of new governance mechanisms, and on the sectoral or industrial changes that have ensued. In contrast to these ‘inside‐out’ perspectives on governance innovation and change, this article considers how two prominent yet relatively under‐studied commodity governance initiatives have been shaped by the broader political economic order in which they operate. To offer an ‘outside‐in’ account of the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) and Bonsucro (formerly the Better Sugarcane Initiative), the article details recent changes in what the author terms the ‘world commodity order’, and situates the BCI and Bonsucro within this order. From this vantage point, the author ultimately makes two analytical claims: (i) that the world commodity order has not precluded the differential institutionalization of these initiatives; and (ii) that aspects of the order have circumscribed the potential of the BCI and Bonsucro to deliver pro‐poor business practices.     

Strathern's Melanesian ‘dividual’ and the Christian ‘individual’: a Perspective from Vanua Lava,Vanuatu

What happens to people's concept of the person when their ‘dividuality’ engages with the Christian concept of the ‘individual’? According to Vanua Lava kastom, when people die they go to sere timiat, the place of the dead. But do they still go there when the person had been a Christian during their life time? Where is the Christian heaven and hell? Is there a separate Christian ‘soul’? Will the dead be eternally separated from each other and their ancestors? Can kastom and Christian concepts be reconciled? Depending on denomination and degree of conversion (devout, nominal, or ‘back‐slider’) people have found multiple answers that help them conceptualise their final resting place. Their answers are of relevance for theoretical debates in anthropology about dividuality, individuality and engagement with modernity.     

‘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.     

British Muslims,multiculturalism and UK foreign policy: ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’ in and beyond the state

After the 7 July and 21 July 2005 attacks on London the government‐sponsored effort to ‘prevent extremism together’ has repeatedly acknowledged the central role of anger at UK foreign policy in the radicalization of some British Muslims. This acknowledgement has been incorporated into a ‘comprehensive framework for action’ centring upon the need for increased ‘integration’ and an effort, critically, to re‐work British multiculturalism as a means to combat terrorism. Examining the history of multiculturalism in Britain and the tradition of living and acting ‘together’ that it suggests, however, raises a set of questions about the society into which integration is supposed to occur, what integration might involve and its real efficacy for combating terrorists. In addressing these issues, this article suggests that the debate over contemporary multiculturalism should be situated within a much wider social and political crisis over the meaning of ‘community’ in the UK, to which questions of global order and foreign policy are central. Comparing the ‘ethical’ basis of Al‐Qaeda's attacks with Tony Blair's invocation of ‘values’ as the foundation for military intervention reveals that both seek to realize models of community through violence and a shared process of ‘radicalization’ which in both cases precedes 9/11 and which might be traced back to the Gulf War of 1991. The article concludes that debate over the future of multiculturalism in the UK is being conducted alongside and is implicated within a second, violent global conflict over community: one which is central to, but essentially unarticulated within the domestic context.     

‘Balkan Mentality’: History,Legend, Imagination

Abstract. In this article I attempt to do two things. First I consider in what sense it could be reasonable to talk of a ‘Balkan mentality’, shared across national divisions by all peoples in Southeastern Europe. I argue among other things that nationalism and its impact on culture and scholarship has been a major stumbling block for the conceptualisation of a shared ‘Balkan mentality’. Secondly, I go on to examine one possible context in which a shared mentality could be said to have existed among the Orthodox Christians in the Balkans. I suggest that such a context could be located in the pre-nationalist Balkan society of the eighteenth century, a period in which the region was politically united by Ottoman rule. To illustrate the content of the mental outlook shared by the Balkan Orthodox in the eighteenth century I examine the autobiographical writings of three major authors, one writing in Greek (Caisarios Depontes), one in Bulgarian (Sofroni Vra?anski) and one in Serbian (Matija Nenadovi?). I identify the shared mental elements reflected in their texts and point out how the transition to a national self-conception taking place at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Balkans, marked the end of this shared ‘Balkan mentality’. The study is thus an exploration in the ‘prehistory’, as it were, of nationalism in the Balkans, an exploration which also looks at the symbolic origins nationalism in the region as reflected in the texts of two of the three authors.     

Rum,seduction and death: ‘Aboriginality’ and alcohol

Racism is here examined in relation to its origins in the colonial culture and in the motivations and intents of the colonisers. It is contained in the metaphors and icons, onto which the stereotypical information is projected, which express fear and attempt to tame the native and turn him into a mendicant. Bennelong is shown as the first instance of the British constructing the image of the ‘degenerate native’ the ‘drunken Aborigine’ the ‘urban Aborigine’. Whites are made innocent of the destruction of Aboriginal society because the Aborigines are ‘drinking themselves to death’. This paper asks whether the notion of social pathology has allowed anthropologists to avoid dealing with the realities of Aboriginal social life.     

Neither ‘America’ nor ‘Québec’: constructing the Canadian multicultural nation

ABSTRACT. Although researchers have deconstructed the myth of stark social differences between the various North American sub‐societies, an assimilating American melting pot and an ethnically oppressive monocultural Québec are still popular representations within Canadian majority discourses, such as the English‐language mainstream media and parts of academia. In this paper, I argue that images of ‘America’ and ‘Québec’ play important roles for the multicultural reconstruction of Canadian nationhood. Examining selected op‐ed articles from two Toronto‐based mainstream newspapers during the 1990s, I develop and exemplify a theoretical understanding of how national identities are constituted and transformed within inter‐ and intra‐national relations of power and alterity. I pay special attention to the particularisation of Canada through the confrontation with American nationhood, the ambiguities of recognising the distinctiveness of Québec inside Canada, and the consequences of projecting Québec's supposedly ‘ethnic’ nationalism outside the boundaries of Canadianness.     

From ‘Relief’ to ‘Justice and Protection’: The Maintenance of Deserted Wives,British Masculinity and Imperial Citizenship, 1870–1920

In the early twentieth century, local British poor law guardians’ concerns with the maintenance of deserted and neglected families were transformed into imperial, and later transnational, policy promoting justice for abandoned wives and children. Both local court cases concerning maintenance and policy debates at the national and imperial levels reveal the ways in which a breadwinner model of masculinity shaped maintenance policy and practice. Although the maintenance problem was framed differently by local welfare providers and imperial heads of state, concerns about welfare costs and human rights intersected in the figure of the irresponsible male citizen, who challenged the dominant model of British/imperial masculinity by refusing to maintain his wife.     

‘Mother's Blood,Father's Land’: Native Title and Comparative Land Tenure Modelling for Claims in ‘Settled’ Australia

Anthropologists working in the field of Australian native title are required to piece together the early laws and customs of claimant groups and assess the degree to which these have continued since the assumption of British sovereignty. The former task is often difficult in south‐eastern Australia because of a lack of good quality early records. I suggest here that there are general principles of Aboriginal land tenure that can be recovered from elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia, where the ethnography is of a better standard, and these can be used as a guide for working with the patchier materials characteristic of the south‐east. The principles mainly cohere around the organic relationship between patrilineal descent and complementary filiation, and are shown to be relevant to the modelling of contemporary south‐eastern tenure, where people speak of ‘bloodlines’ identified with ancestral lands.     

‘Living’ in Nage,or the Meaning of ‘Life’ in an Eastern Indonesian Society

Originating in 19th century cultural evolutionary theory, a revised concept of ‘animism’ has in recent years found new life in anthropology in the writings of ontological relativists. Continuity is found in the reputed attribution of life by members of small‐scale non‐western societies to inanimate objects as well as to organisms. This new animism is typically contrasted with western or modern scientific thought, either exclusively or primarily. Concerning the Nage of the Indonesian island of Flores, this paper analyzes results of research into what things people regard as being alive (muzi). While the majority of Nage deem only animals, plants, and humans to be living, differences appear among informants distinguished by age and gender. As well as the overall finding, this variation and cultural usages contextually depicting certain inanimate objects as being alive raise questions about animism as a unitary way of knowing the world characteristic of single societies.     

Sir John Coxe Hippisley: That ‘Busy Man’ in the Cause of Catholic Emancipation

The late 18th and early 19th centuries represent a critical time for the emergence of modernity in western political life. Of particular interest is the confluence at that time of increased religious toleration with political reform. Research for an earlier study, Parliamentary Politics of a County and its Town: General Elections in Suffolk and Ipswich in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, 2002), led to an examination of Sir John Coxe Hippisley, MP (1747–1825). In many ways, his political career is an exemplar of the broader conflicts of contemporary English political life writ small. Set between 1790 and 1818, Hippisley's parliamentary career is fascinating, for while he was an active and precocious supporter of catholic emancipation, he represented Sudbury in Suffolk, a borough with a high proportion of protestant dissenters. His constituents found Hippisley's enthusiasm for catholic emancipation repugnant, but not so much so that they could not be convinced to continue to vote for him if the price was right. Consequently a constant and expensive wooing of his constituents marked his parliamentary career. On a national level, Hippisley's constant and public pursuit of catholic emancipation, coupled with his equally avid quest for preferment, led to a series of quixotic contradictions in his political behaviour. Hippisley and his political adventures thus represent a crucial development stage in the movement for religious freedom in England and the west, as well as providing an illuminating case study on the dynamics of local politics in the time leading up to the first great age of reform.     

‘Certainly the Muslim is the very devil incarnation’: Islamophobia and The Merchant of Venice

In this paper, we examine Shakespeare's sixteenth‐century play, The Merchant of Venice. Anti‐Semitism is a key theme in this play. The well‐known central character, Shylock, is a Jewish man ridiculed and victimised because of his identity. Much literary research has been done on the anti‐Semitism of the play, and many social studies have compared anti‐Semitism and Islamophobia, but scarcely any research brings a Shakespearean play from the sixteenth century into the context of twenty‐first century Islamophobia. There are a number of similarities between the manner in which Shylock is ostracised and the current victimisation that Muslim communities are facing in Europe and more specifically the UK. With this in mind, we explore contextual and thematic elements of this play and argue that it is possible to apply the way Shylock is unfairly victimised on stage because of his identity as a Jew to the treatment of some Muslims today. In particular, the treatment he faces shares stark similarities with the types, impacts and consequences of Islamophobic hate crime today.