Partial texts: Representation,colonialism and agency in pacific history ∗

Abstract

The great ruling and sacred families of Polynesia were the senior representatives of tribal groupings or clans claiming a common homeland, or cult, and sometimes canoe tradition. Using the traditional framework of Polynesian history the inter‐island links and marriage patterns are examined in the four traditional periods, the age of the gods, the legendary period of the national or tribal ancestors, the semi‐legendary first genealogical period and the fourth period which commences with an ancestor from whom living chiefs can trace their descent without contradiction. A fifth period dealing with the great families since European contact and the rise of independent monarchies is also introduced. Particular emphasis is given to the interdependent yet dichotomous nature of tribal culture, the principal example being the relationship between Tonga and Samoa which originally appeared to be culturally distinct but socially one unit made up of two moieties. While modern political boundaries are largely artificial the great families continue to be mutually interdependent forming exogamous alliances and sharing a sense of pan‐Polynesian identity. The great sacred families, in contrast, tend to favour endogamous unions, a pattern emerging in modern Tonga indicative of a process of sacralisation.     

Bodily differences?: Gender, race, and class in Hans Sloane's Jamaican medical practice, 1687-1688

Despite the multitude of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British medical publications regarding empire and health, Hans Sloane's A Voyage To the Islands [of] Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707) was the first to incorporate significant numbers of female and African patients among its printed case histories. Comprising some sixty-four pages of the introduction, this unique set of records affords scholars the rare opportunity to examine how patients (of both sexes and races, various ages, and all social levels) residing in a "torrid zone" were diagnosed and treated by an English physician during the 1680s. Sloane had expected to encounter illnesses vastly different from those found in England when he arrived in Jamaica, but after practicing medicine in Jamaica for over a year, he concluded that there existed very little difference in the manifestation of illnesses in different climates. Although some ailments were sex-specific and culture-specific, for the most part Sloane transgressed categories of gender and race by diagnosing and treating all his patients according to the same medical ideology. And although it did not directly challenge accepted medical views, Sloane's Voyage revealed incongruities in dealing with such categories within the context of early imperial medicine.     

What's Missing? Gender,Reason and the Post-Secular

Abstract

This article considers whether contemporary debate about the "post-secular" has overlooked the extent to which, as a concept or epoch, it may be "gendered." Jürgen Habermas has suggested that there is something "missing" from secular reason in the shape of transcendental and metaphysical values; but I will contend that the debate is in danger of neglecting the central role of gender—so integral to the conceptual and political formation of modernity—in any rethinking of the symbolic of the post-secular. As feminist theorists have long been reminding us, many of the same processes that gave birth to modernity's elevation of public reason, impartial and non-contingent subjectivity, and models of the free, self-actualizing autonomous agent facilitated by the formation of liberal democracy, were not actually neutral or universal; but highly gendered. They rested on binary representations of women and men's differential nature; and they conceived of differential and gendered division of labour which often precluded women's claiming full humanity, let alone full and active citizenship. So gender, and women, are also in danger of disappearing from this new post-secular chapter in the debate about religion, politics and identity. This article examines how this omission might be corrected, and will outline what might be some of the most significant issues at stake.     

Race,space, and agency in the international introduction industry: how American men perceive women’s agency in Colombia,Ukraine and the Philippines

The international introduction industry, more commonly known as the ‘mail order bride’ industry, is often portrayed in American media as a conduit of human trafficking or a ploy by women from ‘third world’ countries to gain access to American citizenship. This study addresses how men participating in the international introduction industry perceived the industry and the agency/sincerity of women who participate in it across three different geographic spaces, namely Ukraine, Colombia and the Philippines, and how these perceptions often adopt racialized discourses that portrays white Ukrainian women as sexy ‘scammers’, while women of color are more likely to be portrayed as victims of poverty and patriarchy. Based on empirical data collected on romance tours within all geographic spaces with male participants, I suggest that men’s racialized assumptions regarding women’s intentions within the industry, as well as what type of agency they possess, are heavily based on tropes of the third world as backwards, traditional, and static.     

Mirrors of Modernity: Time–Space,the Subaltern,and the Decolonial

This essay is cast as something of a personal narrative. It recounts how I have arrived at inklings and intimations of space and time, particularly pervasive procedures of the spatialization of time and the temporalization of space, in tandem with understandings of disciplines and subjects of modernity. The account begins with my pre-apprentice days in Delhi, moves onto my apprenticeship at Cambridge, covers my journeyman sojourns in Mexico, and extends unto my artisanal concerns in the present. At stake especially are encounters and entanglements with time and space as folded within the creases of subaltern studies and de-colonial understandings (yet also postcolonial perspectives and historical anthropology). On the one hand, I explore how these shifting orientations have drawn upon hegemonic representations as well as non-certified imaginations of time and space, to now press familiar associations and now unravel unusual enunciations of these concepts and processes. On the other hand, I track the active construal, the exact production, of space and time within the epistemic practice of these critical perspectives. At stake throughout are wider issues of meaning and power, alterity and authority, difference and disciplines.     

Who Should Run Elections in the United States?

Much has been said since the 2000 presidential election regarding the administration of elections in the United States, particularly about how election administrators are selected and to whom they are responsive. Unfortunately, there has been little research on the different administrative structures that are possible and the preferences of Americans regarding these different administrative options. In this article we present the results from a national survey of American adults in which we asked them their preference for whether elections should be run by partisan or nonpartisan officials, whether the officials should be elected or appointed, and whether the administration of elections should be by a single unitary executive or by an election board. In addition to eliciting the basic preferences of Americans about these administrative choices, we also undertake a deeper analysis of these data to determine the underlying patterns in support for the different administrative options.     

Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century Gender History: Or,Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?

This essay is a methodological evaluation of the procedures and presuppositions informing the social and cultural history of gender, as exemplified in recent scholarship about the transformations of sex and gender in Britain from the early modern period through the long eighteenth century. It suggests answers to two questions: how can we write the cultural history of gender while maintaining both rigour in the enterprise and an awareness of its limits? And where might we go when these limits suddenly appear to undermine the very foundational presuppositions on which the whole cultural‐historical project is built?     

Masculinity, ‘race’, and family in the colonies: protecting Aborigines in the early nineteenth century

Much of British imperial society in the early nineteenth century was characterised by a reformulated sensibility of manliness and family. Integral to this sensibility was the notion of men's responsibility for dependants. However, the story of Charles Wightman Sievwright, appointed as Assistant Protector of Aborigines in colonial New South Wales, serves to demonstrate that a man's duty of care for very different, racialised kinds of dependants could be emphasised in conflicting ways by British settlers on the one side and by humanitarians on the other, under conditions of colonial expansion. Sievwright's story also encourages more explicit attention to both the tensions and the mutual intrusions between men's public and private roles within colonial society. Sievwright's own efforts as an active, humanitarian man in the political life of the New South Wales frontier were scandalously undermined by his failure to perform the role expected of him in his domestic, familial relations.     

Working in the shade: agriculture,race, and recreational landscapes in Connecticut, 1940–1950

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, shade tobacco growers in the state of Connecticut employed white high school students from Florida and Pennsylvania, as well as African Americans from southern black colleges and high schools to harvest and process their crop. This paper traces the history of these workers as a means for examining overlooked processes of racialization in rural New England, and for expanding on discussions of race, agriculture, and rural landscapes through the context of leisure. I argue that racialization among student workers unfolded according to the structure, management, and representation of leisure and the recreational landscapes that were opened (or closed) to them. Additional contexts bearing on this process included gender, class, and status as resident or non-resident, each of which informed race-based discussions about leisure and recreational landscapes. This empirical study infuses cultural geographic studies of race and agriculture, whether in New England or beyond, with a depth of perspective not normally associated with rural landscapes. It argues for the extension of cultural geographic inquiry on leisure and racialization into the contexts of agricultural and rural landscapes.     

Exclusive Visions? Representations of Family,Work and Gender in the Work of the British Social Exclusion Unit

The Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) of the British Government is a recent and innovative response to social problems in the UK. Through an examination of selected publications of the SEU, the article highlights some of the representations of family, work and gender which provide the discursive context in which the SEU operates and to which it, in turn, contributes. The article suggests that perspectives found in the post-1945 welfare state continue to influence approaches to problems of exclusion. Whilst there are areas in which current political thinking shows evidence of sensitivity to the social recomposition that has attended economic restructuring since 1970, it is argued that there remain tendencies within SEU discussions which reinforce a more nostalgic constitution of work, family and gender relations. Consequently, the article concludes that the potential of the social exclusion debate to grasp fundamental issues is yet to be fully realised.     

Whose world and whose archaeology? The colonial present and the return of the political

El autor identifica un proyecto colonial crecientemente agresivo funcionando en Irak y Afganistán y considera que el fallo catastrófico de la comunidad arqueológica occidental de responder apropiadamente a las condiciones en ambas naciones. La manera de énfasis sobre arqueología está contribuyendo activamente no solamente a la legitimidad de una guerra ilegal y sin ética, sino también a la reproducción del régimen de poder y verdad que la guerra busca establecer. Se llama al WAC a “descentralizar” al mundo como es visto por los centros metropolitanos Occidentales, dejando a la “periferia” tomar la iniciativa, poner la agenda, y promover las medidas arqueológicas alternativas.

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Résumé L'auteur identifie un projet colonialiste de plus en plus agressif en Irak et en Afghanistan, et considère léchec catastrophique de la communauté des archéologues occidentaux à répondre de fa?on approprée aux conditions dans chacune de ces deux nations. Insister sur l'archéologie contribue activement, non seulement à légitimer une guerre illégale et immorale, mais aussi à reproduire le régime de force et de vérité que la guerre cherche à établir. Il en appelle au WAC pour'dé-centrer'la vision du monde des centres métropolitains occidentaux, afin de permettre à la ‘périphérie’ de prendre l'initiative, de mettre en place un agenda, et de préconiser des épistémologies archéologiques alternatives.

     

‘Whose name's on the awning?’ Gender,entrepreneurship and the American diner

While, in recent years, women-owned businesses have become increasingly common, entrepreneurship itself remains a deeply gendered institution, and one that is constructed through everyday practice rooted in space and place. The purpose of the present study is to explore the woman-owned diner as a distinct environment in and through which configurations of gender and entrepreneurship are mutually constituted, socially enacted, and spatially defined. Drawing upon a case study of a present-day diner in Worcester, Massachusetts, I trace the life narratives of two working-class women through their emergence as entrepreneurs in the diner industry. I reflect upon the distinctive space of the woman-owned diner as it is produced through the interaction between the gendered body-subjects of women owners, the social meaning of ‘feeding work’, and the spatial character of the diner institution. Through the gendered social practice of diner ownership, these two women have overcome substantial social, economic and geographic obstacles to their independence and worked to bridge the divide between the value of public and private work. Building on existing scholarship in the field, this study demonstrates the potential for women's agency through everyday practice as business owners, to create new spaces and alternative means of practicing both gender and entrepreneurship.     

Marriage Migration,Gender Transformations,and Family Values in the ‘Global Ecumene’

The metaphor of the market is a poor explanatory tool for the growth in international web-brokered marriages, between (mainly) men from rich countries and women from poor countries. States play an important role in regulating particular forms of migration including creating the ‘need’ for spousal migrants, as well as permitting their entry. The characterisation of the men who seek spouses through international agencies as powerful agents in the world system has to be mediated through understandings of the ways in which gender identities are not simple binaries that the contemporary global order is reproducing on an expanded scale. The characterisation of the women obscures the manner in which they are acting out of their own aspirations; and when a marriage is contracted, the man and woman enter into a personal relationship that cannot be reduced to a commodity exchange. These marriages involve people in negotiations about new forms of personal attachment involving intimacy, spousal roles and family relations. They are constitutive of the social networks of the ‘global ecumene’, a new kind of known world whose borders are constantly expanding. Gender relations are not constituted simply in the realm of the economic. We cannot assume family relations are merely expressions of dominant economic forms. The space of international web-brokered marriages is one in which women can be seen as active subjects in a transnational space that allows them to act outside, to certain degrees, of kinship-based power.     

Está listo (Are you ready)? Gender,race and land registration in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve

Geographers and political ecologists are paying increased attention to the ways in which conservation policies disrupt indigenous customary tenure arrangements. However, much less attention is given to the particular ways protected area management shapes natural resource access for indigenous women. With this in mind, this article examines how a recently proposed state land project in Honduras, Catastro y Regularización, requires that Miskito residents individuate collective family lands in the interests of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘biodiversity protection’. In the debates that followed the project's announcement, Miskito women feared that such measures would erase their customary access to family lands. As the state's project seeks to re-order Reserve land, intra-Miskito struggles intensified among villagers. Such struggles are not only gendered but are shaped by longstanding processes of racialization in Honduras and the Mosquitia region. Drawing upon ethnographic research, I argue that Miskito women's subjectivity and rights to customary family holdings are informed by their ability to make ‘patriarchal bargains’ with Miskito men inside the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. Such findings suggest that scholars and policy makers continue to reflect on the ways global conservation and sustainable development practices may undermine indigenous customary tenure securities, whether intentionally or not.