Sorcery and Warfare in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea

Sorcery and warfare are closely interrelated in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In contrast to other areas of the Highlands, sorcery in large parts of the Eastern Highlands is considered to be an exclusively male domain, and violent retribution for deaths attributed to sorcery is primarily directed against other communities. Thus, sorcery accusations have the tendency to escalate to large‐scale inter‐group warfare, often causing additional casualties. Sorcery beliefs have undergone changes during the colonial and postcolonial era, with new forms of sorcery proliferating, and the zones of safety from sorcery shrinking, due to demographic and economic changes. Sorcery accusations were triggers for the resumption of warfare during the late 1970s and 1980s, and they remain pertinent to outbreaks of hostilities today. In fact, the majority of armed conflicts between 1975 and 2006 among a sample of Fore, Auyana, and Tairora communities in the Okapa and Obura‐Wonenara districts of the Eastern Highlands Province are connected to sorcery beliefs and sorcery accusations. These sorcery accusations are the result of uneven economic development and failure to deliver basic social services. When violence is threatened, local leaders try to mediate the hostility, but the state seems unable to offer alternatives for the peaceful settlement of conflicts.     

‘Operation Restore Public Hope’: Youth and the Magic of Modernity in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT This paper explores the measures known as ‘Operation Restore Public Hope,’ which were authorized during the State of Emergency in January 1998 in Port Vila, Vanuatu, after rioting and looting erupted over the alleged government mismanagement of the mandatory workers' savings fund. The excessive police violence associated with these ‘clean‐up measures’, I argue, undermined the state's claim ‘to restore public hope’ and illuminated the changing relationship between kastomary leaders and the state as well as their competing strategies to define and maintain social order. The extraordinary events of the State of Emergency point to the confluence of sorcery practices and police violence; underline the contested nature of everyday life, and draw attention to the disciplining of young bodies in new urban spaces. Exploring the deployment of a sorcery technique to counter police violence highlights the landscapes of modern power in Vanuatu where magical and state practices coexist with regimes of violence.     

Policing the Holy Nation: The State and Righteous Violence in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT In Vanuatu, the police force has in recent years been strengthened by foreign government aid. AusAid and NZAid are heavily involved inside the police force, seeking to create ‘good governance’ and to shape Vanuatu's national developments. However, these measures also coincide with some other unexpected developments. Recent cases of violence, and especially of sorcery, have led the police to intervene in a quest for moral order. Police are becoming part of the articulation of new occult understandings of wealth and power. These developments are traced back partly to the history of colonial governance and the idea of righteous violence, but also to current restructurings of the Vanuatu state and growing Christian conceptions of Vanuatu as a holy nation.     

Logging,Violence and Pleasure: Neoliberalism,Civil Society and Corporate Governance in West New Britain

ABSTRACT The postcolonial world of Melanesia is made up of diverse experiments, which combine modern and customary technologies of power into new hybrid assemblages. In the 1990s, there occurred a proliferation of landowner companies in rural New Britain. This happened in a context of neoliberalism where the state divested itself of many functions and services by allocating these to a supposedly more efficient private sector. In the Kaliai area, this new economic partnership between state and capital gave rise to more militarised forms of policing, which sought to protect logging by a large Malaysian company from growing local unrest. Supplementing these coercive state actions were private strategies, which used sorcery to intimidate opponents to logging as well as rivals within the landowner company. Opponents were bought off and alliances created through using customary exchange relations as well as through modern gifts of money, western goods and commoditised pleasures.     

Performing dialogical Dutchness: negotiating a national imaginary in parenting guidance

In contemporary Europe, national identities are fiercely contested and governments have sought ways to strengthen national identification. Notwithstanding this European pattern, government policies are implemented differently and belonging to the nation comes to involve different images and enactments across contexts. In the Netherlands, especially, belonging to the nation is at stake in many high‐profile public and political struggles. In this context, a pervasive public imaginary we call ‘dialogical Dutchness’ represents the Dutch as distinctly anti‐nationalist and open to difference. This raises the question whether national boundaries actually become traversable in view of such a national imaginary. How does one become a Dutch subject if Dutchness entails not being nationalist? Through the analysis of a Dutch social policy practice – state‐provided parenting courses – we show how dialogical Dutchness is negotiated and transformed in actual enactments of national difference and belonging. Although dialogical Dutchness foregrounds openness to difference and valorises discussion, it comes to perpetuate and substantiate boundaries between those who belong to the nation and those whose belonging is still in question.     

Sorcery and Negotiating Economic Agency: A Critical Observation from Solomon Islands

In this paper, my aim is to add to the discussions of sorcery in Melanesia by focussing on its relation to economic agency in the context of a case example from Malaita, Solomon Islands. Using Taylor's (2015) categories of ‘distributive’ and ‘possessive’ agency as a critical point of departure, I illustrate how sorcery can be considered as an outcome when people are perceived not to be balancing these forms of economic agency. By drawing on the example of an entrepreneur from Malaita, I highlight the complexity of the negotiations between possessive and distributive agencies and show how critically investigating these negotiations is important for understanding why sorcery may happen but also how to limit the chances of it happening. Furthermore, I also illustrate how critical investigations of accounts of sorcery can reveal complexities of socio‐economic and political life in changing economic and social circumstances.     

Psychoanalysis,Fantasy, Postcoloniality: Turkish Nationalism and Historiography in Post-Ottoman Turkey

In this article, I investigate the surge of scholarly interest in Ottoman minorities since 1980s - a surge that acts in defense of a national culture. What distinguishes the nationalist-cum-Ottomanist historiography of the Turkish historians under study here is the heavy emphasis on notions of tolerance and multiculturalism with direct reference to the imperial era of 15th and 17th centuries. This emerging discourse has been striving to rebut the Orientalist stigmas attributed to Turkish-Ottoman culture and civilization—such as barbaric, despotic and authoritarian—and construct its own tolerant and multicultural historical imagery. Drawing upon the urgent lessons of postcolonial experience, theory and history, I analyze the pitfalls of uncritically clinging to such an imaginary. The emergence of this new Turkish-Ottoman imaginary and its discourse of a Turkish nativism and Occidentalism that emphasizes minority rights, tolerance and the harmonious coexistence of a plurality remains an under-explored territory for postcolonial criticism. The analysis of nostalgic Ottoman literature can illuminate how the ‘Occident/Western’ and ‘Oriental/Derivative’ (i.e. the Ottoman and Turkish) formations of the national imaginary are constructed, remembered and contested in the contemporary global order.     

From lockdown to rāhui and teddy bears in windows: Initial responses to Covid-19 in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Scholarly examinations of states of emergency frequently underscore how the crisis imaginary is employed to rapidly and unjustifiably expand state power. This line of analysis affords great insight into the misuse of state power. It also, however, tends to depict the citizenry as either weak and overwhelmed or at best, duped by the workings of the state, and thus ignores the possibility of democratic processes continuing within a state of emergency. Aotearoa/New Zealand’s response to Covid-19 reveals a collaborative dynamic in which the citizenry actively engaged in constituting the state of emergency, and suggests the need for a broader examination of how collective responsibility, care and blame are envisioned and enacted, not only by governments but by (neo-liberal) citizenries during times of national crisis.     

Prefiguring the State

Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wished‐for, both to experience better practice and to advance change. This paper contributes to prefigurative thinking in three ways. It explores what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; takes its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and addresses what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced. Central to my discussion is the plural state—taking shape as micro, city, regional, national and global formations. Plural state thinking makes room for divergent kinds of states but does not necessarily foreground progressive ones. Thus, to explore in more detail a transformative left conception of the state, discussion turns to 1980s British municipal radicalism. Taking up this adventurous episode in governing as a “thinking tool”, an imaginary of the state as horizontal, everyday, activist and stewardly emerges.     

‘New face of Serbia’ at the Eurovision Song Contest: international media spectacle and national identity1

The aim of this paper is to examine the construction/recycling of national identities primarily through the participation of Serbia (and Montenegro) at the Eurovision Song Contests 2004–2008. First, the performances of this country's representatives at the Eurovision Song Contest will be examined, emphasising the aspects that contribute to the popularity of the songs chosen to represent the nation and the state. All those elements reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality, managing to reawaken the sense of the supposedly idyllic national past associated with them. In this manner of (re-)creating identity, the recycling of memory and imagined tradition, but also references to European cultural, media and political spheres, have great symbolic weight. The second part will offer a discourse analysis of media coverage of the performance of the country as a host of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is shown how the notion of ‘the new face of Serbia’ is supposed to balance different, sometimes even confronted cultural markers present in concurrent identity strategies in Serbia.     

Scenarios of Poiesis: Italian New Media (1994–2004)

This essay attempts to read a number of interventions in Italian new media over the last decade as both a response to and an implicit critique of posthumanism. After a brief discussion of the principal terms in question—new media, interaction, and posthumanism—and a survey of the most important contributors to the discourse of posthumanism in Italy, the essay maps the principal features of Italian media as embodied by the works of three contemporary new media artists. These characteristics include the privileging of a prosthetic model for understanding interaction and more generally the staging of interaction as moments of poiesis. They also include more recently the cancellation of the boundaries between ‘scientific’ and cultural images. The essay insists that by foregrounding the primacy of Italian cultural patterns for determining how meaning is generated in new media, Italian new media artists implicitly critique a reifying tendency among posthuman observers in Italy. The essay concludes with a broad assessment of the importance of poiesis for an Italian technological imaginary.     

Scenarios for the digital age: Convergence,personalization, exclusion

The new media system that has emerged worldwide since the early 1990s is characterized by increasing use of digital technologies in every area and convergence between once distinct media. In Italy there have been a number of national variations on this global pattern: relative weakness of state regulation, a move away from the dominance of the system by 'generalist' television, a high rate of cellular phone use and a slower than average growth of Internet use. As far as consumption is concerned, the most common categories used to describe the emergent system—personalization of media, increased individual choice and mobility—do manage to capture some important aspects, in Italy as elsewhere, but they obscure others, notably the structural constraints limiting individual choice, the formation of new media microcommunities and, conversely, the exclusion of particular groups of citizens from full participation in the new system.     

Coral Roads and their Sorcery: Lost Authority and Spectral Commodification in Buka

Sorcery in Buka, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, is understood as reprehensible in most present contexts, but it is also believed to have once played a constructive role in maintaining social order. This mytheme is important both to the analysis of how traditional systems of sorcery come to be rearticulated in postcolonial contexts, and as a means of understanding how villagers conceptualise social order itself. Here, an analysis of the selective means by which vernacular forms of sorcery are assimilated to the Tok Pisin term poisen is presented together with an examination of the history of institutions of social control in which sorcery is remembered ‐ and forgotten ‐ to have played key roles. In the past, sorcery would have been gavman blong peles, a ‘village government’, a power over and from people, accumulated by the hierarchical integration of lineages within houses known as tsuhana. Sorcery has been privatized and commodified, slipping out of control of traditional authorities, who now pursue a strategy of achieving power over land. Power from people entails, in the Buka context, sorcery or other forms of internalised violence; power over land entails the assertion exclusivist genealogical claims. The pursuit of such claims is mediated by courts, and frequently creates rifts in communities. Sorcery, once freed from its role as government, returns to haunt traditional authorities as the spectre of their former power, and as the spectre of resistance to their current power: to the extent that they emphasize the historical role of poisen, the more they are suspected of it; imagined as the anarchy of jealousies, poisen multiplies in proportion to their success in parlaying forms of traditional authority into economic and political advantage.     

Vikings in Brazil: the Iceland Brazil Association shaping Icelandic heritage

Abstract

The Iceland Brazil Association (AISBRA) was established in 1996 by a group of Brazilians of Icelandic descent, more than 100 years after the first generation of immigrants settled in Brazil in the nineteenth century. The association was the first organisation in Brazil to collectively emphasise and celebrate Icelandic heritage. The association caters to a disparate group of people that had, in many cases, little knowledge about their historical links to Iceland. In spite of the fragmented activities of AISBRA since its establishment, the number of participants has increased, reflecting their growing interest in their Icelandic past. This paper examines how the members of Iceland Brazil Association produce their heritage independently, outside the state recognised heritage, within the Brazilian national context. We analyse how identities are re/shaped in new ways to engage with the past and how values from the past are extracted and turned into contemporary economic, social, and political values. This paper stresses heritage-making as a social imaginary used to define collective identity, which, while based on ancestry, also intersects with ideas of race and class. Representations of their Icelandic heritage allow the members of the Brazil Iceland Association to emphasise their ‘Europeanness’ and thus their associations with whiteness in contemporary post-colonial Brazil.     

The Other Green Revolution: Land Epistemologies and the Mexican Revolutionary State

This paper explores the development of Mexican Revolutionary land epistemologies in the years following the global Great Depression. Demonstrating how ideas about agrarian life informed national development efforts across multiple spheres, including public education, state‐sponsored media, and governmental conservation projects, it argues that human–nature relations were constitutive of state visions of Revolutionary citizenship. Scholarly work interrogating the role of scientific knowledge in land politics has focused on the ways that territorial dispossessions are routed through expert truth claims; this study deviates from that work by asking how resource conflicts can also produce new knowledge to support progressive platforms for change.     

Afghanistan's energy sociotechnical imaginaries: Alternative visions in a conflict zone

Imaginaries are understood to be both discursive and cognitive constructs that shape behaviour, policies, and institutions – but how do longstanding imaginaries evolve in new circumstances, and how do they interact with existing power structures in changed circumstances? Drawing on conceptions of discursive power, this paper investigates the interplay of power with both new and old imaginaries in the case of Afghanistan, specifically regarding alternative energy futures. Employing an interpretive approach, we draw on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with elite stakeholders and policy observers, to provide an account of the relations between alternative energy futures imaginaries and political power. We demonstrate, how certain discursive practices are made possible, authorised and articulated through imaginative geographies. Critically, the government-advocated imaginary of Afghanistan as an energy corridor and hence an energy importer both represents the views of several powerful interests and concurs with the long-held idea of Afghanistan as a buffer state. In this way, political path dependencies are reinforced through a supportive imaginary, just as the dominant imaginary is itself reinforced by the main stakeholders. While in line with our interpretive epistemology we do not make claims for the specific configuration of imaginaries being generalisable elsewhere, we do find the general theoretical approach useful for understanding discursive aspects of conflict zone politics, particularly vis-à-vis energy system trajectories.     

Singing the new Nepal

Nepal's adoption of a new national anthem in 2007 reflected a decision to establish a new social and political order that was republican, federal and inclusive of the country's many minority communities. It came after a ten‐year internal conflict, and was followed by the abolition of the Shah monarchy that had ruled the country since the late eighteenth century. This article describes the historical and political context of the decision to replace the old anthem, the selection of the new anthem, and the debates that arose in the Nepali media and public sphere after its lyrics and the identity of its author were made known. The discussion refers to arguments made by Karen Cerulo about the relationship between the syntactic structure of national anthems and the stage reached in the process of political modernisation of the nation‐state in question, and provides some comparative perspectives on the Nepali case.     

Finding the Past in the Landscape: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Sambaqui</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Kaizuka</Emphasis> Amid Appropriation and Construction of Identities (Brazil and Japan)

In a comparative analysis, it is possible to discuss how sambaqui and kaizuka appear as objects of scientific investigation and also as part of the social imaginary and the cultural landscape. Archaeology, in its trajectory as a scientific field, is influenced or even directed by the different moments of construction of a national identity and discourse. While in Brazil there is a clear cut between the past and the building of a nation, situating sambaqui in the realm of the other, in Japan, the continuum from a past beyond records encompasses and situate the kaizuka within the social imaginary as part of the national narrative.     

Propagating Afrikaner nationalism: The Voortrekker stamps as icons of an ideology,c.1933–1949

This paper posits the importance of visual representations in cultivating a national consciousness among white Afrikaners in South Africa. It provides a case study of stamps issued to commemorate the centenary of the Great Trek in 1938 that sought to raise awareness of and funds for the Voortrekker Monument project. Although stamps are, ordinarily, symbols of banal nationalism, the Voortrekker stamps resonated strongly with the sentiments the Afrikaner volk (people). They reified an iconography of the Voortrekkers and the narrative of the Great Trek already embedded in a canon of texts, images and rituals. The paper provides a semiotic reading of the designs of the stamps and shows how they shaped the cultural imaginary of Afrikaners. Although the Voortrekker stamps were issued with the approval of the postal authorities, they were actually commissioned by the Sentrale Volksmonumentekomitee [Central People's Monuments Committee (SVK)], which had close ties to the National Party (NP) opposition. Although the project was largely state sponsored, the SVK insisted upon its autonomy. Thus the government sanctioned a project over which it exercised no jurisdiction. The United Party paid a price for accommodating sectional Afrikaner interests when it lost control of the state in 1948.     

甲午战争与近代日本国民的形成——近代媒体的发展与作用

培养近代国民是国民国家建设的重要目标,同时具备民族特质和公民特质是国民的内在属性。甲午战争是日本进入近代以来的第一次大规模对外战争,＂印刷资本主义＂的出现和发展形成了能够构成民族共同体的舆论条件。战争与媒体交互影响,使＂日本人＂的自我意识得以强化,对外形成了对朝鲜和中国的优越感和蔑视感,军人被英雄化、神圣化,围绕战争也形成教育方式多样性,民众由此达成了对天皇和国家的认同,甲午战争成为近代日本国民＂民族＂特质的重要标志。