‘If the Teacher were a Man’: Masculinity and Power in Stalinist Schools

This article explores questions about identity among Soviet men teachers, about the construction of masculinity in the Stalinist context and more broadly about the significance of power in structuring gender identities. By examining the personal experience, classroom practices and political perspectives of a man teacher in a ‘women's profession’, this article demonstrates how masculine identity involved the exercise of power even in the context of a repressive political system. Focusing on the multiple layers embedded in the identity of one teacher makes possible a gender analysis of the political processes, social relations, and educational practices characteristic of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Using an interview to understand the formation of masculinity illustrates how individual agency and subjectivity shaped and were shaped by the broader patterns and processes characteristic of Stalinism.     

‘The Men Have Come’: Gender and Militarisation in Kampala, 1966–86

This article explores the gender implications of the militarisation of the Mengo neighbourhood of Kampala. It analyses how the hyper‐militarisation under post‐colonial regimes, particularly those of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, marked a significant gender reversal. The military presence in Mengo emasculated civilian men, who were attacked and abused by soldiers, and led women to assume the roles of ‘protectors’ who safeguarded men, children and their homes. Women volunteered for the most dangerous tasks at the household and community levels and faced constant dangers, including rape, violence and other forms of abuse. Using oral histories collected from the residents in Mengo in 2014, I examine this reconfiguration of gender roles and its reverberations in contemporary Mengo. Interviews with the women and men from Kampala describe the various ways women protected people and spaces and at the same time stress men's vulnerability. This article therefore challenges popular conceptions of women as weak and vulnerable and in need of men's protection in militarised situations.     

‘Tomorrow She Will Reign’: Intimate Power and the Making of a Queen Mother in Rwanda,c.1800–1863

This article explores the relationship between erotic and institutional power through the political biography of the Queen‐Mother (Umugabekazi) Nyiramongi (r. 1845–1863) in Rwanda. Using historical narratives, genealogies, epic poetry and the translated text of royal rituals, this article argues that Nyiramongi used her status as first an object of desire and then as an erotic partner to her husband to manoeuver herself and her family into positions of institutional power. In contrast to previous literature, this article frames women like Nyiramongi as political actors who consciously cultivated their intimate assets to participate in the construction of systems of power, using their status as daughters, wives, lovers, mothers and sisters to exercise indirect power, often leading to positions of institutional and direct power.     

Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy’ and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1900

This essay looks at the role that Anglo‐American women played in governing their Irish immigrant domestic servants and at the racial and gendered meanings that were attached to servitude. In the second half of the nineteenth century, female Irish Catholic immigrants predominated in domestic service employment in the north‐eastern United States. Newspaper and magazine articles portrayed the home as a site of conflict where Protestant, middle‐class families clashed with Irish Catholic ‘peasant’ girls newly arrived in the US. Employers depicted ‘Bridget’ or ‘Biddy’, the collective nickname given to Irish domestic servants, as insubordinate, unrefined and prone to violent outbursts. While reliant on domestic service for wages, female Irish immigrants understood that service represented racialised labour in the United States and was viewed as an occupation befitting non‐white populations.     

‘I Just Like to Kill Things’: Women,Men and the Gender of Sport Hunting in the United States, 1940–1973

This paper examines women's place in sportsmen's magazines and their role in the creation of sport hunting's image in the post‐war United States. It argues that sport‐hunting women were not challenging post‐war constructions of femininity or domesticity. Nevertheless, sportsmen attacked women's attempts to construe hunting as heterosocial recreation, fearing that they would undermine hunting's cultural significance. Instead, the dominant, male‐authored discourse connected authentic hunting to a new post‐war formulation of masculinity that revolved around militarism and the emotional bonds between men developed through battlefield experiences. This analysis takes seriously both men's and women's interpretations of a cultural practice historically associated with one sex, in order to reveal how gender identities are constructed and contested.     

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.     

International Affairs and ‘the nuclear age’, 1946–2013

The article reflects on the distinguished record of publication, in around 130 articles over nearly seventy years, on nuclear politics in International Affairs. Although constituting a small drop in the torrent of writings on nuclear matters since 1945, it can fairly be regarded as the most significant contribution to nuclear discourse by any journal outside the United States. The articles published in International Affairs have covered a wide range of issues including nuclear deterrence and strategy, arms control, non‐proliferation and disarmament, and the policies—and drivers of policy—of countries, in particular the UK and US. Authors have included P. M. S. Blackett, Wyn Bowen, Alastair Buchan, Hedley Bull, Pierre Hassner, Michael Howard, Rebecca Johnson, Michael MccGwire, Michael Quinlan, Nick Ritchie, John Simpson and David Yost. The discussion concludes with Ian Smart's article of 1975 in which he contemplates the nature of the ‘nuclear age’ and its persistence or passing, and comments on governments’ ‘fatuous’ attachment of prestige value to nuclear weapons.     

‘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.     

‘A Certain Amount of Prudishness’: Nudist Magazines and the Liberalisation of American Obscenity Law, 1947–58

In 1947, Sunshine and Health, the flagship magazine of the American nudist movement, challenged the limits of visual display in American society. Exhibiting more than just young, well‐proportioned nude women posing as pinups or centrefolds, it showed parts of the body (breasts, genitalia or buttocks) and types of bodies (male and female, both young and old, ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’, slender and overweight) not normally seen in commercial publications. The legal history of nudist magazines from 1929 to 1963 reveals the contradictions that led to the fall of sexual liberalism and the explosion in eroticism that became a central feature of late twentieth‐century American society.     

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.     

The Queen and her ‘Minister of Fashion’: Gender,Credit and Politics in Pre–Revolutionary France

This article examines the economic, cultural, and political role of credit in Old Regime France through the career of the fashion merchant Rose Bertin. It addresses three aspects of Bertin’s credit practices: her involvement in networks of trade credit, her use of reputation as a form of credit, and the way critics used her credit relations with Marie–Antoinette to discredit the political economy of the Old Regime. Using Bertin as a case study, the article reveals women’s involvement in multiple facets of credit and underlines the practical and conceptual links between credit and other gendered forms of circulation, such as fashion and sex.     

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.     

‘If You Can't Pronounce My Name,You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro‐German Activism,Gender and Hip Hop

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany's racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro‐Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty‐first century, Afro‐Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti‐racist, explicitly Afro‐German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro‐ German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.     

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.     

‘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.     

‘Bound from Either Side’: The Limits of Power in Carolingian Marriage Disputes, 840–870

The article discusses four marriage disputes in ninth‐century Francia which involved noblemen: Count Stephen of the Auvergne, Count Boso of Italy, Baldwin of Flanders and the royal vassal Falcric. All these men were affected by Carolingian reforming measures on consanguineous marriage, divorce and raptus (abduction). The article examines how gender and social status affected the forms of power and the strategies used by different parties in the cases: archbishops and popes, kings, the women involved and the noblemen themselves. A paradoxical situation is revealed: despite the patriarchal basis of Carolingian society, the power even of elite men over women and marriage was often highly contingent. Yet such restrictions on power did not imperil the gender order: the masculinity of the men involved in these marriage disputes was not questioned.