‘To unite their strength with ours’

The history of evangelical activity in northern Aotearoa/New Zealand in the early‐19th century is deeply marked by the presence of missionaries. Positioned in an auxiliary role, missionary women as wives and mothers were incorporated into the work of the mission station which primarily involved responsibility for domestic and familial tasks. In the period 1827–45, there were three distinct phases of women's contribution to the public work of the Paihia mission. In the first phase, educated middle‐class women established and taught in the Native Girls' school and English Girls' school. In the second phase and in response to the growing demands of the mission community, unmarried daughters of resident missionaries were recruited as pupil assistants. For three of these girls in particular, this work provided a form of apprenticeship as they were subsequently appointed and registered as missionaries. By the early 1830s, the recruitment of women missionaries entered its third phase when the CMS sent a number of single women from England. This paper reports on the three phases of women's involvement in missionary endeavours and ways in which this increasing level of involvement helped in the development of mission work as a professional occupation for women.     

Australia's ‘special strategic relationship’ with Japan: another ‘China choice’?

In July 2014, Australia's new Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and his Japanese counterpart, Shinzō Abe, elevated the status of bilateral ties to a ‘special strategic relationship'. Both sides also agreed on intensifying their defence technology cooperation, including in the submarine space. As well, Prime Minister Abbott called Australia a ‘strong ally’ of Japan. Yet, the prospect of a further strengthening of Australia–Japan defence relations has led to criticism by Australian strategic commentators. In particular, critics argue that closer strategic relations with Japan could damage Australia's ties with a rising China. In a worst-case scenario, Australia might even become ‘entrapped’ in a Sino-Japanese conflict. However, this argues that a closer defence relationship is in Australia's strategic interests in the face of China's increasing challenge to the rules-based order in the region. China's uncompromising position in the South China Sea and its more assertive behaviour have led to a greater congruence of threat and risk assessment between Australia and Japan. Indeed, Australia and Japan are increasingly facing a security dilemma vis-à-vis China, albeit to varying degrees. Therefore, for Australia, promoting Japan's ‘security normalisation’ contributes to regional stability. As well, the article points out that closer strategic ties with Japan do not automatically come at the expense of Sino-Australia relations. China's leverage to ‘punish’ Australia for unwanted strategic behaviour is limited, and concerns about ‘entrapment’ in a Sino-Japanese war are exaggerated. However, the more China exerts coercive diplomacy, the closer Australia–Japan defence relations are likely to become.     

The ‘R-Word’ and ‘E-Word’ Definitional Controversies: A Dialogue with My Five Interlocutors

In this piece, I reply to the principal criticisms made by my five interlocutors regarding my conception of Eurocentrism. This entails two key aspects with the first section discussing the ‘E-Word definitional controversy’, where I argue, in the light of the forum, that there are various competing definitions of Eurocentrism in postcolonialism which yield commensurable competing non-Eurocentric antidotes. While I defend my own position, I am interested in revealing this complex picture because it has not been brought to light before and I urge postcolonialists to debate these different conceptions. The second section considers the ‘R-Word controversy’ wherein my interlocutors want me to row back on my claim that post-1945 social science theory is founded on subliminal Eurocentric institutionalism rather than scientific racism or neo-racism. There I consider some of the issues that are stake while concluding that modern Eurocentrism is indeed embedded in racialised thought.     

Beyond Hollywood: Enhancing Heritage with the ‘Orphan’ Film

Global discussions relating to heritage preservation, with their traditional focus upon architecture, archaeological sites, and landscape, often overlook and, at times, even devalue the role of the moving image. The last century witnessed the emergence and development of moving image preservation practice, which largely remains a separate vocation with a unique agenda and approach. With a case study of historical conservation and presentation in San Antonio, Texas, this paper argues for greater dialogue and collaboration between moving image archivists and traditional heritage preservation practitioners. Creative use of archival media offers unparalleled opportunities to illustrate and explore the development and historical trajectory of heritage sites, the visitors to them and, most importantly, the local communities that participate in and facilitate the evolution of this heritage.     

‘Handle with care’: literature,archaeology, slavery

This article examines the relationship between literary and bioarchaeological approaches to slavery, and investigates how the methods and priorities of each discipline might inform each other in understanding what it was like to be enslaved. Both bioarchaeologists and creative writers have attempted to access the inner lives of enslaved people, yet there has been little interaction between them. This paper offers an account of a research project which brought together a literary scholar, two archaeological scientists and seven creative writers to explore how writing might not only communicate a history understood through archaeological evidence, but could itself inform approaches to that evidence. We discuss two key themes which emerged from the project: Conversation and Caring. These themes were crucial to the interdisciplinary process, as it was only through attention to our relationships with each other that we could begin to reassess the nature of material in each of our disciplines.     

‘An Old Carriage with New Horses’: Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy

Debates about Nietzsche's political thought today revolve around his role in contemporary democratic theory: is he a thinker to be mined for stimulating resources in view of refounding democratic legitimacy on a radicalised, postmodern and agonistic footing, or is he the modern arch-critic of democracy budding democrats must hone their arguments against? Moving away from this dichotomy, this article asks first and foremost what democracy meant for Nietzsche in late nineteenth-century Germany, and on that basis what we might learn from him now. To do so, it will pay particular attention to the political, intellectual and cultural contexts within which Nietzsche's thought evolved, namely Bismarck's relationship to the new German Reichstag, the philological discovery of an original Aryan race, and Nietzsche's encounter with Gobineau's racist thought through his frequentation of the Wagner circle. It argues that Nietzsche's most lasting contribution to democratic thinking is not to be found in the different ways he may or may not be used to buttress certain contemporary ideological positions, but rather how his notions of ‘herd morality’, ‘misarchism’ and the genealogical method still provides us with the conceptual tools to better understand the political world we inhabit.     

‘Lifescaping’ toxicants: Locating and living with e-waste in Tanzania

Based on fieldwork in an informal scrap recycling workshop, this article explores how unregulated electronic waste (e-waste) handling activities in Dar es Salaam expose workers to toxic substances as part of their livelihoods. These informal economic activities are situated in the urban landscape within the surrounding global flows of e-waste and recycling and demonstrate how workers reflect on and seek to mitigate the toxic exposures they encounter as part of daily life. The concept ‘lifescaping’ is used to show how, while informal workers may be aware of toxic exposures and make the best of tricky situations in various ways, they have limited access to information about the dangers and must develop their own strategies by performing various micro-actions through which they hope to protect themselves.     

Going ‘backstage’: observant participation in research with young people

This paper reflects on fieldwork undertaken at youth-led community radio station, KCC Live. It draws on Goffman to elucidate the differences between front and backstage spaces at KCC Live, and provides snapshots from research encounters to illustrate the importance of observant participation (over participant observation) in permitting access to these spaces. This paper celebrates the embeddedness of the researcher as a member of the community under study. In doing so, it argues that immersion in community research settings can enable insight into the functioning, relationships, rules and peculiarities of the place and people, all of which are fundamental to ethnographic research.     

‘DOING FAMILY’

Drawing on a case study of married female migrants from two rural villages of Hung Yen province to Hanoi City, Vietnam, this paper investigates the implications of female migration on gender roles and relations within families. The paper shows that wives' migration changes gender roles and relations within the family. Being on the move, migrant wives become the main breadwinners while their husbands left behind take on the role of carers. The migrant wives acquire a stronger voice in family matters and a strong sense of pride, worthiness and earned respect, whereas their husbands experience a loss of power. However, these changing gender roles and relations rarely result in family fragmentations; instead, families are still being sustained as migrant wives ‘do family’. By ‘doing family’, they can exploit their increasing power in an acceptable manner, so that patriarchal family ideals are not openly confronted. This paper provides a more nuanced understanding of the implications of female migration on families, i.e. the simultaneity of the reproduction of and the change in gender roles and relations within families.     

Something to Compete with ‘Gunsmoke’: ‘The Big Picture’ Television series and selling a ‘modern,progressive and forward thinking’ Army to Cold War America

Airing from 1951 until 1971, ‘The Big Picture’ was the United States Army’s primary means of marketing itself to the U.S. public, particularly between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Drawing for the first time on archival records concerning the show’s production, this paper documents how information officers sought to escape the stock-footage straightjacket embedded in the show’s origins and showcase an Atomic Age Army standing sentry at the Cold War’s ramparts. Ultimately, they fought dual losing battles against parsimonious budgets and public indifference, while their insistence on content control hampered potential exposure in more appealing prime-time entertainment programmes.     

‘English Vinglish’ and Bollywood: what is ‘new’ about the ‘new woman’?

Bollywood’s transnational mechanisms offer a unique space to study gendered subjectivity. My article studies a specific Bollywood movie, English Vinglish (2012) to draw out the profile of the ‘new woman.’ Persistently, I question the ‘new-ness’ to the construction of women when the ‘new’ reiterates the values of tradition, nation, and family. The ‘new’ seems to exist as a particular and unique transaction between local traditions and the global spread of populations that make limiting conceptions of woman, nation, or family, anomalies in a world propelled by expanding market needs and demands. The ‘new’ while offering possibilities for women, concomitantly carries different exclusions based on class, religion, language, and other identities. Understanding the formation of gender under contemporary conditions of transnationalism requires attentiveness to an insidious partnership of possibilities and exclusions that makes it simplistic to think in terms of progress or regress.     

DAVID AS A BIBLICAL ‘GOOD-FELLA’ AND ‘THE GODFATHER’

Abstract

Scholars search for analogies with which to better understand biblical texts. David has been compared to the “outlaw”, “refugee”, “vassal”, “renegade”, “guerrilla”, “bandit chief”, “fugitive” and “fugitive hero”. This article suggest that there are better cultural-social analogies, i.e., David as a “goodfellan”while in exile from Saul and in the land of the Philistines, and upon accession to the throne, “The Godfather”.

This article also has, as a part of its purpose, the intent to unmask some of the behavior of David and of monarchy for what they are: essentially organized crime maintained in large part by the use of indiscriminate violence-supported by nonsensical myths and obvious hypocrisy.

Cross-cultural comparisons are made throughout between the David stories, gangster movies and systems of monarchy—especially the ad hoc feudal type. Historical questions aside: The David stories can be “cross-culturally” compared with gangster films as “art”.