Third Wave Evangelism and the Politics of the Global in Papua New Guinea: Spiritual Warfare and the Recreation of Place in Telefolmin

Third Wave pentecostalist theology envisages a global struggle against satanic forces as ‘spiritual warfare.’ Here I examine an instance of spiritual warfare that targeted the village of Telefolip as part of a national campaign. Embracing evangelical doctrines of the dependence of ‘physical development’ on ‘spiritual development,’ villagers burned ancestral relics and purport to have found ‘uranium gas’ on the site of a former spirit house. This discovery is held to be full of promise for the future: as a valuable (if imaginary) resource in Israel's struggles, uranium gas offers villagers wealth and a means of asserting local centrality in global terms. I conclude by arguing that an understanding of the conjunction of spiritual warfare's aims with villagers' hopes for a place in the world beyond the village is crucial to analyzing the dynamics of pentecostalist world‐breaking and world‐making.     

‘Where the F… is Vuotso?’: heritage of Second World War forced movement and destruction in a Sámi reindeer herding community in Finnish Lapland

In this paper we discuss the heritage of the WWII evacuation and the so-called ‘burning of Lapland’ within a Sámi reindeer herding community, and assess how these wartime experiences have moulded, and continue to mould, the ways people memorialise and engage with the WWII material remains. Our focus is on the village of Vuotso, which is home to the southernmost Sámi community in Finland. The Nazi German troops established a large military base there in 1941, and the Germans and the villagers lived as close neighbours for several years. In 1944 the villagers were evacuated before the outbreak of the Finno-German ‘Lapland War’ of 1944–1945, in which the German troops annihilated their military installations and the civilian infrastructure. Today the ruins of demolished German military installations persist around the village as vivid reminders, and act for the villagers as important active agents in memorising this vital phase in Lapland’s recent past. They also appear to facilitate nostalgia for the more independent days before traditional Sámi lifeways were ruptured by stronger Finnish State intervention in the post-war decades.     

Historicizing Edai Siabo: a Contemporary Argument about the Pre‐colonial Past among the Motu‐Koita of Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT In the 1970s the Motu‐Koita, traditional inhabitants of what is now the National Capital District of Papua New Guinea, inaugurated a yearly cultural festival thematically based on traditional coastal trading voyages known as hiri. Contestation over the location and commercialization of the festival in the capital city developed in the new century as one distant village claimed to ‘own’ the hiri. The Motu‐Koita view of their past and their identity has been affected by their encounter with Christianity, colonialism and its aftermath, and the rhetoric of the villagers’ claims drew on criteria of authenticity, cultural purity, and exclusiveness which are arguably contemporary rather than ‘traditional’. This article reviews Motu‐Koita history, the story of the origin of the hiri, and the local politics of the cultural festival. It attempts to understand the way the past, which was formerly mythopoeically invoked, is being historicized and thereby fixed in new local discourses of cultural and heritage rights and ownership, as Melanesians come to terms with the effects of global processes on their traditions and other resources.     

Searching for fish names with the Vula’a of Papua New Guinea

This article describes an ethnographic project initiated by a group of people in Irupara village, Papua New Guinea (PNG), who for a period between 2001 and 2010 self-identified as ‘historians’. At the forefront of the group’s concerns was a younger generation unfamiliar with the local language names of fish and fishing techniques. I document the collaborative project developed to address a situation perceived as a loss of language, culture, and identity. As well as providing a valuable lexicon in an Austronesian language, the research brings to light important distinctions between recording ‘history’ and ways of recalling and expressing the past commonly referred to as ‘historicity’.     

Witchcraft,Social Cohesion and Participation in a South African Village

The past thirty years have seen development agencies, non‐governmental organizations and their funders embrace ‘participatory’ development strategies. These strategies require the poor to take part in decision‐making about, and the implementation of, development projects and programmes. Underlying enthusiasm for participation is the recognition that centralized, top‐down systems and methods have not delivered development, and the assumption that the poor are eager and able to ‘participate’. Using ethnographic research on witch beliefs and their impact on social relations in a South African village, this article argues that such assumptions are not always justified. It shows that witch beliefs and related conflicts have long‐term negative consequences for intra‐community relations and examines what this implies for development policy and practice.     

Village Inventions: Historical Variations Upon a Regional Theme in Uiaku,Papua New Guinea

Anthropologists have come to realize that even the most ‘traditional’ Melanesian practices and ideologies may be historically shaped by the people's experiences within encompassing regional systems. This article examines the reshaping of local understandings of the village among the Maisin people of Oro Province over the past century. I distinguish three contexts within which Maisin notions of the village have been formed: colonial models of village government imposed before the Second World War; Christian village cooperatives in the post-war colonial period; and village meetings in the 1980s. The paper shows that the idea of the village has a complex evolution, shaped within overlapping dialogues between villagers and significant outsiders and between elder and younger village leaders who have had differing experiences of the outside world and the place of their own community within it.     

The reproduction of heritage in a Chinese village: whose heritage,whose pasts?

The study investigates heritage practices in a Chinese village, by describing the tensions that have played out among different voices, meanings and understandings centred on the village’s heritage. In the process of ‘heritageisation’, stakeholders that include the state, the local government, the villagers and the principal lineage strive to negotiate different cultural meanings, values and the traditions. Consequently, three different heritage discourses coexist alongside each other in one locality. On the one hand, the ‘authorised heritage discourse’ is taken up by the government to weave and frame a narrative of nation-building around a Memorial Park. On the other hand, the village uses the past to foster local identity of the place in an attempt to attract tourists. For its part, the major lineage in the village uses the ancestral hall to continue the long tradition of remembering their ancestors via worshiping ceremonies. In between are a medley of heritage sites and artefacts existing in a state of flux and struggle over their conservation. The authors contend that, no matter how mundane, grand or hybrid, assemblages of rich and locally meaningful heritage, such as depicted in this article, should be cherished and utilised for the present agenda of cultural construction in rural China.     

Advocating the rules-based order in an era of multipolarity

Faced with eroding United States hegemony and the rise of a more multipolar distribution of global power, Australia has embraced a new foreign policy platform built around advocacy for a ‘rules-based global order’. In this essay I first argue that the emerging characterisation of multipolarity overemphasises the centrality of the United States and overlooks the legacies of Asian colonisation, decolonisation, state-building and local norm development. I then consider the reasons for the embrace of the rules-based global order construct, locating it as an instinctive reaction to issues arising from the South China Sea dispute, the raw use of power, and the inclination to share the ideas of a close ally. I note, however, that linking Australia closely with the United States approach to global rules has drawbacks, given the United States’ explicit attempts to reserve a right to use force outside the UN Charter. I suggest that Australia would be better served by clearly delineating a separation between its military alliance with a United States, a policy for worst-case scenarios, from its support for international law and institutions, which should form the mainstay and leading edge of its foreign policy.     

Time as told: Telling the past in Kyrgyzstan

This paper addresses Kyrgyz ‘time-telling’, exploring how Kyrgyz herders and villagers ‘tell’ of their experience of time through genealogies, family stories and epic poetry. The author takes a phenomenological approach, drawing on different forms of narrative; interweaving history, myth and story; revealing the life within the past, as genres mesh (and not always seamlessly). She argues that the lived experience of ‘time-telling’ works through narrative, memory, sound, performance, and poetics, providing a matrix through which the past is continuously brought to life for performers and audience alike. The paper is in three parts. The first sets the scene, exploring three interwoven, kin-related Kyrgyz genres – family trees, genealogies, and epic poetry. The second looks at diverse manifestations of the Kyrgyz epic Manas, and its interpenetration with social life. The third reveals how different forms of performing and remembering the epic bring the past to life through the act of performance.     

Landscapes of political memories: War legacies and land negotiations in Laos

Wars and their aftermaths frequently transform land use and ownership, reshaping ‘post-conflict’ landscapes through new boundaries, population movements, land reforms and conditions of access. Within a global context of controversial land concessions and farmland acquisitions, we bring to light the continued salience of historical memories of war in the ways land conflicts are being negotiated in Laos. Considering circumstances at different scales—from bilateral government relations to village-level claims—we find that political capital linked to memories of wartime affiliations have crucial spatial and place-based connections, and that they affect the ways investors, government officials and villagers negotiate over land concessions. Ethnographic evidence, spatial analysis and a survey of expatriate development workers engaged with land issues in Laos suggest that such ‘political memories’ are an important but often overlooked factor in shaping an uneven concessions landscape. We discuss implications for foreign development organizations that tend to privilege technical and legal aspects of land management over such political dimensions.     

‘Caught’ between foreign cultural and development policies: perspectives of German Studies and German as a foreign language in Africa

The promotion of the German language abroad and of German Studies plays a central role in German Foreign Cultural Policy. With regard to Sub-Saharan Africa, otherwise a peripheral region for foreign policy, German as foreign language is firmly established as second language after English. Learners especially in Francophone West and Central Africa have increased over the past decade. Numerous funding programmes and actions are supported by German nongovernmental organizations at college/university levels. But bilateral cooperation between German and African academic institutions are challenged both by negative perceptions of the ‘Global South’ among Western colleagues and by an infrastructure adverse to research and to career development in most African countries. Additionally, North/South relations are traditionally seen in terms of (under-)development by German institutions, effecting cooperation. The paper develops a differentiated picture of African Studies in Africa, and outlines benefits that can be attained through collaboration ‘at eye-level’.     

From ‘neo-vernacular’ to ‘semi-vernacular’: a case study of vernacular architecture representation and adaptation in rural Chinese village revitalization

ABSTRACT

Vernacular architecture can be regarded as heritage places. Recently, the need to protect vernacular heritage in China has been reflected through government policy changes, for example the ‘beautiful countryside’ program which aims to develop rural villages since 2005. However, a conflict between conserving the tangible fabric and the intangible heritage of the vernacular place can become pronounced, as villagers have desires for a modern lifestyle, and maintaining the physical building fabric. Vernacular villages require sustainable development alongside conservation of both tangible and intangible heritage significance. A key factor in keeping a village alive is continuing its utilization by a local community. This paper introduces the terms ‘neo-vernacular’ (buildings with a vernacular appearance with contemporary methods and materials) and ‘semi-vernacular’ (reusing or renovating vernacular buildings in combination with modern and traditional building techniques) to distinguish two approaches to vernacular villages conservation. We analyse the distinctions between the works of Amateur Architecture Studio (AAS) and Atelier Zhang Lei (AZL) to demonstrate the neo-vernacular and semi-vernacular approaches respectively through photo-comparison diagrams, and reviewing comments from local villagers, architectural students, and scholars. In the discussion, we propose that the semi-vernacular adaptation offers a new approach worth pursuing in China’s rapidly changing rural landscapes.     

乡村旅游地空间生产与村民角色转型的过程与机制——以丹霞山瑶塘村为例

乡村旅游空间与村民社会角色是一个相互形塑和建构的过程，揭示两者的互动机制对乡村旅游地可持续发展具有重要意义。研究发现，乡村旅游地空间经历了农业生产空间、农旅并存空间、旅游消费空间的演变过程；村民角色从“农业生产者”，经不同转型轨迹，归于“旅游从业者”角色。权力、资本和市场等主体对乡村旅游空间的建构，对村民角色扮演提出新的期望和规范；村民主体的微观权力、资本积累、个人技能、个人观念影响其角色扮演与空间适应；不同角色村民主体通过微观空间生产行为，促使乡村旅游空间景观化、商业化和制度化，也会产生民宿空间分异和乡村公共空间侵占等问题。     

Border Practices,Boundaries, and the Control of Resource Access: A Case from China,Thailand and Burma

This article traces border practices along boundaries that China and Thailand share with Burma. It portrays a spectrum of small border polities, from principalities on the fringes of Southeast Asian kingdoms, through Nationalist troops in Burma following their defeat in China, to ‘drug lords’ and ‘rebel armies’. The focus here is on Akha village heads who have worked their connections in multiple directions, including into Burma, to position themselves as patrons controlling local resource access. With state appointment as border guardians, village heads become chiefs of new kinds of small border entities, protecting the border for the homeland while enabling certain illicit information, people, and goods to cross. In regions with a history of complex patronage relations, state efforts to control peripheral people, resources, and territories have in fact produced small border chiefs, with practices similar to those of frontier princes in the past.     

Leadership in Absentia: Negotiating Distance in Centralized Solomon Islands

This article examines a tension at the heart of national leadership in Solomon Islands today: a conviction that national leaders need to spend more time in rural environments to better represent rural interests, needs and values, while having to be in town to access the individuals and organizations that, essentially, make them national leaders in the first place. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in urban Honiara and the rural Lau Lagoon, Malaita, we are especially interested in how this tension shapes rural perceptions of the legitimacy of chiefs as national leaders. Given that development projects can only be negotiated in Honiara, where the required state institutions, international (N)GOs and major businesses are based, rural residents feel compelled to send their most important village leaders, especially clan chiefs, to town. However, the longer these leaders are away from their homes, the more they seem distracted by urban ‘luxuries’ and the less they appear committed to their rural homes. In particular, villagers complain about their chiefs' contributions to exchange relations. Villages, thus, find themselves in a double‐bind that exaggerates a broader ‘crisis of leadership’ alongside an urban‐rural divide which challenges the promise of chiefly leadership as solution to antipolitical sentiments and a centralized state.     

The Commonwealth and the Cold War,Neutralism, and Non-Alignment

In the Cold War era, the Commonwealth represented a global sub-system which both permitted and enabled multiple identities. Between 1949 and 1990, as a direct product of British decolonisation, the Commonwealth came to include forty-nine members of varying size with very different agenda and developmental needs to those larger members from the global ‘North’. Its heterogeneous membership included: NATO countries; ANZUS; the Non-Aligned Movement; the OAU; CARICOM; and the Organisation of East Caribbean States. As a ‘unique sovereign regime’, the Commonwealth defied ideological typecasting. It possessed organisational structure and bureaucratic support; it combined economic, financial, technical, and scientific association, and privileged the role of diplomacy through the latitude permitted to its Secretary-General. The Commonwealth's two sustained ‘grand strategies’ were the pursuit of racial justice (in Rhodesia, South West Africa/South Africa) and social justice through the promotion of development, focusing on the principal preoccupations of newly independent states and their nation/state-building projects. These intersected with, but were by no means defined by, the Cold War, and represented a collaboration of West/South, rather than the confrontation of East/West.     

Zionism and Irish Nationalism: Ideology and Identity on the Borders of Europe

This paper is a comparative cultural history of Zionism and Irish nationalism, focusing on themes of race, gender and identity. It seeks to highlight the strong similarities of both nationalist projects: to show how Zionists and Irish nationalists were both heavily invested in state-building projects that would disprove European racist stereotypes about their respective nations and yet, paradoxically, were also part of the general history of European nationalism. Both Zionism and Irish nationalism sought to create idealised images of the past and claimed to be rebuilding a glorious ancient society in the future as a means of escaping a degraded present. Both movements saw language revival as a key means of carrying out this ‘return to history’. And both emphasised martyrdom as a way to build up prideful ideals of devotion to the nation and used sport, militaries and agriculture as forms of nationalist social engineering. Despite their claims to the contrary, neither national movement was truly unique.     

‘The white woman's burden’ – the racialized,gendered politics of volunteer tourism

Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer tourism from the perspective of the ‘white savior complex,’ we seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile ‘civilizing mission’ to the subsequent mandate for development to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as ‘saving the environment.’ Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their depoliticized logic of ‘saving’ and ‘helping’ the less fortunate others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them further. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.     

Howard's War on Terror: A Conceivable,Communicable and Coercive Foreign Policy Discourse

This article explores the relationship between language and political possibility. It is argued that John Howard's language from 11 September 2001 to mid 2003 helped to enable the ‘War on Terror’ in an Australian context in three principal ways. Firstly, through contingent and contestable constructions of Australia, the world and their relationship, Howard's language made interventionism conceivable. Secondly, emphasising shared values, mateship and mutual sacrifice in war, Howard embedded his foreign policy discourse in the cultural terrain of ‘mainstream Australia’, specifically framing a foreign policy discourse that was communicable to ‘battlers’ and disillusioned ‘Hansonites’. Thirdly, positioning alternatives as ‘un-Australian’, Howard's language was particularly coercive, silencing potential oppositional voices.     

Unsettled Rights: Afro-descendant recognition and ex-situ titling in Colombia

Ethnic recognition and collective titling have since the second half of the 20th century been promoted as ways of compensating for historical injustices and countering the destructive effects of capitalist development. While holding promise of autonomy, territorial rights, and resource control, they have also been seen as political technologies governing, spatially tying identities to place, and incorporating new areas into capital market relations. This paper draws on and contributes to these debates by exploring how the Colombian legislation for Afro-descendants ethnic recognition and collective titling is understood, employed and ‘reworked’ from below as well as from above. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and document analysis, the paper follows the case of an Afro-descendant sand-extracting community in the Cauca Valley Region, Colombia. Threatened by a competing mining claim, the villagers seek to gain ethnic recognition among other things to secure rights and control mining resources. In the process, the villagers are offered a land plot away from where they live and work to title as their collective territory; a mechanism that I term ‘ex-situ titling’. As the villagers have no prior relation to the land, nor intend to resettle there, I argue that the ex-situ land titling only serves as a procedural step in the process of ethnic recognition, which, nevertheless, contributes to the uncertainty and incertitude around the villagers' ethnic rights and resource control.