Whose Modernity? Indigenous Modernities and Land Claims after Apartheid

This article questions some of the key assumptions of post‐development and anti‐development critics such as Arturo Escobar and Wolfgang Sachs, who tend to prescribe a puritanical and principled rejection of ‘exogenous development’ that does not necessarily reflect the needs and desires of the beneficiaries of development. Drawing on fieldwork research on land claims in Northern Cape and Northern Provinces (South Africa), the author argues that these beneficiaries tend to deploy hybrid and highly selective and situational responses to development interventions. These hybrid responses can be regarded as indigenous modernities. Development packages are resisted, embraced, reshaped or accommodated depending on the specific content and context. The author also questions James Ferguson's conclusion that depoliticizing development discourses inevitably buttresses bureaucratic state power. Rather, the fieldwork findings suggest that state‐led development is often an extremely risky business that can undermine the legitimacy and authority of governments. In addition, in many parts of the developing world, it is the retreat of the neo‐liberal state, rather than ‘the tyranny of development’, that poses the most serious threat to household livelihood strategies and economic survival. The case studies discussed here suggest that responses to development are usually neither wholesale endorsements nor radical rejections of modernity. Even when resisting and subverting development ideas and practices, people do not generally do so on the basis of either radical populist politics or in defence of pristine and authentic local cultural traditions.     

The politics of the accord does corporatism explain it?

The period between the holding of the National Economic Summit Conference in April 1983 and the 1984 election has seen the politics of the Accord shift from a primary concern with wage setting through the Arbitration Commission to the management of trade‐offs in non‐wage areas between business, government and the ACTU. The politics of the Accord in this period is not understood by adopting an interest group approach to business, the ACTU and the government or by accepting EPAC's view of its own institutional role. Rather, business and the ACTU obey two different logics of collective action and Epac is a ‘disorganising’ institution. It is a representation system based on closure by exclusion called partial corporatism. Partial corporatism benefits business disproportionately and excludes women, welfare recipients and the unemployed.     

Material Culture and the Magical Power of Dance Objects

ABSTRACT This paper takes up the call by scholars such as Alfred Gell to consider objects of material culture as objects, by examining them in the context of production, circulation and reception. Because they are unadorned and without visual interest, langarol, the hand‐held artefacts used in some New Ireland dance performances, do not lend themselves to modes of analysis that see cultural objects as surrogate texts, the hidden meanings of which can be ‘read’. This very ‘lack’ enables us more readily to discern their significance, which lies in their magical potency and in the performance of their creator, the shaman, in attracting, wielding and revealing his awesome power. The power sought is less power over others and more power to — the ability to realise projects that can elicit effects. If consciousness and body are one, such achievements are to be understood as embodiments of intentionality and agency. It is through the production and wielding of such objects that people make themselves.     

Decontextualized Knowledge,Situated Politics: The New Scientific–Local Politics of Rice Genetic Resources in Thailand

Recent practices of scientific–local knowledge interaction in Thailand surrounding rice genetic resources have led to a new phenomenon, which this article calls knowledge inclusion. This study explores several forms of knowledge inclusion —participatory science, localized science, scientized knowledge and hybridized knowledge— as new loci of political practices among government rice breeders, non‐governmental officials and farmers. Ethnographic studies are used to reveal that, through selectively incorporating elements of each other's knowledges, these scientific and local knowledge practitioners have drawn on the discourses of scientific–local knowledges to their political advantage. The ramifications of this new politics vary according to different political arenas in rice genetic resource management. Based on these findings, the article argues that recent practices of knowledge inclusion should not be obscured by the notion of situated knowledge, but should be understood as situated politics of decontextualized knowledge in genetic resource management. The argument reconceptualizes the new scientific–local politics as a synthesis between the power–knowledge relation and the power–structural context in which genetic resource management takes place.     

Unlock the Volume: Towards a Politics of Capacity

In recent years “volume” has become a key analytic idea, and tool, for re‐imagining and making sense of historical and contemporary socio‐cultural and geopolitical phenomena. This paper argues that this important work could be pushed in new directions by thinking seriously of how volume might otherwise be interpreted spatially, as capacity. Accordingly, in this paper, we address what we call a “politics of capacity”. To do so, we draw specifically on debates in carceral geography and, in particular, the pressures on the prison system to illustrate our argument. Drawing on notions of “operational capacities” and “capacity building” in the prison setting, we outline a manifesto for volumetric thinking that moves beyond expressions of power that cut through height, depth and angles, to an understanding of how power is conveyed through maximum and minimum capacities; density and mass; and capacity‐building techniques.     

Decolonial encounters in Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente: indigeneity,coevalness and intercultural dialogue

This article analyses the politics and aesthetics of the depiction of the encounter between the West and the non-West in Ciro Guerra’s film El abrazo de la serpiente, examining how the film deconstructs colonialist imagery and discourses, and engages with the notion and cinematic representation of indigeneity. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the article identifies and discusses the strategies employed in the film to decolonise the category of the ‘Indian’: challenging the colonial linguistic of domination and undermining the tropes of imperialist representations; staging and re-enacting colonial encounters; and subverting the power relations embedded in colonialist ethnography. The article argues that El abrazo de la serpiente acts as an instrument of political and cultural inquiry into the past and the present, and that it both proposes and enacts interculturalidad and intercultural dialogue as a cinematic approach to native culture. While the notion of indigeneity at play is not unproblematic, the film succeeds in foregrounding Indigenous points of view and ‘points of hearing’, challenging a Eurocentric politics of recognition and evolutionary epistemology in favour of a ‘coevalness’ of the native.     

Assemblages of State Power: Topological Shifts in the Organization of Government and Politics

Abstract: Multi‐scalar or multi‐site power relations offer two contrasting ways of understanding the shifting geography of state power. In this paper, we argue for a different starting point, one that favours a topological understanding of state spatiality over more conventional topographical accounts. In contrast to a vertical or horizontal imagery of the geography of state power, what states possess, we suggest, is reach, not height. In doing so, we draw from Sassen (2006 , Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press) a vocabulary capable of portraying the renegotiation of powers that has taken place between central government in the UK and one of its key city regions, the South East of England; one that highlights an assemblage of political actors, some public, some private, where negotiations take place between elements of central and local actors “lodged” within the region, not acting “above”, “below” or “alongside” it. The articulation of political demands in such a context has less to do with “jumping scale” or formalizing extensive network connections and more to do with the ability to reach directly into a “centralized” politics where proximity and reach play across one another in particular ways.     

Vattel's theory of the international order: Commerce and the balance of power in the Law of Nations

Vattel's Law of Nations (1758) claimed that a system of independent states could maintain the liberty of each without undermining the ideal of an international society. The chief institution serving this purpose was the balance of power. In Vattel's account, the balance of power could be stabilized if it operated primarily through a process of commercial preferences and restrictions. These limits on how states ought to defend themselves were grounded in Vattel's thoroughly forgotten writings on the mid-eighteenth-century luxury debates, which addressed the political economy of reforming the state and pacifying the international order. An examination of Vattel's Law of Nations in this context shows that his approach to the law of nations should not be dismissed as a capitulation to the harsh reality of international politics.     

6. ACTES DE PRÉSENCE: PRESENCE IN FASCIST POLITICAL CULTURE1

In order to discuss the notion of presence, I explore Fascist Italy as an example of a presence‐based culture. In the first part of this paper, I focus on the doctrines of “the philosopher of fascism,” Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), in order to show that his programme of cultural awakening revolves around the notion of the “presentification of the past.” This notion formed the basis of Gentile's dialectic of the act of thought, which is the kernel of his actual idealism, or actualism. I argue that actualism should primarily be interpreted as an ontology of a historical reality; it expresses the view that reality is history. In his 1914 inaugural “L'esperienza pura e la realtà storica” (Pure Experience and Historical Reality), Gentile drew this view to its ultimate consequence by developing a view of experience that has some striking parallels with the contemporary views of presence as expounded by Gumbrecht, Runia, and Ankermit. In the second part of my paper, I discuss how Gentile and his collaborators put presence into practice in school reforms, the Enciclopedia Italiana, and in hundreds of monuments, memorials, and exhibitions. Finally, I discuss the 1932 Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, which was not only the apex of fascist culture politics, but also of the practice of presence. In this context, I argue that this practice should not be seen as a politics of historical interpretation, as Hayden White once held, but as a politics of sublime historical experience, or presence. The presence of presence in fascist political culture raises some difficult questions for all who embrace the new paradigm, questions that can only be answered if the notion of presence is somehow balanced by the critical historical method, which is the basis for a true dialogue with the past.     

Book reviews

Books reviewed in this issue. International Relations theory The social in the global: social theory, governmentality and global politics. By Jonathan Joseph . Power, Realism and constructivism. By Stefano Guzzini . International organization, law and ethics * 1 See also Alex J. Bellamy, Massacres and morality: mass atrocities in an age of civilian immunity, pp. 1029–30.
The law of targeting. By William H. Boothby. Just business: multinational corporations and human rights. By John Ruggie . Unimaginable atrocities: justice, politics, and rights at the war crimes tribunal. By William Schabas. No one's world: the West, the rising rest and the coming global turn. By Charles A. Kupchan. Conflict, security and defence The Cambridge history of war, volume IV: war in the modern world. Edited by Roger Chickering, Dennis Showalter and Hans van de Ven. Invisible armies: an epic history of guerrilla warfare from ancient times to the present. By Max Boot . Massacres and morality: mass atrocities in an age of civilian immunity. By Alex J. Bellamy . After war ends: a philosophical perspective. By Larry May . Ballistic missile defence and US national security policy: normalisation and acceptance after the Cold War. By Andrew Futter . Privatizing war: private military and security companies under public international law. By Lindsey Cameron and Vincent Chetail . Governance, civil society and cultural politics Federal dynamics: continuity, change, and the varieties of federalism. Edited by Arthur Benz and Jörg Broschek . Of virgins and martyrs: women and sexuality in global conflict. By David Jacobson . Political economy, economics and development New spirits of capitalism? Crises, justifications, and dynamics. Edited by Paul du Gay and Glenn Morgan . Masters of the universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the birth of neoliberal politics. By Daniel Stedman Jones . Governing guns, preventing plunder: international cooperation against illicit trade. By Asif Efrat . Energy, environment and global health China's environmental challenges. By Judith Shapiro. Green innovation in China: China's wind power industry and the global transition to a low‐carbon economy. By Joanna I. Lewis . The governance of energy in China: transition to a low‐carbon economy. By Philip Andrews‐Speed . Global health and International Relations. By Colin McInnes and Kelley Lee . International history The sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914. By Christopher Clark . Lenin's terror: the ideological origins of early Soviet state violence. By James Ryan . Hitler's philosophers. By Yvonne Sherratt . Empire of secrets: British intelligence, the Cold War and the twilight of empire. By Calder Walton . Nasser's gamble: how intervention in Yemen caused the Six‐Day War and the decline of Egyptian power. By Jesse Ferris . The killing zone: the United States wages Cold War in Latin America. By Stephen G. Rabe . Visions of power in Cuba: revolution, redemption and resistance, 1959–1971. By Lillian Guerra . Europe European security: the roles of regional organisations. By Bjørn Møller . Six moments of crisis: inside British foreign policy. By Gill Bennett . Defending the realm? The politics of Britain's small wars since 1945. By Aaron Edwards . A special relationship? British foreign policy in the era of American hegemony. By Simon Tate . Britain's quest for a role: a diplomatic memoir from Europe to the UN. By David Hannay . Russia and Eurasia * 2 See also James Ryan, Lenin's terror: the ideological origins of early Soviet state violence, pp. 1046–7; and Marlene Laruelle and Sebastien Peyrouse, The Chinese question in Central Asia: domestic order, social change and the Chinese factor, pp. 1076–7.
Wheel of fortune: the battle for oil and power in Russia. By Thane Gustafson . Edge of empire: a history of Georgia. By Donald Rayfield . Georgia: a political history since independence. By Stephen Jones . Middle East and North Africa Revolutionary Iran: a history of the Islamic Republic. By Michael Axworthy . Lebanon after the Cedar Revolution. Edited by Are Knudsen and Michael Kerr . Dynamics of change in the Persian Gulf: political economy, war and revolution. By Anoushiravan Ehteshami . Sub‐Saharan Africa Multiethnic coalitions in Africa: business financing of opposition election campaigns. By Leonardo R. Arriola . Nigeria since independence: forever fragile? By J. N. C. Hill . Peacebuilding, power, and politics in Africa. Edited by Devon Curtis and Gwinyayi A. Dzinesa . South Asia Policing Afghanistan. By Antonio Giustozzi and Mohammed Isaqzadeh . East Asia and Pacific * 3 See also Judith Shapiro, China's environmental challenges; Joanna I. Lewis, Green innovation in China: China's wind power industry and the global transition to a low‐carbon economy; and Philip Andrews‐Speed, The governance of energy in China: transition to a low‐carbon economy, pp. 1041–3.
The Chinese question in Central Asia: domestic order, social change and the Chinese factor. By Marlene Laruelle and Sebastien Peyrouse . China's search for energy security: domestic sources and international implications. Edited by Suisheng Zhao . North America Foreign policy begins at home: the case for putting America's house in order. By Richard N. Haass . US foreign policy and democracy promotion: from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama. Edited by Michael Cox, Timothy J. Lynch and Nicolas Bouchet . The Secretary: a journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the heart of American power. By Kim Ghattas . Latin America and Caribbean * 4 See also Stephen G. Rabe, The killing zone: the United States wages Cold War in Latin America, pp. 1052–3; and Lillian Guerra, Visions of power in Cuba: revolution, redemption and resistance, 1959–1971, pp. 1054–5.
The Mapuche in modern Chile: a cultural history. By Joanna Crow .     

‘The Sun Always Shines in Perth’: a Post‐Colonial Geography of Identity,Memory and Place

In this paper I explore some of the textual possibilities of post‐colonial geography. Using the conceptual tool of place as a palimpsest, I trace some geographies of memory across selected colonial and post‐colonial texts. By focusing on the relationship between representations of ‘sunny Perth’ and ‘Nyungah Perth’, I tease out some of the more general theoretical issues which pertain to a politics of place and space within this (post)colonial Australian context. The nexus of memory, place and cultural identity is central to my analysis. I give particular attention to the ways in which cultural memories are inscribed in some very specific and very ordinary places, and how these places become site‐markers of the remembering process and of identity itself.     

The Story of Koula: music and nationhood in Greece

The Story of Koula, one of the Marshall Plan films, was made in Greece in 1951. It neatly exemplifies the capacity of Europe to ‘talk back’ to the USA within the framework of cultural aid programmes. And as such it can introduce a little‐explored topic: the politics of the avant‐garde in Greece in the post‐Civil War years and in particular the role of US cultural aid. This post‐war perspective throws light on the better‐known National School associated above all with Manolis Kalomiris, who dominated Greek music and musical life in the interwar period. The second part of this paper scrutinises the agenda and achievements of the Kalomiris circle, and that in turn enables useful generalisations about romantic nationalism in music. The third part of the paper reflects on the pre‐World War I achievements of Heptanesian traditions, again caught between singularities and dependencies.     

The Politics of Recognition and Redistribution: Development,Tribal Identity Politics and Distributive Justice in India's Jharkhand

This article illustrates how the potential of recognition‐based politics to achieve distributive justice is determined by political structures and the power relations that constitute them. In response to Nancy Fraser's framework of social justice, it shows that the meaningful coordination of identity‐based claims with distributive justice is constrained — not only by the content of the claims themselves, but also because redistributive demands are subverted through competing pursuits for power and legitimacy between rival political factions. The article describes how the separate‐state movement for Jharkhand in Eastern India was de‐radicalized by three instruments, namely, the reservation system, cultural nationalism and state development discourse. This explains why distributive measures do not feature prominently in the Jharkhand state and why recognition politics has taken a disciplined form in the electoral mainstream while distributive politics continues to be pursued through violent and extra‐parliamentary means.     

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

This article examines Zimbabwean land politics and the study of rural interventions, including agrarian reform, more broadly, using the analytical framework of territorialized ‘modes of belonging’ and their ‘cultural politics of recognition’. Modes of belonging are the routinized discourses, social practices and institutional arrangements through which people make claims for resources and rights, the ways through which they become ‘incorporated’ in particular places. In these spatialized forms of power and authority, particular cultural politics of recognition operate; these are the cultural styles of interaction that become privileged as proper forms of decorum and morality informing dependencies and interdependencies. The author traces a hegemonic mode of belonging identified as ‘domestic government’, put in place on European farms in Zimbabwe's colonial period, and shows how it was shaped by particular political and economic conjunctures in the first twenty years of Independence after 1980. Domestic government provided a conditional belonging for farm workers in terms of claims to limited resources on commercial farms while positioning them in a way that made them marginal citizens in the nation at large. This is the context for the behaviour of land‐giving authorities which have actively discriminated against farm workers during the politicized and violent land redistribution processes that began in 2000. Most former farm workers are now seeking other forms of dependencies, typically more precarious and generating fewer resources and services than they had accessed on commercial farms, with their own particular cultural politics of recognition, often tied to demonstrating support to the ruling political party.     

State strength and capitalist weakness: Manufacturing capital and the Tariff Board's attack on McEwenism, 1967–74

In order to test a number of propositions drawn from recent theories of the state, this paper examines power relationships between manufacturing capital and the state at the federal level of Australian politics during a period of tariff policy reformism between 1967 and 1974. The paper finds limitations to the ‘privileged position of business’ argument of Lindblom, but affirms a more historically dynamic model of state‐capital relations developed independently in the work of Block and Vogel. The paper also affirms the general perspective developed by recent neo‐Weberian theorists regarding the potential for independent state initiative. It is argued that such a perspective is consistent with important aspects of neo‐Marxist ‘relative autonomy’ of the state arguments. Indeed, an important facet of this paper is designed to show, through historical analysis, the conditions under which states within capitalist societies may come to have the autonomy and the capacity to resist important sectors of capital during efforts to restructure the economy.     

Book reviews

Books reviewed in this issue International Relations theory Just war and international order: the uncivil condition in world politics. By Nicholas Rengger. Dilemmas of decline: British intellectuals and world politics, 1945–1975. By Ian Hall. Thucydides and the modern world: reception, reinterpretation and influence from the Renaissance to the present. Edited by Katherine Harloe and Neville Morley. The silence of animals: on progress and other modern myths. By John Gray. International organization, law and ethics Exit strategies and state building. Edited by Richard Caplan. Statebuilding. By Timothy Sisk. Conflict, security and defence In defence of war. By Nigel Biggar. British generals in Blair's wars. Edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan. The strategy bridge: theory for practice. By Colin S. Gray. Perspectives on strategy. By Colin S. Gray. Governance, civil society and cultural politics The Oxford Handbook of the history of nationalism. Edited by John Breuilly. The naked communist: Cold War modernism and the politics of popular culture. By Roland Végsö. Political economy, economics and development The global economic crisis: a chronology. By Larry Allen. Constructing capitalisms: transforming business systems in Central and Eastern Europe. By Roderick Martin. The rise of the People's Bank of China: the politics of institutional change in China's monetary and financial system. By Stephen Bell and Hui Feng. Energy, environment and global health South African AIDS activism and global health politics. By Mandisa Mbali. International history 1 1 See also Michael Brett, Approaching African history, pp. 1524–25.
Europe: the struggle for supremacy, 1453 to the present. By Brendan Simms. Unfinished empire: the global expansion of Britain. By John Darwin. China's war with Japan, 1937–1945: the struggle for survival. By Rana Mitter. The Punjab bloodied, partitioned and cleansed: unravelling the 1947 tragedy through secret British reports and first‐person accounts. By Ishtiaq Ahmed. From Lenin to Castro, 1917–1959: early encounters between Moscow and Havana. By Mervyn J. Bain. Europe The passage to Europe: how a continent became a union. By Luuk van Middelaar. Translated by Liz Waters. Why Europe matters: the case for the European Union. By John McCormick. Europe, strategy and armed forces: the making of a distinctive power. By Sven Biscop and Jo Coelmont. NATO's European allies: military capability and political will. Edited by Janne Haaland Matlary and Magnus Petersson. Transformations in Central Europe between 1989 and 2012: geopolitical, cultural, and socioeconomic shifts. By Tomas Kavaliauskas. Democratic institutions and authoritarian rule in Southeast Europe. By Danijela Dolenec. Russia and Eurasia Hard diplomacy and soft coercion: Russia's influence abroad. By James Sherr. Russia, the West, and military intervention. By Roy Allison. Sovereignty after empire: comparing the Middle East and Central Asia. Edited by Sally N. Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch. Middle East and North Africa 2 2 See also Sally Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch, eds, Sovereignty after empire: comparing the Middle East and Central Asia, pp. 1515–16.
The power and the people: paths of resistance in the Middle East. By Charles Tripp. Israel has moved. By Diana Pinto. Identity and nation in Iraq. By Sherko Kirmanj. Sub‐Saharan Africa Business, politics, and the state in Africa: challenging the orthodoxies on growth and transformation. By Tim Kelsall and others. Al‐Shabaab in Somalia: the history and ideology of a militant Islamist group, 2005–2012. By Stig Jarle Hansen. Approaching African history. By Michael Brett. Routledge handbook of African politics. Edited by Nic Cheeseman, David M. Anderson and Andrea Scheibler. African agency in international politics. Edited by William Brown and Sophie Harman. South Asia 3 3 See also Ishtiaq Ahmed, The Punjab bloodied, partitioned and cleansed: unravelling the 1947 tragedy through secret British reports and first‐person accounts, pp. 1504–05.
Shooting for a century: the India‐Pakistan conundrum. By Stephen Cohen. Righteous republic: the political foundations of modern India. By Ananya Vajpeyi. Why growth matters: how economic growth in India reduced poverty and the lessons for other developing countries. By Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. An uncertain glory: India and its contradictions. By Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen. East Asia and Pacific Will this be China's century? A skeptic's view. By Mel Gurtov. China goes global: the partial power. By David Shambaugh. The China choice: why we should share power. By Hugh White. Shooting star: China's military machine in the 21st century. By Mikhail Barabanov, Vasiliy Kashin and Konstantin Makienko. North America Empire of ideas: the origins of public diplomacy and the transformation of U.S. foreign policy. By Justin Hart. Confront and conceal: Obama's secret wars and surprising use of American power. By David E. Sanger. Latin America and Caribbean Enabling peace in Guatemala: the story of MINUGUA. By William Stanley. Breves narrativas diplomáticas. By Celso Amorim.     

AGAINST POWER? DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN ACQUISITIVE RESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION

Critiques of contemporary political‐economic formations, while grounded in an array of theoretical traditions, have often centered on strategies for relocating power (as embodied in accumulated wealth, control of labor and corporate entities, or the state) in institutions that are nominally more egalitarian or democratic. Such alternative institutions are intended to better represent those who have been historically harmed by the use of power. This article argues for an analytical distinction between such strategies of capturing power on behalf of those without it, and strategies for reducing power differentials directly or annihilating the capacity to accumulate power. We adopt the analytical term subversion to describe these latter efforts to reduce the intensity of, and undermine the capacity to reproduce or deepen, power relationships. Rather than focusing on redistribution or inversion of asymmetrical power relations to benefit the disempowered, subversive strategies work toward decreasing the possibility of accumulating power or, in the extreme case, completely evacuating existing unequal power relations. Thinking about political engagement in terms of limiting the possibility of asymmetrical power relationships (regardless of who holds that power) helps to illuminate a distinction between reactive politics against injustice and proactive politics that pursue alternative, increasingly just conceptual norms. We draw on threads in critical, political, and urban geographies to articulate a particularly geographic concept of “fleeing‐in‐place” as subversive resistance to hegemony, the undermining of the possibility of asymmetrical socio‐spatial power relations within existing contemporary political economies. We propose strategies for research that better highlight the differences between resistance and subversion.     

‘Rocking the nation’: the popular culture of neo‐nationalism

The aim of this paper is to understand contemporary forms of nationalism in a socio‐political context in which neo‐nationalism has obtained a dominant role not just in politics but in public discourse and in the cultural field as well. It investigates the emergence of a particular music scene in the beginning of the 21^st century, shaped by rock bands and performers and supported by far‐right political actors, which has made the ‘national’ imagination emotionally and ideologically appealing to a considerable part of Hungarian society and first of all to young people.     

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.     

The Penitentiary as a Well of Grace in the Late Middle Ages: The Example of Uppsala 1448-1527

This paper offers an introduction to the following papers, which represent the results of a round table at the Nordiska Historikermöte 2004 in Stockholm. It discusses the renewed interest in the study of diplomacy and international politics. This revival during the past few decades is sometimes not more than a reinvention of the old diplomatic history. However, it is also influenced by the history of ideas, as elaborated by Anglo‐American historians, and modern cultural sociology. The history of diplomacy seen from the perspective of cultural transfer offers new insights into early modern diplomacy based on a new reading of well‐known material.