Eine Frage der Politik: Wissenschaft und Ideologie im 21. Jahrhundert

A Political Matter: Science and Ideology in the 21^st Century . In the last two decades, history of science and science studies have been quite reluctant to adopt the notion of ideology when analyzing the dynamics of science. This may be an effect of the decreasing popularity of neo‐marxist approaches within this disciplinary field; but it is also due to the fact that alternative approaches have been developed, for example Michel Foucault's notion of problematization, Roland Barthes' semiotic mythology, Bruno Latour's re‐interpretation of the ontological difference between fact and fetish in science, or Donna Haraway's semi‐fictional re‐narrations of the techno‐scientific world. This contribution undertakes to sketch the impact of two strands of 19^th century immanentism on the authors named above, and on their use of concepts related to the notion of ideology, namely fetish, fetishism, myth and mythology respectively. It is argued that in some respect, Marx' concept of commodity fetishism is worth being re‐examined, since it articulates a dialectical relation of ‘reality’ and ‘seeming’, and its impact on Barthes' mythology is deeper than it might appear at first glance.     

Wife Seclusion and the Spatial Praxis of Gender Ideology in Nigerian Hausaland

In much of Nigerian Hausaland the prevailing religio-cultural ideology of female seclusion (if not always the practice) impinges on married Muslim Hausa women to a greater, or lesser, degree. This article examines the intimate relationships between space, gender and ideology in contemporary rural Hausa society, showing the social construction (and connectedness) of gender identities and associated spatial identities, thus illustrating how spatial praxis is based on hegemonic patriarchal gender ideology. Observations and interview material gathered from a village case study in Kano State demonstrate how gender divisions correspond with the ideology and contemporary practice of wife seclusion. Intersecting patterns of gender, space and time are revealed by detailed analyses of time- and space-use data, which scrutinise men's and women's daily activities and mobility patterns. The cross-cutting of gender with class, age and marital status is shown to be highly significant in determining everyday experiences of spatial praxis, especially for women. A materialist feminist theoretical framework is used to explain this gendered geography of Nigerian Hausaland in which men's and women's worlds are spatially segregated, yet complexly interlocked and interdependent beyond simple public‐private divisions of ‘female’ household compounds (private space) and ‘male’ public space. For this peasant society, aspects of the rural economy and ideology emerge as powerful factors in determining the nature of seclusion as part of gender praxis. It is argued that due to various cultural and religious factors socio-economic development in Northern Nigeria has not been translated into improved autonomy for Hausa women.     

A Women's Health Issue?: Framing Post-Abortion Syndrome in the 1980s

In the 1980s, a subset of anti-abortion activists in the US claimed the existence of ‘post-abortion syndrome’ (PAS), a mental illness resulting from the trauma of abortion. Appropriating vocabulary from 1970s feminist health activism, these anti-abortion activists argued against the main goal of that movement, reproductive justice. Instead, conservative and essentialist PAS activists argued ‘aborted women’ needed to take control of their health by telling their stories of victimisation. Using interviews, congressional hearings and contemporary texts, this article uses PAS to discuss tensions over women's mental health amid the 1980s' backlash.     

Ethnoscaping Canada's boreal forest: liberal whiteness and its disaffiliation from colonial space

This essay examines the construction of Canada's boreal forest from the point of view of critical whiteness studies. Through an evaluation of two texts—a film and a book—produced in conjunction with a 2003–2004 environmental campaign, it argues that the boreal forest is constructed as a white ethnoscape and that, as a result, boreal forest conservation comes to be associated with ‘white’ identity, although by no means exclusively so, and certainly not without significant contradictions. The essay deploys Robyn Wiegman's notion of liberal whiteness to argue that liberal white subjectivity is cultivated in these texts by its self‐conscious distancing, or disaffiliation, from colonial spatial practices. It is argued that this distancing is achieved through the active inclusion of First Nations peoples in the texts such that the boreal forest is constructed as a socio‐natural working landscape. Liberal white disaffiliation is explored through three specific tropes: inclusion, inverted racial historicism and economic partnership.     

‘A dog who I know quite well’: everyday relationships between children and animals

Adult discourses often represent relationships between children and animals as beneficial for children's psycho-social development or as reflecting a ‘natural’ connection between children and animals. In contrast, this paper draws on recent work in sociology and geography where human–animal relationships are seen as socially situated and where conventional constructions of the human–animal boundary are questioned. Focussing on children's own perspectives on their connections with animals, it is argued that these relationships can also be understood within the social and relational context of children's lives. It is argued that this ‘relational’ orientation to children's relationships with animals might significantly enhance our understanding of children's lives and also open up ways of thinking about the place of animals in children's (and adults') social lives.     

The limits to China's non-interference foreign policy: pro-state interventionism and the rescaling of economic governance

China's foreign policy has been long committed to a principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries. While one could easily point out past and present-day inconsistencies in its implementation, this article argues that defenders and critics of the principle both rely on a limited interpretation of ‘interference’ or ‘intervention’ based on an ideology of Westphalian sovereignty. Particularly problematic is the conceptual distinction between the ‘political’ or ‘diplomatic’, on the one hand, and the ‘economic’, on the other. As Polanyi's concept of embeddedness reminds us, markets, society and politics occur simultaneously, and can only act as discrete realms in epistemological abstractions. It is thus argued that non-interference is a semi-formal institution that governs China's diplomatic engagements and affects its economic activities. While the totality of China's interactions with the world has diverse and sometimes contradictory impacts on global governance, non-interference itself has apparent consequences for the rescaling of regional economic governance. Specifically, this article contends that Chinese non-interference results in the empowerment of political elites at national levels, and thus in the (re-)emergence of the nation state as a gatekeeper and facilitator of the advancement of capitalist enterprises. As a result, through non-intervention, China's foreign policy undermines supranational regulatory approaches and fosters state-based regional architectures.     

Shades of green: Public opinion on environmental issues in Australia

Data from the 1990 and 1993 Australian Electoral Studies are used to investigate whether public concern about the environment has declined in Australia over recent years. Questions of the ranking and structure of environmental concerns and of levels of support for environmental organisations are addressed. The data show that public concern about the environment remains high on an ‘agenda of long‐term issues’, that environmental concerns form two distinct clusters (termed ‘brown’ and ‘green') and that active support for environmental organisations correlates only with the green cluster. It is argued that these findings give no more than partial support to the ‘organisational’, ‘postmaterialist’ and ‘risk society’ perspectives on environmental issues.     

Human Security as ontological security: a post-colonial approach

ABSTRACT

This article will critically interrogate the relationship between Human Security and Ontological Security from a broadly postcolonial perspective. The dislocation engendered by successive waves of neo-liberal globalisation has resulted in the deracination of many of the world's inhabitants, resulting in a state of collective ‘existential anxiety’ [Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991]. Under such conditions, the search for ontological security becomes paramount. However, conventional understandings of Human Security as ‘freedom from fear and want’ are unable – from a post-colonial perspective – to provide ontological security since they operate within a culturally specific, Eurocentric understanding of the ‘human’ as ‘bare life’ [Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998]. It will then be argued that post-secular conceptions of Human Security [Giorgio Shani, Religion, Identity and Human Security, London and New York: Routledge, 2014] by acknowledging the role which culture and religion can play in providing answers to existential questions concerning the ‘basic parameters of human life’ are better able to ‘protect’ ontological security in times of rapid global transformation given the centrality of religion to post-colonial subjectivity. This will be illustrated by the case of the global Sikh community. It will be argued that ontological, and therefore, Human Security rests on reintegrating the ‘secular’ and ‘temporal’ dimensions of Sikhi, which had been severed as a result of the colonial encounter.     

Poverty,Dependence and ‘Women’: Reading Autobiography and Social Policy from 1930s New Zealand

This essay explores the construction of ‘women’ in New Zealand during the 1930s, when the social legislation of the First Labour Government was being formulated and enacted. It examines the documentation produced by the legislative process in relation to the autobiographical texts of John A. Lee and Mary Isabella Lee, arguing that there are parallel conflicts in each set of texts. There is a series of double movements: the offer of the state’s protection to women is at the same moment a gesture of defence; ‘women’ are simultaneously constructed as ‘helpless’ and—not so overtly—as needing to be controlled.     

‘Proportioning violence’: Ethnographic notes on the contingencies of police reform in Turkey

In spite of years of efforts in Turkey to reform the police, including an increase in budget allocations for ‘democratic policing training’, ‘capacity building programmes’ and ‘non‐lethal technologies and tools’, police violence persists. How might we conceptualize the relationship between the upsurge of police violence and such investments? In this article, the author suggests that instead of taking ‘reform’ or ‘transformation’ discourses at face value, we look at some of the ways in which police violence is reformatted through the very tools, discourses and idioms of police reform itself. The article draws on 18 months of fieldwork research on police and security in Turkey, where the author observed the on‐site implementation of police reforms in several venues: police academy classes, practical training programmes that also involved ‘international’ security experts, and local police stations and neighbourhoods. The article examines how the processes of reforming expand the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what these reforms were supposed to restrain.     

The Byzantine conquest of Crete (961 AD), Prokopios' Vandal War,and the Continuator of the Chronicle of Symeon

Abstract

Historians reconstruct the Byzantine conquest of Crete in 960?961 based largely on the History of Leo the Deacon and two variants of the continuation of the Chronicle of Symeon the Logothete. However, the account in the continuation is modelled closely, in narrative structure, imagery, vocabulary and ideology, on Prokopios' account of the conquest of North Africa by Belisarios in 533?534. This challenges our knowledge of the campaign but sheds interesting new light on the sophisticated use of classical texts that Byzantine ‘chroniclers’ could make.     

Workers' strategies to secure jobs,their uses of scale,and competing economic moralities: Rethinking the ‘geography of justice’

This paper considers workers' strategies to secure jobs, the justice of these strategies, and the spatial scales which they involve. It is argued that the justice of such strategies is strongly bound up with the scales at which they are enacted: the morality of social relations is intrinsically geographical. The paper discusses strategies within which workers compete individually or collectively for a given geographically-structured supply of jobs, including the use of social oppressions and territorial chauvinism in such competition. It contrasts these strategies with actions which challenge social oppression within employment, and which seek to know, contest and control flows of capital at large spatial scales. These latter strategies present a radical alternative to mutual competition, and embody different notions of economic justice. All of these strategies are analysed for the relations among workers and between workers and capital which they construct, the scales at which these relations are played out, the political ideologies they involve, and the moral notions generated and deployed. It is argued that to understand these different moralities, justice needs to be conceptualised not as rights understood as quasi-property of individuals but rather as a moral aspect of social relations. Accordingly, the ‘geography of justice’ is conceived as the geography of these social relations rather than geographical patterns of (dis)advantage. It is argued that the ‘interests’ of individuals and of collectives are not given objectively by social structure but are constructed through and between different feasible strategies of action; this has implications for the problem which selfishness poses to socialist economic strategies.     

Du passe imaginaire au passe revolutionnaire: Modeles de resistance et resistance des modeles

This article examines the use of dialogues in two texts which functioned superficially as scientific handbooks for women: Aphra Behn's translation of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretien sur la pluralité des Mondes and Elizabeth Carter's Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy Explained for the Use of Ladies (1739) translated from Francesco Algarotti's Il Newtoniasnismo Per le Dame (1737). Original texts exploit the female figure for the scientific cause, but at first glance, both of the original texts appeared generous to the ‘fair sex’. However, neither text is as sympathetic as it initially appears. The confused gender messages emitted by these texts are further complicated by the fact that they were translated by women.     

Police–public relations in transition in Antwerp, 1840s–1914

This article examines how police–public relations have evolved during the nineteenth-century expansion of formal policing. Following recent critiques of the ‘state monopolization thesis’, it dismisses the idea of a ‘policeman-state’ progressively assuming dominion over the governance of crime, generating vicious antagonism between police and public, and effectively coercing the latter into obedience. In order to chart changes in police–public relations across the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the analysis draws on Antwerp police statistics from 1842 until 1913. It assumes that movements in different types of offences reflect the initiative of different actors and also constitute a valuable index of conflicts between police and public. The article argues that although police activity in Antwerp did significantly increase towards the end of the nineteenth century, priorities in crime control were not merely dictated from ‘above’ (the police and authorities) but also delivered from ‘below’ (the people). It shows how police interventions were shaped by shifting policy concerns, by the interests of different urban interest groups, and by the practical constraints of police work. Finally, it counters the idea of a repressive police disciplining a hostile public with evidence of growing public use of the police and of complex popular attitudes towards the ‘blue locusts’.     

Psychology,Psychoanalysis and Theories of Nationalism

Abstract. This article reviews some psychological and psychoanalytic social theories to see what they have to offer in terms of an understanding of nations and nationalism. Three approaches are reviewed in turn: discursive psychology, the psychoanalytic work of Theodor Adomo and the Lacanianism of Slavoj Zizek. In critically analysing and drawing on these varied perspectives it is argued that we need to develop a theory of nationalism that focuses on the production of the national ‘subject’. It 0069s further argued that this theorisation enables us to relate nationalism to wider questions of ideology and political identity in modern societies. Drawing out the contours of such a theory the article intimates the sorts of research directions in which this might lead.     

Ideology,clientelism and the ‘fascistization’ of the Italian state: fascists in the Interior Ministry police

Abstract

This is a study of fascist police personnel under Mussolini's dictatorship. Based on an examination of the personal files of the Interior Ministry police, the article questions how far the recruitment and/or promotion during the mid-to-late 1920s of fascist police officers and officials, several of whom had been involved in the black-shirt movement before the March on Rome, represented an effective ‘fascistization’ strategy. If their presence led to a ‘fascistization’ of the police of sorts, they generally distinguished themselves neither as ‘good’ policemen nor as ‘good’ fascists. The professional attitudes and ideological outlooks of fascist policemen should be considered in the broader context of clientelism and factionalism which characterized public life in Italy and which played a key role in career advancement in the state.     

Materialist hermeneutics,textuality and the history of geography: print spaces in British geography,c.1500–1900

This essay canvasses a range of recent work in literary studies and the history of science advocating a ‘materialist hermeneutic’, an approach to the study of texts which takes seriously their printed format as a bearer of expressive meaning. The essay goes on to show the role of such a hermeneutic in revising our narratives of the history of geographical thought by looking at the print format of British geography books in the era 1500–1900. It is argued that the age of discovery created a ‘problem situation’ for geographical knowledge which was solved by the geographical grammar, this solution only collapsing with the closing of the world in the late-nineteenth century. It is further shown that the so-called ‘new’ geography of the late-nineteenth century developed a radically different print space for geography. The print spaces of early modern and new geography are shown to have been key determinants of the social and intellectual positioning of geography as a scholarly enterprise.     

The politics of ‘forgetting’ as poetics of belonging: between Greek self‐narration and reappraisal (Michaniona, 2000/3)

ABSTRACT. The repressive mechanisms of collective memory have received due attention in the social sciences, with scholars examining the ethics of remembering and forgetting and their political implications. This study focuses on episodes that took place in a Northern Greek town in 2000 and 2003, when an Albanian student was twice denied the right to hold the Greek flag during a commemorative national parade. It is argued that this line of action against the student, representative of Greek attitudes towards immigrants in Greece, asserted the locality's participation in the Greek ‘imagined community’. This was made possible through a process of ‘forgetting’ the locality's history and the analogies this presents with the experience of contemporary immigration. Questioning the ethical implications of this collective decision, the article links regional micro‐politics to nationalist discourses that originate in the European project itself.     

Property and personal development: An interpretation of T.H. Green's political philosophy

This paper considers T.H. Green's theory of property in relation to recent studies of late nineteenth and early twentieth century liberal democratic thought. It is argued that neither the ‘Marxist’ spectacles worn by C.B. Macpherson nor the ‘Whiggish’ ones of Melvin Richter, Peter Clarke and Stefan Collini produce very clear or accurate images of Green's political philosophy. Macpherson's Green appears on close examination as yet another possessive individualist, while the ‘Whigs’ take a turn of the century standpoint and describe Green as holding positions that are ambivalent and fit awkwardly into the categories of individualism/ collectivism. In the remainder of the paper it is argued Green's property theory is best understood by focussing on his interest in the relationship between social life and personal development. By drawing on Green's published and unpublished writings it can be shown that Green's idea of personal development could be expressed in other language than that of economic individualism and that it cut across the individualist/collectivist categories in terms of which it is often discussed.