GUNGARAKAYN WOMEN SPEAK: REPRODUCTION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF TRADITION

This paper analyses the instrumental purposes served by representations of female spirituality deployed by Gungaraakayn claimants in the course of the Finniss River Land Claim. I address the problem of how gender is shaped by configurations of power within and between groups and how, in turn, it shapes those configurations. The paper is thus a critique that seeks to understand the political significance of ‘tradition’ in the present, demonstrating how social formations may be transformed by the operations of practice.     

HETEROTEMPORALITY,THE ISLAMIC TRADITION,AND THE POLITICAL: LAROUI'S CONCEPT OF THE ANTINOMY OF HISTORY1

If tradition has often figured as modernity's other, the Islamic tradition has long played the role of the modern constitutive other par excellence. Modern secularizing practices of timing and spacing feed this grounding of the political beyond the conceptual grip of tradition. The works by the Moroccan historian and philosopher Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) put forward a concept of heterotemporality that distances itself from secularizing practices of timing and spacing, and, importantly, also from theological ones. His critique enables us to understand each of these practices as viewing heterotemporality through one master temporality, a view that represents temporality as, in Laroui's words, “absolute” time. First, this privileged temporality is the homogeneous time of secular progress, and second, it is the homogeneous time of theological truth. Laroui unsettles both practices of timing and spacing by discussing heterotemporality as governed by what he calls the antinomy of the concept of history. For Laroui, this antinomy refers to a specific temporal dynamic that results from the tension between the fundamental discontinuity and incoherence of history, on the one hand, and the production of continuity and coherence through human observers, on the other. Laroui thus reveals that the claims about continuity and coherence that sustain groundings of the political within homogeneous time—either secular or theological—must always be understood in relation to their position within the temporal dynamic of the antinomy of the concept of history. In revealing the temporal dynamic of this antinomy within the Islamic tradition, Laroui reworks the architecture of difference that keeps the secular modern and the Islamic theological conceptually separated from each other.     

FROM THE FIRM GROUND OF RESULT AND FACT TO THE TOSSING SEA OF CAUSE AND THEORY: THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN URBAN DEVELOPMENT*

Are government policies of any real significance in shaping the pattern of development in metropolitan regions? This essay summarizes the widely-held view that ‘economic forces’ determine the distribution of jobs and residences in urban areas, and argues that this conclusion involves serious conceptual difficulties. The essay then shows how the theory of political influence and related concepts can be used to clarify the issue of causation in urban development, and summarizes the authors' own substantive conclusions—that under certain specifiable conditions government activities do have a highly significant role in shaping metropolitan growth.     

BRIGADOON,OR; MUSICAL COMEDY AND THE PERSISTENCE OF TRADITION IN MELANESIAN ETHNOGRAPHY

‘Brigadoon’ is an American musical comedy of the 1940s and early 1950s. The story centres on a village called Brigadoon, in the Scottish Highlands. Two hundred years ago Brigadoon was threatened with an influx of witches. The village priest, fearing the evil of the influx, prayed that God would so change Brigadoon that one night in the village would last one hundred years in the outside world. Thus, to outsiders, Brigadoon appears only one day each century. Brigadoon would thus survive, each centennial appearance being so brief, in the priest's opinion, that the outside world would not affect it. Brigadoon is a picture-postcard ‘traditional Highlands village’: Highland cattle, milk-maids, village fairs, kilts, tartans, clans and bagpipe music overwhelm the audience. In ‘The invention of tradition: the Highland tradition of Scotland’, Hugh Trevor-Roper (1983) demonstrates that the marks of Highlands culture so pronounced in Brigadoon were a late creation. The kilt was invented by a Quaker English ironmaster from Lancashire, Thomas Rawlinson, around 1730; the image of a distinctive Highlands culture was the creation of James McPherson and the Reverend John McPherson in the 1760s; the distinctive clan tartans were created and marketed by cloth merchants in the late 18th and early 19th century, especially the firm of William Wilson & Son, of Bannockburn, and especially in preparation for the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822.