Rehoboth Baster,Namibian or Namibian Baster? An analysis of national discourses in Rehoboth,Namibia*

Abstract. The point of departure of this article is a conception of nations as discursive constructions of ‘us’/‘here’ in relation to ‘them’/‘there’. The empirical analysis examines three national discourses in Rehoboth, Namibia: (1) a discourse on the ethnic Baster nation; (2) a discourse on the Namibian nation‐state and (3) a discourse on the nation‐state containing a variety of ethnic nations (‘the rainbow nation’). The first discourse is characterised by a primordial belief about Rehoboth Basters, their homeland and their ties to this homeland. This conception is challenged by the discourse on the Namibian nation‐state. Here, it is argued that ‘ethnic nations’ are the creation of colonialism; with Namibia's new independence, it is seen as necessary to tear down previous ‘ethnic nations’ and build up a new, united nation‐state. The rainbow discourse attempts to integrate the other two discourses through ideas about overlapping nations, where the boundaries that separate ‘us’/‘here’ from ‘them’/‘there’ overlap and are inclusive rather than exclusive.     

Kamula Accounts of Rambo and the State of Papua New Guinea

This paper contributes to the ethnography of masculinity and the media in PNG. I outline some changes in Kamula men's understandings of masculinity as they are registered in accounts of conflicts between state security services, the Kamula, Rambo and other actors. Outlining this history shows how Kamula men are increasingly entangled in forms of state power and violence that are partially defined by new myths of masculinity expressed in Melanesian readings of Rambo. The paper describes how some of the power effects linked to Rambo are transferred to Kamula men. I argue that in their accounts of Rambo the Kamula are also exploring different models of sovereignty and state power.     

Narratives of nationalism in Eritrea: research and revisionism*

Abstract. Eritrean politics is increasingly captured in competing narratives of nationalism. ‘Official’ narratives emphasize Eritrea's purported stability, orderliness, and uniqueness. This discourse defends and supports the current government's policies. In contrast, recent research challenges those policies, and contributes to a nationalist counter‐narrative. This article seeks to investigate the discursive power of conventional narratives and the implications of new research for accounts of state and nation‐building in Eritrea. The Eritrean case – one of the newest states in the world – intersects with and informs a number of broader debates on nationalism and nation‐building: the impact of globalization, secessionism, and war as well as the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism. The penetration of state and nation‐building projects into every sector of Eritrean life means that all social research is deeply politicised. Journalists and researchers have long been key players in the contested process of conceptualising Eritrean nation‐hood, and this continues in the post‐liberation period. Research thus both buttresses and challenges official discourses, even where it is not explicitly framed in terms of nationalism.     

Totem and Transaction: the Objectification of ‘Tradition’ Among North Mekeo

Most recent treatments of Melanesian post‐contact change have presumed that objectifications of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ have intensified and proliferated in response to the forces of colonialism and the penetration of the nation‐state. Harrison (2000) has recently argued, however, that in pre‐colonial times too Melanesians characteristically objectified their cultural practices and identities as ‘possessions’ that could be readily exchanged or transacted. Supposedly, the key difference between the two eras has accorded with different formulations of ‘property’: ‘private property’ and the logic of ‘possessive individualism’ in the post‐contact era; and ‘trading and gift‐exchange systems’ or ‘prestige economies’ in pre‐contact times. In this article I examine Harrison's portrayal of Melanesian cultural practices as ‘possessions’ and the notions of ‘property’ that he sees as key to the cultural objectification in both pre‐ and post‐colonial settings with reference to ethnographic and historical information regarding the North Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea. I argue from the perspective of the New Melanesian Ethnography that Harrison's view of pre‐contact prestige economies and trade and gift exchange systems retains several misleading a priori assumptions about ‘commodity exchange’ and, illustrating the potential of the New Melanesian Ethnography for historical applications, that he overemphasizes the extent to which post‐contact changes in cultural objectification have involved individualised and commodified forms of property. Consequently, in the case of North Mekeo, both the continuities and the changes between pre‐ and post‐contact cultural objectifications may have proceeded differently from the ways Harrison has outlined for Melanesia generally.     

The impossible capital: Monumental Rome under liberal and fascist regimes, 1870-1943

Every nation-state has a capital city from where the central government's institutions operate and where the past of the nation is remembered monumentally. Following unification in 1870 Rome became the capital of the new Italy. Turning it into a singular site to represent the aspirations of the regimes that came to power, however, proved an impossible task. Not only did the Liberal and Fascist regimes of the period 1870-1943 have contradictory intentions and goals, they also ran up against the complexities of Rome's own history in trying to establish their own. This paper contends that there are important similarities between the two regimes in their approaches to making Rome a capital for the new state and that contemporary cultural analysis of the Fascist regime misses this continuity when it takes the regime's claims to aesthetic novelty and architectural innovation at face value. In the end, Rome resisted attempts at using its monumental space to symbolically unify a country that remained materially and culturally divided.     

Empire‐nation: national and imperial discourses in England

When the states of England and Scotland combined in 1707, conditions were created whereby English nationalism could merge into British nationalism. With the expansion of empire, English nationalism was expressed through imperial‐national discourses allowing English nationalists to claim non‐English space when articulating what might be best understood as an Anglo‐British nationalism. Accordingly, such discourses largely ‘hid’ what one might now understand as ‘English nationalism’ within a ‘British’ discourse of empire. The case of England illustrates that imperial discourses can become intimately bound up with the ‘national’ discourse of the nations at the core of the imperial structures. Accordingly, it is here argued that imperial and national discourse are not necessarily opposed to each other, but are able to feed into each other, affecting the manner in which ideas of the nation and empire are conceived and articulated.     

The paradox of contemporary linguistic nationalism: the case of Luxembourg

Through a case study of the mobilisation around the Luxembourgish language in the 1970s and 1980s, this article investigates the paradox of contemporary linguistic nationalism, resulting from a hiatus between the continued influence of the classic nation‐state model and the new constraints linked to a changed socio‐historical context. Based on an analysis of actors' discourses, parliamentary debates and legislative documents, the investigation retraces the social, political and economic dynamics as well as the cognitive mechanisms leading to a change in the social perception of the Luxembourgish language. It shows how the contemporary context implies specific constraints and difficulties for mechanisms of the invention of tradition, but that at the same time the traditional nation‐state model, where one nation equates with one state and one language continues to function as a reference. Through the Luxembourgish case is raised the more general question of the relation between linguistic nationalism, modernity and change in a contemporary context.     

Neither ‘New Melanesian History’ nor ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’: Recovering Emplaced Matrilineages in Southeast Solomon Islands

ABSTRACT For two decades, Melanesianists have sought to reconcile what Robert Foster (1995) termed the ‘New Melanesian History’ and the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’. The former describes historically oriented studies that critique representations of Melanesian custom as recent objectifications of strategically positioned discourses and practices. The latter describes culturally oriented, particularist studies that characterize Melanesian sociality as an undifferentiated plane of being without integral a priori units; on every scale, human agency must individuate persons and collectivities by means of ‘fraction’, ‘de‐conception’, and ‘decomposition’. In this article I present data from Solomon Islands that resist analysis in terms of an unqualified both/and synthesis of these orientations. Specifically, I argue that articulations of matrilineal connections to land among the Arosi of Makira are neither merely postcolonial reifications of custom nor historically conditioned ‘depluralizations’ from an always pre‐constituted social pleroma. Through historically situated case studies, I show how Arosi land disputes both reproduce and revalue matrilineally defined categories, each understood as the humanized continuation of an autonomous primordial essence. Recognition of the continuing importance of these categories among Arosi highlights what the New Melanesian Ethnography has obscured: that some Melanesians confront a historically transforming problem of how pre‐existent parts fit together to make up social totalities.     

“Vote with your feet”: Neoliberalism,the democratic nation-state,and utopian enclave libertarianism

This paper examines a series of emerging utopian discourses that call for the creation of autonomous libertarian enclaves on land ceded by or claimed against existing states. These discourses have emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and can be seen as a response to the crisis on the part of free-market advocates who critique previous waves of neoliberal reform for failing to radically transform the existing structures of the state. Enclave libertarianism seeks to overcome neoliberal capitalism's contradictory relationship to the liberal democratic state by rethinking the state as a “private government service provider” and rethinking citizens as mobile consumers of government services. Citizens are thus called to “vote with their feet” by opting-in to the jurisdiction that best fits their needs and beliefs. The paper argues that these utopian imaginaries are key to understanding specific new manifestations of post-crisis neoliberalism, and calls for more research into the diversity of discourses and imaginaries that circulate through networks of neoliberal actors beyond specific policy initiatives.     

The Toronto Women's Bathhouse Raid: Querying Queer Identities in the Courtroom

In 1998 the Toronto Women's Bathhouse Committee (TWBC) organized the “Pussy Palace”, Canada's first women's bathhouse event. Held semi‐annually at a gay male bathhouse in downtown Toronto, this newly emergent and potentially transgressive form of identity politics and spatial organizing caught the eye of the policing arm of the state; charges were laid and a public trial ensued. Through an analysis of the court decision and mainstream and alternative press coverage of the Pussy Palace, in this paper we explore the unstable and highly transitory operation of “queer” sexual citizenship within the confines of both the homonormativity of the gay and lesbian community and the regulatory regimes of the nation state. We argue that the policing and judicial institutions of the state seek to neutralize the potential transgressiveness of queer identities by absorbing them into hegemonic nationalist and citizenship discourses.     

Discourse, Party, and Policy: The Case of Abortion, 1965–1972

The parameters of the contemporary abortion debate were established in the pre-Roe period between 1965 and 1972, when groups and forces on the state and manual level competed to redefine the issue in order to pass new policies regulating it. This article traces the abortion politics of New York and Pennsylvania, the two states that led the nation in creating abortion policies before Roe, by looking at the relationship between the discourses created by various groups, the agree of party support they received, and the disparate policies that each state pawed as a result.     

"The City is Dead, Long Live the Net": Harnessing European Interurban Networks for a Neoliberal Agenda

A network discourse has emerged during the last two decades, representing networks as self–organizing, collaborative, nonhierarchical, flexible, and topological. Progressive scholars initially embraced networks as an alternative to markets and hierarchies; neoliberal thinkers and policymakers have reinterpreted them in order to serve a neoliberal agenda of enhanced economic competitiveness, a leaner and more efficient state, and a more flexible governance. The European Commission and the German state have initiated and financially supported interurban network programs, broadly framed within this neoliberal network discourse, despite their long traditions of regulated capitalism. Really existing interurban networks depart, however, from these discourses. Embedded within pre–existing processes of uneven development and hierarchical state structures, and exhibiting internal power hierarchies, really existing networks are created, regulated, and evaluated by state institutions, and often exclude institutions and members of civil society, making them effective channels for disseminating a neoliberal agenda. At the same time, they create new political spaces for cities to challenge existing state structures and relations and are of unequal potential benefit to participating cities, both of which may catalyze resistance to neoliberalization.     

Lucrecia Martel’s Nueva Argirópolis: Rivers,Rumours and Resistance

This article analyses Lucrecia Martel’s 2010 short film Nueva Argirópolis, which was commissioned by the Argentine Ministry of Culture as part of the Bicentennial celebrations. It explains how the film both inhabits yet contests the discourses of the modern nation state underpinning those celebrations, in particular through its representation of conflict between the state and indigenous groups. Its representation draws on images proposed by an earlier work, Sarmiento’s utopian tract of 1850, Argirópolis, images including the river and the island which in Martel’s film undergo a resignification, which overturns Sarmiento’s understanding of relationships between geography, capital, nation and ethnicity. Political and cultural debates of particular relevance to indigenous communities, such as access to land, as well as the way the indigenous are represented in state discourses, surface obliquely in this short film, which both represents diegetically the circulation and relay of rumours of indigenous resistance, as well as suggesting these formally through a soundtrack suffused with murmurs and barely audible sounds. The unsubtitled words of indigenous actors, as well as the authorities’ attempts at investigation of indigenous political activity through staging encounters of (failed) interpretation, and the subversive mimicry by indigenous activists of hegemonic ideas of national foundation are themselves muted, rumoured suggestions of a resistance which always lies just outside this short film’s visual grasp.     

Nation‐freezing: images of the nation and the migrant in citizenship packages

ABSTRACT. New nationalism differs from classical nationalism in terms of its content and focus. Whereas classical nationalism distinguishes itself from other nation‐states in defining its national identity, new nationalism distinguishes the ‘native’ national identity from that of its current and prospective citizens of migrant origin. The terms of integration thus become conditions of membership in the national community. Citizenship and integration policies emerge as central arenas where the discourse of new nationalism unfolds. This study looks into the discourses of cultural citizenship by studying the content of the official ‘citizenship packages’ – materials designed to welcome newcomers and assist them in their integration – in three Western European countries: The Netherlands, France and the UK. What images are depicted of the nation‐state and the migrant in citizenship packages, and (how) do these images freeze the nation?     

The French Campaign for Improved Road Safety: State Power,Public Policy,and Regimes of Justification

In reaction against Bourdieu's state-centered analysis of power, theorists associated with the ‘Groupe de sociologie morale’ argue that non-state actors exercise considerable agency. In so doing, these actors draw upon ‘regimes of justification’ to formulate and defend moral schemes of action. While a necessary corrective to a Bourdieusian view of the world in which habitus and institutional fields of power leave relatively little room for creative agency, this position nonetheless leaves unanswered questions pertaining to the role of the state and its relation to these regimes of justification.

The recent French campaign for road safety provides an opportune instance in which to observe how states can and do draw on regimes of justification to legitimate public policies. Here I argue that the French government used two regimes, namely those based on civic equality and solidarity and on industrial efficiency, to legitimate new measures that cut across longstanding cultural patterns. In this process, the supposedly dirigiste French state actively sought civil society partners to educate French drivers and to convince them to accept, however grudgingly, the new policies. This case example thus suggests a middle path between the Bourdieusian view of the state as the ultimate field of power and the emphasis on individual agency of the approach associated with the ‘Groupe de sociologie morale’.     

Reordering Society: Vigilantism and Expressions of Sovereignty in Port Elizabeth's Townships

Crime and vigilantism in South Africa are generally seen as a reaction to the breakdown of formal law. Both are constituted outside the state and emerge when the new social contract has been broken — that is, when the state can no longer provide security. This article argues that there is often an intimate relationship between vigilante formations and state structures. It explores this apparent paradox through public discourses on crime and the emergence of twilight institutions such as vigilante groups. It suggests that vigilantism has to be analysed as an attempt to promulgate a new legal‐political order, despite being constructed outside this order. This argument is explored in the context of the Amadlozi, a vigilante group operating in the townships of Port Elizabeth. The article situates this discussion within an examination of discourses on crime, as well as the production of township residents and their protection from crime. Finally, it proffers some ideas on sovereignty and its relationship to twilight institutions.     

The Threefold Logic of Papua‐Melanesia: Constitution‐writing in the Margins of the Indonesian Nation‐State

Clashes over the status of West Papua and the political future of the territory proliferated markedly following the end of Indonesia's New Order regime in 1998. Amid a wide variety of demands for justice and independence, and a series of demonstrations, mass gatherings and prayers, only a few Papuans mused on how Papua could become a state and what would constitute its nature as being distinctly Papuan and/or Melanesian. One exception is the work put into the Constitution for West Papua entitled Basic Guidelines, State of West Papua, a document edited by Don A.L. Flassy, a bureaucrat, writer and thinker, with a preface by late Theys H. Eluay, then chairman of the Papuan Council. In this article I analyse this Constitution to show how a combination of Christianity and local customs, and a mimicry of elements of Indonesian nation building and symbols of the Indonesian nation‐state are reshaped to oppose Indonesian nation‐building agendas. The Constitution shows that when Papuans imagine an independent state, forms of vernacular legality play a central role. ‘The state’ has journeyed to Papua and encouraged faith in ‘the law,’ and Basic Guidelines is partly the effect of this growing vernacular legality. My analysis shows that it is essential to see how legal mobilisations and imaginations of the state articulate with other normative systems and practices – in particular Christianity and custom (adat) – and how they mutually allow for and invite strategies.     

Criminalized crops: Environmentally-justified illicit crop interventions and the cyclical marginalization of smallholders

Despite decades of efforts to curb the global supply of illicit drugs and significant shifts in how those efforts are designed and implemented, illicit crop cultivation persists. In this paper, we examine state and international development efforts to eradicate coca in Peru, opium poppies in Laos, and cannabis in California, USA and the ever-changing discourses used to justify and design these interventions. Scholarship in political geography frames eradication interventions as serving ongoing efforts to extend state and market power into the regions in which illicit crops are grown and to marginalize the people growing them. We find that environmental discourses are increasingly used to assert the need for continued illicit crop interventions, and that these discourses articulate with historical and ongoing portrayals of smallholders as environmentally destructive. Environmental harm narratives that justify enforcement and eradication efforts under the guise of protecting ecosystems from illicit crop farmers can become self-fulfilling prophecies when they disproportionately impact smallholders and push them into marginal geographic and economic positions. Our cases illustrate that environmentally-justified interventions drive cycles of marginalization for illicit crop smallholders, often conditioned by race or ethnicity, who are then portrayed as environmental criminals. Meanwhile, new state-sanctioned spaces of opportunity and profit are created for more powerful actors who are able to capitalize on the removal of illicit crop growers from the land.     

Territory,sovereignty and entitlement: Diplomatic discourses in the United Nations Security Council

This paper builds upon feminist approaches within political science, international relations and geography that study how bodies haunt global politics, by exploring how entitlement to power connects through the scale of the body to that of the state. In a context of rising populism and political bluster, as well as post-#metoo discussions of personal entitlement displayed by well-known political figures, there is a need to take seriously how discourses of statehood within security crises are gendered in specific ways. This paper argues that the concept of entitlement offers potential for geographic enquiry by opening up new perspectives on masculinist framings of territory and state in critical geopolitics and in critical international relations. It considers specifically how diplomatic discourses ground and naturalize claims to territory by showing how states’ entitlement to territory and masculinist forms of personal entitlement are connected. Drawing upon feminist approaches to language, discourse and power, this paper studies diplomatic interventions at the United Nations Security Council in New York in 2014–2017 on the crisis in Ukraine. Methodologically, it analyses diplomatic speeches through the concept of entitlement to show how territorial claims are naturalized through rhetorical devices grounded in hegemonic forms of masculinity. It argues that a clearer understanding of the connections between discourses of personal entitlement and state territorial sovereignty can further our understanding of territory.     

Shaping Women: National Identity Through the Use of Language in Franco'S Spain

In my article I show how a very particular identity was created for women during the period of Franco's Spain. I will draw upon a varied range of materials from official discourses, particularly the Sección Femenina (the women's branch of Falange); the Álvarez Enciclopedia and other texts such as songs, poems and the popular press. Following Foucault (1980: 30) I analyse an identity based on oppressive discourses whose power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning process and everyday life’. The nationalistic stress of this discourse is one that encourages women to create a new image of Spanish femininity that should be ‘different’ from the liberated portrayal of women coming from Europe, mainly through the path of growing tourism. The language of these discourses is somehow baroque, elaborated, energetic and highly dramatic. It tries to seek attention through an unnecessary and badly misorientated dramatism. It is cryptic and manipulative and claims to be poetical, but its main intention is to confine women indoors and to make them look at the world through the curtains or from a closed window. On the other hand it made women feel they were the representation of a unique matriarchal nationalism making them appear as the heroines of an essentialist national metaphor: women mothers of the nation. Inherent in Franco's equation of women = femininity = nation is a contradiction that defines women as ‘indoor heroines’ and bases nationalism in a naturalised representation of gender where women are a gendered representation of this nationalism.