Language,history and the nation: an historical approach to evaluating language and cultural claims

ABSTRACT. In contrast to the abstract commitment to individual rights found in liberal critics of Bill 101 and the equally ahistorical approach of multicultural theorists like Bhikhu Parekh, this paper proposes that the particular historical circumstances surrounding the current minority status of different groups is crucial in evaluating the legitimacy of one cultural group to promote its cultural needs over another group within existing states. When the culture of a group residing within a particular state is secure in a neighbouring jurisdiction, the issue at stake is not necessarily the survival of a unique culture but the cultural needs of particular individuals. It does not follow that they have no legitimate claims against the state. However, in examining the language policies in Quebec and the newly independent Baltic states, it is argued that they are different in kind to the rights due to long‐standing communities struggling for linguistic survival.     

Black male: Advertising and the cultural politics of masculinity

During the 1980s, men's bodies began to appear with increasing frequency in television, cinema and billboard advertising. The advertisers’ preferred image of masculinity has generally been young, white, able‐bodied and staunchly heterosexual. This paper explores a partial exception to these generalisations: Ogilvy & Mather's highly successful relaunch of the soft drink, Lucozade. By using selected images of black male bodies and their popular associations with sporting and sexual prowess, Lucozade was able to shake off its long‐established associations with sickness and convalescence, becoming a popular ‘in‐health’ drink with a revitalised and revitalising image. The paper places contemporary representations of black men in British advertising in relation to wider changes in attitudes towards gender, sexuality and ‘race’, arguing that the success of the Lucozade campaign depended not so much on general associations between sport and ‘race’, manliness and muscularity, as on the reader's (socially constructed) knowledge of the particular personalities represented. This assumed knowledge effectively suppresses the more threatening aspects of a stereotypically anonymous and rapacious black male sexuality, provoking desire without evoking dread.     

Language and politics in Italy: from Moro to Berlusconi

The article posits the existence of a nexus between some language dimensions on the one hand, and the type of party system and degree of electoral volatility on the other. The first part dissects the old language of Italian politics, these days contemptuously referred to as politichese , and argues that its cryptic character can be properly understood only if seen against both the functional requirements and systemic constraints of the Italian post-war political regime in general, and the functioning of its party system in particular. The second part examines the new language that emerged in the early 1990s, the so-called gentese , and argues that its populist characteristics are linked to the disintegration of old parties which meant that a sizeable portion of the electorate was up for grabs. Other important factors were the emergence of political actors who wished to differentiate themselves from those of the past and their perception that the Italian party system was changing. Il saggio esplora alcuni dei nessi esistenti tra varie dimensioni del linguaggio politico (lessico, complessitÀ sintattica, tono) da un lato, e dimensioni politiche (tipo di sistema di partiti e grado di mobilitÀ elettorale) dall'altro. La prima parte esamina il vecchio linguaggio della politica italiana, oggi sprezzantemente definito politichese , e sostiene che il suo carattere ermetico e complesso è da collegarsi ad alcune caratteristiche del sistema politico della Prima Repubblica e al suo sistema partitico in particolare. La seconda parte esamina il nuovo linguaggio politico italiano (il cosiddetto gentese ) e sostiene che le sue caratteristiche populiste vanno collegate all'aumento della mobilitÀ elettorale registrata all'inizio degli anni 90 (dovuta anche alla disintegrazione dei partiti tradizionali) e alla percezione, largamente errata, dei nuovi attori politici che la riforma della legge elettorale avrebbe condotto necessariamente a un sistema partitico bipolare.     

Language of political socialization: language of resistance

This paper discusses the notion of language as resistance for Palestinian children living in the West Bank. Drawing from the global/local language discourse, children constructed meaning of language that echoed the Palestinian political environment. The study examines the Palestinian children's language usage and language meaning as a method of political resistance, resilience and reworking. Children's conceptualization of language meaning emerged from discussion of the diversity of naming and strategies of resistance. Data for the study was drawn from the interviews of 12 Palestinian children (six females and six males) 11–13 years of age from cities, villages, and refugee camps in the West Bank.     

Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism: cultural politics in the era of Mussolini

The article explores the efforts of Marinetti's futurists, Sarfatti's Novecento movement, and the Tuscan circle that propounded strapaese to shape a cultural basis for Italian Fascism. The first two movements sought to become an official art for Fascism, while the third sought to produce a culture that would remain true to Fascism's origins in 1919, but all were in different ways 'modernist' movements and they are therefore contextualized both in terms of the challenge presented by Fascism and those faced by their modernist counterparts elsewhere in Europe. It is argued that the three movements enjoyed some success in the 1920s but were effectively shut down by the rise of the intransigent Right in the 1930s. Yet it is also argued that they needed the regime because they were too weak by themselves to assert the principle of artistic autonomy in the face of an internationally ascendant commodity culture. L'articolo esplora i tentativi dei futuristi facenti capo a Marinetti, del movimento Novecento di Sarfatti, così come del circolo toscano detto di Strapaese, nel costruire e definire le basi culturali del fascismo italiano. I primi due movimenti cercarono di costituire un'arte ufficiale del fascismo, mentre la terza si protese a far nascere una cultura che rimanesse legata alle origini del movimento fascista del 1919; ma tutti erano, in maniera diversa, movimenti 'modernisti' e sono qui tra l'altro posti sia nel contesto del cambiamento, nel clima politico e culturale, rappresentato dal fascismo che in quello degli altri movimenti modernisti europei. Viene messo in evidenza che i tre movimenti ottennero un discreto successo negli anni venti, ma furono censurati da una destra intransigente che emergeva negli anni trenta. Tuttavia, è possibile affermare che tutti e tre i movimenti avevano bisogno del Regime perché troppo deboli ed incapaci di consolidare un principio di autonomia artistica nei confronti di una emergente cultura consumista nel contesto internazionale.     

Language,religion and the politics of difference

Language and religion are arguably the two most socially and politically consequential domains of cultural difference in the modern world. Yet there have been very few efforts to compare the two in any sustained way. I begin by aligning language and religion, provisionally, with ethnicity and nationhood, and by sketching five ways in which language and religion are both similar to and similarly intertwined with ethnicity and nationhood. I then identify a series of key differences between language and religion and draw out their implications for the political accommodation of cultural heterogeneity. I show that religious pluralism tends to be more intergenerationally robust and more deeply institutionalised than linguistic pluralism in western liberal democracies, and I argue that religious pluralism entails deeper and more divisive forms of diversity. The upshot is that religion has tended to displace language as the cutting edge of contestation over the political accommodation of cultural difference – a striking reversal of the longer‐term historical process through which language had previously displaced religion as the primary focus of contention.     

James Arbuckle and Dean Swift: cultural politics in the Irish confessional state

James Arbuckle, born a Presbyterian in Belfast, educated at Glasgow University, moved to Dublin under the patronage of the radical Whig Viscount Molesworth. He arrived at the time of Swift's triumph as ‘The Drapier’. Writing under the name ‘Hibernicus’, he produced a series of essays in the style of Addison's Spectator (1725–26). They can be read as a ‘polite’ Whig critique of Swift's Irish writing, particularly on confessional division. Arbuckle was clearly identified as a political opponent of Swift in a series of lampoons from Swift's circle. He wrote more incisively against the confessional state in his 1729 work The Tribune, lost to historians because of a mistaken attribution to Swift's friend Delany. This article will study Arbuckle's critique of Swift, aiming to give an insight into cultural conflict, both Whig/Tory and Anglican/Presbyterian in a period when both Whig and Presbyterian views have generally been overlooked.     

The cultural politics of shit: class,gender and public space in India

In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in India's countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as symbolic action underpinned by ideas of purity, pollution and ‘the body politic’. Part two takes the political economic approach to gain further insights into contemporary discourse, performance and cultural politics surrounding toilets and open defecation in India. Part three examines civil society activities, state campaigns and media accounts of open defecation to explore the disruptive potency of everyday toilet activities, and how these interplay with issues of class, caste, and gender. Drawing on interviews and a review of ethnographic work, we seek to interrogate the idiom of modern sanitation, with its emphasis on cleanliness, progress and dreams of technology, as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Indian modernity.     

Eclectic and pragmatic: the colours of Dutch social and cultural geography

In the Netherlands, human geography has traditionally been an applied, practical science. Close ties have always existed with spatial planning and regional-economic policy. With good reason, the first generation of planning specialists—in the 1960s—consisted largely of people trained as geographers. Geographers were also the socio-spatial engineers of the welfare state (de Pater 2001b; de Pater and de Smidt 1989).     

试论满文文献特征

有清一代留下的大量满献,包括浩如烟海的满档案,真实记载了满族从勃兴、发展到繁荣的历史过程,不仅是中国历史献宝库中的重要组成部分,而且是研究满族历史、清史和东北地方史的珍贵史料。满献,作为一种用少数民族语言字为记录符号的历史献,具有与其他献迥异的特征。本就满献的形式和内容两方面特征予以概要论述。     

Nutrition and food production: Not as anthropologists see them

Hamilton, Sahni, Barry Popkin, and Deborah Spicer. Women and Nutrition in Third World Countries. South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1984. x + 147 pp. including notes, appendices, and references. $24.95 cloth.

International Rice Research Institute. Report of an Exploratory Workshop on the Role of Anthropologists and Other Social Scientists in Interdisciplinary Teams Developing Improved Food Production Technology. Los Banos, Philippines: IRRI, 1982. 102 pp. including references, workshop summaries and recommendations, and list of participants, (n.p.) paper.