Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu

In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treated as part of a modern “tradition”, allowing us, in the process, to redefine what “tradition” might mean. The central place and reverence accorded to intellectuals in Tamil modernity is explored in respect to political party workers, NGOs, parish priests, and social workers in rural areas. I bring together two aspects of Tamil politics normally treated as separate, or in tension with one another: the egalitarian rationalism of the Self Respect movement, and the cultivation of language for its affective and non-rational elements in the politics of language nationalism. Arguing that it is the latter that has allowed the former to circulate as effectively as it does, I focus on the fresh meanings given to these values by young Dalit girls from agricultural labouring communities, as well as girls in coastal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu.     

Tree of Letters, “Tree of Life:” How a Letter of the Torah Can Transform (the Human Being Made in) the Image of God1

Venerable tradition allies the Torah with Wisdom, a “tree of life.”2 2.?Prov. 3.17–18. View all notes The tree of life is an ancient mythic symbol of the earth mother. This essay demonstrates the capacity of the Torah to facilitate a reintegrative return to the mother when, as now, the religious narratives falter that once seemed to ensure the unity of man made in the image of God conceived only as the Father. Participating in the process of this return one discovers beneath the Torah's fractured narrative surface a reduplicative pattern based on the logic of the unconscious, which is founded on the repressed prelinguistic bond with all life formed at the maternal breast. This pattern reflects the recombinant properties that the unconscious shares with the earth, which breaks down and regenerates dead matter as the unconscious breaks down and regenerates the meaning of words. Folded into rhetorical tropes as into a single letter, the Torah's regenerative pattern repeatedly recalls to man what it means to be human, unique among but also one with all the diverse life of the earth.     

The Pillars of “Mahathir's Islam”: Mahathir Mohamad on Being-Muslim in the Modern World

Unlike his bourgeois economic nationalism or diplomatic posturing on behalf of the developing world, Mahathir Mohamad's encounter with Islam remains a largely understudied aspect of his 22-year rule of Malaysia (1981–2003). There is a marked reluctance to take seriously his pronouncements on Islam and engage with his representations of what being-Muslim should entail in the modern world. This essay takes the view that Islam, in fact, represents a significant component of the former Malaysian prime minister's political repertoire, and that an analysis of what may be described as “Mahathir's Islam” can provide a compelling alternative account of his momentous premiership. It argues that while Mahathir's engagement with Islam was fraught with contradictions and has produced a number of negative consequences that affect Malaysian society as a whole, his discourse also contained the ingredients of what Bellah and Hammond (1980) have famously described as civil religion. Mahathir's public representations of Islam – in particular, his championing of the individually responsible believer and interpretation of the message to the Prophet Muhammad as a this-worldly and pro-active “theology of progress” – can thus provide religious validation to the cosmopolitanism of the street that has helped underwrite the social peace of multi-religious Malaysia.     

“In Dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav'n”: The Politics of Possession in Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre

Debates about the “divisibility” or “sharing” of religious sites continue to engage historians, political scientists and anthropologists. This paper assesses the issue of agency in two of the more salient critiques of religious coexistence before approaching the Holy Sepulchre, or Anastasis, as a site for investigating the way various constituencies, most significantly visiting pilgrims and resident monks, have dealt with issues of “sharing”. It contends that inter-communal antagonisms there originate with elite struggles over the possessions of places—struggles which tend to engage political actors far from the site of the conflicts rather than local communities—and concludes that, rather than accept an “identitarian politics” which assumes a profound “civilisational” attachment of cultures to religious identities, we must carefully assess the “politics of possession” which variously play out in sites of inter-communal engagement.     

“The Gudeman of Ballangeich”: rambles in the afterlife of James V

This article concerns a corpus of legends in which James V of Scotland disguised himself as the “Gudeman of Ballangeich” in order to enjoy amorous adventures. The traditions may or may not be contemporary, and equally there is no certainty about whether they reflect actual behaviour (although kings in general, including the Stuart kings, have been known to disguise themselves for a variety of reasons, including pleasure). However, in later centuries, allusions to the “Gudeman of Ballangeich” were used by Scots to refer surreptitiously to a Scots king, by Jacobites to refer to a Stuart king, and members of The Beggar's Benison, an eighteenth‐century libertine club, used tales of James V to evoke memories of a better, pre‐Union, pre‐Calvinist Scotland of cultural creativity and sexual liberty. The legends of James V helped maintain the positive, popular image of this monarch as the “poor man's king” in the face of less kind judgements from contemporary elites and subsequent generations of historians.     

“The Balkans’ Other within”: Imaginings of the West in the Republic of Macedonia

Using the case study of the Republic of Macedonia, I explore how people who live in a realm conventionally cast as insufficient of “the European Self” imagine “the West”. Such imaginings are important because they are intertwined with negotiations of nationhood and citizenship. I argue that in local constructions of the global social order, Macedonia emerges in an interstitial position between “the Balkans” and “the West” as “the Balkans’ Other Within”. Social actors craft this position out of Western hegemonic constructions of the Balkans as a socio‐political anomaly and portray “the Other within” (Macedonia) as the engulfed land of promise. The case study of Macedonia allows us to refine the concepts of “Balkanism” by underlining local perspectives on the promise that “the West” carries for the Balkans and “Orientalism” by emphasizing the possibilities that the construction of the Orient charts for the future advancement or demise of the Self.     

“Tell Thou the Tale”: Shakespeare's Taming of Folktales in The Taming of the Shrew

William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew adapts two European folktales, “The Taming of the Shrew” (ATU 901) and “Lord for a Day” (ATU 1531). The playwright adapts these tales in order to negotiate his role as storyteller with the audience, alternately insisting on his right to innovate and deferring to the audience by allowing them to choose among multiple possible endings.     

“The Delicious Sense of Foreignness”: American Transcendentalism in the Atlantic

Abstract

This essay presents one example of the ways in which place, transiency, and change have shaped the American experience. In the mid-nineteenth century a diverse group of American Transcendentalists came together on the island of Fayal in the Azores. The Transcendentalists' reaction to the Portuguese Catholic culture they encountered in the Azores indicates a broader pattern among nineteenth-century American liberals. These tourists operated within a larger transatlantic atmosphere of uncertainty characterized at times by hope but also by crisis. This culture of uncertainty, moreover, was one of the key factors in shaping how American liberals struggled with their conceptions of religion and nation.     

The “Works of the Old Men” in Arabia: remote sensing in interior Arabia

In the 1920s pilots overflying the Transjordan panhandle discovered thousands of enigmatic stone-built structures which the beduin called ‘’The Works of the Old Men’. We now know these works are several thousand years old, extend from Syria to Yemen and probably number a million or more, making them far older and significantly more extensive than Peru’s Nazca Lines. Like the latter they are often unseen and seldom intelligible at ground level. Now an aerial reconnaissance programme in Jordan and high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth for large areas of Arabia is vastly expanding the database bringing transformation and opportunity. Despite regional and diachronic variations, these works are plainly parts of an immense prehistoric cultural continuum surviving as hunting traps, funerary/religious sites and seasonal camps. Extensive sampling and test-mapping show patterns and associations which suggest methodologies for developing a remote sensing programme to record, map and begin analysis for interior Arabia as a whole. On such foundations may be built interdisciplinary collaboration to interpret and explain this little-known human landscape on the fringes of the Fertile Crescent.     

The necessity of “corporatism”: The case of the Hawke labor government

“Consensual Corporatism” under the Hawke Labor Government is a process of policy decision‐making engendered both by a reaction to perceived past Labor policy‐making failures and the context of the collapse of the long post‐war economic boom.

This paper argues:

1. 1) that the perceptions of economic crisis in Australia in 1983 were accurate and that the Hawkeist consensus model was a correct (though not really corporatist) reaction to the policy requirements of the mid‐1980s;

2. 2) that, primarily because of the fragility of the institutional‐cum‐political base of the Hawke “consensual corporatist” policy process it will take an unusual combination of continuous good management and good luck for the model and its progenitor government to survive beyond the next election.

     

The “Weakened Spring of Government” and the Executive Branch: The Department of Justice in the Late 19th Century

Recent research on American government and public life in the late 19th century suggests that the extensive growth of the American state during this time did not necessarily involve a corresponding expansion of national authority or effective executive bureaucratic administration. Rather, the American polity was characterized by what Wallace Farnham termed the “weakened spring of government,rdquo; a government that “failed to use the powers it had.” This study examines how the late 19th century Department of Justice exemplified this problem. Despite increased personnel, resources, and responsibilities, effective law enforcement by the department was often frustrated by corruption, partisan political activity by department personnel, and by traditional reliance on local, decentralized responsibility for law enforcement. Examples of this were the attempts by the Justice Department to protect federal timber lands and enforce the federal election statutes in the south. Moreover reforms within the department were little more than “patchwork” efforts to achieve effective enforcement capacities.