The Origin of Kinship in Oceania: Lewis Henry Morgan and Lorimer Fison

ABSTRACT This article investigates the importance of Oceania in the early study of kinship. It examines the tensions between evidence and analysis from the Pacific Islands in the development of Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of evolving kinship forms. While other sources from the Pacific islands are investigated it is focused particularly on the correspondence between Morgan and Lorimer Fison, Methodist missionary and key figure in the spread of kinship schedules and anthropological theories throughout Oceania in the 1870s. The empirical data gathered by Fison, challenged Morgan's schema and questioned the orthodox evolutionist hierarchy in Asia and the Pacific. Also investigated is the British response to this unruly evidence.     

The Henry Tax Review,Cartel Parties and the Reform Capacity of the Australian State

The Henry Tax Review is a work in progress, but it has already advanced sufficiently to constitute an important case study of state capacity in Australia. Using the Henry Tax Review as a case study, this paper sheds light on the question of whether the national political system is capable of devising and implementing long-term reforms. Whilst specific policy failures inevitably have a contingent dimension in the form of poor strategy and leadership or unfavourable economic conditions, the paper discusses the erosion of institutional and relational structures which, arguably, has diminished systemic political capacity. This is tantamount to a structural weakening of state capacity in Australia, a development which has the potential to erode the potential of any government to enact significant strategic policy change.     

Henry VIII's Progress Through Yorkshire in 1541 and its Implications for Northern Identities

Abstract

Henry's visit to the North in 1541 has been seen as, alternatively, a powerful response to the ongoing threat to order in the years after the Pilgrimage of Grace or a move in diplomatic relationships with Scotland and France. This paper suggests the level of immediate threat of disorder in the North was low and that the role of the journey in relations with Scotland was more its consequence than its cause. Rather it finds the significance of the visit in a potential renegotiation of the position of the North within the wider realm, a question opened by political and constitutional changes since 1530, a negotiation which the King himself overthrew. Instead of accommodation, Henry sought to emphasise the extent of his defeat of the Pilgrims and the Percy interest, and to humiliate utterly all but the most clearly loyal elements, especially in York itself. Yet the memory of his triumph, if triumph it was, was poisoned for Henry by his failure to meet James of Scotland and by the collapse of his marriage to Catherine Howard; and it passed remarkably quickly from the collective memory of the North, overlain by a developing sense of relations with the Tudors, as with their predecessors, as supportive of a distinctive northern identity.     

Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought

BLANCHOT, M. Awaiting Oblivion translated with an introduction by John Gregg University of Nebraska Press, 1997 85 pp., no price indicated, ISBN 0 8032 1257 7

CENDRON, J.‐P. Le Monde de la protection sociale Nathan, 1996 189 pp., no price indicated, ISBN 2 09 190135 0

CHAVANCE, B. Marx et le capitalisme Nathan, 1996 191 pp., no price indicated, ISBN 2 09 190100 0

MARCEL, B. and TAIEB, J. Le Chômage aujourd'hui Nathan, 1997 (2nd edition) 190 pp., ISBN 2 09 190140 0

La ville des sciences sociales Enquête, 4, 1996, pp. 1–280 Parenthçses, ISSN 1245 2084     

Impoverished mothers and poor widows: negotiating images of poverty in Marseille's courts

In the early fifteenth century, in Marseille's court of first instance, a sailor's wife Margarida Gramone sued her son-in-law's estate to recoup money she had spent nursing her dying daughter and granddaughter. She justified her claim on the money by arguing that she had been completely impoverished by the medicine, doctors and wet nurses that her sick family had needed. She called witnesses to attest to her impoverished state and they told a story of a woman unable to pay her bills and reliant on the charity of her neighbours. Other witnesses in the same case, however, suggest Margarida was not poor, but a woman of means. Attempting to reconcile this discrepancy, this article will examine how Marseille's legally savvy citizens negotiated between at least two different attitudes towards the poor: a Christian celebration of charity and a legal scepticism of a pauper's word. The legal records from late medieval Marseille show a multivalent attitude towards the poor. They suggest that the city's citizens were able to draw on different narratives about poverty in order to win over the presiding judge. At the same time, witness testimony about the poor reminds us that the burden of charity was not always welcomed by Marseille's citizens.