Soviet rule,nation and film: the Kyrgyz ‘Wonder’ years

ABSTRACT. What happens if a community is encouraged to imagine itself visually when its political vessel is a modernising nation‐state within a multinational communist federation? Cinematic works, in their distillation of time and space, contribute to the kinds of imaginings that sustain nation‐states. How this cultural technology reflected and promoted nation‐building in the Soviet era is the subject of this article. It explores how the tensions within the diktat ‘national in form, socialist in content’ played out in practice in the Soviet cultural landscape of 1960s Kyrgyz film, dubbed by Soviet critics as a ‘wonder’.     

‘I Just Like to Kill Things’: Women,Men and the Gender of Sport Hunting in the United States, 1940–1973

This paper examines women's place in sportsmen's magazines and their role in the creation of sport hunting's image in the post‐war United States. It argues that sport‐hunting women were not challenging post‐war constructions of femininity or domesticity. Nevertheless, sportsmen attacked women's attempts to construe hunting as heterosocial recreation, fearing that they would undermine hunting's cultural significance. Instead, the dominant, male‐authored discourse connected authentic hunting to a new post‐war formulation of masculinity that revolved around militarism and the emotional bonds between men developed through battlefield experiences. This analysis takes seriously both men's and women's interpretations of a cultural practice historically associated with one sex, in order to reveal how gender identities are constructed and contested.     

Anthropology, ‘Native Schooling’ and Maori: the Politics of ‘Cultural Adaptation’ Policies

This paper examines three policies of ‘cultural adaptation’ formulated in colonial contexts in the 1920s and 1930s — that of the British Colonial Office for education in Africa, that of the New Zealand Native Schools and that of Maori leaders. While clearly inter-related, these policies were developed and promoted by their respective proponents to serve widely different political goals. Particularly significant is the role played by anthropology in that context. Proponents of all three policies looked to anthropologists for insights and scientific validation of their political agendas. Anthropologists, in turn, not only accepted this role but, particularly in the case of the British Colonial education policy, actively claimed it, involving themselves in the processes of colonial control.     

‘White Skins‘, ‘Real People’ and ‘Chinese’ in Some Spatial Transformations of the Western Province,PNG1

To understand more fully contemporary forms of colonialism in PNG I argue we need to move our analysis beyond local narratives of encounters with Europeans to include narratives about non-Europeans. Through a consideration of Kamula accounts of Europeans, especially missionaries, and Chinese I show how the Kamula model two quite different experiences of colonialism. In one, local people are able to transform Europeans into analogues of themselves and in the other, currently more associated with the Chinese, the emphasis is on difference, rather than on commonalities. These interrelated representations of two distinct kinds of colonialists are, in part, complex signifiers of national, and especially local, concerns about ‘development’ based on logging. I outline how these accounts of Europeans and Chinese express the different forms of power which are currently deployed to transform space in the Western Province. I conclude by speculating that to understand these powers adequately we may need to follow Latour and Callon and extend our analysis of colonialism to include non-human agents.     

The anthropologist,the state,the empire and the ‘tribe’

This review of Akbar Ahmed's The thistle and the drone finds that the book opens new dimensions for understanding the relations between state and peripheral groups.     

NRM Regions in Australia: the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’

This paper identifies external factors affecting the capacity of Australia's now‐formalised 56 regional natural resource management (NRM) bodies and their community‐based Boards to meet planning and management responsibilities. It demonstrates that little is known about the basic capacity‐related characteristics of NRM regions, despite the lengthy and elaborate process of regionalism that Australia has embarked upon, with its associated and substantial devolution of responsibilities and resources. A suite of indicators is used to develop an ‘exploratory’ capacity typology of NRM regions. The ten regional ‘types’ identified are found to attract varying budget allocations under the Natural Heritage Trust Extension and National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. There are indications that State and regional interests within and outside NRM can significantly influence the distribution of resources. An examination of resources allocated to capacity‐building activities shows significant differences between regions in the scale of resources allocated (0–96% of total budget). The paper argues the case for intervention to reduce the gap between ‘have’ and ‘have not’ regions, and for further exploration of disparities in the allocation of resources to capacity‐building activities. Clarification is needed of the extent to which capacity‐building activities adequately target regional NRM bodies and their Boards.     

‘Living’ in Nage,or the Meaning of ‘Life’ in an Eastern Indonesian Society

Originating in 19th century cultural evolutionary theory, a revised concept of ‘animism’ has in recent years found new life in anthropology in the writings of ontological relativists. Continuity is found in the reputed attribution of life by members of small‐scale non‐western societies to inanimate objects as well as to organisms. This new animism is typically contrasted with western or modern scientific thought, either exclusively or primarily. Concerning the Nage of the Indonesian island of Flores, this paper analyzes results of research into what things people regard as being alive (muzi). While the majority of Nage deem only animals, plants, and humans to be living, differences appear among informants distinguished by age and gender. As well as the overall finding, this variation and cultural usages contextually depicting certain inanimate objects as being alive raise questions about animism as a unitary way of knowing the world characteristic of single societies.     

The problem with ‘radicalization’: the remit of ‘Prevent’ and the need to refocus on terrorism in the UK

This article questions the utility of the term ‘radicalization’ as a focus for counter‐terrorism response in the UK. It argues that the lack of clarity as to who the radicalized are has helped to facilitate a ‘Prevent’ strand of counterterrorism strategy that has confusingly oscillated between tackling violent extremism, in particular, to promoting community cohesion and ‘shared values’ more broadly. The article suggests that the focus of counterterrorism strategy should be on countering terrorism and not on the broader remit implied by wider conceptions of radical‐ization. This is not to diminish the importance of contextual or ‘root cause’ factors behind terrorism, but, if it is terrorism that is to be understood and countered, then such factors should be viewed within the terrorism‐counterterrorism discourse and not a radicalization‐counter‐radicalization one. The article goes on to consider the characterization of those presenting a terrorist threat to the UK as being ‘vulnerable’ to violent extremism. While it argues that the notion of vulnerable individuals and communities also lends itself to a wider ‘Prevent’ remit, it cautions that the impetus towards viewing terrorism as the product of vulnerability should not deflect us from what has generally been agreed in terrorism studies—that terrorism involves the perpetration of rational and calculated acts of violence.     

Strathern's Melanesian ‘dividual’ and the Christian ‘individual’: a Perspective from Vanua Lava,Vanuatu

What happens to people's concept of the person when their ‘dividuality’ engages with the Christian concept of the ‘individual’? According to Vanua Lava kastom, when people die they go to sere timiat, the place of the dead. But do they still go there when the person had been a Christian during their life time? Where is the Christian heaven and hell? Is there a separate Christian ‘soul’? Will the dead be eternally separated from each other and their ancestors? Can kastom and Christian concepts be reconciled? Depending on denomination and degree of conversion (devout, nominal, or ‘back‐slider’) people have found multiple answers that help them conceptualise their final resting place. Their answers are of relevance for theoretical debates in anthropology about dividuality, individuality and engagement with modernity.     

The ‘Global’ versus the ‘Local’: Cognitive Processes of Kin Determination in Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT Morgan and his informants' interpretation of Australian social categories as ‘marriage classes’ has survived in Dumont's (and Viveiros de Castro's) distinction of a ‘local’ (Dravidian systems) and a ‘global’ (Australian systems) formula. This paper explains that the ‘global formula’ is neither a necessary nor an applied device in Australian kin category determination, even when genealogical memory is short and when there is a non‐limitation of range in the extension of categories. Instead, a heuristic model, which is called the relational triangle, is proposed. This model depicts the procedure through which Australian people pragmatically determine and extend kin categories. Moreover, it also offers a visualisation of the cognitive schema and processes framing discourse and behaviour in relation to kinship and draws some parallels with Greenberg's hypotheses on markedness in kinship classes.     

From ‘Relief’ to ‘Justice and Protection’: The Maintenance of Deserted Wives,British Masculinity and Imperial Citizenship, 1870–1920

In the early twentieth century, local British poor law guardians’ concerns with the maintenance of deserted and neglected families were transformed into imperial, and later transnational, policy promoting justice for abandoned wives and children. Both local court cases concerning maintenance and policy debates at the national and imperial levels reveal the ways in which a breadwinner model of masculinity shaped maintenance policy and practice. Although the maintenance problem was framed differently by local welfare providers and imperial heads of state, concerns about welfare costs and human rights intersected in the figure of the irresponsible male citizen, who challenged the dominant model of British/imperial masculinity by refusing to maintain his wife.