Dreams,Laki, and Mourning: A Psychoanalytic Ethnography of the Yagwoia ‘Inner Feminine’

This is a three‐part study of dream‐experiences and their existential reality in the life‐world of the Yagwoia of the Papua New Guinea highlands. The focus is on a single conjugal couple, their life‐trajectory, and the articulation of their bond as specifically expressed in their dreams. In the first instalment is presented the general cosmo‐ontological background of Yagwoia dreaming and the fundamental dialectics of the contra‐sexual self‐identity of the couple manifest in their oneiric encounters. The second part explores the intrinsic relationship between dreaming and the practice of gambling which in the Yagwoia life‐world is a domain of men's homo‐social participation in the self‐generative life‐death flow of the world‐body at large. In this aspect, Yagwoia gambling exhibits its true characteristic as an extension and modification of the male‐exclusive domain of hunting, warfare, and the ceaseless in‐/ex‐corporation of the cosmic life‐death flow. The third part continues to explore this cosmic dialectics in the context of the death of the woman and its impact on her man through the period of mourning. The study as a whole presents a cosmo‐poetic ethnography of the Yagwoia dream life developed through the systematic long‐term field‐work grounded in phenomenology and psychoanalysis.     

DREAMS,LAKI, AND MOURNING: A Psychoanalytic Ethnography of the Yagwoia ‘Inner Feminine’

In the first part of this study (Oceania, 76/1) I presented the general cosmo‐ontological background of Yagwoia (Papua New Guinea) dreaming and the fundamental dialectics of the contra‐sexual self‐identity of a conjugal couple (Tilm and QANG) manifest in their oneiric encounters. The second part (Oceania, 76/2) was focused on the man, QANG, and the vicissitudes of his soul's power to affect gambling outcomes. I showed that Yagwoia gambling exhibits its true characteristic as an extension and modification of the male‐exclusive domain of hunting, warfare, and the ceaseless in‐/ex‐corporation of the cosmic life‐death flow. In this third and Final part I deal with the vicissitudes of his favourite wife's presence in his life following her death whereby she became a spirit of the dead. Here my focus is on the practice and intersubjective dynamics of mourning, a process which with singular force realises the Yagwoia life‐world as an indissoluble socius of the living and the dead. It is in this context that the ethnographer also comes to experience and appreciate the palpability of spirits as the real denizens of the Yagwoia world.     

Dreams,Laki, and Mourning: A Psychoanalytic Ethnography of the Yagwoia “Inner Feminine”

In the first part of this study (Oceania, 76/1) I presented the general cosmo‐ontological background of Yagwoia dreaming and the fundamental dialectics of the contra‐sexual self‐identity of a conjugal couple (Tilm and QANG) manifest in their oneiric encounters. The second part focuses on the man, QANG, and the vicissitudes of his soul's power to affect gambling outcomes. I explore the intrinsic relationship between dreaming and the practice of gambling which in the Yagwoia life‐world is a domain of men's homo‐social participation in the self‐generative life‐death flow of the world‐body at large. In this aspect, Yagwoia gambling exhibits its true characteristic as an extension and modification of the male‐exclusive domain of hunting, warfare, and the ceaseless in‐/ex‐corporation of the cosmic life‐death flow. The pursuit of gambling is a fully libidinized field of male interaction. Through cards and dice men screw and drain each other of their bodily sexual potency which flows in the world‐body as a whole.     

Reconnecting with nature: an ecofeminist view of environmental management

Current approaches to environmental management are critiqued as symptomatic of a capitalist system that rests on the appropriation and instrumental use of planetary resources. I argue that people need to find different ways of relating to our co‐members in the web of life. A set of ecofeminist philosophical principles is proposed on which to build that new relationship; the need to develop an ecocentric, as opposed to an anthropocentric, view whereby to be human is to be part of the more‐than‐human, the revaluation of epistemological frameworks to include what rationality currently denies and a focus on an ethic of care extended to the more‐than‐human as a moral imperative and as a call for action. These principles offer exciting possibilities to develop ecocentric connectivities within nature beyond the current limiting and damaging conceptions of environmental management.     

Gender and Life Course in the Narratives of Melbourne's High‐rise Housing Developers

Socially constructed ideas about the life course, sometimes encompassing gender relations, have long informed the views of those within the housing development industry about who should be housed where in the city, living what sorts of lives. Drawing on the findings of a recent study of developers’ narratives about the construction of expensive, high‐rise housing in central Melbourne, a relatively new form of dwelling even in this part of the metropolitan area, several themes are found to characterise the taken‐for‐granted ways in which these city‐builders view the gendered life courses of housing consumers. Developers’ narratives oppose the suburban ‘home’ to the high‐rise ‘lifestyle’, consider central city high‐rise residences as appropriate only for people without families, and see women, separately from the couples they make up with men, only as potential victims requiring the security that high‐rise apartment living is said to provide. These narratives reiterate the characteristics of an essentialised ‘empty nester’, or ‘young professional’ housing consumer, who is envisaged to occupy the new housing and is defined according to life course stage and gender. The developers’ partial and narrow accounts of the likely consumers of this high‐rise housing is one factor amongst many that explains the building of precincts of high‐rise housing that have limited facilities for children and for pursuits other than consumption of the individual ‘lifestyle’.     

Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, 4th Baronet: An Unconventional Politician?*

The political life of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, 4th baronet has traditionally been seen in line with Sir Lewis Namier's views of 18th‐century politics and this article seeks to reinterpret his political life, taking into consideration not only his activities within parliament, but also his role within local government and his cultural activities. It will particularly consider the importance of his role within the concerts for ancient music, his lord lieutenancy of Merioneth and the central part he played in the 1778 treasury warrant crisis as well as his vigorous attempts to defend his interest during the 1774 Montgomeryshire election. This article will also argue that the cultural activities of back‐bench country gentlemen within the 18th‐century house of commons can shed new light upon their political views and activities.     

Still Under the Act? Subjectivity and the State in Aboriginal North Queensland

ABSTRACT Both the colonial encapsulation and post‐colonial recognition of North Queensland's Aboriginal population have been achieved through legislative demarcation. This paper explores the way such demarcation has extended the influence of the state within local Aboriginal life‐worlds, focusing on the State of Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from Central Cape York Peninsula, and recent anthropological theorization of the state, I argue that anthropologists need to seriously consider Aboriginal claims about what Michel‐Rolph Trouillot calls ‘state effects’. But careful examination of these claims suggests that the state no longer simply imposes its projects on fundamentally distinct Aboriginal life‐worlds. Not only is the state now deeply engaged within these life‐worlds, it is also deeply interwoven into post‐colonial Aboriginal subjectivities.     

Debt‐Bonded Brick Kiln Workers and Their Intent to Return: Towards a Labour Geography of Smallholder Farming Persistence in Cambodia

Despite the increasing preponderance of non‐farm work in Cambodia, labour migrants across a range of working conditions remain linked to their rural homesteads through durable financial and social arrangements. This article explores this phenomenon through the case of debt‐bonded brick kiln workers in Phnom Penh, formerly smallholder farmers in villages. Drawing on the field of labour geography, the article first examines the process by which labourers became debt‐bonded, thus situating them within the country’s broader agrarian transition and recasting peasants as rural labour. It then explores workers’ perceptions of rural life, suggesting that the unfreedom of kiln work, contrasted with the fixedness and potential for mobility in rural life, makes workers aspire to return to their land. The article ultimately highlights how the persistence of smallholder farmers can be understood as an issue of poor work under neoliberalism in Cambodia, and draws light on the agency of labour in understanding this.     

Challenging New State Spatialities: The Open Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

Abstract: It is possible to identify a subterranean tradition within Marxism—one in which dialectical thought is harnessed not only to expose the necessarily exploitative and inherently crisis‐prone character of capitalism as an actual system of social organisation, but also to critique the very categories that constitute capitalism as a conceptual system. This paper argues that Henri Lefebvre's work can be included within this tradition of “open Marxism”. In demonstrating how Lefebvre's work on everyday life, the production of space and the state derives from his open approach, the paper flags a potential problem of antinomy in an emergent new state spatialities literature that draws upon Lefebvre to supplement its structuralist–regulationist (“closed”) Marxist foundations. A Lefebvre‐inspired challenge is therefore established: that is, to develop a critique of space which does not substitute an open theory of the space of political economy with a closed theory of the political economy of the regulation of space.     

Human Trafficking and Online Networks: Policy,Analysis, and Ignorance

Dominant anti‐trafficking policy discourses represent trafficking as an issue of crime, “illegal” migration, victimhood and humanitarianism. Such a narrow focus is not an adequate response to the interplay between technology, trafficking and anti‐trafficking. This article explores different levels of analysis and the interplay between human trafficking and technology. We argue for a shift from policy discourses with a very limited focus on crime and victimisation to more systemic understandings of trafficking and more robust micro‐analyses of trafficking and everyday life. The article calls for an agnotological understanding of policy responses to trafficking and technology: these depend upon the production of ignorance. We critique limitations in policy understandings of trafficking‐related aspects of online spaces, and argue for better engagement with online networks. We conclude that there is a need to move beyond a focus on “new” technology and exceptionalist claims about “modern slavery” towards greater attention to everyday exploitation within neoliberalism.     

Shadows of Song: Exploring Research and Performance Strategies in Yolngu Women's Crying‐songs

This paper provides an argument that research on women's crying‐songs in north east Arnhem Land can be effectively analysed as a series of shadow‐dances between the researcher, the singer and the performance context. Within this framework, it explores the processes of transmission and reception of a selection of crying‐song texts from one of the most highly regarded female performers in the region. As singing is a powerful force in the making of Yolngu social, spiritual and political life, music making is shown to play a crucial role in authorizing, describing, teaching and controlling social and ancestral knowledge between men and women and by extension the place of the researcher within the community. Through the regulation of knowledge the making and remaking of the singer and researcher is danced out in a web of mutuality, reciprocity and obligation in which processes of ‘strategic formation’ and ‘strategic location’ emerge. Thus, one woman's melodies of mourning are shown to be a musical gift exchange of various shadow‐dances between learning, receiving, performing and mutually engaging in Yolngu ways of knowing and coming‐to‐know.     

Dealing with the Local State: The Informal Privatization of Street‐Level Bureaucracies in Senegal

Based on comparative research on the mechanisms and representations of petty corruption in West Africa, this article analyses the principal figures of administrative brokerage within the justice system, the customs and the local Senegalese fiscal services. Contractual, voluntary or informal staff mitigate the difficulties of access to bureaucratic institutions, while at the same time being used as a conduit for corrupt transactions. In the context of an opaque, under‐equipped administration, barely‐controlled and with disproportionate discretionary powers, these auxiliary staff contribute both to the daily functioning of the Senegalese post‐adjustment state, and to its circumvention. Through an ethnography of the relationships between the public services and their users, this article describes the important operational logics of the local government, which lay the foundation for the practices of intermediation and brokerage. It also evokes the emergence of new forms of informal privatization and the progressive institutionalization of the ‘informal’ as a management mode of the state in everyday life.     

Capitalizing on Bare Life: Sovereignty,Exception, and Gender Politics

Abstract: This article examines the capital value of bare life as part of aid/development in (post)Taliban Afghanistan. I argue that the political production and spatial fixity of homo sacer “as the object of aid and protection” within specific geographic locations subsequently territorializes gendered bodies as a site for capital accumulation and exchange value through aid/development allocation. This occurs through a continual discursive reduction of “full or proper” human life to the remnants of bare life. This subjective reduction subsequently elicits capitalist‐modernity as a prime method for rescuing bare life and transferring it to an image (and imaginary) of western political and economic life. Gendered multiplicities of bare life emerge from variant forms of political and economic opportunity among aid/development workers and Afghan recipients. I argue that the discursive framing of bare life is situated as a site for (re)constructing rights through “western” frameworks infused with geopolitical and economic exchange value.     

‘Tomorrow comes when tomorrow comes’: Managing Aboriginal Health within an Ontology of Life‐as‐Contingent

ABSTRACT The authors have worked in Australian Aboriginal communities within the Wiradjuri area of central‐western New South Wales. Examining what appear to be distinctive Aboriginal approaches to time, we argue that these stem not from a different notion of time as such but, rather, from the relationship between the social and the self which places a distinctive value on the use and management of time. One way to access the dynamic between time and self is to realise that life is understood as fluid and contingent rather than predictable. This continually subverts the idea that time is measurable and controllable; that life is lived within domesticated sedentary space; and that planning ahead and self‐discipline are virtues. Yet these are notions central to practices associated with contemporary health care. A majority of health care providers, whether Aboriginal or not, are trained in the Australian mainstream health system and may consequently underestimate the implications of different ways in which a person acts on the temporal/spatial dimensions of her life, and how this influences ways in which she manages time in relation to her health and well‐being. Temporal concepts, such as ‘planning’, ‘discipline’, ‘future’, ‘boredom’, or ‘patience’, as well as that of the ‘long‐term’ with regard to managing illness or money, interact with the ways in which Aboriginal people experience themselves as ill or in need of health care, influencing how they act on medical advice. We argue that the key to understanding the use of time lies not in the concept of time per se but in what is involved in developing a responsive social self when the time/space dimensions of the day to day are informed by a fluid and thus contingent ontology of that day to day.     

The Depositional Contexts of the Ships from Thonis‐Heracleion,Egypt

Over 70 ancient vessels have been discovered by the Institut Européen d'Archéologie Sous‐Marine in the port‐city of Thonis‐Heracleion, Egypt. These were deposited both individually and in groups from the 8th to the 2nd century BC. This paper investigates the contexts of these vessels to suggest that a variety of explanations—shipwrecking, ritual deposition, abandonment, and structural reuse—account for their deposition. It also seeks to place these events within the changing landscape of Thonis‐Heracleion to understand the agency behind many of the decisions about what to do with old ships and boats at the end of their use‐life.     

Celebrating the Ordinary: Church,Empire and Gender in the Life of Mère Marie‐Michelle Dédié(Senegal,Congo, 1882–1931)

Member of the congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, Mère Marie‐Michelle Dédié worked within a highly gendered institution, the Catholic church and within a highly gendered colonial society. Although at considerable personal cost, she successfully achieved her goals – the training of African girls and women in the Christian life – by working within prescribed boundaries rather than contesting them. She was lauded by churchmen for her dedication and fortitude, and celebrated by colonial men, who found and imagined in her the kinder face of the imperial enterprise. Mère Marie's life suggests a study of the lives of missionary nuns in the outposts of empire may add to our understanding of the contradictions of empire and the complexities of colonial society, as well as the predicaments and successes of religious women.     

Lebensaltertheorien in der Anthropologie der Romantik

Theories of stages of life within the anthropology of romanticism. – The essay discusses the importance and prominence of theories about different stages of life in the anthropological and medical discourse of romanticism. This discourse has clearly a stabilising and restaurative function, favouring the age of moderate manhood. The political and social regulative implications of these theories demand a restaurative roll‐back. The essay is based on a concept of sociology of knowledge formation.     

Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster Resilience

This paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community‐based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts. Garrison life has been shaped by the confluence of political economic, cultural, geopolitical force relations, which creates a hyper‐adaptive life that exceeds the techniques and rationalities of neoliberal disaster resilience. I draw on autonomist Marxist and Deleuzian readings of biopolitics to identify a new subject of disaster politics that I call, after Deleuze and Guattari, “adaptation machines”, decentralized apparatuses of capture that are parasitically reliant on the population's immanent adaptive capacities. The concept of adaptation machines enables us to envision resilience politics as a struggle over how to appropriate vulnerable peoples’ world‐forming constituent power.     

The Right to the World

The global number of refugees, asylum seekers, and those displaced within their countries are at record levels in the post‐World War II era. Meanwhile, efforts by relatively wealthy and powerful nation‐states to exclude unwanted migrants through enhanced territorial control have reached unprecedented heights, producing great harm–most notably premature death–for many. The factors driving out‐migration from homelands made unviable, coupled with multiple forms of violence experienced by migrants, demonstrate the need for an expansion of rights–conceived of as both entitlements and sites of struggle. So, herein, I assert the need for “the right to the world”–specifically a right to mobility and a just share of the Earth's resources–to help realize the promise of a dignified life for all. In making the case for such, the article offers a critical analysis of the contemporary human rights regime and of the “right to the city”.