Myanmar's gender paradox

The tendency to conflate Myanmar’s Rohingya crisis with anti‐Muslim sentiment in the country more broadly, confuses analyses of influential institutions, notably the civilian government, military, and Buddhist Sangha. The authors discuss the perspectives of female religious nationalists in Myanmar as a means of exploring anti‐Muslim sentiment and grassroots support for Burmese Buddhist chauvinism. They suggest that women’s perspectives help to make sense of the disjuncture between Burmese and international interpretations of the events in Rakhine state and that though women currently play an important role in normalizing anti‐Muslim discourse, there are opportunities to reach them through dialogue that acknowledges their experiences of marginalization.     

The ‘rhinofication’ of South African security

The rhino‐poaching crisis in South Africa raises questions about whether it should be tackled through judicial processes or by the application of hard‐power methods. The poaching of wildlife has traditionally been met with a harsh response to send a clear message of punitive deterrence. While the reaction of the South African authorities has been no different, the contemporary threat posed by poaching intersects with, and is complicated by, wider concerns such as border security and immigration. In many respects, this has led to what can be termed the ‘rhinofication’ of South African security. South Africa has a long political tradition that relies on force rather than dialogue, negotiation and reform. Yet, the hard‐power response to protect the rhino and other large fauna, though necessary at one level, often runs up against the economic frustrations and temptations of a large, predominantly black, under‐class, which for generations has been excluded from wildlife management and conservation by white ‘exceptionalism’. Poachers are thus transformed through their counter‐cultural actions into what Eric Hobsbawm termed ‘social bandits’. While this social chasm lies at the heart of the ‘rhino wars’, it is clear that in practical terms the lack of a political/poaching settlement in the form of a racially inclusive conservation strategy almost certainly guarantees their continuation.     

Is ‘child placement’ trafficking?: Questioning the validity of an accepted discourse (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Within the discursive‐institutional space occupied by organisations working on child protection, child trafficking is often assumed to represent a direct outgrowth of the socio‐cultural custom of ‘child placement’, whereby parents send their children to live (and work) within other households. In Benin, where research for this paper was conducted, the narrative of ‘placement corrupted’ has become so well established that the country's anti‐trafficking law is in fact a law regulating the movement (including placement) of minors, and has in practice resulted in a de facto criminalisation of the intra‐familial mobility that has long formed a normal component of child‐rearing and socialisation within the region. In this paper, I offer a brief overview of this situation, and attempt to question the validity of the discourse on which the anti‐placement law and its attendant policies are based. I will employ the Foucauldian techniques of discursive archaeology and genealogy to unravel the origins of the discourse, and will draw on my own and related empirical research to problematize its conclusions.     

Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography

In Orientalism, Edward Said attempts to show that all European discourse about the Orient is the same, and all European scholars of the Orient complicit in the aims of European imperialism. There may be “manifest” differences in discourse, but the underlying “latent” orientalism is “more or less constant.” This does not do justice to the marked differences in approach, attitude, presentation, and conclusions found in the works of various orientalists. I distinguish six different styles of colonial and postcolonial discourse about India (heuristic categories, not essential types), and note the existence of numerous precolonial discourses. I then examine the multiple ways exponents of these styles interact with one another by focusing on the early‐twentieth‐century nationalist orientalist, Sri Aurobindo. Aurobindo's thought took form in a colonial framework and has been used in various ways by postcolonial writers. An anti‐British nationalist, he was by no means complicit in British imperialism. Neither can it be said, as some Saidians do, that the nationalist style of orientalism was just an imitative indigenous reversal of European discourse, using terms like “Hinduism” that had been invented by Europeans. Five problems that Aurobindo dealt with are still of interest to historians: the significance of the Vedas, the date of the vedic texts, the Aryan invasion theory, the Aryan‐Dravidian distinction, and the idea that spirituality is the essence of India. His views on these topics have been criticized by Leftist and Saidian orientalists, and appropriated by reactionary “Hindutva” writers. Such critics concentrate on that portion of Aurobindo's work which stands in opposition to or supports their own views. A more balanced approach to the nationalist orientalism of Aurobindo and others would take account of their religious and political assumptions, but view their project as an attempt to create an alternative language of discourse. Although in need of criticism in the light of modern scholarship, their work offers a way to recognize cultural particularity while keeping the channels of intercultural dialogue open.     

5. INDIA,ITIHASA, AND INTER‐HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DISCOURSE

An effective and enriching discourse on comparative historiography invests itself in understanding the distinctness and identity that have created various civilizations. Very often, infected by bias, ideology, and cultural one‐upmanship, we encounter a presumptuous‐ness that is redolent of impatience with the cultural other and of an ingrained refusal to acknowledge what one's own history and culture fail to provide. This “failure” need not be the inspiration to subsume the other within one's own understanding of the world and history and, thereby, neuter the possibilities of knowledge‐sharing and cultural interface. It is a realization of the “lack” that provokes and generates encounters among civilizations. It should goad us to move away from what we have universalized and, hence, normalized into an axis of dialogue and mutuality. What Indians would claim as itihasa need not be rudely frowned upon because it does not chime perfectly with what the West or the chinese know as history. accepting the truth that our ways of understanding the past, the sense of the past, and historical sense‐generation vary with different cultures and civilizations will enable us to consider itihasa from a perspective different from the Hegelian modes of doing history and hence preclude its subsumption under the totalitarian rubric of world history. How have Indians “done” their history differently? What distinctiveness have they been able to weave into their discourses and understanding of the past? Does the fact of their proceeding differently from how the West or the Chinese conceptualize history delegitimize and render inferior the subcontinental consciousness of “encounters with past” and its ways of being “moved by the past”? This article expatiates on the distinctiveness of itihasa and argues in favor of relocating its epistemological and ideological persuasions within a comparative historiographical discourse.     

Anti‐cosmopolitan liberalism: Isaiah Berlin,Jacob Talmon and the dilemma of national identity

ABSTRACT. The debate between contemporary cosmopolitans and advocates of nationalism is hardly new. Nevertheless, much of it is based on the erroneous assumption that cosmopolitanism should be seen as an outgrowth of liberalism, and that both should be considered as the complete conceptual opposites of nationalism. In this article I focus on two of the post‐war Jewish anglophile intellectuals who took part in this debate during the Cold War years: the Oxonian liberal philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) and the Israeli historian Jacob L. Talmon (1916–80). I use their examples to argue that the dividing line between cosmopolitans and advocates of nationalism should not be regarded as signifying the distinction between liberals and anti‐liberals; in fact, this debate also took place within the camp of the liberal thinkers themselves. I divide my discussion into three parts. Firstly, I examine Berlin's and Talmon's positions within the post‐war anti‐totalitarian discourse, which came to be known as ‘liberalism of fear’. Secondly, I show how a sense of Jewish identity, combined with deep Zionist convictions, induced both thinkers to divorce anti‐nationalist cosmopolitanism – which they regarded as a hollow, illusionary ideal associated with impossible assimilationist yearnings – from the liberal idea. I conclude by suggesting that, although neither man had ever developed a systematic theoretical framework to deal with the complex interactions between ethno‐nationalism, liberal individualism and multiculturalism, Berlin's vision of pluralism provides the foundations for building such a theory, in which liberalism and nationalism become complementary rather than conflicting notions.     

‘Humanitarianized’ Development? Anti‐trafficking Reconfigured

Over the past three decades humanitarianism has broadened considerably in scope. Humanitarian aid agencies have increasingly moved beyond a traditionally narrow concern with immediate relief aid to engage the wider implications of their work. Humanitarian arguments have also become central to policy legitimation in a range of contexts outside the humanitarian aid sector. By contrast, this article, based on research into anti‐trafficking programmes in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia, considers a case where a particular humanitarian discourse has in fact narrowed. Anti‐trafficking, once informed by development discourses of poverty reduction and long‐term well‐being of populations, has become increasingly shaped by a humanitarian emergency logic of exceptionalism. Long‐term development modalities have contracted into a zeal for the immediateness of ‘rescues’ and saving lives. By drawing attention to how development and humanitarian discourses intersect in anti‐trafficking interventions, this article explores how such shifts in legitimization and mobilization have taken place, in turn transforming actors and practices. The article will suggest that it is the different temporal registers of the two discourses — development and humanitarianism — that help account for this shift from the former to the latter.     

Martin Luther's Use of Rhetorical Masks for Jews,Princes, Clerics,and other Enemies: The Problem of Meaning in a Post Modern Age

In modern times, there is a common widespread and common misunderstanding of Martin Luther's views on Jews, Peasants, Clergy, Women, and Princes. An analysis of Luther's rhetorical use of “masks” as metaphors will help us understand that he was not the father of anti‐Semitism, or of political and social elitism. The purpose of this article is to explore and understand Luther's rhetorical intent in the context of early modern German culture. The central thesis of this article is that Martin Luther may have had in his use of rhetorical masks in his public discourse a hidden communicative strategy. Often his masks involved vulgar, crude, and violent words in his attempt to stimulate and persuade public opinion. Does language have consistent long‐term meaning regardless of context? Michael Giesecke, a professor of German linguistics, correctly argues that each cultural period develops its own ways of triadic perception that involves thinking, acting, and communicating. New ways of processing information as we now see in the electronic revolution holds true in the cultural shift in the sixteenth century fostered by the printing press. The new medium of printed works forces a new way of thinking in every affected age. Our problem is to understand the “new way.”     

The ESR geochronology and geology of the open‐air Palaeolithic deposits in Bollschweil,Germany*

This paper presents ESR (electron spin resonance) ages of rhinoceros and equine tooth enamel from the open‐air Palaeolithic site of Bollschweil on the western edge of the Black Forest near Freiburg, Germany. Bollschweil is one of very few archaeological sites in southern Germany to yield Lower or Middle Palaeolithic faunal and lithic materials from a buried, open‐air context. The geological context of the archaeological remains indicates that the loessic sediments have been reworked. Excavation at this site yielded a cold‐period fauna characterized by bones of mammoth, horse, large bovids and wooly rhinoceros. In the absence of any clear chronostratigraphic marker horizons, the age of the finds could not be determined without the use of a chronometric dating method. Lithic artefacts from the site, including a handaxe and a side scraper, suggest either a Middle Pleistocene or early Late Pleistocene age. The ESR dating results indicate that the deposit enclosing the archaeological finds should be assigned to oxygen isotope stage (OIS) 6, although there exists some possibility that some teeth were deposited later, in OIS 5.     

German modernity,barbarous Slavs and profit‐seeking Jews: the cultural racism of nationalist liberals

This paper examines emblematic texts by two important protagonists of post‐1848 liberalism in Germany, Gustav Freytag and Heinrich von Treitschke, focusing on their treatment of Jews and Poles. The paper analyses the social content of their statements and argues that the elements of anti‐Semitism and anti‐Slav racism that they contain were motivated by the specific kind of nationalist liberalism that frames their affirmation of the process of modernisation. This affirmation was directed against the Poles on the one hand, seen as backward Easterners who had to be pushed into civilisation by Prussian–German colonialism, and, on the other hand, the Jews, largely perceived as representing the wrong kind of modernity against which benign (supposedly German) modernity had to be protected. At the same time, the image of the Jew in Freytag and Treitschke also participates in that of the backward Easterner, permitting to see undesirable, allegedly Jewish aspects of modernity also as distortions resulting from an alien and ancient culture. This analysis has consequences for theorisations of both liberalism and nationalism: it suggests that the racism and anti‐Semitism of nationalist liberals were intrinsically related to core aspects of the liberal world‐view rather than being merely contingent opinions held by particular individuals. It also indicates that the nationalism of many German post‐1848 liberals was ethnic as well as liberal. In this way, the paper contributes to the growing body of literature discussing the illiberal aspects of liberalism as well as the shortcomings of the long‐established conceptual dichotomy of ethnic vs. liberal nationalism.     

Claiming the nation for the people: the dynamics of representation in German public discourse about immigrant integration

Against the backdrop of the current trend to criticise elite‐centred approaches to the study of nationalism, this article sheds light on ways in which elite and popular notions of nationhood are mediated. Thus, public discourse on national identity is explored as a discourse that ordinary people can influence and in which elites make claims to represent the people. To illustrate the dynamics of representative claim‐making and reception, the article uses a case study from German public discourse; the debate about Thilo Sarrazin's 2010 book Germany Does Away With Itself. It finds that, although Sarrazin clearly breaches well‐established rules in national identity discourse, his ideas gain traction from the moment he becomes accepted as representing ordinary Germans. The findings are discussed against the backdrop of the history of German national identity discourse and anti‐essentialist approaches treating nationhood as a political claim.     

Disciplining Subjectivity and Space: Representation, Film and its Material Effects

Although the distinction between representation and reality is increasingly blurred, I argue that representational discourses have material effects in everyday life. By moving “outside the text” I trace the messy terrain between visual discourse and everyday life in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver by examining two questions: (1) how do discursive productions of visual culture articulate, inscribe, and discipline space and subjectivity and (2) how do aboriginal women negotiate the material consequences of those representations? Using discourse and feminist analysis, I analyse how a documentary film, produced by the Vancouver Police Department, constructs spaces and subjectivities of deviance through techniques of realism and the moral gaze of the police officers. I argue that aboriginal women negotiate these deviant representations through their experiences of racism and sexism by police officers. Consequently, aboriginal women are rendered either hyper‐visible or invisible by police officers, marked by their gender, race, and class. Combining an analysis of the documentary film and in‐depth interviews with aboriginal women, I argue that critical geographers must consider the analytical spaces “outside of the text” to explore the material effects of visual representations.     

“The Cockroaches of Canada”: French‐Canada,Immigration and Nationalism,Anti‐Catholicism in English‐Canada, 1905–1929

This article examines the central influence of anti‐Catholicism upon English‐Canadian nationalism in the first third of the twentieth century. Anti‐Catholicism provided an existing rhetorical and ideological tradition and framework within which public figures, intellectuals, Protestant church leaders and other Canadians communicated their diverse visions of an ideal Canada. The study of anti‐Catholicism problematises the rigid separation that many scholars have posited between a conservative ethnic nationalism and a progressive civic nationalism. Often times these very civic values were inextricable from a context of Britishness. In addition, anti‐Catholicism was not simply about theological differences between Protestants and Catholics. Instead this theological thread often intersected with the perceived socio‐political problems that Catholics and Catholicism posed. Hostility to Catholicism was not limited only to fraternal organisations such as the Orange Order; indeed the importance of anti‐Catholicism as a component of Canadian nationalism lies in its presence across the political and intellectual spectrum. Catholicism was perceived to inculcate values antithetical to British traditions of freedom and democracy.     

Child Trafficking: ‘Worst Form’ of Child Labour,or Worst Approach to Young Migrants?

This article presents a critique to the human trafficking discourse in relation to child migration, based on data obtained from the anti‐trafficking community in the Greater Mekong Sub‐region combined with an analysis of secondary material. It also presents a set of qualitative accounts of migration at a young age from Lao PDR and Thailand. On this basis a more theorized, grounded and nuanced perspective on child labour migration is developed. This situates child labour migration historically, embeds it within overarching processes of rural transformation and accounts for young migrants’ agency in the social process of migration, the latter shedding light on the social production of exploitation in relation to young migrants.     

Tourists,sailors and labourers: A survey of early labour recruiting in Southern Melanesia

Abstract

This essay explores missionary allegations about slave‐dealing in Fiji, and their acceptance by British officials, as cultural responses to sexual relationships between indigenous women and white men. It also examines the imperial implications of ‘the culture of anti‐slavery’, whereby rhetoric about the enslavement of non‐European women became a rationale for attempted legal intervention in the mixed‐race community of Levuka. Finally, it considers how humanitarian rep resentations were contested, then appropriated, by one of the objects of their disapproval: a ‘lawless’ white man from Levuka. William Nimmo's response to the anti‐slavery proclamation gives us valuable information about Levuka's growing self‐definition as a community, and its attempts to control behaviour within its ranks. Using the ‘Christianisation and civilisation’ argument as successfully as the missionaries had, Nimmo and his friends sought recognition and respect from British authorities who seemed biased toward the missionary point of view, while making their own bid for official support in Fiji.     

The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race,Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth‐Century American Medicine

Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non‐white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth‐century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico‐scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth‐century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race‐specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti‐abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.     

‘No more road to walk’: cultures of heritage and leprosariums in Singapore and Malaysia

This paper examines how the state, social activists and former sufferers of leprosy participate in an international heritage discourse and how they construct the history of leprosy in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia. This paper finds both dissonances but also convergences between these different interests. The emergence of such entangled narratives is taking place at a time when the leprosariums are threatened by redevelopment and while social activists are calling for their conservation as heritage sites. The paper finds that both the state and social activists, in different ways, have selectively appropriated the history of leprosy to fit an international heritage discourse. Meanwhile aspects of that history, which are deemed incompatible, are discarded to fall in between the cracks of the discourse. By contrast, the oral history accounts of the leprosariums’ residents, as a possible source for intangible and radical heritage, are ambivalent about the sites’ heritage values. They reveal that while many residents reject the heritage discourse that seeks to save their homes from demolition, others have created a unique culture of heritage that appropriates the international discourse, but also expresses their own needs and perspectives. Cultures of heritage are, however, themselves fluid and liable to change like the memories on which they are based.     

You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: How ‘culture’ is Redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in Rural New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper is an ethnographic and historical exploration of Aboriginal Pentecostalism, which permeated quickly into the Aboriginal community in rural New South Wales in Australia during the early twentieth century. Today the Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in this region renounce Aboriginal ‘culture’. This, however, does not mean they reject Aboriginality. By examining Malcolm Calley's ethnography on the mid‐twentieth century Pentecostal movement in this region and drawing upon my own fieldwork data, I show the way in which this group of Aboriginal Christians of mixed descent in a ‘settled’ part of Australia have maintained Aboriginality and reinforced attachment to the community through faith in the Christian God, whilst, paradoxically, developing strong anti‐culture and anti‐tradition discourses. This paper advocates shifting the study of social change from a dichotomised model that opposes invading moral orders against resisting traditional cultures, to one that examines the processual manifestations of the historical development of vernacular realities.     

Cargo Cults and Discursive Madness

Understood as mimetic portrayals of the image of unlimited good projected by European colonial culture, Melanesian ‘cargo cults’ are therefore viewed as ‘irrational’ within indigenous understandings. Consequently, Western anthropological discourse has sought to functionally normalize and nativize ‘cargo cult’ behaviors at the expense of denying their non‐rational character. The result has been a lexical and semantic uncertainty and explanatory instability in ‘cargo cult’ discourse that can be analyzed as a type of discursive ‘madness.’ A strategy of reading the ‘madness’ of ‘cargo cult’ discourse is outlined and applied to key anthropological texts, in particular Peter Worsley's The Trumpet Shall Sound.