How Civilized Were the Victorians?

Abstract

This article addresses the role of the ‘civilizing process’ in the historiography of the Victorian period. The author develops a critique of perspectives that deem the nineteenth century to be an era of discipline and self-restraint, arguing that these result from the hegemonic position of literary perspectives within Victorian Studies and their frequent reliance on Foucauldian-inspired techniques of discourse analysis. In response, he outlines and illustrates the potential for alternative research agendas and approaches that move away from representational sources in order that the Victorian period can be viewed in a new light. These include the study of vernacular photography, cultures of leisure, and the subcultures of groups where the importance of ‘nonverbal’ practices and the cultures inherent in bodily experiences are highlighted – forms of expression that reach beyond established discourse. It is argued that the failure of scholars of the Victorian period to consider this ‘nonverbal’ culture means that the theoretical frameworks of comprehension that currently characterize Victorian Studies are underdeveloped. The essay calls for Victorianists to broaden their theoretical perspectives, engage with new sources, and embrace new methodologies in order to enlarge our understanding of nineteenth-century culture.     

We Were Sitting Around the Table…

Alejandro comments on the sense of indeterminacy that pervaded our discussions, notably over what “archaeology” even consists of and over the dilemmas created when the principle of respect for the local community contradicts ethical principles that the archaeologist feels are universal in scale. He tells the story of Carlos Bruch, an early archaeologist in the Catamarca Region, recounting how Bruch portrayed local people and discounted their conceptions of the past, then constructed his own version, contributing to the official version in archaeological discourse. This continues to have ramifications today in the disenfranchisement of local voices in global colonialist projects. Alejandro saw our indeterminancy and quandaries over dilemmas faced by archaeologists as a positive development—a symptom of archaeology changing its pre-theoretical pre-understandings. He emphasizes the importance of local people enacting their own techniques of social memory and their own vocality.     

Why Were the Dalai Lama and The Panchen Erdeni at odds in History?

Inthewinterof1903,morethan200BritishtroopsenteredGangba,Tibet,ontheexcuseof"negotiations".AllsignsshowedthattheywerereadytogodeeperintoTibet.Wheninformedofthis,theGaxaggovernmentofTibetsentanordertotheLhazhangOfficeoftheTashilhungpoMonastery.Theorderreadinpartasthefollows:"TheBritishtroopshavemadeinroadintoGangba.IftheygodeeperintoTibet,theywillinevitablycausemoreseriousdamagetoourtemporalandreligiouscause.SinceGangbaisunderthejurisdictionoftheTashilhungpoMonastery,youhavetheboundendut…     

Were the Wars of Religion about Religion?

Abstract

William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence raises important questions about the role of religion in society. It challenges all-too-common misunderstandings about the relationship between religion and politics and, most valuably, warns against any assumption that religion is peculiarly prone to violence. This essay nevertheless takes issue with his attempt to disprove what he calls “the myth of religious violence” with evidence from the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe and his claim that “the story of these wars serves as a kind of creation myth for the modern state” (10). The essay emphasizes the importance of understanding the religious dimensions of early modern Europe's wars but also of recognizing that, in both historical and contemporary situations, religious motivations are best understood not as independent variables but rather as catalysts that could exacerbate-or relieve-tensions rooted in other sorts of divisions or quarrels.     

Who Pays the Ferryman? Industry Policy and Shipbuilding in Australia

The lightweight fast ferry industry that has emerged in Australia over the last couple of decades has been a remarkable and surprising success story. Given the contraction of manufacturing in general and traditional shipbuilding in particular, its growth is all the more noteworthy. This paper analyses the evolution of the industry and considers the impact of industry policy on its development. Although the effectiveness of industry policy in Australia has generally been undermined by a lack of political support and inadequate integration with other government policies, it was, nevertheless, an important part of this industry's expansion.     

Who Has the Biggest Bulls? Royal Power and the Persepolis Apadāna

Relationships between power and architecture are a feature of all great civilizations and the Achaemenid world was no exception to this. The architecture of Achaemenid buildings and their relief sculpture was designed to reflect and reinforce the power and status of the Great King. At the heart of this visual program lay the audience hall (apadāna) at Persepolis. In seeking to explain and understand the messages written into this building, we tend to approach the structure as a completed work and view it from the last point in its lifecycle. As a result, we focus on its tribute procession relief and allow ideas of empire to dominate our gaze. This limits our ability to understand how and why the building’s intended audience and message of power might have diverged at different stages in its construction. This article re-examines the art and architecture of the audience hall at Persepolis and redirects the viewer’s gaze to the images of bulls rather than the tribute procession. In focusing on the role of bulls in the scheme of decoration, the article presents a more nuanced reading of the building in its historical, social and architectural context. It shows how Darius I used the Persepolis apadāna to display his authority to rule and to assert the primacy of his status amongst his fellow elites.     

Who Owns the Victorians?

In contrast to Peter K. Andersson, Steinbach argues that there is a great deal of scholarly work on working-class Victorians and that the works of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault are not particularly influential. She argues, first, that ‘middle class’ and ‘respectability’ are terms more useful to Victorian Studies than Andersson’s ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘civilized’; second, that interdisciplinarity is too difficult to achieve and maintain, both on the individual and the institutional levels. She concludes by proposing that Victorian Studies instead commit to a multidisciplinary model.     

Who Knew the Minds of the People? Specialist Knowledge and Developmentalist Authoritarianism in Postcolonial Ghana

By the mid-1960s, local-level development workers in Ghana were expected to act as the eyes and ears of the state, reporting on ‘the minds of the people’ and explaining their reactions to President Kwame Nkrumah's project of socialist reconstruction. This articles argues that through mass education, social welfare and community development plans, both the late colonial and early independent state sought to make its presence manifest in the everyday lives of its citizens, to bind them to a broader vision for their country, and to present their successes to the outside world. By identifying some of the competing models of social development that were promoted by British, Ghanaian and African-American experts in the aftermath of independence, this article investigates the role of specialist knowledge in the developmentalist authoritarianism which is often presented as a generic legacy of the colonial state in Africa.     

Who Pays the Costs of Inflation?

Inflation may be looked upon as a deferred consumption tax which reduces consumer purchasing power through high prices to compensate for earlier excess expansions of credit. A portion of this excess borrowing is by government to finance deficits. The inflation cost may then be compared by family–income class with the alternative income taxes needed to avoid inflation by eliminating the deficits. By this calculation for 1965–75, the inflation cost was highly regressive, with an effective rate of 17 percent on. families below $5,000, and 17 times greater than such families would have had to pay in income taxes. Meantime, the effective inflationary tax rate for wealthy families over $50,000 in income was a bonus, or tax rebate, of one percent.     

Who Shapes the Politics of Expertise? Co-Production and Authoritative Knowledge in Thailand's Political Forests

Expert environmental knowledge has often been described as a governmental rationality that reduces political debate and facilitates state control. In this paper, I argue instead that this line of reasoning simplifies how knowledge gains political authority, especially when expertise is shared and left unchallenged by diverse actors, including those in conflict with each other. Using the framework of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS), I apply this argument to conflicts over the supposed watershed functions of forests in Thailand, where simplified narratives about the impacts of land use on water supply are used as justifications for territorialisation and restrictions on forest land. In particular, I focus on local resistance to the proposed Kaeng Sua Ten dam in northern Thailand in order to demonstrate how protestors have deliberately reproduced formal expertise to empower themselves, but by so doing also reinforcing simplified visions of watershed science and community culture. I argue that exposing the co-production of authoritative knowledge and visions of social order offer greater opportunities for understanding the role of expertise as a political force than analysing competing assemblages based on oppositions of state-led expert knowledge and traditional local practices.     

Who is the rogue? Discourse,power and spatial politics in post-war Sri Lanka

This article analyses ethnic antagonisms and related political discourses in Sri Lanka after the ceasefire agreement in 2002 using the Derridean notion of vouyou (rogue) and Agamben's concept of state of exception. In all three ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, we can observe discourses on ethnicity, space and territories that create fictions of ethnic homogeneity and purity based on a social construct of the ethnic other as “rogue”. Roguishness is linked with issues of territorial control, political justice and virtual or real “rogue states”. It is also pertinent in the justification of violence and the differentiation of just(ified) and unjust(ified), roguish violence and the rivalry over sovereignty. I will argue that these “rogue others” are needed to legitimize a state of exception where force stands out-of-the-law, but needs to be justified as being within the law, since the state of exception is part of a project leading to an ideal state-to-come. This ideal state-to-come to is to be a “pure” state-to-come, in the form of the “pure” Singhalese–Buddhist state, the Tamil homeland, and more recently, the Muslim homeland as expression of distinct Muslimness. Derrida argues that identifying “rogues” is rationalizing and covering deeper rooted fears. In Sri Lanka, the rogue rationale reveals deeper lying anxieties that link security with ethnic homogeneity and the ethnic self and insecurity with multi-ethnicity and the ethnic other. The ethnic other is a force preventing the (ethnically) pure state-to-come to come into being.     

Who Is the Enemy? The Nationalist Dilemma of Inclusion and Exclusion in Britain During the First World War

The First World War polarised British society. The British 'nation' needed a definition of the external enemy to generate internal cohesion as much as the production of modern hostility presupposed the existence of nationalism. Apparently, hostility which is nationalistically motivated is of functional importance for the cohesion of a society in war. But the construction of the nation along the lines of the dialectic structure of exclusion and inclusion implies that even its founding act encourages national splits. The manner in which nationalism generates social cohesion by excluding non-members at the same time always turns it into the expression of and the reason for internal conflicts. First and foremost, however, it was the co-existence of a whole host of concepts of the nation competing with each other for supremacy which turned nationalism into a disintegrative power in society. The co-existing national concepts by and large reflected the political factions and camps in the belligerent society. This article tries to outline the various ways in which the borderlines between the internal and the external enemy, between the hostile part of one's own society and a hostile foreign society converged under the circumstances of the exceptional burden of the First World War. At the end the hostility which was motivated and legitimised nationalistically both split and integrated British society.     

Frankenstein's problem: Who controls the controls?

Langdon Winner. Autonomous Technology, Technics‐out‐of‐control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977. x + 384 pp. Notes and index. $17.50.     

Who were the latter Pleistocene eastern Africans?

A later Pleistocene Khoisan peopling of eastern Africa has been suggested by most researchers. The evidence cited consists of a few isolated crania, archaeological occurrences described as Wilton, rock paintings and scattered populations of present-day hunter-gatherers speaking languages with clicks and viewed as bearing some physical resemblances to living Khoisan groups. When these different lines of evidence are evaluated, it is clear that there is no strong basis for retaining the concept of later Pleistocene Khoisan populations in eastern Africa. Instead, the available data suggest that the later Pleistocene and Holocene eastern Africans were tall, linear peoples.

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Résumé La plupart des chercheurs proposent que l'est de l'Afrique a été peuplé pendant le Pléistocène tardif par des gens Khoisan. Les témoignages citées par ces auteurs consistent en quelques crânes isolés, des mobiliers archêologiques catégorisés comme du type Wilton, des peintures rupestres, et la répartition actuelle de quelques groupes sociaux bien parsemés de chasseurs-cueilleurs qui parlent des langues avec des claquements et qu'on pense à ressembler physiquement à quelques peuples Khoisan d'aujourd'hui. Quand ces lignes de raisonnement sont évaluées individualement, il se manifeste qu'il n'y a aucune base solide qui peut nous justifier à garder l'hypothèse de la présence des gens Khoisan dans l'est de l'Afrique pendant le Pléistocène tardif. Au contraire, les données disponibles nous amènent à penser que les gens est-africains au Pléistocène tardif ainsi qu'à l'Holocene étaient de haute taille et mince.