Telephones,Cameras and Technology in West New Britain Cargo Cults

In this paper, I explore the creative practices of cargo cult followers in the Kaliai bush of West New Britain. I focus on how rural villagers reworked their experiences of meaning and sociality through their appropriations of western technology. In particular, bush Kaliai cult followers frequently used telephones and cameras in idiosyncratic ways that mapped out anew and redisclosed the spaces occupied by a racialised human existence. Through their novel use of western technology, cult followers struggled to resituate and overcome the new distances and cleavages of modernity by unearthing other ways of being white that came from their customary past and ancestral homelands.     

Cults and Christianity among the Enga and Ipili

In this article, I examine the continuities between early-contact cult activities and present day Christianity among the western Enga and eastern Ipili of highlands Papua New Guinea. Christians today see the cults as early attempts to ‘open the road’ for the coming of whites and missionization. Cult leaders are currently understood as prophets who had received messages from God and were sent out to herald the coming new era of social change. The ritual killing of a young man in the 1940s by cult leaders is conceptualized as the local version of the crucifixion of Jesus. The data herein illustrate the creative means by which Ipili and Enga in this region have indigenized Christianity and located their own regional histories and practices in the broader scope of world history.     

正统性、地方化与文化的创制——潮州民间神信仰的象征与历史意义

从秦朝开始,潮州地区就与整个岭南地区一起,归属中原王朝的政治“版图”。但是,王朝教化与地域社会之间的契合,却经历了长期复杂的互动过程。在这一过程中,宋元之际和明末清初的变化尤其具有重要的意义。三山国王和双忠公是在潮州乡村庙宇中最经常见到的两个神祗。这两个神明信仰的形成及其象征意义的转换,与潮州地区数百年来王朝教化与地域社会复杂互动的契合过程有着密切的关系。     

Auerbach,Madness, and the East

ABSTRACT

Erich Auerbach’s lack of interest in engaging with non-Western contexts and literatures has often led critics to identify varying degrees of Eurocentric bias in his work. This perception of bias obfuscates the depths of Auerbach’s thought regarding the non-European, who does have a central place in Auerbach’s overall vision, not only of philology and Western literature, but also of humanism and historical progress generally. This articles accounts for the centrality of the non-European in Auerbach’s notion of realism.     

Agency in the Discursive Condition

This article claims that postmodernity necessarily, and perhaps opportunely, undermines the bases upon which political democracy traditionally has rested; and that therefore some significant work must be done in order to redefine, restore, or otherwise reconfigure democratic values and institutions for a changed cultural condition. This situation presents the opportunity to explore the new options, positive openings, and discursive opportunities that postmodernity presents for political practice; for this the problem of agency provides a focal issue.
The practices of postmodernity, taken together, represent substantial challenges, not just to this or that cherished habit, but to modernity itself and all its corollaries, including its inventions of objectivity, of "the individual" (miserable treasure), and of all the related values (project, capital, consensus and, above all, neutrality) which still underwrite so much of what we do as citizens, consumers, and professionals not to mention as more private persons, parents, and partners. Fortunately, postmodernity does not demolish all our most cherished beliefs, values, and practices; but it does require recognition of how those beliefs, values, and practices actually function and of what alternatives they suppress.     

Discursive Agency: (Re‐)Conceptualizing Actors and Practices in the Analysis of Discursive Policymaking

Interpretive discourse analysis commonly claims to address the interrelation between actors and discourses. However, the analytical focus of most approaches is on structures (discourses) while much less attention is paid to agency. This paper explicitly addresses discursive agency in two steps. First, we systematically review theoretical and analytical dimensions of agency in existing interpretive discourse analysis approaches. This review reveals a set of shared assumptions; most notably a concept of “trialectic” agency emphasizing the constitution of agency among the individual, the (discursive) structures, and the researcher's interpretation. Second, we propose an analytical heuristic, the Discursive Agency Approach, which is developed on the basis of the review and own empirical data. The proposed approach consists of four elements: (1) policy discourses, (2) political institutions, (3) agents defined via a set of characteristics, and (4) strategic practices. This approach is meant to facilitate a systematic exploration of agency under a discourse perspective, tackling the question of how a policy is constituted through the agency ascribed to its proponents in dynamic discursive processes, and how actors acquire political relevance through discursive means. To enable this goal, we propose distinct research steps and associated methods that link the approach to existing means of analysis.     

Cargo Cult Horror

Anthropological analyses of cargo cults offer certain plots alongside ethnographic detail. Many such accounts assume one or the other of three common storylines. Cargo cults have been plotted as bildungsroman, as horror story, and as carnival. Bildungsroman cargo narratives suggest that cargo is good but culting is bad. Carnivalesque accounts reverse this polarity to celebrate culting while disparaging the dangers of cargo. The horror storyline laments both cargo and culting. Over the past fifty years, shifting appreciations of modernity, technology, and progress have reshaped the stories in which cargo cults get accounted: Modernity's cargo bildungsroman has given way to postmodern horror.     

Discursive Representation and Pearson's Quest for a Radical Centre

Noel Pearson is one of Australia's most prominent and influential Indigenous intellectuals. This article examines a major idea in Pearson's writing, the ‘quest for a radical centre’. It examines this idea from the perspective of both its usefulness in understanding the deficiencies in public conversation about Indigenous affairs, and its persuasiveness in legitimating the role that Pearson has played nationally as a champion of the Indigenous responsibility discourse. The article argues that conceptualising public debate as a quest for a radical centre resonates strongly with the theory of deliberative democracy. Similar to Dryzek and Niemeyer's work on ‘discursive representation’, the idea of the radical centre reveals the legitimacy possessed by unelected champions of discourses.

诺艾尔·皮尔森是澳大利亚最杰出的原住民知识分子。本文考察了皮尔森写作的一个主要思想,“探索激进的中心”。在作者看来,这思想有助于理解有关土著事务的公共对话的缺陷,它还让皮尔森在全国扮演的角色——土著人责任话语的捍卫者——富于说服力。将公共辩论理解为对激进中心的探索,这与商议民主的理论非常合拍。与德雷泽克和尼美耶论“话语代表性”的著作相类,激进中心的思想指出了未被选择的话语卫士的合理性。     

Male Cults Revisited: The Politics of Blood Versus Semen

In this article I explore some major differences between male initiations in Melanesia that I ignored in my earlier study. In particular, I focus on the differential emphasis that was placed on blood-letting as against semeningesting as the key means whereby boys were believed to be transformed into men. In the case of the blood-letting rites men seemingly sought both to appropriate to themselves the positively valued capacity of women to give birth to children and to protect themselves from women's negative ability to cause either death or destruction through menstruation, sexual intercourse or witchcraft. By contrast, in the semeningesting rites the properties of women that the men seemed most concerned to appropriate focused on their capacities to receive semen in the act of sexual intercourse and to give milk in the nurturant context. Such major cult differences were, I suggest, directly associated with parallel differences in four inter-related sets of variables; the form of marital exchange (direct as against indirect), the predominant variety of social relations (centripetal as against centrifugal), the prevailing form of leadership (conservative as against entrepreneurial) and, finally and most importantly, differences in gender relations, especially concerning the nature of male dependency on female cooperation in attaining specifically male goals.     

Madness and colonisation: The embodiment of power in Pangia

The article considers two examples of ‘madness’ which occurred during the colonial era in Pangia district, Southern Highlands Province, PNG. The first, immediately prior to pacification, concerned outbreaks of madness among young Wiru men which were similar to the ‘wildman’ behaviour described in the Highlands ethnography. The second style of madness was associated with the so-called ‘hysteria’ accompanying revival activity by Christian missions. The two styles are compared using a Foucauldian perspective, primarily for the ways in which colonial technologies of power were inscribed on the bodies of Pangia people. The article presents an anatomy of colonial power, and suggests an ethnohistory of the body is possible. It examines the ways in which this power was created through discourses and practices involving concepts of the ‘primitive’ and ‘heathen,’ resulting in a transformation of the Wiru subject.     

Madness and Mother Ireland in the fiction of Patrick McCabe

This article explores the relationship between madness and the figure of Mother Ireland in the work of the Irish novelist Patrick McCabe. It situates his work in relation to contemporary feminist responses to representations of Ireland as a woman, by identifying different versions of the Mother Ireland figure as a cause of psychosis in McCabe's writing. It argues that McCabe, in contrast to writers such as Eavan Boland and Edna O'Brien, finds an alternative and radical means of contesting this historically troublesome literary motif.