In search of Derek Freeman

Truth’s Fool is a sympathetic biography of Derek Freeman, the anthropologist best known for his scathing critique of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. Hempenstall, a historian, chronicles Freeman’s life and work, including an appraisal of the Mead–Freeman controversy. Hempenstall is interested in Freeman’s ideas, motives, and intentions as well as his personal struggles. He argues that Freeman has been misunderstood, maligned, and vilified in an uncivil “war” among cultural anthropologists. This review examines Hempenstall’s interpretation of Freeman’s personal struggles and his perspective on Freeman’s two books on Mead and Samoa.     

Towards Eurasia: remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’

In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.     

Material Culture and the Magical Power of Dance Objects

ABSTRACT This paper takes up the call by scholars such as Alfred Gell to consider objects of material culture as objects, by examining them in the context of production, circulation and reception. Because they are unadorned and without visual interest, langarol, the hand‐held artefacts used in some New Ireland dance performances, do not lend themselves to modes of analysis that see cultural objects as surrogate texts, the hidden meanings of which can be ‘read’. This very ‘lack’ enables us more readily to discern their significance, which lies in their magical potency and in the performance of their creator, the shaman, in attracting, wielding and revealing his awesome power. The power sought is less power over others and more power to — the ability to realise projects that can elicit effects. If consciousness and body are one, such achievements are to be understood as embodiments of intentionality and agency. It is through the production and wielding of such objects that people make themselves.     

Anton Dumitriu,the ‘Axiomatic Culture’ and the ‘Crisis of the West’

Anton Dumitriu (1905–92) was a Romanian philosopher and logician who attempted to develop the more or less consistent theory of an ‘axiomatic’ tradition, referring to culture and civilisation in the ‘East’ (defined actually as Far East) vs. the ‘West’ (mainly Europe, both Western and East-Central) especially in the inter-war and post-war periods. Dumitriu's essays on Romanian culture or on Eastern vs. Western culture as published in his book Eleatic and Heraclitic Cultures (1987) will make the object of this study. This work is a revised version of his East and West (1943). It should be noted that most of the material discussed here is actually still available only in Romanian since Dumitriu's work on Logic is already translated into English, but his musings on culture and civilisation are available only in Romanian and are, consequently, almost unknown outside the country. This study attempts to make up for that and also to connect Dumitriu's views on culture and civilisation or East and West both to earlier Romanian views and currents in defining culture as well as to contemporary general European trends, while also taking into account the context of the Communist regime in which the second edition of his book was issued.     

‘Eastern History with Western Eyes’: E.A. Freeman,Islam and Orientalism

E.A. Freeman is remembered today as a confident proponent of English superiority, whose historical writings were distorted by mid-Victorian prejudices in favour of the Aryan race. This perspective privileges some of Freeman's ideas and works above others, and obscures the complexities of his view of the past which only fully emerge through an examination of his two neglected works on the East: The History and Conquests of the Saracens (1856) and The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877). In analysing Freeman's obscure Oriental volumes this article uses the insights of Edward Said who argued that the West exploits the East according to contemporary exigency and consistently represents the Orient as ‘other’. It demonstrates that Freeman composed the Saracens and Ottoman Power in direct response to Britain's support of the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War and Eastern Crisis, and re-arranged the past to represent the Turk as distinct from, and inferior to, the West. Freeman's account of the distinctiveness of the Orient, however, suggests the need to revise literature on Western approaches to the East which has assumed that antagonism towards Islam declined in the modern period, or was masked behind narratives that purported to be secular and objective but which continued to empower Europe and subjugate the Orient. Juxtaposing Freeman's narratives on Western and Eastern history, I argue that his association of Christianity with European progress and Islam with Eastern barbarism is key to understanding his deep fear of cultural contact with the Orient. Far from bolstering the strength and power of the West vis-à-vis the East, Freeman's account of the fearful barbarity of the Islamic Orient is underpinned by his belief in an anti-Christian, Judeo-Islamic, conspiracy that threatened the West with degeneration and recapitulation.     

Andrew Marvell and the Dutch fifth column: new evidence from a copy of Mr Smirke with authorial annotations

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses a previously unknown copy of Andrew Marvell’s Mr Smirke, which features annotations in his hand. We argue that the recipient of the volume was the Anglo-Dutch agent “William Freeman”, who was closely involved with a Dutch fifth column, set up by William of Orange and his spymaster Pierre Du Moulin, which lobbied Parliament during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The essay discusses further archival evidence of Marvell’s links to Freeman and argues that their connection persisted after the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch war. Finally, the essay argues that these links throw new light onto the development of Marvell’s late prose work, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, which is more closely influenced by other pamphlets associated with William’s propaganda efforts in England in the 1670s than has been hitherto realised.     

Gender and Sexuality in Latina/o Miami: Documenting Latina Transsexual Activists

This article examines the borderlands between transgender MTF (male‐to‐female) and gay male communities in Latina/o Miami through an analysis of the participation of Latinas in the Transsexual Action Organization (TAO). Previous research suggests that Cuban and Cuban American gay male culture have historically been associated with gender transgressive behaviour and identity. Because of this, it is often unclear how to distinguish between what is gay male/homosexual expression and transgender expression. If outward gender manifestations that we now call ‘transgender’ were understood in other historical and cultural contexts as ‘homosexual’, how do we label those manifestations today? By labelling them as homosexual are we simply reinscribing the marginalisation of transgender individuals? On the other hand, by labelling them as transgender are we imposing a contemporary category and therefore performing another kind of intellectual violence? In order to address these questions, I analyse a Latino/a organisation that explicitly labelled itself ‘transsexual’. TAO was an early transsexual rights organisation founded in 1970 by Angela Douglas in Los Angeles which moved to Miami Beach, Florida in 1972. Drawing on the organisation's publications, Moonshadow and Mirage Magazine (1972–75), and Douglas's self‐published autobiographical texts, Triple Jeopardy: The Autobiography of Angela Lynn Douglas (1983) and Hollywood's Obsession (1992), I analyse the rarely discussed participation of Latinas in the organisation.     

Tom Stoppard’s Big Picture: The Chaos that is Our World

Abstract

Issues arising from discussions regarding the ‘two cultures’ of science and art are many and varied. Tom Stoppard’s very active utilization of science in many of his plays has resulted in his work — especially the quantum mechanics-informed Hapgood and the chaotics-informed Arcadia — being held up as paradigmatic of one science/art position or another. Often, critical approaches to these plays involve a checklist of scientific facts, implying that the goal of such art is to serve as a delivery device for scientific breakthroughs. While plays, novels, and movies of various sorts may have such goals in mind, Stoppard’s plays do not comfortably fill that agenda, critical arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. Neither do Stoppard’s plays show particular interest in engaging any debate about the superiority of one ‘culture’ over the other. In his two ‘science plays’ in particular, what Stoppard offers is an enrichment of both science and art through metaphorical intertwinings that suggest experience is best served when both camps collaborate. The bigger picture that results argues an overlap in epistemology, namely revealing the uncanny similarity in which artist and scientist approach the material that is our universe.     

The making of the Heart of the World: representation and the Kogi

Abstract

The Kogi of Colombia's Sierra Nevada have maintained a culture isolated from colonial contact since 1600. Living in the ‘Heart of the World’ they call themselves ‘Elder Brother’. They consider themselves the world's caretakers and the keepers of a traditional knowledge long since lost by the invasive and destructive colonizing ‘Younger Brother’. An invitation from a BBC filmmaker to provide a medium for the Kogi to contact the outside world was accepted. The result was a film that the Kogi planned and devised to warn Younger Brother to stop his destructive behaviour.     

Communities of discourse: Ideology and social structure in the reformation,the enlightenment,and European socialism

In contrast to the conventional view of Ludwig Feuerbach as a left-wing Young Hegelian, this article argues that his primary contribution to philosophy is to be found in his later ethics, the basis of which may be discerned in his earlier writings. Over and above recent work on Feuerbach's aesthetics, his relation to Herder, and the relationship between aesthetics and ‘theological politics’ in his thought, Feuerbach's philosophy can re-evaluated, in relation to Epicurus and the French libertin tradition, as articulating an ethics of hedonism. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), the Nachlass fragment ‘Elementary Aesthetics’ (1843), and his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) Feuerbach moves towards the vitalist materialist position that culminates in his (proto-Nietzschean) insight in ‘Against the Dualism of Body and Soul, Flesh and Spirit’ (1846) into the world as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’, thus laying the foundations for his recognition of the centrality of sensuous pleasure to the ethical life.     

The strategic anthropologist

Ken Booth's Strategy and ethnocentrism, published in 1979, deserves to be promoted in scholars' esteem to the very small category of works regarded as classics about strategy. Three reasons serve to explain why, over the years, it never received the acclaim it merits: the relatively undistinguished publisher; ironically, the subsequent debate over more than a quarter of a century about culture as a factor necessary for the understanding of strategy; and the attractively accessible style in which Booth expressed himself. Strategy and ethnocentrism is witty and even occasionally amusing—characteristics apt to trigger a response of some disdain from over‐serious scholars. We can now assess Booth's book in its proper context, which is the long if very thinly populated history of strategic ideas, largely free of unduly distorting ‘presentist’ concerns. The fact that Strategy and ethnocentrism was written in the context of the Cold War really does not matter for the quality of its argument. This work is a classic because it speaks to all periods and about all participants in strategic history. The originality of Booth's treatment of culture does not lie so much in the realm of his grasp of its relative strategic significance, but rather in his relentless unwrapping of the actual, or certainly potential, harm, including unanticipated self‐harm, of ethnocentricity. Today, studies of culture and strategy are not in short supply, but works that compel readers to attempt to take due account of their own ethnocentric frailties are in desperately short supply.     

‘Russian merchant’ legacies in post-Soviet trade with China: Moral economy,economic success and business innovation in Yiwu

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Russian traders operating in China, particularly in Yiwu, the major commercial hub for the ‘small commodity’ trade, and explores the idea of the ‘Russian merchant’ prevalent in Russia today. Rather than examining the new commercial culture from the perspective of global neoliberalism, it deals with Russia’s pre-Soviet merchant estate (soslovie) and its present-day political-ideological evocations. While there is no direct cultural-professional continuity between pre-Soviet and post-Soviet merchants, some similarities have come to the fore and have been encouraged by the state and the Church. This is due to the promotion of a particular moral economy wherein the ‘Russian merchant’ figures as a positive category. Using a case study of a Russian trader in Yiwu, the article illustrates the new ways in which mistrust as well as ‘traditional’ merchant attributes such as patriotism and patriarchal authority, have been harnessed to create a successful Russian transnational business.     

Catholic resistance theory: William Barclay versus Jean Boucher

ABSTRACT

This article examines William Barclay's response to Jean Boucher's De Justa Abdicatione Henrici Tertii (1589) in view of the complexities of Catholic political thought in this post-Tridentine period. It argues that Barclay's famous category of ‘monarchomach’ is problematic for its avoidance of the issue of confessional difference, and that on questions of the relationship between the respublica and the ecclesia Barclay struggled to find an adequate response to Boucher in his De Regno et Regali Potestate (1600). His De Potestate Papae (1609) is treated as the intellectual extension of his battle with Boucher, and more broadly his confrontation with the position of the Catholic League and Jesuits on indirect papal power. By considering Barclay's works in the context of French Gallicanism and the Catholic League in the French Wars of Religion, this discussion aims to reposition Barclay in relation to other Catholic political theorists and thereby re-evaluate the category of Catholic resistance theory.     

Symbolism and Irony in Three Novels by Kosmas Politis

Abstract

In a recent book, Mario Vitti has described Kosmas Politis as ‘emotionally the most highly charged novelist’ of the Generation of 1930. Vitti also points out that Eroica is ‘compositely organized down to the minutest detail’, despite the author's assertion that he wrote each instalment ‘on the presses’. In an attempt to account for the ‘magical’, ‘Poetic' quality of Politis’ writing as pointed out by Greek critics, Vitti investigates Politis' use of irony and of the interior monologue. My purpose in this article is to examine further Politis' ironical approach and to make some preliminary remarks about his use of symbols and imagery (a subject on which far more work has to be done), in the hope that, in so doing, I shall shed some light on the ‘emotionally charged’ and ‘highly organized’ nature of Politis' writing. For reasons of space and time I must confine myself to his first three novels, Lemonodasos (1930), Hekate (1933) and Eroica (1937).     

The religious politics of prophecy: Or,Richard Brothers's Revealed Knowledge confuted

The messianic messages delivered to Londoners by the self-styled prophet, Richard Brothers, were regarded by many sceptical observers and pamphleteers as eccentric or, worse still, the embarrassing utterances of someone wishing to reprise the political turmoil of a by-gone era marred by religious ‘fanaticism’. This article shows the extent to which Brothers's messages, as set down in his Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times (1794–1795), were absolutely central to the religious politics and culture of the 1790s—or what one contemporary critic mockingly referred to as the ‘age of prophecy’. Brothers's prophecies came to the attention of the British government, which culminated in his arrest for treasonable practices in March 1795 when he became a cause célèbre, before being confined to an asylum for eleven years. He was deemed a criminal lunatic but, as this article seeks to demonstrate, his ‘prophetic imagination’ arose out of the same rich theological, political and cultural context that spurred ‘radicals’ like Tom Paine, whilst inspiring poets and artists such as William Blake. If the content of his prophecies were regarded by contemporary sceptics for having no validity, it remains true to say that Richard Brothers, as an educated gentleman and naval officer, dramatically altered 18th-century expectations and perceptions of what prophets were and the nature of prophecy itself.     

The temptations of William Pascoe Crook: An experience of cultural difference in the Marquesas, 1797—1798

Abstract

The missionary William Pascoe Crook was the first European to make an extended residence in the Marquesas. He failed to make a single convert in the two years he was there but instead risked a ‘conversion’ of sorts in everyday compromises between fitting in with, and preserving his independence from, a way of life he found to be abhorrent. This paper reconstructs the quality of Crook's experience during his sojourn in the Marquesas and reflects on the ethnographic ‘Account of the Marquesas Islands’ compiled on his return to London in 1799. It emphasises the processes by which Crook came to a partial understanding of tapu and the role of mimicry in his adaptation to lapu as a force that will make sense of him, but that he himself does not comprehend. The paper relates Crook's experience of cultural difference to problems in the anthropological concept of culture.     

SOUSA VITERBO AND THE IDEA OF INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of Sousa Viterbo's contribution to industrial archaeology. This Portuguese historian and archaeologist not only employed and printed both the terms ‘archaeology of industry’ and ‘industrial archaeology’ in the late 19th century, but also left behind a number of writings which secure his place as a true ancestor of the current industrial archaeology. Selected excerpts of three of Viterbo's texts written between 1896 and 1902 are here translated into English for the first time.     

‘The Pathos of Conservation’: Raphael Samuel and the politics of heritage

When Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture was published in 1994, it was critically received. Yet, the book has not had the impact of other key works such as Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) or Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987). A number of factors have contributed to this, such as Theatres essentially being an unfinished project, and ‘heritage’ in the book having multiple personas – the net result being that Samuel’s arguments can at times be hard to pin down. Yet with interest in his approach to heritage now growing, this article seeks to unravel Samuel’s core ideas and arguments pertaining to heritage, and to give an historical background to their evolution. With the central tenets of Samuel’s argument essentially being a case for the democratisation of heritage; the validity of what we might today call ‘unofficial’ narratives and discourses; and to challenge the dominant view that heritage was ultimately history’s poor cousin, I argue that Samuel’s ideas have much to offer contemporary research agendas in heritage.     

Losing the Forest but not the Stories in the Trees

In 1922, F.E. Williams began his first assignment as the Australian Territory of Papua's assistant government anthropologist in the Purari Delta. During this eight-month trip, Williams obtained information on daily life, social relations, material culture, as well as religious beliefs and practices. He collected ethnographic specimens, made sketches and took some 96 photographs and used 29 of these photographs in his 1924 monograph The Natives of the Purari Delta, a publication that subsequently came to define the area for Europeans. However, Williams obscured the culturally specific ways in which Purari histories were locally reproduced and understood. This essay highlights a long-term ethnographic trend by which communities of the Purari have been portrayed as without ‘history’ or as having only a rudimentary historical consciousness and suggests that, despite this ‘particular bundle of silences’, the Purari is not without ‘important stories’.     

Public technology: nuclear energy in Europe

ABSTRACT

The concept of ‘public science’ has been fruitfully used to indicate the intricate interrelatedness of science and society. In studies of knowledge and its publics, however, technology has been routinely subsumed under science and the distinctive nature of technical knowledge neglected. We are aiming in this article at conceptualizing the public nature of technologies. First, we start with surveying the literature on public science. Second, we scrutinize various conceptual approaches to better understand the social and cultural factors embedded in technologies. In so doing, we reflect upon the twentieth-century history of technologies as public things. Third, we focus on nuclear energy in Europe as an exemplary case of a large-scale technology which has been shaped as part of public culture. We suggest that the specificities of the nuclear as a publicly shaped societal entity can be understood as an example of the wider category we propose to call ‘public technologies’.