A Space and Time for a Generation to React: The Gattjirrk Cultural Festival in Milingimbi

This article deals with the annually held Gattjirrk Cultural Festival organised in Milingimbi, a Yolngu community in Northeast Arnhem Land, and has the objective of analysing its socio‐cultural and political meaning. Although this event is considered an amusement (wakal), it nevertheless constitutes an arena to negotiate postcolonial realities in which Yolngu people are forced to live. Focusing on the organisers' overall frame of ‘sharing culture’ and youths' interpretations of hip‐hop dances as ‘performative tactics’, I suggest that the Milingimbi Festival creates a space in which generational perspectives within the community as well as the tension between Yolngu people and the non‐indigenous (balanda) world may be displayed and mediated. While the Festival has been mainly conceived as a space for encountering and ‘sharing culture’ with other groups and people both within the community and with the balanda world, it is also seized as an opportunity by young people to generate new ways to engage with and challenge others. By weaving together elements of Yolngu heritage and pop culture, I argue that fun or burlesque dances (wakal bunngul) are ‘tactics of cultural remix’ that through laughter and irony demand a witnessing: a mutual recognition, engagement, and responsibility to participate and to respond. It is thus in their own ways that these performances produce new connections and relationships bringing together old and young, Yolngu and balanda in an effective although fleeting encounter.     

The Poetics of the Crocodile: Changing Cultural Perspectives in Ambonwari

ABSTRACT Ambonwari people from the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, had a rich repertoire of song‐dances, each of which was associated with specific events and the birth of something new. Together they represented the entire human life cycle as well as the cosmology at large. Visual, verbal and tactile modalities of singing and dancing were tightly interwoven; images and symbols were enacted by the dancers, in their decoration, arrangement, movements and in the whole ceremony and were firmly situated in their landscape. Accordingly, song‐dances were also an important practice in male initiation ritual. The first song‐dance of the ritual was the crocodile song‐dance. This article analyses different transpositions of images and meanings which can be decoded from the dance, from the objects that were part of the initiation rite, and from the parallelism and rich allegory of verses. These transpositions operate at different levels until they converge upon the existential facts of birth and death. In the new millennium and under the influence of a Catholic charismatic movement, however, Ambonwari broke off their relationships with spirits, abandoned the men's houses and stopped talking about male initiation ritual. Along with other traditional song‐dances the crocodile song‐dance has been taken over by the song‐dances of the Holy Spirit. These changes in social and cultural perspectives, which are still taking place, are at the same time products and producers of the changes in their relationship to ‘space’ and ‘time’ which are at the same time changes in visual and auditory perception and expression of their life‐world. All these changes should not be seen merely in some abstract or symbolic terms but as tangible processes generated by people's action.     

Using an awakening narrative to leave behind a former national‐identity: an investigation of the conversion of national‐identity in Taiwan

National‐identity has become a civil religion and a major source of how people define themselves. Changing one's nationality thus is a salient event/social process in today's society; therefore, people's nationality conversion deserves more academic attention. Treating the convert as a social type and regarding people's self‐reports (or converts' accounts) as topics for analysis, this article examines the Taiwan case to illuminate how people tell their stories of converting nationality. ‘Converts’ usually employed an awakening narrative to leave their former national‐identity behind: For example, the ‘awakening’ plot is readily apparent, a huge contrast between a previous ‘wrong’ self and a current ‘correct’ self is mentioned, and the ‘awakening’ is delineated as an achievement. The symbolic awakening is harnessed as a strategic tool to create discontinuity autobiographically, to justify one's major change, to ensure that one's cognitive security remains intact, and to call for more awakenings. This article further notes that, since narrative itself is a practice, people always have ‘a self in the making’ which determines (and is determined by) how people (re)tell their life stories. Moreover, in Taiwan's case, we see that ‘awakeners’ usually admired early awakeners but blamed late awakeners (which constitutes an interesting triadic group relationship); people may also describe their experience of having multiple awakenings before the ‘grand’ awakening (‘Awakening’). © The author(s) 2015. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2015     

Asia's century and the problem of Japan's centrality

Japan has long been regarded as a central component of America's grand strategy in Asia. Scholars and practitioners assume this situation will persist in the face of China's rise and, indeed, that a more ‘normal’ Japan can and should take on an increasingly central role in US‐led strategies to manage this power transition. This article challenges those assumptions by arguing that they are, paradoxically, being made at a time when Japan's economic and strategic weight in Asian security is gradually diminishing. The article documents Japan's economic and demographic challenges and their strategic ramifications. It considers what role Japan might play in an evolving security order where China and the US emerge as Asia's two dominant powers by a significant margin. Whether the US–China relationship is ultimately one of strategic competition or accommodation, it is argued that Japan's continued centrality in America's Asian grand strategy threatens to become increasingly problematic. It is posited that the best hope for circumventing this problem and its potentially destabilizing consequences lies in the nurturing of a nascent ‘shadow condominium’ comprising the US and China, with Japan as a ‘marginal weight’ on the US side of that arrangement.     

Relinquishing nuclear weapons: identities,networks and the British bomb

Recent analysis on the prospects for achieving a world free of nuclear weapons has tended to focus on a set of largely realist strategic security considerations. Such considerations will certainly underpin future decisions to relinquish nuclear weapons, but nuclear disarmament processes are likely to involve a more complex mix of actors, issues and interests. The article examines this complexity through a sociological lens using Britain as a case‐study, where relinquishing a nuclear capability has become a realistic option for a variety of strategic, political and economic reasons. The article examines the core ideational and organizational allies of the UK nuclear weapon ‘actor‐network’ by drawing upon social constructivist accounts of the relationship between identity and interest, and historical sociology of technology analysis of Large Technical Systems and the social construction of technology. It divides the UK actor‐network into three areas: the UK policy elite's collective identity that generates a ‘national interest’ in continued deployment of nuclear weapons; defence–industrial actors that support and operationalize these identities; and international nuclear weapons dynamics that reinforce the network. The article concludes by exploring how the interests and identities that constitute and reproduce the ‘actor‐network’ that makes nuclear armament possible might be transformed to make nuclear disarmament possible. The purpose is not to dismiss or supplant the importance of strategic security‐oriented analysis of the challenges of nuclear disarmament but to augment its understanding by dissecting some of the socio‐political complexities of nuclear disarmament processes.     

Strategizing Britain's role in the world

In recent commentaries on British foreign policy, the New Labour and coalition governments have been criticized for lacking strategic thinking. Academics describe a ‘strategy gap’ and note that old ideas about Britain's role in the world, such as Churchill's 1948 reference to ‘three circles’, continue to be recycled. Parliamentarians bemoan the ‘uncritical acceptance of these assumptions’ that has led to ‘a waning of our interests in, and ability to make, National Strategy’. This article argues that a primary problem has been the lack of consideration of how identity, strategy and action interrelate in foreign policy. Using the insights of role theory, the article seeks to address this by outlining six ideal‐type role orientations that the UK might fulfil in world politics, namely: isolate, influential (rule of law state), regional partner, thought leader, opportunist–interventionist power and Great Power. By considering how variations in a state's disposition towards the external environment translate into different policy directions, the article aims both to highlight the range of roles available to policy‐makers and to emphasize that policy often involves making a choice between them. Failure to recognize this has resulted in role conflicts and policy confusion. In setting out a variety of different role orientations, the author offers a route to introducing a genuine strategic sensibility to policy‐making, one that links identity with policy goals and outcomes.     

The ALP and the union movement: ‘Catch‐all’ party or maintaining tradition?

Considerable debate continues over whether the Hawke government has been loyal to or betrayed the ‘Labor tradition’. This article argues that two important ideological influences upon Labor are ‘labourism’ and ‘social democracy'; both depend upon the union movement for ideas and practical support While labourism explains much about the accord process and suggests that the ‘Labor tradition’ was not betrayed by the Hawke‐Keating axis, it cannot capture the complete ideological landscape of the contemporary labour movement Labourism fails to explain the more social democratic aims of the Australian Council of Trade Union's objective of ‘strategic unionism’. Yet, ironically, strategic unionism may well fail due to the steady decline in union membership over the last fifteen years. The influence of social democracy and labourism upon the Australian Labor Party (ALP) would diminish should unions’ coverage of the work force continue to decline and with it arguably, so would the'Labor tradition’.     

Feminist geography,the ‘everyday’, and local–global relations: hidden spaces of place‐making*

An interest in the taken‐for‐granted, mundane routine activities of women's lives has long been central to the production of knowledge in feminist geography. Here, I revisit the ‘everyday’ in relation to changing lines of inquiry as geographers work to capture the complexity of local–global relations in conceptualising an accelerated pace of the stretching of social relations over space. Through a primary focus on feminist work on care in the home, I explore the various ways in which the meanings and organisation of caregiving activity are intricately connected with the intertwining of globalisation, neoliberalism, social conservatism and a ‘greying’ population in the West. Foregrounding gender in my discussion, I review literature and draw on research examples to illustrate ways in which various types of ‘hidden’ caregiving contribute to contemporary place‐making, and open up our understanding of the ‘local’.     

‘Womanly Qualities’ and Contested Methodology: Gender and the Discipline of Economics in Late Imperial Germany

This article analyses the affinities between two debates of the 1890s in Germany: one over women's intellectual abilities and one over the production of knowledge in economics. Economists and advocates for women's higher education found common cause and language because of the rhetorical centrality of the working woman, family and motherhood to a social reform discourse that connected the university, the women's movement and the state. The historical economists conceptualised their ‘science’ in a way that allowed ‘womanly qualities’ to be identified as appropriate to its optimal practice. A limited comparison with the United States highlights the historical specificity of this construction of social‐scientific knowledge.     

Does a multi‐tier NATO matter? The Atlantic alliance and the process of strategic change

This year NATO will celebrate its 60th anniversary. So far the world's most powerful military alliance has been a remarkable success story. However, as the first decade of the new century draws to a close there appears to be a widening strategic rift among the allies. ‘Two‐tier NATO’ is by now an established piece of shorthand in international strategic debate to indicate an ‘alliance à la carte’ divided into two or more factions of member states with divergent interests. Evidently, the alliance increasingly struggles to reach consensus on a whole range of strategic issues. So is NATO on a path to disintegration and, ultimately, to failure? This article argues that the organization has developed from a fixed ‘two‐tier’ into a rather fluid ‘multi‐tier’ alliance. On many issues the alliance is in fact divided into several different camps that are pushing in different directions. Thus, allies can be grouped into one of three tiers: a ‘reformist’, a ‘status‐quo’ and a ‘reversal’‐oriented one. While the evolution of such a multi‐tier alliance will not inevitably result in NATO's demise unmanaged, this manifestation of camps will continuously disrupt the organization's strategic agility. The article finds that if NATO is to maintain strategic vitality, it needs to develop new institutional mechanisms and establish a consensus on its strategic posture in the changing international order and to make ‘variable geometry’ work.     

Hearing girls’ silences: thoughts on the politics and practices of a feminist method of group discussion

Many contemporary feminist research methods employed in the interest of realizing social justice advocate ‘listening’ to subordinated others, groups variously categorized and marginalized by gender, sexuality, race, age, and so on, in order to examine the sources and workings of knowledge construction and social power. Increasingly, feminist scholars are using group discussion or focus groups, in an effort to give subordinated others ‘a voice.’ Group discussions are seen as potentially empowering in exploring and enabling group members’ social agency and knowledge production while at the same time diminishing the unequal power relations between the researched and researcher. In this article, I argue that the attention given to ‘voices’ in group discussions (dis)misses meaning‐ful silences thereby limiting its political potential. There exists an ‘epistemological messiness’ inherent in a feminist group discussion method that makes it difficult to hear meaning‐ful silences. Through reflection on my own research into the spaces of adolescent Latina gender identities, this article offers some insights into this messiness and recommends that a feminist group discussion method be guided by a politics of voice which includes ‘silence within voice.’     

Mapping Common Futures: Customary Communities,NGOs and the State in Indonesia's Reform Era

The post‐Suharto ‘Reform Era’ has witnessed explosive revitalization movements among Indonesia's indigenous minorities or ‘customary’(adat) communities attempting to redress the disempowerment they suffered under the former regime. This study considers the current resurgence of customary claims to land and resources in Bali, where the state‐sponsored investment boom of the 1990s had severe social and environmental impacts. It focuses on recent experiments with participatory community mapping, aimed at reframing the relationship between state and local institutions in planning and decision‐making processes. Closely tied to the mapping and planning strategy have been efforts to strengthen local institutions and to confront the problems of land alienation and community control of resources. The diversity of responses to this new intervention reflects both the vitality and limitations of local adat communities, as well as the contributions and constraints of non‐governmental organizations that increasingly mediate their relationships to state and global arenas. This ethnographic study explores participants’ experiences of the community mapping programme and suggests its potential for developing ‘critical localism’ through long‐term, process‐oriented engagements between communities, governments, NGOs, and academic researchers.     

Geography and Global Change Science: Relationships Necessary,Absent, and Possible

Initiated by geoscientists, the growing debate about the Anthropocene, ‘planetary boundaries’ and global ‘tipping points’ is a significant opportunity for geographers to reconfigure two things: one is the internal relationships among their discipline's many and varied perspectives (topical, philosophical, and methodological) on the real; the other the discipline's actual and perceived contributions to important issues in the wider society. Yet, without concerted effort and struggle, the opportunity is likely to be used in a ‘safe’ and rather predictable way by only a sub‐set of human‐environment geographers. The socio‐environmental challenges of a post‐Holocene world invite old narratives about Geography's holistic intellectual contributions to be reprised in the present. These narratives speak well to many geoscientists, social scientists, and decision‐makers outside Geography. However, they risk perpetuating an emaciated conception of reality wherein Earth systems and social systems are seen as knowable and manageable if the ‘right’ ensemble of expertise is achieved. I argue that we need to get out from under the shadow of these long‐standing narratives. Using suggestive examples, I make the case for forms of inquiry across the human‐physical ‘divide’ that eschew ontological monism and that serve to reveal the many legitimate cognitive, moral, and aesthetic framings of Earth present and future. Geography is unusual in that the potential for these forms of inquiry to become normalised is high compared with other subjects. This potential will only be taken advantage of if certain human‐environment geographers unaccustomed to engaging the world of geoscience and environmental policy change their modus operandi.     

East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the Zionist vision?

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement or a Western‐civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement.     

NGOs as Social Movements: Policy Narratives,Networks and the Performance of Dalit Rights in South India

Donor‐funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co‐opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term ‘NGOization’. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights‐based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs and their funders in agenda setting, specifically in bringing the previously excluded issue of caste discrimination into development policy discourse in the form of a Dalit‐rights approach in Tamil Nadu, south India. The authors explore the institutional processes of policy making and NGO networking involved, the alliances, entanglements of NGOs and social movements, and the performativity of NGO Dalit rights. But at the same time, the article illustrates how NGO institutional systems have constrained or failed to sustain such identity‐based claims to entitlement. In Nancy Fraser's terms, the article explores success and failure in addressing ‘first‐order’ issues of justice, that is rights to resources (in this case, land), and in tackling ‘second‐order’ injustices concerning the framing of who counts (who can make a claim as a rights holder) and how (by what procedures are claims and contests staged and resolved). This draws attention to the important but fragile achievements of NGOs’ discursive framings that give Dalits the ‘right to have rights’.     

Accordism and the environment: The resource assessment commission and national environmental policy‐making

This paper explores the reform of environmental policy‐making by the Hawke government through its creation of the Resource Assessment Commission (RAC). The paper pursues two themes. First, it argues that this reform must be seen within the broader context of the Hawke government's approach to public policy generally. The paper argues that the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has instituted a model for policy politics based on key strategic and normative approaches—a model this paper refers to as ‘Accordism’. Secondly, this paper looks at the RAC and in so doing argues that, on the basis of the norms that underpinned the reform of environmental policy‐making based on this body, the Commission may be placed squarely within the ‘Accordist’ paradigm.     

The Islamic State lexical battleground: US foreign policy and the abstraction of threat

This article suggests that President Obama's consistent references to the extremist Sunni group as ‘ISIL’ (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is not a trivial matter of nomenclature. Instead, the Obama administration's deliberate usage of the ISIL acronym (as opposed to other commonly‐used terms such as ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ or ‘ISIS’, ‘Islamic State’, ‘IS’, ‘so‐called Islamic State’ and ‘Daesh’) frames the public perception of the threat to avoid engagement with the requirements of strategy and operations. Both the labelling and the approach could be defended as a response to the unique challenge of a transnational group claiming religious and political legitimacy. However, we suggest that the labelling is an evasion of the necessary response, reflecting instead a lack of coherence in strategy and operations—in particular after the Islamic State's lightning offensive in Iraq and expansion in Syria in mid‐2014. This tension between rhetoric, strategy and operations means that ‘ISIL’ does not provide a stable depiction of the Islamic State. While it may draw upon the post‐9/11 depiction of ‘terrorism’, the tag leads to dissonance between official and media representations. The administration's depiction of a considered approach leading to victory has been undermined by the abstraction of ‘ISIL’, which in turn produced strategic ambiguity about the prospect of any political, economic or military challenge to the Islamic State.     

Last charge of the knights? Iraq,Afghanistan and the special relationship

At the heart of the ‘special relationship’ ideology, there is supposed to be a grand bargain. In exchange for paying the ‘blood price’ as America's ally, Britain will be rewarded with exceptional influence over American foreign policy and its strategic behaviour. Soldiers and statesman continue to articulate this idea. Since 9/11, the notion of Britain playing ‘Greece’ to America's ‘Rome’ gained new life thanks to Anglophiles on both sides of the Atlantic. One potent version of this ideology was that the more seasoned British would teach Americans how to fight ‘small wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby bolstering their role as tutor to the superpower. Britain does derive benefits from the Anglo‐American alliance and has made momentous contributions to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet British solidarity and sacrifices have not purchased special influence in Washington. This is partly due to Atlanticist ideology, which sets Britain unrealistic standards by which it is judged, and partly because the notion of ‘special influence’ is misleading as it loses sight of the complexities of American policy‐making. The overall result of expeditionary wars has been to strain British credibility in American eyes and to display its lack of consistent influence both over high policy and the design and execution of US military campaigns. While there may be good arguments in favour of the UK continuing its efforts in Afghanistan, the notion that the war fortifies Britain's vicarious world status is a dangerous illusion that leads to repeated overstretch and disappointment. Now that Britain is in the foothills of a strategic defence review, it is important that the British abandon this false consciousness.     

Wrathful Ancestors,Corporate Sorcerers: Rituals gone Rogue in Merauke,West Papua

Anthropological studies of ritual ‘failure’ challenge the assumed efficacy of ritual in affirming the social order. Drawing from fieldwork in West Papua, I examine the ‘failure’ and ‘success’ of two rain‐making ceremonies – one hosted by an indigenous Marind expert, the other by an Indonesian oil palm corporation. Participants conceived the failure of the first ritual as a punishment meted by ancestral spirits against Marind who support agribusiness expansion. Meanwhile, the success of the corporate ceremony confirmed rumours that corporations wield foreign and powerful forms of sorcery. Drawing on Gregory Bateson's notion of the double bind, I suggest that the ritual outcomes dramatize the irreconcilable demands placed on Marind by custom and capitalism. Attempts to endorse agribusiness incur ancestral punishment, while efforts to oppose it are thwarted by the superior power of corporate sorcerers. In this context, I argue, the moral implications of the corporate ritual's unexpected ‘success’ prove just as problematic as those of the customary ritual's dramatic ‘failure’. Co‐opted yet efficacious, corporate rituals point to a new social order in which both Marind and their ancestral spirits find themselves subjected to foreign sources of supernatural control.     

Understanding Social Performance: A ‘Practice Drift’ at the Frontline of Microfinance Institutions in Bangladesh

This article examines the role of microfinance staff and procedures in enabling microfinance's social mission. It does so primarily through studying institutional ruling relations and practices in rural Bangladesh. Attempting to move away from the linear and deterministic approaches of impact studies, it ethnographically scrutinizes the everyday practices of implementers. Findings point to the emergence of systemic practices that jeopardize microfinance institutions’ potential to perform their social mission. These include low client‐selection standards, hard selling of loans and forceful loan renewal, little follow‐up on loan use, and abusive and violent client‐retention and repayment‐collection strategies. This is conceptualized as a ‘practice drift’ as distinct from the commonly reported ‘mission drift’. Rather than stemming from planned, top‐down changes in institutional mission and strategy, practice drift emerges from a displacement of decision‐making processes to the branches. The article argues that observed changes in microfinance practice are enabled by decentralized structures and management systems that leave the choice of tactics used to achieve targets to the discretion of field staff.