Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 6. Decemver 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 6 Front cover ANTHROPOLOGY IN CHINA China has its own anthropology ancestors, revered today well beyond the discipline. In this photograph, former Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress Gu Xiulian and former Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng jointly unveil a statue built to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Fei Xiaotong, China's most celebrated anthropologist. Official sources declared that the statue was intended to highlight the academic achievements of this nationally celebrated anthropologist. The Wujiang Municipal Party Committee and the Wujiang municipal government also dedicated a ‘Cultural Garden’ to ‘further expand the popularity’ and ‘enhance the influence’ of Kaixiangong village, the village in which Fei did most of his fieldwork. The Culture Garden is made up of an Exhibition Hall of the History and Culture of the Village, built in memory of Fei Xiaotong's sister, Fei Dasheng, and the Fei Xiaotong Museum. The museum explores the anthropologist's extraordinary life, highlighting in particular Fei's 26 visits to Kaixiangong. However, many Kaixiangong residents, and some government officials, were not enamoured of the commemorative statue that was erected on 23 October 2010. In his official standing pose, Fei Xiaotong was deemed ‘too distant’, and unlikely to ‘find repose’. Wu Weishan who had carried out the original official commission (and whose 31‐foot statue of Confucius was inexplicably removed from Tiananmen Square earlier this year), then visited Kaixiangong village and consulted its residents, after which he sculpted free of charge what was generally felt to be a more fitting replacement. The new statue depicts Fei relaxed and smiling in an armchair, echoing the Chinese ‘big‐tummy Maitreya Buddha’. Villagers believe this statue to be a more apt tribute to Fei's memory, and have expressed the hope that it will bring happiness to their village. Back cover BACK TO ‘CIVILIZATION’? Civilization is the name of a successful series of computer games (more than nine million units sold globally: see http://www.civilization.com ). Over the past two decades, the games have become increasingly sophisticated, not only in terms of programming, but also with respect to the background history, sociology and economics. For example, irrigation can increase food production, and granaries enable surpluses to be stored and populations to increase. The moods of the citizens matter too: ‘If a city has more happy citizens than content ones, and no unhappy ones, the city will throw a celebration for the ruler called “We Love the King Day”, and economic benefits ensue.’ Featured civilizations range from the Aztecs to the Zulu. It is not known whether Sid Meier (‘the father of computer gaming’) and his fellow game designers have ever studied anthropology. Even if they had, it is unlikely, as Chris Hann points out in his editorial in this issue, that the concept of civilization would have figured prominently in their curriculum. Civilizational analysis is a lively subfield of sociology and has never really gone away in archaeology, but it largely disappeared from anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century. Hann discusses some of the reasons for this, and lends his support to recent efforts to revive anthropologists’ interest in the concept. For all its variation, Sid Meier's addictive gameplay exemplifies the fiercely competitive, often violent ethos of today's capitalist civilization. The aim of each game is to rule the world in the name of just one civilization. Hann sees affinities with recent popular books engaging with world history, which rely heavily on contemporary readers’ familiarity with IT. The big question is whether ‘killer apps’ (Niall Ferguson) and the rise of silicon intelligence at the expense of carbon (Ian Morris) will eventually eliminate civilizational pluralism.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 2. April 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 2 Front cover THE CAPITOL INSURRECTION Thousands of people marched toward the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. The rally that day was part of an attempt to overturn the outcome of the presidential election. The attempted coup was carried out by multiple means. While the violent attack on the Capitol building that day has captured the world's attention, attempts to undermine democratic processes in the United States have a longer, more insidious history, including multiple forms of voter suppression, some of which are built into the system. The US has never been a direct democracy. In fact, in 2000 and 2016, candidates who lost the popular vote ‘won’ the election. The 2020 presidential election was perhaps outstanding because the unabashed attempts to disenfranchise voters – primarily minority voters – were suddenly on full display. The losing candidate tried to strong-arm state election officials into fraudulently changing the vote count and pressured the vice president to overturn the lawful outcome of the elections – all of which happened in full view of the public. When it became clear that the vice president would not undermine the election result, the losing candidate called on his supporters to come to Washington, DC to demonstrate their belief that the election had been stolen from him and from them. The ensuing violent attack on the Capitol building was a spectacular display of a larger failed attempt at a coup. In this issue, Gregory Starrett and Joyce Dalsheim narrate their eye witness fieldwork accounts of the ‘March to save America’ rally earlier on that fateful day. Back cover THE MYANMAR COUP On 2 March 2021, police shot Kyal Sin, a 19-year-old protester, in the head from behind with live ammunition while she was engaged in peaceful civil disobedience in Mandalay against the Myanmar military, which seized control through a violent coup on 1 February. The artwork depicts Kyal Sin, whose name means ‘pure star’, as one of the martyrs of the democracy movement. Prior to attending the rally, Kyal Sin had posted on Facebook her wish for her organs to be donated should she die during the protest. Since the coup, millions of civilians across Myanmar have taken to the streets in protest. Civil servants, along with the general public, have participated in a nationwide strike. In response, the military have fired weapons into crowds of peaceful protesters, engaged in extrajudicial killings, raided civilian homes and businesses, kidnapped and illegally detained protesters, strikers, political and civil society leaders, tortured detainees and terrorized countless other civilians. In this issue, Seinenu M. Thein-Lemelson reviews the history of violence and persecution perpetrated by the Myanmar military against participants in the Burmese democracy movement. The persecution of activists has included repression of their cultural and ritual life. The democracy movement possesses its own list of saints, martyrs (azarni) and heroes (thuyegaung). Between 1988 and 2012, keeping photographs or artistic depictions of these martyrs and heroes constituted an illegal act. During that time, owning or publishing this artwork of Kyal Sin could have resulted in imprisonment and torture. Indeed, even now the Myanmar military is so concerned about her martyrdom that they exhumed her body and filled her grave with cement. When Kyal Sin was shot, she was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words: ‘Everything will be OK’, revealing a youthful hope and innocence. This sense of child-like purity has deepened the poignancy and loss felt by all those who mourn her death. Kyal Sin's nickname was ‘Angel’ and a halo hovers above her head. She holds the Myanmar flag, shredded with bullet holes, in her left hand. Behind her are the outlines of other protesters or perhaps past martyrs of the movement, giving the three-fingered salute, in approval and solidarity.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 30, Number 1. February 2014

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 1 Front cover POO WARS Mandisa Feni of Site C, Khayelitsha sits on a portable toilet on the steps the provincial legislature. She is one of the many poo protesters who, in June 2013, dragged containers of human waste from the shanty towns on the urban margins to the provincial legislature in Cape Town's city centre. By collecting this shit from the urban periphery and dumping it at the centre of provincial political power, the protesters powerfully enacted their refusal to accept the portable toilets that the authorities had provided for people living in these informal settlements. Rather than accepting what they regarded as second‐class ‘portaloos’ for second‐class citizens, they demanded modern, permanent, porcelain toilets, just like those in middle class homes in Cape Town. Similar to the case of the Great Stink of London of 1858, the politically powerful could not ignore the stench aroound Parliament. In his editorial in this issue, Steven Robins argues that a lack of in‐house, ‘modern’ toilets in shanty towns continues to plague its inhabitants, who have taken to imaginative protest in various ways. His study on the politics of shit in Cape Town represents a form of public anthropology on a largely private activity. This politics of human waste is not popular in the mainstream media and is considered to be irrational and unruly by the wider public. But, as developments in Cape Town show, when human waste becomes matter out of place, it can also become a potent substance when deployed in popular protest. Back cover FACE VALUES Villagers in Kanga, northern Mafia Island, Tanzania, watch a screening of part of the BBC/RAI series Face values (1978) in 1985. The film (at that time on a reel‐to‐reel system) was projected onto the white‐washed wall of the village dispensary. Prince Charles, shown here on screen, was Patron of the RAI at the time and had studied anthropology at Cambridge. He encouraged the making of this series and acted as the interviewer of the five anthropologists involved. It was argued by the RAI that the presence of royalty would ensure a large TV audience for the series in the UK, and indeed, this seemed to be the case judging by the BBC's audience figures. However, the series was much criticized both by the newsprint media critics and by anthropologists. In this issue, in the second part of her article, Pat Caplan considers why the making of ‘educational’ material for a mass audience about people and societies in other parts of the world is problematic and probably rather unlikely to achieve the aims set out by the Prince: ‘If more people could have the advantage of information and knowledge about other people's behaviour, customs, religion and so forth, then perhaps some of the prejudice against immigrants in UK could be slowly reduced’. It also considers how local people have viewed this film material and how and why their reactions have changed over time.     

Crossroads of Identities in Women Religious in Spain. Catholicism,Society and Second Vatican Council (1953–69)*

This article examines the evolution and transformation of female religious life in Spain under Franco's regime, which began after the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and ended with the dictator's death in 1975. During the dictatorship, the public stance towards Catholicism made consecrated religious life one of the potential social undertakings for women at that time. The Concordat of 1953 corroborated National Catholicism, and women religious abided by a heritage sanctioned by this ideology. The Second Vatican Council parted ways with this tradition, and some women religious reassessed their role as females and consecrated women in their society. This article analyses how the renewal doctrine of the Council was received in Spain, particularly regarding female religious life, revealing the commonalities and differences of opinions and practices resulting from the break with National Catholic schematism, as well as the first manifestations of renewal among women religious.     

Shaping Women: National Identity Through the Use of Language in Franco'S Spain

In my article I show how a very particular identity was created for women during the period of Franco's Spain. I will draw upon a varied range of materials from official discourses, particularly the Sección Femenina (the women's branch of Falange); the Álvarez Enciclopedia and other texts such as songs, poems and the popular press. Following Foucault (1980: 30) I analyse an identity based on oppressive discourses whose power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning process and everyday life’. The nationalistic stress of this discourse is one that encourages women to create a new image of Spanish femininity that should be ‘different’ from the liberated portrayal of women coming from Europe, mainly through the path of growing tourism. The language of these discourses is somehow baroque, elaborated, energetic and highly dramatic. It tries to seek attention through an unnecessary and badly misorientated dramatism. It is cryptic and manipulative and claims to be poetical, but its main intention is to confine women indoors and to make them look at the world through the curtains or from a closed window. On the other hand it made women feel they were the representation of a unique matriarchal nationalism making them appear as the heroines of an essentialist national metaphor: women mothers of the nation. Inherent in Franco's equation of women = femininity = nation is a contradiction that defines women as ‘indoor heroines’ and bases nationalism in a naturalised representation of gender where women are a gendered representation of this nationalism.     

‘Chilling’ and ‘hopping’ in the ‘teenage space network’: explorations in teenagers’ geographies in the city of Mechelen

Within the field of children's geographies several calls have been made to develop ‘teenagers’ geographies’ as a complementary field of research and practice. It has been stated that teenagers remain ‘invisible’ or ‘marginalised’ in public debates as well as in research and practice, even within childhood studies and children's geographies. Further explorations in teenagers’ geographies could contribute to the research on ‘diverse childhoods’. This article explores the spatial worlds of teenagers (approximately 12–16 years) in Flanders (Belgium), a region characterised by a dense network of smaller cities and ‘urban sprawl’. Based on street interviews and observations in a small city several mental maps and patterns of teenagers’ use of public space were identified. Starting from a case study in the city of Mechelen, this article suggests how these perspectives can be integrated into urban planning by identifying and tying together relevant planning layers, thus creating a more closely knit ‘teenage space network’. Wouter Vanderstede is an urban planner, anthropologist and historian. He is a researcher and staff member at Childhood & Society Research Centre–Onderzoekscentrum Kind & Samenleving vzw. Child friendly and teenager friendly planning and design of public space is one of the main research themes of the institute. View all notes     

Pickets,Protests and Purses in the American Civil Rights Movement

At first glance, perhaps nothing seems more mundane and apolitical than a purse. But purses have always been much more than a fashion accessory. This article analyses how southern Black women – both the legendary and the lesser known – in the ‘classical’ phase of the Civil Rights Movement used purses to appear as respectable ladies' when their dress and comportment were under close surveillance. Yet they simultaneously used their purses as private, female-controlled spaces that aided them in achieving a wide variety of social, economic and political objectives. In fact, many southern Black women used their purses to hide critical items needed to prepare themselves and protect their bodies as they voted, sat-in, rode on public transportation and integrated schools. Using oral histories, memoirs, newspaper and magazine stories and photographs, this article argues that Black southern female activists used purses primarily as ‘toolkits’. In the process, it reveals that Black southern women's participation in the armed self-defence movement is far more significant than scholars have appreciated.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 2. April 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 2 Front cover THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION OF 2011 Over a million Egyptians in Tahrir Square praying in remembrance of the 25 January revolution's ‘martyrs’. More than 300 people were killed in the popular uprising that forced President Hosni Mubarak to step down on 11 February. A memorial, seen in the centre of the image, displays the photographs of some of those who lost their lives. Motivated by a pressing need for political and social reform and inspired by the recent success of the Tunisian revolution, Egyptians took to the streets on 25 January in unprecedented numbers. For 18 days, major protests erupted in several Egyptian cities calling for the removal of the regime. In Cairo protesters converged upon and occupied Tahrir Liberation Square, which became both the symbolic and physical centre of the revolution. With the tide of revolt sweeping across the Arab world fears were raised, both internally and internationally, about a possible Islamist hijack. Yet in Tahrir Square the main ideology was liberal; hundreds of thousands of Egyptians from diverse social backgrounds and radically different ideological inclinations united on the fundamental demands of freedom, equality, justice and dignity. In this issue, Selim Shahine reflects on the political consciousness of the young activists who led the uprising, and on the discourse on generations that surrounded these events. Mohammed Rashed presents a participant's account from Tahrir Square and reflects on some of the factors that might have contributed to the success of its continued occupation: the formation of an embryonic form of community, and the receding of the usual identities based on class and religion in favour of a simple yet powerful identity as people of the revolution. Back cover CLIMATE CHANGE AND ANTHROPOLOGY A man watches the ocean waves on Jaluit Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Few societies have a more intimate relationship with the sea. The country's average elevation is a mere seven feet, and the highest point is 32 feet. No point in the archipelago is more than half a mile inland, and most locals live within 100 feet of the shore. The islands have always been vulnerable to the ocean; an early 19th‐century account of Marshallese life refers to a local fear of inundation, and magical formulae to prevent it. In the present century, such dangers may increase past the point of adaptability and resilience, as sea‐level rise and other consequences of global climate change are likely to render the country uninhabitable. Marshall Islanders are familiar with these threats via local observation as well as media coverage, forcing them to come to terms, both conceptually and emotionally, with the possibility that their homeland is doomed. We usually conceive of climate change as an ‘environmental’ issue, but this framing may say more about Western conceptions of nature‐culture than about climate change itself. Global warming could as easily be termed a social issue: it is caused by socioeconomic behaviour, experienced by local actors, interpreted according to culturally specific ideologies, and communicated by human agents. In this issue, Peter Rudiak‐Gould draws on his ethnographic investigation of Marshallese climate‐change attitudes to argue that anthropology has only scratched the surface in its contribution to our understanding of global warming. A question of theoretical and practical importance remains largely uninvestigated: how is the foreign scientific prophecy of devastating climate change received, interpreted, understood, adopted, rejected and utilized by local communities? It is a question of particular relevance in an island society for whom that prophecy amounts to no less than nationwide destruction.     

Experimental Publics: Activist Culture and Political Intelligibility of Climate Change Action in the Hunter Valley,Southeast Australia

The ethnographic study of Western environmental activism opens up the prospect of studying subjectivities formed in opposition to dominant Western ideas and values, and yet encapsulated within Western societies and democratic polities. One of the directions in which it points the anthropologist, which is pursued in this article, is towards the study of the political lifeworlds of activists, their self‐identity as citizens and their embeddedness in the wider society. Environmental politics can be an emergent activity in citizens' lives, as expressed in John Dewey's concept of ‘the public’ as citizens who organise themselves to address the adverse consequences of situations that they experience in common (Dewey 1991[1927]). This paper focuses on a middle ground of social action between habitual daily practice, and the domain of institutional politics: groups of people in small voluntary organisations in the heavily coal‐mined Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia, who are moved to collective action to address the threatening aspects of anthropogenic climate change. Action group members variously articulate their reflexive understandings of the structural contradictions of environmentalism in corporate capitalist societies where values of consumerism and processes of individualization corrode collective concerns of citizenship‐based politics. These understandings inform activists' personal motivations, values and ideals for a ‘climate movement’, diverse modes of political action and striving for wider political intelligibility.     

Monuments, Memory and Marginalisation in Adelaide's Prince Henry Gardens

Social and cultural dominance is (re)produced in the landscape by the exclusion or marginalisation of subordinate and minority groups. This paper illustrates the long-standing and ongoing exclusion of representations of indigeneity in and around Prince Henry Gardens, part of one of the most significant cultural and memorial sites in South Australia. Prince Henry Gardens is home to a large number of monuments and memorials that commemorate almost solely non-indigenous people and events. This is a selective and deliberate landscape of the dominant culture. It confirms a legacy of indigenous dispossession and is symbolic of ongoing marginalisation. While there have been recent compensatory initiatives by state and city agencies to create landscapes of reconciliation through symbolic gestures such as renaming parkland areas, these are argued to be contentious. They associate indigeneity with the city's margins, with violent places and public drunkenness, and perpetuate problematic associations between ‘real’ indigeneity and nature. The paper concludes with some ideas for new memorial landscapes intended to help construct a postcolonial Australian city.     

Cartoons,secularism, and inequality

In this article, I discuss the tragic attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015. First, I comment on Didier Fassin's article ‘In the name of the Republic’, published in anthropology today in April 2015. I express my disagreement with him on the issue of laïcité, and offer a critical examination of the concept, taking into account what I call ‘the Christian heritage of the secular state’. I then examine the various French reactions to the tragedy and focus on the history of the French state and its (post)colonial relations with French Islam to offer an explanation of the events.     

Taking Care of Tar: Royal Canadian Navy Medical Practitioners of the Second World War

Abstract

‘War subjects the young to ultimate tests, it also furnishes standards for judging the lives of the old.’

Felix Frankfurter's memorial to Bettman, March 1945     

Recent developments in social and cultural geography in Spain

Controversy has erupted in Selma, Alabama, over recent efforts to commemorate the career of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate cavalry officer and founding member of the original Ku Klux Klan. More generally, the controversy in Selma is emblematic of an enduring regional pattern in which contests over the future are couched in terms of the past. Relative to other media, monuments appear to be trustworthy and lasting. Despite this appearance of historical consensus and stability, the city's public spaces are the product of and conduit for ongoing politics. The current conflict pits memorial activists associated with the Civil Rights Movement against neo‐Confederates. Interpreted in the context of Selma's increasing promotion of Civil Rights heritage and the recent election of the city's first African American mayor, the Forrest affair highlights the utility of the concept of symbolic accretion for understanding the complexities of commemorating antagonistic histories in the same place. Symbolic accretion describes the appending of commemorative elements onto already existing memorials. The situation in Selma suggests two different types of symbolic accretion, allied and antithetical. More generally, the act of commemoration itself may be understood as a process of accretion in that heretofore anonymous spaces are formally recognized via the grafting of memorial elements.     

Public anthropology and the financial crisis (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

When anthropologists write about finance and the economy, their publications seldom reach audiences as wide as those of economists or journalists. Is there a space for anthropologists in public debates about our era's acute economic dilemmas? The short answer should be yes, partly because anthropologists are trained to probe social silences and make the invisible visible, and because we reject the pitfalls of Econ 101, oversimplifications that pervade public discourse. Academic anthropologists can draw lessons from what we might term ‘public economics’, as well as from the writings of Gillian Tett, an award‐winning financial columnist trained in anthropology. Perhaps we can also learn a little from tricksters – or from satirical activists who deploy irony, caricature, and paradox as sharp instruments in this age of austerity and billionaires. As we analyze finance and the economy in the aftermath of a financial meltdown whose causes and policy implications are intensely debated, our challenge still is to satisfy journalists' appetite for sound‐bite narratives without sacrificing nuance, historical contingency, and complexity.     

Post‐totalitarian national identity: public memory in Germany and Russia

Through a comparative analysis of Germany and Russia, this paper explores how participation in the memorialization process affects and reflects national identity formation in post‐totalitarian societies. These post‐totalitarian societies face the common problem of re‐presenting their national character as civic and democratic, in great part because their national identities were closely bound to oppressive regimes. Through a comparison of three memorial sites—Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial in Germany, and Lubianka Square and the Park of Arts in Russia—we argue that even where dramatic reductions in state power and the opening of civil society have occurred, a simple elite–public dichotomy cannot adequately capture the nature of participation in the process of memory re‐formation. Rather, mutual interactions among multiple publics and elites, differing in kind and intensity across contexts, combine to form a complex pastiche of public memory that both interprets a nation's past and suggests desirable models for its future. The domination of a ‘Western’ style of memorialization in former East Germany illustrates how even relatively open debates can lead to the exclusion of certain representations of the nation. Nonetheless, Germany has had comparatively vigorous public debates about memorializing its totalitarian periods. In contrast, Russian elite groups have typically circumvented or manipulated participation in the memorialization process, reflecting both a reluctance to deal with Russia's totalitarian past and a emerging national identity less civic and democratic than in Germany.     

Is native anthropology really possible? (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

Although native anthropologists are often understood to be quite different from non‐native anthropologists, this paper argues that the distinction is not as clear as is often presumed. Both types of anthropologists are partial outsiders who are positioned at a relative distance from those they study in the field. This is illustrated with a discussion of the author's own fieldwork with Japanese Americans as a ‘native anthropologist’. Ultimately, the cultural differences we experience with the ‘natives’ are productive for fieldwork and essential for anthropological knowledge.     

Acts of heritage,acts of value: memorialising at the Chattri Indian Memorial,UK

Abstract

The Chattri Indian Memorial is a public site that hosts and embodies heritage in complex ways. Standing on the edge of Brighton, UK in a once-remote part of the Sussex Downs, the Memorial was built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought on the Western Front during the First World War. As both a sacred place and a space of socio-cultural heritagization processes, the monument is an enduring testament of past values of war heroism, but also more ephemeral practices of ritual. The article documents the heritage-making at work within memorialisation at the Chattri as a case study, examining how differing ‘valuations’ of a memorial site can be enacted through time, between material form and immaterial practices, and across cultures. The article theorises participants’ current affective practices as conscious ‘past presencing’ , and analyses how their conscious acts of heritage-making affectively enacted values of morality, community and belonging.     

Von der Vaterschaftsbestimmung zum Rassegutachten. Der erbbiologische Ähnlichkeitsvergleich als ‚österreichisch-deutsches Projekt’︁ 1926-1945

The anthropological paternity test basing on a comparative examination of resemblances between a presumptive father and the child was developed in a ‘joint venture’ by Austrian and German anthropologists. After the Nazi rise to power the test was more and more abused to clarify questions of ‘dubious Aryan descent’ whereas in Austria its original function was retained until Austria's annexation by the German Reich. Then Austrian anthropologists too rushed to offer their services to the National Socialist racial legislation. The author shows that accusations by German state officials of the Austrian anthropologist rendering to many expert opinions in favour of the Jewish population, a legend repeated after the war, cannot be upheld any longer.     

‘That Gleaming Sword of Satire’1: Power,Passion and Parliament in the Mid-Victorian City

Political print satire, construed as an articulation of sedition and dissent, is most commonly associated in Britain with its 18th-century ‘Golden Age’. Beyond Victorian fiction, the go-to 19th-century source tends to be the hegemonic, London-centric Punch. It is not widely known that, as Punch mellowed and popularised in the 1860s and 1870s, England's booming urban centres gave rise to a distinct form of citizen journalism which used boisterous satire as an effective vehicle for sociopolitical comment, evidence-based analysis and civic activism. Not only did the provincial satirical periodical filter parliamentary affairs through a critical provincial lens but at a time when politics were largely local, it engaged with the extra-parliamentary power vested in civic and municipal governance. It aspired to much more than diversion through witty posturing. Morally and ideologically inspired, fuelled by righteous indignation, it successfully used the protest of the pen to agitate in the cause of social and political reform, demonstrating the ‘everyday’ resistance and common sense essential to liberal governmentality. Referencing some of the most enduring and respected examples of the genre – the Porcupine in Liverpool, the Town Crier in Birmingham and the Free Lance in Manchester – this article casts light upon this poorly understood journalism of conviction. A cause and effect of both emotional and intellectual release, it serves as an excellent example of citizenship as performed political passion, in an age of public conformity and restraint.     

Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock,anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti-nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.