Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier

A generation of scholarship on the experiences of the frontier—spanning models of violent conflict to various kinds of intimacy—has been highly influential in building a nuanced picture of Australia's colonial race relations. Regionally-focused histories provide a valuable avenue for bringing these models of frontier historiography together within the same frame, because it is at the localised level of social relations that the cross-hatched intersections between violence and intimacy can emerge into clearest view. This article traces the threads of cross-cultural encounter on one Australian frontier to assess how violent conflict could arise as much from conditions of inter-connectedness and familiarity as from conditions of strangeness and fear, and to ask, under such conditions, what kinds of frontier violence drew the intervention of the law.     

另类社会空间:中国边疆移民社会主要特殊性透视(1644-1949)

边疆社会存在许多内地社会所不曾具有并且往往为学术界所忽视的文化现象。本文所使用的“边疆社会”的术语并不是简单地以地理范围为依据,而更主要的是企图从文化人类学角度揭示拉铁摩尔所谓的“边疆风格”(the frontier style)现象,与通常所谓的“边疆地区的社会”这一术语在内涵上大相径庭,可以作为透视边疆移民社会中“边疆化”诸多现象的概念工具。     

Another Time,Another Place

This paper explores the way in which the languages of space and time condense and how the values of spatiotemporal fluidity and fixity are gendered. It considers several narratives from South Pentecost, Vanuatu, stories of primordial beings and of more proximate ancestors which alike stress women's association with flight and flood. Such narratives are situated in the context of labour migration in colonial history and more recent patterns of migration to towns. Here too, the movement of men and women is differentially constructed. These processes are considered in the context of recent feminist theories of the relation of spatiality and temporality, in modernity and ‘postmodernity’.     

Introduction： Interfaces in Qing Frontier History

Inspired by the vibrant state of the last several decades of scholarship concerning the Qing frontier, the three authors of this introduction organized the “International Workshop on Defining the Jecen： The Evolution of the Qing Frontier, 1644-1918,” which took place on May 25-26, 2012, at the sponsoring institutions-Hong Kong Baptist University and the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. The primary objective of the workshop was to foster dialogue among colleagues from several Asian and North American institutions who currently are researching the Qing frontier. All participants were encouraged to contribute insights into long-standing questions based on the methodologies derived from their own scholarly backgrounds. Apart from aiming to break down unnecessary barriers of language, geography, and theoretical orientation, the conference also promoted two approaches to the topic that will simultaneously further the progress of contemporary pioneers and open fresh paths for future innovation.     

Australian-African relations 2002: Another look

Various recent developments and events in Africa, including the involvement in 2002 of the Prime Minister of Australia in Commonwealth initiatives in relation to Zimbabwe, have made it timely to review the nature and extent of Australia's relations with African countries. This commentary describes current Australian policies on Africa, including trade relations and aid programs, against the background of the political and economic situation in Africa in the new millennium. In conclusion, the comment is made that Australia's dealings with African countries might have more significance to its own interests than is generally acknowledged. This is so particularly in respect of common standpoints on multilateral trade issues, and the future of the British Commonwealth.     

Senseless Violence: Liminality and Intertwining

The claim of this article is that the perpetrators of violence are “liminal” figures, being inside and yet outside of the world in which they act. It is this liminality, this existing on the border, that makes their violence senseless. Because of it, their actions can be understood in terms neither of the actual reality of their victims nor of the imagined reality that the perpetrators placed them in. Sense, here, fails, for the lack of a common frame. Liminality exists in a number of forms: economic, religious, and political—each with its potential for violence. What distinguishes political liminality is the scale of its violence. As Carl Schmitt shows, the liminal sovereign or ruler is both inside and outside the state, employing its means for violence even as he is unconstrained by its laws. I contend that this sovereign exists in a continuum with the practitioners of terrorist violence, who are also liminal figures. To analyze this liminality, I explore the intertwining between the self and the world that sets up the common frame that gives sense to actions. I then examine the causes of its breakdown.     

The Unquiet Frontier

Abstract

There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the “post-secular.” My own view is that it constitutes the unprecedented and paradoxical coexistence of two supposedly contradictory social, religious, and cultural trends: on the one hand, the persistence of secular objections to public religion and on the other, the novel re-emergence of religious actors in the global body politic. John Caputo’s much quoted aphorism — that God is dead, but so also is the death of God — captures this agonistic model of the post-secular, in which what we are looking at is not the revival of religion, or the reversion of secular modernity into a re-enchanted body politic, but something more unprecedented and complex. Yet it also means there is little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. This article considers one possible model, that of “post-secular rapprochement,” as one way of envisaging how newly-emergent forms of religious activism and discourse might be mediated back into a pluralist public domain.