Securing Modernity: Towards an Ethnography of Power in Contemporary Melanesia

ABSTRACT Contemporary public discourses, which depict Melanesian nation states as weak or as having failed, serve to legitimize the imposition of external, neo‐paternal, regulatory structures on former colonies. Such discourses problematise the numerous local experiments that combine custom, state structures and religion so as to create modern Melanesian ways of governing. Starting with the colonial policy of indirect rule, Melanesia has had a long history of experiments that have sought to tie together different regimes of power in relays, which are meant to remediate, supplement and strengthen state structures. Today, those relays are pathologised as dysfunctional precisely because they can be used to subvert, contest and divert state programs. Current political problems arising from growing ethnic and economic divisions are producing new conflicts, new moral languages for figuring evil, and new tactics and technologies of power. Many of these new experiments seek to reconnect the nation state with the moral authority, pastoral regimes, and individualizing practices of Christianity.     

全球资本主义:三次重大转型——对于经济—社会关系的社会—哲学解读

从19世纪起,资本主义社会向工业时代过渡,经济、文化与价值观等各方面都发生了转变,这些转变为经济与社会的关系问题提供了研究基础。19世纪至今的资本主义可以划分为三个发展阶段,即自由资本主义阶段、有组织的资本主义阶段和非西方式的民主经济阶段。可将一个阶段向另一个阶段的过渡称为大转型。每一次转型都是资本主义现代性类型出现危机的结果,而新的现代性类型是通过寻找新的社会价值和社会组织关系来形成的。分析资本主义三次大转型的经济、社会根源,可以清晰地洞察资本主义的过去、现在和未来。同时,三次大转型的新理论框架为预测全球资本主义的未来发展方向提供了理论基础。     

Objects of Memory: The Ethnography and Archaeology of Heirlooms

With the emergence of chiefdoms, a new ideology of inherited social difference had to be created and sustained over time. One way that inherited social inequalities may have been constructed, legitimated, and maintained is through the transmission of heirlooms or artifacts that objectified a collective ancestral past. Archaeologists have generally viewed heirlooms as anomalies or complications in the archaeological record. In this paper, however, I argue that, if identified, heirlooms have the potential to provide a richer and finer-grained understanding of the human past, in general, and to aid in the determination of hereditary rank, in particular. I discuss and compare the ethnographic evidence for heirloom use in bands, tribes, and chiefdoms, and, based on this evidence, I suggest criteria by which heirlooms might be identified in the archaeological record. Some examples of possible heirlooms from the archaeological literature are also presented. Finally, an evolutionary model for the circulation and disposal of heirlooms is proposed.     

The Teaching of Ethnography in Higher Schools and of Elements of Ethnography in Middle Schools

Apparently encouraged by Il'yichev's speech, Anuchin uses the forum of a philosophy journal to urge more work on synthesis in geography. He visualizes the geography of the future as a science that would seek to uncover what he calls the “parameters” of the geographic environment and would seek to establish the precise limits within which man might alter the environment without causing undesirable after-effects.     

Ethnography of ideology

Altorki, Soraya. Women in Saudi Arabia: Ideology and Behavior Among the Elite. New York: Columbia University Press. 1986. xii + 183 pp. including glossary, bibliography, and index. $30.00 cloth.

Caplan, Patricia. Class and Gender in India: Women and Their Organizations in a South Indian City. New York: Tavistock Publications. 1985. xiii + 258 pp. including glossary, references, name index, and subject index. $35.00 cloth; $16.95 paper.

Rosendahl, Mona. Conflict and Compliance: Class Consciousness Among Swedish Workers. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology. 1985. × + 203 pp. including illustrations, appendices, notes, glossary, references, and index, n.p.     

Gateways to Power: The Castles of Ranulf III of Chester and Llywelyn the Great of Gwynedd

As an expression of his immense power and standing, Earl Ranulf de Blundeville, sixth Earl of Chester (1181–1232) granted his own Magna Carta in Cheshire. Ranulfs subsequent building programme can be regarded as comparable architectural expression. This article aims to provide a fresh interpretation combining a variety of approaches as to how Ranulfs personal power is manifested in the medieval landscape of north-west England and North Wales. It is argued that Ranulfs relatively overlooked and yet close relationship with Llywelyn Fawr, or Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, Prince of Gwynedd (C. AD 1173–1240), sheds further light as to the purpose of the position of Beeston and Cricieth castles in their landscapes. This study has wider implications as to how archaeologists can discern manifestations of lordly power in the designs and landscape settings of medieval castles. While this topic has been widely discussed over the last three decades, it has been hitherto under-investigated in the north-west of England and North Wales where the dynamic allegiances between lords were key components in how power was expressed.     

Historical Ethnography of Tahiti

Douglas L. Oliver. Ancient Tahitian Society: Volume 1, Ethnography; Volume 2, Social Relations; Volume 3, The Rise of the Pomares. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975. xv + 1419 pp. Illustrations, figures, maps, bibliography, and indices. $55.00.     

The Social Production of Latin@ Visibilities and Invisibilities: Geographies of Power in Small Town America

This paper explores the sociospatial dynamics unfolding in Perry, a rural Iowa town that has been facing rapid change since the 1990s due to growing Latin@ settlement. We focus on what we call the social production of Latin@ visibilities and invisibilities: spatialized practices by individuals, families, communities, and institutions that render different Latin@ groups visible or invisible, with repercussions for survival, community integration, and political praxis. We discuss the border within as an extension of border politics and borderlands rhetorics to the US “heartland”, and how the entrenchment of a regime of deportability creates racialized and gendered conditions for the in/visibility of Latin@ immigrants and Latin@s more broadly. We conclude by considering some of the theoretical and political implications of our analysis for such geographies of power and the social relations, locations, and discourses that constitute and are constituted by them.