The Concept of Taboo in Raga,Vanuatu: Semantic Mapping and Etymology

This article discusses the two terms that convey the concept of taboo in Raga, the language of north‐central Vanuatu originally spoken in north Pentecost, and provides linguistic evidence expanding on the information published previously by the anthropologists Masanori Yoshioka and John Patrick Taylor. Based on the corpus collected in north Pentecost in the period 2015–2017, and on older ethnographic and religious written material, a semantic map is proposed for the two taboo‐related Raga terms: sabuga and gogona. Reviewing the terms that designate the concept of ‘taboo’ in the neighbouring languages, the study also explores the possibility of borrowing and semantic interference from other languages, and proposes that sabuga is a reflex of Proto Oceanic *tabu, albeit an irregular reflex, and gogona a reflex of Proto North and Central Vanuatu*kona ‘sacred, taboo’.     

The Tenco effect. Suicide,San Remo,and the social construction of the canzone d'autore

Abstract

Canzone d'autore is an indigenous expression that has no precise equivalent in other languages. Its social use identifies a genre of popular song that presuppose the existence of an ‘autore’ taken in its most vigorous sense, meaning a ‘creator’, an ‘artist’– but how did this claim to artistry originate? How did it insinuate itself into the world of song, a genre that by definition belongs to the realm of what is traditionally called in Italian ‘musica leggera,’ with unmistakably pejorative connotations? In this essay, I will put forward a sociological interpretation of the genesis of the canzone d'autore, using as a strategic conceptual device the idea of cultural trauma. The traumatic event that I propose to explore, making use of this concept and its analytical machinery, is the suicide of the singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco during the seventeenth San Remo ‘Festival della Canzone’ (‘song festival’) – that is the best-known, most controversial, and most influential single event in the field of Italian ‘musica leggera’, an annual event regularly attended every year – via radio, television, or audience participation – by millions of Italians. Through a reconstruction of that suicide and above all of the public and dramatic events that followed in response to it, the paper examines the social process that transformed an individual tragedy into a collective, social drama, a process that not only produced a new musical classification, but also a new cultural and aesthetic category.     

The politics of evolution: Morphology,medicine, and reform in radical London

Summary

This essay closely examines the highly contested but widely employed historiographical category ‘absolutism’. Why are scholars so divided on whether it is even legitimate to use the term and, if they agree to do so, why are they still much at odds in explaining what it is? What are the main historiographical currents in the study of absolutism? Is it the same thing to speak of absolutism in regard to the practices of early modern European monarchies and with reference to the political ideas of so-called absolutist theorists? By addressing these questions through the methodology of intellectual history, this essay provides a comprehensive account of debates on absolutism and, at the same time, suggests that further work needs to be carried out on its theoretical aspects. In this respect, the author will propose a series of key ideas and principles which are meant to encapsulate the core of an early modern doctrine of absolutist monarchical sovereignty. It will also be argued that, when studying political thought, the term ‘absolutism’ might be abandoned in favour of the plural ‘absolutisms’ as a better way of understanding the past, its languages, opinions, people. In so doing, a thorough analysis of what political absolutism(s) is will be set forth, and a series of more general considerations on history-writing will also be advanced.     

Palawa Kani and the Value of Language in Aboriginal Tasmania

Over the past forty years the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, long marked as an iconic case of extinction, have revitalized many elements of their ‘lost’ culture. Palawa kani, the constructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language, is an example of such efforts. The construction and utilization of palawa kani is one element of a broader Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural politics working to strengthen the Indigenous status, authenticity, and presence in Tasmania specifically and Australia more generally. In this article I recount the historical documentation of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages and analyze the process through which multiple historical languages were utilized in the construction and consecration of a single ‘official’ Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Rather than existing strictly as a tool for communication, I argue palawa kani is a cultural artifact that, like an emblem, works to distinguish the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, one that lacks many of the stereotypical components of Australian Aboriginality, within Tasmanian society. As such, it is best understood in relation to Clifford's ‘indigenous articulations’ (2001) and Cowlishaw's mythopoeia of Aboriginality in Australia (2010, 2011). I examine what palawa kani does for, and what it represents to, the larger Tasmanian Aboriginal community.     

Languages of Stateness in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings: The PLO's Popular Committees as Twilight Institutions

Public authority beyond the state has often been seen as isolated from the state and/or constituting a threat to the state. Recent scholarship, however, has started to conceptualize ‘state’ and ‘non‐state’ forms of public authority as closely connected and interdependent. This article contributes to this theoretical shift by means of a qualitative case study of public authority in Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon. Lebanon's Palestinian camps are routinely characterized as ‘states‐within‐the‐state’, undermining the sovereignty of the Lebanese state. Yet, as this article demonstrates, both a generic state idea and the specific Lebanese state system constitute crucial benchmarks for the Popular Committees that govern informal Palestinian settlements. The article therefore conceptualizes the Popular Committees as ‘twilight institutions’ and explores the ‘languages of stateness’ that they adopt both communicatively, vis‐à‐vis Palestinian competitors, and coordinatively, vis‐à‐vis Lebanese counterparts. This reveals that the Popular Committees emulate the Lebanese state institutions they come into contact with, to bolster their own authority. They do this partly to be viable interlocutors for Lebanese state institutions; this suggests that the Popular Committees’ non‐state authority might validate rather than challenge state authority in Lebanon, and that state and non‐state authority can be mutually constitutive.     

Enclosures from Below: The Mushaa’ in Contemporary Palestine

This article traces the declining fortunes of the mushaa’, a once‐prominent Levantine culture of common land. Palestinians managed to resist attempts by the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate to break up the mushaa’. Under Israeli colonization, the remaining commons are now subject to another type of appropriation: individual Palestinian contractors seize hold of mushaa’ land and build on it. This article introduces the concept of “enclosures from below”, whilst looking at the dynamics of seizure of the commons by Palestinian refugees, who once were peasants practising mushaa’ on their lands and are now landless, some having become expert contractors. I show that the contractors consider their actions to be a form of resistance against the settler colonial project, manifested in the advancing of the Wall and settlement expansion. This is described through a case study of the Shu'faat area in Jerusalem. Changing uses of mushaa’ land reflect wider tendencies in the Palestinian national project that has become increasingly individualized.     

Endangered minority and regional languages (‘dialects’) in Italy

The Italian linguistic situation is characterised by a remarkable number of language varieties, although the development of Italian in the past 150 years has been the cause of a language shift from local languages to Italian. The degree of endangerment suffered by so-called ‘Italian dialects’ is shown using the Major Evaluative Factors of Language Vitality drawn up by a UNESCO ad hoc expert group in 2003, and the data offered by the 2006 ISTAT survey on language use. The debate in Italy on the vitality of ‘dialects’ and their future has done little to activate mechanisms and strategies to reverse the worrying language shift that both minority languages and ‘dialects’ are undergoing.     

The Roman Shipwreck of Antirhodos Island in the Portus Magnus of Alexandria,Egypt

Between 1998 and 1999 three excavation campaigns were undertaken on a shipwreck at the now‐submerged site of the ancient Portus Magnus, off the coast of Alexandria. The site, close to the island of Antirhodos, was identified through geophysical and archaeological surveys carried out by the Institut Européen d’Archéologie Sous‐Marine (IEASM), directed by Franck Goddio. The remains of the ship lie c.5 m deep and are spread over c.350 sqm. No cargo has been found. Artefacts recovered, the details of the ship's architecture and radiocarbon dating all suggest it sunk between the end of the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE. Its dimensions correspond to those of commercial ships of the Roman era. Identification of the wood used contributes significantly to our knowledge of materials used in naval architecture of this period.     

A METHOD FOR GROUPING POTTERY BY CHEMICAL COMPOSITION

A new similarity measure is proposed, the ‘dilution factor spread’ or, derived from it, a ‘goodness of fit’ parameter. This has the advantage that raw data without any transformation can be used, diluted samples are recognized and errors of individual concentration values can easily be included. The use of this similarity coefficient in multivariate cluster analyses to construct dendrograms is shown and compared with the use of the well-known similarity measure of Euclidian distance in attribute space and of the cos θ measure.     

Perennial crisis and the loss of flexibility

Crisis interrupts routine in unwelcome ways with an uncertain outcome. The Greek word krisis (κρíσις), which is etymologically close to criterion and criticism, was occasionally used in relation to social ailments. However, more often, it was used to refer to a medical condition characterized by a high fever. A critical condition in English and other European languages refers to a similar situation. Two possible outcomes were envisioned in ancient Greece: you died or you recovered. In the contemporary world, the term ‘crisis’ can be of limited relevance since crisis is endemic and chronic in one or several domains virtually everywhere. There are two general causes for this: accelerated, runaway globalization generates unpredictable, unintentional side effects; and different parts of a lifeworld change at different speeds, leading to disjunctures and destabilization. Perhaps volatility is a more appropriate term.     

DĒMOKRATIA'S POSSIBLE DISCONNECTION: UNTIMELY ANTIQUITY,TEMPORAL OUTSIDENESS,AND HISTORICAL FUTURES OF POLITICS*

This article discusses notions of possible disconnection in the post-1990s political present that are formulated as untimely articulations of the ancient Greek democratic past and of the concept of dēmokratia. These are modalities of transition that foreground political futurity as emanating neither from anticipation of evental change to come nor from abstract utopianism. Rather, dēmokratia’s projected break with the present and presentism is grounded in transtemporal confrontations and routes of historical memory. These are engagements with antiquity that take hold of and refigure the relation among past, present, and future politics, as well as the inside and outside of democracy, at a horizon of Nachleben (afterlife) that sustains no fixed beginning or end. I discuss these temporalities as disconnective in a sense that differs from historical futures opened up by technoscientific or anthropocenic prospects. Dēmokratia challenges the self-narration of present democracy as a project of the future by positing modalities of outsideness, repotentialization of the past, and interweaving of times and political languages in non-narrative terms. The outcome is a form of futurity that opens up the possibility of imagining not only a novel political subject and community but also a logic of their emergence that enables both to be incessantly reconfigured. Dēmokratia’s possible disconnection works against a sense of lost political futurity, but it needs to be recognized as grounded in a state of loss, insofar as political domination may also be built into future democratic principles. For this reason, it invites a reflexive problematic about the representability and translatability of disconnective political futures and communities.     

The beginning of ideology: Consciousness and society in the French reformation

David Lewis presented Convention as an alternative to the conventionalism characteristic of early-twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Rudolf Carnap is well known for suggesting the arbitrariness of any particular linguistic convention for engaging in scientific inquiry. Analytic truths are self-consistent, and are not checked against empirical facts to ascertain their veracity. In keeping with the logical positivists before him, Lewis concludes that linguistic communication is conventional. However, despite his firm allegiance to conventions underlying not just languages but also social customs, he pioneered the view that convening need not require any active agreement to participate. Lewis proposed that conventions arise from “an exchange of manifestations of a propensity to conform to a regularity” (87–8).

In reasserting the conventional quality of languages and other practices resting on mutual expectations, Lewis comfortably works within the analytic tradition. Yet he also deviates from his predecessors because his conventionalist approach is comprehensively grounded in instrumentalism. Lewis adopts an extension of David Hume's desire-belief psychology articulated in rational choice theory. He develops his philosophy of convention relying on the highly formal mid-twentieth-century expected utility and game theories. This attempt to account for language and social customs wholly in terms of instrumental rationality has the implication of reducing normativity to preference satisfaction. Lewis’ approach continues in the trend of undermining normative political philosophy because institutions and practices arise spontaneously, without the deliberate involvement of agents. Perhaps Lewis’ Convention is best seen as a resurgent form of analytic philosophy, characterized by “a style of argument, hostility to [ambitious] metaphysics, focus on language, and the dominance of logic and formalization” that solves the dilemma of “combining the analytic inheritance…with normative concerns” by reducing normativity to individuals’ preference fulfillment consistent with the axioms of rational choice.     

Public Attitudes toward Official Bilingualism in Canada: Making Sense of Regional and Subregional Variation

ABSTRACT

Pierre Trudeau’s vision of Canada’s cultural policy was situated within a bilingual framework. Canada, so conceived, has “no official culture” and two official languages. Nearly 50 years later, debates regarding the effects and broader significance of this policy combination persist as illustrated by the recent debate about Supreme Court judges. Yet, Canadians’ attitudes about bilingualism have received relatively little scholarly attention. This paper probes the structure and recent evolution of public attitudes toward the general idea of official bilingualism using the Survey on Official Languages (2003) and the Canadian Election Studies (1997–2011). It goes on to investigate regional differences in public support for bilingual Supreme Court judges using a large-scale survey conducted by Vox Pop Labs in 2015 (n = 291, 577). The combination of these data sources offers new insights into the contextual and individual-level determinants of regional differences in public attitudes toward bilingualism policy in Canada.     

‘English Vinglish’ and Bollywood: what is ‘new’ about the ‘new woman’?

Bollywood’s transnational mechanisms offer a unique space to study gendered subjectivity. My article studies a specific Bollywood movie, English Vinglish (2012) to draw out the profile of the ‘new woman.’ Persistently, I question the ‘new-ness’ to the construction of women when the ‘new’ reiterates the values of tradition, nation, and family. The ‘new’ seems to exist as a particular and unique transaction between local traditions and the global spread of populations that make limiting conceptions of woman, nation, or family, anomalies in a world propelled by expanding market needs and demands. The ‘new’ while offering possibilities for women, concomitantly carries different exclusions based on class, religion, language, and other identities. Understanding the formation of gender under contemporary conditions of transnationalism requires attentiveness to an insidious partnership of possibilities and exclusions that makes it simplistic to think in terms of progress or regress.     

Crafting Aboriginal Nations in Taiwan: The Presbyterian Church and the Imagination of the Aboriginal National Subject

Abstract

This study argues that since the end of World War II, the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church’s practical institutionalised arrangements for evangelisation have had the unintended consequence of creating an imagined multi-layered aboriginal national Subject. The argument is founded upon analysis of three main points. First, aboriginal members’ daily practices within the three-level federalist church polity formed in their minds an acquired “schema”, a ready-made cognitive structure that could be easily appropriated by them to imagine their own nations in a certain way. Second, when the Church promoted the translation of the Bible and hymns into aboriginal vernaculars for practical evangelising reasons, it unintentionally created tribe-based cultural-linguistic mediums as national languages upon which the contents of aboriginal nations could be elaborated and reproduced. This step further consolidated tribe-based ethnic categorisation and facilitated the reification of aboriginal nations. Third, since aboriginal ministers and elders were institutionally endowed with many strengths in comparison to other aboriginal elites, they came to serve as human activators in formulating and spreading the imagination of the multi-layered aboriginal national Subject.     

Balanced Bilingualism: Patterns of Contact Influence in L1 and L2 Turkic and Bakhtiari Speech in Juneqan,Iran

Most studies on language contact in Iran have focused on the effects of Persian on the country’s minority languages. There are also many cases where large regional languages such as Azeri, Kurdish, Balochi, Lori and Bakhtiari exert an influence on smaller regional languages, and a few studies have appeared on this topic. This paper examines the effects of language contact in the city of Juneqan in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province, Iran, where the position of two minority languages—Bakhtiari and Qashqai Turkic—appears to be evenly balanced. The analysis is based on a comparison of L1 and L2 speech from two bilingual individuals with a different L1, as found in responses to the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) questionnaire. Drawing on examples from lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax, the article argues that the equivalent influence of each language on the first- and second-language speech of members of the other language community is likely achieved not by simple equal status, but through the counterbalancing of regional Bakhtiari dominance with majority mother-tongue Turkic population in this city.     

Republic in early modern China: The cross-cultural dissemination of a political concept

ABSTRACT

The English term republic and the Chinese term Gonghe (共和, “joint harmony”; i.e., “republic” in modern Chinese) stem from different conceptual origins and carry different connotations. When they first encountered the term republic, the intellectuals of China and Japan could only understand it by drawing on the political knowledge of Chinese antiquity. But soon after, two different concepts corresponding to the term republic emerged in the form of Chinese characters within the Chinese and Japanese linguistic environments—minzhu (民主, “people's rule”) and gonghe, which gradually shed their ancient Chinese significations. After its coining as an early modern political concept in the Japanese language, the term gonghe sporadically filtered into the Chinese linguistic context during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1898–1902, the concept of gonghe rapidly gained popularity in China, primarily due to its introduction by Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873–1929) and other figures, with a clearly demarcated line separating the term from its ancient Chinese significance. As the concept of gonghe spread in China, it became embroiled in the contemporary tide of political reform, both influencing and being influenced by this trend. In the first decade of the 20th century, two competing interpretations of the term gonghe appeared. The moderates, represented by Liang Qichao, maintained that the evolution of the political system had a natural order; that their contemporary China did not yet have the conditions to adopt a republican system; and that it was necessary to first improve the citizens’ character, and cultivate the habits of self-governance among the people. The radicals, represented by Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, 1866–1925), held that China should overleap a constitutional monarchy, overthrow the Manchu emperor through violent revolution, and directly establish a republican form of government. The views of the radical party won discursive power, but their discussions and deliberations on the implications of a republic were clearly inadequate. Following the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution, a republican form of government was quickly established, but its functional results fell far short of people's expectations, causing the concept of a republic to be distrusted, criticized, and even shelved.     

Religion and ethno‐nationalism: Turkey's Kurdish issue

One approach within the Islamic camp treats Islam, which emphasizes overarching notions such as the ‘Islamic brotherhood’ and ‘ummah’, as incompatible with ethno‐nationalist ideas and movements. It is, however, striking that in the last decades, several Islamic and conservative groups in Turkey have paid increasing attention to the Kurdish issue, supporting their ethnic demands and sentiments. Even more striking, the leftist, secular Kurdish ethno‐nationalists have adopted a more welcoming attitude toward Islam. How can we explain such intriguing developments and shifts? Using original data derived from several elite interviews and a public opinion survey, this study shows that the struggle for Kurdish popular support and legitimacy has encouraged political elites from both camps to enrich their ideological toolbox by borrowing ideas and discourses from each other. Further, Turkish and Kurdish nationalists alike utilize Islamic discourses and ideas to legitimize their competing nationalist claims. Exploring such issues, the study also provides theoretical and policy implications.     

The Natsyas of the Grodno region of Belarus: A Field Study

Abstract. This research was conducted in 1993–4 in several peripheral kolkhoz villages in the north-west Belarus Grodno province, a religious (Catholic/Orthodox) and linguistic (Belarussian/RussiadPolish/Lithuanian)borderland. The members of the folk communities of this region conceive and categorise social reality differently than it is done by the members of a nationalised and urbanised society, according to religious, and not nation-state, criteria. People are divided by these criteria into natsyas, i.e. religious groups. There are two main natsyas: the Catholics (also called Poles) and the Orthodox (called Rus' or Belarussians). The distinctive criterion for several natsyus is the language of a prayer: the Catholics pray in Polish and/or Lithuanian, the Orthodox in Old Church Slavonic and Russian. The terms Catholic natsya and Polish natsya (and similarly Orthodox natsya or Rus' natsya) are synonymous. The language of everyday speech does not differentiate the natsyas; all the villagers speak Belarussian dialect or so called ‘plain language’. The natsya, a concept specific of traditional folk societies, should not be confused with a ‘nation’, a political term of the modem world. None the less, the kolkhoz peasants of the region under study are confronted with a concept of ‘nation’. It results in a turmoil in their worldview and in confusion about their identity; what we see in the Belarussian villages is a process of change. The borderland where the material was collected seems an excellent field for the study of the process of the emergence of nations.