A man for the people

Abstract

This study focuses on hospitality in Tanzania, as a topic of historical importance. Although there are many references to hospitality within both primary and secondary sources and anecdotal accounts, hospitality is effectively unexplored in the historical scholarship for any part of sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at southwestern Tanzania between 1600 and 1900 as a case study, this work aims to make hospitality, for the first time, primary focus of historical study rather than a peripheral and passing allusion. Towards that end, I examine why and when some societies chose to extend hospitality to outsiders and strangers. In southwestern Tanzania between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, extending hospitality to guests, strangers, and ‘foreign residents’ was a paramount value and social expectation, which could result in inclusion of outsiders. Hospitality towards newcomers became a cultural norm. I contend that direct, immediate, and personal gain was far less important than a circulation of hospitality. In the long term social and political institutions were buoyed by this moral expectation. In order to demonstrate these claims, I employ proverbs, oral traditions, and explorers’ accounts as historical evidence for hospitality's enduring salience in shifting contexts in southwestern Tanzania from precolonial times into the twentieth century.     

Love and Marriage Among the Ruins

Abstract

Walker Percy articulated that the American South, liberated by civil rights legislation and economic growth from former strife, was needed in a new quest to save the Union. Percy believed that the troubles facing America were the philosophical and anthropological failures of late-modern thought. Difficult consequences emerged from these failures in the form of failed marriages. The distinctive capacity of the person to intimately love the other for the other's own good is displaced, if not eliminated, by theorists who narrow man to a this-worldly preoccupation while simultaneously denying his unique aspects. One injured element, broached by Percy in his novels The Second Coming and Love in the Ruins, is the shared love of the domestic family that becomes misconceived and misshaped in an age no longer conversant with the sacramental significance of man. Percy's discerning observations in these novels afford a unique purchase on the institution's diminishment in the midst of a humanistic age. The failure of this basic and complex love is one of the most deeply and painfully felt consequences achieved by the intrapersonal splits that have resulted from the age of theorist–consumerism. From man's failures to move beyond ideology and theory emerge his inability to even understand love's connection with his existence.     

Planning people

“Problems of economic planning seem to acquire a resemblance to the problems of military strategy, where in practice the choice lies between a relatively small number of plans, which have in the main to be treated and chosen between as organic wholes, and which for a variety of reasons do not easily permit of intermediate combinations.”     

与虎共舞 在狂野处转身

春节期间中国各地时兴舞狮子,不过云南省双柏县小麦地冲的一支彝族人却有"舞老虎"的风俗。每年正月初八,全村的成年男丁到后土地庙遗址集合,先杀鸡敬"土地神",随后祭"虎神"。巫师占卜选中8位村民,让他们打扮成老虎的样子,披上画有虎斑纹的披毡,脸、脚、手上绘上虎纹,颈上挂一个大铜铃,一直到正月十五。     

A history of the African people

Abstract

Colonialism entailed numerous changes in Swazi socio-economic configurations, including a growing recourse to waged employment. Yet little is known about the dynamics that drove indigenous Swazi women to work for wages. This article argues that colonial policy, by adversely impacting areas of production involving Swazi people, drove women to seek wage employment. Moreover, this was not a smooth process, but a contested issue. Swazi men, chiefs, the monarchy and colonial administrators all attempted to frustrate female participation in wage employment. In spite of such barriers, as oral interviews with mid-twentieth century working women show, women continued to take up wage employment, and eventually secured the implicit support of colonial administrators in the service of the colonial economy.     

Cattle Hybrids Among the Sherpa of Nepal

The geographic distribution of cattle species in the Nepal Himalaya is not uniform. Rather, as in other mountainous regions of the world, an altitudinal zonation of cattle is to be found in the Himalaya. While the broad outlines of such zonation can be attributed to the contrasting abilities of different bovine species to survive at different elevations, certain bovine distributions may result from cultural perceptions of cattle resources. This study focuses on the ecological patterns of high-altitude bovine resources among the Sherpa of Nepal's eastern Himalaya.     

The great war and the British people

The “Adam Smith Problem” is the name given to an argument that arose among German scholars during the second half of the nineteenth century concerning the compatibility of the conceptions of human nature advanced in, respectively, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and his Wealth of Nations (1776). During the twentieth century these arguments were forgotten but the problem lived on, the consensus now being that there is no such incompatibility, and therefore no problem. Rather than rehearse the arguments for and against compatibility and incompatibility, this paper returns to the German writers of the 1850s–1890s and demonstrates that their engagement in this argument represents the foundation of modern Smith scholarship. It is shown that the “problem” was not simply a mistake best forgotten, but the first sustained scholarly effort to understand the importance of Smith's work, an effort that lacked any parallel in English commentary of the time. By the 1890s British writers, overwhelmingly ignorant of German commentary, assumed that there was little more to be said about Smith's work. Belated international familiarity with this German “Problem” played a major role in transforming Smith from a simple partisan of free trade into a theorist of commercial society and human action.     

The great war and the french people

Thomas Hobbes's theory of action seems to give up on the idea that actions are ‘up to us’. Thomas Pink has argued that this counter-intuitive stance should be understood as the implication of his radical assault on the scholastic Aristotelian model of action. Hobbes rejects the existence of the immaterial soul. This means that he must also reject the existence of so-called elicited acts of the will, which form the primary locus of human agency. In this paper an alternative interpretation is presented. It is argued that Hobbes's fundamental disagreement with the scholastic tradition is not over the existence of elicited acts of the will but over scope and productiveness of mechanical explanation. Hobbes aims to give an account of human actions as in our control and as ‘up to us’ while at the same time applying and defending his mechanical mode of analysis. This paper contributes to the contextualisation of Hobbes's views and furthers our understanding of his theory of action.     

America and the people truly without history

Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico. By RICHARD BOYER. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Pp. x, 341.

Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500–1700. By SUSAN KELLOG. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Pp. xxxiii, 285.

To the Royal Crown Restored: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1692–94. Edited by JOHN KESSEL, RICK HENDRICKSA and MEREDITH DODGE. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Pp. xv, 612.

The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. By STEVE J. STERN. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 478.     

Gift Exchange as Sensory Experience Among the Anganen

Gift exchange among the Anganen of the Southern Highlands Province (PNG) may be a complex, multifaceted sensory experience for participants and audience alike. This article primarily looks at the sensory dimensions of the organisation of space, with attention also given to sound, the immense heat of large pork distributions and the possibility of heightened emotional states such as trepidation or expectation that may feature in some events. These provide the ambience for the specific meaning of exchange to emerge. I compare a number of exchanges primarily through focusing on what I term politicisation (which may variously concern prestige, the degree of social opposition, or the amount of aggression displayed). Be it through contextual factors, or the inherent structural orientation of any exchange, political intensity varies due to different manifestations of sensory criteria. Gender and space are a major focus. In events that lack overt political intensity such as the marriage ceremony, women occupy centre stage. However, in more overtly politically intense events such as the yasolu ceremonial pork distribution, it is men who command centrality. As far as sound is concerned, while oration may feature, most interest is directed at the role of silence at marriage, the keening of women mourners at mortuary exchange, and a number of non‐discursive utterances by men in politically intense events that express aggression or exuberant pride. The argument is that these are not incidental but constitutive aspects of the politics of exchange. As such, the sensory dimensions of sight concern more than just the amount of wealth given, while the audible dimensions must go beyond oration alone.     

Anti-Utopianism Among Arms Controllers

Abstract

[T]he President's embrace of the goal, both utopian and dangerous, of a world without nuclear weapons will inevitably weaken support for the strategy of nuclear deterrence upon which the defense of the West continues to rest.     

Among Polynesia's first pots

X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and petrographic thin section microscopy are applied to a sample of anomalous appearing Lapita pottery sherds from Nukuleka, the earliest archaeological site in Polynesia. Both analyses indicate non-local origins for the ceramic vessels, suggesting they were brought on founding canoes. Mineral inclusions in ceramic tempers eliminate sources to the west of Tonga in eastern Melanesia; rather the temper source is most probably a dacitic high island from a distant island arc of central Melanesia. Polynesian origins and settlement are issues more complex than currently recognized by the orthodox progressive settlement model for Lapita expansion across Oceania.     

在汉族人的环绕中

到了该说再见的时候了。明天,郝瑞和我就要各奔东西,他去盐源,我去美姑,继续我们各自的田野。这二十天来,我陪同郝瑞到漫水湾去米市,一道走村串寨,一道翻山越岭,一道调查采访。此刻,离别的感觉．