Friends Farm: Australia’s First Quaker Commune

Australia has a long and rich history of religious groups trying to establish some sort of utopia by removing themselves from urban centres to rural idylls. The first of these was H errnhut, in western Victoria (1853–1889), and today there are many such as D anthonia B ruderhof and N ew G ovardhana, in NSW, C henrezig, in Queensland and R ocky C ape H utterites in Tasmania. While Quakers in the UK and USA have a tradition of forming rural communes starting from the seventeenth century, the first, and most important of such in Australia was F riends F arm, established in 1869 on what is now Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. This group was led by the charismatic Alfred Allen, a radical Quaker from Sydney. He believed that he had been reborn, held Christ within him, and had achieved sin‐free perfection. He was disowned, twice, by Sydney Quakers after when he led his small band of would‐be communards to the “wilderness” of Queensland where they sought to create a perfect society. Not surprisingly, it did not quite work out that way.     

Aid and the Geopolitics of the Post‐Colonial: Critical Reflections on New Labour’s Overseas Development Strategy

In the post Cold War era, issues of poverty, inequality and social exclusion have become central to many of the key discussions of international relations and development aid. In this context, this article sets out to analyse the nature and specificity of the development strategy of the New Labour government in Britain, as it has evolved since 1997. In the setting of the literatures on post‐colonialism, aid and development, the authors examine the specific concepts and approaches that help to frame such a strategy, giving particular attention to the commonalities and divergences between the British Government’s 1997 and 2000 White Papers. The perspective used connects ideas and issues from domains of knowledge which tend to remain independent of each other, namely aid and development studies and post‐colonial theory. Situated on the terrain of aid and development, the guiding objective of the article is to raise certain questions concerning power, knowledge and geopolitics, so that a wider conceptual and policy‐oriented debate might be engendered.     

‘The Sun Always Shines in Perth’: a Post‐Colonial Geography of Identity,Memory and Place

In this paper I explore some of the textual possibilities of post‐colonial geography. Using the conceptual tool of place as a palimpsest, I trace some geographies of memory across selected colonial and post‐colonial texts. By focusing on the relationship between representations of ‘sunny Perth’ and ‘Nyungah Perth’, I tease out some of the more general theoretical issues which pertain to a politics of place and space within this (post)colonial Australian context. The nexus of memory, place and cultural identity is central to my analysis. I give particular attention to the ways in which cultural memories are inscribed in some very specific and very ordinary places, and how these places become site‐markers of the remembering process and of identity itself.     

Gentrification within Australia’s ‘Problem City’: Inner Newcastle as a Zone of Residential Transition

Inner Newcastle has undergone a significant reorientation of both its residential composition and physical form over the last decade. The process of gentrification within two inner city suburbs (Cook’s Hill and Newcastle East) indicates the existence of an emergent consumer class within inner Newcastle. The spatial occurrence of this group within inner Newcastle can be considered as a strategy for the creation of a distinctive identity based upon inner city residency and conspicuous consumption. Consumption of the inner city operates at a variety of scales including the refurbishment of historic terraced housing and cottages and participation within inner Newcastle’s developing café culture.     

Post‐9/11 Masculinist Incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan: Women’s Bodies as Bullets in Imperialist Agendas

The gender question in the Middle East now serves ends beyond the local. It may be registered within a cluster of international patriarchal war‐promoting discourses that find tremendous benefit in the historical bulk of literature that demonizes the Middle Eastern male and victimizes the female. This article attempts to defend two related arguments, both of which are well served by Foucault’s Biopolitics (Foucault, The birth of biopolitics), in which he correlates between territorial control and the violence inherent to any hegemony’s preoccupation with the body (i.e., the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body) and Achille Mbembe’s theory of Necroplotics and its designation of who “may live” and who “must die” (Mbembé, 2003:11–4). I argue that in the post‐9/11 era, the world has witnessed a globalist civilizational masculinist incursion on its demonized Middle Eastern/Islamic Other. The militaristic discourse at work seems to be self‐appropriating the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body as a site of sexual oppression and (mis)using it to its own means. The impetus of the 9/11 necropolitics, aggressively transposes gender dialog/conflict in the Middle East/Muslim countries from a benign social and intellectual interface, where different alliances may be negotiated, to an aggressive militaristic zone, where the “bogeyman” must “die.”     

Orphans’ Land Rights in Post‐War Rwanda: The Problem of Guardianship

In 1994, the Rwandan civil war and genocide produced thousands of orphans. Alongside the war, the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Rwanda has produced a current population of about 300,000 orphans — many of whom are compelled to head households. These orphans urgently require land use rights, but many find that their rights to their deceased parents’ customary land holdings are denied or restricted by their guardians and others. Despite the legal protections for children that are guaranteed within Rwanda's laws, the reality is that many guardians do not respect orphans’ land rights and few orphans have sufficient access to administrative and legal forums to assert and defend these rights. In contrast to most accounts in the literature that discuss more generally the issue of African orphans’ land rights in the context of adults’ land rights, this article focuses on specific cases in which Rwandan orphans independently pursued their land rights. Ultimately, the article concludes that in Rwanda — and elsewhere in Africa — government officials should re‐examine their ideas about guardianship and grant orphans urgent attention as individuals and as a special interest group.     

Maori Tribalism and Post‐settler Nationhood in New Zealand

In this article I begin by sketching the main events in a recent dispute over the allocation of fishing quota among Maori. I seek to shed some light on the ideological grounding of this dispute in the simultaneous individualisation and tribalisation of Maori society since the late 19th century. Because the New Zealand nation is now imagined as an essentially binary one (bicultural, or treaty‐based) there is no secure place for urban indigeneity which constitutes a third voice. The inability of urban Maori Authorities to gain a share of the fishing quota is a reflection of this binarism.     

‘I Am a Slave Not a Wife’: Slave Women in Post‐Proclamation Gold Coast (Ghana)

This article contributes to the recent wave of historical studies that have examined the immediate social transformations implied by slavery abolition on gender relations. It highlights slave women's attempts to alter their status and the personal agency they displayed in the immediate post‐proclamation period in the Gold Coast (present‐day Ghana). During this very early period (1874–1877) women were quite an active presence in the colonial court and the percentage of cases discussing the right of women to leave their husbands increased. Traditional and colonial powers soon reacted to this changing situation. There were two main constraints to women's emancipation. On one hand there was a general confusion on the legal status of wives within traditional family, and on the other, the logic of debt concealed within the repayment of dowries tried to force women back into bondage even when they succeeded in changing their status from slaves to free women.     

‘Divided Within Itself’: The Parliamentary Labour ‘Right’ and the Demise of Post‐War Revisionist Social Democracy in the 1970s

The article seeks to identify a neglected dimension of the ‘crisis’ and schism of British social democracy in the 1970s from within the ranks of the parliamentary Labour ‘right’ itself. Accounts of the so‐called ‘Labour right’ and its influential revisionist social democratic tradition have emphasized its generic cohesion and uniformity over contextual analysis of its inherent intellectual, ideological and political range and diversity. The article seeks to evaluate differential responses of Labour's ‘right‐wing’ and revisionist tendency as its loosely cohesive framework of Keynesian social democracy imploded in the 1970s, as a means of demonstrating its relative incoherence and fragmentation. The ‘crisis of social democracy’ revealed much more starkly its complex, heterogeneous character, irremediably ‘divided within itself’ over a range of critical political and policy themes and the basis of social democratic political philosophy itself. The article argues that it was its own wider political fragmentation and ideological introspection in the face of the ‘crisis’ of its historic ‘belief system’ which led to the fracture of Labour's ‘dominant coalition’ and the rupture of British social democracy.     

Introduction Locating an Australia‐wide Anthropology

ABSTRACT Ethnographic research concerning Aboriginal social life in the earlier settled areas of the continent has formed a minor strand within the body of Australian anthropological research. Yet these studies speak directly to the current national discourse concerning distressing conditions in many Aboriginal communities in the north. The kind of anthropology generated in South East Australia has always sought to do more than simply depict particular collective worlds—it also addresses how they are made, particularly in conditions of upheaval, relocation and engagement with state institutions and the nation's ideologies. By drawing attention to one kind of border, that between cultural/social worlds we hope to overcome another boundary, that between ethnographies of the north and the south. To this end, we draw attention to the process of boundary making that has been a crucial dynamic within the changing historical and social configurations that have shaped Aboriginal experiences of the social world. Thus, instead of reporting on the significance of cultural characteristics, this collection shifts attention to relationships with others, with the state and the encompassing society.     

Post‐truth anthropology

Countless commentators have announced the advent of the post‐truth era, but while everyone seems to be talking about it, there is little agreement about what it really means. This article argues that anthropology can make an important and distinctive contribution to understanding post‐truth by treating it ethnographically. Commonly proposed explanations for post‐truth include changes in political culture, in the structure of information in the digital age and universal cognitive weaknesses that limit people's capacity for critical thought. While all these are likely important factors, they do not account for the role of culture in creating and sustaining post‐truth. In fact, it is likely that culture, especially in the form of metacognition, or thought about thought, plays an important role by providing knowledge practices, techniques for allocating attention, and especially competing theories of truth. Ethnographic methods provide anthropologists with a distinctive window on post‐truth cultures of metacognition.