‘Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style,Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

This essay examines a 1968–9 campaign by Tanzania’s ruling party Youth League to outlaw mini–skirts and other ‘indecent’ fashions as ‘decadent’ affronts to Tanzanian ‘national culture’. It situates the intense, public debate on the campaign both in terms of the state’s contested national cultural project, and in relation to intersecting anxieties about shifts in women’s work and mobility in urban space, and the politics of sex in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Arguing that ‘the city’ ndash; both as an imagined space and as the site of particular, gendered social struggles – is central to understanding the campaign, the essay charts attempts by the ban’s opponents to fashion viable personas and notes the limits of these attempts.     

British Railways and the Challenge from Road Haulage: 1919-39

Interwar Britain witnessed the rapid rise of road transportas a serious competitor to the railways. This article examinesroad–rail competition for freight traffic. It demonstratesthat, contrary to previous accounts—which have been highlycritical of the railway companies—their failure to preventrapid loss of traffic to the roads was the inevitable consequenceof the regulatory framework under which the railways had beenreturned to private control in 1921. Given the constraints imposedby this framework, price competition with road hauliers wouldhave further depressed railway company profits. Railway policythus concentrated on pressing for a revision of the legislativeframework governing road–rail competition.     

Models of masculinity: sex education,the United States Public Health Service,and the YMCA, 1919-1924

In 1918, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) told American parents that "it is no longer possible for you to choose whether your child will learn about sex or not." According to the PHS, most American boys learned about sex from "improper sources" by the age of nine. The "unfortunate effect of these early impressions" had, PHS warned, not only resulted in a gross misunderstanding of sex, but also been a major factor in the spread of venereal disease (The Parents' Part [the U.S. Public Health Service, 1918], p. 5). To counter and correct this miseducation, PHS joined with the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) to create a sex education program aimed at adolescent boys. Officially launched in the spring of 1919, the "Keeping Fit" campaign provides a unique insight into the federal government's attempt to medicalize and regulate American sexuality through the forum of public health.     

理想与利益--浙江省宪自治运动新探

1919-1926年的浙江省宪自治运动,是民初中国联省自治浪潮中的一个重要组成部分。它在省内外多种因素的推动下而发生,并在运动中先后产生了三种不同的省宪：九九省宪、三色宪法、浙江省自治法。省宪的条体现了当时人们的许多自治理想,但运动参与动机各异使之自始便存在着严重分歧,省宪理想成为他们追求不同利益目标的工具。运动断断续续的进行伴随着各方势力激烈的冲突,亦折射出浙省多重的地方政治权力结构。运动的无果而终,并非简单由于“军阀扼杀自治”。     

Merchandising and sanctity: the invasive cult of Padre Pio

In the final decades of the twentieth century, the Blessed Padre Pio da Pietrelcina (1887-1968) became a 'saint' of global stature. It is most exceptional for the cult of a saint to acquire such dimensions in so short a time. Further, this is the story not of someone with a modern profile of sanctity,but someone who on the contrary answers to the traditional model of sanctity, and whose cult is moreover characterized by an instrumental devotional repertoire. Despite this 'classic' model, his person and cult are extremely ambiguous. This article describes and analyses the processes which have brought and continue to bring this about, and the recent development of the cult in Italy. By these processes a controversial cult, often associated with anti-ecclesiastical devotional activities and of limited scope, has become one of the most important and irreproachable in Italy. In part through the personal support of Pope John Paul II, in about a decade Padre Pio has grown from a friar in a controversial fundamentalist context to an almost invulnerable national saint, who is beginning to become a part of the Italian identity. The power of his cult is so strong - a devotional avalanche - that it has sidelined other cults, and to an increasingly large degree defines the Italian sacred landscape. The Pio cult encroaches on other devotions, and moreover is becoming its own competitor: to an increasing degree Pio's central pilgrimage site at San Giovanni Rotondo is losing pilgrims to the secondary pilgrimage site at Pietrelcina and to the hundreds of chapels and local shrines that have sprung up the length of Italy.     

Three thousand families: English Canada's colonizing vision and British family settlement, 1919-39

After the First World War, Canada's immigration policy became more restrictive and immigration more controlled. For English Canadians, immigration of the "right type" of people—those from the British Isles—remained vital to strengthening the nation. This article examines the 3,000 Family Scheme, a joint British-Canadian settlement project in which British families, comprised of over 18,000 individuals, were relocated to homesteads as colonizers of Canada's remote areas. There, many endured isolation and hardship, and were largely blamed for their own plight. A nation-building project that failed, the 3,000 Family Scheme reveals the connections among several enduring national myths in the interwar years: the potential for agricultural expansion, British superiority, and the capabilities of a maturing Canadian state to control the settlement process.     

Articulating national identity in Turkmenistan: inventing tradition through myth,cult and language

A study of myth, cult, and language as tools of state power, this paper analyzes ways national identity was constructed and articulated in one state. When Türkmenistan became independent in 1991 its first president, Saparmyrat Nyýazow, promoted himself as the ‘savior’ of the nation by reconceptualising what it meant to be Türkmen. Myth, public texts and language policy were used to construct this identity. While they were the targets of the state's cultural products, Türkmen citizens contributed to the processes of cultural production. Nyýazow legitimised his authoritarian leadership, first by co‐opting Türkmen citizens to support his regime, and then by coercing them as participants in his personality cult. The paper concludes that Nyýazow used the production of culture, ‘invented tradition’ in Hobsbawm's sense, to bolster his agenda and further his own power. It also argues that the exaggerated cult of personality Nyýazow cultivated limited his achievements, rather than solidifying them.     

The construction of a "population problem" in colonial India, 1919-1947

This article examines the construction of a "population problem" among public health officials in India during the inter-war period. British colonial officials came to focus on India's population through their concern with high Indian infant and maternal mortality rates. They raised the problem of population as one way in which to highlight the importance of dealing with public health at an all-India basis, in a context of constitutional devolution of power to Indians where they feared such matters would be relegated to relative local unimportance. While they failed to significantly shape government policy, their arguments in support of India's 'population problem' nevertheless found a receptive audience in the colonial public sphere among Indian intellectuals, economists, eugenicists, women social reformers and birth controllers. The article contributes to the history of population control by situating its pre-history in British colonial public health and development policy and outside the logic of USA's Cold War strategic planning for Asia.