Punishing convicted ravishers: statutory strictures and actual practice in thirteenth and fourteenth-century England

Several thirteenth-century English statutes provided increasing sanctions for ravishment or abduction of wards and wives. The penalty for conviction as a ravisher came to include a term of “penal servitude”, as well as the payment of damages to the plaintiff and an amercement to the crown. The evidence of the cases decided in the common law courts indicates that the payment of damages precluded penal servitude and that arrangements to pay made while in jail effected the prisoner's release before the term ended. Disregard of the ‘penal’ provisions and the continued use of jail or its threat to ‘coerce’ a defendant into compliance with the award of the court illustrate the disjunction between legislation and legal practice. That statutes about ravishment cannot be taken as self-enforcing contributes to the growing body of scholarship reminding us that history cannot be written from the statute books alone.     

“Turkish Dames” and “English Mastiffs”: The “Turk” and the Female Body in Massinger’s The Renegado

Abstract

In early modern travel discourse, exploration of ‘distant’ or ‘other’ lands is typically configured as some aspect of the female body. Power relations between East and West were often described in terms of conquest or ravishment, the site of which is typically the female body, as might be seen in early modern English literary response to the Ottoman. Couched in terms of the menace the Ottoman poses to the Western Christian, Massinger’s The Renegado courts parallels between sexual license, female rebellion, and religion to address domestic threats at home–not from the Ottoman Empire, but rather from the rebellious English women, who represent a clear danger to the patriarchal hegemony.     

Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy’ and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1900

This essay looks at the role that Anglo‐American women played in governing their Irish immigrant domestic servants and at the racial and gendered meanings that were attached to servitude. In the second half of the nineteenth century, female Irish Catholic immigrants predominated in domestic service employment in the north‐eastern United States. Newspaper and magazine articles portrayed the home as a site of conflict where Protestant, middle‐class families clashed with Irish Catholic ‘peasant’ girls newly arrived in the US. Employers depicted ‘Bridget’ or ‘Biddy’, the collective nickname given to Irish domestic servants, as insubordinate, unrefined and prone to violent outbursts. While reliant on domestic service for wages, female Irish immigrants understood that service represented racialised labour in the United States and was viewed as an occupation befitting non‐white populations.     

Everyday articulations of prostitution: how some Filipina migrants in rural Japan describe sexual–economic relationships

This article draws attention to ‘everyday articulations of prostitution’: the diverse, performative ways that people reproduce and rework meanings of ‘prostitution’ as they mobilize the term in their day-to-day lives. The article offers an ethnographic illustration of this process by exploring why and to what ends a group of Filipina wives of rural Japanese men referred to the behavior of another Filipina woman in their community as ‘prostitution.’ It demonstrates that when mobilizing this term, these Filipina women were not categorizing sexual–economic relationships (like ‘prostitution’) in terms of payment systems, as other scholars have assumed. Rather, geographical and cultural factors, such as the stigma associated with these women's migration histories and their long-term residence as wives and mothers in the small rural communities where they had worked in bars, led Filipina women in Central Kiso to describe such relationships according to the sentiments motivating them, the ways one utilized gifts or money from a sexual partner, and whether or not one demonstrated appreciation of this financial support. The article maintains that attention to everyday articulations of prostitution such as these expands our understandings of the situated meanings people can invest in this term. It illustrates how culture and geography shape the ways discourses of prostitution are mobilized to stigmatize some intimate-economic behaviors and, thereby, legitimize others.     

Tolerant majorities,loyal minorities and ‘ethnic reversals’: constructing minority rights at Versailles 1919*

ABSTRACT. The 1919 Versailles Peace Conference created new states in East Central Europe (ECE), but the imperfect implementation of the ‘one nation, one state’ formula resulted in more than twenty‐five million ‘unassimilable’ minorities. With the introduction of majoritarian democracy, this gave rise to what we term ‘ethnic reversals’: ‘formally dominant majorities’ suffered status decline, while previously ‘minoritised majorities’ found new political powers. Accordingly, the 1919 Minorities Treaties sought to manage these ‘ethnic reversals’ by instituting a liberal minority rights regime that tried to create both ‘tolerant majorities’ and ‘loyal minorities’. While the Treaties reflected the influences of Anglo‐American and Anglo‐American Jewish elites – the most notable voices of liberalism in an age of ethnic homogenisation – we suggest that in contexts of historical diversity with little institutionalised liberalism, ‘ethnic reversals’ raise issues that cannot be resolved within liberal conceptions of minority rights that rely solely or primarily on cultural protections.     

HEALTH CONCERNS OF ‘INVISIBLE’1 CROSS-BORDER DOMESTIC MAIDS IN THAILAND

With the rising number of sex venues along the Thai–Burmese border and the perceived links between migration and the HIV epidemic, the Thai authorities and NGOs have begun concerning themselves with health problems of immigrant workers and seeking effective social welfare programmes for them. However, this paper argues that formal service programmes targeting specific groups may not be enough and notes a need to call attention to officially invisible migrants, particularly domestic maids from Burma who are more vulnerable precisely because they are ‘invisible’. The ‘maid trade’ from Burma to Thailand is statistically invisible firstly because domestic work is not recognized as a formal occupation either by the employers or the employees and therefore, they fail to be registered in census data. Burmese female domestic workers in Thailand are normally recruited through informal channels facilitated by regional trans-national networks that also engage in human smuggling. Domestic workers remain invisible in Thailand also because most of them are live-in and tend to work for one family for lengthy periods of time. They are normally out of reach of labour unions, religious organizations, non-governmental organizations and public health services. The fear of being caught as ‘illegal workers’ by the authorities further hinders their contact with the public. This paper also attributes the migrants’ invisibility to the tradition of ‘domestic servitude’ in Thai society. Using three detailed case studies, the paper demonstrates how the invisibility has contributed to the health vulnerability of these women in their daily lives.     

Editorial: Social Spirituality: Monastic Cell or Hectic Street?

Abstract

What makes theology political? Is it the social location of the author, the sources drawn upon, or the content of the argument? Each of these three possibilities is theologically significant, but a little reflection proves none of them decisive in claiming the adjective ‘political’ for a theology. The ‘material production’ of theological works cannot, by itself, render one theology political and another apolitical; for all theological works share a similar ‘social location’ given the similar socio-economic reality of publishing. Whether or not theology is political, or adequately political, cannot finally be determined by material production, the authors' social location or the content of the argument per se. Such forms of apodictic reasoning cannot distinguish apolitical from political theology. It can only be a function of practical reasoning. It alone can advance the current stalemate among persons that theology should be characterized as ‘church’, ‘confessional’, ‘sectarian’, ‘liberatory’, ‘political’ or ‘public’. I argue that the best we can do to adjudicate these differences is to engage in, as Charles Taylor has so aptly put it, practical ad hominem arguments.     

Conformity and resistance in the Victorian penal system: archaeological investigations at Parliament House,Edinburgh

Abstract

Archaeological investigations at Parliament House in Edinburgh included the recovery of artefacts from a void discovered during building works. This space had been used as undercourt jail cells in the late 19th century, a time of penal reform. The assemblage contains items representing domestic, light industrial and clerical activities, as well as personal items such as children's toys and women's clothing. The Victorian penal code, contemporary accounts of prisoners, warders and chaplains, and historical and criminological studies suggest that they reflect not only the Prison Board's attempt to enforce conformity but also prisoners' and prison employees' resistance to the system.     

Planting Peace: The Greater London Council and the Community Gardens of Central London

‘Peace’ has not lent itself easily to emblematic or mnemonic forms of representation. In Europe’s furnished urban landscapes of the 19th century peace was often personified in female allegorical form. She can be seen in many of the sculpted memorials that commemorate distant battles fought on the edges of Empire. Invariably, however, the figure of ‘Peace’ had a more modest role in the allegory of commemoration than that of ‘Victory’ or ‘Triumph’. As an ideal, peace and pacifism is more often regarded as a process, a long‐term goal that cannot be captured in single static form. To this end, the promotion of peace has most often been realised through intervention, occupation, and fluid, temporal forms such as campaigns, marches, songs, dances and other extended programmes. Peace has also been promoted through slow, evolutionary forms such as designed landscapes, parks and gardens. Drawing on international parallels, this paper examines in detail two community gardens in central London. Each owes its origins to radical local agendas set within the political climate of the Cold War of the 1980s, but both were born out of grand visions for world peace, multilateral disarmament, and global accord. Twenty years after their creation, the author explores their current condition and examines their value as sites of political value and heritage.     

Post–national Spain? Post–Spanish Spain?

The term ‘post–nationalism’ has been proposed to designate the emergence of political bodies in the wake of economic globalisation. However, not only is the ‘post–national landscape’ strongly redolent of nationalism, but nations themselves continue to correlate with the political subject in ways that cannot be dismissed. In Spanish political debates the notion of ‘post–nationalism’ has been deployed along with the concept of ‘patriotism of the constitution’, vulgarising their original philosophical use. In this context both terms do ideological duty against the peripheral nationalities in an effort to relegitimise the centralised control of the state. In this article I ‘deconstruct’ the self–serving duality between ‘constitutionalists’ and ‘nationalists’ by showing that traditional state nationalism overlaps with the ‘constitutionalist’ position. Subsequently, I consider whether some form of Habermasian detachment of nation from state can be contemplated for Spain.     

Revolution,uprising, civil war: the conceptual dilemmas of 1956

There were from the very beginning two ways of conceptualising the events of 1956 in Hungary, labelling it as a revolution or a national uprising. There also emerged a third way of conceptual definition when what occurred in 1956 was named an anti-totalitarian movement. From the theoretical perspective of Begriffsgeschichte the Hungarian events of 1956 cannot simply be assumed under the notion of ‘revolution’, the term first applied to what took place in France in 1789, since it was not the kind of a forceful collective effort leading to an unknown future. The notion of ‘revolutio’ works better to describe the analytical meaning of the Hungarian anti-Soviet and anti-Communist disturbance. The reason has been that the main thrust of the Hungarian situation in 1956 was similar to the seventeenth-century English and the eighteenth-century American ‘revolutions’, to return definitively to a point of departure by regaining some of the formerly lost social and political liberties.     

Confabulations: A Conceptual History

Confabulations are inaccurate or false narratives purporting to convey information about world or self. It is the received view that they are uttered by subjects intent on ‘covering up’ for a putative memory deficit. The epidemiology of confabulations is unknown. Speculated causes include amnesia, embarrassment, ‘frontal lobe’ damage, a subtype of ‘personality’, a dream-like event, and a disturbance of the self. Historical analysis shows that ‘confabulation’ was constructed at the turn of the century as part of a network of concepts (e.g. delusion, fixed idea, etc.) Meant to capture narratives with dubious content. This paper deals with the history of the construction of the word and concept of confabulation and with earlier recognitions of the behaviours that serve as their referent and puts forward a model based on historical data. Two phenomena are included under ‘confabulation’: ‘untrue’ utterances by subjects with memory impairment and ‘fantastic’ utterances marshalled with conviction by subjects suffering from psychoses and no memory deficit. Under different disguises, the ‘covering up’ or ‘gap filling’ hypothesis is still going strong. Although superficially plausible, it poses problems in regards to the issue of ‘awareness of purpose’: if full awareness is presumed, then it is difficult to differentiate confabulations from lying; if no awareness is presumed then the semantics of the concept of ‘purpose’ is severely stretched and confabulations cannot be differentiated from delusions. The received view of confabulations also neglects the clinical observation that confabulations (particularly provoked ones!) Do occur in dialogical situations: i.e., the manner of the asking may increase their probability. It is suggested here that confabulations are a disorder of a putative narrative function which is also found in ‘normal’ subjects. It is also hypothesized that this trait is normally distributed in the population. In the absence of adequate epidemiological information, research efforts should be directed at mapping the distribution of this narrative (or confabulatory) capacity in the community at large. Only then it will be possible to understand the significance of its disorders. In the long term, this approach will prove more heuristic than unwarranted speculation based on few anecdotal cases.     

Fake It Until You Make It: Searching for Mimesis in Buka Village Politics

Contemporary Melanesian communities face difficulties both because of the withdrawal of government services and the continued influence of clientelism within the politics of the distributive state. A notable reaction to both these problems is the organisation of a broad class of groups that may be termed ‘parastatal’: informal organisations, often evanescent, which form around the state and its absence. These may often appear as ‘mimetic’ of recognisable state forms. Characteristically, the analysis of such ‘mimesis’ in Melanesia is framed by doubt that the emulation of state forms extends to the alleged rationality or ‘interiority’ of the state. Here, a case in which villagers in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville undertook to prosecute themselves for non‐payment of school fees is discussed in order to expose the substantial difficulties with understanding parastatal organisation in terms of ‘copying’. The case suggests integration of the villagers into the actually existing state system is much deeper than is often assumed.     

Open borders as an act of solidarity among peoples,between states or with migrants: changing applications of solidarity within the Schengen process

Abstract

The article analyses the historical understanding of the term ‘solidarity’ in the context of the Schengen process, which started in the 1980s and remains relevant until today. During this time, the Schengen Area grew from encompassing five Western European countries to 26 member-states across the whole continent. In this context, the term ‘solidarity’ was referred to frequently in official documents, in speeches or in the media – despite the fact that the term was not at all central at the time of foundation. It is important to note, however, that during the process of enlargement, the meaning of the term ‘solidarity’ changed repeatedly. First meant to denote solidarity between all the European peoples, in the Western European Union it also referred to the reconciliation of European peoples after the Second World War. In the 1990s, the official understanding of solidarity concerning Schengen shifted to describe an effective inter-state cooperation among the EU member-states. In the last years, the term solidarity was most evoked in the call for an even burden-sharing within the European Union. All these different understandings have one aspect in common: they focus on the internal dimension of European solidarity. However, during the entire Schengen process, the term ‘solidarity’ was also applied in another, an external, global dimension, to call for humanitarian support towards refugees reaching the Schengen Area from anywhere in the world. The article argues that the term ‘solidarity’ must hence be looked at as a political concept and not a neutral, analytic term. Critical regard for the current political interests as well as the concrete historical framework are crucial for any academic discussion of European solidarity. The categories of inclusion and exclusion especially must be core aspects when analysing the term ‘solidarity’ historically.     

Impersonating a Voter: Constructions of Race,and Conceptions of Subjecthood in the Franchise of Colonial New South Wales,c. 1850–1865

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the treatment of Aboriginal Australians as politically entitled subjects within New South Wales during that colony's first elections under ‘universal’ male suffrage. Using the case of Yellow Jimmy, a ‘half-caste’ resident prosecuted for impersonating a white settler at an election in 1859, it examines the uncertainties that surrounded Aboriginal Australians’ position as British subjects within the colony's first constitutions. By contrast to the early colonial franchises of New Zealand and the Cape – where questions of indigenous residents’ access to enfranchisement dominated discussions of the colonies’ early constitutions – in the rare instances in which indigenous men claimed their right to vote in New South Wales, local officials used their own discretion in determining whether they held the political entitlements of British subjects. This formed a continuity with the earlier treatment of Aboriginal Australians under settler law, where British authority and imperial jurisdiction was often advanced ‘on-the-ground’ via jurists and administrators rather than via the statutes or orders of Parliament or the Colonial Office.     

Humiliating the Brazilian poor: The iconoclasm of former president Lula

Circulating in Brazil's social media today are many vicious attacks against presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known simply as Lula. Widely and enthusiastically shared memes humiliate Lula by depicting him as a poor, uneducated drunkard who deserves to be in jail, thus criminalizing his class background and political biography. What do the memes and conversations reveal about the roots of this aggression against him? Brazil has been plagued by a large corruption scandal called ‘Operation Car Wash’, for which many hold Lula partly responsible. The attacks are also an attempt to discredit Lula as a presidential candidate, which has placed his candidacy in the balance. But the memes also suggest a deep and genuine fear of poverty and the poor, which is related to fragile consumer‐oriented class relations. The iconoclasm of Lula and the destruction of his dignity reflect this anguish. The memes serve to create a symbolic line between ‘us’ – the ‘middle class’, the ‘good people’ (pessoas do bem) – and ‘them’ – the poor, who are depicted as immoral drunkards who have no dignity.     

AGA,AMIO AND LOTO: PERSPECTIVES ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE SELF IN SAMOA

The article concerns the Shore/Freeman controversy about the terms aga and amio. Shore sees aga as the Samoan category for ‘culture’ and amio as the category for ‘nature’ in the Hobbesian sense. Freeman says that Shore has his terms backwards. I argue that Freeman is correct in his assertion that aga cannot be equated with ‘culture‘. However, Freeman wrongly defines aga as innate essence. In fact aga is the term for identity, which in Samoa is external and social. Amio is best understood as a derivative of that part of the self which Samoans call the loto and which we call subjectivity.     

Virtue language in historical scholarship: the cases of Georg Waitz,Gabriel Monod and Henri Pirenne

Historians of historiography have recently adopted the language of ‘epistemic virtues’ to refer to character traits believed to be conducive to good historical scholarship. While ‘epistemic virtues’ is a modern philosophical concept, virtues such as ‘objectivity’, ‘meticulousness’ and ‘carefulness’ historically also served as actors' categories. Especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians frequently used virtue language to describe what it took to be a ‘good’, ‘reliable’ or ‘professional’ scholar. Based on three European case studies—the German historian Georg Waitz (1813–86), his French pupil Gabriel Monod (1844–1912) and the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935)—this article argues that such virtues cannot neatly be classified as ‘epistemic’ ones. For what is characteristic about virtue language in historical scholarship around 1900 is an overlap or entanglement of epistemic, moral and political connotations. The virtues embodied by, or attributed to, Waitz, Monod and Pirenne were almost invariably aimed at epistemic, moral and political goods at once, though not always to the same degrees. Consequently, if ‘epistemic virtues’ is going to be a helpful category, it must not be interpreted in a strong sense (‘only epistemic’), but in a weak one (‘epistemic’ as one layer of meaning among others).     

Digital harm and addiction: An anthropological view

A broad trend of anti-tech rhetoric has raised fears about the dangers of digital overuse and reliance and suggests that technology is addictive, unnatural or harmful. Some people have limited their hours of ‘screen time’ or resorted to the practice of ‘digital detoxing’ – a catch-all term to describe temporarily ‘leaving’ the digital world. Using her ethnographic work in a North American digital detox retreat, the author considers an anthropological approach to digital harm and addiction that emphasizes their socially constructed nature. Following Horst and Miller (2012) and the view that digital harms are socially constructed, she argues that digital technology will be removed in different places for different reasons, and that geographically bound cultural values are vital to understanding how digital harms come to be imagined and counteracted. Whether or not digital use will ever be proven to be clinically harmful, digital harm is best viewed as a ‘social fact’.