Globalization and the Power of Indeterminate Meaning: Witchcraft and Spirit Cults in Africa and East Asia

The obsession with witchcraft in many parts of present-day Africa is not to be viewed as some sort of traditional residue. On the contrary, it is especially present in the more modern spheres of society. In a comparative, global perspective, this linking of modernity and witchcraft is not particular to Africa: in other parts of our globalized world, modern developments coincide with a proliferation of what the Comaroffs (forthcoming) call ‘the economies of the occult’. In this article, representations in South and West Cameroon about ekong, supposedly a novel form of witchcraft explicitly associated with modern forms of wealth, are compared to Weller's study of the upsurge of spirit cults in Taiwan, during the recent economic boom of this ‘Asian tiger’. The power of such discourses on occult forces is that they relate people's fascination with the open-endedness of global flows to the search for fixed orientation points and identities. Both witchcraft and spirit cults exhibit a surprising capacity for combining the local and the global. Both also have specific implications for the ways in which people try to deal with modernity's challenge.     

Australia’s Colombo Plans,old and new: international students as foreign relations

This article draws on recent research and policy developments to make a case for considering international students as an important component of Australian foreign relations. It links historical and contemporary Australian experiences of international students, especially in the Colombo Plan and New Colombo Plan, to the field of public diplomacy, and sets an agenda for further research in this direction. It highlights the need to recover student voices and to be sensitive to the emergence of everyday or ‘vernacular’ internationalism, as a phenomenon of international students visiting, traveling and otherwise encountering different groups of Australians. It suggests a need to take up anew this form of inquiry for both earlier postwar student experiences and the post-1980s period, in which international students’ voices are frequently silenced by debates over commodification, funding needs, and neo-liberal economics.     

Because Pigs Can Fly: Sexuality,race and the geographies of difference in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy

This article explores the ways that the popular diasporic novel Funny Boy, set in Sri Lanka but written from Canada by an exiled Sri Lankan born Tamil, intervenes in the country's contemporary geographies of difference. The novel itself explores a Tamil boy's struggle to negotiate life in Sinhala-dominated Colombo while also coming to terms with his emergent same-sex desire. By focusing specifically on the writing of two familiar middle-class Sri Lankan spaces central to the novel's narrative—the family home and the school—the article shows how these everyday geographies regulate and normalise carnal desire in a society which still operates anti-homosexual legislation. It also suggests how the erosion of the meanings of these familiar spaces is a tactic central to the main protagonist's sexual liberation. By reading these sexualised geographies through the polemic racialised Sinhala/Tamil divisions in contemporary Sri Lankan society, the paper shows how the novel makes an important political intervention in contemporary Sri Lankan politics where devolution and federal solutions to recent civil unrest have produced territorialised geographies of difference that prescribe ‘places for races’. By evoking the Funny Boy's fictive and sexualised geographies of exclusion and resistance, this article unsettles the logic that binds intra-racial solidarity, its cognate geographical modelling, and instead highlights the exclusions that exist at all levels in Sri Lankan society.

Amma held up her hand to silence us. ‘That's an order,’ she said.     

Australian foreign policy and news media: national identity and the sale of uranium to India and China

This article explores the utility of a constructivist-media communications approach to understanding the production of national identity in Australia through a case study of the Australian Labor Party's 2011 decision to allow uranium sales to India. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were increasingly concerned with India and China, as ‘rising’ superpowers whose prominence offered opportunities for economic prosperity even as it undermined settled regional power balances. This article finds that, rather than a matter of rational strategy, the decision was made in a context of considerable anxiety about the ‘Asian century’ as the Australian public, politicians and policymakers struggled to comprehend geopolitical change. It further argues that the constructivist project in international relations can benefit from engaging with insights from media and communications methodologies and by taking a less hierarchical approach to ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ discursive agency.     

Violent histories and the ambivalences of recognition in postcolonial Papua New Guinea*

On the 23 July 2009, in a ceremony at the Bomana War Cemetery near Papua New Guinea’s capital city Port Moresby, 86-year-old Wesley Akove was awarded the first of a series of ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel commemorative medallions’ given by the Australian government to PNG civilians who had assisted Australian troops during the Second World War. If the awarding of Mr Akove’s medallion is in many ways an archetypal enactment of the ‘politics of recognition’, consideration of three other instances of encounter between Orokaiva people in PNG’s Oro Province and Australian colonial forces disrupt the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel trope on which this recognition ritual hinges. These encounters include the wartime executions of Orokaiva men by Australian forces, recent protests by landowners along the Kokoda Track and the murder of two European gold miners at the beginning of the twentieth century by Orokaiva warriors. Considered together, narratives about these encounters speak to an asymmetrical field of power in which Australia acts to control the terms and temporalities of the recognition it offers to wartime carriers and their descendants, enacting particular, contingent forms of relationality in ways that reproduce colonial hierarchies.     

Foucault and Technology

This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) employed the terms ‘technology’ and the ‘technique’ over the course of his intellectual career. His use of these words in his mature writings, it is argued, reflects a profound ambivalence: Foucault sought to denounce the pernicious effects of what he called modern ‘technologies of power,’ but also deliberately evoked the more positive values associated with ‘technology’ to develop a philosophical standpoint shorn of the ‘humanist’ values he associated with existentialism and phenomenology. The article situates Foucault’s condemnation of power technologies within the broader skepticism towards ‘technological society’ that pervaded French intellectual circles following World War II. In the first phase of his career (1954-1960), Foucault built on these attitudes to articulate a conventional critique of technology’s alienating effects. Between 1961 and 1972, the theme of ‘technology’ fell into abeyance in his work, though he often suggested a connection between the rise of technology and the advent of the ‘human sciences.’ Between 1973 and 1979, ‘technology’ became a keyword in Foucault’s lexicon, notably when he coined the phrase ‘technologies of power’. He continued to use the term in the final stage of his career (1980-1984), when his emphasis shifted from power to ‘technologies of the self.’ The essay concludes by addressing Paul Forman’s thesis on the primacy of science in modernity and of technology in modernity, suggesting that in many respects Foucault is more of a modernist than a postmodernist.     

Seeing the churches like the state: taxes and wealth redistribution in late antique Italy

Two key economic questions tend to be asked about the transformation of the Roman world. First, how did Roman fiscal structures continue, disintegrate and transform? Second, how did emerging churches play a role in the redistribution of wealth through new administrative structures to create a new social system, what Ian Wood has called a ‘temple society’? These two processes – one focussing on the continuity or discontinuity of the Roman economic structures and the other on churches within that system – are usually examined separately or assumed to follow, what we call here, a ‘Gallic model’. In this article, we first demonstrate that Wood’s ‘temple society’ is far more complex in its emergence in Italy than in Gaul. Second, we argue that the churches of Italy remained embedded within late Roman fiscal structures, even as they transformed during late antiquity. Fiscal arrangements, examined through the churches of Rome and Ravenna, established churches as ever more central economic actors to the state fiscal system by 600 and shaped their long-term wealth redistribution process.     

Dress-code: gender performance and misbehavior in the manor

This article is a queer reading of the architecture of Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf's mansion Mårbacka. Through a combination of performativity theory and architecture theory, the article addresses social and historical constructions of gender and sexuality, complicit with the entities age, class and nationality, through architecture. Architecture is explored ‘on the one hand’ as a representation of social norms and ‘on the other hand’ as a practice which can subvert them. Departing from a performative perspective on identity, the term cross-cladding is introduced as a tool to interpret architecture as dressing and thereby its complex, layered and manifold performances of gender and sexualities. The article writes a social and architectural history of what has been called ‘the most famous manor in Sweden and of Swedish manors the most famous in the world’ (Sterner 1935, 4). Mårbacka was not simply the home of Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) and her kin but also a public display of this Nobel Prize-winning first woman of the Swedish Academy – a national monument. Lagerlöf continuously worked on the main building. In 1919–1924, it was transformed with the help of the architects' office of Isak Gustaf Clason. It also appears in Lagerlöf's novels and throughout the building there are references to her books and biography. There is something queer here. The master of Mårbacka was a woman who loved women and made room for a household of women. This article discusses how architecture can represent a gendered disguise and reveals Mårbacka as an excessive, patriarchal ‘power suit’, which enabled a lifestyle that deviated from the norms of society.     

Power in Australian foreign policy

The 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper emphasises the importance of ‘maximising’ Australia’s power and influence. However, the White Paper and much of the commentary on Australian foreign policy do not clearly conceptualise ‘power’ or indicate how it ought to be increased. The Lowy Institute’s recent Asia Power Index implies one possible strategy via its resource-based approach to measuring power. We outline a different approach and argue that power should be conceptualised and evaluated as a specific relationship causing behavioural change, rather than as a general attribute of its wielder. To complement the Lowy Institute’s carefully catalogued database, and facilitate a more focused conversation about maximising power and influence in Australian foreign policy, we offer a typology identifying five pathways through which states can translate their material and non-material resources into outcomes that serve the national interest.     

Wild Colonial Ploys? Currents of Thought in Australian Foreign Policy

This article proposes a new method of mapping domestic preferences and their effect on Australian foreign policy from the perspective of three distinct ‘currents of thought’s flowing through Australian society and policy makers about Australia and the world. Traditionalism prioritises security relationships with ‘great and powerful friends’s; Seclusionism stresses autarky and minimal international involvement; Internationalism advocates a creative, multilateralist role in building international stability and prosperity. A currents of thought approach, by looking for an underlying motivation for Australian foreign policy actions, assists in understanding the policy's intent, identifying its supporters and detractors, and in anticipating what types of policy responses will be motivated by different international stimuli. It is also useful for further understanding the underlying processes behind the broad changes of direction in Australian foreign policy.     

Australian Indonesia-specialists and debates on West Papua: Implications for Australia-Indonesia relations1

This article explores the modes by which Australian scholars construct knowledge of Indonesia with particular reference to the debates on West Papua in the post-Suharto period. It examines their perceptions, beliefs and attitudes towards human rights issues with a view to analysing the underlying forces, motivations and implications of activism. This article casts doubt on a common, yet often unacknowledged, perception in Indonesia about Australian Indonesia-specialists who are categorised as: intellectuals who always see Indonesian government policies as ‘negative’.2 2. ‘Indonesia specialists’ refer to both scholars who have and who do not have formal Indonesian studies or training who get involved in the study of Indonesia and Indonesian society. Whenever I use ‘Indonesianists’, I refer to scholars who have formal Indonesia studies or training. By Australian scholars, I mean scholars who are Australian by ‘residence’. View all notes I demonstrate that the theorisation of Indonesian society has been diverse in Australia as exemplified by the West Papua debates. Australian scholars’ social positions and mobility, not government policy, shape their beliefs, attitudes and knowledge construction of Indonesia. Thus, considering Australian scholars from a monolithic perspective misses the reality that contemporary intellectual culture in Australia is no longer based on a traditional class.3 3. For an excellent discussion on contemporary intellectual culture, see Eyerman (1994 Eyerman, Ron. 1994. Between Culture and Politics: Intellectuals in Modern Society, Cambridge: Polity.  [Google Scholar]). View all notes I argue there are two major opposing groups in West Papua studies which I label as the ‘affirmative revisionist’ scholars who tend to be more optimistic towards resolution of conflicts in West Papua and the ‘sceptical reformist’ scholars who are dubious about any major changes in West Papua. This latter group believes the people of West Papua should be given the opportunity to remain integrated with Indonesia or to opt for selfdetermination. They tend to use the perceived failure of Indonesia in the protection of human rights in West Papua to attack the Indonesian government and Australian governmental agencies dealing with Indonesia. This article argues that this criticism may adversely impact on future Australia-Indonesia relations.     

Re-regulating the Gambling Industry: Regulatory Reform in Victoria and New South Wales, 1999–2006

Historically, in Australia, gambling policy and regulation have been the sole responsibility of Australian State and Territory governments. However, in 1998–99 the Commonwealth commissioned an unprecedented national inquiry into gambling that was highly critical of existing gambling policies and regulatory regimes. The Productivity Commission proposed a ‘blueprint’ for an effective, independent gambling regulatory system. Seven years on, this article revisits Australian gambling regulation to present a contextualised account of regulatory reform in Victoria and New South Wales (NSW). It finds that that they have taken a markedly different approach to structural reform. Neither State has adopted the Productivity Commission's ‘ideal’ regulatory model. Reforms have been shaped by local circumstances and government priorities, rather than the regulatory principles and functions outlined by the Productivity Commission.     

Australia and middle power approaches to Asia Pacific regionalism

This article presents a liberal-institutionalist conceptual framework drawn from Middle Power theory to analyse Australian foreign policy approaches towards Asia Pacific regionalism. Building on precedents set by the former Keating administration, the Labor government of Rudd/Gillard (2007–13) undertook high-profile efforts not only to engage, but to champion, the regionalism process in the Asia Pacific. This enterprise became fused with a self-proclaimed identity as a ‘creative middle power’. Through an analysis of regional community building, regional security architecture and regional order, the article identifies the strong linkages between the theory and practice of ‘middle power’ diplomacy, and the concept of ‘regionalism’ itself, in Australian foreign policy. The article thus contributes to the theoretical literature by exposing the important intersections between the two concepts and concludes that despite Rudd’s prolific attempts to harness Australia’s middle power credentials, Canberra was not able to significantly affect the process of Asia Pacific regionalism unilaterally.     

Class,capital, and identity in Australian society

Despite a comparatively ‘flat’ social structure and lack of obvious class-based cleavages, Australian society is stratified by objective, multidimensional measures of social class. Using data from a July 2015 survey of a random sample of Australian citizens, latent class analysis identifies six class types in Australian society, based on the distributions of cultural, social, and economic capital among respondents. The resulting classes are categorised as ‘precariat’, ‘ageing workers’, ‘new workers’, ‘mobile middle’, ‘emerging affluent’, and ‘established affluent’. The precariat is characterised by high numbers of retired pensioners, the ageing worker class the highest mean age, and the new worker class by its low rate of unemployment. The established middle class accounts for one quarter of the adult population, while the emergent affluent class has the youngest mean age, and the established affluent is the most advantaged. We also show Australians are acutely aware of their class identity.     

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.     

China's strategic partnership with Latin America: a fulcrum in China's rise

China has over the last two decades been committed to creating a strategic partnership with Latin American states by persistently extending its economic and political involvement in the continent. China's efforts in this regard reflect not only its desire to intensify its economic cooperation and political relations with nations in Latin America, but also its strategic goals of creating its own sphere of influence in the region and enhancing its ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in order to elevate China's status at the systemic level. With access to Latin American markets, resources and investment destinations, China may sustain its economic and social progress that bases its long cherished dream of restoring its past glory of fuqiang (wealth and power) and rise as a global power capable of reshaping the current world system. The enormous economic benefits deriving from their economic cooperation and trade may persuade Latin American nations to accept the basic premise of China's economic strategy: that China's rise is not a threat, but an opportunity to gain wealth and prosperity. This will help China gain more ‘soft’ power in and leverage over its economic partners in Latin America, and thereby help it to rise in the global power hierarchy.     

Organizing the ‘people’s community’: the NSDAP and the ‘ethnic Germans’ in Nazi-occupied territories

ABSTRACT

This article refers to recent scholarly debates on the term ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft), which throughout the Third Reich remained rather vague and encompassed often contradictory purposes. It deals with the relations between the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) and some of the ‘ethnic German’ (volksdeutsche) organizations to exemplify how German society should be transformed into a ‘people’s community’ after 1933. Thus, it is necessary to analyse the ‘people’s community’ not by asking whether or not its different purposes were realized, but by examining its functions in the Nazi regime. This functional analysis of the ‘people’s community’ focuses on the NSDAP and its relations with ‘ethnic German’ organizations after 1933, primarily in Nazi-occupied territories during the Second World War. First, the article describes the NSDAP’s efforts to align the ‘Germans abroad’ (Auslandsdeutsche) after the seizure of power and to organize the German Front (Deutsche Front) in the Saar territories in 1934/35—an experience serving as a blueprint for the relations between the NSDAP and ‘ethnic German’ organizations during the Second World War. Second, it evaluates the creation of the Ethnic German Community (Volksdeutsche Gemeinschaft) in the General Government and its efforts to organize ‘ethnic Germans’. Third, it interprets the foundation of the German People’s Community (Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft) in Lorraine and its ongoing attempts to establish a racial hierarchy of ‘ethnic Germans’ over the autochthonous French population. Fourth, it looks at the connection between the Germanization of Lower Styria and the launch of the Styrian Homeland Union (Steirischer Heimatbund) as an ‘ethnic German’ movement. The article argues that the NSDAP’s operational routines regarding both the German population and the ‘ethnic Germans’ living in the occupied territories shaped the ‘people’s community’.     

The Snub: Robert Menzies and the Melbourne Club

Bart Ziino’s scholarship illuminated some of the complex reasons behind thousands of Australian men’s failure to enlist for military service in the First World War. This article explores the corresponding complexity of the establishment’s response to non-enlistment. It focuses on the case of the barrister and politician Robert Menzies and the Melbourne Club, to investigate how elite gentlemen’s clubs used the concept of ‘fitness for membership’ to punish young, able-bodied non-enlistees by excluding and/or publicly criticising them. It shows that clubs’ treatment of such cases was inconsistent and internally contested, and argues that the apparently honourable discourse of loyalty that was such a fixture of elite groups in the 1920s and 1930s often masked arcane, less honourable agendas. It suggests that the establishment was more likely to punish men like Menzies who had offended doubly: not only by failing to enlist, but also by directly challenging establishment values and power.     

Shades of green: Public opinion on environmental issues in Australia

Data from the 1990 and 1993 Australian Electoral Studies are used to investigate whether public concern about the environment has declined in Australia over recent years. Questions of the ranking and structure of environmental concerns and of levels of support for environmental organisations are addressed. The data show that public concern about the environment remains high on an ‘agenda of long‐term issues’, that environmental concerns form two distinct clusters (termed ‘brown’ and ‘green') and that active support for environmental organisations correlates only with the green cluster. It is argued that these findings give no more than partial support to the ‘organisational’, ‘postmaterialist’ and ‘risk society’ perspectives on environmental issues.     

‘Annamese Coolies’ at Australian Ports: Charting Colonial Geographies of Emotion,and Settler Memory,from French Vietnam to New Caledonia via Interwar Australia

In 1927, a ship carrying indentured Vietnamese workers travelled down the eastern coast of Australia on its way to New Caledonia. The movement of the Ville d’Amiens steamer through Australian waters sparked protests against alleged ‘French slavery’ and, eventually, moved politicians to recall the ‘injustice’ of the ‘pre-White Australia’ era. This article uses the Ville d’Amiens episode as a portal through which to explore the nexus between geographies of colonialism and of emotion. It argues that colonial and national power operated in pervasively ‘triangular’ ways, via the interplay of an affective triangle – of guilt, shame and pride – and a geo-political triangle – of French Vietnam, Australia and New Caledonia. Further, the article calls for greater exploration of the historical, geo-spatial contingencies of memory, motion and emotion.