‘Defending the race’: the Italian reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism

Abstract In 1938 the regime's popular periodical La Difesa della Razza published the portrait of Saartjie Baartman (a Khoisan woman known to the western world as ‘The Hottentot Venus’) to discourage miscegenation in the empire of Italian East Africa. But by 1938, Italian public and scientific interest in the Hottentot Venus had long faded away. In addition, readily available photographs of Italo-Eritreans could have been used to show the ‘outcome’ of miscegenation. Why then did the regime's organ publish a portrait of ‘The Hottentot Venus’? This article addresses this question, and explores how Baartman's story could serve the regime's aim of forging a new ‘racial consciousness’ among Italians. By focusing on the transformation of scientific discourses from the 1850s to the late 1930s, and on their silences, the article illuminates the process through which some of the regime's anthropologists constructed a new, ‘made in Italy’ story for the Hottentot Venus. Deliberately leaving out all the main issues long debated during the previous century, they turned this figure into an empty icon to support Fascist colonial obsession with the purity and prestige of the Italian race.     

Pre-pottery farmers on the Pacific coast of southern Mexico

Large island-like shell mounds along the southern coast of Mexico are the earliest known archaeological sites on the Pacific margin of Mesoamerica. These aceramic deposits date to between 7500 and 3800 cal BP and have been interpreted as locations where foragers, living elsewhere seasonally on the coastal plain, harvested shellfish and other estuarine resources. Based on an accumulation of paleoecological data from elsewhere in the lowland Neotropics of Mesoamerica, southern Central America and South America we pose and provide a first test of an alternative subsistence model: that the Archaic Period populations in this area were slash and burn farmers. Burned maize phytoliths first appear in these sedimentary records at 6500 cal BP in association with macroscopic charcoal and forest disturbance plant taxa. Periodic burning and forest disturbance, consistent with farming activities, are also evident in the macroscopic charcoal record between 6500 and 4700 cal BP. Pollen, phytolith and charcoal records all point to sustained burning, forest disturbance and the cultivation of maize between 4700 and 3800 cal BP. These data suggest that people were slash and burn farming during the Archaic Period prior to the adoption of pottery and the proliferation of Early Formative Period villages and full-fledged agriculture based on near or total reliance on crop plants after ∼3800 cal BP.     

Scraps of English Folklore,XII.

EUROPEAN BALLADRY. By WILLIAM J. ENTWISTLE. Oxford : at the Clarendon Press (Humphrey Milford). 1939. xii +404 pages. 17s. 6d. Reviewed by Edward M. Wilson.

THE FOLK LITERATURE OF A YUCATAN TOWN. By MARGARET PARK REDFIELD. 4to. Pp. 50. Contributions to American Archaeology, 13. Carnegie Institution of Washington. 1935. Reviewed by F. J. Norton.     

Harvest Rites in Ireland

LES FONCTIONS MENTALES DANS LES SOCIÉTÉS INFÉRIEURES. Par L. LÉVY-BRUHL. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1910. 8vo, pp. 461. Reviewed by E. A. Hooton.

THE FOLK-LORE OF HEREFORDSHIRE. Collected from Oral and Printed Sources. By ELLA MARY LEATHER. Intro, by EDWIN SIDNEY HARTLAND. Sidgwick &; Jackson, 1912. Large 8vo, pp. xxviii + 288. Ill. Reviewed by Charlotte S. Burne.

JOURNAL OF THE FOLK-SONG SOCIETY. NO. 16 (Vol. IV., Part iii., December 1911). A Collection of one hundred and five Songs of Occupation from the Western Isles of Scotland. Compiled by Miss FRANCES TOLMIE. 19 Berners Street, W., 1911. 4to, xiv, 143–278 + ix. Reviewed by K. W. Grant.

LA RELIGIONE PRIMITIVA IN SARDEGNA. By RAFFAELE PETTAZZONI. Piacenza: Societá Editrice Pontremolese, 1912. 8vo, pp. xxiii + 253. Reviewed by R. R. Marett.

LA CHANSON POPULAIRE DE L'ILE DE CORSE. Par AUSTIN DE CROZE. Avec conclusion de M. PAUL FONTANA. Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1911. 16mo, pp. xv + 188. Reviewed by A. M. Spoer.

LE LÉGENDAIRE DU MONT SAINT-MICHEL. Par ÉTIENNE DUPONT. Paris: Robert Duval, 1911. Sm. 8vo, pp. xlvii + 173.

THEMIS. A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. By JANE ELLEN HARRISON. With an Excursus on the Ritual Forms preserved in Greek Tragedy by Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, and a Chapter on the Origin of the Olympic Games by Mr. F. M. CORNFORD. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1912. 8vo, pp. xxxii + 559. Ill. Reviewed by W. Crooke.

LA SOCIÉTÉ MUSULMANE DU MAGHRIB. MAGIE ET RELIGION DANS L'AFRIQUE DU NORD. Par EDMOND DOUTTÉ. Alger: Typographie Adolphe Jourdan, 1909. 8vo, pp. vi + 617. Reviewed by E. Sidney Hartland.

THE SUK : THEIR LANGUAGE AND FOLKLORE. By MERVYN W. H. BEECH. With Intro, by Sir Charles Eliot. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. 8vo, pp. xxiv + 152. Maps and ill. Reviewed by A. R. Wright.

THE LAND OF UZ. By ABDULLAH MANSÛR (G. Wyman Bury). Macmillan, 1911. 8vo, pp. xxvii + 354. Ill. Reviewed by Hans H. Spoer.

MATERINSKAYA FILIACIYA v VOSTOCHNOY 1 CENTRALNOY AZII. [Mother-right in Eastern and Central Asia]. V?p. 1. Materinskaya Filiaciya u Kitaycev, Koreycev i Yaponcev [Mother-right in China, Korea, and Japan]. V?p. 2. Materinskaya Filiaciya u Tibetcev, Mongolov, Myaocz?, Lolo i Tai [Mother-right among the Tibetans, Mongols, Miaotzu, Lolos, and Tai]. By NICHOLAS MATSOKIN. Vladivostock, 1910–11. 8vo, pp. 40, iv + 147. Reviewed by M. Trophimoff.     

Cultural spending in Ontario,Canada: trends in public and private funding

Governments around the world have accepted the idea that spending on culture can have economic side‐effects such as attracting high technology industry, regenerating urban economies, or increasing a country’s status in the global economy. As governments increased their cultural spending, however, critics charged that their interest reflected an instrumental approach to funding the arts that prioritized large cultural organizations and iconic building projects with the potential to attract tourists over more mundane matters such as operating funding. This study examines flows of government and private funding to cultural organizations in the province of Ontario, Canada on the basis of the size of these organizations. The data show that in real terms, government operating grants to organizations that have received large infrastructural grants for building projects were lower in 2006 than in the pre‐spending cut era of 1990. When a larger group of arts organizations is examined by size, the reality is more complicated than either advocates or critics of the instrumental approach claim. One universal pattern across all size categories is the increase in private funding to cultural organizations in Ontario.