Thomas Hobbes and the Term ‘Right Reason’: Participation to Calculation

Three times between 1640 and 1651, once at considerable length, Hobbes used and accepted, and then mocked, repudiated and discarded, the ancient/medieval term recta ratio/right reason. These repeated fluctuations in his thinking and rhetorical strategy occurred during the writing of his three major treatises on moral and political theory, one additional note on the term in De Cive, and an unpublished commentary on Thomas White's De Mundo. They are made obvious by his substitution of recta ratio for reason or natural reason when recycling passages from Elements of the Law for use in De Cive, and by his subsequent reversal of that substitution when revising other passages in De Cive for use in Leviathan. Despite incorporating recta ratio as a structural element in De Cive, he finally reverted in Leviathan to regarding the term as a deceptive verbal construct, non-existent in rerum natura, and ridiculing its users and proponents. Right reason carried connotations linked to it in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, and Hobbes's reversals in his view and use of it, and his final dismissal of it, provide further evidence and justification for the now familiar modern claim that he was a herald of modernity.     

Unlikely amazons: Brazilian indigenous gender constructs in a modern context

Feminist theory predicts that when traditional societies with egalitarian gender relations contact European state societies in which gender stratification exists, the traditional society will adopt the European gender construct. This rule may be modified in cases where the relations between the two types of society are modulated by interpretive processes which allow the state society to appropriate symbols of the indigenous culture for their own purposes, and the indigenous society to shape contact and change as they occur. This article describes how European contact transformed gender constructs among the Bakairí Indians of central Brazil, while accounting for the presence of an anomalous group of women who behave differently to the typical Indian woman. It explains how individual Bakairí, along with the support of key Brazilian institutions, have employed interpretively the early-contact indigenous version of the female gender role to authenticate the indigenous identity.     

Mary Ellis (1897–1907): Workhorse of the South Australian Mosquito Fleet

In 2006, as part of the Flinders University Maritime Archaeology Field School, Department of Archaeology staff and students excavated and recorded the remains of the Australian-built ketch Mary Ellis . Colonial-period Australian shipbuilding has, for the past 20 years, been considered one of the most important themes in Australian maritime archaeology. This paper presents a summary of field investigations and a preliminary interpretation of the shipwreck, which adds to the slowly-building dataset on this theme of Australian maritime archaeology.
© 2008 The Authors     

Bioarchaeology in the United Arab Emirates*

Physical anthropology and bioarchaeology (one of the newer interdisciplinary sub‐disciplines) are alive and well in the U.A.E. Older analytical approaches that rely on subjective observations and non‐systematic study of human remains are being replaced with more biocultural and processual approaches that integrate biological data from human remains within a broader archaeological and cultural context. With the publication of a major synthetic work based on analysis of the human remains from Jebel al‐Buhais, a new era of skeletal analysis in the U.A.E. has been heralded. This short review examines the ways that skeletal analysis can be integrated within broader archaeological contexts.     

Christmas in the Workhouse: Staging Philanthropy in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical

This article provides an overview of the representation of workhouse philanthropy in the nineteenth-century periodical. In the 1830s and 40s, the popular representation of the workhouse was of a cruel institution in which paupers were systematically beaten and starved. However, the ideological significance of the workhouse shifts in the depictions of privately funded philanthropy that proliferated in magazines and newspapers during the Christmas publishing season. In representations of the workhouse at Christmas, paupers are shown receiving gifts and enjoying entertainments against a festively decorated backdrop. Middle-class benevolence is at the heart of these Christmas performances: these treats are not funded by the poor rates, but by individuals, who are frequently depicted in attendance at the workhouse Christmas. The institution, now redolent with ideas of care, charity and goodwill, functions in these texts as a stage for the projection of a bourgeois philanthropic self; the reader, the audience of this ideological performance, is encouraged to self-identify with the middle-class values that overlay these workhouse scenes. Entwined with these depictions of private philanthropy are underlying ideas of discipline and control. Just as the middle-class guests enact an idealized identity, so too do the paupers enact the role of the indebted and grateful poor. This article examines how the nineteenth-century periodical constructs the workhouse as a performance space for the middle classes; it explores the various agendas of these constructions and analyses the ideological messages they convey.