Ethnic Land Rights in Western Ghana: Landlord–Stranger Relations in the Democratic Era

In Citizen and Subject (1996), Mahmood Mamdani denounced the ‘bifurcated nature’ of the African state which, in his account, imposed ethnic hierarchy and chiefly despotism on rural dwellers while reserving democratic citizenship for the urban minority. Have twenty years of ‘decentralized democracy’ in many countries washed away these distinctions? This article takes up this issue in an analysis of the politics of land allocation and landlord–stranger relations in Western Ghana. An analysis of historical trajectories, and our own field observations and interviews in two Western Region districts, suggest that at the local level, the bifurcated character of political authority that was identified by Mamdani persists in the domain of economic rights. The record also shows that state policies and institutions, rather than working to chip away at ethnic hierarchy and chiefly authority, work at least in part to reproduce these features of the local political economy. In both non‐democratic and democratic eras, Ghana's central government has played an important role in shoring up chiefly and ethnic privilege in the land domain. These local hierarchies influence the practical meaning of democracy and economic liberalization for rural citizens, and should be explored more systematically in future studies of democratic and electoral politics in Ghana and elsewhere.     

‘We will make the happy tremble’: triumphal victimhood in Charles Robert Maturin's The Milesian Chief

Charles Robert Maturin’s The Milesian Chief (1812), long neglected, may now be ripe for closer attention, particularly for its evocation of the imagined power of suffering over audiences. Deploying a structure supplied by Sidney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl and Madame De Staël’s Corinne, the novel dramatizes the arrival of a cosmopolitan heroine in Ireland, her tortured romance with an Irish nobleman, and their ultimate destruction in a rebellion vaguely reminiscent of those of 1798 and 1803. Less useful for its insight into national history than for its almost anthropological grasp of deeply changing patterns of desire, the novel dramatises a struggle that ends in a striking triumphalism little noted by previous critics. The concepts of René Girard and Eric Gans are used to assess the work’s rhetoric of victimhood and its insistent emphasis on the effect of renunciations of desire on adversaries individual and collective.     

Provisioning of the Inka army in wartime: obsidian procurement in Pambamarca,Ecuador

Ninety-nine obsidian artifacts from fortified and non-fortified sites in the Pambamarca region of northern Ecuador were analyzed with XRF to examine patterns of procurement of obsidian by soldiers in the Inka army and by the local Cayambes who were resisting Inka conquest. The results show that the Inkas acquired material from several different sources, a pattern consistent with provisioning by subject peoples in partial fulfillment of labor obligations. The Cayambes also acquired material from multiple sources, although they may not have directly procured material from all of the sources because the external boundary of Inka territory bisected the region of obsidian sources. That frontier may have prevented the Inkas from accessing one source, Callejones, from which the Cayambes acquired some of their obsidian. In addition, the Inkas were acquiring some obsidian from the Yanaurco-Quiscatola source, which had been previously abandoned around AD 1000.