Enshrined in Law: Legislative Justifications for the Removal of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Children in Colonial and Post-Colonial Australia

While the completion of two different inquiries, along with separate apologies and reparation packages, might suggest that the policies justifying the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in Australia were distinct, the situation is far more complex. Both child and ‘native’ welfare were colonial and later state responsibilities, creating the potential for policies and practices to be informed by different forces and to vary by jurisdiction. However, by analysing the debates around legislation from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article establishes commonalities as well as differences in both the arguments used to justify Indigenous and non-Indigenous child removal and the practices that evolved in the implementation of such legislation. By interrogating such arguments through the lens of whiteness and race, the article identifies the role which child removal was imagined to play in the process of building the settler colonial nation.     

The Rehabilitation of an Uncomfortable Past: Everyday Life in Vietnam during the Subsidy Period (1975–1986)

In 2006, the Museum of Ethnology organized a special exhibit on everyday life in Hanoi during the “subsidy period”, the term increasingly used to describe the decade of high socialism that began in 1975 with the reunification of a divided Vietnam and ended in 1986 with the official introduction of market reforms known as ??i m?i (Renovation). The representational strategies, which linked the collectivism of the past with the individualism of the present, prompted a nationwide discussion regarding the significance of a moment that previously had no clear name or place in official accounts due to the severe hardships it produced. The details presented demonstrate how the rehabilitation of this decade has expanded the political boundaries of what state institutions can present as having historical and ethnographic value in Vietnam as well as opened new avenues for comparative studies with (former) socialist states elsewhere.     

Making leeway in the Leewards, 1929–51: The negotiation of colonial development

Britain began to sponsor economic development in its colonial territories under the Colonial Development Act of 1929. The first CDA project was for housing on Antigua; other schemes for the Leewards soon followed. The isolation and poverty of this colony highlighted the practical difficulties of promoting development. Challenges included the negotiation of new methods of administration. Governors conceded autonomy in return for assistance; under pressure from Treasury, the Colonial Office learned how to supervise far-flung projects, while its subject departments gained influence at the expense of the regional. Trial and error in the design and supervision of projects on the Leewards provided information about what types of housing policy were cost-effective and acceptable locally. By the 1950s the advice of United States experts also made itself felt. Funds provided under the CDA and later development Acts were limited, but they transformed the machinery and influenced the content of colonial policy.     

Ideology and British expansion in Bengal, 1757–72

Accounts of the early stages of British expansion in India have tended to emphasise its unplanned and opportunistic character; they have often seen the motors of expansion lying within unstable Indian states or in the need of the East India Company to meet the costs of fast-growing armies. Reviewing the evidence from Bengal between 1757 and 1772, this article argues that a distinctive kind of frontier patriotism generated in the East India Company's Indian settlements constituted an important ideological context for its conquests. Company servants routinely derided Indian rulers as Asiatic despots, or ‘faithless’ Muslims. Their sense of Indian rulers as degenerate and corrupt both fuelled military aggression, and also made some Britons suppose that the East India Company could effect rapid reforms in Bengal, drawing out previously untapped surpluses from the agrarian base. At the same time, the need to forge alliances within the old regime encouraged some Company officials to adopt a more conciliatory tone, and to imagine that viable systems of political order existed within the traditions of the Mughal empire.     

Ideology and the Retreat From Personhood

Abstract

In this paper I make two primary arguments. First, I argue that what makes totalitarian regimes distinctive and leads to their hyper-repressive atmosphere is ideology. Such regimes are totalitarian precisely because they are ideological. These regimes are thus better termed and understood as “ideocracies.” Second, I attempt to depict in precise terms how ideological regimes attack the human person to disable agency and responsibility. Numerous authors such as Václav Havel and Czeslaw Milosz have argued that living in an atmosphere saturated by ideological lies has a very profound effect on the human person. Very few authors, however, have even attempted to delineate how ideology does this work. First, I examine one such attempt by Hannah Arendt. Then I use the resources of phenomenology and the work of Robert Sokolowski to give my own account of how ideological thinking and ideological language attack human agency.