Searle's Social Reality

Book reviewed in this article:
The Construction of Social Reality by John R. Searle     

Drought,Domestic Budgeting and Wealth Distribution in Sahelian Households

Over the past twenty‐five years, Sahelian households have experienced recurrent harvest failure and greater reliance on remittances from migratory wage labour. Household subsistence has become less dependent on household grain stores and more on the liquidation of individual wealth stores. This study investigates how these broader changes have affected struggles between household members over obligations to support the household in the Zarmaganda region of western Niger. As the land‐derived leverage of male patriarchs has declined and household dependence on individual wealth stores has increased, domestic budgeting has become more contested. Household heads make case‐by‐case moral claims on other household members during times of grain shortage. Women and subordinate males invoke Islamic law, which accords primary provisioning responsibility to the household head, to protect their individual wealth in times of grain deficit. This article investigates the nature of these budgetary struggles, showing how individuals’ decisions to contribute individual wealth to support the household are best understood as highly situated, affected not only by the specific material conditions of the household but also the interplay of the moral, structural, and individualistic imperatives that derive from one’s position within the household. Using reconstructed livestock wealth histories for the members of fifty‐four households in western Niger, this study investigates the material consequences of these struggles. Male heads of corporate households, the historic managers of the household’s land and agricultural labour, have lost wealth relative to their wives and married male subordinates since the drought of 1984.     

Post‐Conditionality Politics and Administrative Reform: Reflections on the Cases of Uganda and Tanzania

This article contributes to the discussion of the nature of external intervention in the reform processes of indebted states. Looking at administrative reform in Uganda and Tanzania, it is argued that external involvement in sub‐Saharan Africa is becoming increasingly differentiated. For some states — including the two cases dealt with here — a key set of continuities and changes allows us to conceptualize a regime of post‐conditionality. Post‐conditionality regimes exist where extreme external dependence and economic growth produce a set of political dynamics in which external–national distinctions become less useful, in which there emerge a set of unequal mutual dependencies, and in which donor/creditor involvement in reform becomes qualitatively more intimate, pervading the form and processes of the state. Details of this dispensation are provided in an analysis of key ministries and key interventions by donors/creditors. The article finishes by considering the contradictions of the post‐conditionality regime, and its prospects.     

Putting the border in place: customs regulation in the making of the Irish border, 1921–1945

This paper explores the historical geography of the making of the Irish border through a focus on the practices of customs regulation through which it was constituted and on the impeded, permitted and concealed mobilities of people and objects across the customs boundary after 1923. It traces how legislative change at the level of the state – in this case the governments of the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom – was translated into the routine practices of those trying to regulate the movement of people and objects across the customs boundary, and considers the responses of those subject to, and regularly subverting, these efforts. Drawing on recent interests in the prosaic practices of the state, and in materiality and mobility more widely, our focus is both on the work of political power at the border through the practices, texts, tools and techniques of customs regulation, and on the experience and effects of customs control for those living near the newly defined line between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State.     

Northern Ireland Representation at Westminster: Constitutional Conundrums and Political Manœuvres

This article focuses on the issue of Northern Ireland's representation at Westminster. It investigates the political context of the decision to increase Northern Ireland's representation in the house of commons at Westminster from 12 members to 17 in 1978–9. Exploring this episode in more detail, it is argued, provides a more informed overall understanding of the history of devolution in the UK and of the way issues concerning Northern Ireland often overlapped with questions of constitutional change in Scotland and Wales. The article also throws light on the matter of Northern Ireland MPs and their voting rights at Westminster during Northern Ireland's experience of devolution prior to 1972.