Kingdoms of the Cameroon Grassfields

The three volumes considered here offer significant contributions to studies of African kingship and contribute to an emergent political anthropology of the Grassfields. Each adopts an approach on a sliding scale of emphasis on evidence and interpretation. Fardon takes a strongly evidence-based approach, reflecting recent methodological concerns in anthropology, which invites challenge and dialogue. Warnier presents an innovative methodological paradigm which emphasizes interpretation through observation of human action in engagement with material culture. Argenti takes the view that slave raiding underpins state formation and masquerades, and presents his own interpretations in that light. His approach resonates strongly with contemporary moral concerns about the Atlantic slave trade but lacks historical evidence.     

The Right that failed ? The ambiguities of conservative thought and the dilemmas of conservative practice in international affairs

This article seeks to assess the dilemmas and ambiguities of contemporary Anglo-American conservative thought and practice in international affairs. It bases its discussion in an understanding of conservative thought as a philosophy of imperfection but points out that there is a dominant way in which this has been understood in the last two hundred years but a rather different sensibility as well. It then argues that the dominant sensibility has become mired in crisis in the latter part of the twentieth century and as a result movements have arisen, allegedly within conservative thought, but in fact largely alien to it, and which now dominate the scene, especially in the United States. It seeks to trace the differences between the US and UK in this respect and offers an interpretation of the relative paucity of conservative thought-and oscillations and ambiguity of conservative practice-in the UK in the 1990s. Finally, the article offers some thoughts, drawn from that secondary sensibility in political conservatism, about what might be done.     

Generations,Mobility and Community: Geographies of Three Generations of Greek and Italian Ancestry in Sydney

Geographies of three generations of Greek and Italian ancestry in Sydney totalling 245 000 people in 2001 are identified. A model of community sequences is developed within a conceptual framework of intergenerational spatial, occupational and social absorption. Considerable intra‐ and inter‐generational occupational mobility took place and the third generations showed higher proportions as managers, professionals and associate professionals than persons of Australian ancestry. Second and third generations had occupational profiles which were much closer to the host society than the first generations. Despite occupational mobility, employment, residential and social trends associated with the first generations affected the adult second generations and to an extent the third. Several thousand members of three generations re‐grouped into successive local communities, patronised facilities in core communities, and maintained place identities.     

DIAGNOSING FROUDE'S DISEASE: BOUNDARY WORK AND THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY IN LATE‐VICTORIAN BRITAIN

Historians looking to make history a professional discipline of study in Victorian Britain believed they had to establish firm boundaries demarcating history from other literary disciplines. James Anthony Froude ignored such boundaries. The popularity of his historical narratives was a constant reminder of the continued existence of a supposedly overturned phase of historiography in which the historian was also a man of letters, transcending the boundary separating fact from fiction and literature from history. Just as professionalizing historians were constructing a methodology that called on historians to be inductive empirical workers, Froude refused to accept the new science of history, and suggested instead that history was an individual enterprise, one more concerned with drama and art than with science. E. A. Freeman warned the historical community that they “cannot welcome [Froude] as a partner in their labors, as a fellow‐worker in the cause of historic truth.” This article examines the boundary work of a professionalizing history by considering the attempt to exclude Froude from the historian's discourse, an attempt that involved a communal campaign that sought to represent Froude as “constitutionally inaccurate.” Froude suffered from “an inborn and incurable twist,” argued Freeman, thereby diagnosing “Froude's disease” as the inability to “make an accurate statement about any matter.” By unpacking the construction of “Froude's disease,” the article exposes the disciplinary techniques at work in the professionalization of history, techniques that sought to exclude non‐scientific modes of thought such as that offered by Froude.     

A Strategic Framework for Monitoring Coastal Change in Australia's Wet-dry Tropics – Concepts and Progress

A strategic framework for monitoring natural and human-induced change in the coastal plains of the Alligator Rivers Region in the wet-dry tropics of northern Australia is presented. The framework also supports refinement of methods used to monitor the vulnerability of coastal areas to change, including human-induced climate change and sea-level rise. The information derived through the framework can be used to assess scenarios, highlight the potential significance and implications of changes, and assist land managers formulate management responses. The framework incorporates several large-scale studies for monitoring atmospheric and hydrodynamic processes as well as mapping and monitoring projects specific to environmental change in the freshwater wetlands and the floodplains of the Region. Monitoring is proposed to address processes influencing the stability and rate of change of the floodplain environments. These include large-scale processes, such as inter-annual variability in weather conditions affecting the morphology of the coastal plains, shoreline and riverbank stabilisation, headward expansion of tidal creeks, and salinisation of freshwater basins. Information management is also addressed, and a Geographic Information System structure proposed for effective data collation, analysis and management. The information management system will facilitate data sharing and participation of multiple agencies and organisations interested in coastal change, especially where a landscape perspective or whole ecosystem approach is advocated.