Apollo alone and adrift in Samoa; early mead reconsidered

Derek Freeman. Margaret Mead and Samoa; the Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983. 375 pp. $20.00     

An Angel on the Wind: How Heroic Policy Narratives Shape Policy Realities

Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a new and maturing theory of the policy process that takes a systematic, scientific approach to understanding the social construction of policy realities. As such, NPF serves as a bridge between postpositivists, who assert that public policymaking is contextualized through narratives and social construction, and positivists, who contend that legitimacy is grounded in falsifiable claims. The central questions of NPF are: What is the empirical role of policy narratives in the policy process and do policy narratives influence policy outcomes? First, the contributions of NPF scholarship at three levels of analysis—micro, meso, and macro—are examined. Next, necessary conditions of a policy narrative are specified, accompanied by detailed discussion of the narrative components: narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. Finally, an empirical illustration of NPF—a case study of Cape Wind's proposal to install wind turbines off Nantucket—is presented. Although intercoalitional differences have long been studied in the NPF scholarship, this is the first study to examine intracoalitional cohesion or the extent to which a coalition tells the same story across narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. NPF is a new approach to the study of the policy process that offers empirical pathways to better speculating the role of narrative in the policy process.     

The Secret History of TANU: Rumor,Historiography and Muslim Unrest in Contemporary Dar Es Salaam

This article explores historical rumors and narratives told by Muslims of Dar es Salaam, contending that Julius Nyerere, TANU founder and first president of independent Tanzania, was an inexperienced schoolteacher thrust into the role of political activist through sponsorship of the Muslim community. This history was allegedly hidden by the current government to cover up not only Nyerere’s meteoric rise to a position of leadership, but also subsequent actions that wrested the movement from Muslims and other early TANU leaders to monopolize power for himself and upcountry elites. Just as academic historians critique the teleological trajectory of many nationalist histories, these rumors critique Tanzanian nationalist history through appropriating its historiographic form to forefront postcolonial grievances. The discursive nature of such rumors articulates the discontent permeating the postcolonial Muslim community of Dar es Salaam. And as political speech in action, rumors are instrumental in mobilizing new postcolonial political configurations.     

Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence: An International History

This article focuses on Australia's response to the joint Anglo-American effort to expand military facilities on the island of Diego Garcia in early 1970s. The primary emphasis will be on the Whitlam government's rationale behind its diplomatic manoeuvre towards great power rivalries in the Indian Ocean and its supportive position towards the concept of building the Indian Ocean as a peace zone. It argues that the Whitlam government's policy towards the international diplomacy around Diego Garcia contributed to the shaping of a unique Australian foreign policy, one free from attachment to British and American considerations, although still mindful of the need to factor the interests of the UK and the USA into Australia's calculations of its own best interests.     

A short-snouted trematosauroid (Tetrapoda,Temnospondyli) from the Early Triassic of Australia: the oldest known trematosaurine

The trematosauroid temnospondyl Tirraturhinus smisseni gen. et sp. nov. from the Arcadia Formation of central Queensland, Australia, is described on the basis of its rostrum. This is the first trematosaurine (short-snouted) trematosauroid from Australia, and is considered to be most closely related to Tertrema acuta from Spitzbergen. Tirraturhinus smisseni occurs alongside lonchorhynchine (long-snouted) trematosauroids in the Arcadia Formation; the co-occurrence of both trematosauroid morphotypes in that fauna is repeated in a number of non-marine Early Triassic faunas elsewhere in Pangaea. The Arcadia Formation is probably Griesbachian (earliest Triassic), so that T. smisseni is the oldest known trematosaurine.     

Fridtjof Nansen and the Aegean population exchange

This article examines Fridtjof Nansen’s role in elaborating the compulsory Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923–1924. Thrust into a spiralling crisis, the League’s High Commissioner took on humanitarian, representational and negotiating roles having long-term as well as immediate impact, while the Norwegian’s emergence at Lausanne as chief spokesman for an agreement widely considered reprehensible invites scrutiny of his interventions. Drawing on recent publications and key archival sources, the analysis presses four strands of argument. First, while Nansen helped articulate the exchange idea along with Greece’s Eleftherios Venizelos, he neither originated it nor provided the essential political impetus. Second, Nansen’s oft-cited ‘first mention’ of making it compulsory assigns him a misleadingly strong role in a solution chiefly engineered by Kemal’s Turkey. Third, his impact on the agreement’s scope, involving exemptions for minority populations in Western Thrace and Constantinople, was limited. Fourth, Nansen’s ultimate push for a lasting settlement blended pragmatism with strategic vision. Subsequent delays and wider political failure not of his making to secure equitable property exchange highlighted the harsher aspects of a deal all the main parties in fact favoured, Nansen recognized as necessary and which thwarted a still worse calamity.     

‘Fare di ogni famiglia italiana un fortilizio’: The League of Nations' economic sanctions and everyday life in Venice 1

Abstract

The imposition of punitive sanctions against Italy by the League of Nations in November 1935 in response to the invasion of Ethiopia, a fellow league member, provided the fascist regime with an opportunity to mobilize the civilian population into ‘resistance’ against the ‘economic siege’ and to promote its ideals of nationalism, imperialist expansion and autarchy. This article examines the way in which the fascist authorities in Venice, aided by a supportive local press, sought to use the sanctions and ‘sanctions resistance’ to engage Venetians – especially women – in the fascist project and explores the effect of the anti-sanctions resistance measures on Venetians' daily lives. Placing importance both upon the regime's intentions as well as Venetians' reception of the anti-sanctions rhetoric, and drawing upon Michel de Certeau's observations on The Practice of Everyday Life, the article argues that Venetians' reception of such propaganda was characterized above all by confusion and by a multiplicity of personal choices and reactions, spanning a range of possible responses from unequivocal support through passive acceptance or indifference to outright rejection or subversion of the sanctions resistance measures that sought to elicit consent for the fascist project.