The secessionist spectre: the influence of authoritarianism,nativism and populism on support for Quebec independence

In recent years, Quebec has been undergoing a re‐evaluation of immigration and integration policies. The secessionist Parti Québécois had become the leader of this debate, which also coincided with a rise of right‐wing nativist, populist and sometimes authoritarian movements in other Western societies. This paper aims to evaluate the similarity or dissimilarity of Quebec's nationalism to these other nationalisms. We use the 2015 Canadian Election Study data to explore the influence of authoritarianism, nativism and populism directly on support for secession and also, indirectly, on voting intentions. We find that authoritarianism has a negative influence on support for Quebec independence and independentist parties, while the pattern is the opposite, and the effects somewhat weaker, for nativism and populism. Hence, we argue that Quebec nationalism does not seem to correlate with the right‐wing populist movement extending throughout many Western societies. Thus, Quebec nationalism was shown to be a distinct form of nationalism.     

Crossing boundaries in the Mediterranean: papal trade licences from the Registra supplicationum of Pope Clement VI (1342–52)

This article examines a number of ‘trade licences’ issued during the pontificate of Clement VI, found predominantly in the unpublished Vatican Registra supplicationum. These licences were privileges granted to merchants exempting them from the papal ban on trade with the Muslim world. The article argues that the licences can demonstrate, amongst other things, that merchants were more concerned with their spiritual welfare and the ramifications of illegal trade than has often been presumed, and that the papacy was aware of the need for merchants to have contact with Muslims, in contradiction to the view of a fundamental opposition between the Church and Islam during the period. They provide a valuable insight into the changing Western attitudes towards contact with different Muslim groups in the Mediterranean, and also shed considerable light on the complex interaction between mercantile objectives and religion in the Middle Ages.     

‘Traditional’ Healers,Speaking and Motivation in Vava'u,Tonga: Explaining Syncretism and Addressing Health Policy

ABSTRACT Bilateral health system development in Tonga is implicated in a misrepresentation of ‘traditional’ healing that has serious implications for the provision of health care. It has strengthened the tendency to homogenise and stereotype a diverse body of healers in counter distinction with biomedicine. The diversity of and syncretism in non‐biomedical local healing practice is little appreciated in policy debates. Addressing the epistemological, social and linguistic context of syncretism in terms sensitive to healers' concerns and conceptualisations is vital to build on the pre‐existing collaborations between health professionals and a diverse body of healers in a country that has experienced a marked shift from communicable to non‐communicable disorders. This paper examines the diversity and syncretism of five of the most popular ‘spirit’ healers in Vava'u, Tonga in terms suggested by healers themselves using the Tongan concept and value of tauhi vaha'a (to evoke and intensify relatedness) as an analytic tool. The creativity implied in healers' socially constitutive use of language with ancestors, relatives, patients, churches and the hospital questions the value of any notion of traditionality and suggests considerable grounds for collaboration.     

Theorising other, ‘other childhoods’: Issues emerging from work on HIV in urban and rural Zimbabwe

This paper agrees that universal models of childhood must be unpacked in order to reveal the diversity of ‘other childhoods’ in the global south, but argues that local, culturally specific understandings of childhood also need to be theorised and deconstructed. We attempt to do this by exploring experiences that are ‘other’ to ‘other childhoods’ and so examine the ‘un-childlike’ issues of young peoples' sexual health and child household headship in Zimbabwe. We contend that a century of contestation around the social production of identities in and through space has produced local contemporary understandings of childhood that seriously endanger youngsters in an era of HIV/AIDS. We argue both that other dimensions of ‘other childhoods’ must be recognised locally and that local understandings of childhood require greater international recognition if the pandemic is to be tackled. Finally, our exploration of these ‘margins’ of human experience lead us to believe that children must be understood both as competent and independent agents of social change and as vulnerable social becomings in need of protection.     

The Angelic Brethren and Everyday Sacredness: A Protestant Theologian's Journey from Berlin to Leiden in 1717*

In the summer of 1717, a private teacher named Jacob Michelmann travelled from Berlin to Leiden to meet the head of a Protestant community known as the Angelic Brethren. During a pivotal time in European religious and intellectual history, Johann Wilhelm Überfeld sought to inculcate in his followers, including Michelmann, a powerful sense of everyday sacredness. Überfeld criticised what he perceived as the markedness of religious speech and acts compared to unmarked everyday activities. Implicitly, this state of affairs rendered the bulk of daily life profane, that is, largely detached and irrelevant to religious life and spiritual progress. For Überfeld and his followers, however, the divine spirit could communicate even through seemingly mundane trivialities, if believers had eyes to see and ears to hear. Accordingly, they paid great attention to household chores and domestic spaces. During his journey, Michelmann successfully acquired this mindset. Yet several years later he started neglecting the lessons of his journey, which caused conflict with Überfeld. Based on the visitor's own travelogue and a wealth of other sources, this article describes Michelmann's journey from its inception to its aftermath while probing Überfeld's notion of everyday sacredness.     

Continuity and discontinuity in the historical development of modern psychopharmacology

In the middle of the twentieth century psychiatry underwent a transition that is often referred to as the "psychopharmacology revolution." Implicit in the term revolution is the idea that a paradigm shift occurred. Specifically, it has been argued that psychiatry abandoned the psychoanalytic paradigm in favor of a qualitatively distinct conceptual system based on brain chemistry. The validity of this view requires that psychoanalysis had the status of a paradigm. This paper presents evidence that psychoanalysis did not constitute a paradigm and that the advent of psychopharmacology was not, technically, a scientific revolution. Instead, the rise of modern psychopharmacology was the culmination of a linear growth of biological knowledge that began to develop in the nineteenth century.