Memories of Trauma: Problems of Interpretation

Disturbing Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in the Twentieth Century. Edited By Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas     

The Locus of Carthage: Compounding Geographical Logic

North Africa’s Phoenician city of Carthage was above all a logical place from which the well-informed maritime Phoenicians colonized and controlled the Western Mediterranean. The leading important factors affecting the founding of Carthage were mostly geographical: overall centrality along the southern coast of the Western Mediterranean; proximity to the island bridge of Italy via Sicily; nascent oceanographic knowledge of water currents and wind gyres as well as shoals such as the Gulf of Sidra and the shelter of the Gulf of Tunis itself; and important local topography and religious landmarks.     

Learning to be suburban: the production of community in Westwood Hills, Pennsylvania, 1952–1958

In 1952, working-class women in the newly built suburb of Westwood Hills, Pennsylvania began publishing a mimeographed newsletter entitled The Hilltrotter. They used the newsletter to shape their community and by doing so learned and taught how to be suburban. This process occurred both discursively and materially, as the staff of The Hilltrotter simultaneously sought to create a shared conception of community and to shape the everyday lives of Westwood Hills' residents. This paper investigates the work of women on The Hilltrotter and by doing so shows how they produced a constellation of identities – of community, class, age, gender, and citizenship. They constructed these identities through their efforts to make Westwood Hills into a safe, stable, and well-ordered suburban community. In doing so they contributed to the formation of a postwar hegemonic order that enlisted the working class in the reproduction of capitalism.     

Searching for the Intercultural,Searching for the Culture

This paper questions a dominant view of culture as being relatively bounded and hermetic by questioning the concept of an intercultural domain that is brought into existence as a necessary consequence of this view. The paper suggests that recognition of cultural processes does not lead to the need to posit ‘a culture’ which is constituted by them. The view that ‘a culture’ is a relatively autonomous, relatively hermetic and relatively homeostatic entity arises, this paper argues, in the birth of nationalism and the founding years of anthropology, which are intimately linked. This approach, characterised here as modernist, is criticised for failing to deal well with complex cultural relationships. It results in the need to theorise an intercultural space, or a realm of cultural change, between cultures theorised as entities. Here the later work of Malinowski is used as an exemplar. The paper argues for alternative conceptualisations, such as Gluckman's suggestion that intercultural relations occur within social fields which are the proper subject of anthropology, and Strathern's contention that ‘society’ is a redundant concept, yet not denying ‘sociality‘. The case of the Aboriginal people of Broome in their struggle with the state over the terms in which their prior rights to land will be recognised is used to illustrate this.