A first meeting place: John Webber’s An Interview Between Captain Cook and the Natives (January 1777)

On 26 January 1777, on the first stage of his third voyage to the Pacific, James Cook anchored in Adventure Bay on what is now called Bruny Island, Tasmania. Cook encountered the local Nuonenne people on two occasions, the second of which was recorded in an unfinished drawing (possibly done on the spot) by the expedition’s artist, John Webber. Comments in their journals from officers and sailors on board Cook’s ships indicate that the European perceptions and representations of Aboriginal people were initially mediated by the explorers’ stereotypical understanding of other races. However, through a close reading of a number of structural features of Webber’s composition – symmetry, resemblances in opposition, chiasmus, a figure who acts as a spectatorial stand-in, spatialisation – it is argued that Webber’s drawing recognises the Aboriginal people encountered by the British as individuals, attends to the dramaturgy of the encounter, and is marked in various ways by a powerful and grounded indigenous agency. It is proposed that anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’ paradoxical aphorism ‘structure of the conjuncture’ might be used to illuminate and designate the particular quality of events, the ‘indigenous countersigns’, depicted by Webber in this drawing.     

Policymaking in the Parallelogram of Forces: Common Agency and Human Service Provision

The "congressional dominance" literature in political science provides valuable insights into the legislative control of administrative agencies. However, this literature tends to be conceptualized with respect to regulatory agencies, and it is not especially helpful in understanding the dynamics of policymaking in the provision of human services. After distinguishing the tasks of regulation and human services provision, we present an alternative: a common agency model of human service policy as the outcome of interest group bargaining. We illustrate its implications with an analytic narrative of service provision for the seriously mentally ill.     

Nationalism without a nation: the rise and fall of Zulu nationalism in South Africa’s transition to democracy, 1975–99

During South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy the most virulent opposition to change came from Zulu nationalism. Post‐apartheid, however, Zulu nationalism has largely waned. This is because Zulu nationalism was instrumentally invoked and jettisoned by the Inkatha Freedom Party. Beginning in 1975, Inkatha embraced a ‘third way’ resistance politics between ‘acquiescence’ in apartheid and ‘impossible’ militant resistance. It was only later that Inkatha turned to Zuluness when it was out‐competed by the ANC and allies, first over the leadership of resistance politics and secondly during the transition. After 1994 the inclusion of the IFP in democratic government made old strategies redundant and thus it abandoned Zulu nationalism. Moreover, while a widespread sense of Zuluness exists, the meanings attached to it vary to the extent that the Zulu nation cannot exist. Thus the Zulu nationalism of the transition was an elite‐driven political nationalism prosecuted without a popularly imagined Zulu nation.     

Changes in Food Consumption and the Implications for Food Security and Undernourishment: India in the 1990s

This article examines the changes in the nature and quantity of food consumption in India during the reform decade of the 1990s, and analyses their implications for calorie intake and undernourishment. The study documents the decline in cereal consumption, especially in the urban areas, and provides evidence that suggests an increase in the prevalence of undernourishment over the period 1987/88 to 2001/2002. The results also point to a significant number of households, even in the top expenditure decile, suffering from undernourishment. This calls for a reassessment of the current strategy of directing the Targetted Public Distribution System (TPDS) exclusively at households ‘below the poverty line’. This study shows that, both as a source of subsidized calories and as a poverty reducing instrument, the PDS is of much greater importance to female‐headed households than it is to the rest of the population. Another important result is that, notwithstanding the sharp decline in their expenditure share during the 1990s, rice and wheat continue to provide the dominant share of calories, especially for the rural poor. The overall message is that, especially in a period of significant economic change, one needs to go beyond the standard expenditure‐based money metric measures to assess the changes in the living standards of households.