Animals Old and New. Multiple Perspectives on the Meaning of Beasthood

Caton, Hiram, ed. The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock. Lan‐ham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1990. xiii + 351 pp. including references and index. $38.75 cloth, $22.75 paper.

Monberg, Torben. Bellona Island Beliefs and Rituals. Pacific Islands Monograph Series, No. 9. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991. xix + 449 pp. including appendixes, references, and index. $42.00 cloth.

Lindstrom, Lamont. Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. xvi + 224 pp. including references and index. $29.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.     

Nested assemblages: migrants,war heritage,informal learning and national identities

ABSTRACT

This article examines relations between Anzac heritage and Australian national identity, among migrant visitors to the Australian War Memorial (AWM). What meaning could a story derived from Australian involvement in the First World War have to migrants who moved to Australia after the Second World War? Participants in qualitative interviews were eleven first-generation Australians, whose countries of birth were England, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand, Philippines, Scotland, South Africa and Sri Lanka, with parental countries of birth extending to Austria, Germany, India and Japan. Drawing on sociomaterial assemblage theory, the findings illustrate the concept of nested assemblages. At increasing scalar levels, the migrants form visitor-AWM assemblages, they may (or may not) feel part of a national Anzac heritage assemblage, and as migrants they are entangled in multiple national assemblages concurrently. Assemblages pertaining to family, faith, learning and memorialising were additional networks at play. Mapping interrelations amongst these assemblages showed migrants as actively gathering and interpreting heritage, sometimes as the enactment of national identity and at other times as the performance of informal, lifelong learning. The findings have importance to institutions seeking to be responsive to diverse and changing populations, particularly those wrestling with tensions around national identity.     

Meat–Eating,Masculinity, and Renunciation in India: A Gandhian Grammar of Diet

This paper focuses on the writings and the autobiography of one of the century’s most prominent vegetarians, who was almost as noted (or notorious) for his alimentary and sexual experiments as for his political ones. A consideration of diet is, I argue, in many ways central rather than marginal to a Gandhian gendered ethics and a Gandhian politics. The accounts of the eating and abjuration of meat in the Gandhian oeuvre can serve as a useful point of entry into the investigation of two linked loci of Gandhi’s dietary practices: the question of meat and modernity, and the question of meat in the context of the patriarchal vegetarian household. These accounts are fascinating for their profoundly conflictual ethical logic, and they help establish the intimate and unexpected links among meat–eating, modern formations of masculine identity, and the gendered dynamics of the patriarchal Hindu household. Using the evidence of Gandhi’s autobiography, correspondence, journalism, and public addresses, in conjunction with the writings of his contemporaries, I map therefore a trajectory of his gastropolitics, from the carnophilic mandate of the early years (during which he associated meat–eating with nationalist duty and access to a kind of culinary virility), to the diasporic discovery of vegetarianism in London, and finally to the carefully elaborated alimentary rigours and public fasts of the later years. All of this helps to underline how profoundly somatic Gandhi’s ‘experiments in truth’ were, and how pronounced was his belief that the purification of the body was inseparable from the purification of the mind necessary for swaraj (self–rule).     

The Judicial Bookshelf

The death of Justice Byron R. White on April 15, 2002, occasioned numerous assessments, as had happened when he retired in 1993. From his perspective, he was the accidental jurist. "Well, I never wanted to be a judge," he confessed to a reporter in a rare interview in 1999. "I said to the president I would give it a try." White's "try" lasted thirty-one years, among the longest tenures of twentieth-century Justices. Yet many appraisals of White passed over a critical point: the Supreme Court in 1993 was a very different institution from the one he joined in 1962. This was true beyond the obvious changes in personnel. No one on the bench in 1962 was still sitting when White retired. In 1962, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who succeeded him, was only four years out of Harvard Law School and was completing a year as a research associate at Columbia University Law School prior to joining the professorate at Rutgers in Newark.     

18th- and 19th-century shipyards at the south-east entrance to the West India Docks, London

Archaeological fieldwork in 1997 on the Isle of Dogs, at the south-east entrance to the West India Docks, recovered evidence of 17th- to 19th-century shipyards, associated activities and foreign trade. Reused timbers may be the remains of the 17th-century Rolt's yard. Reclamation along the natural inlet was accompanied by the construction of a timber dry dock probably in the late 18th century. This soon fell out of use and was filled in with the construction of new dry docks to the south in 1806 by Thomas Pitcher. Much of the debris dating to the first half of the 19th century from ship repairing and building and from a range of ancillary crafts, together with ceramics from Iberia and the Far East, probably came from Pitcher's yard.     

The Judicial Bookshelf

Almost anyone who can read would describe the Supreme Court of the United States as a legal body–an institution that says what the law is in the context of deciding cases. May the Court also be fairly described as a political institution? Even to pose the question raises eyebrows, because Americans commonly use the word “political” to refer to partisan politics—that persistent struggle between organized groups called political parties to control public offices, public resources, and the nation’s destiny. In this sense of the word, the federal courts are expected today to be “above politics,” meaning that judges are supposed to refrain from publicly taking sides in elections, from otherwise jumping into the arena of electoral combat, 2 or from deciding cases based on the popularity of the litigants.3 While democratic theory anticipates that elected officials will answer to the people, the rule of law envisions something different: an abiding and even‐handed application by the judiciary of the Constitution and statutes shaped by the people and their representatives.