Epistemic justice and everyday nationalism: An auto‐ethnography of transnational student encounters in a post‐war memory and reconciliation project in Kosovo

This contribution introduces an exercise in epistemic justice to the study of everyday nationalism in post‐conflict, transnational (local and international) encounters. It explores how everyday nationalism, in often unexpected and hidden ways, underpinned a cocreational, educational project involving several local (Albanian) and international (British based) university students and staff collaborating on the theme of post‐war memory and reconciliation in Kosovo. The set‐up resembled a microcosm of transnational social encounters in project collaborations in which the problem of nationalism, typically, is associated with one side only: here, the Kosovars. Guided by Goffman's (1982) social interactionist framework, the study employs selected participants' paraethnographic and auto‐ethnographic reflections of their project experiences and practices after the event in order to trace the everyday workings of mutual assumptions and constructions of a national self and other for all sides involved. In this, it explores how the project participants' asymmetric positioning within a wider, global context of unequal power relations shaped their vernacular epistemologies of belonging and identity. It thereby excavated what otherwise taken‐for‐granted criteria can become relevant in such local/international social encounters as reflected upon and how the enduring power imbalances underpinning these might best be redressed.     

A female war correspondent on the Italian front, 1915–17: the Austrian travel journalist and photographer Alice Schalek

In July 1915, Alice Schalek was accredited to the Austro-Hungarian Kriegspressequartier (War Press Office) as one of a small number of female war correspondents, publishing her war reports and photographs in the prestigious Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse and in the illustrated German magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. Schalek’s writings and photographs were very popular, but also sharply criticized in some quarters for their alleged lack of objectivity and a tendency to glorify the war. Her most prominent critic was the Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus, whose negative judgment dominated Schalek’s historical reputation for many decades. Focusing on Schalek’s assignments to the Italian front during 1915–17, this article looks at the working conditions faced by Schalek as a female war reporter and reconstructs the war images she transmitted to the public through her writings, photographs, and lectures. Moreover, it asks in what ways Schalek’s work reflects a female perspective on the war.     

West Papua,Indonesia and the Melanesian Spearhead Group: competing logics in regional and international politics

The idea of a shared Melanesian identity has been consolidated over the last three decades or so through the most important subregional organisation in the South-West Pacific—the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG). The solidarity of this group has been strained over various issues from time to time, but none is as fraught as the Indonesian occupation of what is commonly known as West Papua, whose indigenous Papuan people are ethnically Melanesian. In addition to recounting the Indonesian takeover of West Papua in the context of the dynamics of decolonisation, the Cold War and early regional development, the article examines the emergence of Melanesian identity and the MSG, before considering more recent developments. These focus on a recent bid by West Papuans for MSG membership, key aspects of Indonesia's role in the Melanesian subregion, and the extent to which these developments highlight competing logics in regional and international politics.     

The public life of the Swahili stonehouse, 14th–15th centuries AD

Houses are an important subject of archaeological research, normally explored through the households they contain. This has established a deliberately social agenda for the archaeology of houses, yet has had the unintended consequence of creating bounded worlds for study. Although household archaeologies explore the ways that households contributed to broader social and economic realms, it is rare to think through the public role of houses for non-residents and the larger population of the settlement. This paper seeks to explore this more public aspect of houses using the data from archaeology at Songo Mnara, a 14th–15th century Swahili town on the southern Tanzanian coast. This was a time when stone-built domestic architecture was first emerging in this region. The archaeology of the houses provides data for a series of ways that the house was at the heart of the economic and political life of the town, as well as demonstrating a spatial continuity between indoor and outdoor spaces. It is therefore suggested that the domestic and residential functions of the house for a particular household should be balanced with an appreciation of the broader world of the house itself.     

Nationalism versus constitutionalism in Fiji*

Abstract. Since Fiji became an independent state in 1970 it has experienced three coups against elected governments. On each occasion, intervention has been justified on the grounds that the rights and interests of indigenous Fijians have been under threat from a government controlled by Indo‐Fijians, the country's second largest ethnic group. This is despite the fact that the constitutions under which these governments were elected contained extensive provisions for the protection of indigenous rights and interests precisely to meet such concerns. Since the coup of May 2000, the 1997 constitution has been resurrected through the legal process and fresh elections held. Although this represented a formal victory for the forces of constitutionalism, the election itself resulted in the return to office of the post‐coup interim administration that had been appointed by the military and which had pledged to uphold the primacy of Fijian interests against other claims. The story of nationalism versus constitutionalism in Fiji is one in which all the efforts of institutional designers seem to have been consistently trumped by the successful manipulation of ethnic identity, especially (although not exclusively) by Fijian nationalists. But it also suggests that there is more to the problems of stability in Fiji than the fact of ethnic difference. In addition, the article critically assesses arguments which favour the development of a new form of constitutionalism which dispenses with the liberal ‘rule of uniformity’ in favour of principles and practices that give explicit recognition to cultural difference.