Fairies,Fractious Women,and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture

TABOU ET TOTÉMISME À MADAGASCAR: ÉTUDE DESCRIPTIVE ET THÉORIQUE. Par ARNOLD VAN GENNEP. Paris: E. Leroux, 1904. Reviewed by E. Sidney Hartland.

THE MASAI, THEIR LANGUAGE AND FOLK-LORE. By A. C. HOLLIS, with Introduction by Sir Charles Eliot Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1905, 8vo Pp. xxxii + 364. Price 14s. net. Reviewed by N. W. Thomas.

ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH POPULAR BALLADS. Edited from the Collection of Francis James Child by HELEN CHILD SARGENT and GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE. London: D. Nutt 1905. Reviewed by A. Lang.     

A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales,I & II / Studies on the Book of Deer

The web portal of the Folklore Archive of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain, gives access to three databases: ArxiuFolk, the Database of the Folklore Archive; RondCat, the Catalan Folktale Search Engine; and BiblioFolk, the Bio-bibliographic Repository of Catalan Popular Literature. This article describes how these databases work and the possibilities they offer for researchers.     

Slavery in Africa: Interpretation and illustration

Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. xvi + 349 pp. including maps, bibliography, and index. $39.50 cloth; $12.95 paper.

Bonner, Philip. Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth Century Swazi State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. x + 315 pp. including maps, bibliography, appendix, and index. $49.50 cloth.

Ross, Robert. Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. xi+160 pp. including glossary, bibliography, maps, and index. $19.50 cloth.     

‘Demonstrating the Machine Guns’: Rebellion,Violence and State Formation in Early Colonial Darfur

Recent literature on British colonial rule in Africa has increasingly emphasised the ways in which relatively cautious colonial states were formed in processes of engagement and accommodation with local societies. This article uses the example of a major rebellion against colonial authority in southern Darfur in 1921 to demonstrate the ways in which these processes of local engagement might themselves feed into rebellion against state authority, rather than secure colonial rule. The rebellion was inspired by Mahdist millenarian belief, but the involvement of local societies in both the rebellion and its repression was also shaped by patterns of local rivalries into which the colonial state had entered as an additional actor. The article also reminds us, more broadly, that spectacular violence and local accommodation were not distinct modes of colonial governance but rather continually intertwined in processes of colonial state formation.     

Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

Local press,dispersal and community in the construction of asylum debates

How has the prominent and contentious international issue of asylum been debated at a local level; what local variations are there and why? This paper presents analysis of local newspapers and interviews with press workers for Cardiff and Leeds, two UK case study locations that have received asylum seekers through the dispersal policy. The case studies show that asylum is framed and constructed differently by the local press in different places with implications for reactions to asylum seekers and community cohesion. The relations between local press and community are explored as explanations for varying discourses. It is found that the way the local press represents and constructs local identity sets the framework for reactions to dispersal; and that the operation of the local press within local networks of power and information shapes the extent to which established discourses can be challenged. For Cardiff, the localising of asylum through the dispersal policy created an opportunity for local negotiation of difference in the context of the national moral panic on asylum.