Biros,Books and Big‐men: Literacy and the Transformation of Leadership in Simbu,Papua New Guinea

This article examines local strategies used to build leadership roles and enlist public support in a newly literate Papua New Guinean highlands rural community. The ethnographic evidence presented shows how the relationship between literacy and local ideas about modernisation and development has facilitated a shift in patterns of local political structures. When literacy is viewed as an unequally distributed and novel resource with inherently modernist connotations it becomes evident why male villagers in a contemporary highlands village endeavour to acquire and exploit it in rivalry with others. And while individual villagers market their reading and writing proficiency as a means to bolster their reputations within the existing socio‐political system, this has significance for traditional leadership and authority patterns, given that village leaders have traditionally been unschooled and therefore do not possess these highly regarded skills. To illustrate these processes I examine the political careers of two prominent villagers with particular attention to their respective claims to head two competing village‐based development projects. An analysis of the agendas they use to legitimate their authority roles in these projects makes clear how the quest to be seen to be literate has become a constitutive component of a prospective leader's repertoire of skills.     

A multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental investigation of the findspot of an Iron Age bog body from Oldcroghan,Co. Offaly,Ireland

In 2003, the remains of an Early Iron Age bog body, known as ‘Oldcroghan Man’, were recovered during the cutting of a drainage ditch in a bog in the Irish Midlands. Only some fingernails and a withe fragment remained undisturbed in situ in the drain face, providing the sole evidence for the original position of the body. A detailed reconstruction of the depositional context of the body has been undertaken through multi-proxy analyses of a peat monolith collected at the findspot. The palynological record shows that the surrounding area was the focus of intensive human activity during the Later Bronze Age, but was largely abandoned during the Bronze Age–Iron transition in the mid-first millennium BC. In the mid-4th century BC, a bog pool developed at the site, evidenced in the stratigraphic, plant macrofossil, testate amoebae and coleopteran records. Plant macrofossil and pollen analysis of peat samples associated with the fingernails suggests that the body was deposited in this pool most likely during the 3rd century BC. The absence of carrion beetle fauna points to complete submergence of the body within the pool. Deposition occurred shortly before or around the time that the surrounding area again became the focus of woodland clearance, as seen in the extended pollen record from the peat monolith. This period corresponds to the Early Iron Age in Ireland, during which renewed cultural connections with Britain and continental Europe can be seen in the archaeological record and widespread forest clearance is recorded in pollen records from across Ireland. The palaeoenvironmental results indicate, therefore, that the demise of Oldcroghan Man took place at a pivotal time of socio-economic and perhaps political change.     

A Grand-Guignol legacy: Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane

This article examines Martin McDonagh's most recent play, A Behanding in Spokane (2010), through the lens of Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, deploying the scholarship of Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson on this specific theatrical style. The article links discussions of Grand-Guignol with the amputation suffered by the drama's main character, Carmichael, played by Christopher Walken in the play's first production, and with the case of hands he brings with him on his journey around America. I draw on V.S. Ramachandran's work on consciousness, phantom limbs, and apotemnophilia in order to consider Carmichael's amputation in relation to self-defining narratives, loss, lack, excess and difference, with particular emphasis given to issues of race.     

Marx on the Reciprocal Interconnections between the Soil and the Human Body: Ireland and Its Colonialised Metabolic Rifts

Marx’s writings on Ireland are widely known, but less appreciated is their centrality to the formation of his ecological thought. We show how Marx’s understanding of metabolic rift evolved in line with his writings on colonial Ireland, revealing a concept more holistic than the “classic” metabolic rift of the soil. We recover and extend this concept to the corporeal metabolic rift, showing how both are inherent in Marx’s various writings on Ireland. Whilst the rift of the soil concerns the extraction and consumption of organic soil constituents, the corporeal rift describes processes of depopulation, and their effects on demography and family formation. These “rifted” processes are interconnected such that depleted soil impacts on the health of those who consume food grown on those “rifted” soils. We argue that the presence of these rifts substantiates Ireland’s inability to sustain itself both economically and organically, which determined its persistent post-Famine underdevelopment.