SINGING SUBJECTS AND SACRED OBJECTS: MORE ON MUNN'S ‘TRANSFORMATION OF SUBJECTS INTO OBJECTS’ IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN MYTH

Nancy Munn's ‘The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth’ is a landmark in our understanding of the processes by which the Aboriginal world is created and sustained. Her paper is summarised and then related to similar concerns extant among the neighbouring Aranda. Munn's account of relationships between people and country is shown to be part of a wider reality encompassing all stages of the life-cycle and characterised by a triple dialectic between ‘surface’ and ‘depth‘, between male and female, and between life and death. The study is preliminary to a psychological account of these dialectical processes to be published at a later date.     

Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”

This introduction to the translation of Henri Lefebvre's 1956 essay “The theory of ground rent and rural Sociology” moves through three stages. First, it suggests that Anglophone appropriations of Lefebvre have tended to focus too much on his urban writings, at the expense of understanding his early work on rural sociology, and failing to recognise how his urban focus emerged as a result of his interest in rural–urban transformation. Second, it provides a summary of his wider work on rural questions, including his unfinished work on a major treatise of rural sociology; and outlines the key themes of the present essay in relation to these other projects. Third, it connects Lefebvre's issues to wider debates in political economy and geography about aspects of the rural, land and ground rent, not least including the work of Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui.     

‘Mother's Blood,Father's Land’: Native Title and Comparative Land Tenure Modelling for Claims in ‘Settled’ Australia

Anthropologists working in the field of Australian native title are required to piece together the early laws and customs of claimant groups and assess the degree to which these have continued since the assumption of British sovereignty. The former task is often difficult in south‐eastern Australia because of a lack of good quality early records. I suggest here that there are general principles of Aboriginal land tenure that can be recovered from elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia, where the ethnography is of a better standard, and these can be used as a guide for working with the patchier materials characteristic of the south‐east. The principles mainly cohere around the organic relationship between patrilineal descent and complementary filiation, and are shown to be relevant to the modelling of contemporary south‐eastern tenure, where people speak of ‘bloodlines’ identified with ancestral lands.     

A Combined Cluster and Interaction Model: The Hierarchical Assignment Problem

This article presents a new spatial modeling approach that deals with interactions between individual geographic entities. The developed model represents a generalization of the transportation problem and the classical assignment problem and is termed the hierarchical assignment problem (HAP). The HAP optimizes the spatial flow pattern between individual origin and destination locations, given that some grouping, or aggregation of individual origins and destinations is permitted to occur. The level of aggregation is user specified, and the aggregation step is endogenous to the model itself. This allows for the direct accounting of aggregation costs in pursuit of optimal problem solutions. The HAP is formulated and solved with several sample data sets using commercial optimization software. Trials illustrate how HAP solutions respond to changes in levels of aggregation, as well as reveal the diverse network designs and allocation schemes obtainable with the HAP. Connections between the HAP and the literature on the p-median problem, cluster analysis, and hub-and-spoke networks are discussed and suggestions for future research are made.     

Fixity and fluidity: chiefly authority and settlement movement in colonial Botswana

This article proposes that anthropologists and historians of colonialism, landscape and the colonial construction of chieftaincy in Africa should examine particular case studies in more detail to elicit the complex social and material processes implicit in such notions. In particular it focuses upon the colonial conflation of the notions of settlement nucleation and sedentism in the period of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in Botswana (1885–1966), processes of material change, and the position of Tswana chiefs with regard to settlement and authority. The perceived “failure” of the Tawana chiefs in Ngamiland District to exert settlement control over the dispersed population is analyzed through detailed colonial records of conflict to argue that what failed was the colonial construction of chieftaincy itself, as well as the colonial imagination of landscape in Africa. The article’s emphasis upon the materiality of dwelling in the landscape also seeks to convince historians and anthropologists alike of the vast research potential of material culture in the analysis of colonial histories, social and cultural change, and indigenous notions of modernity.     

Walter the Chancellor on Ilghazi and Tughtakin: a prisoner’s perspective

This article concerns two leading Turkish rulers, active in the Near East during the crusading era: Tughtakin of Damascus and Ilghazi of Mardin. They were important commanders, but the surviving sources create difficulties when outlining the contours of characters and cultural perspectives. Muslim authors typically present them as idealised Islamic rulers and yet it is difficult to accept such stereotyped portraits. This article sheds new light on these men, seeking to understand how far they had transitioned from the steppe culture of their forefathers into a more distinctively Islamic mould. It focuses in particular on the Antiochene chronicle written by Walter the Chancellor. He witnessed both rulers at first hand when he was their prisoner in Aleppo in 1119, an experience which left him deeply scarred. This is tainted evidence, yet it will be shown that many of Walter’s observations also provide invaluable insights that deserve to be taken seriously.     

SINGING SUBJECTS AND SACRED OBJECTS: A PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE ‘TRANSFORMATION OF SUBJECTS INTO OBJECTS’ IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN MYTH

In an earlier paper published in this journal Nancy Munn's ‘The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth’ was discussed and related to Aranda mythology. This paper commences where the earlier one finished and offers a psychological account of ‘the transformation of subjects into objects’. In particular, it discusses, within a psychoanalytic framework, the relationship between communication, the body and the environment inherent in Aranda myth and rite, suggesting that what Munn calls ‘the a priori grounds’ of the Aboriginal moral order can be understood as a set of dialectical shifts occurring within the life-cycle. These shifts involve the realisation and reconciliation of a number of oppositions, including male and female; earth and sky, death and life; conscious and unconscious; and, in particular, language and speech.