The ‘Sleepiness’ of George Sarawia: The Impact of Disease on the Melanesian Mission at Mota,c. 1870–1900

George Sarawia, ordained in 1873 as the Melanesian Mission’s first Indigenous priest, was a pioneering figure in the mission’s plans for an Indigenous-led Anglican Church in the region. Sarawia founded Kohimarama, a mission station on Mota in the Banks Islands, Vanuatu, where he taught Mota Islanders and hosted visiting teachers and clergy. By the 1890s, some of the European missionaries had become critical of Sarawia and his flock on Mota, underlining their ‘natural, sleepy condition’ and recommending more intensive European supervision. This article will explore the role of epidemic and endemic disease, as well as the shortage of water on Mota, in creating substantial challenges for Sarawia and his mission. As he grew more incapacitated in later life, these challenges were insufficiently acknowledged by Sarawia’s critics.     

Indo-Hispanic Dynamics: From Contact to Colonial Interaction in the Greater Antilles

Indo-Hispanic interaction is an essential issue in the colonial period in the Caribbean, but its study is currently marginalized as an offshoot of pre-Columbian archaeology. This state of affairs denies the indigenous contribution to the past and present ethnocultural composition of the region and privileges a colonial approach in scholarship. This paper reviews important aspects of the history of archaeological research on contact and colonial interaction in the Greater Antilles and its theoretical underpinnings. It also presents two recent archaeological case studies that show different facets of the interaction processes using new methodological approaches: El Cabo, Dominican Republic, with evidence of early contact, and El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba, a context of interethnic interaction under colonial conditions.     

The Merovingian nobleman's home: castle or villa?

The physical appearance of the Merovingian villa has been ignored by most archaeologists and historians, largely because of the paucity of information. Three radically different images can be found in the sparse literature; something akin to a Roman villa, a forerunner of the medieval castle, or a village settlement such as the excavated site of Warendorf, Germany, to which a number of analogous sites have been found in the recent past. This article argues for the continuity of Roman traditions, if not the actual physical buildings. In particular the absence of fortification is discussed. Traditionally, violence and the development of castles are accepted as cause and effect, yet endemic insecurity did not give rise to a Merovingian castle. The common enclosures of Merovingian villas, far from being defensive, are seen as having symbolic meaning which was actively employed to define propriety, legal rights, and social relations. The maintenance of peace and personal safety depended on the adequate understanding by individuals of local politics and the ordering of their social world; an understanding expressed in the physical world of architecture.     

Firm agency and global production network dynamics

The Global production networks (GPN) framework has been influential in the analysis of globally coordinated economic arrangements. However, research on GPNs tend to focus on a well-established industries and their existing governance structures with a very little attention to the temporality and changes in these networks and their governance structures. Specifically, despite the central role of ‘lead-firms’ in GPNs, the literature lacks a clear depiction of their competitive and evolutionary trajectory. In response, this paper is concerned with (re)opening the ‘black-box’ of firms and showing how lead-firms’ strategies and practices shape the evolutionary dynamics of GPNs. The paper argues that changing lead firm strategies play a crucial role in shaping the evolution of GPNs, reflecting changes in the industrial and/or business and institutional environments. The paper investigates the Danish, multinational energy company, Ørsted, and discusses the importance of accounting for firm dynamic capabilities, i.e. intra-firm practices and extra-firm (evolutionary) dynamic drivers, in analytical frameworks that analyse GPN dynamics and industries. Lead-firm strategies are shaped by firm-specific capabilities, industry-specific competitive dynamics, and institutions. Accordingly, GPNs’ evolutionary process can be understood as an adapting and/or response mechanism by lead-firms to changes in local and international business as well as multi-scalar institutional environments.     

Producing Privatization: Re‐articulating Race,Gender, Class and Space

Abstract: This article combines insights into the mutually constituting nature of gender, race, class and space with Marxist analyses that interrogate how social relations both produce and are constrained by institutions to explore waste management privatization in Johannesburg. It argues that the crystallization of racialized, gendered inequalities within bargaining institutions underpinned financial motivations for privatization. The form of privatization varied across the city due to the ways in which the class of the area serviced articulated with the racialization and gendering of capital and labour in these spaces. An array of material conditions and ideologies informed these processes in which workers were active, although not necessarily progressive agents. Focusing on how privatization is produced through spatialized and institutionalized social relations illuminates avenues for struggle hidden from view in both aspatial, ideal‐type feminist political economy analyses and geographic analyses of privatization inattentive to the mutually constituting nature of gender, race and class.     

Competition or cooperation? Jewish day schools,synagogues and the (re)construction of young people’s Jewish identities in England

Diasporic synagogues have historically provided a number of educational and social functions. However, the growing popularity of state-funded Jewish schools in England necessitates analysis of these institutions’ changing roles and their implications for performances of Jewishness. Drawing upon interviews with rabbis, and interviews and focus groups with parents and students at a Jewish school, this article demonstrates three challenges for synagogues associated with the recent growth in Jewish day schooling: the instigation of instrumental attendance at services in order to secure a school place; and the co-option of synagogues’ traditional functions as both education and social centres. In the process, it illustrates how conceptualisations of Jewish identity are contested, resulting in discrepant attitudes towards Jewish education. Consequently, the article contributes to understandings of the spaces in which young people practise their Jewishness, and highlights the challenges for community leaders in ensuring that Jewish schools and synagogues cooperate rather than compete.     

The Story of Koula: music and nationhood in Greece

The Story of Koula, one of the Marshall Plan films, was made in Greece in 1951. It neatly exemplifies the capacity of Europe to ‘talk back’ to the USA within the framework of cultural aid programmes. And as such it can introduce a little‐explored topic: the politics of the avant‐garde in Greece in the post‐Civil War years and in particular the role of US cultural aid. This post‐war perspective throws light on the better‐known National School associated above all with Manolis Kalomiris, who dominated Greek music and musical life in the interwar period. The second part of this paper scrutinises the agenda and achievements of the Kalomiris circle, and that in turn enables useful generalisations about romantic nationalism in music. The third part of the paper reflects on the pre‐World War I achievements of Heptanesian traditions, again caught between singularities and dependencies.