Organizing against Land Grabbing in Cambodia: Exploring Missing Links

Using a case study of Prey Lang Community Network (PLCN) in Cambodia, this article adds to emerging literature on local responses to land grabbing. While much of this literature has focused on political opportunity structures, this article looks at the agency of local groups organizing in response to land grabbing. Noting that organization and connections have been ‘missing links’ in the literature, the authors draw on thinking on collective action and social networking. Their findings highlight the importance of identity politics in the development of movements responding to land grabbing. Transnational discourses and external support also play a significant role in local responses to land grabbing in general, and in the modest success achieved by the PLCN in particular. All this complicates the traditional understanding of political opportunity structures and calls for a more dynamic approach.     

LETTER WRITING AND ELITE IDENTITY IN THE NETHERLANDS, 1770–1850

This essay argues that correspondence was an important means for the Dutch elite in the period 1770–1850 to develop, consolidate and express an elite identity. Children were taught a “natural” epistolary style, which often meant “decent” or “as fits an elite child”. In line with Bourdieu's thesis that elites are so confident of their leading position that they feel free to deviate from language norms, adolescents diverged from decent language, whereas lower‐class correspondents composed humble letters to their superiors. Daily correspondence and ceremonial letters served to keep upper‐class values in mind and to hold the elite together.     

Hysteria as a Shape-Shifting Forensic Psychiatric Diagnosis in the Netherlands c. 1885–1960

Based on criminal court cases found in archives and newspapers, this article traces how the diagnosis of hysteria functioned in trials and Dutch forensic psychiatric practice c. 1885–1960. Informed by Science and Technology Studies and praxiography, hysteria is studied as a ‘fire object'. It can make multiple relations with gender, which can be absent or present. This approach asks whether and how gender is important regarding hysteria. Gender only ‘stuck’ to hysteria in certain situations. In rape cases, hysteria took the form of lying and was connected to women. Although a woman's hysteria could be used as a reason to exonerate the male perpetrator's crime of murder, a man's hysteria never served to exculpate a female perpetrator of a crime. Signs on the body appeared to be very significant but did not suffice for a clear diagnosis. Inconsistencies during the psychiatric examination of the body therefore needed to be coordinated by pointing to other bodily symptoms, personal life stories, academic literature or logical reasoning. To analyse the ways hysteria functioned as a versatile fire object in the courtroom and pre-trial investigation alerts us to hysteria's shapeshifting potential that might explain the power of the hysteria label in twentieth-century medicine and culture.