The Science of Empire: Darwinism,Human Diversity,and Russian Physical Anthropology

Summary : The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the “natural history of humanity” in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in the a priori accepted developmental evolutionary model. The other constructed a new language that undermined the idea of species/subspecies/races/nations/ as stable, externally bounded, and internally homogeneous units and attempted to rationalize imperial hybridity. The article's main focus is on the latter classificatory narrative, its relational methodology, and the protostructuralist units of comparison that it produced.     

The Governor's vale levu: Architecture and Hybridity at Nasova House, Levuka, Fiji Islands

As an integral component of colonial culture, colonial architecture provides a tangible expression of western presence and domination throughout various colonial settings. In tropical colonies, such as Fiji, western architecture was not simply transplanted, but became transformed through the conscious integration of western and nonwestern architectural elements and grammars. Thus hybrid colonial architecture played a significant role within the sociopolitical strategies of both colonizer and colonized elites. Nasova House, the main government building of the autonomous Cakobau polity (1873–74) and British colonial regime (1874–82), provides a unique example of the use of colonial hybrid architecture in late nineteenth century Fiji.     

Vernacular culture and the place of folk music

This paper focuses on an evening event at the Community Centre, Jacksdale, Nottinghamshire, UK in 2001 featuring a group called The Chase, performing folk music and dance from France and other European countries. It raises a series of issues concerning the relationships between folk culture and modern everyday life. These questions intersect with debates concerning authenticity, tradition, working-class culture, community and sense of place. The paper develops the concept of vernacular culture within a dynamic and plural conception of place as a means of theoretically locating folk music within modern everyday life.     

Untangling the different components of Norwegianness*

ABSTRACT. National identity is under scrutiny in Europe. A new non‐ethnic conception of the nation to replace the traditional ethnic one is needed. National identity is therefore undergoing a public reconstruction. This article is based on narratives of “Norwegianness” that emerged in a qualitative interview study of white majority Norwegians who live in multicultural suburbs in Oslo. I respond to an overlooked need to analytically untangle different components of “Norwegianness” as phenomenological knowledge, to decouple its different constituents from each other. In order to analyse qualitative data where notions of “Norwegianness” and “non‐Norwegianness” are at play, their different aspects must be clarified. I identify multiple discursive oppositions that researchers ought to keep apart, and distinguish between civic aspects (citizenship), cultural aspects, and ethnic/racial aspects. I suggest that everyday notions of the national are fruitfully studied as discursive space constituted by a series of overlapping, but sometimes mutually contradicting, oppositions.     

Socialist statuary as post-socialist hybrids: following the statues of Dr Petru Groza in Romania

This paper is concerned with the post-socialist lives of Communist statues. While acknowledging that post-socialist transformation frequently involves searching for new identities based on the disavowal of the communist past and the de-communisation of cultural landscapes, the paper stresses the importance of exploring complex continuities from the state-socialist period. This is illustrated by a case study of the fates of three socialist-era statues of the Romanian Communist leader Dr Petru Groza which were erected in Bucharest, Deva and B?cia. The paper examines how these socialist-era statues have been de- and re-contextualised, translated and re-valued into ‘post-socialist hybrids.’ The analysis explores the complexities of the historical geographies of these statues after 1989, particularly the way that they continue to play a role in the shaping of identities, societies and politics.     

Working Towards Regional Agreements: Recent Developments in Co‐operative Resource Management in Canada's British Columbia

Canada's experience with ‘regional agreements’ has attracted considerable attention in Australia as a means by which Indigenous people can secure their native title rights to land and sea and ensure they can participate in the development and management of their homeland territories. However, regional agreements implemented in Canada thus far have often taken years to negotiate. To provide a degree of certainty for resource management and decision‐making while the native title claims process is underway, Canadian governments have proceeded to establish interim resource use and management agreements with Indigenous communities. While both governments and Indigenous people stress that interim arrangements do not replace or limit the scope for future claim settlements, it is recognised that the development of such co‐operative relationships will make long‐lasting formal agreements easier to achieve. This paper draws on several recent examples of interim agreements that have been negotiated for the salmon fishery resource in the Skeena River catchment, and considers how these local experiences offer useful approaches for resource management and native title issues in Australia. These examples demonstrate the importance of building shared understandings of resource values and management approaches prior to cementing co‐management partnerships in formal settlements. They also show some of the problems and prospects facing Indigenous peoples in their efforts to benefit from such co‐management agreements.     

Cultural geographies of the contact zone: Gaels,Gallsand overlapping territories in late medieval Ireland

In writing about the social and cultural geographies of the past, we frequently reinforce notions of difference by using neatly delineated ethnic terms of reference that often superscribe the complexities of reality on the ground. Referring to ‘Gaels’ and ‘Galls’, demarcating ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ worlds in late medieval Ireland, is but one example. We often exaggerate, too, the boundedness of geographical space by speaking more of frontiers and less of overlapping territories. Using the context of late medieval Ireland, I propose in this paper the application and broadening of the concept of the contact zone—prevalent in postcolonial studies for a number of years—to address this specific issue of overstating social and cultural geographical cohesion and separation in the past. The use of the concept of the contact zone in geography has been largely confined to the modern period, which in the extant literature has received priority for various reasons, not least of which is the wider availability of source material. However, in this paper, I suggest that its relevance to the study of the medieval period is equally as strong, and perhaps its application can serve to deflect our imaginings of earlier geographical worlds as somehow more static and less complicated, and instead open the possibility of reading the fluidity and interconnections of the more distant past.     

Enacting parenting policy? The hybrid spaces of Sure Start Children's Centres

This article draws on research in three UK Sure Start Children's Centres which explored them as particular kinds of spaces, with the intention of understanding how policy imperatives and discourses interact with other dynamics. The role of the material spaces of the buildings, of ambivalent interactions of users with staff, and friendship groups among users are seen as key to understanding the centre as a ‘hybrid’ space in which policy intentions were exceeded by other aspects of everyday life. This has implications not only for understanding policy programmes in action, but also for how academic analysis and theory positions itself in relation to these spaces.     

The nation in the region: flamenco and canzone napoletana as national icons in modern Spain and Italy (1880–1922)

Although the relationship between music and nationalism has been at the centre of recent cross‐disciplinary research, many areas remain unexplored. Among them are forms of ‘national music’ that nest overlapping identities, functioning simultaneously as vehicles of regional, ethnic, urban, global and diasporic belongings. This article focuses on the national dimension of these multilevel identities, concentrating on the swings and transmigrations between the national and the regional. It compares two Mediterranean traditions which, particularly between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have served as multilevel identifiers of national and regional belongings: flamenco and canzone napoletana (Neapolitan song). I argue that, besides geographically bounded identities, both genres were constructed as ‘national’ primarily abroad, rather than in their home countries, thus contributing to a theory of the ‘international’ dimension of ‘national’ music. In the case of flamenco, I focus on the irradiation centre of the time, Paris, although the modern notion of musical Spanishness was first associated with national identity in Russia. The canzone consolidated its international position mostly through the Italian diaspora, achieving a much wider reach than is ordinarily thought, both nationally and globally.