Beach Boys Do It Too: Subculture and Commoditised Desire in a Transnational Tourist Site in Kerala,South India

This article is based on an ethnographic study of a group of Scheduled Caste (SC) male youth in a globalised tourist site in Kerala, South India, who participate in situational sexual and romantic relationships with predominantly tourist women from the global north. We first aim to expand on the “sex and romance tourism” literature of such encounters to provide an Indian context. Secondly, we aim to highlight how young men involved in such encounters undertake complex mediations of localised and global forms of consumption and commoditisation to participate in the neoliberal tourist market place. Mainly by way of a subculture known as the Jungees, we describe how young men utilise the former processes to seek economic and social mobility for themselves and their families but also to valorise and re-imagine their identity along racial, gendered, caste and class-based dimensions. Finally, we explore the young men’s articulation of a hierarchy of preferred encounters that draws on gendered, sexualised and racialised local and global imaginaries of commoditised desire(s) of tourist women from the global north. We highlight the ways in which participants actively utilise the neoliberal context to engage in a range of self-generated livelihood strategies and to contest their marginality.     

Having her hand in it? Elite women as ‘makers’ of textile art in the Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

In the Middle Ages, elite women acted as creators, donors and recipients of textile art. This article analyses a small but representative group of seventh- to thirteenth-century embroideries in order to examine the motivation for their creation and to investigate the ways in which women could mark their own presence through textile art. It discusses written sources alongside the material evidence; these sources include documentary, hagiographical and literary texts, which provide information about cultural norms and the expectations of society. Set within the context of these sources, the evidence suggests that society both channelled women's creativity into textile art and idealised it. At the same time, as artists and patrons of ornamented textiles, noblewomen had creative control over the medium; embroidery became a field in which their works were noted and celebrated.     

A Single Thread of Meaning: Esperanza Ortega's Hilo solo

Scholarship on Marie de France's Lai de Lanval has long held Guinevere's accusation of homosexuality against Lanval to have been motivated by hurt feelings: it is made, in the words of one commentator, "in the fury of a woman scorned." This article suggests that subtler motives may have been apparent to the text's earliest audiences. By the twelfth century, sodomy was increasingly categorized by ecclesiastical legislation as a kind of treason. Accordingly, it is likely that Guinevere's charge is meant to counter Lanval's insinuation that, in attempting to seduce him, she has tried to lure him into an act of treason as well.     

Have sex will travel: romantic ‘sex tourism’ and women negotiating modernity in the Sinai

Since the 1970s, studies on western women's ethnosexual tourist–local relationships have tended to focus on the beaches of the Caribbean and have come to one of two main conclusions – either they are no different from the overtly exploitative relationships of heterosexual male sex tourists or they are different because they involve a softer, caring element of romance. This article proposes that both positions have led to constrictive, circular research that highlights the racialised and economically disparate nature of these exchanges but mostly ignores the importance of imaginative and emotional geographies caught up in such relationships. Based on fieldwork interviews with men and women in the resorts of the South Sinai, Egypt, I argue that these encounters can be seen as examples of a modern subjectivity that are defined by and take place within imagined (fixed) constructions of landscapes, native third world masculinity (in this case Arab/Bedouin), femininity (white, heterosexual, western), freedom and love (spiritual and physical): all presented in some form of opposition to a particularist idea of modernity and viewed through a filter of selective (and spatially circumscribed) histories. By adding a geographical dimension, this article aims to open up the current debate on female sex tourism to a wider range of issues and reveal more of the conflicts, tensions and imaginations that make up these encounters.     

Ransoms of non-combatants during the hundred years war

Although we know a great deal about the captivities and ransoms of noble prisoners during the Hundred Years War, the ransoms paid to soldiers by non-combatants, though far more common, received less publicity in contemporary chronicles and less notoriety in the courts of law. In consequence, we learn about them largely through the generalized, and perhaps rather routine, complaints of the preaching clergy. This article examines some of the permutations of ransom which non-combatants - particularly peasant non-combatants - were obliged to pay to men-at-arms during this war. They vary from ransoms agreements like those negotiated by noble prisoners to protection rackets and slavery which many contemporaries considered to be more appropriate to the circumstances of crusade against Islam than to the wars between Christian peoples.     

The Lantern-Bearers of the history of technology

Historians of technology need to focus more on studying human experiences of technological change rather than technological objects. Aesthetic debates over ‘realism’ and ‘romance’ in the later nineteenth century suggest that greater attention to the inward world of lived experience can enhance our understanding of historical experience. The well-known writer Robert Louis Stevenson experimented with a variety of new forms of romance to write about contemporary events in the South Seas with primary attention to inward experiences of technological change, as opposed to accounts of technological objects.     

Dragons,saints and wells

Stories of conflict between saints and dragons flourished between the eighth and fourteenth centuries at the disputed boundary zone between folktale and hagiography. The presence of dragons at wells was an accepted image in vernacular culture, independently adopted by successive writers of saints' Lives to enliven stories about the spiritual power of their heroes and the pastoral and missionary work they performed. In the transition of hagiography from its Middle Eastern origins the dragon, originally a plausible desert snake, took on mythical status and became identified with social evils from paganism to corruption. Christian imagery of baptism involved a symbolic contrast of lethal and healing waters, given visual expression in the sculptural motif of a dragon encircling the font. But the story of the dragon-fight could carry multiple meanings. Earlier texts reflect a world in which clerical culture had to make headway against lay power, and the dragon is something to be banished, like the aggressive chieftains faced down by saints. Later on Christianity was presented as part of a harmonious social order, and the dragon is crushed by the pious force of chivalry.     

‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’: Anthropology and Matriarchy in H. Rider Haggard's She

This essay examines the nineteenth-century debate about an imagined matriarchal past, arguing that it raised significant questions about gender and history. It scrutinizes the interdisciplinary nature of the debate, demonstrating that anthropology and literature intersected in a fraught investigation of ‘mother-rule’. The essay contends that H. Rider Haggard's novel She (1887) engages in complex ways with anthropological visions of a matriarchal past. The work of the major matriarchal theorists, J. J. Bachofen, J. F. McLennan, John Lubbock, and L. H. Morgan, often seen as triumphalist accounts of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, was beset by tensions about gender, power, and temporality, caught between evolutionary meliorism and nostalgia, between a defence of patriarchy and recognition of cultural variability. Haggard's She, the essay argues, exposes and deepens the tensions at the heart of the anthropological narrative. Critics have conventionally read She as a matriarchal dystopia, yet the novel offers an ambivalent dramatization of matriarchy, and is attracted as well as repelled by the matriarchal past embodied in the white African queen Ayesha and her people, the Amahagger. More than a femme fatale, Ayesha is sorceress and scientist, harbinger of life and of death; even her violence unsettles assumptions about gender and power. Haggard's evocation of the Amahaggers’ marriage practices works to question the anthropologists’ hierarchical cultural evolutionism, moving towards an appreciation of plural cultures. The narrative's insistence on cyclical temporalities also disrupts a linear narrative of progress from matriarchy to patriarchy, conveying the potent attractions of a resurgent female past.     

The complete Himerius translated and explained

The Alexander Romance depicts Alexander going alone to the court of Darius disguised as his own messenger, dining with the Persians and advancing his own reputation as a munificent king. This episode substitutes a fictional scene for a number of dramatic banqueting incidents in the historical record that cast Alexander in a negative light, specifically, the burning of Persepolis, the proskynesis affair, and the wedding at Susa, which are all banqueting scenes concerned with Alexander’s generosity, reputation, and relations with the Persians. It is also an opportunity for intertextual allusion, especially to Homer and Herodotus. It is, further, only one of many occasions in the Romance when Alexander is said to go alone to visit his enemies in disguise; these episodes integrate the composition and evince a concern with the treatment of ambassadors. It is finally one of the only instances of the explicit characterization of Alexander in the Romance.     

The Interactional Nature of Emotion Work in Thai Marriages: Anger,Romance and Guilt

Marriage has increasingly been recognised as a site of emotional interaction and satisfaction, in which the interactional, relational nature of emotion is evident, but most accounts of emotions in marriage rely on Western examples. What does the study of Thai marital emotions tell us about the culturally specific nature of marriage and emotional interaction? Using data derived from interviews with middle-class married couples in Bangkok, Thailand, this article focuses on three emotions that have particular significance in Thai marriage: anger, romance and guilt. I demonstrate the ways in which Thai married couples actively engage in emotion works, including by creating, decreasing, increasing and employing emotions, in order to fulfil their spousal roles and sustain a lasting marriage. I argue that emotion works are relational, and are performed in marital interactions within particular socio-cultural rules and contexts. Importantly, along with a Western idea of individualism, Thai traditional values, mainly marital harmony and endurance, influence emotional interaction in marriage.