Meeting / Derrida

In August 1999, Jacques Derrida gave a number of lectures and seminars in Melbourne and Sydney. The seminar of 13 August, held at Sydney's Seymour Centre Theatre, was open to the public. It consisted of a question-and-answer session with Genevieve Lloyd, David Wills, Paul Patton and Penelope Deutscher. Its title, 'Themes from Recent Work', reflected interests in the work from Specters of Marx (1994) onwards which some, including Paul Patton, have referred to as deconstruction in its affirmative phase. What follows is a by-no-means verbatim record of the event. Rather it is but one member of the audience's account of what transpired in the seminar – an account which is therefore necessarily selective and pressed through the grid of my own quasi-philosophical interests. Following this account of the seminar, I offer some marginal notes on the open discussion following the seminar, then, finally, some reflections on a particular matter discussed at the dinner which followed that – madness.     

Defining ‘real India’: representations of authenticity in independent travel

As an alternative to the stereotypical mass tourism, independent travellers – travellers who travel for extended periods on low budgets while ostensibly avoiding formalized tourist activities and locales – are invested in constructing ‘authentic’ travel experiences. Practices such as ‘off-the-beaten-track’ travel and cultural engagement provide the means by which independent travellers are able to make claims to such authenticity. Authenticity is constructed by travellers through idealizations of intimacy and non-commodification. These idealizations are tangled in narrative representations of ‘real’ India and ‘real’ Indians, their ‘real’-ness typified by an absence of other travellers, tourists and, more generally, Western contamination. In these ways, ‘authentic’ travel is dependent upon actively constructed binaries of Western travelling subjects and exotic Indian objects. Yet travellers' fantasies of the Other are fragile and subject to collapse at moments in which so-called Others articulate their subjectivity in a way that is inconsistent with travellers' expectations. Through a focus on travellers' narratives of their experience, both the requirement for an Orientalist dichotomy as well as the ruptures that continually challenge this dichotomy, will emerge.     

Oestrogen Rising 2016: Ireland’s stained and bloodied cloths

A weaver, seamstress, laundress and artist, in this essay I shall spin a yarn, tangle a web, and construct a text(ile) of the inter-weave of narrative and identity that I define as my intellectual, textual, somatic and material/visual practice obsessions. My work explores ‘the places in-between’ in the entanglements of Irish and Northern Irish gender and identity, and in the abject fabrics of death and of desire. As an Irish feminist, sense-making of the complexities, conundrums, challenges and contradictions of my land, my cloth, my body and my culture owes much to Irish women before me who fought for female suffrage, and Irish women now – north and south of the border that divides the island of Ireland – who still struggle for equality of citizenship, social justice, human rights, and full reproductive autonomy. My contention is that when we accept that Ireland herself is a many-layered cloth, a stained and bloodied cloth, a cloth marked irreversibly by history, conflict, denial and abuse, stained by its own repression, marked through denial of all its people’s rights and needs, and bloodied by its greatest export, the haemorrhage of its people, then – polemical, didactic or reflective, with more compassion, empathy, humility and heart – we just might make peace with our past.     

Refugees,migrants, neither,both: categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’

The use of the categories ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ to differentiate between those on the move and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of their claims to international protection has featured strongly during Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and has been used to justify policies of exclusion and containment. Drawing on interviews with 215 people who crossed the Mediterranean to Greece in 2015, our paper challenges this ‘categorical fetishism’, arguing that the dominant categories fail to capture adequately the complex relationship between political, social and economic drivers of migration or their shifting significance for individuals over time and space. As such it builds upon a substantial body of academic literature demonstrating a disjuncture between conceptual and policy categories and the lived experiences of those on the move. However, the paper is also critical of efforts to foreground or privilege ‘refugees’ over ‘migrants’ arguing that this reinforces rather than challenges the dichotomy’s faulty foundations. Rather those concerned about the use of categories to marginalise and exclude should explicitly engage with the politics of bounding, that is to say, the process by which categories are constructed, the purpose they serve and their consequences, in order to denaturalise their use as a mechanism to distinguish, divide and discriminate.     

伊斯兰学者刘智的"元气"与日本儒者伊藤仁斋的"一元气"思想——朱子学"理"、"气"学说的批判与重构

在"文明间对话"被各国学界极为重视的当代,特别值得关注与研究的是,17-18世纪的回儒学与日本德川儒学之间的具有价值和意义的对话.刘智和伊藤仁斋是同时代不同文化背景的两位思想大师,同时受到朱子学影响,并吸收融合而产生出自己独特的思想体系.本文将探讨这两位思想家对朱子学"理"、"气"思想的重构特色.进一步想说明,不同文化...     

The changing configurations of self-(m)other dialogue in North Cyprus

This paper deals with issues of identity, nationalism, postcolonialism, and self-other relations with a focus on a period of transformative events in North Cyprus. It notes how nationalism has been the dominant means of identification for Cypriots in their modern history, and argues that unless weakened and supplanted by a radically pluralist democracy, nationalism imagines one's identity as an indivisible unity and has no place for different others within the nation. However, a pressing relationship with others and otherness is no stranger to Cypriots either, which makes it clear that the border that defines the ‘we’ of such nationalism is, at the same time, the line that divides the self intrinsically, indicating the otherness of the self or its alterity. Subjectivity involves subjection to the other.     

热贡鲁若中"玛泽"与藏族历史的渊源关系

文章从历史学、宗教学、民俗学等角度,将流行于黄南藏族自治州同仁县隆务河流域的六月会主体节目之一"玛泽"的文化内涵进行了新的探讨,并就"玛泽"节目的历史和宗教渊源关系,民俗形成过程,以及对军事、生产活动中的意义提出了自己的看法.     

三江源自然保护区生态旅游开发的SWOT分析

本文就三江源自然保护区开发生态旅游产品的可行性及发展潜力,运用SWOT分析模式进行客观分析,并得出三江源开发生态旅游产品是实现该地区可持续发展的最佳途径。     

Changing patterns of mobility,citizenship and conflict in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Mobility and migration are inherent ingredients of Indonesian cultures. In an archipelago with thousands of islands of various size, character and nature, mobility is an important means to make a living and to survive by migration. The right to free movement in Indonesia is constitutionally granted. It can create mobility and give expression to equal citizenship rights at the same time as it can trigger the enforcement of borders among cultural groups and the ethnification of local and regional politics. Mobility thus always comes along with immobility. Physical mobility of one group of people might cause immobility of another group or it might create cultural and political immobility in the same group. In places such as Eastern Indonesia, people have developed reciprocal means to integrate newcomers. Whereas the immigrants are usually disadvantaged citizens with regards to land and customary rights, those living in the area for generations have nonetheless become integral parts of quite peaceful local settings, one way or the other. The advancement of decentralization, democratization and direct elections of political representatives can lead to political empowerment, the promotion of ethnicity as election capital and changing patterns of belonging. This paper illustrates these ambivalences by looking at mobility in Indonesia more generally and how changing national policies and laws lead to reinterpretations of mobility patterns and trigger changes in relations between local population groups and existing mechanisms of cultural and political inclusion and exclusion. Butonese migrants in Maluku will here serve as a case study.     

Governing multicultural Brussels: paradoxes of a multi-level,multi-cultural,multi-national urban anomaly

ABSTRACT

Updating our earlier work on Brussels as the paradigm of a multi-level, multi-cultural, multi-national city, and in the context of Brussels’s recent troubled emergence as the epicentre of violent conflict between radical political Islam and the West, this paper sets out the paradoxical intersection of national (i.e. Flemish and Francophone), non-national and ethnic minority politics in a city placed as a multi-cultural and multi-national ‘urban anomaly’ at the heart of linguistic struggle of the two dominant Belgian communities. Brussels is one of the three Regions of the Belgian federal model alongside Flanders and Wallonia. It is also an extraordinarily diverse and cosmopolitan city, in which a mixed language Belgian population lives alongside very high numbers of resident non-nationals, including European elites, other European immigrant workers, and immigrants from Africa and Asia. After laying out the complex distribution of power and competences within the Belgian federal structure, we explore whether these structures have worked over the years to include or exclude disadvantaged ethnic groups. To better understand these processes, we introduce our view of the multi-level governance perspective.     

The emerald isle: Ireland and the clash of Irish and Ulster-British nationalisms

This article will focus on the development of Irish and Ulster-British nationalisms through examining five factors that had the greatest impact on the creation and growth of these nationalisms: the geographic and topographic setting; demographic changes; sociocultural factors; economic and class factors; and the impact of the colonial power. The article will show that nationalism is driven by variables that originate from broader processes extending beyond the national group.     

‘Both an Arab and a woman’: gendered,racialised experiences of female Palestinian citizens of Israel

Following feminist and postcolonial discourses, this paper uses the concept of ‘everyday experience’ as a tool to trace the social world of educated Palestinian women in Israel. The term refers to the complex array of these women's experiences in racialised and gendered social sites, as well as within the class, religious, and ethnic contexts in the subordinated group and its relations with the dominant Jewish group. Based on 108 in‐depth interviews with Palestinian women citizens of Israel, the paper claims that educated Palestinian women are located in a ‘third place’ between cultural, gender, class, national and racial structures that generates a continual ambivalence. Within this marginal, ‘unhomely’ space women negotiate their own identities and challenge dominant social definitions. Women create various modes of interim spaces and multi‐dimensional, shifting identities for themselves. The ambivalent attitudes generated by the women's experiences expose the possibility of shedding categorising markers. The omnipresent existence of the gendered, racialised regime of knowledge makes every place a potential site of subversion and resistance.     

羌族宗教信仰与藏文化的关系考察研究

岷江上游羌族宗教信仰是多元混杂的,导致这种现象的产生,既有历史的因素,又有现实的因素.历史的因素可追溯到古羌人时代,从那里我们可寻羌族宗教信仰之渊源的一些踪迹;现实的因素可从羌族地处藏彝走廊,受汉藏文化影响的现状中去采撷一些实际的表现.本文拟就羌族原始宗教信仰中的藏文化因子,羌族天神信仰与藏族民间宗教信仰的渊源,羌族和藏族有关人类起源传说的相似与区分,羌族原始宗教信仰与佛教文化的糅合等方面对羌族宗教信仰与藏文化的关系作一较为深入的考察分析.     

Identification,the exercise of democracy and the fear of the Other – the June EU referendum in the UK

ABSTRACT

The focus is the oscillation among leave voters in the EU referendum from the exercise of rights - an act of dis-identification – towards the assertion of identity as members of a British community. This was mediated by voters acting in an association of citizens calling on the equalising agency of the British people whilst claiming membership of a locally circumscribed community, perceived as injured, through entanglement with the Other prominent among them Europeans. Hence the recovery of the injured community as the object of the denunciators’ desire for identity coupled with the fear of the Other. Predicated on this was the resumption of class, gender and ethnic roles reflected in division among voters. The denunciation of togetherness with Europeans served leave voters to substitute the exercise of rights with a longing for identity. Instrumental in this was the lack of deliberation in the plebiscite to articulate the will of individual voters through a general will. The ‘direct power’ exercised enabled many to cast away their role as citizen in an attempt to claim their privileges as members of a racially and culturally demarcated British community. Paradoxically, the voters’ unashamed disavowal of their agency as citizens by seeking to restore a divided social world as the source of their identity was represented as an exercise in democracy. To some playing on words was supplemented by the use of force removing the gap between the discursive exclusion of the Other and the continued physical presence of bearers of different races and culture.     

Citizenship, ‘rubbished’ dissidents and local restoration of the dead – the execution of Luri political activists in south-western Iran

The paper's focus is a critical moment in the trajectory of the Islamic state in Iran, the trace of which was still discernible in the presidential election of 2009. It draws on ethnographic research among the Lurs of south-western Iran between 1979–1982 to examine the impact of the abolition of politics as contested representations at the centre on a ‘remote’ periphery. The end of a short-lived political activity, as a distinct form of power, in Iran in 1981 was earmarked by mass executions of which only 1600 had been officially counted for the period of 20 June to September 1981 (Amnesty International). The executed were guilty of expressing dissent against divine rule of which the Islamic state was an embodiment. Although the Lurs paid a less heavy penalty for this ‘crime’ than elsewhere in the country the survivors' response to the loss of a young relative in the hands of Islamic executioners was noticeably muted. The response is looked at as the restoration of the status of the dead to the executed relative whose body had been ‘rubbished’ – wrapped in an American flag and abandoned unburied in a desolate place by the Muslim executioners. The paper argues ‘rubbishing’ signified the annihilation of citizenship under the Islamic rule in which the body of the citizen is seen as harbouring ‘the most corrupt’ subject, the sinner who could not even be ‘rectified’ through a less destructive use of force – flogging and mutilation. It, therefore, had to be disposed of – ‘rubbished’. The survivors, on the other hand, by confining themselves to the symbolic return of the executed relative to the community left unacknowledged his quest for equality and liberty. By their reluctance to remember and recount the executed's words and deeds the survivors refused to grant him the ‘immortality’ of a citizen whose death outlived his destruction. The brutal suppression of political agency at the centre and its muted recognition in the periphery are explained as a negation of political power. The power entails postponing the use of force to the last resort thus allowing plurality as a human condition to be realised. Consequent on this realisation is the publicly contested opinions by many who would inevitably challenge the truths guarded by few both at the centre and periphery. It was this challenge that led the ruling mullahs to invoke the Koranic Truths to annihilate the disseminators of opinions. The unspoken citizenship of the annihilated dissidents in the periphery served in turn to reassert the Lurs' historically cherished otherness geared to the use of force. The citizenship called for a discursive inclusion of Lurs, through the use of ‘the pen’, in a wider world, by postponing the use of force. In contrast, the traditional Luri rebels relied heavily on an immediate use of force, through the celebrated ‘rifle’, to perpetuate their perceived inaccessibility. Resistance leads to emancipation, the paper argues, when the particularised subjectivity of local actors is superseded in the universal – objectified – political space in which the agent, i.e. the citizen, overrides the boundaries within which localness is reproduced.     

季节变化对军牧一号猪生产力及生长发育规律的影响

本试验研究了不同季节（舍温变化）对母猪生产性能及仔猪发育情况的影响，以及温度对生长猪日增重的影响和断乳仔猪的生长规律。试验结果表明：军牧一号母猪冬季窝产仔数多，但仔猪的成活率、健仔率低，夏季窝仔数少，但成活率和健仔率高，春秋季成活率、健仔率偏低，与其它两季比较差异不显著（P＞0．05），仔猪初生重和断乳体重大。     

民俗变异与民俗学者的立场

现今中国的经济变革正在引起包括物质、精神、社会等层面上的民俗的复杂变化。作者认为民俗学者应当站在学术、社会和人文的立场上来对待、研究这一现象。     

犹太人能成为基督徒吗?反思、挑战与困惑

本文从一名犹太基督徒的视角出发,阐述了在作者身上所发生的犹太教与基督教身份之间的张力,并从耶稣、保罗以及早期犹太基督徒身上寻找解决方案,进而消解基督教与犹太教之间历史上的误会与冲突,以及如何从基督教的角度去协同与犹太教的关系。最后,作者陈述了现代以色列国内巴勒斯坦人的现状,并提出作为一个基督徒的正当立场。     

Place,identity and football: Catalonia,Catalanisme and Football Club Barcelona, 1899–1975

A growing body of work considers sport and the social construction of identities. Drawing from that research, this article considers how football clubs are involved in the construction of national identities by making explicit the connections between sport, identity and place. The first part of the article examines the literature addressing sport and collective identification/representation and considers critical approaches that uncover the power relations that frame the sport/identity nexus. The second part of the article applies these ideas to a discussion of Football Club Barcelona's role in the social construction of Catalan nationalism and national identity from 1899 to 1975.     

人类学视野中的“采百花”习俗

在盛行一夫一妻制的大理州洱源县西山乡白族传统社会中,婚姻之外还存在着结交情人的"采百花"习俗。"采百花"习俗在当地白族传统社会中呈公开而普遍的存在状态,与其他绝大多数社会为维护婚姻家庭和谐稳定所规定的伦理道德和法律规范相悖。本文作者对"采百花"习俗进行了长期的田野调查,深入分析研究了大理洱源西山白族传统社会中"采百花"习俗的历史文化背景、基本特征、群体认同、社会规范及其在当代社会中发生的变迁,为探求白族传统婚俗文化提供了一个民族志个案。