Mixed emotions : anthropological studies of feeling

Starting with Aristotle's suggestion that thought plays a central role in emotion, this chapter explores how in the absence of the bodies of missing persons, mourners find it difficult to express their emotions by 'conventional' means, either through ritual, however inadequate, or through spectacles, however cathartic. In such situations there is a strong tension between emotions-as-beliefs (that the person might return) and intuitive knowledge (that the person is lost forever). The consequent anaesthetization of thought and emotion in attempting to resolve this aporia (the recovery of something which has disappeared) is nevertheless a particularly fertile domain for the cognitive manipulation of the two concepts of "loss" and "absence" through (popular) "naive" art, especially where conventional religion cannot offer soteriological solutions to emotional and symbolic collapse. Emotion, therefore, is not just personal, but sustained through social scaffolding, which provides ways to conceptualise and 'resolve' apories.peer-reviewe

Bloodmoney and brideprice have no merit : marriage, manipulation, and the transmission of resources in a S. Tunisian village

This paper is about the presentation and manipulation of the exchange of goods and services in Southern Tunisian marriages. It is also an attempt to explain the rationality of such presentations by reference to the transmission of property and to domestic politics. Most discussions on marriages among the Arabs have noted that the size of marriage payments are no necessary reliable guide to the social position of the contracting parties (Comaroff, 1980; Peters, 1980) as seems to occur in the European Mediterranean, although ethnographies on Tunisia (e.g. Cuisenier, 1976; Abu Zahra, 1982) are silent on this point. Tapper (1981) has even suggested that direct exchanges and brideprice are 'alternative forms' of marriage, the former egalitarian the latter hierarchical. Even where brideprice is exchanged, 'the complicated system of gifts and countergifts allows of great variations, so that it is extremely difficult for an outsider to know how great are the expenses which a bridegroom in any one case really has for his bride when everything is taken into account' (Granqvist, 1931:126).peer-reviewe

Religion, politics and ethnicity in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571-1878)

This paper examines the relationship between religion, ethnicity and politics in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571–1878), the period of Ottoman rule. Its major thesis is that in the pre-industrial framework of Ottoman rule in Cyprus neither religion nor ethnicity were major sources of conflict in a society composed of two ethnic groups (Greeks and Turks) and following two monotheistic faiths(Christianity and Islam) in marked contrast to the recent history of Cyprus. In broad outline it closely parallels Gellner's thesis (1983) that nationalism is a by-product of industrialization, extensive education literacy and geographical and social mobility, and it seeks to show that the major cleavages in Cyprus were mainly intraethnic rather than interethnic.peer-reviewe

Patrolling society’s borders : slavery, apostasy and the Inquisition

Walter Benjamin once famously remarked that we write books because we wish to read them. Not being able to read them, as they have never been written, we write them. In the case of history, we write books perhaps because we wish someone had then written an account of what we now wish to explore. Lacking that, we write such books for the people of, and from, the past. At least we can give them a voice their contemporaries and time had denied them. Imagine that as historians we were to be offered an opportunity to b, presented with a mass of undreamt of data from, say the Malta National Archives. Let us take the period when the Order of St John ruled Malta between 1530 and 1798 as an example. We are sure that each one of us could imagine an ideal text, which would shed light on some particular aspect of their research. One could even imagine writing a history of unwritten histories. It is precisely when we begin to pose these types of questions that we realize only too uncomfortably that the mass of data that we possess deriving as they do from legal records, notarial archives, and other written sources, rich as they are, clearly deal with matters that concerned the economy, the elite, trade, booty, the church, family properties, and such like information. These are all very important, but let us imagine some hypothetical text that could have been useful to highlight the life and times of the mass of the population, or even of some particularly underprivileged group of Maltese society. One immediately thinks of slaves. They were clearly the most underprivileged group in Maltese society, they were on the margins, their lives were apparently ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Yet they were central for the economy, both in their capture and in the labour they performed, and by the end of the sixteenth century, a mere two generations after the knights Set foot in Malta, they constituted some ten percent of the population.peer-reviewe

A case of “plus ça change”, a “missed opportunity”, or a “new land-grab”?

This was submitted as part of a call for papers by The Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Animal Rights, Malta on the ‘Agricultural Land Reform White Paper’.This is an anthropological analysis of the White Paper on Agricultural Land Reform. It is not a legal analysis, and legal experts may well be dissatisfied with its lack of discernment with respect to land lease law in Malta. Its basic premise is that law cannot be seen in isolation to its social and economic effects, particularly one that deals with land and its exploitation. Certain interpretations of the law here may be wrong or tempered by other aspects. But popular views of what the law entails, as explored in this submission paper, still have a social reality that influences people’s perceptions, and actions, even if they may be erroneous. In that respect the law has a reality and social effects independent of the legislators’ intentions and the legal experts’ interpretations. One of the most surprising aspects of this White Paper (WP) is that it treats land tenancy primarily as a legal issue quite independently of its agricultural implications. And yet, on the other hand, it justifies itself by the need to provide a ‘secure food supply’. This necessitated enquiring not just whether Malta has ever been able to provide for itself, but also whether the actual land tenure regime that the WP attempts to shore up has ever been adequate for this purpose. The answer to both questions is negative. Malta has never been able to supply itself food wise, and I argue that the current land tenure regime is a significant contributory factor to Malta’s agricultural underdevelopment. Our current land tenure rental regime can never supply the country with an ample food supply; it also supplies us with the ‘wrong products’, shadowing and trying to compete with cheap food imports rather than concentrating on niche markets. This is not the fault of the tenants. It is the fault of the State that, in the name of ‘protection’, turned tenants not into commercially oriented farmers but into part-time cultivators who progressively considered the land they worked ultimately more significant for its transmissible (and divisible) capitalizable value as potential real estate, rather than in terms of its productive agricultural income through cumulative investment. Nor is there any evidence that the agricultural authorities ever previously explicitly oriented their policies, efforts, and announcements, towards the aim of a ‘secure food supply’. The conclusion is that the authorities were obliged to scrabble around to find a quick legitimating fix and alighted on ‘food supply’ as the widest, most populist, and most unassailable argument to fix what they considered a legal problem. The authorities claim that they desire to protect agricultural land. This may be disingenuous. Rather, they seem intentioned to shore up a monopolistic land tenure system through the White Paper. Ironically, it is this land tenure system itself that (in my opinion) is a major cause of Malta’s agricultural underperformance. This is an odd blind spot given that the White Paper is issued by the Ministry of Agriculture. It is also unfortunate because any legal tenancy regime has direct causative effects on the type of agriculture that emerges, e.g., whether it is dynamic, static, or even regressive, the level of investment, innovation, and the introduction of new ideas, crops, niche products or cabbages. This paper thus explores the structure of Maltese agriculture arguing that it evolved into two segments: (i) the private more professional sector innovating in new crops and products oriented towards the market such as wineries, olive oil producers, intense greenhouse horticulture, etc, and (ii) what I label a ‘simulated peasant mode of production’, where the ultimate capitalisable value of the land is more important to the protected part-time cultivating tenant than its agricultural output. The latter is largely the consequence of the protected private land tenure regime and explains why “farmers” (often employees deriving their main income elsewhere) try to hold on to it so tenaciously. The full-time farmer presents a different profile. This paper is both a political economic and an anthropological treatment of the motivations, effects and implications of the Private Land Rental Regime on agriculture It is political economic in that it looks at the State’s motivations in framing and sustaining it in the name of “protection”, as well as the rental regime’s effects on agricultural development; anthropological in that it explores some of the attitudes and dispositions of tenants and landlords emerging from this framework in which they have been enmeshed sometimes uncomfortably for generations. It is far from extensive. The literature quoted is strictly limited to the task: official papers, reports, comments etc. It does not compare the local scene to other examples of land tenure reform. That would have necessitated more than the 4 weeks available for comments and submission. Nevertheless, it is hoped that these observations will be useful for policy makers, legislators, and the interested public, and contribute to a positive resolution of what is more than a legal challenge despite what most participants seem to believe.peer-reviewe

The discovery of Malta : nature, culture and ethnicity in 19th century painting (a review article)

The publication of `The International Dictionary of Artists who painted Malta` by Nicholas de Piro (Malta, 1988) deserves our warmest welcome. Here for the first time in a lavish presentation are grouped a large number of paintings produced by the most varied artists and dilettanti (both Maltese and foreign) depicting Malta over a considerable time periods, but mainly from the 19th century.peer-reviewe

Explaining disappearances as a tool of political terror

Despite the widespread use of disappearances as a central tool of terror in recent decades, little is known about the emergence of the phenomenon or its underlying rationale. We argue that growing international accountability norms, coupled with the improved quality of reporting human rights abuses, paradoxically reshaped the repressive strategies of certain regimes and pushed them to deploy more clandestine and extrajudicial forms of repression, predominantly disappearances. We also explore the timing of disappearances: when a state decides to deploy a particular instrument of terror can greatly benefit our understanding of why it was used. We show that repressive regimes tend to use disappearances in the first period after a coup, taking advantage of the general confusion and opacity to secure strategic benefits and protect the regime from external scrutiny and future accountability. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on human rights and political repression by highlighting an ‘unintended consequence’ of international accountability norms: repressive regimes turn to clandestine crimes

Mediterranean conundrums : pluridisciplinary perspectives for research in the social sciences

This paper has two purposes. First, it summarises the various papers presented at a Pluridisciplinary Conference on the Mediterranean treating the region from a variety of perspectives, a selection of which are published in this issue of History and Anthropology. Second, it attempts to explore some of the tensions between historians and anthropologists, and political scientists and geographers, in the treatment of the region.peer-reviewe

How landscapes remember

This paper considers the possibility that as subject or agent, the landscape might have the potential to contain, store or transmit memories of their past, which are engaged experientially as uncanny. In a simple sense it asks why there are some landscapes – or landscape features – that are regarded as spiritually animated by different social groups, at different times. The paper focuses on the Neolithic temple site of Borġ-in-Nadur, in Southern Malta, which as well as having been a site of prehistoric ritual activity has more recently been the site of a significant devotion to the Virgin Mary, who graced the site with regular apparitions, and a focus for national and transnational Goddess pilgrimage. The paper suggests that sites such as Borġ-in-Nadur can be seen as palimpsest landscapes, in which memory is layered such that experiential engagements with them draw the past in to the present, and forwards into the future. The paper examines the intertwining of prehistoric, Catholic and Neo-pagan engagements with Borġ-in-Nadur, extending Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire (sites of memory) to encompass the milieux de memoire, or memorial environments, which are themselves also context of, and for, the uncanny