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An emotional basis for morality? Since professional historians have tended to reject easy formulations about learning from the past, or history repeating itself, they have often been left stammering when asked to justify what history does, or what it is worth. On good days, of course, most historians can justify what they do, at least to themselves, but an air of suspicion has tended to linger over so-called ‘soft’ sub-fields of history that are not thought to get to the real meat of historical significance. For decades, this meant powerful white
1 Towards a new republican morality Any attempt to follow the development of Robespierre’s thinking, leading finally to the speech of 18 Floréal (7 May 1794) and proclamation of the festival in honour of the Supreme Being on 20 Prairial Year II (8 June 1794) has to try to answer two main questions. The first is whether progress in his thinking on the importance of the problem which the lack of any acceptable national moral system through the early years of the Revolution had created can be traced. The second is why he chose a Revolutionary Festival to launch
chap 8 13/8/04 4:24 pm Page 176 8 The political morality of food: discourses, contestation and alternative consumption Roberta Sassatelli Anthropology and sociology have been keen to show that consumption is a social and moral field, and that consumer practices are part of an ongoing process of negotiation of social classifications and hierarchies. Food consumption in particular has been associated with symbolically mediated notions of order (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). We know that particular foods are identified with annual festivities, set apart for
5 Crime, security and morality Agrarian discontent with the slow and ineffective progress of the Land Commission provided certain possibilities for mobilisation behind republican opposition to the Irish Free State, if the leaders could convincingly demonstrate that the redress of such grievances hinged upon a rejection of the Cumann na nGaedheal government. However, Liam Mellows did not inspire a successor in Galway, or at least not one that would successfully harness the potential for agrarian and political upheaval in Galway as he had done in 1915–16. Neither
representations of African women and how these influenced conceptions of tradition versus modernity in development discourse. Second, I demonstrate how representations of African gender identities and relations, domesticity, morality, and sexuality permeated colonial discourse and influenced practice. Finally I provide a critique of gendered colonial development discourse and its
48 3 Prostitutes, courtesans and public morality During the sixteenth century, many French and German cities officially closed their brothels, as though yielding to the demands of Protestant reformers that they form godly societies dominated by civic righteousness.1 No more should public authorities connive at sexual relationships outside marriage, let alone extract revenue from them. Choice of the lesser evil should give way to a new kind of moral absolutism. Some Protestant critics called whorehouses ‘schools that teach more shameful things than they prevent
produced a vocabulary for the comparative analyses of politics, represented, most importantly in his Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics (1969b). This chapter traces F. G. Bailey’s varied oeuvre to arrive at three enduring and intertwined aspects in his ethnography of politics: morality, truth, and power. Focusing mainly on his political ethnographies of Orissa
Introduction This chapter considers scriptural citation in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English morality drama. As scholars such as John Wasson and Pamela King note, the survival rate of plays that might be considered ‘moralities’ does not ‘supply adequate evidence of a coherent “movement” within the development of native theatre’. 1 Nonetheless, as King herself argues, the extant examples – including The Castle of Perseverance ( c . 1400–25), Wisdom and Mankind
The works of F. G. Bailey (1924‒2020) provide a masterful template for good ethnography: the kind that leads to theoretical insight. Central to this endeavour is Bailey’s ability to conceptually connect the well-described micro-contexts of individual interactions to the macro-context of culture. Bailey’s core concerns – the tension between individual and collective interests, the will to power, how leaders yield and keep power, and the dialectics of social forces which foster both collective solidarity as well as divisiveness and discontent – are themes of universal interest; the beauty of his work lies in bite of his analyses of how these play out in local arenas between real people. Bailey’s ethnographic gaze enables richly thick descriptions of social interactions in which actors recognize the rules of the game, simultaneously deploying creative actions that circumvent those rules in ways that Bailey’s models illuminate. His work provides nuanced, yet explicit road maps to analyzing the different leadership styles of everyday people as well as contemporary leaders: Boris Johnson, Trump, Obama, Putin, Macron, Modi, Kim Jong-un. It is our hope that this volume will inspire new generations of anthropologists to revisit his seminal texts by demonstrating the broad range of research areas in which Bailey’s conceptual and methodological toolkit can be applied. The range of topics and cultures studied in the chapters collected will help new scholars navigate their way through the ethnographic thicket of their own research.
In 1869, Parliament disestablished the Church of Ireland, dissolving what Benjamin Disraeli called the ‘sacred union’ of church and state in Ireland. Disestablishment involved fundamental issues – the identity and purpose of the established church, the religious nature of the state, the morality of state appropriation of church property for secular uses, and the union of Ireland and Britain – and debate was carried on at a high intellectual level. With disestablishment, the Church of Ireland lost much of its property, but it recovered, now as an independent Episcopal church with a renewed mission. The idea of the United Kingdom as a semi-confessional Protestant state, however, was dealt a serious blow.