1998 NVSA Teasers

Friday, April 3

"Hodge and His Ethnographers: Chronicling the Rural Laborer, 1870-1902"
Patricia O'Hara, Franklin & Marshall C.

Late century interpretations of rustic behaviors and habits are premised upon the anthropological "doctrine of survivals," which construed an analogy between extant primitive foreign cultures and the culture of Hodge--an "other" English culture regarded as a repository of "strange survivals."  The anthropological science of culture draws paradigmatic parallels between primitive and rustic cultures.

Urban Britons touring the countryside of this most urbanized, industrialized nation testified to the "deep-seated rurality" characteristic of the English character.  This paradoxical construction of national identity requires a negotiation between the modern experience of rural life (the vacation) and conventional strategies for representing that life (the Georgic, the pastoral) of the sort found in Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich: a Long-Vacation Pastoral.  Through the mechanisms of modern tourism, the countryside is made to underwrite bourgeois values and social structure.

The convergence of the historical and spatial structures at play throughout Tess of the D’Urbervilles constitutes a Bakhtinian chronotope, literally a "time-space."  The text positions Tess in Wessex landscapes that she finds to be both native and alien at once. She wanders in a "transcendental homelessness" which, strangely, becomes her home.  [For a longer abstract, click here.]

Saturday, April 4

"Furthering Citizens' Dispositions: J.S. Mill and Liberal Nationalism"
Colene Bentley, McGill U.

In On Liberty and in Representative Government, John Stuart Mill endeavoured to find a new place for English nationalism in the public sphere of civil society, which was to be made up of autonomous, rational, reflective, and articulate individuals whose decisions would be unblinkered by convention and tradition. Moving away from the Burkean view of national identity as comprised of shared culture, memory, and responsibility, Mill attempts to navigate between civic and national identities, by acknowledging that liberal choices are made within extra-political contexts, one of which is nationalism.

Early Victorian British Unionism relies on a complex construction of "Irishness" that is composed of an understanding of race that defies epidermal marking, of anarchic masculinity and sexuality, and of class conditions posited as the result not of socioeconomic circumstances but of Irish difference itself.  Certain Irish nationalisms are not just `anti-colonial, but the very imperialist discourses which construct them are in reaction against nationalisms emerging in the colonies.

Working from E.J. Hobsbawm's work on ethnic nationalism, the paper considers Eliot's development of a concept of sacrificial ethnic identity in The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda.  Harper, the "mother" of African-American women's journalism and the most successful African-American poet of her century, appropriates and transforms that sacrificial identity in her works "Moses" and Iola Leroy.

Because race, for Olive Schreiner,  means the differences between Briton and Boer as much as between black and white, her articles and pamphlets discussing the Boer are her most significant attempts to define the racial future of the South African nation.  She invokes the language of race in attempting to shape a distinctively South African national identity which takes account of (though it does not include) Zulu, Bushman, and Bantu..

"Ethnology and Ethnography: A.C. Haddon and the Construction of Anthropological Knowledge in late Victorian Britain"
Sandra Rouse, Cambridge U.

A.C. Haddon's original conception of what constituted anthropological knowledge was grounded in his early field expeditions to Torres Strait in 1888 and the Aran Islands in 1890-91. After each expedition he redefined the boundaries of his ethnology and ethnography in light of his field data and the dictates of scientific societies to create a novel and idiosyncratic vision of anthropology. By 1898 he had translated his vision into an "ideal" anthropological expedition the results of which defined the structure of the discipline at Cambridge for the next fifty years.

The figure of the parent that emerges in the advice literature of mid-century Britain is a devoted gardener, attentively nursing the tender seedlings in her care.  Darwin not only modelled his parenting on this trope, but the qualities he identifies in the Autobiography as vital to his success as a scientist--love, observation, patience--are long associated with the feminine, and with this new model of the parent.  His emotional investment in parenting increasingly reveals itself in the content, rhetoric, and affect of his scientific writing after The Voyage of the Beagle.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin argues persuasively that female choice and male display function as selective, shaping agents in all species he surveys--until he gets to humankind, in which the gender roles are abruptly reversed.  Darwin, however, seems to glide over this glaring discontinuity unconcerned.  He concentrates instead on the way in which racial and gender traits among an interbreeding population become fixed when the principles upon which mate choices are made remain consistent through many generations, he thereby preserves a semblance of scientific decorum.

"'Instruments of Torture': Territories, Identities, and Street Music in Victorian London."
John M. Picker, U of Virginia.

Battles over street noises in London were not just concretely but conceptually territorial:  they attempted to protect not just neighborhoods and city blocks from intrusive noises, but also such regions of identity as professionalism, nationality, and the body.  Those opposed to annoying street sounds endeavoured to defend the purity of English national identity against the taint of foreign influence; to uphold economic and social divisions between the lower and middle classes; and to protect the frail, afflicted bodies of (English, middle-class) invalids from the invasive, debilitating effects of (foreign, lower-class) street music.

During the nineteenth century, local governments like Brighton's took on the role of keeper of public collections. In the 1830’s, however, it seemed in no way inevitable that it would develop a strong enough urban identity to be willing to pay for a municipally supported museum.  Yet despite its rather poor start when compared to the older commercial/ industrial cities like Norwich, Bristol, Manchester, and Birmingham, Brighton began the twentieth century with a well established art gallery and museum that held one of the most ambitious series of contemporary international exhibitions ever seen in a provincial English town.

John Thomson, a  pioneer in the use of photography as a tool for anthropology, first used it in East Asia in the1860s. Achieving realism by bringing his camera into the streets, his carefully composed photographs cement his theories about social types.  Turning in the 1870s to the street laborers of East London earlier studied by Henry Mayhew, he uses the the same range of artistic conventions to underscore Mayhew's distinction between "civilized" and "nomadic" peoples, explicitly cross-referencing his Asian photographic work.

Sunday, April 5

"Tropical Ovaries: Obstetrics, Ethnography, and Vampiric Bodies in Tilt, Braddon, Conan Doyle and Stoker"
Piya Pal Lapinski, Bowling Green State U.

Nineteenth-century constructions of female vampires are located within the intersections of gynecological and ethnographic discourse.  In such disparate examples as Braddon's Lady Ducayne, Doyle's Sussex Vampire, and Stoker's White Worm, female vampires are sexually aggressive, racially indeterminate courtesans who endlessly reproduce themselves, and threaten the to overwhelm the reproductive power of Englishwomen--and thereby the British Empire itself.

The earliest Western experiments with fingerprint identification took place in Bengal. Francis Galton's attempts to correlate fingerprint patterns with race, ethnicity, gender, intelligence, insanity, and criminal propensity combined with a misunderstanding of the Indian caste system to construct a notion of hereditary criminal tribes.  When fingerprint identification was exported back to Europe and applied to class rather than caste, it helped construct the new "knowledge" of hereditarian criminology.

Alhough it is the first display of Mexican artifacts after Mexico's 1821 independence, William Bullock's 1824 display has been ignored by scholars because of its blend of shameless, low-brow theatricality and naked economic opportunism. Many of Bullock's items, however, wound up in the British Museum, and an examination of Bullock's show tells us something about the function of popular entertainment in the formation of European museum consciousness.

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