Big Man Research Articles

The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Champion Boxer by Wynn Wheldon

Reviewed by: The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Champion Boxer by Wynn Wheldon Todd M. Endelman Wynn Wheldon, The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Champion Boxer ( Amberley Publishing, 2019). Pp. 288. $32.95. It is an understatement to say that the history of boxing does not command attention in the field of eighteenth-century studies. Sad to say, Wynn Wheldon's biography of the bare-knuckle fighter Daniel Mendoza, a London-born Jew of Spanish and Portuguese descent who was active in the ring in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, will do little to correct this. It is long on anecdotes and short on analysis. Wheldon, who came to the subject because his wife is a descendant of Mendoza, writes in a lively and engaging way but does not probe the implications of Mendoza's career. This is regrettable. Prizefighting flourished in Britain at this time but not elsewhere in Europe. Why, one wants to know, did the British have a fondness for fisticuffs and what does this say about British taste and social habits? In addition, prizefighting's popularity, which often bridged the social gap between the highborn and the lowborn, its links with gambling and crime, and the imaginative work it did in crystallizing notions of nationality and masculinity are left unexplored. The one dimension of Mendoza's life that Wheldon pursues is his Jewishness, especially its place in his career and in the formation of images of the Jew. In this period, at least thirty Jews made a name for themselves in the ring, Mendoza the best known and the most successful among them. He was credited with introducing a more "scientific" form of boxing, one that emphasized finesse, agility, and intelligence, rather than brute strength and bulk. (He himself was not a big man. He stood five feet seven inches tall and weighed 160 pounds in his heyday.) Long after his career in the ring came to an end, he continued to tour the provinces, attracting large audiences to exhibitions of his prowess, in which he sparred and imitated the boxing styles of other well-known fighters. He was, as Wheldon makes clear, as much a showman as an athlete. His Jewish birth was not an obstacle to acceptance into "the fancy" (the boxing fraternity), success in the ring, and popular acclaim. A "Mendoza" became a slang word for a physical set-to. Throughout his career, he fought as a Jew—that is, he was labelled as such by friends and foes ("Mendoza, the noted fighting Jew"), a label he embraced. He was a great hero to the Jews of London, who vicariously participated in his victories in the ring. His triumphs occurred, however, at the same time that popular culture continued to stigmatize Jews as untrustworthy, scheming, rapacious, and greedy. The coexistence of anti-Jewish sentiment and pro-Mendoza admiration may represent one of the first manifestations of a phenomenon that became commonplace in twentieth-century [End Page 482] America, where athletes and entertainers from minority groups enjoyed public acclaim while racial stereotyping continued to thrive. The concurrence of such seemingly opposed sentiments calls for further comment. One possible reason that Wheldon does not engage with this problem is that he believes that Mendoza, whom he calls, with good reason, "the most famous Jew of his day" (in Britain), made potential assailants think twice before harassing Jews in the street. He did so, according to Wheldon, by erasing "a particular stereotype of the Jew as craven and submissive and un-English" (213). His only evidence for this is a passage from the radical reformer Francis Place's autobiography, in which Place claimed that Mendoza's celebrity and the spread of boxing skills among young Jewish men put an end to Jew-baiting. While there might have been a diminution in random assaults on Jews in London in the first half of the nineteenth century, there is no reason to attribute this to Mendoza. More likely, it was due to the more general decline in casual violence and the Evangelical-inspired growth of civility and respectability. Moreover, even in the wake of Mendoza's triumphs, there...

The Essential Nonessentialized Brown Girl

The Essential Nonessentialized Brown Girl Christine Imperial (bio) Letters to a Young Brown Girl Barbara Jane Reyes BOA Editions LTD www.boaeditions.org/products/letters-to-a-young-brown-girl 72 Pages; Print, $17.00 "Brown Girl Fields Many Questions," the first poem of Barbara Jane Reyes's sixth full-length collection of poetry Letters to a Brown Girl, confronts the reader with the brutal reality of Filipino brownness. It begins: If you want to know what we are whose body parts are scattered to the winds, dispersed as heirloom seeds into the beaks, stomachs, and dropping of migratory birds, broken through our clear film of rage to leaf and fruit, no matter what territory or terrain. Reyes does not allow this eloquently rendered lyric to dissolve into a universal reading that allows anyone to take on the persona of the poem. She immediately deconstructs her own lyric to expose the ways in which the New Critical mode of close reading widely used to understand a poem devalues the subjectivity the poem is birthed from. "iii. In which English 'we' is crude lacking in the specific exclusive and inclusive distinctions of the Tagalog 'tayo' and 'kami'" stands out for it illustrates the persona's awareness of what English lacks as a means of expressing the specificity of the Filipinx identity. Reyes recognizes that the brown girl must work harder when writing in English for what can be in one word in Tagalog must be stretched out and re-articulated. What follows after this deconstruction of language is a decompression of the opening lyric through a long list of images and experiences that exposes the conditions surrounding the brown girl's subjectivity: what it's like when they ask whether your mother was a green card hunting whore,a nudie dancer near the military base, a drug addict, a welfare cheatwhat it's like when they say you are an illegal, when they say fucking monkey, when they ask why you eat dog, when they call you a dirty Filipino.What it's like when they tell you you should be grateful. Here we see that the brown girl cannot be a blank slate. She cannot be a universal figure. Her lyric is not everyone's lyric. Knowing her poems are going to be read by a white audience, Reyes exhausts the reader by showing the ugly reality of oppression against brown bodies. Instead of allowing the white reader to feel sympathy and passively consume, she forces them to confront the ways in which their privilege has come at the cost of bodies of color. By listing down these experiences, Reyes lays the framework for the brown girl's reclamation of her identity. Throughout the collection, Reyes's language is direct and unflinching as it rallies against disguising language in the figurative. In "Brown Girl Manifesto: #AllPinayEverything," Reyes writes, "Because so much depends upon vacuous speech" she is reminding the reader of the power of voice. She asserts her writing is not metaphor. It is not a tropical fantasy nor is it wholly an experience of laborious subservience. It is who the brown girl is, and the brown girl is not afraid to scream. The brown girl who must tell her own story, because nobody else can. As Reyes writes in "Track: 'You're the One,' Fanny (1971)," "Hell yeah, let this Brown Girl be, ruby rock and roll gypsy in a big man's dirty world. I make ovaries of stone. I make the hottest blood. I'm the one. I'm my own thing." Throughout the collection, the poems take on the form of lists that name the collective experience of brown girlhood. The list simultaneously accumulates and de-accumulates experience. It allows for the reader to process each item both as individual experience and part of a larger one. This is significant for it reflects the text's tension of trying to illustrate the collective experience of the brown girl while also recognizing the individual character and narrative of every brown girl. The text's final poem "Dear Brown Girl" is a massive list where this tension is most palpable. She writes: 37...

ROUTES OF KUÇEDRA

The article takes the reader along the multitude of entanglements between the social, political, economic, infrastructural, scientific, and mythological meanings of water in Albania. Waterways, along with the routes of the mythical water figure called Kuçedra, continuously bring to the shore the meaning and the relation to authority. The latter used to be an essential part of the unwritten laws or the so-called Kanuns that were managed by the big men of particular patrilines. The article argues that the relation to authority is deeply rooted in the structural terrains of the Albanian society. The changing nature of the water (in similar ways to Kuçedra) always manages to trickle down, permeate, entangle and transgress these ambiguities and generate space-time in contemporary Albania.

Trends, Compliance Theory within the Bakassi Conflict and 21st Century Challenges to Nigeria’s Foreign Policy.

Conflicts between states is not a new thing, just as conflicts between human beings are unavoidable as a result of both state and human interactions on daily basis. Nigeria the “presumed giant of Africa” was caught in a conflict with her neighbour Cameroon baptized as “Africa in miniature”, and had to settle the Bakassi conflict amicably after some standoffs under the ICJ. The Foreign Policies of Nigeria from Independence has swung from one leader to another depending on the circumstances especially with the Bakassi palaver. This paper has a goal to systematically analyze Nigeria’s foreign policy paying attention to the transformational phases that were both inter and intra. This work went forth to look at the changes that occurred within the Foreign Policy of Nigeria after the Bakassi verdict with the Compliance Theory at work and lastly, it dwells on the Foreign policy challenges that Nigeria faces as the big man in Africa. This work espoused that the significant historical developmental trends that shaped the Foreign Policy of Nigeria were its Pan-Africanism and economic diplomacy drive backed by her support for African unity. More so, this work diagnosed that the peaceful settlement of conflicts by Nigeria took centre stage especially after the implementation of Bakassi verdict and a great challenge Nigeria faces now is the fight against Terrorism perpetrated by Boko Haram. This paper settles on the fact that, in order for Nigeria to be seen as the hegemon in Africa, her foreign policy has to be pragmatic and flexible reflecting events within Nigeria, on the continent and internationally especially with the advent of COVID-19, implementation of the Abuja High Court Verdict on the “NERA 10” and deepening Xenophobia against Nigerians in South Africa and among others.

Multilayered Democracy in Papua: A Comparison of “Noken” System and Electoral College System in the United States

The elucidation of understanding popular sovereignty through the implementation of democratic principles when applied to a pluralistic Indonesian society requires a comprehensive study. This study is a normative-legal research by using statute, case, and conceptual approaches. This paper provides information on the latest trend in research. The results show that the characteristics of the general election by Noken system are in line with the Electoral College system to presidential elections in the United States, especially in the Noken system as represented by the chieftain (election by the big man). The Noken system is the result of the relations of political culture and the strengthening of local democracy. Hence, the constitutionality of Noken system is a translation of the constitution that pays attention to the social diversity that lives in society. Not only in the context of general elections, but in every aspect of national and State life, as more attention is given to the constitution of social diversity in society (constitutional pluralism).

Big Man or Boogey Man? The concept of the Big Man in political science

AbstractThe Big Man has attracted considerable attention from social scientists, both as an explanatory force as well as a phenomenon to be explained. But the concept has become unmoored from its original meaning. Once used to refer to an apex figure within a patrimonial regime, today Big Men are often described as dictators or thieves. I show this using an original dataset covering discussions of Big Men in leading African Studies journals since 1980. I find that authors, especially political scientists, overemphasise theft and underemphasise accountability of Big Men. Then, drawing on my research with Ghanaian local politicians, I show how Big Men are constantly under pressure from their supporters. The paper concludes with a modest call to put the Big Man back in his place as powerful but also empowered, and thus indebted, to those beneath him.

“Biting the hand that feeds them? The case of Ghanaian Pentecostal discourse on ‘breaking from the past’”

ABSTRACT Ghanaian Pentecostal pastor-prophets encourage their members to break away from the ancestral past which is projected as a vessel of demonic operations responsible for mishaps in society. Yet traditional priestly actors have challenged the notion that indigenous religious imaginations and ritual spaces are a crucial platform where power and recognition are contested by some pastor-prophets. As such, these traditional priests have particularly warned pastor-prophets to desist from oppugning traditional religion or face exposure of their underground dealings with the traditionalists. In this paper, I reflect on confrontations between traditional priestly actors and neo-Pentecostal pastor-prophets in Ghana, arguing that such confrontations are a function of a power struggle as to who the ‘Big Men’ are in contemporary Ghanaian society. To understanding these confrontations, I contend further that there is the need to interrogate the differing points of continuity and disjuncture between these two traditions.

The Big Man Muqtada al-Sadr: Leading the Street in Iraq under Limited Statehood

ABSTRACT The article conceptualises the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a big man to explain his proven capability for navigating the hazardous terrain of Iraqi politics. Introduced in Sahlins’ anthropology on Melanesia and refined in African studies, the notion of the big man has been underexploited in accounts of the Arab region. This article defends its relevance for sociopolitical analyses of Iraq and for the study of religious actors. Personal authority is the defining characteristic of a big man, and the mobilisation of followers is the key to his renown. In situations of limited statehood, the ability to build support upon extra-institutional foundations can yield long-lasting political results. Muqtada al-Sadr has relied on an exceptional combination of resources to establish himself as a kingmaker on the political scene. We trace the roots of his ascent and foreground the strategies he has used to accumulate authority in his person. The article analyses Muqtada’s response to the wave of popular protests that swept Southern Iraq in 2019, observing a shift from initial support to open confrontation with the demonstrators. We argue that this shift threatens his status because it undermines his most important power resource: the ability to lead the street.

The sheikh versus the president: the making of Imam Dicko as a political Big Man in Mali

ABSTRACT In the lead up to the military coup in Mali in August 2020, Imam Mahmoud Dicko solidified his status as one of the country’s most important power brokers. How did a religious leader achieve this in a country where politics is considered ‘dirty’, the social capital of religious leaders rests on being seen as honest and pious, and politics and religion are considered constitutionally separate? Drawing on recent work in African Studies that utilises the classical ‘Big Man’ concept of Marshall Sahlins, this article tracks the political engagement of religious leaders with a particular focus on the political career of Imam Dicko. We document both his failures and how he learned to play politics without tarnishing his image as a pious man of God. We argue that Dicko’s hybrid mix of theology and politics led his followers into new terrain that even the secular opposition could buy in to. In turn, this opens up space for Salafi actors to navigate the straits between resistance and collaboration with the state.

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891

‘I trap her with a CD, then tomorrow find her with a big old man who bought her a smart phone’. Constructions of masculinities and transactional sex: a qualitative study from North-Western Tanzania

Men’s role in transactional sex is relatively unexplored, limiting initiatives to prevent exploitative transactional sex and its negative health implications for girls and women. We addressed this literature gap by conducting eight focus group discussions and twenty in-depth-interviews with boys and men aged 14 − 49 years in 2015 in Tanzania. We employed a novel combination of theoretical perspectives – gender and masculinities, and social norms – to understand how transactional sex participation contributes to perpetuating gendered hierarchies, and how reference groups influence men’s behaviour. Findings signal two gender norms that men display within transactional sex: the expectation of men’s provision in sexual relationships, and the expectation that men should exhibit heightened sexuality and sexual prowess. Adherence to these expectations in transactional sex relationships varied between older and younger men and created hierarchies among men and between men and women and girls. We found that approval of transactional sex was contested. Although young men were likely to object to transactional sex, they occupied a structurally weaker position than older men. Findings suggest that interventions should employ gender synchronised and gender transformative approaches and should prioritise the promotion of alternative positive norms over preventing the exchange of gifts or money in relationships.

Big man sovereignty and sexual politics in pandemic time

ABSTRACT This essay investigates why voters both forgive and reward the corruption enacted by Trump and Zuma because of the powerful illiberal fantasies they solicit in relation to their respective national mythologies of the good life. It does so by attending to the sexual politics these presidents articulate and perform. It describes and analyzes Mar-a-Lago and Nkandla as dream palaces of national belonging, Trump and Zuma’s public and private utterances about gender and sexual minorities, the rape allegations that have swirled around the two men, and their responses to pandemics. While their presidencies have no doubt violated the norms of constitutional democracy, the essay argues that we need to see them as both aberrant and symptomatic in relation to such norms.

Election of Regional Representative Councils Members with Noken System in Election Principle Perspective

The holding of General Elections, including the election of members of the Regional Representative Council in parts of Papua, has its own character because its implementation is different from the general election. If all this time we only know that, the implementation of the General Election is carried out in a "direct, general, free and secret manner", then there are some areas in Papua that still use the general election with the noken/tie system. This is because the culture of indigenous peoples in the Papua region in terms of decision-making concerning common interests is carried out through deliberation meetings involving members of the community as a whole or certain people ("Men with authority" or "The Big Man") only as representatives to take a decision. This is also corroborated by the Constitutional Court Decision Number 47-81 / PHPU.A-VII / 2009 which basically states that they do not question the voting system used by indigenous peoples in the central highlands of Papua, because the essence of the General Election process is that everyone can exercise direct, public, free and confidential voting rights. With the implementation of the General Election (including the election of DPD members) with the noken/ikat system, it does not provide guarantees and legal certainty for the constitutional rights of voters to determine for themselves who they think is best based on their rational logic. Honesty does not only mean that no provisions in the General Election are violated or simply that no votes are manipulated. Honesty must also be interpreted as the system that most allows the people to elect candidates according to their conscience based on the capacity and integrity of the candidates.

THE ROLE OF IN THE ROLE OF INTONATION IN CINEM TION IN CINEMA LANGUAGE

Background. The article reveals the essence of the concept of intonation, reveals its composition, function and roles in the language of cinema. Intonation is an adornment of oral speech, it is argued that it is the most important element in revealing the character of the characters. This is proved with factual examples from the films Onam bilmasin (Let Mama Don't Know) and Katta Odam 2 (Big Man 2). It is substantiated that the study of the language of cinema in the linguistic aspect, especially, the study of the phonetic, lexical-semantic and grammatical aspects in the future can lead to an increase in the level of films, some recommendations are given to improve the language of cinema.

Divine Payoff: Genealogies, Parasites, and the House of Marduk

AbstractOverviews of social development in early southern Mesopotamia of the third to first millennium BCE, which prominently address the question of state formation, assume a trend toward ever-decreasing functionality of kinship attribution. The article attempts to justify in broad outlines, but by connecting one or the other finding, that this cannot be proven empirically and is theoretically implausible, considering that familiarity as a criterion of kinship was necessary to establish relationships of trust. This trust was the condition for the possibility of patronage and the imposition of power. The article investigates both by trying to find suitable social contexts in the early societies of this region by starting with cosmological designs. As actors of these mutual observations in the medium of power, the argumentation establishes the community and the Big Man, whose outsider position (but communal affiliation) it describes as parasitism. In terms of difference theory, the usual tendency to overlook the constitutive oscillation between communal participation and familial representation in these social systems by presupposing a concept of unity, such as a state, are thus shown to be misguided.

Big cat acts and big men: performing power and gender in South Africa’s circus industry, c.1888–1916

ABSTRACT This article analyses lion-taming performances in South Africa through the acts displayed in three circuses: Frank Fillis’s, William Pagel’s and the Boswell’s, between 1888 and 1916. While lion-taming proved popular in the international arena, especially Britain, by the 1830s already, it was performed in South Africa only from the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on global literature on the symbols – both natural and cultural – integral to these acts, this article argues that the lion-taming performances by men were based on those of the metropole’s highly stylised acts of masculine domination over nature. However, we reveal two crucial differences evident when comparing the acts of the metropole (and even other colonies) to South Africa’s performances, which was contoured by the idiosyncrasies of the socio-political order. The lack of black African tamers speaks to the need to maintain colonial order and racial hierarchy. The acceptance of female tamers in the ring (which was unique in its timing compared to the global context) was a result of a local gendered context. However, this article argues that the key feature of performing white masculinist power was evident within these acts, reflecting notions of gender and race integral to this particular late nineteenth and early twentieth century settler colonial society.

Diamond Desire – Probing the Epistemological Entanglements of Geology and Ethnography at Diamang (Angola)

ABSTRACT In the wake of the Anthropocene there is a growing body of literature questioning the colonial and imperialistic underpinnings of geology, mineralogy and mining sciences. When focused on the African continent, these critiques echo and complement previous analyses of the role that anthropology has played as the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’. This article proposes to liken the two debates by focusing on the ethnographic practices promoted by the Angolan diamond mining company Diamang (1917–1988) during the interwar period. It argues that mineral desire, the greed for mineral resources such as diamonds, copper or gold, was the drive behind the introduction of ethnographic collecting and field-working to the Portuguese colony. The implications of this shift in perspective will be explored regarding the ongoing restitution debate. First, the article demonstrates that the history of the objects collected by Diamang disrupts ‘classic’ readings of the history of Portuguese anthropology focused on ‘disciplinary big men’ and their agendas. Second, it shows how the gathering and interpretation of ethnographic and archaeological data were totally integrated into the extractive apparatus of Diamang. The article then concludes by suggesting that the decolonisation of ethnographic collections must consider their entanglements with mining, geology and mineralogy.

Товарищу Плеханову, астероиду и человеку

Товарищу Плеханову, астероиду и человеку

“Yankee, Why Does a Big Man like You Fear My Baby?”: The Politics of the Anti-Japanese Movement, 1908-1924

ABSTRACT This article rethinks the making of the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908 arguing that the agreement between the U.S. and Japan was not singularly a mechanism of exclusion but one that had the power to include and exclude. Further, it examines political discourse between 1908 and 1924 to show how Japanese women’s labor – both reproductive and productive – became a source of deep anxiety for anti-Japanese exclusionists in the early twentieth century leading to a panic that further incited the anti-Japanese movement and ultimately led to full exclusion. In their anti-Japanese campaign, statesmen and public officials drew upon a politics of fear targeting the (re)productivity of Japanese women at a time when birthrates amongst white American women were declining and immigration from Japan Southern and Eastern European was climbing. This panic, like other anti-immigrant movements that targeted women throughout the twentieth century, was a means to achieve political hegemony in the west at a time when white American settlement was not a foregone conclusion.

Expanding the evolutionary explanations for sex differences in the human skeleton.

While the anatomy and physiology of human reproduction differ between the sexes, the effects of hormones on skeletal growth do not. Human bone growth depends on estrogen. Greater estrogen produced by ovaries causes bones in female bodies to fuse before males' resulting in sex differences in adult height and mass. Female pelves expand more than males' due to estrogen and relaxin produced and employed by the tissues of the pelvic region and potentially also due to greater internal space occupied by female gonads and genitals. Evolutionary explanations for skeletal sex differences (aka sexual dimorphism) that focus too narrowly on big competitive men and broad birthing women must account for the adaptive biology of skeletal growth and its dependence on the developmental physiology of reproduction. In this case, dichotomizing evolution into proximate-ultimate categories may be impeding the progress of human evolutionary science, as well as enabling the popular misunderstanding and abuse of it.