Imperial Frontier Research Articles

H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political & Literary Contexts of His African Romances, by Gerald Monsman

<i>H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political &amp; Literary Contexts of His African Romances</i>, by Gerald Monsman

Martial Races: the Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914 (review)

Reviewed by: Martial Races: the Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914 Keith Surridge (bio) Heather Streets , Martial Races: the Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), xi + 241 pages, hardback, £50 (ISBN 0 7190 6962 9). It is well known that within the British Empire there were peoples who, because of their supposed military traditions and cultures, regularly supplied recruits to the British army. Better known as 'martial races', these groups, in particular the Sikhs of Punjab and the Gurkhas from Nepal, provided the empire with its elite soldiers. Until now, littlework has been done to explain why the British regarded these men as especially martial. However, Heather Streets has finally carried out this necessary investigation and, in a stimulating, cogently argued and well-written book, has laid bare British notions of what constituted a martial race and its importance to Britain's imperial standing. Importantly, Streets explains that military efficiency was not the sole reason forthis policy: the need for martial races within the army was necessary to offset fears regarding masculine and racial degeneration within both imperial and British society and culture. [End Page 146] Although the book focuses primarily on Britain's Indian forces, and essentially on the Sikhs and Gurkhas, it also examines the role played by the Scottish Highlanders. Highland regiments were often linked to the Sikhs and Gurkhas, especially after the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58. Together, these troops were considered the best examples of manhood Britain and India had to offer. These were the shock troops of empire, the go anywhere, do anything men who kept the 'watch and ward' on the imperial frontiers, particularly the North-West Frontier of the Indian Empire. This association of the Highlanders with the Sikhs and Gurkhas is well-known, but their links to martial race ideology has not been studied. Thus, Streets attempts to show, and I think successfully, 'that the historically specific context in which martial race ideology became dominant was neither a "metropolitan" nor an "imperial" matter, but one that transcended both' (3). At the time of the Indian Mutiny, the Highlanders already stood out as much for their military capabilities as for the distinctive uniforms, and already had a reputation as elite troops, especially since the Crimean War (1854-56). When Highlanders and Sikhs were successfully paired they became the object of fervent admiration. The Gurkhas too had played their part during the Mutiny, their loyalty evident. In response to the massacres of British women and children by the mutineers, the enormous press coverage, with many reports provided by army officers, stressed the bravery and loyalty of the Sikhs and Gurkhas, as well as the martial skills of the Highlanders. Following the Mutiny it was decided that the Indian forces, which until the early twentieth century were divided into three armies, those of Bengal, Bombay and Madras, should never again be recruited mainly from one group. Beforehand, for the larger and more active Bengal army, the British had relied mainly on high caste Brahmins and Muslim soldiers from Oudh (Awadh), who had been based in their own regiments. It was then decided that recruiting policy should be altered, and that regiments should be of mixed castes and religions, the most obvious manifestation of the principle of divide and rule. However, these recommendations were subsequently ignored. By 1887, alongside the Gurkhas, most recruits for the Bengal Army came from the Punjab, which had remained loyal during the Mutiny and where the Sikhs dominated, although Punjabi Muslims were also prized as recruits. Indeed, by 1914, 75% of the Indian army comprised those alleged martial races. Moreover, with the growth of race ideology British recruiters were concerned they should have the right sort of troops to fight a Russian invasion of India through Afghanistan, which was expected at any time and remained the focus of British fears until 1907. Thus northern, [End Page 147] lighter skinned Indians, believed to have originated from ancient 'Aryan' conquerors, were considered far superior troops to the darker skinned southern Indians who comprised the Madras and Bombay armies. The irony here was that the latter forces had remained loyal...

An Imperial Frontier of the Sasanian Empire: Further Fieldwork at the Great Wall of Gorgan

The 2006 season has yielded significant new insights into the Great Wall of Gorgan's relation to landscape features and settlement, notably the division of the associated complex water supply system into sectors. The westernmost part of the wall is buried deeply beneath sediments from a past transgression of the Caspian Sea. An unexpectedly high number of brick kilns, of standardised design, shed light on the manner of the wall's construction. Geophysical survey, satellite images and excavations have established that some or all of the associated forts were densely occupied with buildings, thought to be barracks, suggesting a strong military garrison.

H. Rider Haggard on the imperial frontier: the political and literary contexts of his African romances

H. Rider Haggard on the imperial frontier: the political and literary contexts of his African romances

The Turkana Patrol of 1918 Reconsidered

This essay seeks to place the events in Turkan during the first decades of the twentieth century into a wider perspective. Despite their modest numbers and the wasteland they inhabited, the challenge to the Turkana did not come from their neighbors, whom they could raid with success or live in harmony with. The threat to their traditional way of life came from Ethiopian and British imperialism, the reasons and forces of which the Turkana were oblivious to. Britain could not tolerate an Ethiopian presence in Turkan and regarded the problem of the Turkana as largely an imperial contest with the “Abyssinians.” In the 1960s and 1970s revisionist historians challenged this interpretation, arguing that the Turkana, in order to defeat their African neighbors, adopted new leaders and military techniques in the 1880s that introduced into Turkana society a new and aggressive militarism. Since their territorial ambitions in Turkan appeared to have been satisfied by using these tactics by the 1890s, Turkana “militarism” was thereafter used to defend their pastures and waterholes from incursions by African neighbors, to recover livestock stolen by them, or to replenish Turkana herds lost to raids, drought, or disease. Turkana historians have thus argued that the representation of Turkana militarism for continued territorial expansion is more a Western creation, for the Turkana were more concerned to defend their acquired territory than participate in unprovoked belligerence against imperial invaders. Sadly, at the time neither of the protagonists could have predicted the subsequent unmitigated disaster for the Turkana in the aftermath of the Turkana Patrol of 1918, in which they had become the unwitting victims of a larger conflict for control of an imperial frontier.

:Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers c. 1600-1800: A Study of Scotland and Empires

:<i>Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers c. 1600-1800: A Study of Scotland and Empires</i>

The Japanese Colonial State and the Dissolution of the Late Imperial Frontier Economy in Taiwan, 1886–1909

In the first few days of July 1902, camphor workers in the mountains around the town of Nanzhuang (Nansh?) abandoned their stills and joined a growing exodus of settlers and townspeople who, fearing rumors of an impending indigene attack, had packed up their belongings and were fleeing the town. Japanese colonial officials on the spot requested a dispatch of troops from the Xinzhu garrison to restore order and project the state's authority in this thriving center of camphor production on the edge of Japan's colonial empire (1895-1945). The company arrived on July 6, just in time to thwart a direct strike on the town. The so-called savage insurgents?in reality a motley crew of over eight hundred disgruntled frontiersmen, displaced camphor workers, and indigenes led by the Hakka settler-cum-indigene chief Ri Aguai? nevertheless surrounded and destroyed several frontier guard stations and camphor stills in the mountains. Faced with a disturbance reaching critical proportions and threatening to spill into neighboring mountain districts and paralyze the thriving camphor industry, colonial officials called for more reinforcements. Three days later, the army deployed Xinzhu's second infantry company and first artillery platoon to the scene for action.

Mackillop and Murdoch (eds), Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers; Bryan, Twa Tribes

Mackillop and Murdoch (eds), <i>Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers</i>; Bryan, <i>Twa Tribes</i>

Historical dynamics: why states rise and fall

Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics--why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract--this book shows that a similar research program can advance our understanding of dynamical processes in history. Peter Turchin develops hypotheses from a wide range of social, political, economic, and demographic factors: geopolitics, factors affecting collective solidarity, dynamics of ethnic assimilation/religious conversion, and the interaction between population dynamics and sociopolitical stability. He then translates these into a spectrum of mathematical models, investigates the dynamics predicted by the models, and contrasts model predictions with empirical patterns. Turchin's highly instructive empirical tests demonstrate that certain models predict empirical patterns with a very high degree of accuracy. For instance, one model accounts for the recurrent waves of state breakdown in medieval and early modern Europe. And historical data confirm that ethno-nationalist solidarity produces an aggressively expansive state under certain conditions (such as in locations where imperial frontiers coincide with religious divides). The strength of Turchin's results suggests that the synthetic approach he advocates can significantly improve our understanding of historical dynamics.

Railway network development in inter-war Romania: Economic and strategic motives

The railway geography of the Pannonian zone was substantially reconstructed after the First World War as a result of the demise of the Habsburg Empire and the need for unity within the new states of the region. While some main lines were effectively destroyed like the direct link between Szeged and Timisoara (which is only now being revived in the context of European support for cross-border cooperation), many new connections were proposed across the former imperial frontiers. This study deals with Romania where former Carpathian frontier needed radical attention. But as achievements of the period 1919-49 are examined it is evident that the ambitious proposals of the expansionists were compromised by need for careful prioritization given the limited finance and the engineering challenges; also the need to reconcile economic and strategic interests and provide for qualitative improvements throughout the system as a whole as well as new construction.

National Identity and Shifting Imperial Frontiers: Whiteness and the Exclusion of Colonial Labor After World War I

ABSTRACT This article addresses both the specific history and the broader implications of France's expulsion of colonial labor after World War I. The article also considers questions of race, immigration, and exoticist culture during the interwar years, showing that the French fascination with the Other reflected a determination to confirm a national identity as white. The use and expulsion of colonial labor in effect transferred a central colonial focus, racial identity, to the metropole.

The Jews of Ekaterinoslav in 1905 as Seen from Town Hall: Ethnic Relations on an Imperial Frontier

SUMMARY: В статье Джеральда Сура исследуются отношения между еврейским и нееврейским населением Екатеринослава через призму реакции гласных Городской Думы на октябрьский погром 1905 г. в этом бурно развивавшемся городе на периферии империи, в Новороссии. Опираясь на источники на русском и украинском языках, статья вскрывает уважительные, пусть и не слишком близкие, взаимоотношения между элитой процветавшей еврейской общины, склонной к аккультурации и ассимиляции, и русским купечеством и образованным обществом, которые, очевидно, признавали вклад евреев в экономическую и культурную жизнь города. Сур выдвигает тезис о том, что погром должен быть инкорпорирован в социальную историю города как результат нарушения сложного межэтнического баланса и баланса власти и политического/экономического влияния в имперском городе России начала ХХ века. Настоящая статья предлагает именно такое “прочтение” феномена погрома.

The 'New Frontier' of Empire in the Caribbean: The Transfer of Power in British Guiana, 1961–1964

The vicissitudes of British imperial divestment after 1945 require scholars to explore systematically the United States’ role in reshaping the contours of the British Empire. According to William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, 'the post-war Empire was more than British and less than an imperium ... it was nationalized and internationalized as part of the Anglo-American coalition. US foreign policy after 1945 was directed not only at forging a North Atlantic coalition which would 'contain' die Warsaw Pact, but also at collaborating in die management of the political and economic changes that swept die non-European world. The history of international relations since 1945 has been defined by the 'end of empire' - whether Belgian, British, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, or Soviet. As each empire has disintegrated, US influence has been extended during, and through, die process of imperial disengagement. In some cases, for example the Japanese mandates acquired at the end of die Second World War, die extension of US influence led to formal control. In others, as in Jordan, Morocco, Indonesia, and die former Belgian Congo, the United States has used military and/or economic aid to fashion an 'informal empire', to borrow die term popularized by Robinson and John Gallagher. The transfer of power in British Guiana between 1961 and 1964 illustrates Louis and Robinson's claim that British imperial disengagement was managed by the Anglo-American coalition. It shows how die two powers constantly (re)negotiated die terms of their relationship in various parts of the world in order to maintain their strategic partnership. And it shows how British disengagement created the conditions for US control. In effect, die transfer of power in British Guiana was not simply the accession to office in an independent country by the nationalist elite; it also transferred control of the country's political system and economic and foreign policy to the United States. As Louis and Robinson observe, 'Kennedy's New Frontier began where Europe's imperial frontiers had ended.

The Reach of Rome: A History of the Roman Imperial Frontier, 1st--5th Centuries AD. By Derek Williams. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 342 pp. $29.95

The Reach of Rome: A History of the Roman Imperial Frontier, 1st--5th Centuries AD. By Derek Williams. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 342 pp. $29.95

"Scenes of Horror," Scenes of Sensibility: Sentimentality and Slavery in John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam

“Scenes of Horror,” Scenes of Sensibility: Sentimentality and Slavery in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam Tassie Gwilliam* It has been asserted that sentimentality and transracial love plots work to mystify slavery and colonialism—to dematerialize them and take them out of the realm of exploitative labor—but John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) demonstrates that slavery and colonialism can also themselves serve to illuminate not only the contradictions and internal pressures endemic to sentimental love plots, but also the laborious and problematic process of creating sentimentality itself. 1 In Stedman’s heterogeneous Narrative, the intermittently heard, countering voice of the beloved slave and the contamination of “romance” and the domestic by colonial violence together serve to reveal the holes in sentimentality. 2 Despite (or perhaps even because of) the popularity of sentimentality in the 1780s and 1790s as “a powerful mode for representing colonial relations and the imperial frontier,” in Mary Louise Pratt’s words, its imperatives also tangle Stedman’s text, pushing narrator and narrative into unsustainable extravagance and unsought self-confrontation. 3 Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam is at once the description of a suicidal military expedition against the maroons (the “Revolted Negroes” of the title), a travel book exploring the natural history of South America, the narrative of a man of sensibility encountering a brutal and corrupt plantation society founded on the spectacular torment of slave bodies, a picaresque masculine adventure self-consciously modeled on Roderick Random and Tom Jones, and the avowedly sentimental tale of the transracial romance between Stedman and the mulatto slave Joanna, hopefully defined by Stedman as a reversal of Inkle and Yarico, the seminal sentimental-romantic encounter between new world and old. 4 Not only the wildly divergent genres and models invoked, but the dangerous [End Page 653] congruence between slavery and the sentimental make the narration of this relationship both volatile and disruptive. 5 The ability of the sentimental—and of the love plot to which it is here tied—to represent sexuality in a context of slavery and violence undergoes intensive testing through Stedman’s Narrative. Because the story of Stedman and Joanna documents a series of negotiations with problematic facts—most vitally the fact that Stedman entered into the quintessentially colonial economic/sexual agreement of formal concubinage with Joanna—the text registers with peculiar clarity the compromises and coercion common in the sentimental love plot, both as a genre and as erotic wish-fulfillment. The inescapable, repeated confrontations with bodily torment, the proximity of transformative violence to the body of the heroine, and the baldly economic valuation of that body translate all too seamlessly into sentimentality. I Stedman’s description of his romance with Joanna may be said to offer a classic example of (failed) containment; the juxtaposition and interpenetration between this forcefully but uneasily sentimentalized encounter and the violent spectacles of slavery demonstrate the impossibility of sealing off the realm of the personal from the political and social, as well as the inevitably disfiguring effects of slavery on the love plot. 6 Stedman’s narrative in fact documents the strains of the effort to convert the political to the personal. 7 The collapse of the clear lines of demarcation around romantic and sentimental interludes in Stedman’s narrative echoes the doomed attempt to carve out a domestic space in the overwhelming physical and psychic violence of colonial Surinam. 8 There is no inviolable domestic or narrative space under slavery; at each point that Stedman raises barriers between home and public spaces, or between sentimental diversion and central story, slavery confounds the drawing of boundaries. But the demands of sentimental narration also undermine Stedman’s efforts to cordon off this romance from the other experiences described: the need for a heroine in distress—and a hero suffering through her suffering—calls back in full force the cause of suffering, the heroine’s enslavement. The awkward effects of assimilating the institutional violations inherent in slavery to the modes of sentimentality pervade Stedman’s Narrative. What originates as trading in...

"The Extention of His Majesties Dominions": The Virginia Backcountry and the Reconfiguration of Imperial Frontiers

"The Extention of His Majesties Dominions": The Virginia Backcountry and the Reconfiguration of Imperial Frontiers

Production Within and Beyond Imperial Boundaries: Goods, Exchange, and Power in Roman Europe

After Rome had conquered much of temperate Europe, the administration directed the establishment of industries important to the maintenance of military and economic control of the new provinces. These included stone quarries, pottery manufactures, and metal industries. Recent research shows that much production was not as centralized as has been believed; diverse industrial sites throughout the provincial landscapes indicate a variety of arrangements for supplying the needs of the empire. In many instances, Roman production systems relied upon indigenous traditions of manufacturing. The provincial economies depended also upon materials collected and processed beyond the imperial frontiers. Analysis of Roman imports in Germany, Scandinavia, and eastern Europe, and of the contexts in which they occur, suggesta that goods produced outside of the empire played a major role in the imperial economy. These commercial links, over which Roman authorities had no effective control, contributed to substantial changes in economics and in social and political configurations in societies beyond the Roman frontier.

Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 by Robert H. MacDonald

writing more generally. It would have been useful to have more detailed comparisons between Ondaatje’s individual texts (and especially across the genres) precisely because Ondaatje is such a hybrid writer himself. But Barbour does offer an extremely reliable, responsible overview of On­ daatje’s work; his readings, if overburdened by critical references, are sensi­ tive and informative. The critic who writes on Ondaatje is confronted with a difficult task: on the one hand, one cannot help but be aware of the way in which these texts resist meaning (captured concisely in Barbour’s claim that “[m]eaning is not the point; writing is” [135]); on the other hand, it is diffi­ cult to resist the critical task that involves finding, or creating, meaning in the very places where one insists that it does not exist. To Barbour’s credit, he does not succumb to this latter temptation as he respects the mongrel text in all its curiosity and mystery. Ba r b a r a leck ie / Carleton University Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890-1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). viii, 258. $35.00. Speaking to a Toronto audience in 1910, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, told a story that, no doubt unintentially, pro­ vided a truer picture of the Boy Scout than the many soldierly images so prominently displayed throughout that decade: Each boy is expected — and we put him on his honour to do it — to carry out some good deed every day to some animal or person. I have today received information of one of your local scouts who woke up in the night to find he had forgotten to do his good turn. He heard a mouse in the trap, so he got up, went to that mouse, tenderly took it out of the trap, and handed it to the cat.1 The story is helpful for two reasons. First, because it reminds us that, even though MacDonald’s study has a 1890-1918 timeframe and chronicles a movement in the heyday of imperial fervour, imperialism itself was more of­ ten imbibed than overtly inculcated; and that, though Baden-Powell’s Scout­ ing for Boys is indeed one of the most compact manuals of imperialism ever produced, we still need to consider the probability that the theory of scout­ ing as promulgated by Baden-Powell and the practice of it by thousands of young devotees were often not in accord. Experience teaches, among other things, one important fact about such movements (which are, in many ways, akin to religious movements): that when one bases an historical study on 109 the “preaching” — the written manifestoes — one might come to conclusions not at all recognized by those who “practised.” Secondly, Baden-Powell’s story may be the only image of the Boy Scout that modern readers recognize and to them MacDonald’s thesis may seem somewhat far-fetched. They might be unconvinced that the Boy Scouts they know — those inoffensive campfire enthusiasts and intrepid do-gooders (even helping old ladies across the street against their wishes) — are descended from a band of devoted imperialists, propagandized by Baden-PowelPs Scout­ ing for Boys. I belonged to a troop myself; and a less imperialistic, less manly, less woodscrafty troop would be hard to find. I never knew who Baden-Powell was till much later; I never read — or was asked to read — his Scouting for Boys. I was simply there for the fun and comradeship, and the uniform. This is not a disparagement of MacDonald’s thesis — not in the least; it’s just a recognition that what MacDonald is concerned with, quite intention­ ally, is the myth of scouting, a myth that he in no way suggests is congruent with the reality. In fact, though he argues that “the myth of the imperial frontier provided both the context and the material for the construction of Scouting,” the “experiences of the individual could always be ordinary, the power of myth dissipated in the light of day, and the ideal forgotten in squalid reality” (206). MacDonald is well aware that Baden-Powell’s story...

Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890-1918 by Robert H. MacDonald (review)

Reviews177 Robert H. MacDonald. Sons ofthe Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890-1918. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. viii + 259. $38.00 CDN. The impact of uniformed youth organizations on the pattern of social and cultural behavior in the first half of the twentieth century must have been considerable. In 1967 Mass Observation in England sampled two thousand adults for the Baden-Powell Scout Guild: at least one in three of those interviewed had belonged, however briefly, to the Boy Scouts or Girl Guides. Early in-house narrative accounts of Britain's pioneering Scouts and Brigades were nearly all uncritical and mythologizing. Not until the 1970s did historians draw attention to Robert S.S. BadenPowell and Scouting in relation to pre-1914 ideologies of imperialism, militarism, national efficiency, and social Darwinism. More recently, character training, Christian social idealism, masculine power, and good citizenship have received support as of equal importance in the pluralistic composition of Scouting. MacDonald's book presents a challenging new interpretation, that it was the myth of the frontier that drove Scouting on in its first years, glorifying the idea of the frontiersman and the war scout, helping Baden-Powell to become a cult hero at Mafeking, and giving inspiration and impetus to the Scout movement itself. The author presents a readable cultural history of Scouting from what he defines as its early frontier enthusiasm through to the subsequent evolution of the Boy Scout into the status of a patriotic symbol. MacDonald's aim has been to illustrate the original context of Scouting, using Baden-Powell and his Scouting for Boys (1908) as a point of entry into the Edwardian age and patiently tracking down contemporary texts recommended in the best-selling handbook. This is, of necessity, a study of masculinist ideology; the influence of the frontier on women and the girls' youth organizations is declared a separate study. For the outward symbols of the frontiersman, a potent symbol of masculine fantasy, dramatized through the Boy Scout movement the call to a revitalized manhood. The frontiersman as stereotypical adventurer supplied, according to the author, an alternative ethic for a decadent British society. The myth of the imperial frontier is, therefore, interpreted as providing both the context and the material for the construction of Scouting. Ironically, the public school code and Smilesian self-help came more readily to Baden-Powell himself than the frontier tradition of individualism and comradeship. The book opens by examining the pre-1914 crisis in masculinity, of fears for national efficiency, that the organizers of youth movements like Baden-Powell sought to answer by preventing the physical and 178Victorian Review moral deterioration of die British race during a period of fierce rivalry widi Germany. The heroic mydi of die frontiersman in popular culture, from Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking saga to the Canadian Mounted Police to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, found as its final representative Rudyard Kipling's Lost Legion of pioneers in die outposts of die British Empire. Thus Frederick R. Burnham, an American frontier scout translated to Matabeleland, came to symbolize imperial scouting's golden age, like Baden-Powell himself. Burnham was one of three men to escape from Major Wilson's last stand at die Shangani River in 1893, die British national anthem being sung before die troop were slaughtered by die Ndebele. The escape 'afterwards direw a shadow of cowardice' (67) over the American scout's reputation because he had not died with his comrades. The Chief Scout's own legend was also carefully cultivated in South Africa: substituting 'die Wolf that Never Sleeps' for die less dian elegant native nickname of 'die hyena that creeps about at night' (84). There are no wolves in Africa. Baden-Powell's heroic image ultimately began to take shape after die siege of Mafeking, his iconography as a Boer War hero dramatizing die ideology of the British Empire. Next came die selling of die imperial hero by Arthur Pearson, publisher of The Scout, for obvious commercial reasons. While Scout troops sprang up spontaneously, Baden-Powell also stumped the country giving promotional lectures in draughty Y.M.C.A. halls to coincide widi Pearson's publication of die fortnighdy...

Third-Worlding at Home

As a student of history of social formations located in what has come to be known as third world, I was intrigued by a recently published report recounting experiences of a score of American Christian pilgrims who only five years earlier had established home and mission deep in jungle. According to report, these new missionaries had reasoned that, if their efforts were to have authenticity, they would have to share daily hardships, gloom, and fear that permeate a blighted and primitive environment. knew it would not be easy to gain trust of local inhabitants. Indeed, many of natives suspected that pilgrims constituted vanguard of a new wave of colonization. Only recently, similar colonizers had occupied a nearby community from same language group, obliging locals to flee deeper into shadows of a jungle increasingly encroached upon by implacable, moving frontier of civilization. But pilgrims felt prepared for their task. One had been raised in Indonesia and thus was already acquainted with peace and joy that comes from living on while others had spent several months getting ready in Latin America, which often exhibited less extreme manifestations of third world life than they later encountered in mission territory. Interestingly, report tells us little about natives themselves and only positive reference comes in a pilgrim's exuberant reaction to a local wedding ceremony. really know how to celebrate life, he declares; They know how to celebrate a moment. The collective they; ritual otherness; present tense. Where can we find this imperial frontier? A French traveller recently described it as the only remaining primitive society (Baudrillard 1988:7). It is located in world's fifth largest Spanish-speaking nation; but it is also an important African country, and its Asian and Caribbean diasporas are increasingly significant as well. As you undoubtedly have guessed, it is here in US of A. The particular frontier described in report is a dilapidated, drug-infested, trash-strewn, grafitti-riddled, Puerto Rican barrio in urban jungle of North Philadelphia. And determined missionaries are non-denominational, charismatic Christian yuppies: young, white, highly-educated professionals, among them lawyers, physicians, an occupational therapist, a nurse, and last but not least, a theology student (Carvajal 1989). Most work in lucrative occupations outside barrio where they purchased or rent homes - but of course