Popular Agency Research Articles

Power and Agency in Newfoundland and Labrador's History

IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE a more important historical question than who or what actually makes history. English-Canadian historiography, like Anglo-American historiography generally, long cherished the notion that powerful elites did most of the making. The flourishing of social history since the late 1960s has meant that those old, treasured notions must take into account the importance of a popular agency in history. In the case of the writing of Newfoundland and Labrador's history, it is surprising to see that the older ideas are still alive, in the work of Jerry Bannister. Equally astonishing, Bannister's work draws on Gerald Sider's anthropological reordering of Newfoundland history. Sider's Between History and Tomorrow is ostensibly interested in the concepts of culture and class which dominated social history. However, his imposition of what Marx called a supra-historical theory of merchant capital bears little similarity to history. Although a much better researched work than Sider's, Bannister's The Rule of the Admirals argues that only the propertied classes, and their state functionary allies, are important in understanding the history of 18th-century Newfoundland. According to its title page, Sider's book is the significantly expanded and updated second edition of Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986). The author promises that he has expanded on his original analysis of merchant capital in Newfoundland fishing communities to show its relevance in understanding the subse-

Towards a critical political geography of African development

In this paper we aim to rethink the political geography of African development at the beginning of the 21st century. Central to our thesis are two intertwining legacies, paralleling Edward Said’s Orientalism. The first is the construction of Africa in the western imagination and the second is an enduring trusteeship towards the continent. The core movement we seek to critique and move beyond is the complicity between racialised knowledges about Africa and a series of political interventions that seek to ‘help’ Africans to develop. The paper begins by examining the legacy of colonialism in the policies towards and representations of Africa. Although selective and schematic we argue that what unites these power–knowledge constructions is a sense of trusteeship towards the continent. The next step is to look at ways of decolonising our knowledges as a means to effect more appropriate political engagement with Africa. For this we touch on a range of theoretical positions, but look most closely at the corpus of post-colonial theory for ways of doing this. While not uncritical of post-colonialism we find it potentially useful for destabilising western authority and in addressing questions of popular agency and cultural constructions of exclusion. From here we attempt a reformulation which addresses the role of the state, the politics of place and space, and the ways in which ‘we’––professional geographers––might go about our work.

:Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland

Introduction: grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society Michael J. Braddick and John Walter 1. Ordering the body: illegitimacy and female authority in seventeenth-century England Laura Gowing 2. Child sexual abuse in early modern England Martin Ingram 3. Sex, social relations and the law in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London Faramerz Dabhoiwala 4. Exhortation and entitlement: negotiating equality in English rural communities, 1550-1650 Steve Hindle 5. Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modern England John Walter 6. 'Bragging and daring words': honour, property, and the symbolism of the hunt in Stowe, 1590-1642 Dan Beaver 7. Administrative performance: the representation of political authority in early modern England Michael J. Braddick 8. Negotiating order in early seventeenth-century Ireland Raymond Gillespie 9. Order, orthodoxy and resistance: the ambiguous legacy of English puritanism, or, Just how moderate was Stephen Denison? Peter Lake 10. Making orthodoxy in late Restoration England: the trials of Edmund Hickeringill, 1662-1710 Justin Champion and Lee McNulty.

On Legalism, Popular Agency and "Voices of Suffering": The Nigerian National Human Rights Commission in Context

The set of standards for the evaluation of National Human Rights Commissions (NHCs) formulated and applied by the UN constitute the dominant conception of an ideal NHC. Virtually every scholar, nongovernmental organization, and governmental body that has commented on the effectiveness of NHCs shares this dominant UN-driven conception of the ideal NHC. However, this dominant conception is significantly limited, and requires fundamental enlargement and revision if the NHCs animated by its vision are to have a significantly increased transformative potential. A performance assessment study of the Nigerian National Human Rights Commission (using the more holistic vision of ideal NHC developed in this paper) shows that when linked adequately with NGOs, NHCs are indeed very useful resources for human rights promotion and protection.

Nueve estudios sobre el espacio: Representación y formas de apropriación

Historians will find these provocative essays useful in rethinking the geographical aspect of our work. The editors divided the chapters into two groups: the first serves to introduce the reader to postmodern trends in geography; and the second part analyzes how social actors create regional identities in a given geographic space. Unlike many books produced from conferences, the papers in this collection work well together and the observations of the first section establish themes that the more empirical studies of the second half develop. Some contributions still read like presentations and could use more elucidation to achieve their ambitious objectives.Eric Van Young once wrote that, “Regions are like love—they are difficult to define, but we know them when we see them.” This collection agrees that the categories often used to define regions “objectively” (ethnicity, politics, hydrology, ecology), are rarely consistent. Regions are socially constructed and constantly changing but also grounded in space (p. 17). Another theme centers on how cartography represents space and how such representations are exercises in power and popular identity. Maps draw lines that reify regions, representing transitory social processes as concrete.Claude Bataillon’s article uses comparisons across Mexico to demonstrate the contradictory principles that divide space. Mexico contains economic, religious, administrative cities that are “centralizing poles” of regions, while at the same time activity is organized along networks (redes) tending to “equalize” relations between communities. Luc Cambrezy follows up on this theme pointing out how these networks challenge the hierarchical organization of space. The tools geographers have to represent information: lines, points and shaded “zones,” tend to privilege administrative units and emphasize “internal continuity and external discontinuity” of regions (p. 74). Alfred Siemens suggests maps are analogous to Bentham’s panopticon. They have a point of view that is fuereño y arribeño, a perspective drenched with power that has been especially detrimental to understanding Mexico’s tropical lowlands.Roberto Melville illustrates the state’s role in creating regions noting how development projects legislate the creation of regions out of watersheds. Jean-Yves Marchal and Rafael Palma Grayeb demonstrate that region has become una palabra vacia by ably deconstructing the traditional definitions of the Huasteca. Their essay proposes some alternative approaches that need further development.The volume’s second part provides insightful essays describing the relationships between popular identities, territory, and the state. Interactions between dominant and subaltern groups build geographical spaces from the bottom up. Emilia Velázquez demonstrates how subordinate indigenous groups preserved local controls as the government forced them to abandon communal land holding under the liberal state and later introduced land reform and cattle use after the revolution. José Velasco’s essay describes the fate of the Chinatecas relocated to a completely new territory when the Cerro de Oro dam flooded their traditional settlements. Velasco demonstrates that in spite of the coercive nature of this government controlled process (the state dictated settlements and aimed at “integrating” the natives into the national culture) the villagers recreated ethnic territories and identities on their own terms. Marielle Pepin Lehalleur compares four agricultural communities and finds villagers refused to accept the backward economic role national policy had assigned ejidatarios, demonstrating that popular agency, not state policy, determined local realities.Finally, Michel Agier meditates on the limitations of maps in portraying the network of social interactions that characterize the urban lives of the inhabitants of Salvador de Bahía, Brazil. The essay returns to the “question of scale” raised throughout the volume between local agency and the elusive cartographic dream of mapping reality.

Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia

Speaking Out:Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia Jochen Hellbeck (bio) A central issue in recent studies on Stalinism is the question of how Soviet citizens experienced the communist regime, and how one is to define their relationship toward the aims and practices of the Soviet state. The most striking feature of several of these studies, notwithstanding their varying approaches and conclusions, is the shared conviction that members of Soviet society for the most part remained aloof from the values of the communist regime. Purely negative categories such as non-conformity, dissent, and resistance have quickly asserted themselves as dominant keys of interpreting individual and collective attitudes toward the Soviet state.1 In light of archival revelations of recent years this assessment seems to be abundantly confirmed: the outpouring of previously classified sources from [End Page 71] Soviet archives has shed ample light on mass cases of popular dissatisfaction with the policies of the Soviet regime. These acts range from workers' strikes and disgruntled talk in bread lines, to the private reflections of critically minded diarists. Prior to the opening of the archives, these moods could only be inferred yet not authenticated. But now the available source basis conclusively shatters the image fostered by the communist regime of a harmonious union between the Soviet state and its people.2 Yet we should keep in mind that documentary editions, however much they may be based on hard archival evidence, are always selective in emphasis, and we should therefore interrogate the motives and purposes behind the current emphasis on popular non-conformity and protest. In part, it is certainly a natural pendulum swing that provides a corrective to the tradition of contrived Soviet self-representation. But in addition, one can easily discern a tendency, especially on the part of post-Soviet Russian historians, to portray state and society of the Stalin era in dualistic terms and emphasize heroic acts of resistance, in the service of representing the Stalinist regime as an alien force that violently imposed itself on the Russian population.3 In the West, the opening of the Soviet archives intersects with a methodological shift, particularly the embrace of microhistory and Alltagsgeschichte.4 With their premium on the immediate experiential world of individuals or social communities, these disciplines stress the idiosyncrasy of [End Page 72] popular outlooks and their irreducibility to the overarching ideological precepts of the ruling regime, and they thus evoke an image of individual agents effectively coping with intrusive external powers through strategies of everyday resistance.5 Evidently these distinct archival, political, and methodological trends have a cross-fertilizing and mutually reinforcing effect which lends further authority to the voices of the newly discovered sources. Conceptually, the new concern with how members of the Soviet population engaged official policies is a welcome development which adds both concreteness and complexity to traditionally schematic notions of state-society transactions. Recent studies have imparted an exciting sense of popular agency, of "ordinary people's" capacity to mold or subvert the political blueprints of the Bolshevik regime. But in its present form the focus on popular self-expression and everyday resistance is also problematic in at least three related aspects. First, it endows individuals with a questionable potential to engage the world of public norms, symbols, and practices in virtually limitless ways. Individual subjects are portrayed as appropriating or subverting official ideology at will, suiting their own – and this implies, extrahistorical – interests. These individuals thus emerge as strangely detached from their social and political environment. Rather than inhabiting this environment, Soviet citizens appear to treat it as a theater of public meaning with its distinct rituals, but also with its set of costumes and requisites that individual actors make free use of in the pursuit of their ulterior aims.6 Amidst the exciting discovery that Soviet citizens were not just passive or intimidated recipients of state policies but vocally engaged the terms set by the Bolshevik regime, one senses that historians have lost sight of the specific frames of meaning guiding individuals' articulations and actions. Into the ensuing void of meaning, scholars tend to inadvertently project their own liberal [End Page 73] values on historical actors, endowing them with a...

Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico

Teresita Martínez-Vergne is seeking to broaden the horizons of nineteenth-century Puerto Rican historiography with her new book. She has turned away from the social and economic history that has previously dominated approaches to this period, toward a post-structuralist-informed discourse analysis of liberal sensibilities and policies in the island’s capital. Martínez-Vergne traces the rise of a local liberal urban bourgeoisie and its efforts to define itself ideologically vis-à-vis shifting political currents in the Spanish colonial regime and the increasingly worrisome plebeian classes. Other historians of Puerto Rico have taken up this theme in the last 15 years, but none have yet examined its expression through the conceptualization and dispensation of charity. Thus, this book has the potential to provide illuminating insights into Puerto Rican class and gender relations, social mores, and changing political culture.Martínez-Vergne argues that during the nineteenth century, local liberals asserted their hold on new positions of political and social power opened by Spanish liberal colonial administrations, particularly local ayuntamientos and the boards of newly formed charitable institutions such as the Juntas de beneficencia. In the process, they also challenged the Catholic Church’s control over care for the poor. San Juan liberals constantly negotiated a fragile balance between their beliefs in free choice and the capacity for individual improvement and their desire to maintain social order. Hoping to foment and then safely channel the productive capacity of the popular classes, whom they alternately portrayed as lazy and threatening, the liberals enthusiastically regulated both public space and the “private” spheres of sexuality, family, and home through legislation and state philanthropy. Building off the vast European literature on the subject, Martínez-Vergne shows that “assistance and repression” were “the twin pillars of beneficencia” (p. 66). The scattershot training for trades and meager material aid offered to destitute men, women, and children were often overshadowed by the liberals’ criminalization of vagrancy and its feminine counterpart, prostitution, the effective re-enslavement of hundreds of free Africans shipwrecked on Puerto Rico’s shores, and the physical enclosure of unruly plebeian women. Alleged protection of vulnerable children also placed them under heavy-handed state surveillance. Early efforts to provide public education ultimately served the liberals’ goal of creating a docile, disciplined labor force.The most significant weaknesses of the volume seem to stem from overreaching the available sources. Despite Martínez-Vergne’s protestations to the contrary, the laboring men, women, and children of San Juan largely remain powerless figures in this historical narrative, as they often have in other post-structuralist-inspired histories. We get few examples of the pressures from below which she periodically insists fueled liberal bids for power. The exception is the chapter that examines women’s requests to the Junta de beneficencia for child support. Here, Martínez-Vergne begins to explore the contours of plebeian women’s discourse on motherhood. She concludes that both women applicants and officiating men “were participating jointly in a public performance in which both actors benefited” (p. 99); the women received material aid, and the male members of the junta confirmed their superiority to and power over others. For the most part, however, almost against the author’s stated intentions, Shaping the Discourse on Space paints a seemingly omnipotent picture of bourgeois agency. The men of the rising urban professional classes in Puerto Rico consistently create oppressive social mores, political policies, and economic options, which they successfully inflict on the poor, “infiltrating their psyches to embed bourgeois notions of social harmony and civic propriety” (p. 116). The dearth of plebeian newspapers from the nineteenth century, the complete lack of criminal records for this period in San Juan, and the apparent paucity of surviving petitions from inmates of the Casa de beneficencia led Martínez-Vergne to rely primarily on liberal regulations. Her treatment of such sources does not allow her to convincingly demonstrate either significant popular agency or the extent of liberal influence on plebeian worldviews and practices. This does not, however, invalidate the pioneering spirit of Shaping the Discourse on Space. In her emphases on discourse analysis, physical space as an analytical category, and public charity as a key to the formation of politics and class identity, Martínez-Vergne has set out to establish new methodological and theoretical precepts for Puerto Rican historiography. Despite the project’s shortcomings, I applaud her efforts.

A New Century of Solitude?

The 25th anniversary of LAP invites us to consider politics and scholarship from the 1970s to the 1990s as a whole and to ask how we are to understand and confront the legacies of that turbulent period for the 21st century. LAP was born at a time when questions of revolution and counterrevolution, capitalism and socialism, had an immediacy that threw societies into convulsion and, frequently, regimes of violent repression. Other by-products of the era were more salutary; the times challenged scholars to pursue research and writing that focused on the experiences and prospects of the oppressed. As a historian, I see continuities as well as changes in politically engaged writing of Latin American history since the 1970s. Throughout the period, the writers of such history did their research on a terrain between tragedy and promise. The turn toward a history from below that traced the dignity, creativity, aspirations, and agency of common people-as well as their sufferings and subordination-was inspired by the charged mix of discontent, idealism, and hopefulness that redefined so much of political life in Latin America and other world regions in the 1960s and early 1970s. At the same time, too many things went wrong for promise to remain untarnished. Too often, potentials always seemed to remain just that. In Mexico, idealistic protest gave way to massacre in Tlatelolco in 1968. In South America, political polarization culminated in kinds of military regimes in Brazil and the Southern Cone. The new regimes, determined to root out once and for all the dissidents considered to stand in the way of national unity, order, and progress, violently crushed the Vfctor Jaras who had sung of hope and the political activists, workers, peasants, and youth who had dared to find inspiration in the music. At first, perhaps, such nightmares could simply be denounced as outrages. The flame of popular agency could be kept alive and celebrated in solidarity