Traditional Authority Structures Research Articles

Democracy and Moral Autonomy

The focus of this paper is on the justificatory basis of democracy. The paper operates on two levels, theoretical and historical. On the theoretical level the author claims that many of the arguments put forward to justify democracy, such as that formulated by Dahl in ‘Democracy and its Critics’ based on his two principles of equality, although not without merit, suffer certain crucial weaknesses and do not, in fact, get at the real basis of the belief in the unique legitimacy of democracy. He goes on to argue that this legitimacy is grounded not simply in the positive egalitarian consequences expected from democracy, but rather is to be found in the moral autonomy of the human being. Further, he claims, this moral autonomy is itself rooted in what the author calls the Cartesian autonomy of reason. On the historical level he claims that, while Descartes was himself extremely conservative with regard to orthodox Christian belief and traditional structures of political authority, many self-styled followers of Descartes saw the autonomy of reason as implying a radical rejection of all ‘external’ authority, first in respect of religious belief, but also, then, with respect to the secular authority. The result was that within what Jonathan Israel refers to as the ‘Radical Enlightenment’, there developed as early as the mid-seventeenth century a tradition of liberal and democratic radicalism, based explicitly on the Cartesian autonomy of reason and what was referred to as the ‘freedom to philosophise’. The author illustrates this with a brief account of the Dutch radical thinker Franciscus Van den Enden. He argues that if we posit moral autonomy as the basis of democratic legitimacy, this privileges one particular conception of democracy, namely deliberative democracy, as its paradigmatic form. Throughout the whole argument he gives a central role to the autonomy of reason as, in particular, it began to sweep across Europe with the influence of Cartesianism. It is possible that there are older egalitarian roots to modern democratic ideology or that democratic authority is grounded on democracy's epistemic properties. The author looks at these claims towards the end of the paper and concludes that the autonomy of the moral agent as based itself on the autonomy of human reason is the most plausible basis of the unique legitimacy of democracy.

Aligning community engagement with traditional authority structures in global health research: a case study from northern Ghana.

Despite the recognition of its importance, guidance on community engagement practices for researchers remains underdeveloped, and there is little empirical evidence of what makes community engagement effective in biomedical research. We chose to study the Navrongo Health Research Centre in northern Ghana because of its well-established community engagement practices and because of the opportunity it afforded to examine community engagement in a traditional African setting. Our findings suggest that specific preexisting features of the community have greatly facilitated community engagement and that using traditional community engagement mechanisms limits the social disruption associated with research conducted by outsiders. Finally, even in seemingly ideal, small, and homogeneous communities, cultural issues exist, such as gender inequities, that may not be effectively addressed by traditional practices alone.

Surviving Violence, Contesting Victimhood: Communal Politics and the Creation of Child-Men in an Urban Indian Slum

This paper explores the emergence of violent child identity politics in a communally sensitive urban slum in Hyderabad, a city in southern India. My ethnographic landscape is Sultanpur, a Muslim-dominated ghetto in the northern quarters of Hyderabad, which has been marked by decades of hostilities between local Hindus and Muslims. These tensions had everyday and extreme manifestations (ranging from quotidian expressions of symbolic violence to rioting, looting and bomb blasts) which increased the vulnerabilities of Muslim male children in the slums; the latter being humiliated by ordinary passers-by in times of peace, and at other times being attacked by rioting mobs. To counter their victimhood and organise their own retribution, sections of local boys in Sultanpur, aged between 9 and 14 years, co-ordinated themselves into child squads (bacchon ke fauj). These child vigilantes patrolled the slum borders and common public places, constantly establishing a disciplinary control over fragile aspects of ghetto life. For example, the male child squads not only aggressively prevented members of other communities from entering the slum, they also monitored the movement of Sultanpur-wallahs, often physically assaulting local women who were caught having affairs with Hindu men. In my paper I show how the power, presence and practices of these child squads upturned traditional structures of male and female authority, contested conventional notions of male childhood in a volatile urban space, and sustained nascent masculinities within the moral and social economy of impoverished Muslim male children.

The Prophet and the Engineer Meet Under the Mango Tree: Leadership, Education, and Conflict in the Southern Philippines

This essay represents an attempt to contribute to the growing body of literature on education in conflict and emergency situations by analyzing shifts in sources of authority and their influence on conceptions of leadership in the context of a decades-long armed conflict in the predominately Muslim regions of the southern Philippines. Interviews with school principals conducted in the conflict areas of Muslim Mindanao in two separate periods of field research, reveal a fluid pattern of strategic blending of authority sources in response to the conflict’s impact on social conditions. This data shows, I will argue, an evolution from patterns of leadership grounded in traditional and/or formal authority structures to a mode of leadership rooted in religious authority and aspirations of technological competence conceived as pragmatic prophetic leadership.

The other Mr Wilberforce: role conflict and colonial governance in Sierra Leone 1878–1913

This article considers role conflicts for Africans who occupied leadership positions in the colonial governance structure of the Sierra Leone Protectorate in the late nineteenth century. In particular it examines the source of conflicting identity issues for Western-educated or mission-converted indigenous leaders. It focuses these general issues through the example of the Rev. D.F. Wilberforce, who was both a missionary and a colonial appointee to a paramount chieftaincy. Wilberforce exemplifies the kinds of problems faced by colonial appointed chiefs, problems exacerbated by his role as an American missionary. It examines the pressures inherent in the contradictory roles he was required to fulfil. More generally it suggests that economic shifts in agricultural practice resulting from the late colonial desire to make West African colonies self-funding exacerbated already declining relations between the colonial authorities and indigenous rulers in the Protectorate. It examines the way colonial governments dealt with traditional governing practices vested in native social organizations and societies; how colonial paranoia about African secret societies allegedly involved in ‘ritual murder’ and ‘cannibalism’ compromised the colonial government's understanding of traditional authority structures; and how this influenced the exercise of political and legal control over these organizations and over supposedly recalcitrant native rulers.

Structures and Stratagems: Making Decentralization of Authority over Land in Africa Cost-Effective

Summary Community-led land tenure reform requires specification of “the community,” and this raises long-standing issues concerning the balance between civil and traditional local authorities in Africa. Recent experience with decentralization of authority over land suggests that the cost of creating new local land administration capacities is high. A less costly option is reliance at least in part upon traditional authorities, who de facto retain considerable popular legitimacy and still control land in much of rural Africa, and experience suggests opportunities for creative institutional amalgams of civil and traditional local authority. There are very considerable differences among traditional authority structures in Africa, and so the potential of this approach will vary from case to case. In developing such decentralized systems, the interests of transparency and accountability will best be served by creating checks and balances between the different levels of land administration.

HALAKHIC NIDDAH CONSULTANTS AND THE ORTHODOX WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN ISRAEL

This article takes a critical look at the story of enlightened progress that has informed analyses of Israeli Orthodoxy in recent years. Celebrating the successes of Orthodox reformists, this narrative brands resistance to challenges to traditional institutions, authority structures and cultural norms as unenlightened fundamentalism, patriarchal backlash or unreflexive apologetics. The article offers a more nuanced interpretation through an analysis of the training of women as halakhic niddah consultants and the context in which this profession emerged. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data and content analysis, the author considers the training and certification of halakhic consultants; their pathways into training; their multiple roles and venues of operation; the legal advice they provide; and the sensibilities and interpretative strategies that shape their reading of the Halakha. At each juncture, it is demonstrated that halakhic consultants bear concurrent traditionalist and reformist potentialities. Contextualizing the emergence of women halakhic consultants within other changes in the social organization of niddah, it is argued that halakhic consultants are more appropriately understood as part of a conversation about niddah within the Orthodox community. The article concludes that religious change is not produced by renegade mavericks, but is rather the product of negotiations between a range of voices as they respond to and attempt to accommodate internal and external pressures and challenges.

Gender Transgression as Heresy: The Trial of Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc has exercised a hold on the imagination, both medieval and modern, far exceeding her limited military achievements. It is perhaps for this reason that the trial of Joan on charges of heresy, culminating in her conviction and execution, is typically interpreted in a cynical light. The primary theme of the literature is that the she was brought to trial and convicted for challenging the institutionalized power of state and church. The issue of gender transgression, which is repeated throughout the transcripts of Joan’s trial, is either ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. It is typical of the medieval narrative that belief systems no longer accepted today are not taken seriously, and this is done through reducing them to familiar categories.
 
 This paper aims to take the trial of Joan of Arc seriously by arguing that Joan really was a heretic because she was different from orthodox Christians in that she transgressed traditional gender roles. This issue played a major role in Joan’s trial and one can scarcely read two paragraphs of the record without issues of gender transgression being raised and denounced. Furthermore, gender transgression was explicitly identified as amounting to heresy, and theological arguments were given by learned experts to justify this connection. This is not to deny that Joan was a heretic on other grounds; her obstinate refusal to submit herself to the Church militant and insistence on her ability to interpret her own revelations are crucial issues. Likewise, we do not intend to deny the political aspect of her trial, but rather to argue that the defense and reinforcement of traditional authority structures cannot be demarcated from the issue of heresy and gender transgression.

Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France

Reviewed by: Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France Karlis Racevskis Russo, Elena. Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. 346. It can be both useful and rewarding to study the past in light of certain key themes that allow us to gauge the distance separating us from bygone eras. When it comes to the Enlightenment, as Elena Russo’s book shows, few concepts are as revealing as the notion of taste. While Russo is obviously not the first scholar to survey this theme, what makes her contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship particularly noteworthy, even groundbreaking, is the new light it sheds on the entire movement of ideas known as the Enlightenment. Her approach reveals the importance of an under-appreciated aspect of the age, and thus proposes a reorientation in our customary ways of viewing and interpreting the eighteenth century. To put it succinctly, Russo sees the century in terms of two antithetical halves, each marked by a particular aesthetic philosophy. As a result, Russo’s perspective brings with it a number of consequences for contemporary critical approaches to the Enlightenment. One of the principal areas of contention marking critiques of the Enlightenment over the last few decades concerned the so-called Enlightenment project and the question of knowing whether it had been betrayed and had deviated, or was still valid and only needed to be completed. Russo’s contribution, in this regard, is to show, first, that the Enlightenment consisted of more than one project and, second, to demonstrate that the philosophes’ concern for aesthetic issues rivaled their passion for political causes. “If the Enlightenment could be said to be a project,” Russo explains, “that project did not consist only in remapping the world of knowledge through an encyclopedic reordering of sciences: it also meant conquering the domain of taste and the arts” (2). While this project never achieved the theoretical and rhetorical consistency of the struggle the philosophes waged against the forces of superstition, fanaticism, and ignorance, it did manifest itself as an ever-present concern in many of their writings, as Russo demonstrates. Paradoxically, however, while the philosophic struggle to emancipate humanity from ignorance could be seen as a progressive development growing in intensity as the century advanced, the campaign to legislate taste in the domain of letters and the arts turns out to have been reactionary and backward looking. Taste, as it was understood in the first part of the century, was known as le goût moderne and was mainly characterized by “its rejection of the [End Page 141] absolutist and classicist grand narrative in favor of dissonant paratactic storytelling; its ironic use of preexisting forms; its deconstruction of classicism and its fragmentation of narrative … its recurring theatricality and self-referentiality; its blurring between reality and the space of representation … its confusion of hierarchies, be they ethical, representational or gendered” (9). Not surprisingly, these developments in the realm of ideas pertaining to taste took place during the Regency, at a time when traditional structures of authority were increasingly being brought into question and were therefore weakening or even breaking down. It is in the theater of Marivaux especially that we find the most vivid and complete expression of this newly emerging taste for the arbitrary, the intuitive, the ephemeral, the spontaneous, and the unabashedly theatrical. Marivaux’s originality is particularly remarkable when we take note of his purpose, which was “to explore the many ways the subconscious peeks through the carefully wrought structure of verbal and social conventions and the codes of politeness and galanterie” (136–37). It is therefore a theater marked by its esprit, a quality that partakes of both the cognitive and the intuitive propensities of the human mind, that combines the rational and the aesthetic components of taste. Another author known for this dual manifestation of esprit was Montesquieu, whose Lettres persanes, published “at the height of goût moderne,” as Russo notes, could be considered “one of the greatest works of subversive, burlesque bigarrure, which recklessly juxtaposed theology and sex, philosophy and satire, natural law and fashion, politics and oriental romance” (40). At...

Histoire des curés (review)

Reviewed by Clarke Garrett Dickinson College (Emeritus) Histoire des curés. By Michel Lagrée, Nicole Lemaitre, Luc Perrin, and Catherine Vincent. (Paris: Fayard. 2002. Pp. 523. €23,00.) The four authors of this work have set themselves a formidable task. Drawing on a vast body of scholarship, most of it published in the last thirty years, they describe and analyze the history of the Roman Catholic Church [End Page 877] from the fourth century until the present, focusing, as much as possible, on the perspective of the parish priest, the person placed in charge of the "care of souls" in a specific territorial space within a diocese. Catherine Vincent is the author of the introduction and the first section, which in a little over a hundred pages covers the period from the fourth century until the fourteenth. It is a remarkable achievement. Vincent draws on a wide range of studies, most of them in French but including a respectable number of works in Italian and English as well. She emphasizes that our knowledge is still fragmentary and that much of the written record reflects the ideal and not the reality of parish organization and priestly conduct. Adapted from the structures of the Roman Empire, the organization of the Church into dioceses and parishes was the distinct contribution of the church based in Rome. It was not present in the Eastern Church or in Celtic Christianity, which until the Middle Ages was essentially autonomous. The establishment of the parish system was a process of centuries, articulated by Carolingian and Gregorian reformers but not firmly in place until the thirteenth century. The second section, on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, is the work of Nicole Lemaitre. A central theme is that from the perspective of the parish clergy, the period reflects two contrasting notions of the nature of the Church, both of which had had their advocates in the previous millennium. The reformers, at least those of the mainline Reformation, rejected the notion of hierarchical authority within the clergy and the special calling of the clergy, living within communities but set apart from them, to embody spiritual and moral perfection. Those who adhered to Roman authority were equally committed to reform, but only within the traditional structures of authority. The Council of Trent, Lemaitre argues, was a genuine work of reformation, addressing the concerns of the past and resolving many of them. Especially crucial for the future, she demonstrates, was the decision to create seminaries in which the clergy would receive an education as little concerned with the material, secular world as possible. The third section, on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is by the noted scholar Michel Lagrée. It is difficult to summarize. Lagrée notes that despite their training, many clergy, at least in France and Italy, were deeply involved in the social and intellectual transformation that was the Enlightenment. The French Revolution thus presented a tragic dilemma, because so many priests, some of them influenced by the pervasive movement of Jansenism, welcomed it as a divinely sanctioned opportunity to transform both Church and state. The chapters on the nineteenth century are somewhat fragmentary, perhaps because Lagrée attempts to cover too many topics and as a result loses sight of the central theme of the evolution of the parish clergy. The final section, on the Church since World War I, is the work of Luc Perrin. It is the least satisfactory part of the book, but then recent developments, [End Page 878] especially since Vatican Council II, are the least amenable to historical analysis. Perrin emphasizes the enormous impact of the World War I on the clergy—fourteen per cent of Frenchmen killed in the war were priests, monks, or seminarians. The role of the Church in occupied Europe in World War II is treated without much depth or analysis, although it is still a topic of enormous controversy. The section on Vatican II is fuller and more balanced, especially concerning its impact on the...

The Ségolène Royal Phenomenon: Political Renewal in France?

This article analyses Ségolène Royal's rise during 2006 to become the first ever female mainstream French presidential candidate in the context of ongoing presidentialising tendencies within the French Fifth Republic. It considers the extent to which Royal's candidacy represented a turning point for the French Left, not only because of her gender, but also because of her challenge to the Left's traditional organisational and ideological norms of presidential electoral politics. Her participatory democratic campaign organisation, Désirs d'Avenir by‐passed traditional party authority structures throughout 2006. However, in the face of declining poll ratings, Royal's candidacy reverted to a more orthodox relationship to the PS as ‘presidential party’. Ideologically, her novel political language and down‐to‐earth style combine with a complex blend of egalitarianism and authoritarianism which treads novel ground. Yet the intriguing elements of her political vision have struggled to coalesce into a coherent and credible presidential programme.

‘BOLLYWOOD FLASHBACK’

The songs that punctuate Hindi films and give them much of their remarkable international appeal are particularly significant sites in the cinema's attempt to deal with challenges to traditional structures of authority. Focusing on spectacular moments of non‐narrative – and often explicitly erotic – pleasure, such songs proffer utopian scenarios within which the tensions raised by the narratives of kinship in crisis that dominate Hindi film are emolliated. It is the moments of melodic fantasy embedded in Hindi film, the song and dance routines which offer these condensed images of reconciliation, that predominantly working class youths in Britain appropriate in order to express the conflicting hopes and fears that characterize their own cosmopolitan identities. In this article, I discuss two of the most important instances of remix culture in Britain over the last decade in order to offer a retrospective take on the uses of Hindi‐language film by second‐generation Asian youths.

Social Charters and Organisation for Access to Woodlands: Institutional Implications for Devolving Responsibilities for Resource Management to the Local Level in Chivi District, Zimbabwe

The “paradigm shift” in natural resource management away from state-centred control toward community-based approaches in which local people play a much more active role is situated within the theoretical framework seeking to empower local communities through decentralization policies. This study examines the organizational framework within which decentralization is implemented using a case study from southern Zimbabwe. At the local level there is a complex interface between traditional and modern authority structures, with both complimentary and conflicting jurisdictions and mandates. Given this multiplicity of organizations, the study advocates for systematic examination of appropriate organizations to be involved in the decentralization process.

Reimagining Islam in Diaspora

This article looks at the mediation of one aspect of Middle Eastern culture, Islam, in the context of diasporic Muslim communities in the West. It explores the impact of information and communications technologies on debates relating to the normative boundaries of Islamic identity and community. It is argued that media technologies provide channels for new or previously disenfranchised voices to be heard in the public sphere of Muslim diasporas. Simultaneously, traditional structures of authority are refigured and, to some extent, marginalized in favour of alternative interpretations of religious knowledge perceived as more relevant to contemporary diasporic life in the West.

The Persistence of Patriarchy in Franz Kafka's “Judgment”

Though commentators such as Gerhard Neumann have read Kafka's “Judgment” as a critique of patriarchal authority and the tyranny of familial relations, the story's powerful effect originates from the affirmation of patriarchal authority which motivates its plot. The story situates the protagonist in a conflict between the demands of a patriarchal family and a universalist culture outside the family based on friendship. The victory of the father and the resulting death of the son function as part of an attempt to recover traditional structures of authority which have been eroded by a modern notion of culture based on individual freedom and ‘elective’ affinities rather than binding ones. The death of the son is not an example of senseless repression but of a self-sacrifice of modern and individualist desires in favor of the patriarchal authority of the father.

Political Institutions and the Evanescence of Power: Making History in Highland Bolivia

The Bolivian Quechua community of Quirpini appears to be governed by a number of political institutions whose activities have little capacity for historically transformative action. An analysis of actions by each institution reveals that they either never mobilize people or are set up so that collective action is possible only with the assent and cooperation of the Spanish-speaking elite of the nearby regional capital. What appears to be Quirpini's system of self-governance is in practice the means by which the village is dominated. (Politics, Bolivia, power, mediation, action) Until approximately 1984, the major political role of the kurajkuna (political authorities) of the indigenous Quechua community called Quirpini was to perform menial services for the leading officials in the town of San Lucas, the regional capital. Most of the authorities were required to go to town on a weekly basis to do tasks such as sweeping the mayor's patio, taking eggs to the authorities, and gathering and cutting firewood for them. One of the commonplaces of political anthropology about the Andes region is that a key, if not the central, role of communal authorities is to represent the community to those outside, particularly neighboring communities and to elements of the dominant Hispanic society and government (Abercrombie 1986; Rasnake 1988). Seen in this light, the services provided by the kurajkuna to the officials of San Lucas were not only perquisites enjoyed by members of the central town's Spanish-speaking elite, but an unmistakable representation of the subordination of Quirpini to San Lucas. By performing menial tasks and giving minor tribute to the authorities of San Lucas, the communal authorities were repeatedly concretizing, if not embodying, the submission of Quirpini to the regional center. This was the state of affairs before a new priest was assigned to the San Lucas region in the early 1980s. He began a systematic program aimed to reduce the campesino(1) communities' subservience to San Lucas, a key part of which was to put an end to the kurajkuna's services to town authorities. In Quirpini, the form this change took was an attack on the kurajkuna as the institution then existed. He allied himself with the young head of the communal peasant union (sindicato), Justiniano Cruz. According to Cruz, who provided most of the information about these events, the official leader of the community at the time (the cacique) was ineffective. The union, with the padre's support, got the community to remove the kurajkuna (including the cacique) from their positions and declare that whereas in the past an incoming authority had been chosen by his predecessor, from then on they would all be chosen at a community meeting by popular vote. Furthermore, where in the past each authority changed at a different date, according to the cycle of fiestas, now all the kurajkuna would be chosen together, and take office together. There was no specific date on which the offices changed hands; rather, the transition was gradual, as marked by the presence of both old and new authorities at the weekly meetings of authorities for some weeks after the vote in January. Finally, the community unilaterally declared that the kurajkuna would no longer perform services for the town authorities. The change was instigated by the church and union together, and made the system by which the kurajkuna were selected more similar to that of the union. It would be reasonable to suppose that the change initiated a period of union domination over the traditional authority structures, as happened in the ex-hacienda communities of the highlands and elsewhere (Rivera Cusicanqui 1990; Izko 1992). In fact, however, the union local had virtually no political significance at all, and the position of local sindicato head was a rotating one-year position treated as a rather minor requirement of male adulthood, comparable to a lesser position in the school or kurajkuna hierarchy. …

The Design Salon: An Experiment in Participatory Graduate Education

Issue Alternative educational processes that challenge the traditional classroom hierarchies, authority structures, and knowledge structures should be explored. These processes may provide a venue for integrating societal, cultural, and theoretical issues into graduate interior design education. Goal The purpose of an experiment in graduate education at Pratt Institute was to create a learning community of faculty and students that develops students’ skills in ideation and critique, broadens their knowledge base in terms of design discourse, and encourages radical thinking. Application The Design Salon is an on–going experience in the Pratt Institute Graduate Interior Design Department. Based on Freire's dialogic model of education, it has created a setting for continuing discourse and exploration of ideas among students and faculty. The Design Salon experience has implications for organizing other courses at Pratt as well as for other graduate interior design programs. Description The Design Salon, its historical context, requirements, content, and process at Pratt are discussed. An argument is made for incorporating the Design Salon or similar participatory educational experiences into mainstream interior design at the graduate level. Conclusions The Design Salon represents a step towards a type of education that can create socially responsible designers who challenge the status quo and who are reflective and informed. It has implications that could infuse and fundamentally alter the process and content of graduate design education.

Literature and Domination: Sex, Knowledge, and Power in Modern Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Literature and Domination: Sex, Knowledge, and Power in Modern Fiction Richard Pearce M. Keith Booker . Literature and Domination: Sex, Knowledge, and Power in Modern Fiction. Florida: U of Florida P, 1993. 188 pp. $24.95. Keith Booker begins his study of Literature and Domination by focusing on Pozzo in Beckett's modernist exemplar, Waiting for Godot. Pozzo is not only "a typical Beckettian tyrant figure," he also represents the traditional structures of authority. His return as blind and lame in the second act, then, signals the breakdown of traditional structures "that so haunts (and inspires) the modernist literary imagination." But though he is now helpless and unable to enforce his authority, he is still able to dominate Lucky. It is "not that there is insufficient structure in the way power is wielded in the modern world," concludes Booker. "On the contrary . . . there is too much structure, even without any authority for that structure, so that a conservative shoring of fragments like that recommended by Eliot would only serve to make the situation more oppressive than it already is." Joyce's Dublin reflects just this oppressive situation, as the large cast of characters [End Page 428] (not just in Dubliners, I would add, but in all his novels) are paralyzed by "preexisting discourses and institutions" that have lost "the legitimating authority of some transcendent originating center." Booker explores the way six exemplary modernist works reflect, interrogate, resist, and pose alternatives to the traditional forces of domination. And he insists that, though domination is primarily reflected in its control of knowledge, it extends to political and religious oppression—and the relations between men and women. Samuel Beckett's Watt comically exposes, resists, and undermines the domination of Enlightenment epistemology, scientific thinking, and the drive to master not just the world but the very texts we read and write about our experience. And it specifically reflects the way authoritarian discourses, as critiqued by Horkheimer and Adorno, resulted in the political and religious oppression of Ireland as well as the horrors of fascism. Virginia Woolf's The Waves shifts the focus to gender and the domination by male institutions and discourses that deny women enabling subject positions. But Woolf does not just expose the patriarchal forms of social and psychological domination, she offers an alternative, communal mode of intersubjectivity. And her concern is not simply with social and psychological dynamics; it is also with the very real pain suffered by individuals which drives Rhoda to suicide. In a different way, this painful form of domination is also the central concern of Vladimir Nabokov, whose Humbert Humbert dominates Lolita by seeing this real girl as a literary artifact. Nabokov's parody of Humbert's confession, while seeming to reinforce this artificiality by highlighting the fictionality of Lolita, also illuminates the way Lolita and her mother are constituted as individuals by the discourses of American popular culture and the way Humbert is constituted by the discourse of European high culture. Interestingly, this new-Marxist critique qualifies Nabokov's anti-Marxism in its incipient "dialogue with the Stalinist terror that looms in the margins of so many of Nabokov's texts." Thomas Pynchon's V. also explores the discourses of patriarchal domination, though in much greater depth and scope—especially through recurrent images of sexual violence associated with Western imperialism and fascism. Pynchon lures us toward a dominant mode of reading, while continually undermining those strategies and revealing their ideology. The focus on reading as a form of domination is further developed in Booker's treatment of ltalo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. And his chapter on Beckett's late novel, The Lost Ones, serves as a conclusion, which "offers a number of useful lessons for those who would seem to oppose dominant reading strategies in both the reading and the teaching of literary texts." Booker's study of these key modern texts establishes a base for engaging literary representations of power and domination in socially relevant ways, especially since it is well grounded in much relevant theory. But the base needs further development, for the social relevance is established only nominally through brief references and not worked out in...

Practice and Change: An Episode of Structural Disjunction and Conjunction among the Sadama of Ethiopia

This paper is concerned with religious proselytization as a means of creating new relationships and practices among the Sadama. Though religious conversion constituted a threat to the traditional authority structure, creating a rift between converts and traditionalists, both groups were ultimately brought together again in a new structure. The latter was largely a result of historical accident and convergence of values which led to changing relationships between both groups. The paper examines the processes involved in these events and the implications for practice theory.

Proposals for health services in northern Nigeria.

This paper outlines practical proposals for the implementation of primary health care in the Bodinga province of Nigeria. The inhabitants of Bodinga are Hausa Moslems, and their culture, religion, and traditional authority structure differ from those of other ethnic groups in Nigeria. The success of any health program in Bodinga is dependent upon careful consideration of these factors. The recommendations presented focus on 4 issues: community participation and the Hausa Islamic culture, health education, social services, and the potential role of traditional medicine. Given the Hausa culture's regard for traditional rulers, district and village heads should be converted 1st; they can then be used as instruments for the promotion of the basic health scheme. Community participation could be followed by a health education program aimed at the prevention of infectious diseases caused by an unclean environment and consumption of contaminated food. Female health inspectors can be used to advise villagers on child care and family planning. At present, there is no hospital or rural health center in Bodinga, and access roads connecting the villages are inadequate. Each village needs a small clinic and each district needs a rural health center or a hospital at each government headquarters. The basic health scheme requires staff that are locally trained and responsive to the needs and priorities of the community served. An official integration of traditional medical practitioners with modern medical personnel is advised. The Nigerian government must be involved, politically and financially, in this project.