Presentation Postmortem

In this final installment of the Ethnogeography Weblog you are to render your individual impressions of the research project presentations of the Epistemic Field Teams. As well, you are to post any questions you might wish for the EFTs to address. Here are a few queries to inspire your evaluative commentary on the representations:

What dimensions of the slideshow were effective and which were not? What did you learn from the presentation that you did not know before? How could the presentation have been improved? How would you evaluate the presentation: superior, satisfactory, unsatisfactory?

I encourage you all to be thoughtful and constructive in your comments and, where appropriate, to explore areas of interpretive contiguity, as it were, with your own research. Write away!!

Imagined Communities and "Breaker Morant"

Near the close of Chapter Six Benedict Anderson draws a critical distinction between official nationalisms and the more spontaneous linguistic-nationalisms of the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. Let the following quotation from his summary on pages 109-111 provide a context for you to reflect on the very troubling portrait of nationalism and identity displayed in "Breaker Morant."

...[F]rom about hte middle of the nineteenth century there developed what Seton-Watson terms "official nationalisms" inside Europe. These nationalisms were historically "impossible" until after the appearance of popular linguistic-nationalisms, for, at bottom, they were responses by powerful groups--primarily, but not exclusively, dynastic and aristocratic--threatened with exclusion from, or marginalization in, popular imagined communities. A sort of tectonic upheaval was beginning, which, after 1918 and 1945, tipped these groups towards drainages in Estoril and Monte Carlo. Such official nationalisms were conservative, not to say reactionary, policies, adapted from the model of the largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded them....In the name of imperialism, very similar policies were pursued by the same sorts of groups in the vast Asian and African territories subjected in the course of the nineteenth century. Finally, refracted into non-European cultures and histories, they were picked up and imitated by indigenous ruling groups in those few zones (among them Japan and Siam) which escaped direct subjection....In almost every case, official nationalism concealed a discrepancy between nation and dynastic realm....The reason for all this was not simply racism; it was also the fact that at the core of the empires [think Britain] nations [think Australia] too were emerging...And these nations were also instinctively resistant to "foreign" rule. Thus, imperialist ideology in the post-1850 era thus typically had the character of a conjuring trick.

Taking your lead from this quotation explain the diverse nationalist and dynastic tensions at work in the court martial of Morant, Handcock, and Witton.

Freud and Mazlish on Civilization

In this week's individual webbog post I am eager to learn of your interpretations and/or readings of civilization as this phenomenon is understood by Mazlish and Freud. There are key differences between these two figures as well as significant similarities, so make it your goal to offer meaningful reflection on what they have to say about the advantages and disadvantages offered by the historic invention of this key concept. Both men convey distinct concerns about civilization and its implications for the modern quest for individual liberty and self-flourishing and in the course of our reading of their critiques of civilization we learn much about the complex, intertwined history of self and its other.

"Civilization" and "The Last Wave"

In this first installment of our webblog for 2009, I would like each of you to offer comment on "The Last Wave." You may try to sort it out for yourself as one way of writing about it, although I would like it best if you would comment on the film in light of the dialectic of civilization and savagery we have studied these last several months. Should you like to more about what Peter Weir was trying to get at by way of the film, have a look at the text of an interview conducted with the director in 1979 at:

http://www.peterweircave.com/articles/articlei.html

OK, you have until later this week to get your comments up. I look forward to seeing them.