Suchergebnisse

The dissertation offers a localized, symbolic analysis of the tropes which organize mothers' everyday practice on a remote Tongan atoll. It pays particular attention to the language, meanings and practices associated with 'health'. I argue that as mothers, women are active agents in the invention of Tongan culture, and figure in the production of a national image of traditional modernity. Insofar as Tongan health promotion and medical services include a strong focus on maternal child health issues, mothers are placed at nexus points between 'modern' medicalized ways of perceiving bodies, food, hygiene or risks, and the future generation, their children. As mothers therefore, women are key figures in the interpretation of medical and modernizing messages and directions for social practice. Despite the government's official adoption of Western models for representing health, at the level of everyday life in the village, 'health' is played out differently from the illness treatment and prevention focus associated with biomedicine. Locally, traditional practices, including notions of kinship, gendered roles of motherhood and traditional behaviour, counter the orthodox emphasis of biomedical health, and replace it with a more locally meaningful tropes of "mo'ui lelei" [living well] and "va lelei" [good connections], according to "anga fakatonga" [the 'Tongan way]. Va lelei depends on making and exchanging traditional textiles made from pandanus fibre. Examining rural mother's everyday practices demonstrates the way in which textiles are polysemic, signifying good mothering, but also the obligation of the entire maternal kindred, through life and death. Mothers in this remote and economically under-privileged part of Tonga are what feminist philosopher Ruddick (1989) would call 'good mothers', but their behaviour and priorities differ from her germinal theorising of the work of mothering. In re-inventing WHO-promoted, biomedical notions of health, they use their own cultural practices to be both traditional and modern. In the process protecting their families in the face of state players who use modernity as an excuse to forget to redistribute wealth to the remote areas of Tonga.

What can fish stories tell us about how people live with the complexities of rapid environmental transformations and the local effects of national, globalized, and neoliberal desires for resources? To answer this, I take the Tä'atu fish harvesting ritual and accompanying oral narrative to be an "ecography" that addresses human intimacies and changes on a small atoll in Tonga. This type of analysis draws on traditional ecological, political, and sociological knowledge, as well as geography, history, and cultural symbols, to give a deeper understanding of place and the contemporary experience of people intimate with the local environment as source of food and livelihood. When examined in the light of today's drastically depleted stocks of Pacific pelagic fishes such as skipjack tuna, the ecography of the Tä'atu provides a benchmark for a shift in a human–fish relationship that provided Polynesians with practical and poetic sustenance for hundreds if not thousands of years. At the same time, the myth of the Tä'atu highlights the historic political importance of desire, beauty, and their confluence with bounty, in the production of generations of chiefly privilege and cultural practice. Imbricated with the shifts in human–fish and beauty–bounty relations are lessons for the contemporary chiefly–commoner relationship in Tonga, the last nation to claim status as an uninterrupted Polynesian kingdom, as well as laments for the loss of independence an important food resource offered. Today, as in the past, the Tä'atu is a fishy tale about the geopolitics of various desires.

AbstractAdam Smith's famous doctrine of the Invisible Hand, introduced in the Wealth of Nations in 1776, was anticipated by the great Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian (145–87 BC) in his Records of the Historian. Sima Qian's statement is deeper in that, unlike Smith, he links the "invisible hand"'explicitly to the price mechanism. Their analyses had a common philosophical foundation: the characteristically Chinese concept of a general, spontaneous natural order. They arrived at their similar conclusions by applying this concept to a similar contemporary issue in political economy ‐ the appropriate extent of government intervention. More intriguing, if more equivocal, is the possibility of a direct intellectual debt through the agency of A. R. J. Turgot and two Chinese who were visiting Paris as guests of the Jesuits just before Adam Smith's famous visit to the same city.