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Indigenous knowledge and resilience are embedded in the prevailing culture of traditional societies. This study aims to investigate the Pashtun culturally embedded indigenous knowledge and resilience to climate change. The Pashtun indigenous knowledge is culturally entrenched and guides them socio-culturally to mitigate the worst impact of climate change. It is revealed Pashtun indigenous knowledge and resilience are rooted in their culture and social structure. Their folk literature, metaphors, poetry, traditions, cultural capitals, social organizations, and colonial history are key elements to understanding the different aspects of Pashtun's traditional wisdom and resilience to climate change. Pashtun social structure (such as kinship bonds, brotherhood, and reciprocity) and cultural institutions (such as Jirga) also strengthen their resilience to bounce back from the worst impact of climate change. Indigenous knowledge, sociocultural institutions, and resilience collectively help them to face the worst impact of climate change. Pashtun have bad memories of colonial exploitation and Pakistan's exploitative policies; hence, they do not trust state initiatives, and they rely on their traditions to counter the worst impact of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1876 and World War II, Antwerp's business elite regularly convened at the lectures of the Société Royale de Géographie d'Anvers (SRGA, 'Royal Geographical Society of Antwerp'). Similarly to other geographical societies emerging across Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, these lectures employed the magic lantern to project visual images from distant lands. The SRGA had close ties with King Leopold II of Belgium and his imperial pursuits. Nestled within the international port city of Antwerp, the society attracted an audience vital to Leopold II's colonial ambitions – the city's commercial and financial elite. This study reflects on knowledge production and dissemination within this scientific circle in a Belgian colonial context. Rather than academic enrichment, the evenings were leisure activities, fostering connections among the business elite. Against this backdrop, the article reflects on the concept of scientific legitimacy during a specific era of Belgium's colonial past. • The colonial magic lantern lectures of the Royal Geographical Society of Antwerp attracts the commercial elite of Antwerp. • Geography and the circulation of Knowledge and visual representations of Congo Free State and Belgian Congo. • The globalisation of Belgian business interests and commerce of Antwerp important in Belgium's colonial past. • Travel magic lantern lectures as a leisure activity in the city of Antwerp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Christianity in Northern Region of Malawi serves as an illustrative case study where technological objects affect religious practices. To elucidate the role of material objects in the constitution of the religious world, the article discusses the example of electricity as a key infrastructure and its role in bridging the modern material world with the colonization of religious practices. Within this analyze, religiosity is conceived not merely as a system of symbols but rather in terms of holistic, embodied, yet institutionalized practices. The pivotal role played by electric musical instruments concerns the establishment of a centralized public sphere closely intertwined with a Christianization project and technological advancements. Electronic keyboards operate within a religiously significant electrical infrastructure, which is intricately interwoven with political and religious ideologies, embodiment, and subjectivity. The electronic sound becomes agents of profound influence, imbuing religious musical experience with the affect of civilization. This transformative impact, however, also underscores the historical marginalization and suppression of indigenous drumming traditions, initially by early missionaries, and later by institutionalized Christian churches. The historical relation between electricity, embodied affect, and religion are exemplified by two case studies: the history of the industrial Presbyterian mission of Livingstonia and the adoption of electric instruments by Katawa Singers and other local gospel choirs. Paradoxically, the development of electrical infrastructures obscures significant asymmetries within the religious socio‐spiritual world. In the Northern Region, other spiritual practices rooted in ancestral reverence and traditional healing modalities construct an antagonistic yet interconnected network that is overshadowed by the mediated public sphere shaped by technical developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits one of the earliest instances of British colonial aerial aggression in an urban milieu in South Asia to better understand the normative conceptions of airmindedness, the popular appreciation of aviation. A day after the massacre of unarmed civilians in Jalianwala Bagh, Amritsar, in 1919, three Royal Air Force airplanes armed with bombs and machine guns flew out from Lahore toward Gujranwala in Punjab. The event unleashed a whirlwind of rumours that spread from Lahore to Rangoon, which spoke of the collective fears of aerial violence. If the scant evidence presented by the pilots to the official inquiry into the unrest in Punjab served only to whitewash the record, a peoples' report that marshalled witness testimonies indicted the colonial state's proclivity for violence. By assembling photographic evidence and crafting a cartographic triangulation of the sites of bombing from their testimonies, the colonial subjects challenged the statist narrative. The asymmetry of vertical violence in Gujranwala was also excavated as political commentary in a novel published in New York by an Indian author. By piecing together these disparate discursive fragments, my article attempts to make a composite sketch of the popular responses to trace a non-Western perspective on airmindedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political systems of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, and Lebanon are defined by ethnic or religious divides that have historical roots in their Ottoman and European colonial past. This paper aims to investigate the impact of these historical legacies on popular representation and institutional structures. The Ottomans and European colonizers created institutions that allowed subjects to elect their representatives, shaping these countries' initial experiences with modernity. This paper employs historical institutionalism as a theoretical approach, and path dependency as a methodology to explore how historical legacies have shaped the political institutions and power‐sharing arrangements in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, and Lebanon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Memoria Americana is the property of Memoria Americana, Cuadernos de Etnohistoria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Im Jahr 1898 reiste der Bergassessor Hugo von Königslöw (1868–1926) in die deutsche Kolonie Kiautschou in China, die erst wenige Monate zuvor durch einen erzwungenen Pachtvertrag in die Verfügungsgewalt des Deutschen Kaiserreichs gelangt war. Von Königslöw vertrat als einer der ersten Kolonialherren die Schantung-Bergbau-Gesellschaft und war bis 1901 in der Hauptstadt Qingdao (dt. Tsingtau) tätig. Dort trug er in einem Sammelbuch Fotografien der Stadt und des Umlands zusammen, von denen er einen Großteil selbst aufgenommen hatte. Sein China-Album bietet daher einerseits eine authentische Quelle zur Bergbaugeschichte der Kolonie, andererseits liefert es eine Dokumentation der individuellen Interessen des Urhebers, der neben den Fotografien aus Ostchina auch Aufnahmen der US-amerikanischen Mountain States sammelte, die er auf seinem Rückweg nach Europa bereiste. Das Sammelbuch aus dem Besitz der Familie von Königslöw wurde durch den Fotografen und Bildwissenschaftler Stephan Sagurna erschlossen und an das Montanhistorische Dokumentationszentrum des Deutschen Bergbau-Museums Bochum vermittelt, wo es heute auch digitalisiert vorliegt. Das Fotoalbum sowie Reproduktionen aller Aufnahmen waren vom 19. Juli bis zum 29. September 2024 in der Präsentation „Nach China? Das Fotoalbum des Hugo von Königslöw" im LWL- Museum Henrichshütte in Hattingen zu sehen. Aktuell wird die Wanderausstellung in der Universitätsbibliothek Siegen gezeigt (15. Oktober bis 6. Dezember), weitere -Stationen werden Paderborn und Iserlohn sein. In 1898, mining inspector Hugo von Königslöw (1868– 1926) travelled to the German colony of Jiaozhou Bay in China, which the Chinese had been forced to lease to the German Empire just a few months previously. As one of the first colonial masters of the Shandong Mining Company, von Königslöw worked in the territorial capital of Qingdao until 1901. While there, he collected an album with photographs of the city and its environs, the vast bulk of which he took himself. His China Album is therefore both an authentic historical source on the history of mining in the colony and a record of its author's own personal interests; hence the inclusion of images of the Mountain States of America that he visited on his return journey to Europe. The album, long in family hands, was studied by the photographer and visual studies expert Stephan Sagurna and then entrusted to the Mining History Documentation Centre at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, also in digitised form. Both the album itself and reproductions of the photos it contains were exhibited in the presentation "Nach China? Das Fotoalbum des Hugo von Königslöw" at the LWL-Museum Henrichshütte at Hattingen from 19 July to 29 September 2024. That touring exhibition can currently be viewed at Siegen University Library (15 October to 6 December), after which it will travel on to Paderborn and Iserlohn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major episodes in the four centuries of French colonial history, the 132 years of Algerian colonization and, in particular, the “gangrene” represented by the Algerian War—to use the term coined by Benjamin Stora in 1991—continue to weigh on our present. These episodes in our history are both invisible and omnipresent. They are the “elephant in the room” that nobody sees. And yet, in our analyses of today's France, reflection on their present-day traces must occupy an important place.

Societal Impact Statement Agricultural techniques are inherently connected to social organization. Under colonialism, broadly understood as foreign powers suppressing (parts of) a local population, escape agriculture offers a way to avoid despotism by producing food and other produce in independent and sustainable ways. Crop diversity plays an important role in escape agriculture, demonstrated here by the variation of rice varieties on Maroon farms in Suriname. Histories of Maroon agricultural practices, and similarly marginalized groups in (formerly) colonized regions, are informative for current interventions in agriculture. Agronomic support to marginalized groups will only be successful when addressing historically grown social disengagement. Summary Rationale: Food is essential for successful marronage and produced by means of escape agriculture. Today, communities in the interior of Suriname continue to farm by following practices of escape agriculture. Our study traces the historical development of these farming practices, in particular the extensive cultivation of rice. Our aim is to show that the diversity of rice varieties used in their fields reveals the sophisticated farming techniques and social significance of escape agriculture. Methods: We visited about 60 farm plots upstream the main rivers of Suriname where we interviewed the person in charge about the rice varieties grown in their fields. We asked about origin, names, and characteristics of each rice variety. We also screened historical sources, primary and secondary, as well as anthropological accounts of these communities for historical evidence of rice cultivation and varietal diversity. Results: Plots were farmed primarily by women and contained a broad range of different rice varieties. Naming and origin stories show a clear reference to the escape from plantations and the leading role of women in farming and food security. In some fields, a small patch was reserved for a rice type with very dark grains, used mostly for ritual purposes. Results also show adoption of more recently introduced rice varieties. Conclusion: Rice plays a key role in escape agriculture as practiced by Maroon communities in Suriname. Rice varieties are used as agricultural markers of difference.

This investigation of four biographical narratives on the same person, all published since 2018 and inspired by the same epistolary corpus, demonstrates differences in authorial purpose and reader expectation across the ‘speculative spectrum’ of biographical interpretation. The subject, Elizabeth Macarthur, arrived in New South Wales in 1790. Two of the texts are works of historical scholarship, with apublishers’ classification non-fiction biography. The other two are published as novels. The authors’ differing purposes, their interpretations and their stylistic treatments of the same source material, provide an illustrative demonstration of the narrative functions of biography and biofiction. This essay examines the depiction of Elizabeth Macarthur’s life in the four texts to highlight the differences between scholarly biographies and biofictions from the perspective of their writing practices. It examines their use of speculation and literary devices and how these are signposted to the reader by evaluating the authors’ engagement with archival sources, their use of empathy and projection and their narrative techniques. It questions how biofiction can supplement or supplant traditional biography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War, necessitating a re-negotiation of the legal and social status of its former imperial subjects. This article discusses the wartime experience of Paul Messi, a Cameroonian language assistant at the Colonial Institute, Hamburg. Messi moved to Germany in 1913 to succeed his uncle, Karl Atangana who had returned to Cameroon to become Paramount Leader of the Ewondo and Bane. Atangana had secured the position in Germany for his nephew along with providing him with a stipend. The outbreak of war saw Messi stranded in Hamburg, suffering from ill health and cut off from financial assistance. However, due to Atangana's petitioning to the German government, his daughter Katharina, and Messi were reunited in Madrid before repatriation in 1919. The return to Cameroon was difficult, Messi, despite his desire to leave Germany, was treated as a suspect person by the French authorities. Focusing on Messi's account of his experiences, this paper highlights how the war not only disrupted intra-empire familial connections but also how these connections enabled a negotiated return to Mandate Cameroon in the early post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews a selection of works by Black diaspora artists who were included in the 2024 Venice Biennale. The article focuses on artists included in the pavilions of Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Benin, along with artists included in the Arsenale and the collateral exhibition Passengers in Transit. Drawing on the biennale's theme of Foreigners Everywhere, the author explores how these artists engaged with its expanded meanings, drawing on the experiences of mobility, impermanence, diaspora, and nation building. The article details the different registers these terms hold for Black diaspora artists, as they address concerns about climate change, social injustice, migrant labor, cultural memory, and understandings of the nation. In beginning with these questions, these artists also assert new starting points in which Africa's global significance historically and toward the future was reiterated, defamiliarizing the terrain of art-historical production. Artists also explored these questions using methods that often enfolded the personal with the diverse experiences of a collective, returned viewers to local and indigenous knowledge systems, foregrounded human and non-human relations, and looked toward difficult and unacknowledged histories to imagine what might be possible, collectively, now and in times to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how contemporary women writers from South Asia are challenging traditional historical narratives by excavating and reconstructing silenced feminine perspectives, with a focus on The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2019) by Uzma Aslam Khan. Employing Linda Hutcheon's theory of historiographic metafiction, the study analyzes Khan's narrative strategies in reimagining colonial history through a feminist lens. The study argues that Khan's work resurrects neglected historical narratives and enhances readers' historical awareness by inviting critical engagement with the construction of historical knowledge. By skillfully interweaving fact and fiction, Khan expands the boundaries of traditional historiography, incorporating postmodern dimensions into her exploration of political and historical themes. The study demonstrates how Khan's novel gives voice to subaltern experiences, particularly those of women within the context of South Asian colonial history, challenges dominant discourses, and fosters a more complex historical consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science Museum Group (SMG) object 2005-7446 was built by a British rolling stock manufacturer in 1927. It was exported as a first-class passenger coach to Britishadministered Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and ran on the lines operated by the former Rhodesia Railways. But, in 1974, the carriage was on its way back to Britain, overseen by the artist, conservationist and railway enthusiast, David Shepherd. After being displayed at a series of locations across Britain, the carriage was acquired by the National Railway Museum, part of SMG, in the early 2000s. It was kept in storage until 2024. With the carriage now on display at SMG's National Collections Centre in Wroughton, this article asks what stories it has the potential to tell. It argues that interpretation of the carriage since its repatriation has focused on the story of its return, while gaps in the knowledge of its operational life - including the experiences of passengers and the impacts of the railway's labour hierarchy - have been overlooked. By tracing the carriage's archival trail in Britain and consulting SMG's technical files, this paper highlights the importance of foregrounding such untold narratives. It concludes to suggest ways forward for future research, interpretation strategies and the management of associated files. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the death of 13-year-old 'half-caste' Cissy Brennan in far north Queensland in 1910. The entangled accounts of police constables, the Government Medical Officer, family and community members, and news reports, reveal how these narratives are buried deep within the coronial structures and colonial discourses of the inquest file. The article argues that the witness testimonies in the magisterial inquiry, including the findings of the police constables, and Government Medical Officer, became the dominant narrative in writing about Aboriginal female bodies within coronial law, creating a flawed and fragmentary historical account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Plants, People, Planet is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Working from the GLOBALISE project, we have enhanced access to over 5,000 Dutch maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, renowned for their geographic and historical significance. We have laid the groundwork for enriching these maps with annotations and metadata following the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) standards, directly linked to their digital representations from the collection-holding institutions. This approach ensures a FAIR framework for sharing research results and fosters collaborative annotation. We enriched the maps with georeferencing annotations and employed automated tools to extract toponyms and geographic features, enabling large-scale analysis. These annotations open new pathways for exploring understudied historical regions, such as early modern Kerala, and assessing Dutch colonial influence globally. By publishing our data early, we aim to encourage further collaborative refinements, allowing a wider scholarly community to improve and build upon this work. This approach highlights the potential of combining historical cartography with computational tools to empower large-scale geographic and historical research. Highlights: • Dataset of over 5,000 early modern Dutch maps, accessible for collaborative annotation. • Automated tools used to extract geographic features, toponyms, and cartographic symbols from maps. • New opportunities for large-scale analysis of early modern topographies and Dutch colonial influence.

In this themed issue of Paedagogica Historica, editors Pieter Verstraete, Maria Romeiras, and Carlos Manique aim to merge the flourishing fields of disability history and the history of education. Despite past initiatives like the 2005 special issue on disability and education and the 34th ISCHE conference in 2012, these fields have largely remained separate. This issue presents three articles that intersect these domains, capitalising on recent historiographical evolutions. Both fields share activist origins, with the history of education emerging in the 19th century and disability history in the late 20th century. Recent trends in disability history, such as non-Western perspectives and renewed interest in institutional histories, align with the new cultural history of education. The included articles exemplify this synergy by exploring the architecture of French deaf institutions, tactile reading systems in East Asia, and the Perkins Institute for the Blind. This collection underscores the potential of integrating these research fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Foco (Interdisciplinary Studies Journal) is the property of Revista Foco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Between March and June of 1759, a general military campaign ("entrada general") towards Chaco was held by the Governance of Tucumán, Buenos Aires and Paraguay. Despite the high amount of documents that were produced at the moment -both written papers and maps- this event has aroused little interest in historiography. In this paper, we aim at reviewing this military campaign from a historico-anthropological approach that resituates the documents in their contexts of production, by considering the complex relationships that link empirical facts -the actions-, imaginaries -the representations- and what is registered in the documents -the discourses. In this way, we present an ethnographic interpretation of the military campaign that delves into the facts, the different actors' objectives and motivations, and the distinct interethnic scenarios that were developed on the borders of Chaco. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the Sufi teachings of a religious authority who has taught at the Al-Ghazali Institute of the Grand Mosque of Paris. It first shows that this teacher's vision of Sufism and of the Orient and Occident is based on the views of the French thinker René Guénon, but with a stronger Islamic accent, similar to Michel Valsan's reception of Guénon. It then discusses which new implications this Guénonian-tinged Sufism contains, firstly, when it is performed for a migrant audience, and secondly, when it is taught at the highly symbolic site of the Grand Mosque of Paris. In this context, we also discuss parallels and differences between Guénon's valorisation of the Orient on the one hand and colonial Orientalism as manifested at the Mosque of Paris since the 1920s on the other hand. Finally, we will present the teacher's positions and way of thinking as representing a place where diverse currents of thought and political claims intersect and show that this challenges their potential classification as "integrated" or "non-integrated" within current political debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Fronteras de la Historia is the property of Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia e Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article showcases that studies on Hindi and Urdu literature are also being conducted outside South Asia and that elsewhere, too, such literary studies and socio-political analyses are being combined in quite specific ways. Boycott of foreign goods was one of the most important parts of colonial India's freedom struggle and many intellectuals from the literary and art worlds expressed their views on it. In his Hindi and Urdu stories, Munshi Premchand used his unique narrative technique, critical perspective on social events, and deep understanding of Indian society also to comment on the boycott of foreign goods. The article examines how such reflections of India's struggle for independence manifest in two of Premchand's lesser-known stories in which he argued for boycotting foreign goods. Our analysis portrays Premchand as an activist writer, who chose common people's language to present gendered social documents, in a form akin to oral history, as his specific contribution to India's freedom from foreign rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1573, the Spanish Crown presented Friar Dionisio de Sanctis to occupy the episcopal see of Cartagena. Very early on, the prelate realized that it was not he who had the patronage of the San Sebastian Hospital, but the secular chapter. Thus, he filed a lawsuit against the municipal institution to recover the government of the hospital. Using the case file, the details of the lawsuit are presented and the speech of the response given by the city’s attorney general to the prelate’s demand is analyzed. In doing so, we seek to explain the role played by the bishops in the foundation and government of the colonial hospitals and some aspects of the functioning of the local justice system. It is hypothesized that with the appeal filed, the bishop sought to have the patronage of the hospital returned to him, just as his predecessors had held it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Foco (Interdisciplinary Studies Journal) is the property of Revista Foco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Linked open data on collection agents contribute to increased discoverability, accessibility and transparency of natural history collections. Despite major efforts to digitise and open up museum and university object collections, related information is often stored in internal resources. This paper describes a project conducted at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) contributing to its collection disclosure and development initiatives. Information on historical collectors and other collection agents was transferred from the internal MfN collector wiki to Wikidata. For a total of 600 collection agents, existing Wikidata items were enriched or new items created. Special emphasis was put on linking these people to the Museum, to document their affiliation with the MfN, its collection and its archive. Within the project, an open participatory approach was taken. Several Wikidata edit-a-thons were organised to test this collaborative and innovative format for possible future application by the Museum. By opening up institutional silos and openly sharing data on agents connected to museum holdings, these data become more widely accessible and reusable, for example, as a resource for transdisciplinary provenance research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around 300 physicians from Switzerland, the German as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire joined the Dutch Colonial Army between 1814 and 1914. While their motives to volunteer in the first place could widely differ, many among them eagerly published on their experiences as medical officers 'Far East', presenting their alleged heroic deeds and the struggles they faced as medical men in the tropics to a broad readership in Germanophone Europe. This article zooms in on the lives of three such 'medical mercenaries' deployed in Aceh, where the Dutch fought one of the longest, most costly, and deadly wars in their Imperial history: the Swiss Dr. Heinrich Erni, Austrian Dr. Heinrich Breitenstein, and Prussian Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Stammeshaus. By analysing their testimonies of the daily lives in the military camps, it asks how European masculinities were forged, challenged, and contested through medicine and medical experts in colonial wars fought in from a European perspective remote, unknown tropical outdoor spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History is a representation of the past based on (written) knowledge which has been passed on from one generation to the next, with a preference given to written sources from a Eurocentric tradition. However, written sources about (former) colonial territories are a product of the colonial system in which they were produced. Acknowledging the biases in these archives, therefore, opens the way for acceptance of other forms of knowledge which were previously deemed “not objective” in Eurocentric historical disciplines. This paper presents several examples from the Banda Islands in Maluku province in Indonesia to attest that, by placing contemporary perceptions of the past and local reiterations of history on an equal pedestal as colonial documentation, we can work towards a more decolonial practice of writing histories. In the case of the Banda Islands, this means a shift from a colonial Eurocentric perspective of its history towards a narration of the past which honours the Bandanese heroes, religion, and resilience.

The current discourse on African architecture is strongly influenced by social design—a practice for which architecture holds an important role in addressing complex societal questions and problems. The use of “alternative” building materials, as opposed to industrial materials like concrete or steel, is very central within this discourse. However, as this article argues, this strong binary approach to building materials is heavily influenced by colonial and postcolonial logic. To understand this continuity, I will trace some path dependencies visible in the Central African region from the colonial period to the present. In the first section, the material preferences of a Belgian architecture firm working in Rwanda in 2012 are related to the binaries of the architecture firms operating in this region in the 1970s and 1980s. In the second section, I discuss how the strong distinction between so-called “local” and “modern” materials is a remnant of the colonial period. Through an in-depth analysis of the shifting valuations of cement and burnt lime in Central Africa, the article aims to make these colonial categories feel less natural. Building on post-colonial science and technology studies (STS) scholarship, the conclusion proposes an alternative to binary thinking—a conscious material choice that tries to understand building materials as situated processes, allowing to go beyond the industry-driven denominators by which we currently value our building materials.

This article examines archival documents, government papers and newspaper reports relating to the first three years of the government-run child welfare system in the Australian colony of Victoria (1864–1866) to present a case study that explores how historians might use emotion as a conceptual tool for engaging with the humanity of marginalised voices from the past, particularly for periods beyond living memory. It argues that studying emotion in public debate reveals important information about the (limited) ways in which colonial society valued vulnerable children of the poor, and that despite the systematic silencing of children within child welfare records, there remain opportunities to connect with their humanity. Through a case study approach, the article demonstrates that emotion can be a tool for developing a contrapuntal reading of sources that present different – sometimes directly contradictory – narratives of events. Thus, the article makes a contribution to the social history of child welfare and also offers approaches to understanding the humanity of people from the past that will be of interest to social historians more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the relationship between land revenue systems and returns to agricultural labour in colonial India. I provide the first district‐level comparative estimates of agricultural labour returns relative to average income, on the basis of wage/income ratios for 1916. I then use those estimates to analyse the impact of the land revenue systems established by the British colonial authorities. Results show that districts with a larger proportion of non‐landlord land revenue systems presented higher relative wages, closer to the average income. This effect was mainly driven by differences in land concentration connected to the type of landownership introduced by land revenue systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of Indian films on popular culture and the influence of dominant political ideology on Indian films are interspersed with dialectical variations. Although a binary representation of these subtleties remains elusive, while promoting ideological superstructures in society, ‘the relatively mixed, confused, incomplete, or inarticulate consciousness' is replaced with a ‘generalised system'. In practice, the tendencies governing public emotions during moments of crisis are employed as tropes in Bollywood films. However, the ontology of political underpinnings and subversive ideological possibilities that enmesh lived experiences remain smothered by an unproblematic representation of historical events. With this rationale, the paper analyses three Bollywood films Panipat (2019), Tanhaji (2020) and Samrat Prithviraj (2022). These films seem to auger the idea of Dharma and Ramrajya in the construction of a Nation catering to the populist notion of a safe and secure nation under just Hindu rule. The paper argues that these films cater to the framework of historiography promulgated by the colonial historians on one hand; and function as a contrapuntal response to the ideological moorings of the leaders of the All-India Muslim League. This objective is achieved by a stereotypical and binary projection of good and evil by glossing over the ‘mixed consciousness’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a visual turn in the field of history of education, including visual sources has far from become standard practice when writing histories of education or when considering children's voices from the past. Yet photographs can be especially fruitful when considering marginalised children who left few traces in other records. Building upon theories and insights from multiple disciplines, this article aims to contribute to recent methodological approaches to researching the experiences of marginalised children. Through the preservation of bodies, actions, and movements in space and time, photography may provide access to the lives of children growing up in colonial boarding schools. From a case study of a school in Merauke, West Papua (Netherlands New Guinea) in the 1920s, three specific merits of photography as source in educational history are discussed, as well as the difficulties and limits of this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have written detailed studies of evolving European interpretations of the changing environment of Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as producing a sizeable body of work on Māori systems of thought as tangata whenua (Indigenous people of the land). While several studies have examined the environmental history of the Chinese in New Zealand, with one exception, we simply do not have any knowledge of the environmental views of nineteenth-century New Zealand's third-largest ethnic group. This short exploratory article examines the plurality of environmental perspectives of the Cantonese migrants who came in increasing numbers to Aotearoa from the mid-1860s. It highlights the manner in which Cantonese deployed concepts such as fungsui/fengshui 風水 (literally, wind and water) to interpret Aotearoa environments as well as the importance of imported deities in drawing New Zealand into Chinese cosmologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale is the property of Berghahn Books and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)