Made which to measure? Nineteenth century science and sporting bodies

The modification of bodies to enhance performance for competitive sporting purposes originated in the mid eighteenth century. Since then, ‘science’ has informed the discourses of sports training practices, but its influence has changed significantly, now being directive rather than merely being addressed in the ethos of training. Today, sports training practices often are associated with scientific research focussed on understanding the biological processes underpinning physical achievements. However, in the first two centuries of modern sport, science, rather than directing practice, was used as a legitimating, justifying discourse that served to empower training practices.

This paper, an exercise in historical anthropology, replaces conventional ethnographic data with the texts of sports training manuals, sports periodicals and medical journals to examine how these discourses represented the influence of science on the preparation of the body for competition. The focus on the nineteenth century is instructive because, first, physiological models at the century’s start were influenced by Galenic theory, but were underpinned by modern empirical science at its end. Second, from the 1860s, amateurism inspired a major rethinking of training; the ensuing contrast with the preparation of professional athletes illustrates how science was deployed in the making of nineteenth century sporting bodies.

Voices from the margins? Women at the footy.

Based on focus group and single person interviews with women Australian rules football (AFL) supporters this paper explores the issue of how women articulate their support of a male dominated sport. We demonstrate that women supporters (widely overlooked in studies of sports) express their support of AFL with as much power and passion as is credited to male supporters. Moreover, women have formed about a half of AFL at-ground spectators for over a century with the historical record suggesting that the passion of their support was no less then than now. Yet to what extent have women supporters emerged from the metaphorical margins of AFL to appropriate distinctive spaces in their consumption of this sport? Using their voices and accounts of their at-ground actions, we argue that women fans perform an appropriation of supporting practice that is clearly gendered - in being a feminine discourse of support constructed by women - while giving the appearance of being genderless through their appropriation of discursive frames to legitimate their support of a male dominated sport. We conclude that in consuming football women fans perform doxic actions that reproduce, in leisure spaces, wider processes of gender inequality while, in a contradictory manner, contesting them through the appropriation of their own places in these spaces.

Advances in self-engagement research method : the case of disadvantaged female migrant entrepreneurs in Auckland, New Zealand

The “self-engagement research method” is a set of research procedures, which aims to search latent (hidden) attitudes within a given group of individuals, such as disadvantaged women. This method also examines the research participants practises through an intensive involvement in the process of research. Research on self-regulation has also tended to emphasize having personal control over an event as the primary determinant of whether individuals can effectively monitor and alter their behaviour to attain a desired end state (W. Britt, 1999, 699).

The “self-engagement procedure” originated from fieldwork of social research, especially from the present author’s experiences as a researcher and practitioner on women’s empowerment under the micro-finance programme in Women’s Empowerment Foundation, Auckland and in Grameen Bank Micro-finance programme (Nobel prize winner Professor Mohammed Yunus on poverty reduction through micro-finance).

This technique is based on the oft-cited phenomenon of discrepancies between what research Participants say what they often believe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participant_observation). This follows on Gabriel (1991:123-126) namely that participant observation is a useful technique for gaining insight into facts and is also useful for the rural poor or marginal groups, who are unable to communicate their problems. The problem is that since the 1980s, some anthropologists and the social scientists have questioned the degree to which participant observation can give truthful insight into the minds of other people (Geertz, Clifford,1984 & Rosaldo, Renato, 1986).

This paper discusses the difficulties found in using participant observation to discover discrepancies between what participants say and what they really believe. It also discusses self-engagement research procedures which the author has developed through the long-term research experiences with disadvantaged groups of women in Auckland. These procedures discover the discrepancies between what participants say and what is in their mind.

These self-engagement procedures were used from the beginning of the fieldwork to locate research areas and get access to the study settings. It was found there are gaps in this method. For example, there are no systematic processes in which researchers can gain access into the community or be welcomed by research participants. It was also difficult to discover the insight into the facts that cause disempowerment and how micro-finance impacts everyday life on research participants. McCracken (1988 cited in Mertens, 1998:321) argued that researchers collect data directly through observation, but it is not possible to imitate, repeat involvement in the experiences of research participants.

This research draws on and extends the long traditional of participant observation in social research. In field research practises, participant observation was used in different ways for gaining insight into different aspects. A good example is the use and mis-use of the “field journal” in this type of research. The journal typically explained and analysed experiences and understanding of participant observation, in-depth interviews and group discussions on the impact of micro-finance on women’s lives. However, researchers later realised that there were gaps in collected knowledge that needed to be filled. This led to “self-engagement procedures” which developed greater confidence that collected data could truly give insight into patterns of behaviour.

This paper addresses sensitive issues of women’s empowerment under the micro finance programmes and makes a contribution to the literature. The “self-engagement method” detects the “silent facts” of women’s lives. In research conducted amongst disadvantaged women in Auckland, New Zealand and Grameen Bank micro-finance programme in Bangladesh. The method of self-engagement led to better data when participants (both research and subjects) clearly perceived the purpose of the research, when participants have control over providing personal information, and when subjects can build trust with researchers. One overall lesson of this research is that research data and findings are more generalisaable and valid when the participants in the research process understand the relevancy to his/her disadvantaged position and the causes of this, and when participants perceive that it is an opportunity to voice his/her disadvantages and causes.

The “self-engagement research method” involves a variety of behavioural activities. This paper also attempts to discuss in detail, these activities. This paper attempts to discuss the process of the “self-engagement method” in a systematic way. This has been addressed in the research process, in which research participants and researchers become self-engaged to detect the reality of the impact of micro finance to empower the disadvantaged. The stages of self-engagement procedures were developed and followed throughout field research into entrepreneurial behaviour of disadvantaged women in Auckland.

Research on self-regulation has also tended to emphasize having personal control over an event as the primary determinant of whether individuals can effectively monitor and alter their behaviour to attain a desired end state (W. Britt, 1999, 699).

A suitable research method could identify the empowerment/disempowerment of a disadvantaged group of individuals. The self-engagement procedures create a process, in which research participants and researchers become ‘self-engaged’ and gain insight into facts.

From site to text : Australian Aborigines and the origin of the family

Missions were not simply sites of modernity, they were also the source of key data for the modernist theories of human progress. The idea that so called “primitive peoples” provided a window to the origins of human institutions seemed axiomatic to nineteenth-century theorists of human society who sought evidence for these ideas from settlers, administrators and particularly missionaries. The 1870s and 1880s were the high point of missionary engagement with study-bound anthropologists, as questionnaires and letters were sent from the centres to the edges of empires. Missionary responses, augmented with settler and explorer observations, became the footnotes in early anthropological texts on “primitive” societies. These analyses were then mined for the foundation texts of the other social sciences in the late nineteenth century. Along with many other scholars, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read the anthropology of the period and slotted the findings into their analyses of human society.

Dancing and listening : Odissi across cultures

This paper discusses issues that arose for me when I interviewed an Odissi dancer about her learning this Indian dance form, travelling as she did from Australia to Orissa to spend several months of each year over an 11-year period to live with her guru, the late Sanjukta Panigrahi. The issues I discuss are the problems associated with making a text from a live encounter, and the choice of perspectives used in analysing that text. Drawing on discussions by ethnographers, anthropologists and others about the role of poetics in intercultural research, and on my own dance experience, I reflect on my ‘positioning’ in the various stages of the research. I go on to propose that the live, the temporal and what is remembered in the body are important, potentially poetic modalities of knowledge, which can easily be elided in academically validated ways of thinking and doing.

Defending friends : Robert Codrington, George Sarawia and Edward Wogale

Friendship between nineteenth century missionary anthropologists and their converted cultural mentors was central to the gathering of cultural and linguistic information. This chapter traces the friendship between Anglican missionary/anthropologist, Robert Codrington, and brothers George Sarawia - first Melanesian priest - and Edward Wogale - deacon. Codrington's theological perspective on Melanesians and his close friendships with the pupils of the Melanesian Mission School at Norfolk Island allowed him to resist the increasing racialism of Atlantic science in the late nineteenth century and to challenge the evolutionist anthropology of the 1870s and 1880s. The chapter is based, in part, on a cache of letters from Wogale and Sarawia to Codrington written in Mota, the lingua franca of the Anglican Mission.

Transforming history and myth: on the mutuality and separation of shared narratives in Eastern Tibet

Questioning the distinction between ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ societies, and an implied separation between myth and history, anthropologists have increasingly urged for an understanding of both myth and history as equally valid modes of shared social consciousness. This article takes up this point of view by referring to a written history of Lhagang, a town in Eastern Tibet; a history that appears to have the transformative content and oral circulation of myth. Using Lévi-Strauss’ structural analysis of myth and Santos-Granero's concept of topograms to demonstrate the mythemes that derive from the written history and circulate among Lhagang Tibetans, the article argues that, within the political and cultural context of Lhagang, myth and history shift in and out of indigenous categories even while being categorically distinct.

Knowing Indonesia : intersections of self, discipline and nation

 This is the first book in almost two decades to bring together scholars of Indonesia from the Australian academy in a single volume to reflect on and engage in a deep critique of their field. This is a timely contribution. The importance of Indonesia to Australia has never been more acute and it is essential that we have the tools for interpreting and understanding our nearest neighbour. Investigation of debates within the field of Indonesian studies will help us interpret better the perceptions and politics informing our study. As is befitting the multi-disciplinary nature of Indonesian studies, the book brings together leading political scientists, historians and anthropologists to give their unique perspectives and analysis of this field in the Australian academy and elsewhere in the West. This approach results in some divergent views on the fundamental questions of how Indonesia should be studied and the uses of Indonesia knowledge for activism, and presents new ideas about how we might pursue our work in the future.

Book review: An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia, edited by Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett, xvii + 293 pp, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2008, ISBN 9780855756604 (pbk), $39.95

An Appreciation of Difference: WEHStanner and Aboriginal Australia is a tribute nearly 30 years after his death to one of the lost esteemed anthropologists who worked in Indigenous Australian contexts. It is also a reflection on what Stanner achieved in his lifetime and what his work contributes to current Indigenous issues and Indigenous studies in Australia today.

Book review: Review of 'W. E. H. Stanner, The dreaming and other essays' with an introduction by Robert Manne. Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009. ISBN: 9781863955171, (Pb) 336 pp. $AUD32.95

There is no more imposing figure in the history of Australian anthropology than W.E.H. ('Bill') Stanner (1905-1981). While some of his contemporaries produced more ethnography, none matched his skill and eloquence in describing the life-worlds of Aboriginal people. While others of his age were just as closely involved in arguing for the defensibility of Aboriginal society, none did so with such convincing passion. With these two legacies in mind, anthropologists in the here and now would be hard put to describe Stanner's oeuvre in either/or terms. He is best remembered for his scintillating, sympathetic analyses of Aboriginal myth, ritual and local organisation, together with his trenchant critiques of Durkheim and Freud.

Under western eyes again : rights vernacular and the gender culture 'clash'

Gender features prominently in debates about the clash between human rights and culture, where ‘culture’ is often portrayed as a supreme obstacle to the realisation of women’s rights. Sometimes framed as an ethical conundrum between universalism and cultural relativism, the clash between culture and rights recites one as always and inevitably undercutting the other — culture undermines rights, and the imposition of human rights damages culture. An innovative attempt at recasting this clash has been a focus less on abstract philosophical debates and more on the cultural politics of rights — in particular, how they are made relevant to everyday life. Anthropologists Merry (2006; 2008a) and Levitt and Merry (2009; 2011) propose the analytical and ethnographic study of vernacularisation by demonstrating how, in local contexts, women’s human rights are remade in the vernacular. This approach has yielded rich knowledge about the myriad ways in which expectations of female inferiority and masculine entitlement to violence are contested — not through the import of Western ideas of human rights, but through the local idiom. This article considers the productive contribution of vernacularisation to this contested terrain, while also pointing to the limits that issue from its dependence on distinguishing the global from the local. Today, these two spaces are not so clearly discerned — particularly in multicultural settings where the local and the global are fused, and where human rights are translated into a vernacular of current political anxieties to do with racial and cultural difference. This is a vernacular that disguises or disavows racism through the language of human rights. These themes are illustrated and explored through the case study of a small community event in an outer suburb of Melbourne, where gender, culture and religion play out through both local and international rights vernacular.

Imaging identity: media, memory and portraiture in the digital age

Imaging Identity presents potent reflections on the human condition through the prism of portraiture. Taking digital imaging technologies and the dynamic and precarious dimensions of contemporary identity as critical reference points, these essays consider why portraits continue to have such galvanising appeal and perform fundamental work across so many social settings. This multidisciplinary enquiry brings together artists, art historians, art theorists and anthropologists working with a variety of media. Authors look beyond conventional ideas of the portrait to the wider cultural contexts, governmental practices and intimate experiences that shape relationships between persons and pictures. Their shared purpose centres on a commitment to understanding the power of images to draw people into their worlds. Imaging Identity tracks a fundamental symbiosis — to grapple with the workings of images is to understand something vital of what it is to be human.