Health, Discipline and Appropriate Behaviour: the Body of the Soldier and Space of the Cantonment

2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 815-856 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERICA WALD

AbstractAnxiety about the intemperance and misbehaviour of the European soldiery in nineteenth century India prompted a raft of regulations which not only imposed a punitive regime on those living and working in and around the cantonments, but prompted an extension of military space. This paper specifically examines the methods and levels of control—both of which existed and were attempted in and around the cantonment. These ranged from regulations enacted to order the physical space of the cantonment, to calls for a more direct control over the bodies of the soldiers themselves as well as the numerous others who occupied the land. Crucially for this argument, moral and medical concerns were of critical importance in moulding this ordering. However, as this paper argues, social and class perceptions of the men—and the fear of provoking their wrath—dictated what officers and officials felt was legally possible. The various ways in which the military and government imposed order on the cantonment (or attempted to do so) had serious implications for the shaping of the empire itself and European understanding of its inhabitants.

The Forum ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-709
Author(s):  
Daniel Schlozman ◽  
Sam Rosenfeld

Abstract This article pursues a developmental understanding of American parties as autonomous and thick collective actors through a comparison of four key historical actors we term “prophets of party”: partisans of the nineteenth-century Party Period; Progressive reformers; mid-twentieth century liberal Democrats; and activists in and around the body popularly known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission. Leading theories portray political parties as the vehicles either of ambitious politicians or of groups eager to extract benefits from the state. Yet such analyses leave underdetermined the path from such actors’ desires for power to the parties’ wielding of it. That path is mediated by partisan forms and practices that have varied widely across institutional and cultural context. As parties search for electoral majority, they do so in the long shadow of ideas and practices, layered and accreted across time, concerning the role of parties in political life. We analyze four such prophesies, trace their layered contributions to their successors, and reflect on their legacy for contemporary party politics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Grimell ◽  
Mariecke van den Berg

In this article, we explore the process of transitions from a military life to a civilian life. Making use of the concepts offered by Dialogical Self Theory, we explore how individuals negotiate the acquisition of new, civilian identities by integrating different, sometimes conflicting, cultural I-positions. Moreover, in this article, we explore how this narrative process is reflected through embodied processes of becoming civilian. We do so by presenting an in-depth analysis of two case studies: that of former Lieutenant Peter, who fully transitions to civilian life, and of Sergeant Emma, who opts for a hybrid outcome, combining a civilian job with working as an instructor in the military. We will argue that the narrative and embodied process of transition are intertwined in self-identity work, and that attention to the specifics of this entanglement can be useful for professionals who counsel military personnel who transition to civilian life.


1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (03) ◽  
pp. 92-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Neumann ◽  
H. Baas ◽  
R. Hefner ◽  
G. Hör

The symptoms of Parkinson’s disease often begin on one side of the body and continue to do so as the disease progresses. First SPECT results in 4 patients with hemiparkinsonism using 99mTc-HMPAO as perfusion marker are reported. Three patients exhibited reduced tracer uptake in the contralateral basal ganglia One patient who was under therapy for 1 year, showed a different perfusion pattern with reduced uptake in both basal ganglia. These results might indicate reduced perfusion secondary to reduced striatal neuronal activity.


Author(s):  
David G. Morgan-Owen

Historians have argued that the British Army was afflicted with an insular focus on home defence in the late nineteenth century and that this preoccupation was evidence of the paucity of military strategic thought and the lack of co-operation and dialogue between the two services. This chapter challenges that viewpoint and argues that the military leadership was, in fact, consistently much more interested in preparing for operations overseas than it was in planning to prevent an invasion. The military authorities were only deflected from this aim by differences of opinion with the Admiralty on the application of naval power and on the Navy’s inability to commit to the safe passage of troops by sea, disagreements which obliged the War Office to limit the scope of its strategic discourse. This had significant implications for both military and imperial policy, particularly the defence of India.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095715582110259
Author(s):  
Caroline D. Laurent

In recent Franco-Vietnamese literature written by descendants of immigrants, the liminality of exile is portrayed in all its complexity through migrant bodies – that of parents’ bodies – and through political and social bodies – linked to History and the Việt Kiều’s positionality in French society. The experience of external movement becomes an internal one, creating porosity between the outside and the body, self and others, places and times. This article argues that, in Minh Tran Huy’s Voyageur malgré lui and Doan Bui’s Le Silence de mon père, by representing their family’s migration, both authors present the silenced histories of the Vietnamese community in France. In order to do so, Tran Huy and Bui first focus on uncovering and writing the stories of their silent fathers: through their embodiment of exilic history, the fathers transmit the wound of their immigrant condition to their daughters. Consequently, daughters come to manifest similar bodily expressions of traumas they have not experienced and know little about. The fathers’ histories are eventually voiced and re-invested by the second generation. This shows how the unearthing of their fathers’ life stories is also about reappropriating a dual identity as well as making Asian diasporic perspectives and histories visible, notably to create new avenues of representation for French individuals of Asian descent.


1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.


2002 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER R. SEIDL

The use of products extracted from plants for medicinal purposes can be traced to the beginnings of civilization and up until the end of the nineteenth century natural products were the principal source of medicines. Since then their relative importance has oscillated according to the strategies of large pharmaceutical companies. Now that these strategies are changing, there are new opportunities for countries like Brazil, in which a large proportion of the world's biodiversity is located. There are, however, new circumstances that must be taken into consideration: material must be collected by groups which are formally authorized to do so and under the conditions of the Convention of Biological Diversity, the discovery process is being successively outsourced to smaller specialized firms and there is a growing integration with producers of cosmetics and phytomedicines.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Viz Quadrat

AbstractIn 2011, twenty-six years after the end of the military dictatorship, the Brazilian government took the initiative of implementing the right to memory and to the truth, as well as promoting national reconciliation. A National Truth Commission was created aiming at examining and shedding light on serious human rights violations practiced by government agents from 1946 to 1985. It worked across the entire national territory for almost three years and established partnerships with governments of other countries in order to investigate and expose the international networks created by dictatorships for monitoring and persecuting political opponents across borders. This article analyzes the relationship between historians and the National Truth Commission in Brazil, in addition to the construction of dictatorship public history in the country. In order to do so, the Commission’s relationship with the national community of historians, the works carried out, as well as historians’ reactions towards its works, from its creation until its final report in 2014, will be examined.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-22
Author(s):  
Lara Langer Cohen

Abstract This article considers Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave as an unexpected site for nineteenth-century theorizations of racialized Blackness. Mammoth Cave became a major tourist attraction in the 1840s, generating a host of guidebooks, travel accounts, magazine illustrations, panoramas, newspaper articles, and fiction. Crucial to its fame was the fact that the guides who led visitors through the cave were enslaved men. This article argues that white writers responded to the guides’ knowledge of the cave by reframing it as affinity. In doing so, they transformed Mammoth Cave’s subterranean darkness into a manifestation of racialized Blackness. But the writers’ racialization of Mammoth Cave also had a tendency to slip out of their control. As they associated its spatial darkness with racialized Blackness, the literal underground of Mammoth Cave flickered into an underground that was more than literal—a mysterious Black formation, of unguessed dimensions and certain danger, beneath the world as they knew it. Finally, the article asks what we can glean from the literature of Mammoth Cave about the body of Black thought it sought to disavow: the alternative relations between race and the underground that the guides theorized through their own subterranean explorations.


2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 195-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Sazima ◽  
Cristina Sazima

Several bird species feed on a variety of external parasites and epibionts, organic debris, dead and wounded tissue, clots and blood, and secretions from the body of other vertebrates (hosts or clients). We present an overview of so called cleaner birds from the Neotropics based on field records, literature, and photo survey. We found that 33 bird species in 16 families practice cleaning even if some of them do so very occasionally. The birds range from the Galápagos ground finch Geospiza fuliginosa to the widespread black vulture Coragyps atratus. Clients mostly are large herbivores such as capybaras, deer, and livestock, but also include medium-sized herbivores such as iguanas and tortoises, and carnivores such as boobies and seals - a few bird species associate with these latter marine mammals. No carnivorous terrestrial mammal client is recorded to date except for a domestic dog, from whose hair black vultures picked organic debris. Some clients adopt particular inviting postures while being cleaned, whereas others are indifferent or even disturbed by the activity of cleaner birds. Capybaras, giant tortoises, and iguanas are among the inviting clients, whereas boobies try to dislodge the 'vampire' finch Geospiza difficilis. Most of the Neotropical cleaner birds may be lumped in one broad category (omnivores that dwell in open areas and associate with large to medium-sized herbivores). A second, restricted category accommodates some species from Patagonia and the Galápagos Islands (omnivores that dwell in open areas and associate with carnivorous marine mammals, or seabirds and marine reptiles). Two still more restricted categories accommodate the following: 1) forest-dwelling cleaner birds; and 2) marine coastal cleaners. Additional records of Neotropical cleaner birds will mostly fall in the broad category.


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