scholarly journals Faiva: Trials of Skill: the Song and Dance of Tongan Politics, 1773-1993

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Wendy Rona Pond
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martial Arts ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Rivalry

<p>The work embarks on a quest to discover the parameters of faiva, the dances, martial arts, aquatic and land-based sports which are exhibited on Tongan festival grounds as trials of skill. The work is organised as a succession of festivals (katoanga), shows, receptions, night concerts, funerals, and regattas spanning 200 years, from the 1770s to the 1970s. The work employs a strategy of Juxtaposing ethnographic and historical evidence. This technique enriches historical records with an ethnographic reading, and allows historical insight into the choreographic and aesthetic conventions of Tongan performances. It indicates which accounts to trust and what sense to impute to fragments. Contest on the festival ground, contest in twentieth century social status rivalry, and contest in eighteenth century political challenge, all follow the same codes. The work proposes a new paradigm for interpreting Tonga's political history. That paradigm is faiva. The work proposes a critical theory for reading Tongan records. Tongan accounts are not intended to recount historical origins, but to validate new configurations. In politics, history, and faiva, the eighteenth century objective was to harness the realm of the sacred. Part I is an ethnographic description of villagers rehearsing a dance in 1971, torn between reluctance to fulfill feudal obligations to the ruling aristocracy, and the appeal of retaining a reputation as the island's leading dancers. Of all tasks, presentation of a faiva was given priority. Part II is a historical reconstruction of the repertoire of the late eighteenth century. Here each faiva is seen exhibited in its lakanga : appropriate occasion. Martial arts and implement dances accompanied presentations between chiefs contesting for power. Mock battles followed presentations to the gods. Night dances were lit by torchlight. High-ranking women processed at the weddings of sacred chiefs. Appropriate settings enhanced the peculiar aesthetic of each faiva; political and religious agendas added force to performances. Part III describes the process of a new repertoire emerging, and the social fabrication of its legitimacy. The Appendix assembles an eighteenth century repertoire of choreographies and song texts, demonstrating that records exist for the scholarship of early Tongan music and dance.</p>

scholarly journals Faiva: Trials of Skill: the Song and Dance of Tongan Politics, 1773-1993

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Wendy Rona Pond
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martial Arts ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Rivalry

<p>The work embarks on a quest to discover the parameters of faiva, the dances, martial arts, aquatic and land-based sports which are exhibited on Tongan festival grounds as trials of skill. The work is organised as a succession of festivals (katoanga), shows, receptions, night concerts, funerals, and regattas spanning 200 years, from the 1770s to the 1970s. The work employs a strategy of Juxtaposing ethnographic and historical evidence. This technique enriches historical records with an ethnographic reading, and allows historical insight into the choreographic and aesthetic conventions of Tongan performances. It indicates which accounts to trust and what sense to impute to fragments. Contest on the festival ground, contest in twentieth century social status rivalry, and contest in eighteenth century political challenge, all follow the same codes. The work proposes a new paradigm for interpreting Tonga's political history. That paradigm is faiva. The work proposes a critical theory for reading Tongan records. Tongan accounts are not intended to recount historical origins, but to validate new configurations. In politics, history, and faiva, the eighteenth century objective was to harness the realm of the sacred. Part I is an ethnographic description of villagers rehearsing a dance in 1971, torn between reluctance to fulfill feudal obligations to the ruling aristocracy, and the appeal of retaining a reputation as the island's leading dancers. Of all tasks, presentation of a faiva was given priority. Part II is a historical reconstruction of the repertoire of the late eighteenth century. Here each faiva is seen exhibited in its lakanga : appropriate occasion. Martial arts and implement dances accompanied presentations between chiefs contesting for power. Mock battles followed presentations to the gods. Night dances were lit by torchlight. High-ranking women processed at the weddings of sacred chiefs. Appropriate settings enhanced the peculiar aesthetic of each faiva; political and religious agendas added force to performances. Part III describes the process of a new repertoire emerging, and the social fabrication of its legitimacy. The Appendix assembles an eighteenth century repertoire of choreographies and song texts, demonstrating that records exist for the scholarship of early Tongan music and dance.</p>

scholarly journals Private Lives, Public Histories: The Diary in Twentieth-Century Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Moran
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Private Citizens ◽  
Mass Circulation ◽  
Public Archives ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThis article examines the growth of interest in diary keeping in twentieth-century Britain. It explores how diary keeping by private citizens was encouraged in the first part of the century by mass-circulation newspapers, diary manufacturers, diary anthologists like Arthur Ponsonby, and the social research organization Mass Observation in response to changing notions of the self, privacy, and daily life. It discusses the ways in which, in the context of a growing interest in public archives, these private diaries have more recently been imagined as compelling forms of historical evidence, as well as some of the problems of organization and interpretation that these kinds of texts present. I argue that the inherently opaque and incomplete nature of private diaries means that they can add nuance to our understanding of the recent past and offer insight into the randomness and singularity of everyday experience as it is being lived.

The Gender of Subscribers to Eighteenth-Century Music Publications

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 94-152
Author(s):  
Simon D. I. Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Musical Interests ◽  
Insight Into

One of the most important and valuable resources available to researchers of eighteenth-century social history are the lists of subscribers that were attached to a wide variety of publications. Yet, the study of this type of resource remains one of the areas most neglected by academics. These lists shed considerable light on the nature of those who subscribed to music, including their social status, place of employment, residence, and musical interests. They naturally also provide details as to the gender of individual subscribers.As expected, subscribers to most musical publications were male, but the situation changed considerably as the century progressed, with more females subscribing to the latest works by the early nineteenth century. There was also a marked difference in the proportion of male and female subscribers between works issued in the capital cities of London and Edinburgh and those written for different genres. Female subscribers also appear on lists to works that they would not ordinarily be permitted to play. Ultimately, a broad analysis of a large number of subscription lists not only provides a greater insight into the social and economic changes that took place in Britain over the course of the eighteenth century, but also reveals the types of music that were favoured by the members of each gender.

Exhuming the Nahualli: Shapeshifting, Idolatry, and Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico

2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-228
Author(s):  
Anderson Hagler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
At Will

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between ritual specialists, nanahualtin or nahualistas (pl.) and nahualli or nahual (sing.), and healing practices, adding context to the social roles they fulfilled and the range of feats they performed. The cases examined here reveal that nanahualtin operated as intellectuals in their communities because of their ability to control animals, prognosticate, and heal or harm individuals at will. Some nanahualtin shapeshifted from humans to animals while others possessed animal companions. The elevated status of nanahualtin led commoners to seek their advice, which conflicted with the established orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. Because clergymen championed the sacraments as the best way to access the divine, non-orthodox rituals performed in mountains, rivers, and caves were derided as idolatrous devil worship.The 11 criminal and Mexican Inquisition cases examined here range from 1599 to 1801. Two seventeenth-century cases (1678 and 1685) and one eighteenth-century case (1701) contain Nahuatl phrases and testimonies from Chiapas and Tlaxcala, respectively. The cases from Chiapas demonstrate the use of Nahuatl as a vehicular language outside the central valley of Mexico. This article examines the gender of the animals into which ritual specialists transformed as an emergent category from trial records, which provides insight into Catholic officials’ understanding of the nahualli. Last, this study notes social divisions between rural and urban clergy regarding the power of nanahualtin and the efficacy of their magic.

The Shoemakers’ Riot and the Limits of Popular Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 256-290
Author(s):  
Abhishek Kaicker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Urban Crisis ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Economic Conflict ◽  
The City ◽  
Insight Into

In 1729, a minor clash between a group of Muslim shoemakers and a Hindu jeweler in the streets of the city spiraled into an extraordinary urban tumult that led to fierce fighting and much bloodshed in the courtyard of the city’s congregational mosque. Offering a detailed study of the shoemakers’ riot, as the event came to be known, this chapter explores the possibilities—and the limits—of everyday popular politics in the Delhi of the early eighteenth century. Despite their artifactual nature, accounts of the riot offer invaluable insight into the actions and intentions of the city’s lowest inhabitants at a moment of urban crisis, and the goal of the historical reconstruction in this chapter will be to illuminate the tangled happenings of March 1729, while still preserving the multiplicity of meanings assigned to them. The shoemakers’ agitation cannot be neatly subsumed into the standard categories of economic conflict or sectarian hatred that have given us the conventional understanding of the period. Instead of closing the meanings of the event in narratives of “larger significance,” this chapter attempts to behold the city of the eighteenth century from the eyes of the shoemaker.

John Marsh and Provincial Music Making in Eighteenth-Century England

1996 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 96-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Robins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Present Writer ◽  
Valuable Source ◽  
The Past ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Importance ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Huntington Library

During the past few years the extensive manuscript journals of the Georgian amateur composer and musician John Marsh (1752–1828) have become increasingly recognised as valuable source material which provide a unique insight into provincial musical making in the southern counties of England. For long known only in the heavily abridged (by Marsh's youngest son Edward Garrard) and incomplete version in the Pendlebury Library, Cambridge, the emergence of the original version in 1990 has brought about a substantial re-evaluation of Marsh's career and personality. Subsequently sold at Christie's in December of that year, the original is now housed in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The complex history and a description of the journals and their contents can be found in an article by the present writer in the Huntington Library Quarterly, an issue which also includes an article on the social importance of the journals by William Weber. My purpose here is to provide an introduction to Marsh's experiences as a concert manager and leader in the cities in which he was resident.

Forgotten Women

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Slave Owner ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Female Slave ◽  
Insight Into

Women have remained virtually invisible in the historiography of slavery and absenteeism. However, there were a significant number of female absentees who managed their vast West Indian estates -and those enslaved upon them-from metropolitan Britain. This chapter examines the correspondence of one such slave-owner. Anna Eliza Elletson was a London-based absentee who was heavily involved with the transatlantic management of Hope estate, her Jamaican plantation. The correspondence she sent to her Jamaican attorneys contains detailed discussions of the practicalities of running her estate and provides a unique insight into the mindset of a late eighteenth-century female slave-owner. In analysing the attitudes and behaviour of this particular woman this chapter investigates the extent to which she variously reinforced, subverted and challenged the social mores and gendered assumptions of late eighteenth-century Britain.

Implementing Innovative Social Investment

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Investment Policies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Productive Potential ◽  
Original Insight ◽  
Insight Into

The turn towards a ‘Social Investment’ approach to welfare implies deploying resources to enhance human capital and mobilise the productive potential of citizens, starting in early childhood. Many influential academic and policy advocates present it as a new paradigm for the 21st Century. The book is structured in three parts around the social investment themes of: interventions in early life, labour market activation, and social solidarity. Empirical chapters offer original evidence from ten European countries: Italy, UK, Sweden, Finland,Greece, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Spain. Each of these chapters uncovers regional and local realities of social investment policies and services. Editorial chapters overview the conceptual landscape and synthesise key advances in thinking about the social investment 'paradigm', informed by original insight into what implementation of its principles can look like at street level.

Exposed and Concealed Sexuality: Virgin Records in the Eighteenth-Century Ashkenazi Protocols of Amsterdam

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-273
Author(s):  
Tsila Rädecker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Community Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Financial Interests ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Jewish Families

Abstract This article analyses the documentation of the accidental loss of virginity in the eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Community records of Amsterdam. By revealing the interplay between theology and Jewish Community life, various aspects, such as the economization and the institutionalization of virginity, come to the fore. Furthermore, the virgin records show that conflicting notions of physical and spiritual virginity were decontextualized and used to serve the community’s purposes. In short, documentation of virginity, although based on a rich rabbinic tradition, gives insight into the readaption and creation of theological concepts to accommodate the social and financial interests of Jewish families, especially the mercantile elites.

CONSTRUCTING A JACOBITE: THE SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF GEORGE LOCKHART OF CARNWATH

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 977-996 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL SZECHI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Insight Into

George Lockhart of Carnwath is best known for his bitter denunciation of the Anglo-Scottish Union in his Memoirs, concerning the affairs of Scotland, first published in 1714. There Lockhart appears as a wholly Jacobite narrator and moralist, passionately inveighing against the iniquity of his peers. Yet we know that his background was not cut from the same cloth as that of his more stereotypical Jacobite contemporaries. Not for him the brooding presence of a Cavalier ancestor ‘martyred’ while fighting alongside Montrose or ancient traditions of loyalty to the Stuarts. Rather, like many Scotsmen after him, he was converted to Jacobitism in the course of the political crisis gripping early eighteenth-century Scotland. From the point of view of the historian studying the dynamics of political commitment the fact that Lockhart falls into this category is a godsend. Uniquely among his Jacobite peers, in the Memoirs and in his many surviving letters, as well as the correspondence and accounts of affairs penned by contemporaries, Lockhart has left the historian a substantial amount of evidence to work on. This article will explore the social and intellectual background to George Lockhart's adherence to the Stuart cause, focusing in particular on the interplay of social forces that shaped his childhood and teenage years, before going on to trace the key features of his understanding of politics and society. Lockhart was not a natural convert to Jacobitism, and the fact that he and many like him moved in that direction merits close analysis. By better understanding why a man like Lockhart embraced the exiled Stuarts we can gain a more general insight into the revival of the Jacobite cause in Scotland in the early eighteenth century.

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