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On August 17, 1945, Indonesia proclaimed its independence from Dutch colonial rule. Five years later, the Republic of Indonesia was recognized as a unified, sovereign state. The period in between was a time of aspiration, mobilization, and violence, in which nationalists fought to expel the Dutch while also trying to come to grips with the meaning of \"independence.\" Rifle Reports is an ethnographic history of this extraordinary time as it was experienced on the outskirts of the nation among Karo Batak villagers in the rural highlands of North Sumatra. Based on extensive interviews and conversations with Karo veterans, Rifle Reports interweaves personal and family memories, songs and stories, memoirs and local histories, photographs and monuments, to trace the variously tangled and perhaps incompletely understood ways that Karo women and men contributed to the founding of the Indonesian nation. The routes they followed are divergent, difficult, sometimes wavering, and rarely obvious, but they are clearly marked with the signs of gender. This innovative historical study of nationalism and decolonization is an anthropological exploration of the gendering of wartime experience, as well as an inquiry into the work of storytelling as memory practice and ethnographic genre.

This paper analyzes the Indian English novel The Lowland (2012) by Jhumpa Lahiri and examines its representation of the Naxalbari movement's (1965-1975) gendered history to locate women, their roles, their marginalized position, and the growth of their individual independent identities. The Naxalbari movement is the first major peasant protest within 20 years of Indian independence. (2) Though the first actions of the movement were in a village of North Bengal, this paper mainly concentrates on the movement's activities after it was urbanized and joined by the middle class. It, therefore, tries to locate the position of middle-class women within the movement. In the endeavor to engage with the different narratives regarding the roles of 20 (th) century Bengal middle-class women in the movement, the paper historically views and assesses two contradictory perspectives regarding the involvement of women. While a few narratives stress how the participation of women enabled them to attain a certain degree of emancipation from the confinement of the patriarchal society, my detailed study revealed a counter-narrative that stresses the androcentric underpinning of the movement. Hence, this paper analyzes how Lahiri's novel The Lowland engages with this problematic and contradictory location of women within the Naxalbari movement. Though there have been few studies on the gendered historical narrative of the Naxalbari movement, (3) as discussed briefly in the following sections, its representation has not yet been significantly explored within the scholarly studies of Indian English Literature. I address this gap by analyzing the text through the lens of the movement's gendered historical narratives to foreground the representation of women's experiences in it. Thus, my goal is to analyze women as a subversive force within the movement who represent both the dissenting voice of the Naxalbari movement as well as the critical voice against the gender hierarchy within it.

The matrilineal Yaawo of northern Mozambique are recognized as having had a tradition of female figures of spiritual and political authority, though little is known of their history. This article takes “voice” as its analytical focus to explore how these women feature in the historical memories of the region. Methodologically, it brings together the study of oral traditions and oral history. Focusing on the narratives as “collections of diverse voices” (Barber 1989), I analyze how past voices echo in the narratives and intertwine with the voices of their contemporary narrators and how contemporary narrators engage with the remembered voices of the past. As this article argues, examining the ways that the relationship between the deeper past and the present is performed in oral history can bring us a better understanding of women’s gendered leadership in a more distant past, as well as its changing shape in more recent times.

Is maternal love biologically determined and independent of class and culture, or is it fluid and changeable, shaped by the social context within which individuals find themselves? Recent work on the history of emotions has encouraged us to regard not simply the outward cultural configurations of human emotion as mutable and changeable, but also the actual emotions themselves. Yet so deeply rooted is the Western belief that mothers’ love for their children is natural and innate that scholars have struggled to envisage parental love in the past as differing significantly from that in the present. Looking at working-class mothers in Victorian Britain, this article argues that the very different norms and values surrounding motherhood in this historical context did indeed create a different range of emotional experiences. It also, however, seeks to deepen our understanding of why emotions take the precise forms they do. By shifting focus away from the social elites who form the mainstay of most emotions history, this article offers new insights into the ways in which societies construct and experience their emotional norms.

This article explores how American and European humanitarian workers and organizations treated, and represented, a group of Armenian women who were among those “absorbed” into Turkish, Kurdish, and Bedouin households during the genocide of 1915. Taken into Bedouin households, they were tattooed on their faces and hands, according to Bedouin custom. While the “recuperation” of “absorbed” women and children was a core element of these humanitarian organizations’ postwar programs of Armenian national reconstruction, most relief workers viewed the “recuperation” of the tattooed women as far more “difficult”—if not impossible—because of the physical marks they bore, and what those signified to the relief workers. Using both official and private documentation and a range of visual sources, this article unpacks differing discourses and practices around the “troubled” reclamation of the tattooed women, among a number of humanitarian organizations and their varying constituencies of relief workers. Their differences in response expose the complex shifts in interwar humanitarianism, but further consideration also reveals a deeper commonality: the drive to “classify” the objects of humanitarian aid according to criteria of recuperability, with accompanying practices of inclusion and exclusion in the name of national reconstruction—despite the avowedly “modern” claims of that postwar humanitarianism to be able to “fix” and to “save” all.

“Making a Living” moves the gendered analysis of sex work in an economic direction. Using examples from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Venice, the analysis focuses on the ground-up economics that provided women as well as men with disposable income, economic value, and agency. Based on the firsthand testimonies of ordinary women from throughout Europe summoned before Venice’s moral tribunal of the Executors against Blasphemy, the research illuminates the larger story in world history about the economic potential of the sex trade for household and family and how market demands undermined gender norms and religious traditions. The Bestemmia’s microstories refine our picture of the trade in relation to household composition and alternatives to patriarchal rule. Both individual and corporate behavior on the part of Venice’s sex workers lend themselves to a different interpretive paradigm for prostitution, one that departs from conceptualizations that view the trade in primarily moralistic terms as external to or even opposed to the family unit. In Venice, sex work did not necessarily separate women from the rest of the population. On the contrary, they remained deeply embedded in the city’s social and financial networks as well as family life. This is evidenced by various constituencies within the city responding to plausible economic incentives and thus approaching the sale of sex differently.

DESPITE the substantial and significant body of scholarly work on changing gender relations among African peoples who are (or were) primarily cultivators, the gender relations of predominantly pastoralist peoples have been, with a few notable exceptions, curiously excluded from historical examination. Instead, despite work which has shown the complexities of trying to determine the ‘status’ of East African pastoralist women, pastoralist gender relations seem to exist outside of history and be immune to change. Earlier anthropological studies that addressed pastoral gender relations applied a synchronic model, analyzing them in terms of either the pastoral mode of production or pastoralist ideology. Harold Schneider, for example, contended that among East African pastoralists, men's control of livestock gave them control of women, who were ‘usually thoroughly subordinated to men and thus unable to establish independent identity as a production force’. In his rich ethnography of Matapato Maasai, Paul Spencer claimed that both male and female Maasai believe in ‘the undisputed right of men to own women as “possessions” ’. Marriage, in his view, was therefore ‘the transfer of a woman as a possession from her father who reared her to her husband who rules her’. Melissa Llewelyn-Davies' study of Loita Maasai women in Kenya corroborated Spencer's findings. Loita Maasai women perceived themselves, and were perceived, as ‘property’, to be bought and sold by men with bridewealth. Llewelyn-Davis argued that ‘elder patriarchs’ used their control of property rights in women, children and livestock to control the production and reproduction of both livestock and human beings. Similarly, in his symbolic analysis of pastoral Maasai ideology, John Galaty contended that Maasai men were the ‘real’ pastoralists, while Maasai women were negatively equated with lower status hunters, providing an ideological explanation for their lower status. Thus, whether they attributed their findings to material or ideological sources (or some combination of the two), few anthropologists questioned the ‘undisputed right’ of contemporary male pastoralists ‘to own women as possessions’.

Omwene hango [the owner of the home] is the only person with true authority to discipline children. So, when your husband died, the authority of omwene hango died with him, and you were left alone. HISTORIANS of gender have shown the importance of documenting and scrutinizing instances in which gender terminologies are invoked and employed. A compelling instance can be found in an examination of the widows of Maragoli. In this upland rural area of about two hundred square kilometers in western Kenya, the dynamic relations surrounding widowhood provide a useful opportunity to analyze the construction of feminine and masculine categories, as well as the political strategies that emerged out of these categories. Widows in this rural part of Kenya were certainly subject to the limitations imposed on them by the invocation of strict gender categorization – perhaps at this point in their lives more than any other. And yet, surprisingly, these widows were able to use such categories for their own purposes. By expressing their grief publicly – usually in ways that focused on their social and economic needs – Maragoli widows not only reinforced the importance of gender categories but also sought to redress their grievances through these very categories. What is important, though, is that they consciously presented themselves as ‘poor widows’, as idealized stereotypes of suffering females who were believed to become needy and helpless at the death of their husbands. They told their stories in ways calculated to solicit sympathy. And this usually worked to their advantage since it placed men in the difficult situation of having to defend their ‘ideal’ masculinity. Only by helping guarantee the economic livelihood and social status of bereaved widows could men uphold their own self-image. Thus the relationship between them was informed by a reciprocity that suggests that the widows were more than passive recipients of male charity. By presenting their grief publicly so as to solicit relief for their sufferings, widows were actively able to turn what men saw as stereotypical feminine behaviour – emotionality, helplessness and weakness – into strengths. That is, by consciously attempting to make men feel more ‘manly’, Maragoli widows were able – at least partially – to exploit existing gender roles to get what they needed.

Far from the battlefront, hundreds of thousands of workers toiled in Bohemian factories over the course of World War I, and their lives were inescapably shaped by the conflict. In particular, they faced new and dramatic forms of material hardship that strained social ties and placed in sharp relief the most mundane aspects of daily life, such as when, what, and with whom to eat. This study reconstructs the experience of the Bohemian working class during the Great War through explorations of four basic spheres—food, labor, gender, and protest—that comprise a fascinating case study in early twentieth-century social history.

The fan made a surprising appearance in fine art from the 1860s to the 1920s, from the rise of Japonisme to the establishment of a recognizably twentieth-century form of modern art. The locus for this change in its currency was created by several key trends in this period, aesthetic and social. From Whistler, through the Impressionist circle and thence to the Nabis, male and female artists adopted it as both a motif and a form in their development of a modern aesthetic. At the same time, it became a key form in the repertoire of fin-de-siècle arts, connoting decadence rather than modernity. The fan, previously associated stereotypically with personal adornment and the feminine and thus carrying ephemeral cultural status, became prominent in the design and fine art fields as their borders dissolved and as the territories of gender became mobile in the development of a modernity orchestrated by consumerism. This trend links cultural activities in Britain, France and their colonies, such as Australia.