South Africa and Japan: Between domestic reform and global reach

Beset by shifting public opinion and a rising chorus of calls for early withdrawal, the US president has outlined a plan for successfully completing his administration's project in Iraq. But victory means something very different for the US than it does for Iraqis themselves, and defining the agenda on Washington's terms risks prospects for lasting stability.     

Voices on Paper: Multimodal Texts and Indigenous Literacy in Brazil

This paper focuses on the recent production of multimodal writing in an indigenous community in Brazil, resulting from the equally recent introduction of literacy. Seeing this form of writing as part of the process of intercultural semiosis and cultural translation, the paper discusses how concepts of local indigenous oral culture and received wisdom interact with the Western concept of writing as the ‘record’ or ‘representation’ of speech, bringing to writing the indigenous notion of cultural ‘enactment’ or ‘performativity’. In an effort to overcome a view of alphabetic writing as semantically only propositional, mimetic and decontextualized, the Kashinawa´ community, by adding visual components to alphabetic texts, appear to transform writing into contextualized performative ‘poiesis’, which simul taneously inaugurates a complex process of semiosis inseparable and only comprehensible from their local cultural perspective.     

Social change and social conflict in nineteenth‐century England: The use of the open‐closed village model

Following earlier articles on social change and conflict in rural England 1780–1850, we assert the relevance of the open‐closed model of social structure, particularly to the study of Burwash by Wells [1981]. This paper demonstrates that no parish was insulated from economic and other influences exerted in and by neighbouring parishes. More especially, although open parishes challenged the upper Establishment, they were not devoid of internal strife, since different interests were not subject to the overriding influence of the large landowners who dominated the populations of closed parishes.     

Peasants and conflict in nineteenth‐century rural England: A comment on recent articles

This note replies to two previous contributions by Mick Reed in the Journal of Peasant Studies. The author agrees with Reed on the importance of family labour to the peasantry. While recognising that subsistence was significant, he cannot, however, agree that peasants stood outside the capitalist economy, since they depended on the market for the bulk of their living. However, within the capitalist economy the distinction between the peasant and estate systems is important, making attention to the open‐closed model a necessary part of studies such as those of Roger Wells and Mick Reed. In this context, the author asserts a more limited role for the concept of ‘conflict’, by distinguishing it from ‘friction’.