[Review of] Virginia Huffer, The Sweetness of the Fig: Aboriginal Women in Transition

During 1970 and 1973, University of Maryland professor of psychiatry Virginia Huffer spent some time with the women of the Lardil and Kaiadilt tribes who live on Mornington Island in northern Australia\u27s Gulf of Carpenteria [Carpentaria]. Forced to accommodate increasingly to Western ways, these women struggle to maintain traditional linkages while they undergo modern change. This conflict between the past and the future, as well as the everyday realities of their existence, are presented through Huffer\u27s psychobiographical lens, primarily through the intervention and words of her chief informant, Elsie Roughsey, a cooperative, friendly, generous, and intelligent Lardil woman who is, in aboriginal terms, a good yarner. Elsie\u27s tribal name-Labbarnor- sweetness of the fig -gives the book its title. The work is essentially Elsie\u27s statements mixed with descriptive and analytical observations by the author and short treatments of interviews with nine older Lardil women, seven younger (teens through twenties) Lardil women, and seven Kaiadilt women

[Review of] Donald B. Smith. Long Lance: The True Story of an Impostor

In the 1920s, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, reputedly a Blood (or Blackfoot) Indian, was the talk of New York City. A graduate of Carlisle Indian School, a cadet at West Point, a war hero, and a sparring mate for Jack Dempsey, Long Lance was the American Indian made good. He was a journalist of some renown, an eloquent speaker, and a self ordained spokesman for the Indians of America. Before the decade was finished he had written a highly popular autobiography of his life on the Canadian Plains, actually chased off wolves and speared a moose for his role as an Ojibwa warrior in a silent movie, and attended New York social functions regularly, sometimes in buckskin, sometimes in full dress tuxedo. He was the authentic Indian hero come to the metropolis. Or was he? As the Great Depression hit full force, various investigations revealed that Long Lance was living a lie. Instead of being a chief of the Blood, he was, in fact, Sylvester Long, originally of Winston, North Carolina. Rumors that he was half-black circulated, with the inevitable result that friends spurned him and he plunged into near-obscurity. Despondent, abusive, drunken, suicidal, and broke, Long Lance finally blew his brains out at his patroness\u27 home in 1 932. He was only forty-two years of age

Between Duty and Romance: The Attraction of Sounding “Black” in Paris

The histories of Black Americans who significantly influenced French life and culture in Paris are hardly marked or visible across the most frequented tourist destinations or within state-sponsored museums dedicated to national history. Instead, certain tourist-oriented live performances constitute audible monuments to Black soldiers and musicians. Audible monuments are sound objects constructed through live orature, collective participation, or sound-producing movements that recall history and memory for the purpose of witness engagement or tourist consumption. Toward a critical analysis grounded in performance studies theory this essay first replays and reinterprets the music and military histories shared between African-descended US soldiers and the nation of France as a gendered and misaligned romance, and then suggests how performance events like the tours of “Black Paris” can rehearse that romance and then rupture it by a contemporary African presence.

Serial murder as allegory : a subconscious echo of unresolved childhood trauma

This thesis explores the notion that we may be able to more fully understand the etiology of serial murder. Specifically, it concludes that the behaviours of serial murderers can be allegorical of unresolved childhood trauma - that in the murderous actions of the adult there can be a depth of subconscious allegorical connection to the repressed (forgotten) and unresolved trauma of the murderer's own childhood. The focus for this hermeneutic inquiry is the intersection that can be constructed between the phenomenon of serial murder and the assertion of the psychoanalyst Alice Miller that every perpetrator of violence was once a child who was (himself or herself) a victim. Alice Miller's concept of Poisonous Pedagogy is explained and critiqued. Her belief that our childhoods tell the stories of our adult behaviours is questioned in light of the similar theoretical ground of Life History, Life Narrative, Psychobiography, and Psychoanalytic Narrative. Miller's contention that there are directly allegorical connections between childhood abuse and adult murderous behaviours is illustrated by her analysis of the life of Jurgen Bartsch. A hermeneutic examination of the biographic records of two other serial murderers (Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy) is then undertaken to question the available support for Miller's contentions It is concluded that there is strong support for Miller's assertions regarding the etiology of violence, and that violent adult behaviour, even serial murder, can be allegorical of unresolved childhood trauma. It is suggested that there is a need to extend this area of research through face-to-face engagement with perpetrators of violence. It is recommended that we directly engage serial murderers in personal discourses that will allow further exploration of Miller's notion that serial murderers' behaviours are allegorical echoes of harm that was done to them

The High Time Resolution Spectral Evolution of Gamma-Ray Bursts

Previous studies of the evolution of gamma-ray burst spectra have generally relied on fitting sequences of spectra. These studies usually were confined to bright bursts and often lacked sufficient temporal resolution. We have developed techniques which sacrifice spectral resolution for temporal resolution. First, the crosscorrelations between intensity lightcurves in different energy bands allow for the classification of the spectral evolution of a large burst sample. Second, the energy correlation of pairs of counts places limits on short-duration, narrowband emission.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, AIPPROC LaTeX, to appear in "Gamma-Ray Bursts, 4th Huntsville Symposium," eds. C. Meegan, R. Preece and T. Koshu