‘A Beautiful Fiction of Law’: Rhetorical Engagements with<i>Terra Nullius</i>in the British Periodical Press in the 1840s

Dolin, Kieran

doi:10.1080/13555502.2013.857860

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In an era when even 'benevolent' colonial ideologies remained innately expansionist (King 2015), it suited the projects of Empire to classify forager societies as residuals of humanity's primordial state (Gordon 1992). Emerging 'scientific' formulations of race (Coombes 1994, 9) assessed these societies to fall short of the 'criteria of humanity' (Hitchcock 2015, 263), minimizing their legal and philosophical status (Dolin 2013) and justifying their exclusion from moral injunctions on violence and killing. The destruction that followed is a matter of record (Adhikari 2010;Anthing 1863;Gordon & Douglas 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in San Forager Theories of Disease, and Its Implications for Understanding Images of Conflict in Southern African Rock Art

Skinner¹,

Challis²

2023

CAJ

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San forager populations in nineteenth-century southern Africa were forced to adapt to greatly destructive aspects of the colonial project. Forging new societies from heterogeneous sources, they engaged in prolonged armed insurgency, recording their exploits, presence and beliefs in the rock-art archive of the Maloti-Drakensberg. These images reference conflict and trauma, conventionally interpreted as visions of spiritual warfare. However, viewed through the lens of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), deeper dimensions emerge. PTSD is the culturally subjective experience of generalizable neuropathologies which develop following a traumatic event. Diagnosable in diverse communities worldwide, it nonetheless requires insider idioms to understand its local expressions. We explore how PTSD manifested in this historic and cultural context; how its symptomatic social dysfunctions would have been understood in forager aetiology, and how its intrusive flashbacks would have intruded on altered-state experiences induced to heal the consequences of violence. We find that the artists were not passive victims of trauma, but rather used art symbolically to reconsolidate individual and collective understandings of traumatic events.

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