ILOS

In northern Middle English and Middle Scots, a verb in the present indicative plural ends in -e (later zero) if the subject is an adjacent personal pronoun; otherwise it ends in -s. This 'northern subject rule' is generally supposed to have become established in early Middle English. Its history is undocumented, but the idea that it arose from contact with Celtic has recently gained ground. The case is here reviewed, and though still far from compelling, is found better than has previously appeared. Regardless of language contact, it is shown that the system evident in the rule is independent of the suffix in -s, and could have arisen very early in Old English. Central to the account are the origins of the reduced inflection, and the loss at syllable boundaries of Old English h (Germanic v).

Este trabajo estudia la imagen del 'otro' mexicano que presentan las cartas escritas por la noruega Maggie Plahte entre 1910 y 1920. Sus cartas fueron 'descubiertas' y editadas dos veces, y dos veces fueron presentadas como 'mirada femenina'. Mi análisis no confirma esta presentación. Más que ser una mirada de género, la representación que Maggie hace del mexicano, y sobre todo del mexicano indígena, resulta ser una mirada de raza y de clase. Concretamente, el contexto histórico de la Revolución Mexicana hace que su imagen más bien romántica del 'indio' se tambalee y que su discurso se racialice. Aparece un indio violento y transgresivo, que desafía la distancia reconfortante que, en otros contextos, permitía una imagen del indígena como niño inocente o como hombre de la naturaleza. El indio revolucionario desafía la zona de confort y la convierte en una zona de peligro, zona de conflicto.
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This paper studies the representation of the Mexican 'other' in the letters written by the Norwegian Maggie Plahte between 1910 and 1920. Her letters were 'discovered' and edited twice, and twice they were presented as a 'female gaze'. My analysis does not confirm this presentation. Rather than a gendered gaze on Mexico, Maggie's representation of Mexicans and of indigenous Mexicans in particular, is class-and race-related. More specifically, the Mexican Revolution shakes her rather romantic image of 'the Indian' and contributes to a racialization of her discourse. A violent and transgressive Indian appears who challenges the comfortable distance that allowed for an image of the indigenous as an innocent child or a man of nature. The revolutionary Indian turns Maggie's comfort zone into a danger zone, a conflict zone.

In September 1907, Norwegian writer and journalist Peter Lykke-Seest embarked on the first voyage of Norway’s state-sponsored transatlantic shipping line. In his accounts on the possibilities for travel, commerce and migration in the Mexican Gulf, published in Norwegian newspapers and then collected in an English-language book (1909), the author inscribed himself into the logic of the Norwegian—and Mexican—elites and translated existing discourses of migration and international business into tangible observations. This essay studies how Lykke-Seest described and envisioned Norwegian emigration to Cuba and Mexico, and relates these depictions to contemporary conceptions of “preferred” and “undesirable” migrants that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. For Lykke-Seest, the Norwegian emigrants in Eastern Cuba represented the bad: they meant failure and poverty, an example not to follow. The colony of ship captains and businessmen in Veracruz were the good: they stood for money, success and the preservation of Norwegian traditions. And in the traveler’s last writings of Mexico, Porfirianism had become the word for the rational, the modern: Norwegian businessmen, trade agents and even farmers should seize the opportunities the country had to offer.

How did a Nazi travel writer end up being an enthusiast of the Mexican Revolution, celebrating
the Indians who had accomplished it? This article studies the travelogues of Norwegian Per
Imerslund (1912–1943). It places Imerslund’s depictions of Mexico and its revolution in the
context of his journeys, his writing and publishing strategies, and the political discourses
circulating in the Europe and Mexico of the 1930s and 1940s. It shows how Imerslund
wrote and rewrote the revolution – an ordinary war in his early writings, an exemplary
struggle of the Indian people in later ones. Revisiting Mexico, Imerslund also revisited his
conception of the country, its history and its inhabitants. The analysis draws on Bakhtin’s
concept of dialogism to suggest a reading that balances a consideration of travel narratives
as products of discourse, on the one hand, and an acceptance of them as expressions of an
evolving and maturing writer, on the other.

This article studies the letters written by Norwegian Maggie Plahte, who lived in Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, it argues that these letters offered Plahte an opportunity to fully explore her professional identity. While she remained to the outside world “the wife of” diplomat Michael Lie, she gradually wrote of herself as his colleague, concerned with her countrymen’s interests in Mexico and offering her own analyses of the political situation in the country. Relating her case to the wider context of the Mexican Revolution and of Norwegian and international diplomacy in the first decades of the twentieth century, the article argues that in Mexico and in writing of Mexico, Plahte identified as a diplomat herself.

This article looks at how Russia places herself in relation to one of her southern neighbours, Georgia, and vice versa. Russia and Georgia have recently been engaged in a short but full-fledged war, hence their interrelationship has been intensely debated in both countries. Both Russia and Georgia are, as it were, poised ‘between East and West’.As a starting point, therefore, we hypothesized that Russians would present themselves as a European nation while they would orientalise the Georgians. Conversely, the Georgians would define themselves into and the Russians out of Europe. We found, however, that identity construction on the Russian-Georgian border is not symmetrical. While the Georigan discourse basically confirmed our assumption, in Russia the dominant discourse is that Russia and Georgia are closely related, fraternal peoples. This shows the importance of power relations in the study of reciprocal identity formations.While hegemonic discourses often are discourses of exclusion our study shows that a discourse of inclusion—in our case a rhetoric of ‘brotherhood’—often may be a more effective technique of domination. The prevailing discourse in the weaker group, on the other hand, will focus more on cultural distance towards the more powerful Other.

Scattered across the globe there exist a handful of unrecognized statelets. Although some such entities have proven short-lived, others have demonstrated remarkable tenacity. The South Caucasian de facto states – Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh – have existed for almost 20 years now. This article offers a comparative analysis of how these statelets have attempted to consolidate statehood though processes of state- and nation-building. Despite many outward similarities, both ambitions and outcomes have varied greatly. Interestingly, whether the ultimate goal has been independent statehood or status is seen only as a springboard for unification with ethnic kin does not seem to be a decisive point.

I 1993 American political scientist Samuel Huntington published his famous article on 'The clash of civilizations?' in which he insisted that the most serious conflicts in the coming era would be between groups that are radically different from each other in terms of language and culture (Huntington 1993). One might say he was rather unfortunate with the timing as the next major conflict, reaching genocidal proportions, took place in Rwanda the next year between two groups that in most respects were extremely similar. The Hutu and the Tutsi are both Christian peoples, speak the same language and had lived intermingled for centuries in the same country. They intermarried and shared the same social and political culture. The main differences between them were body height and their traditional lifestyle and economyagriculture vs. livestock breeding. Based on these differences their colonial masters in the early 20 th century separated them into two distinct ethnic groups. (Gourevitch, 1998: 47-55; Mann, 2005: 432-34) Often it was impossible to tell a Hutu from a Tutsi by their appearance,

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. states rather than a federal state: in the constitution, all the Union republics were granted a right to secede. As a result of this structure, no new borders were drawn on the map when the state collapsed in 1991. Instead, what used to be the internal borders, delineating its constituent parts, were elevated to the status of international boundaries. This invested them with an incomparably greater importance, much more than they had been intended to carry. Many of them had been drawn in a rather casual manner, reflecting compromise solutions between various concerns-the ethnic distribution of the population, historical and cultural differences, economic efficiency and political expediency.

ABSTRACT. The article examines the effects of job competition on ethnic relations within a multinational state. It argues that demographic increase leads to competition for blue-collar jobs while an increase in the number of graduates from higher education leads to competition over elite jobs. In the first case, people risk unemployment, in the second, blocked career opportunities. Mass-level unemployment may lead to anger-driven mass riots, while an intelligentsia will formulate more rational strategies to eliminate threatening competitors from the labour market. One such strategy is to insist that the state ought to be a national state, in which the national elites will be in control. While questions of identity no doubt also may have an enormously mobilising power in times of national resurgence, identity issues are normally intimately intertwined with interest politics. These mechanisms are traced in the history of ethnic mobilisation in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states during and after perestroika.

When the Soviet Union began to unravel in the late 1980s, many observers expected that the 25 million ethnic Russians who lived in the non-Russian republics represented an important group of people who could be mobilized by ‘empire-savers’ to stem this process. Russians who would end up as minorities in new nationalizing states, had little if anything to gain from state disintegration. They were also highly resourceful in terms of education and occupational positions. The sinister role which ethnic Serbs played in Slobodan Milosevic’s schemes to salvage the Yugoslav state boded ill, as did the bloody war waged by France in Algeria in protection of the pied-noirs in the 1950s.As it turned out, the Russians in the non-Russian republics for the most part remained remarkably passive, and this contributed in no small degree to the tranquil transition to a new political map in Eurasia. This article is an attempt to explain this counterintuitive outcome. I revisit a typology of identity trajectories for the Russian diaspora which I developed in the mid-1990s and conclude that its basic insights remain valid. At that time I had argued that Russians outside the RSFSR had already for some time been going through a process of dissociation from the Russian core group. They were adopting some cultural traits from the local population without undergoing any kind of assimilation. While there were important regional varieties as well as generational differences within each Russophone community, as a general rule it could be said that they had developed an identity of their own, or more precisely: one local identity for each republic. In this way Russian ethnic solidarity was weakened and the mobilizational potential of the diaspora issue for political purposes was diminished.Empirical research carried out by myself and others over the last 15 years, including large-scale opinion polls, seem to confirm these assumptions. After the break-up of the unitary state the distance between the identity trajectories of the various Russian-speaking post-Soviet communities have gradually grown wider, for a number of reasons. Those Russians who were least willing or able to adapt to the new political circumstances have in many cases returned to Russia, making it even more important for those who remain to learn the local language and find their cultural-political niche in their country of residence as a national minority.

Leo Tolstoy developed his religious ideas in conscious opposition to the Orthodox faith in which he was raised. Shortly after his spiritual crisis in the late 1870s he embarked upon a criticism of Orthodox dogmatic theology as it was expressed in the Orthodox catechisms in common use at the time. The result was the long and unwieldy tract Investigation of Dogmatic Theology (1879-80), into which he poured his undisguised contempt for the Russian theologians' attempts to systematize the Christian faith. Tolstoy concluded that the teaching of the Russian church, which until a short time before he had tried to follow for a couple of years, in reality was nothing but a lie, indeed a deliberate deception. 1 Orthodox theology as presented in the catechisms consisted of "blasphemy," "pure fantasy," "feverish hallucinations," "conscious lies," and "pitiable and villainous distortions." 2 On the basis of these and similarly devastating statements it is easy to draw the conclusion that Tolstoy's attitude toward the Orthodox faith after the crisis was entirely negative. A closer look, however, reveals that he remained deeply ambivalent: he was both repulsed by and attracted to Orthodoxy at the same time. Thus, for instance, in Confession (1884), an autobiographical book Tolstoy wrote shortly after Investigation, he claimed, rather unexpectedly, that Orthodoxy consists of both truth and falsehood, and he saw it as his task to disentangle the two and to dig out the occasional nuggets of wisdoms from what he called the dung of stale Orthodoxy. 3 Sometimes Tolstoy made a distinction between the teaching and practice of the official Church, which he rejected, and the living faith of uneducated Orthodox Russians, which he admired. In many of the very same books and articles in which Tolstoy denounced the falsity of Orthodox doctrine he also lavished praise on the piety and religious practice which he found among simple Russian believers. On several occasions he returned to the 1 Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90 tomakh (Iubileinoe izdanie) (PSS) (Moscow, 1930-72), 23:63.