The solitary position of nurses who practise in geographically isolated communities to provide direct health care to a predominantly Aboriginal population characterises nursing in remote areas. Munoz & Mann (1982) described this practice as unique. The uniqueness of this practice, however, has remained shrouded in superficial descriptions featuring service delivery at a one or two-nurse-post, the physical distance of nursing posts from hospital facilities and the autonomy with which nursing is performed. Only glimpses of the reality of nursing practice in a remote area have been revealed through the study of the educational needs of remote area nurses (Munoz & Mann 1982, Cameron-Traub 1987, Philp 1988, Kreger 1991a, Bell, Chang & Daly 1995). A key problem is the lack of a systematic description and detailed analysis of nursing as it is practised in a remote area.The purpose of this study was to explore, describe and analyse nursing practice in a remote area. The research was undertaken at Warburton, an isolated community mainly inhabited by the Ngaanyatjarra people in the Central Desert of Western Australia. An ethnographic design was chosen for this exploratory inquiry into the social and cultural pattern of everyday nursing practice. In a pre-entry study a suitable setting and informants were found. Fieldwork was conducted at the Warburton nursing post by the researcher and involved living on site for a year. Data gathering techniques were participant observation together with interviewing, collection of pertinent documents and the daily chronological recording of fieldnotes, memos and a personal journal. Data analysis was performed concurrently with data gathering. The process followed the Developmental Research Sequence Method by Spradley (1980). Through a cyclical process of data collection and analysis the domains, taxonomies and componential variables in the ++ / culture of remote area nursing practice emerged.Amorphous practice was the overall theme revealed in the underlying cultural patterns that shaped the practice of nursing in the remote area. The term amorphous practice is defined as the changeable nature of practice from nurse to nurse, from situation to situation, from time to time. This was observed in the recurrent differences between nurses in their knowledge, abilities and attitudes as well as in the variability between nurses in their management of client care. Contributors to the phenomenon of amorphous practice were found in three distinct, but inter-related, tributary themes termed detachment, diffusion and beyond the nursing domain. Detachment explained the nurses' feelings of separateness from the usual professional and organisational structures needed for the enactment of nursing. Diffusion encapsulated the broad spread of the nurses' role in remote area practice. Beyond the nursing domain described an unregulated practice considered to be outside the responsibilities of nursing care. The substantive theory of amorphous practice provided a detailed description of how nursing was practised in the remote area. It also explained why it was so different from nursing as it is generally understood by the profession.

The subject of this thesis is the by now traditional grouping of certain innovative works of historiography produced in eighteenth-century Britain and France; namely the historical works of Voltaire, and the historical writings of the philosophes; and, in Britain, the histories of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. This thesis gives a historical and expository analysis of the individual strategies of literary self-fashioning and generic appropriation which underlie this impression of resemblance. It particularly demonstrates that the major characteristics of the contemporary vision of philosophic historiography – the idea of a European history of manners or l’esprit humain, and the insistence on the rejection of the practices of the érudits – which have become incorporated within scholarly definitions of ‘Enlightenment historiography’, are well-established generic tropes, adapted and affected in France as in Britain, by authors of diverse ambitions. The invitation to assume inauthentic connections contained within the practice of philosophic historiography is shown to be embraced by Gibbon, in a notable literary challenge to the paradigms of intellectual history. This study contrasts the textual evidence of these authors’ experience of literary, personal, and political challenges regarding the definition of their role as public, intellectual writers, to the acquired image of an ideal of ‘Enlightenment writing’. It considers the Frenchness of philosophie, and the potential Britishness of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. As part of its wider analysis of the practice of intellectual writing with a historical focus, its scope includes the writings of British clerics and writers on religion; of French academicians; and of the late philosophe Volney, and Shelley his interpreter. The major conclusion of this thesis is that eighteenth-century British and French history writing does not support any synthesis of an Enlightenment historical philosophy, narrative, or method; while it is suggested that one of the costs of the construct of ‘Enlightenment’, has been the illusion of familiarity with eighteenth-century intellectual culture, in France as well as Britain.

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem westlichen Verständnis von chinesischer Schrift. Im westlichen Diskurs herrscht eine Auffassung vor, der zufolge die chinesischen Schriftzeichen eine „fast naturalistische Darstellung“ von Dingen seien, die unabhängig von der gesprochenen Sprache im Sinne „eines visuellen Objekts“ funktionieren soll. Dabei wird die Tatsache, dass auch sie wie alle anderen Schriftsysteme zur Wiedergabe der gesprochenen Wörter verwendet werden und dadurch funktionieren, ausgeblendet. Die Vorstellung der sprachunabhängigen chinesischen Schrift wirkt darüber hinaus auch auf die Kulturtheorien ein, die auf der Schrift basierend die chinesische bzw. asiatische Kultur zu charakterisieren und sie mit der europäischen zu vergleichen versuchen. Dabei ist zu beobachten, dass die angenommene sprachunabhängige Bildhaftigkeit oder Konkretheit der chinesischen Schrift zwar einerseits Grund für eine Aufwertung ist, wobei das aus ihr resultierende Denkmodell als ein alternatives des westlichen Denkens aufgefasst wird, dass aber letztendlich aus derselben Auffassung auch das negative Urteil entspringt, mit jener visuellen Konkretheit gehe ein ‚geringer Abstand zu den Gegenständen‘ einher und daraus folge eine Unfähigkeit zum abstrakten Denken bei dem, der sich dieser Schrift bediene. Die Frage, die vorliegende Arbeit durchzieht, lautet daher: Woher stammt dieser ‚Mythos‘ der chinesischen Schrift, der wiederum zurückwirkt auf das westliche Ostasienbild? Und warum bewahrt er sich so hartnäckig im westlichen Denken, dass seine Nachwirkung bis in aktuelle Theorien zu beobachten ist? Wie ist die ambivalente Einschätzung chinesischer bzw. ostasiatischer Kultur in ihnen zu verstehen, die aus derselben ideographischen Auffassung chinesischer Schrift stammt? Durch eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Rezeptionsgeschichte der chinesischen Schrift unter Berücksichtigung des abendländischen China-, bzw. Ostasienbilds wird versucht, darauf zu antworten. / This dissertation deals with the Western views of Chinese characters. In Western discourses the Chinese written language has generally been viewed as a naturalistic representation of things, close to visual images (pictographs) or as a means of conveying ideas (ideographs), unrelated to spoken language. The fact that they reproduce spoken language like all other writing systems has been underexplored. Under this assumption, cultural theories have defined Chinese or Asian cultures as essentially distinct from European cultures. However, the language-independency and concreteness of Chinese script provides reason for revaluation of those views that consider the Chinese (or Asian) ways of thinking as an alternative to Western thought: that which ultimately arises from the negative judgments that those with visual concreteness are farther detached from objects, and are, therefore, unable to exercise abstract thinking. Through a critical analysis of the history of discourses of Chinese writings, this work address the following questions: Whence comes the ‘myth ''of the Chinese character, which, in turn, reinforces the Western views of Asia: why it remains so persistent in Western views as observed in contemporary cultural theories; how the ambivalent appreciation of Chinese or East Asian-culture resulted from the same ideographic view of the Chinese written language.

This study examines the role of history in the writings of the English deists, a group of heterodox religious controversialists who were active from the last quarter of the seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century. Its main sources are the published works of the deists and their opponents, but it also draws, where possible, on manuscript sources. Not all of the deists were English (one was Irish and another was of Welsh extraction), but the term ‘English Deists’ has been used on the grounds that the majority of deists were English and that they published overwhelmingly in England and in English. It shows that the deists not only disagreed with their orthodox opponents about the content of sacred history, but also about the relationship between religious truth and historical evidence. Chapter 1 explains the entwining of theology and history in early Christianity, how the connection between them was understood by early modern Christians, and how developments in orthodox learning set the stage for the appearance of deism in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Each of the following three chapters is devoted to a different line of argument which the deists employed against orthodox belief. Chapter 2 examines the argument that certain propositions were meaningless, and therefore neither true nor false irrespective of any historical evidence which could be marshalled in their support, as it was used by John Toland and Anthony Collins. Chapter 3 traces the argument that the actions ascribed to God in sacred history might be unworthy of his goodness, beginning with Samuel Clarke’s first set of Boyle Lectures and then progressing through the writings of Thomas Chubb, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and William Warburton. Chapter 4 charts the decline of the category of certain knowledge in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the rise of probability theory, and the effect of these developments on the deists’ views about the reliability of historical evidence. Chapter 5 is a case-study, which reads Anthony Collins’s Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) in light of the findings of the earlier chapters. Finally, a coda provides a conspectus of the state of the debate in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, focusing on the work of four writers: Peter Annet, David Hume, Conyers Middleton, and Edward Gibbon.