Feeding the Mountains: Sacred Landscapes,Mountain Worship,and Sacrifice in the Maya and Inca Worlds

Three texts reviewed here address the linkages between religion and mountainous landscapes in the Maya and Inca realms. Bassie-Sweet provides a thorough analysis of the Maya mythologies of creation and situates its players and concepts within the real world. Besom thoughtfully tackles the place of mountains and child sacrifice within the Andes with a focus on the late prehispanic Inca. Reinhard and Constanza offer a detailed and richly illustrated case study of state-sponsored child sacrifice on a mountaintop in the south of the Inca Empire. Taken together, these somewhat disparate books produce several fascinating parallels in the sacred geographies of mountains and the offerings made to them.     

Apollo and the Virgin: The Changing Meanings of a Sacred Site on Anafi

The ruins of an ancient Greek temple on a Cycladic island form part of an Orthodox Christian shrine. To local people and returning migrants, the site is that of their patron saint; its pre‐Christian past is irrelevant except in so far as it establishes their specific link with the ancient world, and thus with national claims of unbroken continuity between modern and ancient Greece. To early travellers and antiquarians, and to today’s archaeologists, it has been primarily the ancient site which is of interest, while tourists are more concerned in finding “an unspoilt island”. A historical survey of information about the ancient and the Christian site reveals ambiguities and confusions about both. These multiple meanings for locals and scholars are discussed.     

Perpetual Alleluia and Sacred Violence: An Afterword

This paper re-examines Paul Schroeder's thesis concerning the new international order after 1815 and argues that the practicalities of power projection were as important in shaping foreign policy as were diplomatic principles and practices. Highlighting Wellington's role in policy-making, it re-assesses British interventions in Portugal in the 1820s to argue that the exercise of British power resulted from a range of influences apart from the adherence to the Concert system. British interventionism was constrained by the limitations of military and naval power, difficulties in securing co-operation with the Portuguese, and the nature of Portuguese politics and the Portuguese state. The experience and legacy of the Peninsular War also made British ministers sceptical about the potential impact of foreign interventions in the region during the 1820s. Interventions in Portugal demonstrated that Britain could not project power on a global or significant scale in areas where it did not locally command substantial war-making resources, as in India. Schroeder's emphasis on Concert diplomacy and C.A. Bayly's on global-reach fail, therefore, to capture the appropriate range of influences on power projection.     

Transcendence and Apocalyptic: A Reply to Barber

Abstract

This essay takes up Dan Barber's challenge to think Christian theology non-analogically. It does so by re-affirming and re-conceiving transcendence according to a kind of apocalyptic exigence. Apocalyptic transcendence, it is argued, occurs according to a mode of action that is irreducible either to the univocal production of pure immanence, or to the analogical mediation of transcendence within immanence. Rather, apocalyptic transcendence is operative as a mode of action by which immanence is suspended and the territorial conceptions of this-worldly sovereignty are denied. Through engagement with the work of John Howard Yoder, it is argued that apocalyptic thus gives way to doxology as that mode of engaged and embodied action that alone exceeds the presumed need for effective ontological production.     

Rockfort Temple at Tiruchirapalli,India: Conservation of a Sacred Landscape

Sacred sites in India are subject to many development pressures. Unlike heritage monuments, cultural and historic landscapes have not been the focus of institutional protection and preservation efforts. Using Rockfort Temple complex at Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu, as a case study, we propose that an integrated conservation approach be based upon restoring the natural and spatial archetypes that constitute the landscape vocabulary. A group of excavated and structural temples are located on a hill on the banks of the river Kaveri surrounded by a medieval fort that became the nucleus of urban growth over time. Overwhelming growth of commerce within the last half century has resulted in many problems such as traffic congestion, confusing circulation, and visual chaos, which in turn have led to the loss of sanctity. The structure of the pilgrim landscape constituted by circumambulatory paths, tanks and groves, shrines and temples can be clarified and made legible by minor design interventions such as restoring historic buildings, reviving the holy tanks, planting sacred trees, and building rest pavilions along the pilgrim path.     

From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor's Spatial Fix and theGeography of Capitalism

Mainstream neoclassical economic geography and its Marxist critique have largely failed to incorporate active conceptions of working class people in their explanations of the location of economic activities. Neoclassical approaches tend to conceive of workers simply as factors of location, whereas Marxist approaches primarily focus on how capital structures the economic landscape in its search for profit and frequently relegate labor to the status of "variable capital." Both approaches present Geographies of Labor. They have not really examined how workers try to make industrial landscapes. In contrast, I argue that workers have an interest in how the economic geography of capitalism is made; consequently, they seek to impose what we might call "labor's spatial fix" and so play an active role in the unevenly developed geography of capitalism. Examining how workers try to develop their own spatial fixes allows us to incorporate a more active sense of workers as geographical agents into understandings of the production of space under capitalism. Recognizing that workers' efforts to create "labor's spatial fix" are significant allows us to theorize how workers attempt to make space as an integral part of their social existence (a Labor Geography ) and so to write less capital-oriented economic geographies.     

日本女性离职问题及其劳动权的法律保障

日本经济的长期不振,导致了失业率急剧上升,女性失业尤为突出。随之,也带来了女性失业性离职的诸多问题。察其女性离职的原因,社会的、公司的、个人的等多种因素同时并存,相互交织,呈复合态势。离职带来的直接影响是收入的锐减;就心态而言,乐观向上与消极处世并存。由于年龄的差异,日本女性再就业呈“M”型态,再就业形势仍十分严峻。对此,日本采取了改进和完善女性劳动权保障制度和修改《雇佣保险法》和《男女雇佣机会均等法》等举措。     

Imagining Humane Realism: Moving from Sacred Secularism toward a Pragmatic Theory of Human Rights

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to problematize secular humanistic conceptualizations of human rights by challenging the absolutist and supposedly irreligious foundations on which they rest. In doing so, this piece will adopt the position that secular humanism is, in fact, a religion, and, as such, its dictates concerning human beings and the proper treatment thereof are logical byproducts of a very peculiar "modern" religious faith—a religion, as it were, that places humanity at the center of its worship—and, therefore, are no less arbitrary than the overtly religious dogma it rejects. By exposing the all too confident moral authority that secular faithful bestow upon themselves and the will to judgement that is so prevalent in modern humanistic ideology, this article hopes to create a space for a re-imagining of human rights that is less authoritarian and more open to self-criticism than the modern, secular movement.