Fidelity and Sacrifice: The Gender Discourse of Traders in Pre- and Post-Opium War Canton

This article examines the discourse of two American couples in the China trade regarding fidelity and sacrifice during the period in which the spatial confines of the Canton system gave way to the intensified interactions of the Treaty Port era. Before the Opium War, when the Qing court had mandated that Western husbands conducting business in Canton live apart from their wives, marital tension was accentuated by the separation from absentee husbands. In the subsequent Treaty Port era, enhanced spatial mobility of the couples did not assuage their concerns. Instead, intensified cross-cultural encounters allowed them to project their feelings and expectations on the “foreign other” as racial categories developed and their imperial proclivities began to escalate. Bringing the Western women in contact with elite Chinese and other Western women only aggravated their agitation as they faced their Chinese counterparts, whom they readily construed as competitors. The socio-political and spatial reconfigurations provided new dimensions to the discourse of fidelity and sacrifice. The voices of the American couples recorded here are those of individuals, but the underlying anxiety they articulated represented the growing pains of more intimate Sino-Western encounters.     

In Search of Middle Preclassic Lowland Maya Ideologies

Journal of Archaeological Research - Little is known about Middle Preclassic/Formative lowland Maya belief systems or ideologies, compared to later periods, but with increasing research at Middle...     

The Boundaries of Women's Power: Gender and the Discourse of Political Friendship in Twelfth‐Century England

The discourse of friendship was an integral part of political language and interaction in twelfth‐century England. Because the qualities that made a good political friendship – loyalty, wise counsel and generosity, among others – corresponded so closely to the criteria for successful lordship, historians often used the quality of a king's friendship as a signifier for the quality of his rule. Yet their treatment of women's political friendship was markedly different. The discourse of friendship therefore provides a window into the larger struggle over the representation of gender and rulership in twelfth‐century historical writing in England, reflecting chroniclers’ anxiety about female sovereignty. Twelfth‐century historians depicted women's participation in political friendship as acceptable only within certain circumscribed boundaries that corresponded to the sanctioned political roles for women in general. Otherwise, chroniclers attempted to efface the existence of women's political friendship, sometimes describing the same situations in different language depending on whether the main participant was male or female. Chroniclers also represented women as arbiters of friendship, showing men how better to conduct their relationships either through direct instruction or counter‐example. In both cases women reinforced male friendship, either by being excluded from it, or by demonstrating the correct way to carry it out.     

Linguistic Ideologies,Text Regulation,and the Question of Post-Structuralism

Three works are reviewed that make significant contributions to anthropological linguistics. Two address theoretical and ethnographic concerns regarding linguistic ideologies and the dilemmas they pose for speech practices such as text regulation. Such practices are harnessed to cultural projects such as language modernization and nationalism. The third, a post-structuralist reading of language-and-culture studies concerned with orality and literacy, brings post-structuralist theory into conversation with ethnographers of communication and other students of language. This article argues that such an intervention is welcome and long overdue, though it questions what form this intervention should take.     

Mobile Cartographies and Mobilized Ideologies: The Visual Management of Jerusalem

This article analyses a recent ideological shift in the visual management of Jerusalem. Through two case studies in the real estate and tourism industries we show how mobile technologies are shaping both actual settings in, and visual consumption of, Jerusalem. The analysis points at the creation of a “tunnel vision” for consumers and visitors, which promotes Jewish hegemony in the city and simultaneous detachment from Palestinian spaces and histories. This tunnel vision situates the viewers in physical and simulated enclaves within the city, creating a relationship of distance and elevation to promote their embodied identification with Israel's Judaizing mission for the area, primarily the Holy Basin. This mode of viewing Jerusalem is evocative of Israel's post‐second intifada policies and the concurrent rise of right‐wing ideologies, which relegate to the margins alternative readings of the contested urban landscape.     

Imagined Country: National Environmental Ideologies in School Geography Textbooks

This essay considers the "imagined geographies" of Britain found in school geography textbooks in the postwar period. The first part of the essay considers the role that school geography plays in processes of social reproduction. It suggests that textbooks represent an important resource through which meanings are negotiated in the everyday lives of teachers and students. The second part of the essay discusses some of the specific "national environmental ideologies" found in geographies of Britain. The essay concludes with a discussion of the wider context in which geographies of Britain are taught in schools.     

Coordinating Transport and Urban Planning: From Ideologies to Local Realities

In Europe, the idea that coordinating transportation and urban planning is a necessary condition for setting sustainable urban development into motion has spread throughout academic and professional circles. While this concern is not new, the objectives underlying transport and urban planning coordination have deeply changed over the last decades. How have local authorities translated the requirements and objectives of national laws? How have they accounted for the evolution of these global objectives? What factors explain innovation and continuity in the relationship between land use planning and transport policies? In a comparative research between Switzerland and France, we addressed the question of political change by reconstituting the “trajectories” of four urban areas: Geneva and Bern in Switzerland and Strasbourg and Bordeaux in France. We have described the policy paths of these urban areas since the end of the 1960s by focusing on the contents of master plans, the principal technical solutions and projects that have been implemented, and the means of inter-sectorial coordination used. For each case, factors of change or inertia have been identified by focusing on three main variables that are often studied alternatively in public policy analysis: ideas, institutions and interests.