Misconceptions and Complexities in the Study of China's Cities: Definitions,Statistics, and Implications

A noted American authority on urbanization and the household registration system in China reviews and clarifies factors leading to misunderstanding and misconceptions regarding the number of inhabitants of China's major cities. Principal sources of confusion linked to reliance on official statistical sources are the multi-layered meanings of the term "city" and, consequently, simultaneous publication and use of a multitude of official population statistics for the country's "cities." Other complicating factors analyzed by the author include the effects of the Chinese hukou (household registration) system and the rapid rate of urban growth and change over the last three decades. Systematic population and per capita GDP data for the years 2000 and 2005, all based on the multiple boundaries and systems for five major cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen), are collected to illustrate both the countrywide situation and specific cases. Also included is a critique of several studies and popular accounts of Chinese cities to highlight misstatements and areas of misunderstanding based on inappropriate use of statistical data. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, O53, P20, R12. 2 figures, 6 tables, 130 references.     

Frontiers of Disease: Human Desire and Environmental Realities in the Rearing Of Horses in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century South Africa

Abstract

Horses have played an important economic, military and cultural role in South African history. However, disease has always posed a threat to their survival. Horsesickness, a viral infection transmitted by midges from the genus culicoides, is endemic in much of the country but has historically assumed epizootic proportions in certain years. In the lowveld and Zululand nagana (trypanosomosis), spread by tsetse flies, has killed both horses and cattle and affected the distribution of human settlement and agricultural activities. In addition, much of South Africa is very arid, yet has rich floral taxa. Several plants, such as Senecio spp. are highly toxic to horses, but in times of drought and fodder shortages, equines are faced with the choice of starvation or potentially succumbing to toxicosis by eating poisonous weeds. This paper considers the environmental impact of these three types of horse diseases in South Africa and explores the scientific and ecological investigations undertaken since the late nineteenth century to try to control them. Research into horse diseases brought together the laboratory and the field and raised important questions about the part played by environmental factors, as opposed to just germs, in the distribution of livestock infections and the ability of farmers and scientists to tackle them effectively.     

Current Realities,Idealised Pasts: Archaeology,Values and Indigenous Heritage Management in Central Australia

This paper addresses the inter‐cultural meanings and assumptions which have arisen in the interpretation of heritage and its conservation in central Australia. Conflicting views of heritage conservation are grounded in particular constructions of the past which are adapted and redefined in relation to the present. In central Australia, Indigenous notions of time and property have stressed the symbolic value of objects in terms of the Dreaming and their active role in exchange. The definition of objects as personal effects and their enhancement of social values through exchange have been at odds with archaeological understandings of the same objects as artefacts and attempts to conserve them as items of heritage significance. Specific examples discussed include the use of artefacts in economic exchanges, interpretation of archaeological sequences, and the application of concepts of significance through land rights and heritage legislation.     

乌鲁木齐早期人类活动与城市形态演变

通过文献记载与考古研究成果,分析了乌鲁木齐早期人类活动的空间分布和唐代轮台城的兴废,并探讨了清代以来乌鲁木齐城市形态演变的规律和原因。认为军政职能是清代城池建筑的主要原因,商业贸易发展是城市形态变异的内动力,现代工业发展是形态突变的根本原因。     

Making and Breaking the Aboriginal Remote: Realities,Languages, Tomorrows (A Commentary)

The concept of ‘remote’ has intensified a fundamental misunderstanding of widespread rural Aboriginal situations. More, it has served to mask the causality for current problems, which will remain intractable until causality is effectively addressed. This commentary re‐examines how ‘remote’ is produced, both by and within the dominant state and society and, by means of a reconsideration of demand sharing and long‐distance travel, from and within Aboriginal communities. On that basis new kinds of confrontational engagements with the production of remote are suggested.     

Human Activities and Site Formation at Modern Lake Margin Foraging Camps in Kenya

Interpretation of archaeological sites with predominantly freshwater fish and reptile remains has been impeded by lack of documentation of how humans process such vertebrates, of bone modifications resulting from such handling, and of physical characteristics of sites produced by these activities. We report on 19 contemporary foraging camps on the shore of Lake Turkana, Kenya, with the creation, abandonment, and resulting faunal assemblages of 7 of these more closely described. Variable processing activities created a range of site structures but cross-assemblage regularities in patterns of bone surface modification and element frequencies are perceptible. Most sites were very large, with special-purpose activity areas peripheral to the main residential area. Site structure and size depended mainly on specific subsistence activities carried out and features of the camp locale rather than upon the number of occupants or duration of occupation. Sites can be classified as base camps or as fish production camps, with consistent differences in site structure and bone assemblage characteristics.     

The Politics of the Pipe: Clay Pipes and Tobacco Consumption in Galway, Ireland

In this paper, clay pipes and the historical record are used to explore the illicit importation of tobacco in seventeenth-century Galway, Ireland. This is part of a wider tradition of the politics of smoking, including the proliferation of the clay pipe, the widespread smuggling of tobacco, and the overtly political nineteenth-century pipes that touted nationalist emblems. Here, the juxtaposition of the archaeological and historical records locates subversive local agency in the face of overarching colonial mandates. Colonialism, trade, consumption, and identity are linked in an examination of a merchant community's maneuvers through the expanding Atlantic economy and the restricted colonial mandates that marked the world around them.     

The Democratization Process and Popular Participation in Africa: Emerging Realities and the Challenges Ahead

Many observers have judged the recent wave of democratization in Africa as an unstoppable process and have overemphasized the role of external factors in inducing this change. This article argues that the quality of change has been fragile and defective in many respects, and draws attention to the susceptibility of the process of democratic transition to reversals. It goes on to underscore the importance of internal forces in bringing about change and in ensuring the sustainability of democracy in Africa. The tasks that lie ahead for civil society in Africa and the role of the international community and political conditionality of aid in this context are then debated.     

Migration,Human Resource Transfers,and Development Contexts: A Logit Analysis of Venezuelan Data

This paper is concerned with the reciprocal relationship between migration and development in Third World settings. Using individual-level data for Venezuela, migration behavior is related to a person's age, educational attainment, gender, and characteristics of his/her place(s) of residence as an out-migrant, in-migrant, or stayer. Place characteristics are in terms of four groups based on employment patterns: the core, regional centers, resource frontiers, and traditional rural areas. Four questions are of concern. First, does development influence migration? All analyses indicate this is so. Second, does migration influence development? Findings are ambiguous in that places experiencing improvement in their mix of human capital lagged in the net number of persons obtained through migration whereas a gain in numbers was accompanied by deterioriation in human capital profiles. Third, was incipient polarization reversal occurring in Venezuela in the late 1960s, early 1970s? This paper departs from the usual approach by addressing this question in terms of human capital attributes instead of population aggregates. On this basis, polarization reversal is in evidence, particularly in regional centers. Finally, this study answers in the affirmative that places with different development characteristics generate migration streams differing in type, magnitude, explanation, and impact.     

长江流域环境变化与人类活动的相互影响

本文探讨了全新世以来长江流域环境变化、人类活动以及它们之间的相互影响,以期人们认识该流域人与自然的历史渊源和现实问题,为我们保护好、建设好长江经济带提供理论基础。     

Queensland Aborigines,Multiple Realities and the Social Sources of Suffering: Psychiatry and Moral Regions of Being: Part 1

ABSTRACT This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico‐religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal ‘other’ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio‐political realities. I conclude that the residents' narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream ‘commonsense’ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.     

Interpreting Socioeconomic Changes in 17th-Century England and Port Royal, Jamaica, Through Analysis of the Port Royal Kaolin Clay Pipes

The Port Royal pipes reflect a growing consumerism in 17th-century English economy. The desire for tobacco fueled a tobacco-growing economy in the Chesapeake colonies, which then contributed to England's economic growth. This growth was aided by small preindustrial manufactures like clay pipes, which helped supplement family household incomes, so that small luxuries could be purchased. Along with tobacco smoking, novel types of food and drink were consumed, resulting in the adoption of new customs and habits, particularly in frequenting public institutions like coffeehouses and taverns in both England and Port Royal.     

Producer Services,Transaction Activities,and Cities: Rethinking Occupational Categories in Economic Geography

Applying insights from 'new institutional economics' to classify economic activities or occupations avoids some problems for which conventional classifications of services and particularly producer services have long been criticized. In institutionalist thinking the mixture of organizational forms such as market, hierarchy or network in an economy is mainly determined by transaction costs, which can in turn be correlated to specific 'transaction activities'. Typical transaction activities can be identified in markets and in other institutional arrangements, allowing the classification of real economic activities, occupations or firms as transactional or not. Many other commonly applied labels like informational related activities appear comparatively imprecise. This categorization and differentiation sheds new light on discussions about spatial development, from the world city debate to claims about the presumed role of high-tech occupations in metropolitan areas. It is argued that transactional occupations, especially those requiring higher qualifications, can be expected to be highly concentrated in larger agglomerations. In contrast, many non-transactional occupations though requiring high qualifications and usually also regarded as basic for metropolitan economies, like parts of R&D, are not necessarily concentrated there.     

From Algerie Francaise to France Musulmane: Jacques Soustelle and the Myths and Realities of 'Integration', 1955-1962

This article explores the rise and fall of the notion of intégrationas a means of resisting pressure for decolonization in Algeria,focusing on the work of Jacques Soustelle, the eminent ethnologistand Gaullist politician who was Governor-General in Algeriafrom 1955 to 1956. Soustelle’s integration plan was avision developed in Algeria, and its diffusion in France andadoption by a number of diverse groups in the metropole canbe seen as an important case of Algerian influence on Frenchpolitical and intellectual life. The network of Algériefrançaise sympathizers and movements which adopted integrationas their watchword is examined, demonstrating how integrationtook on almost mythical qualities and appealed to figures fromacross the political spectrum. The article also suggests thatintegration can be seen as a contribution to our understandingof the role that a vision of a multiracial and multiculturalgreater France played in the policy and rhetoric of some advocatesof Algérie française.