War and Diplomacy in the Middle East

Book reviewed in this article: The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992, James A. Baker, III, with Thomas M. DeFrank The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait: Saddam Hussein, his state and International Power Politics, Mussallam Ali Musallam     

REVIEW

Mobul: The Ancestor of the Kambot People in North East New Guinea (translated by John Tschauder) By Josefine Huppertz. Alano. 1992. Pp. 152.     

May It Please the Court? The Solicitor General's Not‐So‐“Special” Relationship: Archibald Cox and the 1963–1964 Reapportionment Cases

Forty-two years ago, the Warren Court decided the jurisprudential progeny of Baker v. Carr . ¹ Six cases, headed by Reynolds v. Sims , ² continued to remake the legal landscape of legislative apportionment using the "one person, one vote" principle. For President John F. Kennedy's Solicitor General, Archibald Cox, the Reynolds decisions were dangerous. He feared they would precipitate a constitutional crisis that would underscore why Justice Felix Frankfurter, his mentor, had urged his judicial colleagues to avoid entangling their institution in the "political thicket" of legislative apportionment.     

Performing race and gender: the exoticization of Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong

Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong are two exceptions to white hegemony in early show business. They became the first Afro-American and Chinese-American stars in the 1920s and reached international stardom in spite of their ethnicity but also because of it. Their careers and success were based on their exoticization. Baker and Wong's exoticism has much to do with ethnicity, but also with sex and gender. Their exotic dances on stage or on screen can be considered to be forms of erotic shows. This article shows how sex, gender, and race are entangled in their movies and burlesque shows. It also discusses the ways in which the agency and the audience of the performer should be taken into account, and analyzes how these performances were both rooted in Western imaginative geographies and connected to symbolic and material spaces.     

A few words for Axel Vander: John Banville and the pursuit of deconstruction

The revelations about Paul de Man’s activities in Belgium during the Second World War placed him, and by extension deconstruction, on public trial. The affair gave rise to a series of novels, such as Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992) or Bernhard Schlink’s Homecoming (2008), that dismiss critical theory as ethically bankrupt charlatanism. John Banville’s Shroud (2002) and Ancient Light (2012) place the enigmatic theorist Axel Vander, a figure resembling de Man, in the dock, but these novels form no decisive judgement about his guilt. The texts reflect on memory, mourning, forgetting and responsibility, and about what writing might consign to the future, questions persistently raised by de Man and Jacques Derrida. As such, they might be said to speak to, or “inhabit”, deconstruction, rather than condemning it. This essay traces how Banville reckons with Axel Vander, and pursues the thought of de Man and Derrida, by means of three words: shroud, ash and cleave. These words at once connote concealment, destruction and separation and also preservation, survival and connection. As the discussion suggests, such words testify to the memory work performed by deconstruction.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviews in this article:
Socioeconomic Background and Achievement, by Otis Dudley Duncan, David Featherman, and Beverly Duncan.
Social Status and the City, by Richard P. Coleman and Bernice L. Neugarten.
Neighborhood, City and Metropolis: An Integrated Reader in Urban Sociology, by Robert Gutman and David Popenoe (eds.).
One-Dimensional Central Place Theory, by Michael F. Dacey, Omar Davies, Robin Flowerdew, James Huff, Angela KO and John Pipkin.
Searching for Structure: An Approach to Analysis of Substantial Bodies of Micro-data and Documentation for a Computer Program, Revised Edition, by John A. Sonquist, Elizabeth L. Baker, and James N. Morgan.
THAID: A Sequential Analysis Program for the Analysis of Nominal Scale Dependent Variables, by James N. Morgan and Robert Messenger.
Multivariate Nominal Scale Analysis: A Report on a New Analysis Technique and a Computer Program, by Frank M. Andrews and Robert C.
Messenger. Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research
OSIRIS: Architecture and Design, by Judith Rattenbury and Neal Van Eck.     

Book reviews

John Carey, King of Mysteries: Early Irish Religious Writings
John Hines, A New Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Great Square-Headed Brooches
Lloyd and Jennifer Laing, Early English Art and Architecture
Anna Ritchie (ed), Govan and its Early Medieval Sculpture
P.S. Barnwell, Kings, Courtiers and Imperium: the Barbarian West, 565–725.
Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300–1450
Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400
A.E. Leont'ev, Arkheologiia meri. K predystorii Severo-Vostochnoi Rusi (The Archaeology of the Merya)
Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe (eds), Words and Works: Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson
R. Künzel, The Forgotten Side of the Low Countries' Social History, 7th–13th centuries. Beelden en zelfbeelden van middeleeuwse mensen. Historisch-antropologische studies over groepsculturen in de Nederlanden, 7de–13de eeuw
Emma Cownie, Religious Patronage in Anglo-Norman England 1066–1135.     

Das Opium des Volkes

G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker (Eds): Popular Belief and Practice: Papers Read at the Ninth Summer Meeting and the Tenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Cambridge University Press, 1972; pp. xii+331. Derek Baker (Ed.): Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest: Papers Read at the Tenth Summer Meeting and the Eleventh Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Cambridge University Press, 1972; pp. xV&Plus;404.     

The Origin of Folk-Culture

The legend of Sir Richard ‘Bloody’ Baker, concerning events alleged to have occurred in the parish of Cranbrook, Kent in the sixteenth century, was first recorded in 1850. This legend bears such strong similarities to the English folktale of Mister Fox that it has been suggested it was deliberately fabricated by a Victorian faux antiquary. There are, however, many other oral traditions current in Cranbrook about Bloody Baker which do seem to be authentic folklore, while certain details incongruous in the recorded narrative appear to be survivals from an earlier version. These considerations make it probable that the legend is an organic local variant on the Mister Fox motif, notwithstanding the lateness of its first record.     

How the nerves reached the muscle: Bernard Katz,Stephen W. Kuffler,and John C. Eccles—Certain implications of exile for the development of twentieth-century neurophysiology

This article explores the work by Bernard Katz (1911–2003), Stephen W. Kuffler (1913–1980), and John C. Eccles (1903–1997) on the nerve–muscle junction as a milestone in twentieth-century neurophysiology with wider scientific implications. The historical question is approached from two perspectives: (a) an investigation of twentieth-century solutions to a longer physiological dispute and (b) an examination of a new kind of laboratory and academic cooperation. From this vantage point, the work pursued in Sydney by Sir John Carew Eccles’ team on the neuromuscular junction is particularly valuable, since it contributed a central functional element to modern physiological understanding regarding the function and structure of the human and animal nervous system. The reflex model of neuromuscular action had already been advanced by neuroanatomists such as Georg Prochaska (1749–1820) in Bohemia since the eighteenth century. It became a major component of neurophysiological theories during the nineteenth century, based on the law associated with the names of François Magendie (1783–1855) in France and Charles Bell (1774–1842) in Britain regarding the functional differences of the sensory and motor spinal nerves. Yet, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that both the histological and the neurophysiological understanding of the nerve–muscle connection became entirely understood and the chemical versus electrical transmission further elicited as the mechanisms of inhibition. John C. Eccles, Bernard Katz, and Stephen W. Kuffler helped to provide some of the missing links for modern neurophysiology. The current article explores several of their scientific contributions and investigates how the context of forced migration contributed to these interactions in contingently new ways.     

BOOKS IN SUMMARY

Geography And History : Bridging The Divide . By Alan R. H. Baker. ¿Qué Es La Historia Teórica ? By José Carlos Bermejo Barrera. The Lost Italian Renaissance : Humanists , Historians , And Latin's Legacy . By Christopher S. Celenza. Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte : Werner Conze Und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945. By Thomas Etzemüller. Was ist Geschichte ? Einführung in die historische Methode . By Norbert Furrer. The New History and the Old : Critical Essays and Reappraisals . By Gertrude Himmelfarb. What History Tells : George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe . Edited by Stanley G. Payne, David J. Sorkin, and John S. Tortorice. George L. Mosse Series in European and Cultural History. States And Citizens : History , Theory , Prospects . Edited by Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth.     

Peri mortem cranial injuries from a medieval grave in Saint Peter's Cathedral,Bologna, Italy

In 1999, renovation work in the 16^th century crypt in Saint Peter's Cathedral, Bologna (Italy), uncovered a capuchin‐type grave probably from the Early Middle Ages, containing commingled bones belonging to several individuals. A study of the osteoarchaeological material by the Laboratory of Bioarchaeology and Forensic Osteology of the University of Bologna identified two skulls of young males, both presenting signs of direct traumatic lesions produced peri mortem: one on the frontal, the other on the left parietal. The aim of the present study was to examine the lesions in relation to possible aetiological factors. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

John Lewyn of Durham: A North Country Master Mason of the 14th Century

Abstract

This paper examines the structural evidence for the claims made on the behalf of the 14th-century master mason, John Lewyn. It suggests that comparison of artistic detail, has limited usefulness when attempting to identify his work. Buildings which, on a superficial level, bear little resemblance to one another, can nevertheless be shown to have significant mutuality of concept when studied in depth. Thus, a close examination of John Lewyn's known works and contemporary buildings suggests that Lewyn was the dominant influence in the northern region during the later 14th century, and that he retained control of planning to a fine level, whilst allowing his deputies varying degrees of independence in the execution of detail.     

Making links between sex work,gender and victimisation: the politics and pedagogies of John Schools

This article will explore the links between sex work, gender and victimisation. It will draw on the literature on victims and victimology, as well as the literature on sex work, to explore the ways in which sex work, gender and victimisation are presented at John Schools. These are court diversion educational programmes that teach those arrested for soliciting for the purposes of buying sex the negative consequences of their actions and are currently operating in parts of the USA, Canada, the UK and South Korea. Focusing on a case study of a John School in England, it shows how the pedagogies of the John School are inherently political and structured by the local and extra-local contexts in which it is situated. It also demonstrates the small but significant influence of radical feminist ideas and tropes in the John School and the ways in which the John School presents victimisation relationally as male clients causing hidden harms to victims, most notably residents and female sex workers. Here, the active construction of both the victim and offender identity is critically reflected on.     

After the ‘king of beasts’: Samuel Baker and the embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon

This paper draws on and develops a range of concepts and methodologies from ‘more-than-human’ and animal geographies to map some embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon. It focuses in particular on the exploits of Samuel Baker and some of his contemporaries. The paper attends to the attachments, crossings and ethics that passed between hunted and hunting bodies to flesh out the colonial visions of these ‘seeing men’ of empire. It critically engages with existing work on hunting and colonial natural history by examining interwoven human and nonhuman experiences, exploring elephant hunting as a collection of embodied and co-evolutionary processes with complex material histories. Drawing out the importance of embodiment, affect and intercorporeal exchange the paper then reflects on the performance, epistemology and ethics of hunting practice and traces the role played by a code of sportsmanship in orientating and legitimating the ethical sensibility of hunting. In conclusion the paper details what is gained from this style of embodied historical analysis which unsettles any simple spatio-temporal territorialisation of (post-) colonial historical geographies.     

Barcelona—fast forward? City entrepreneurialism in the 1980s and 1990s

Since 1979 the city council of Barcelona has sought to guide the city's destiny by a variety of methods, most powerfully by securing the 1992 Olympic Games candidacy, but also by means of two strategic planning exercises, begun in 1988 and 1992. These strategies are examined within their political and economic contexts in order to understand how they relate to changes in Spanish and Catalan politics, in global/local economic shifts and in thinking on city guidance. Significant differences in the three phases of city promotion are identified. It is concluded that strategic planning within the context of the intense spatial economic competition of the late 1990s may be even more difficult for Barcelona than was its drive up to 1992.     

Royal Scottish geographical society

Conflict and Change in the Countryside. By Guy M. Robinson, 237 × 162 mm, xxvi + 482 pp, Belhaven, London, 1990, pbk, ISBN 1–85293–044–6, £14.95.

The Third Statistical Account of Scotland: The County of West Lothian. Edited by Patrick Cadell, 230 × 145 mm, 377 pp, Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, 1992, hbk, £37.50.

The Third Statistical Account of Scotland: The County of Roxburgh. Edited by John Herdman, 230 × 145 mm, 368 pp, Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, 1992, hbk, £37.50.     

Sea bird fowling in southern Patagonia: a contribution to understanding the nomadic round of the Canoeros Indians

As well as providing data on meat yield, avian remains can be expected to give information on seasonality, an important parameter for understanding prehistoric hunting economies. An archaeological survey conducted in the Skyring Sea (Province of Magellan, Chile) between 1992 and 1994 provided bird bone assemblages that have been analysed with this aim in mind, of which 12 are discussed here. Cormorants and steamer ducks constitute 97 per cent of the specimens identified. The proportions of avian remains are compared with the mammals remains, and mostly show a predominance of the former. The status and seasonal distribution of animal resources are discussed in order to understand the motivation for such a specialization on bird hunting, when mammals (Artiodactyls and Pinnipeds) can bring a much higher yield of meat. This nomadic marine economy can best be understood when comparisons are made with other sites from the same cultural area. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.