Drug Bodies: Relations with Substance in the Wau Bulolo Valley

Over the past decade, marijuana has become a significant element in the lives of Papua New Guinean youth. While placing them in conflict with community leaders, young men find meaning in marijuana. Used to affect agency, differentiated according to strength and color, and compared to plants once used by their ancestors, the drug is attributed with properties that do in fact change the substance of the body. Contrary to Strathern (1987), marijuana is now seen as transforming the bodies of its users, giving the power to overcome shame, understand ancestral stories, and work without tiring. Non‐users' discourses against use likewise evoke changes in substance, drying the blood of men who smoke it and oversee its circulation. Offspring of such men are characterized by their weak bones and they often die as infants. In this paper, I will examine these competing discourses of marijuana as they emerge in the communities around Wau (Morobe Province, PNG). I examine the way in which this new commodity begins to take on locals meanings and emerges as a powerful substance in the lives of young men and women.     

民初惩罚女性性犯罪的法律问题

民国初年,国家对女性性犯罪的惩罚较前有所减轻。大理院通过一系列的解释例,对女性的通奸、重婚等性犯罪行为进行了相应的界定,强化女性性犯罪的告诉权;强调"无告诉权不理"、"律无处罚正文,即不为罪"等办案原则,对女性的性犯罪案件进行相应的宽宥处理。但在法律解释及司法实践中,北洋政府却也加强了对女性性犯罪的严格控制。     

太平军中的婚姻状况与两性关系探析

定都天京后,洪秀全等首义诸王在频繁选美的同时,却又借助于严刑峻法,继续推行隔绝男女、拆散家庭的政策,规定即使夫妻同居也是死罪,使得两性关系成为大平军中最大的禁忌,动辄得咎,导致广大军民的不满和抵触情绪日益滋蔓。弛禁后,大平天国推行严判上下尊卑的婚姻政策,同时仍然强调严男女之大防,严禁异性在婚姻之外稍有混杂,但总的来说局面已日趋失控。围绕婚姻等问题所引发的事态和变化是大平军军纪演变过程的一个缩影,对其战斗力的消长和军(官)民关系均产生了不可忽视的影响。同时,它又从一个侧面征明,在大平天国时代,洪秀全等人根本不可能萌发近代意义上的妇女解放或男女平等意识。     

The Good of Wrath: Supernatural Punishment and the Evolution of Cooperation

Abstract

Human cooperation remains a puzzle because it persists even in contexts where traditional theories predict it should not do so (i.e. among unrelated strangers, who never meet again and where reputation effects are absent). The leading explanation argues that cooperation occurs only if non-cooperators are punished. However, punishment is costly, so ‘second-order’ non-cooperators may arise who defect from contributing to punishment, thus unravelling this solution. We propose an alternative: during our history, the fear of supernatural punishment (whether real or not) deterred defectors and may therefore represent an adaptive trait favoured by natural selection. Supernatural beliefs are universal among human societies, commonly connected to taboos for public goods, so it seems plausible that they serve an important function in fostering cooperation. This hypothesis offers an explanation for (a) geographic variation in religious practices as solutions to local cooperation problems; and (b) the power of political appeals to religion to elicit cooperation.     

Someplace Else: The Tragedy of Korean-American Relations

Book reviewed:
Mitchell B. Lerner. The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy.     

Bodies (and Spaces) do Matter: The limits of performativity

This article explores the insights and limitations within geography of Judith Butler's concept of 'performativity'. As a processual, non-foundational approach to identity, many feminist and post-structuralist geographers have incorporated performativity into their work on the intersections between gender, sexuality, ethnicity, space and place. Yet few have explicitly undertaken a close and critical reading of Butler's theory. The author argues that performativity ontologically assumes an abstracted subject (i.e. abstracted as a subject position in a given discourse) and thus provides no space for theorizing conscious reflexivity, negotiation or agency in the doing of identity. Butler posits a subject abstracted from personal, lived experience as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness. Uncritically transcribing this abstracted subject into geography limits how we can conceptualize the linkages between emerging identities, social change and spatially-embedded, intentional human practice. A more thoughtful and nuanced use of performativity would allow geographers to map how concrete subjects (individual or collective) do identity in relation to various discursive processes (e.g. those that constitute race, class, sexuality and gender), to other subjects, and to layers of institutions and practices.     

Review Article: The Perils of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Relations

JAMES J. BARNES and PATIENCE P. BARNES. Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries in London, 1844–67. Selinsgrove, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 1993. Pp. 475. $55.00 (US)

IAN F. W. BECKETT. The War Correspondents: The American Civil War. Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton, 1993. Pp. 198. £17.99

ROBERT M. BROWNING, JR. From Cape Charles to Cape Fear: The North Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the Civil War. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Pp. xi, 453. $44-95 (US)

GEORGE E. BUKER. Blockaders, Refugees, and Contrabands: Civil War on Florida's Gulf Coast, 1861–1865. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Pp. ix, 235. $29-95 (US)

HOWARD JONES. Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992; Pp. xiii, 300. $50.95 (US).     

死刑与儒家的公平正义——中国传统法律有关宽宥的限度

清朝命案刑科题本的近代读者,不得不佩服清代县长调查和审判命案时所表现的勤勉和称职。因此,从县长的立场来看,审理每一件命案不仅要有效率,同时也必须兼顾人道的考量。本篇文章分析四件因为「护亲情切」而杀死人的案例,充分显示县长如何运用娴熟的技巧,把明确及不明确的案情片段结合起来,做出既符合清代法律规定也顾及当时道德标准的判决。官僚体制为求效率,在执行律法时似乎会和儒家的仁义道德产生矛盾。但作者认为,清代处理命案的法律制度,已足以解决该项问题。     

Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women

The second part of 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning author David I. Kertzer's interview with the Italian political leader Romano Prodi covers the period from the fall of Prodi's first government in 1998. Starting with the causes of the 1998 crisis, the discussion follows Prodi's subsequent career as President of the European Commission (1999–2004), the introduction of the Euro, the expansion of the EU, and the attempts to introduce a new European constitution, before moving to the second Prodi government (2006–08). Describing his subsequent role as UN Special Envoy for the Sahel and his candidacy in the 2013 Italian presidential elections, Italy's former Prime Minister reflects more widely on the current state of European and Italian politics.     

The Geography of Crime and Punishment in the Russian Federation

A UK-based team of two geographers and a criminologist presents the results of its ongoing investigation of the geography of Russia's prison system, which in 2011 is in the early stages of transition from housing inmates in communal barracks (regardless of the severity of their crimes) to one more similar to that in the United States, in which facilities are differentiated to accommodate the entire spectrum of inmates from those housed in maximum security prisons (cellblocks) to minimum security institutions ("colony settlements"). The authors seek to determine whether a Soviet-era spatial bias in the location of facilities persists in presentday Russia by comparing the location of prisons across regions with the distribution of the country's population as well as the per capita incidence of recorded crimes and serious crimes.