Gender and Mahalle (Neighborhood) Space in Istanbul

Studies of gender have an important place in studies of Turkey because the discourses of Islamism and secularism, and modernity and tradition, make the bodies and practices of Turkish women the site of debate. However, few studies have used a spatial analysis to examine the production of gender in daily life. This article is simultaneously a study of how gender is produced through space and of the creation of various kinds of spaces in an Istanbul mahalle (neighborhood). The mahalle is the space of intimate daily life in the Turkish urban context, and narratives of and ways of life in the mahalle articulate competing notions of what it means to be a woman in Turkey. This study of gender and mahalle space reveals the linkages between space and gender to be multiple and shifting and the boundaries between private and public spaces to be fluid. Furthermore, this reading of gender and urban space, when brought back to the Turkish context, also contributes to research which interrogates the idea of modernity at the core of national identity in Turkey, of which gender is a central and constitutive element.     

Collaboration or obstruction? Rebel group behavior during natural disaster relief in the Philippines

Under what conditions do rebel groups collaborate with the government in disaster relief operations? Despite the fact that many natural disasters occur in armed conflict contexts, little is known about the impact of conflict actors on natural disaster relief efforts. Affected by the same typhoon, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the New People's Army (NPA) behaved differently in the aftermath of the natural disaster. While the MILF collaborated with the government in relief efforts, the NPA did not. This article explains this variation by arguing that the level of hostility between the rebel group and the state in the pre-disaster period as well as the type of social contract that exists between the rebels and the local population shape collaboration during natural disaster relief efforts. The theoretical argument is explored through a comparative case study between these two rebel groups in the aftermath of a devastating typhoon in the Philippines in 2012.     

Gender,Perceptions of Safety and Strategic Responses among Ohio University Students

Research on perceptions of safety in public spaces must seek a balance between paying careful attention to the effects of gender, while challenging simplistic notions of a dichotomy of fearful women and fearless men. In a study of perceptions of safety among undergraduate students at the Ohio State University, this principle was addressed by decentering fear as the object of study and focusing instead on the various strategies that women and men use to manage their perceptions of safety—including avoidance of certain situations (for example, being in specific places, or going outside after dark), precautionary measures, and assertions of confidence. Questionnaire responses and follow-up interviews indicated that most students usually felt safe on campus; however, women were more likely than men to have felt unsafe. Students used a wide range of strategies to make themselves feel safer, from staying home after dark to formulating plans for self-defense to telling themselves they had nothing to fear. While a focus on strategic responses illuminated areas of overlap in men's and women's experiences, gender differences were also striking. Men are unlikely to rely on avoidance strategies, while some women view self-imposed restrictions on activity as normal and necessary. Furthermore, many men are unwilling or unable to relate to questions about fear and safety, explicitly or implicitly reinscribing fear as a ‘women's issue’.     

Women’s public lives and sovereign arrangements in Karachi’s inner city

Women’s public lives in Pakistan are often presented through tropes of oppression and restricted mobility. While women do struggle with all kinds of limitations that curtail their movement in the public sphere, they also negotiate their way and find their place in the public realm through various means that remain understudied in this context. In this article I track women’s movements in public space in the historic quarters of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and most populous city. What emerges in the study is that a key aspect of women’s movement through their neighbourhood is their membership in or attachment to various sovereign arrangements – political and religious, formal and informal – that seek to rule and govern the space of the quarter. These arrangements include political parties and groups, religious organizations and the shrines of Sufi saints. Ultimately I argue that women’s public lives are driven not so much by the assertion of an individualized citizenship as by an attachment to and association with collective arrangements that allow a participation in the making of political and religious imaginaries.     

Tehran’s subway: gender,mobility, and the adaptation of the ‘proper’ Muslim woman

Tehran’s subway, the most affordable means of public transportation in the city, offers a useful context to study the relationship between women’s spatial mobility, the construction of self, and social production of space. This study focuses on Line 1 of Tehran’s subway that connects Tehran’s Bala Shahr (Northern Tehran) and Paeen Shahr (Southern Tehran) neighborhoods. This study draws upon 46 semi-structured interviews with women who were using subway Line 1 in the fall and winter of 2012. The average hour-long interviews examine how women’s emotional states as well as their perceptions of self and space vary as they traverse the city on Line 1. Representing a cultural as well as a spatial transect through the city, the perceptions of women on subway’s Line 1 convey the repudiation of the state’s attempt to promote a singular Muslim female identity. The findings suggest that similar to women’s perception of space, their gendered identities are constantly changing through the enhanced mobility that is facilitated by Tehran’s subway system. In contrast to what is presumed in the West, with a simple change in their hijab style or make-up, Iranian women innovatively negotiate contrasting spaces.     

The Excavation of a World War II Army Camp at Mortonhall,Edinburgh

Abstract

Archive material relating to Mortonhall, Edinburgh, indicates that there was a World War I army camp within the grounds of the estate, which was occupied by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. However, excavations carried out by CFA Archaeology Ltd during Scottish Water’s Edinburgh Drinking Water Project revealed physical remains which relate to a later World War II army camp. This appears to have been initially occupied by the 16th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry in 1940, who were billeted in tents, with the permanent camp being constructed by private contractors from 1942. Archive material suggests that the camp largely consisted of Nissen huts. This evidence is supported by the limited archaeological excavations which uncovered a number of concrete hut bases of the size pertaining to the standard dimensions of Nissen huts. However, there was also evidence of different architectural styles with a number of the buildings having been constructed from brick and asbestos. Reports that Mortonhall was a POW camp were probably unfounded, but it seems to have functioned as a camp for displaced Eastern Europeans. The exact date of closure is unknown, but the size of the camp was clearly being scaled down by the 1950s.     

森林史研究:以菲律宾森林滥伐史研究为重点

本文主要介绍国际森林史研究的发展历程和解释菲律宾森林滥伐史的主要观点。就国际森林史研究来看, 经历了一个从重点研究温带森林史向热带森林史转变的过程。就菲律宾森林滥伐史研究来看, 提出了诸如人口增长压力说、木材生产和贸易说、林业政策鼓励说、行政不力和政治腐败说等重要解释框架。森林史研究需要超越从单因素出发进行解释的现状, 需要向综合研究转变。国别和专题的森林史研究需要从全球森林史和环境史的整体视野来关注。     

Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical nomos

In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political. I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpins his theory of sovereign power. Starting from Agamben's spatial conceptualizations, I explore his attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt described as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how the definitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had dominated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and the lack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the century which followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading some key episodes in the history of European geography; in particular, the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzel's grand geographical project and the Geopolitik experiment. What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geographies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vital that we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil the Arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around which turn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo‐biopolitical machine.     

I Want to Buy a Black Pot

Cooking pots made by craft specialists in a neighborhood in a small city in the Philippines are hand made, using the paddle and anvil technique, and then slipped with an iron-rich clay and polished with a marine shell. They are fired in an open fire, removed while very hot, and immersed in a bed of rice chaff. The result is a shiny black pot that is easily recognized in the market as being the product of this neighborhood. Such pots are valued by consumers as more beautiful and durable compared with pots made elsewhere. To see if the iron and carbon surface treatments improve the performance of the cooking pots, 50 pots were commissioned, with surfaces that varied from no treatment to slip only or carbon only as well as both carbon and slip. This collection was tested at the University of Arizona, and results clearly indicate that heating effectiveness is improved with both slip and carbon present. The surface treatments of red slip and smudge also affect the performance of pots for water permeability. However, our tests show no obvious relationships between strength and different surface treatments. The project illustrates the power of combining ethnoarchaeology with experimental studies in understanding artifact design.     

Geophysical and Archaeological Investigation of the Survivor‐Camp of the Antelope (1783) in the Palau Islands,Western Pacific

Survivor‐camps were an unavoidable and particular category of terrestrial shore‐camp when European scientific, mercantile and imperial interests began to impinge significantly on the islands of the Pacific Ocean. In 1783 the packet Antelope was wrecked in the Palau Islands and the account of the ‘new’ archipelago, first published in 1788, was, after Cook's voyages, the most popular Pacific text in the late‐18th century. The results of archaeological and geophysical research at the camp reported here contribute to a nuanced account of early culture contact and of survivor‐camp behaviour, demonstrating the significance of shore‐camp remains for understanding maritime societies. © 2010 The Authors     

The camp

Walter Benjamin has famously pointed out that we are living in a society in which the exception has become a norm. Giorgio Agamben adds to this claim another one, that the spatial ordering principle for this new order is the camp. This article focuses on this diagnosis. We do not, however, discuss its validity but rather unpack what is meant when the concept of camp is used. The camp is, we argue, given by three structuring principles that might contradict and overlap in various ways: a disciplinary disposit if according to which a distinction between inside and outside is established; a logic of transgression according to which the inside‐outside distinction is deliberately blurred; and finally a biopolitical rationale according to which the distinction between inside and outside is re‐established on each side so that the included are included as excluded (as bodies to be governed) and the excluded are excluded as included (within the realm of power). Finally, we claim that it is the combination of these three principles — discipline, transgression and biopolitics — that leads to a society in which the exception has become the norm. Such ‘society’ is, we show, given by a strange and paradoxical overlapping of bonding and un‐bonding, of distinction and indistinction.     

The Spanish Philippines: Archaeological Perspectives on Colonial Economics and Society

When scholars consider Spanish colonialism in the Philippines their impressions are based largely on documentary evidence of their 377-year colonial presence and on romanticized impressions of the larger Spanish empire. In the New World, wherever Europeans settled, there is a clear break in the archaeological sequence of pre-Columbian cultural traditions. In the systemic context these changes continue to be evidenced in architectural style, city plan, and diet. Today, however, archaeologists working in Luzon, Cebu, and Mindanao are revealing vast differences between the nature of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines and that seen in the Americas. There, the remoteness of the colony from Europe, combined with its geographical position on the doorstep of China, created a unique Spanish colonial adaptation that reveals the significance of Asia in the world economic order.     

Integrating History and Archaeology in the Study of Contact Period Philippine Chiefdoms

Malay texts, Philippine oral traditions, Chinese tributary records and geographies, early Spanish writings, and archaeological evidence from Philippine sites present divergent views of political structures and political economies in Philippine chiefdoms of the late first millennium to midsecond millennium A.D. While some sources claim a political landscape dominated by a few large-scale, highly centralized polities almost wholly supported through foreign trade, others suggest the presence of more heterogeneous and politically segmented configurations of varying scale and complexity and with eclectic economic bases. These disparate narratives are evaluated in terms of methodological biases, their cultural context, and the historical circumstances of their production.     

考古学与性别

本文节译自英国杜伦大学(DurhamUniversity)考古学教授马太·约翰逊(MatthewJohnson)1999年出版的《考古学理论:导言》(ArchaeologicalTheory:AnIntroduction)一书的第八章“考古学与性别”(“ArchaeologyandGender”)。本章节通过对其中几个最流行主题的归纳综述了近二十年来性别考古学的概况,并且介绍了一例典型个案,最后还以答问形式阐述了作者本人对此领域较混淆的若干问题的看法。