On the Anthropogenic Factor in Landscape Formation (Landscape and Ethnos VII)

In attempting to classify anthropogenic factors of landscape formation, Gumilev rejects Arnold Toynbee's concept of challenge and response as the factors underlying the genesis of civilizations on the ground that it ignores the factor of ethnic differentiation. Gumilev finds that the principal changes introduced by man into the landscape are associated with certain short-term periods of superhuman effort that coincide with intensive processes of ethnogenesis. This intensive activity is followed by a damping inertia that leads ultimately to a new equilibrium between the ethnos and the environment until the next upsurge of activity.     

A CRITIQUE OF L. N. GUMILEV'S WORK ON ETHNOGEOGRAPHY AT A MEETING AT LENINGRAD UNIVERSITY

Following a critique by the ethnographer V. I. Kozlov of the biological-geographical conception of ethnic history advanced by L. N. Gumilev, a seminar was convened at the Geography Faculty of Leningrad University to discuss the merits of Gumilev's work and of the critique. The consensus of the speakers was that Gumilev's model of ethnic development, treating mankind largely as a biological species and attributing the origins and disappearance of ethnic communities to biological factors, should be treated as a working hypothesis that still required experimental proof. Several participants said they could not agree with some of Gumilev's propositions, especially the existence of a psychic innate drive that is presented as the key element in the generation of new ethnic entities. But speakers did not question his right to present his views, and Kozlov's attack on Gumilev did not appear to find wide support.     

Progress in the human geography of the Maghreb

Sutton and Lawless review a selection of the prolific literature on the Maghreb's human geography published from the late 1970s onward. The pedigree of the discipline in Maghreb was established by several notable geographers who lived, researched, and wrote there. Augustin Bernard's writings on rural settlement, his atlas, and study of Algeria are still cited. Jean Despois's regional study with Raynal and his work on Tunisia, together with the detailed rural research of Jean Poncet, provides a particularly rich coverage for that country. Jean Dresch's early work on Morocco exemplified an early critique of the contemporaneous uncritical colonial human geography. The Sahara's fascination also inspired pioneering studies by Robert Capot-Rey. The work of these notables and others provided a solid background of geographical literature on the Maghreb to be supplemented, criticized, and challenged by more recent researchers, sometimes pupils of the above individuals, and increasingly North African by birth. The tradition of general texts on the Maghreb has continued, though increasingly with systematic approaches replacing regional appraisals. The geography of the decolonization of the Maghreb by Isnard has been replaced by a study summarizing recent collaborative work by a team of French geographers. The Saharan extensions of the Maghreb states have often been linked in general works, sometimes being juxtaposed against the Maghreb as in the essays offered to Jean Despois. Lawless and Findlay's collaborative study juxtaposes geographical studies of each country's economic development with political scientists' evaluations of their sociopolitical development. This review limits itself largely to geographers and geographical journals, only occasionally including significant works from other subject areas, and to 1977-1978 publications, with a few notable exceptions. The spatial juxtaposition of contrasting approaches to economic development, liberal market economy approaches by Tunisia and Morocco arguably leading to dependency, and centrally-planned strategies by Algeria and Libya resulting in bureaucratic constraints serves to offer the Maghreb as a pertinent case-study region for the applied geographer of developing countries.     

评德国新教传教士花之安的中国研究

花之安是19世纪德国新教传教士。1864—1899年,他在中国从事传教活动达35年之久。他以“文字传教”为工作重点,一方面用中文写作了若干宗教宣传品和介绍西方文化的读物;另一方面,他也有意识地研究中国,把中国的各方面情况和他自己的认识介绍到西方社会。然而花之安的研究工作主要是为传教服务的。由于宗教偏见和西方文化优越论的影响,花之安的中国观带有显著的帝国主义倾向,是西方列强征服中国的文化辅助工具。     

Lev Gumilev: The Ideologist of the Soviet Empire

Summary

Russian intellectuals like to appeal to examples of foreign history. Lev Gumilev's views on history are a good example. Gumilev was one of the most well-known representatives of Eurasianism, which was in turn one of the most interesting intellectual constructs in Russian historiography. Gumilev believed that Russia was born not from Kievan Rus—the view of the majority of Russian historians of his time—but from the empire of the Mongols. While Gumilev saw Europe as a hostile entity to Russia/Eurasia, this was not the case with the neo-Eurasianists of the Yeltsin era. This article examines Gumilev's Eurasianism and its influence on modern Russian national identity.     

川端康成《睡美人》解味

《睡美人》为川端康成晚期作品。它的荒诞内容使读者感到困惑。探讨《睡美人》的深层内涵又是把握川康成整个创作不可缺少的。如果我们联系《睡美人》之前的整个川端创作,了解他在其他作品中以不同形式反复演奏的主题,理清其发展脉络,我们会清晰地看到这篇重要作品的坐标。川端从创作伊始就存在的“恋母情结”、“处女崇拜”,在20世纪50年代对“入魔”、“入佛”的阐释,贯穿一生的“生死轮回”思想都在这篇不长的作品中作了川端式的诗意抒发。作品散发现代主义的颓废情调,这是不言而喻的,然而它又体现了川端以东方文化传统对人生哲理的独特思考,全篇充满禅理,为此它又是一篇不容忽视的川端的典型作品。     

Population geography

This paper reviews the general patterns of demographic change, historical population geography and migration and works that were published during 1995-96. The review includes works of geographers, demographers, historians, and others, where there are clear geographical implications. The aim of the review is to show that population geography thrives and indicates some of the challenges it faces in the light of developments both in related areas of geography and beyond the discipline in, for example, demography and history. The paper begins by examining recent methodological and substantive trends in economic, social and cultural geography. Then, it demonstrates the relevance of demographic phenomena to those fields where they are largely ignored.     

Premises of Visuality: Max Blecher and Marcel Proust

In this article we discuss the modern premises of visuality and the effects of the cultural transfer of optical and photographic techniques on the work of Max Blecher, a Romanian Jewish writer who was a keen explorer of Marcel Proust’s works. In his works Blecher pursued the same theme as Proust—the mechanisms of interior memory and life—and often used optical instruments as a metaphor of identity. The role of the photographic model in his depiction of social tableaux, characters, and dispositions, originated partly in the influence of Proust’s writing and partly in other techniques of the European literary avant-gardes.     

东西对话：中国政治地理学研究展望

中国政治地理学的发展尚处于起步阶段。中国与西方政治地理学者的学术交流相对有限,这主要是由于语言的障碍,以及中国学者对于研究课题政治敏感性的担忧,普遍缺乏对政治地理学研究内涵的理解。本文基于对中西方政治地理学发展现状及相关研究可能性的理解,指出以下五个在中国具有进一步拓展空间的政治地理学课题：广域行政与空间政治;国际关系与地理想象;边界冲突与划界研究;边界与边界区域研究;环境政治地理学。这些课题的开展不仅可以加强中国自身的政治地理学研究,而且对西方正在进行的政治地理学研究也会起到积极的推动作用。     

My Enemy’s Enemy: Consequences of the CIA Operation against Abulqasim Lahuti, 1953–54

In January 1954, the Iranian émigré poet living in the Soviet Union, Abulqasim Lahuti, was summoned before the Central Committee in Moscow to discuss the publication of a fraudulent Persian-language autobiography that reflected unfavorably on his experiences in the Soviet Union. This autobiography was the result of a 1953 CIA operation in Iran launched by Donald Wilber after he had become convinced that in case of a Soviet takeover Lahuti would be the one most likely put forward as leader. To preempt this threat, the CIA published the counterfeit autobiography. Unlike Mosaddeq and other CIA targets, however, Lahuti’s position as a cultural mediator between the Soviet Union, Soviet Tajikistan, and Iran made the consequences of this operation more complex than the CIA had imagined. This paper explores its aftermath using recently declassified Soviet archival documents and interviews. It argues that this operation transformed Lahuti’s professional and social standing in Moscow, empowered him to challenge his long-time enemy Bobojon Ghafurov on the issue of Tajik ethnogenesis, and helped change the official Stalinist line on Persian literary culture. Lastly, this operation politicized Lahuti’s biography in ways that are relevant to the present day.     

From Siam to New York: Jacques May and the ‘foundation’ of medical geography

The history of medical geography is marked by a search for ancestors. The story usually begins in the writing of Hippocrates before re-emerging in the works of 18th and 19th century practitioners. In recent years, historical geographers have called for the destabilising of such assertions of lineage and descent. This paper offers a reconsideration of the history of medical geography through an exploration of the often hidden connections and intersections that have helped to frame the future trajectory of the sub-discipline. More specifically, we focus on the important contribution made by Dr Jacques Meyer May and offer a complex and multi-layered account that examines the close interweaving of his work as a colonial surgeon and specialist in tropical medicine and his role as a medical geographer in the United States.     

Investigating cultural evolution through biological phylogenetic analyses of Turkmen textiles

The debate on the evolution of culture has focused on two processes in particular, phylogenesis and ethnogenesis. Recently, it has been suggested that the latter has probably always been more significant than the former. This proposal was assessed by applying cladistic methods of phylogenetic reconstruction to a data set comprising decorative characters from textiles produced by Turkmen tribes since the 18th century. The analyses focused on two periods in Turkmen history: the era in which most Turkmen practised nomadic pastoralism and were organised according to indigenous structures of affiliation and leadership; and the period following their defeat by Tsarist Russia in 1881, which is associated with the sedentarisation of nomadic Turkmen and their increasing dependence on the market. The results indicate that phylogenesis was the dominant process in the evolution of Turkmen carpet designs prior to the annexation of their territories, accounting for c.70% of the resemblances among the woven assemblages. The analyses also show that phylogenesis was the dominant process after 1881, although ethnogenesis accounted for an additional 10% of the resemblances among the assemblages. These results do not support the proposition that ethnogenesis has always been a more significant process in cultural evolution than phylogenesis.     

Forum: Cultural Geography and Cultural Studies

This forum discusses linkages between cultural geography and allied ‘cultural’ disciplines. A symposium on this topic – held at the 2005 conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers in Armidale – was triggered by the targeted inclusion of geography in a cross‐disciplinary network funded by the Australian Research Council. Although non‐geographers in the network have articulated strong interest in and an enthusiasm for geography, their knowledge of, and everyday participation in its disciplinary travails have been limited. Given this, the papers in the forum review geography's long and dynamic consideration of the relations between place and culture, and raise a set of key issues for geographers to consider: how we might interact with other disciplinary debates about the ‘cultural’, retain distinctiveness as the home of intellectual inquiry around issues of space and place, and leverage opportunities to forge more permanent connections to geographers working not in our traditional institutional settings, but in a range of research centres, schools and disciplinary homes.     

Archives and care: Caring archival research practices in geography

Archival research has been long recognized as a key method in geography, and such research continues to appeal to scholars excavating historical influences on contemporary places. At the same time, geographical literature on care is growing rapidly. However, while geographers have often implemented care into their archival research and practice, these literatures have remained largely distinct from each other. In this paper, I bring archives and care into closer conversation. Drawing on existing geographical literature on care and on archival methods, work in archival studies, and my own research and ethnographic experiences in archives, I show how the socio-material practices of geographers in the archives help generate spaces of care, where ethical caring practices exist, and caring relationships flourish. I demonstrate how archival work in geography and beyond includes relationships of care between archivists, researchers, and archival records. I share some examples and strategies that geographers and other researchers can—and do—follow in maintaining, continuing, and repairing archival relationships, even in times of precarity and uncertainty.     

Voluntary regions and the case of Las Vegas

A shifting American cultural geography, stemming from clustering of like-minded people, has been much-discussed in recent years. The “voluntary region”, proposed by Wilbur Zelinsky in his path-breaking The cultural geography of the United States, is a regional construct relatively unexplored by cultural geographers that may help in their contributions to such conversations. As described by Zelinsky, voluntary regions are places that attract individual, like-minded people away from long-standing “traditional regions” based on a desire for amenity and economic opportunity. I review the concept and its sparse embrace in the literature and suggest that it has much to offer our discipline. Using Las Vegas as a paradigmatic example, I explore methods that can be used to explore the formation and character of voluntary regions. I argue that the voluntary region framework is an encompassing lens through which cultural geographers can examine the complex nature of place and regional construction at the hands of dynamic forces that lead people to resettle in new places.     

Results of the Third Congress of the Geographical Society of the USSR

A review of the IGU symposium on the history of geographical thought, held in July 1976 in Leningrad, discusses common themes in papers presented by Soviet geographers and foreign participants. In the view of the Soviet organizers, the foreign presentations were more concerned with the past than with the current impact of geography on socio-economic activities, which is said to distinguish the Soviet school of geography. The work of the symposium demonstrated that the ideas of geographical determinism had been largely abandoned. The presentations of foreign geographers suggested that they were still inadequately informed about the work of Soviet geographers despite ongoing translation programs.     

Institutions and Falsified Culture in the Novel Evening Act by Croatian Writer Pavao Pavličić

`In one area of his prose work, the Croatian writer Pavao Pavli?i? belongs to a group of writers in the 1970s who used a fantastic narrative model and thematized irrational parallel worlds as opposed to a realist model of narration. Pavli?i?’s novel Evening Act (published as Ve?ernji akt in 1981) has a realistic beginning, but it slips into fantastic narration when the main character, a young man called Mihovil, discovers his ability to falsify documents and works of art. At the same time, he is capable of recognizing falsified art works and documents that are accepted as an integral part of social, cultural, and historical memory. When this ability becomes dangerous, Mihovil falsifies his own body to escape from his unbearable reality. This paper will analyse the function of the fantastic model in Pavli?i?’s novel as a postmodern play with traditions of Croatian and world literature and culture. The ludic layer of the novel has a highly symbolic value: it draws attention to the relationship of cultural institutions and society to the authenticity of art works, the role of art, and ways of preserving (or destroying) cultural memory.     

Friedrich Ratzel and the nature of (political) geography

It is impossible to understand Ratzel's Politische Geographie without placing the figure of its author in the perspective of the critical bourgeois geography of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. From this point of view, Ratzel is the last representative of this bourgeois movement born in the first part of the eighteenth century in Germany with the name of “pure geography” or “natural geography”, and developed in the following century thanks to the great works of Karl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt. The purpose of bourgeois critical geography was to create a geographical discourse (a reasoning) able to transcend the identification between geographic knowledge and cartographic representation that was maintained by the Staatsgeographen—that is by the state geographers who defended the feudal aristocratic regime. But it is precisely this identification that German bourgeois geographers appropriated in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the bourgeoisie came into power through a compromise with its ancient political opponent. Only Ratzel, direct heir of the Erdkunde tradition of Ritter and von Humboldt, was an exception by opposing the new bourgeois state geography with his own state-based geography.