The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation – as in the context of colonial era evictions – there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of ‘sites of memory’, which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern ‘memory’, suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and ‘being first’. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory.     

Nitrate ruins: the photography of mining in the Atacama Desert,Chile

A photographic album entitled Oficina Alianza and Port of Iquique 1899 illustrates the industrial development of nitrate mining in Chile. From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, British capitalists dominated the extraction of Chilean nitrate and its export as a fertilizer and an explosive. The Oficina Alianza, a nitrate works at the centre of British monopoly of the trade, is, as other oficinas across the Antofagasta and Tarapacá regions of the Atacama Desert, a ruin. This article considers the correspondences between Alianza’s photographic album, a record of a working nitrate oficina, and its abandoned industrial structures. It examines the ruin and the photograph as Benjaminian allegories.     

A National Saint in a Fascist State: Catherine of Siena,ca 1922–1943

The annual festival of Saint Catherine of Siena is now the focus of a self‐conscious internationalism which celebrates Catherine as both Patron Saint of Italy and Co‐Patron Saint of Europe. When Catherine of Siena was proclaimed Patron Saint of Italy in 1939, however, the annual festival in her honour was quite different in ethos, being a highly patriotic, nationalistic, and even militaristic celebration of Catherine's significance in and for Fascist Italy. The article examines the campaign for Catherine to be proclaimed a “national saint” and “patron of Italy” during the 1920s and 1930s, locating it within the context of the relationship between Catholicism and Fascism in Mussolini's Italy. It also examines the celebration of her annual festival between 1940 and 1943 in the context of Italian participation in the Second World War, until the fall of Mussolini and his regime.     

A programme for the conservation of architectural plasters in earthen ruins in the American Southwest: Fort Union National Monument,New Mexico,USA

Abstract

Plasters constitute an important component of many ruined architectural and archaeological sites. Methods for their in situ conservation have lagged far behind the field treatment of other materials due to their ephemeral nature and the lack of programmatic laboratory and field research. A preservation strategy involving documentation, stabilization, interpretation and maintenance offers a methodological approach adaptable to most contexts. A pilot conservation programme is described for the stabilization and interpretation of the lime plasters within the nineteenth-century adobe ruins of Fort Union National Monument in New Mexico. Methods of documentation, emergency stabilization, injection hydraulic lime grouting and mortar repairs are described.     

Gender,Race, and Rumours: Re-examining the 1943 Race Riots

Focusing on three riots of the World War II era – those of Beaumont (Texas), Detroit, and New York's Harlem – this essay examines the rumours that sparked these disturbances to uncover the gendered ideologies that underlie racial violence. In these rumour narratives, women appear as either rape victims or tortured mothers, while men appear as either depraved rapists or noble protectors. The deployment of these images helped forge a defensive collective identity that facilitated the outbreak of violence. Because racial and gender ideologies were intimately linked, the author argues, race riots must be analysed through the lens of gender in order to be fully understood.     

地方志中"八景"的文化意义及史料价值

"八景"是中国地方志中一个十分重要的内容构成.然而,历史学家们对它的评价却一直非常苛刻.这究竟是怎么回事?本文拟在大量文本调查的基础上,从八景的文化意义与史料价值的角度,提出初步的分析说明.     

A world apart: geography, Australian quarantine, and the mother country

In many respects the Australian colonies were what one person called "the proud offspring of a grand old mother." Yet when it came to the prevention of imported infectious disease, Britain's Australian colonies were not a chip off the old block. British opposition to the lengthy and costly imposition of quarantine had intensified throughout the nineteenth century, eventuating in the abolition of human quarantine in 1896. The Australian colonies, on the other hand, which had based their first quarantine regulations on British law and remained constantly aware of changing medical trends in the mother country, gradually expanded the breadth and capabilities of their maritime quarantine as the century progressed. Although other European powers and British colonies progressively adopted systems of medical inspection more in line with British port prophylaxis and away from quarantine, the Australian colonies invested increasing amounts of time and money into more elaborate quarantine stations and regulations. In this article I examine some of the basic features of coastal disease prevention in the Australian colonies and how they differed from British controls. Australia's distance from Britain was emphasized in the quarantine debates geographically as well as in policy. I argue that the often controversial differences in quarantine policy were for the most part a product of Australia's geographical location. The natural prophylactic of Australia's remoteness was not a reason to minimize quarantine in the colonies but rather served to increase it; whereas, it was argued that "the geographical position of England deprived it of the advantages...derived from a comprehensive quarantine system." I discuss this seeming anomaly in light of other arguments that have claimed that the close proximity of a state to the acknowledged origin of a disease was likely to increase its eagerness to quarantine.