Nepal's Traditional Settlement: Pattern and Architecture

The Kathmandu Valley is the cultural hearth of Nepal. The cultural landscape that developed here during the past 2(100 years remained unique in many respects from that found in neighboring Asian countries. The scale and arrangement of open space, the distribution of temples and houses and the location of cremation sites and rest houses all indicated an understanding of visual response to settlement design and the importance of social interaction. The continuous facade of lavishly carved wooden windows on backgrounds of red brick walls provided unique pictures of streets and remained as visual testimony of the high level of artistic skill and of the affluent economic conditions reached by the people of the Kathmandu Valley during the Malla Period. Much of this cultural development slowed down with the beginning of the present Shaha dynasty. Traditional buildings have been replaced by incongruous tall buildings with little emphasis on artistic taste. Some work on historical preservation has been underway. But, in view of the fast demographic changes and pseudo-modernization of the valley, how much of these architectural treasures can be preserved is still a matter of conjecture.     

“自下而上”:当代中国农村社会研究的社会史视角

从互助组到人民公社体制结束,是一个前后相继、不可割裂的时代。从"自下而上"的社会史角度对此进行研究,可以纠正以往研究的缺失,丰富我们对新中国历史的认识。中国社会史研究应当引入到现当代史的研究,这亦是社会史研究应有的社会关怀。     

Urban Settlement Systems and Rural Sustaining Communities: An Example from Chan Chan's Hinterland

Abstract

The study of prehistoric cities has often been marked by research strategies that focus completely on urban centers and thus preclude the delineation of entire settlement systems by ignoring the interrelationships between cities and their rural sustaining communities. A major focus of recent research in the Moche Valley on the Peruvian North Coast has been on elucidating the nature of urbanrural relations between the prehistoric Chimú city of Chan Chan and contemporaneous sites located in its hinterland. Excavation at the village of Cerro la Virgen together with additional evidence obtained from other sites in Chan Chan's rural sustaining area has provided insights into Chimú lifeways in nonmetropolitan areas, as well as evidence suggesting a multifaceted plan for organizing lands outside the civic center of Chan Chan. The archaeological data indicate that an important aspect of the organization of rural argicultural zones was the restriction of settlement to villages circumscribed by the Chimú state.     

Ödemiş-Dereuzunyer: Architectural Features of a Rural Settlement to Be Submerged by Dam Waters

ABSTRACT

The village of Dereuzunyer located in the Rahmanlar Valley of the Küçük Menderes Basin is a settlement that is a natural extension of a topography shaped by a joint contribution of culture and nature. It has preserved the authenticity and integrity of its traditional rural fabric and gives detailed information about the architectural approach, building technology, construction techniques, landscape features and traditional craftsmanship of past rural life. While some of the cultural assets in the settlement containing detailed information about the rural lifestyle of the past have survived to date despite the harsh natural conditions, the remainder have been neglected, become dilapidated, and fallen into ruin over time due to lack of maintenance by the local people because of rumors about the possible dam project and expropriations in progress. After completion of the Rahmanlar Dam in 2019, the cultural landscape values of Dereuzunyer will be lost irretrievably. This article aims to make a contribution to creating awareness about avoiding such losses, not only by introducing the non-renewable values of Dereuzunyer, by documentation of its historical development, its traditional architecture, its traditional building types, its construction techniques, and its plan and façade features, but also by promoting and interpreting its lost cultural heritage.     

Narratives of Community and Change in a Contemporary Rural Setting: The Case of Duaringa,Queensland

Contemporary rural communities are being affected by a range of changes and processes in Australia, including major changes in demographic patterns; the organisation and performance of primary industries; levels of government support for economic and social infrastructure; and wider developments in technology and changing socio‐cultural values. The impact of these processes has been felt unequally and small communities which have had a traditionally close relationship with agricultural industries are particularly challenged. The current paper reports on one such community and provides the opportunity to analyse both the the substance and cultural understandings of such forms of rural change/uncoupling. The paper presents local narratives of community and change in Duaringa, Central Queensland and responds to recent international literature suggesting that the meanings and politics of rural change are as significant as the economic trends that are occurring. The Duaringa narratives demonstrate both the substance and dynamics of expressions of community (and loss). And the paper concludes that these meanings are also influenced by wider processes including consumption‐oriented lifestyles and national interests in South East Asian relations.     

From the Ground Up: Agency,Practice, and Community in the Southwestern British Bronze Age

Embodied, sensual, engagements between people, earthly elements, and celestial bodies during focused, periodic acts of ritual construction and artifact deposition in the southwestern British Bronze Age resulted in the remaking of identities, local communities, symbolic/mythical knowledge, and the landscape itself. To appreciate how material culture, time, and space were employed to define the criteria by which people understood themselves and their world necessitates an archaeological focus upon shared practices in particular settings that served to define rules of engagement with the environment based upon shared human perceptions. Agency appears in this encounter as central in the construction and perpetuation of symbolic perception, shared social memory, and community identity.     

"We Know What the Problem Is": Using Oral History to Develop a Collaborative Analysis of Homelessness from the Bottom Up

Using audio, video, and radio interviews, the Cleveland HomelessOral History Project (CHOHP) has sought to foster the developmentof a collaborative analysis of homelessness from the bottomup. Designed to overcome problems with traditional academicresearch on homelessness, CHOHP explicitly seeks to share researchwith those living on the streets and in the shelters in Cleveland,Ohio and involve homeless people in the process of analysis.Rather than focusing on the personal pathologies of the homeless,the analysis that emerges from CHOHP suggests that trends indowntown and neighborhood real estate development, the criminalizationof the poor, the growth of the temporary labor industry, andthe retrenchment of the welfare system have led to the emergenceof powerful interests invested in perpetuating homelessness. Beyond analyzing these trends, CHOHP's formal research settinghas emboldened homeless people to act and become agents forsocial change.     

Religion,Community and The Infanticidal Mother: Evidence From 1840s Rural Wiltshire

Abstract

The existing literature on the history of infanticide has typically considered the crime as a reaction to a specifi c set of diffi cult individual circumstances, but has not attempted to place the infanticidal mother within a longer personal timeframe. Nor has the role of her religious belief been much examined. This article investigates three key elements in the case of Rebecca Smith (1807–1849), the last woman executed in England for the murder of her own infant: her bad marriage; her poverty; and her Baptist religion. These factors provide context for her socio-economic and psychological development, and thus for her status as England's best documented serial infant killer. The article suggests that, as a married woman, Smith's choices were infl uenced by conditions both wider and deeper than the more immediate issues which have tended to be associated with infanticide by unmarried women.     

Preferences for Housing, Jobs, and Commuting: A Mixed Logit Analysis

This paper reports stated preferences of Dutch workers for combinations of housing, employment, and commuting. The analysis uses standard logit models as well as mixed logit models. Estimation results offer insights into the relative importance of various aspects of housing, employment, and commuting. Households dislike commuting and the value of commuting time implied by the model is high in comparison to the wage rate. Nevertheless, preferences for some housing attributes are strong enough to make substantially longer commuting acceptable to most workers. Of special interest is the strong preference for living in small-or medium-size cities, especially among two income households. Using a mixed logit model instead of a standard logit model results in a substantial improvement of the loglikelihood, reflecting the importance of heterogeneity among respondents. If no individual characteristics are incorporated into the model, the mixed logit implies substantially lower average monetary evaluations of most attributes. These differences are much smaller if some individual characteristics are incorporated into the model.     

The Archaeology of Rural Settlement and Class in a Pre-WWII Japanese Plantation on Tinian,Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

A large body of literature today exists on the events of World War II in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands located in the Western Pacific, written mostly by the victors of the conflict and their descendants. In contrast, no first-hand Japanese accounts have been translated into English from the pre-war period of sugarcane plantations in these islands, between 1914 and 1944. To fill this void in the literature, archaeologists working on the island of Tinian have begun to contract Japanese historians to conduct interviews with former Okinawan residents of the pre-war plantations and synthesize information from primary historical documents. What has become evident by this exercise is that many memories of the pre-war plantation system in the islands reflect a spirit of relative egalitarianism among the Okinawan laborers, while the rural archaeological record suggests evidence of an emerging economic class structure.     

Reconceptualizing Participation for Sustainable Rural Development: Towards a Negotiation Approach

In many popular intervention methodologies aimed at stimulating sustainable rural development (in the widest possible sense) the idea of ‘participation’ is a leading principle. This article will demonstrate that the process in which actors are supposed to participate is often thought of as being a process of planning, decision‐making and/or social learning. It will be argued that such an operationalization of development processes is based on inconsistent theoretical assumptions, and can easily lead to unproductive development interventions due to an inability to handle conflicts. As an alternative it is proposed to use negotiation theory as a basis for organizing participatory development efforts. The implications of such a shift in thinking about participation are far‐reaching: it requires new modes of analysis, and different roles, tasks and skills for facilitators of participatory processes.     

散村的形成及其演变——以江汉平原腹地的乡村聚落形态及其演变为中心

传统时代江汉平原腹地的乡村聚落,主要选择地势稍高的自然墩台、长冈或建造人工墩台,以躲避洪水的侵袭;很多台墩依堤而建或与堤相联,但台墩之间并不相连,从而形成以散居为主导的乡村聚落形态。江汉平原腹地以散居为主导的乡村聚落形态之形成,有其根深蒂固的地理基础与社会经济根源。环境与资源条件的限制、传统的经济生活方式,乃是散村形成并长期延续下来的根本原因。     

Fearing Food: The Influence of Risk Perceptions on Public Preferences for Uniform and Centralized Risk Regulation

Public opinion features prominently in policy research because it sets bounds on the definition of policy problems and acceptable policy solutions. We contend that public opinion is also important for setting bounds on the level of government at which policy hazards are regulated by shaping preferences for uniformity of regulation and, relatedly, preferences for centralization. We offer a theoretical argument for why risk creates pressures for uniform standards and examine the extent to which preferences for uniformity and centralization are the product of fairly stable individual-level predispositions (e.g. partisanship and ideology) versus more fluid attitudes like perceptions of risk, which vary in response to crises, new information, and issue framing. We test our argument using survey data in the policy domain of food safety and find that individuals who anticipate greater risk from food-borne illness prefer more uniform food safety regulation, which translates into preferences for federal-level policymaking. Our results imply that contextual circumstances and strategic communications that influence risk perceptions can create not only generalized public demand for more regulatory policy but specific demand for uniform, centralized regulation.