A Papago woman and a woman anthropologist

Ruth M. Underhill. Papago Woman. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979. xiii + 98 pp.     

Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture,Modernity, and Early Bengali Fiction

The novel in nineteenth-century Bengal was formed under European influence, adopting its techniques of representation from bourgeois realist fiction. Both witness to and participant in the making of colonial modernity, it placed particular emphasis upon the social substantiation of persons through the depiction of domestic interiors. The furniture of the bourgeois house became an important ingredient in that representational process. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's examination of the way in which furnished interiors came to compose the universe of private man in the nineteenth century, I argue that in the Bengali novel, there is a constant tension between that mode of self-construction and the suspicion and distrust of European furnishings exhibited in representative novelists of the period. Ultimately, in the fiction of Rabindranath Tagore, this distrust manifests itself in a rejection of the bourgeois interior, as well as a questioning of the very tools of realist representation.     

The modern cemetery: a design for life

In discussing the importance of public health anxieties within the birth of modern forms of governmentality, Foucault frequently mentions, but does not develop, the questions that arose about the appropriate disposal of the dead. In this paper, I explore the spatial rationalities of the modern cemetery in England in the mid-nineteenth century. As an illustrative example, I provide a detailed analysis of John Claudius Loudon's proposals for cemeteries. Loudon, a horticultural writer and designer who campaigned vigorously for cemetery reform, became crucial in the reconfiguration of the cemetery. I use Loudon's ideas as a dispositif, a material space that also provides a method of analysis for illuminating the operation of various inter-related governmental spatialisations and techniques. Specifically, I illustrate how the cemetery captures the diversification and widening of dispositional techniques of institutions and, at the same time, integrates hygienic imperatives, aesthetic-moral registers and an array of educational-civic functions. I argue that the cemetery, in real and ideal terms, manifests and intensifies a variety of rural and urban spaces and, paradoxically, generates a model milieu for the living.     

East End immigrants and the battle for housing: a comparative study of political mobilisation in the Jewish and Bengali communities

Twice in the recent history of the East End of London, the fight for decent housing has become part of a bigger political battle. These two very different struggles are representative of two important periods in radical politics – the class politics, tempered by Popular Frontism, that operated in the 1930s, and the new social movement politics of the seventies. In the rent strikes of the 1930s the ultimate goal was Communism. Although the local Party was disproportionately Jewish, Communist theory required an outward looking orientation that embraced the whole of the working class. In the squatting movement of the 1970s political organisers attempted to steer the Bengalis onto the path of black radicalism, championing separate organisation and turning the community inwards. An examination of the implementation and consequences of these different movements can help us to understand the possibilities and problems for the transformation of grass-roots activism into a broader political force, and the processes of political mobilisation of ethnic minority groups.     

Charisma,populism, and the formation of national identity: Sheikh Mujib and Bengali nationalism

Identity formation is a complex process and has been discussed by post-structuralist discourse theorist Ernesto Laclau. This paper focuses on Laclau's proposed ideas on the means of identity production and populism and studies the popular independence movement for Bangladesh under that rubric. It locates charismatic leadership as a necessary condition for populism and identifies Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the charismat suturing the various chains of equivalence that rose to become the populist movement that resulted in the nation's struggle for independence in 1971. This paper also looks at the transformational leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and acknowledges it as a necessary condition for the patterns of identity creation in East Bengal in the late 1960s.     

A Vietnamese Flag and a Bowl of Australian Flowers: Recomposing racism and sexism

This paper looks at the relationship between the discourses of racism and sexism and the configuration of school space in an Australian high school. I argue that school space is proliferative of racialised and sexualised divisions. Divisions can be identified between groups of 'Asian' girls, between 'Asian' girls and 'Asian' boys, and between 'Asian' students and 'non-Asian' students. While these divisions are legislated by discourses of racism and sexism, this paper focuses attention on 'Asian' girls response to this situation. I argue that against the experience of social marginality 'Asian' girls tactically reproduce differences. By highlighting the changing dynamics of spatial-social divisions in school, I show how 'Asian' girls contest and rework racialising/sexualising discourses to recompose 'Asian'/femininity.     

Choice Flowers and Well-Ordered Tables: Struggling Over Gender in a Nineteenth-Century Household

Historical archaeologists have generally considered households as isolated,bounded entities, and not as sets of social relations. Consequently, the household has gone unrecognized as an arena of struggle. Analysis of documents associated with the household of nineteenth-century reformer Gerrit Smith challenges this approach. At his Peterboro, New York estate, a struggle ensued between family members because of conflicting ideologies of self-presentation, and between worker and employer on account of the period's shifting gender ideology. In order to access the meanings of objects excavated, the material remains associated with the Smith household must be considered in light of these struggles.     

The glorlous life of a tibetan centenarian

hi Feb. 1910, he was born in a manor of Horkhang family in Gyama Valley in Maizhokunggar Cotunty which was 100 kilometers from Lhasa City. He was instructed by Sherab Gyatso, the famous scholar from Qinghai Province. In 1934, he formally became the heir of the Ngabo family. In Feb, 1951, he was appointed by the 14th Dalai Lama and the Kasang Government （the local government of Tibet） as chief negotiator with the central government in Beijing.     

吴梦窗花卉词误笺举隅

文章例举了郑文焯、朱彊村、杨铁夫等大家对梦窗词作中玉兰、海棠、豆蔻三种花卉所作的笺注并进行了辨正,确定了梦窗词中的"玉兰"是秋天莹白色兰花;辨明了"小春海棠"的植物特征;辨析了"蛮江豆蔻"、"蛮姜豆蔻"之间的差异。     

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.     

The environment as a life support system: the case of Biosphere 2

This paper studies an attempt to replicate the Earth’s biosphere in the second half of the twentieth century with the aim of preserving and refashioning the environment as a self‐reproducing ecological system. Ecosystems dynamics framed the planet Earth as a closed system and directed scientific attention to questions of global environmental management. The image of the Earth as a spacecraft and operable in a similar way supported ideas of placing the environment in a laboratory setting. Using the case of Biosphere 2, launched in the Arizona desert in 1983, this paper studies the images of nature and environment contained in this quest to create an ecosystem and human habitat as good as, or superior to nature on Earth (known in this context as Biosphere 1). The second biosphere was designed as ‘a prototype for a space colony’ that would eventually enable its deteriorating predecessor, the Earthly biosphere, to reproduce and allow human settler societies to migrate to other planets. The paper draws on the cultural history of the ship in Western culture and on ships and spaceships as archetypes of autarkic enclosures set apart from nature. It argues that Biosphere 2 as an example of a technologically controlled endosphere advanced an understanding of the environment as a ‘life support system’ that emphasized not completeness but systems integrity, and was based on principles of functionality and replaceability. The paper will explore how notions of biospheric life support shaped demands on the natural and social environments in Biosphere 2 and Biosphere 1.     

The trial of the new woman: citizens-in-training in the new Soviet Republic

This essay examines the texts of Soviet plays from the 1920s known as agitation trials that deal with issues of women's emancipation and participation in the public sphere. It argues that, far from showing women to be men's equals (the ostensible purpose of the plays), the trials give a shocking portrayal of their heroines' faults, from passivity and meddling to gossip and lack of discipline. Given these weaknesses, the women delegates are supposed to recognise their need for tutelage from the new authorities. Their citizenship is thus held, at best, on contingent approval from those authorities.