Cultural Niche Construction and Remote Sensing of Ancient Anthropogenic Environmental Change in the North Coast of Peru

Archaeological land use results in the modification of natural environments according to cultural templates and strategies. Deeply entrenched environmental legacies can result from such “niche construction,” influencing subsequent cultures and continuing to resonate in modern ecological function. These changes can be better understood through archaeological remote sensing.Here, I describe spectral responses of densely vegetated sugarcane fields in the Chicama Valley (north coast of Peru) to archaeological features and associated anthropogenic soils (anthrosols). Ongoing satellite remote sensing documents approximately 440 previously unrecorded major archaeological monuments and smaller features within a 310 km² sample of the Chicama Valley The majority of these date to the Moche–Chimu periods (ca. AD 300–1400), with others dating to the Cupisnique–Colonial periods. The newly recorded features are significant for accurately reconstructing the socio-ecological history of anthropogenic environmental change in the region.In addition to advancing analyses of archaeological settlement, these results reveal how prehispanic land use legacies result in persistent anthropogenic niches that can affect modern agricultural potentials. The relationships between anthropogenic features and sugarcane development can be directly evaluated through vegetation indices and physically based image transforms. Phenological response is linked to long-term alterations in soil texture, organic-matter content, and moisture capacity. Past land use thus has a significant impact upon contemporary ecological function, resulting in anthropogenic microenvironments. As sugarcane increasingly is an important industrial crop, these results have the potential to be widely applied to archaeological and agronomic problems, including reconstructions of archaeological landscapes, understanding persistent anthropogenic environments, and mitigating heritage loss while potentially improving precision agriculture.     

Dreams and Conversions: A Comparative Analysis of Catholic and Buddhist Dreams in Ming and Qing China: Part I

Since the Church fathers, oneirology and dream revelations were regarded with considerable suspicion among theologians and ecclesiastical authorities, though dreams remained a powerful and pervasive feature of religious expression at a popular level. Among converts in Ming-Qing China, where lay initiatives were necessarily important given the paucity of European priests, holy dreams were crucial in the formation and consolidation of a powerful religious subculture. The following is a version of the keynote address delivered at the Fourth Biennial Meeting of the Religious History Society, in July 2004 in Newcastle, Australia.     

Dreams and Conversions: A Comparative Analysis of Catholic and Buddhist Dreams in Ming and Qing China. Part Two

A database of holy dreams, assembled from Jesuit reports of the 17th century, forms the basis for qualitative and quantitative analyses, the results of which are compared with a second database of holy dreams drawn from Buddhist sources of the 17th and 18th centuries. The comparative analysis of religious images, doctrines, and the social history of dreams allows for some tentative observations on the psychology of Christian conversion and the sociology of Christian community formation in late Ming and early Qing China.     

Women and Citizenship in Indonesia

Literature on citizenship canvasses three related issues: membership of a political community, the rights and obligations associated with that membership, and participation in the life of that polity. This paper investigates Indonesian women's experience of these aspects of citizenship in the twentieth century. As a plural society, Indonesia needs to accommodate gender differences within its notion of citizenship. Only women can ensure that this accommodation is worked through in an equitable manner.     

Being Canadian: Dual Citizenship in Historical Perspective

Why do states configure their citizenship laws in certain ways? Why do they allow or prohibit dual citizenship? Why was it only in 1946 that Canada decided to enact its first citizenship law which prohibited multiple national allegiances? Why was a similar proposal abandoned in 1931? And why was this citizenship law changed in 1977 to allow dual citizenship? A common answer is that citizenship reflects the national “identity” of each nation-state. Through a perusal of the debates regarding citizenship laws in Canada, I locate the particular motivation for introducing those laws. I argue that although the symbolic element of citizenship laws is significant, citizenship laws are enacted as a political instrument to achieve immediate and specific goals. In particular, accepting dual citizenship in Canada should be seen as a one of the strategies political elites tried in order to incorporate English and French speakers under the same flag.     

Unsettling Time: Persistence and Memory in Spanish Colonial Peru

In this paper, I explore the politics of memory during the Toledan reforms—a series of ambitious administrative changes legislated in colonial Peru between 1569 and 1581, by viceroy Francisco de Toledo. At the center of Toledo’s project was an initiative to resettle the entire native population of the audiencias of Lima and Charcas into a series of planned towns called reducciones. This movement—reducción—sought to transform Andean indigenous peoples into subjects of the Catholic Church and the Spanish crown through a series of explicitly spatial operations, including regional population nucleation and settlement planning. But the terms of these changes were also temporal: as reducción shaped landscapes and built environments, it also sought to transform indigenous historicity, bringing native peoples into the Era of Christ and carefully regulating the social institutions and practices by which they accounted for their pasts. The Toledan reforms therefore present a clear example of one empire’s attempts to subjugate conquered peoples through mnemonic practices. Yet archaeological research in one corner of the viceroyalty—Peru’s Zaña valley—suggests that the story of how indigenous memories were actually shaped during the course of resettlement and its aftermath was far from straightforward. To understand these transformations, I argue that we must explore not only the short-term dialectic of Spanish designs and their indigenous responses, but also the “afterlives” of reduccion in the 17th and 18th centuries. Over the longer term, reducción achieved staying power through a series of unanticipated pathways, in which landscape change, demography, and indigenous agency all played essential roles. I argue that these developments ultimately resulted in much more complex forms of remembering than those implicit in reducción legislation and that they underscore the importance for archaeological studies of memory of attending both to the materiality of imperial landscapes and long-term processes of subject formation.     

Negotiating Femininity: Women and representation in emergency employment in Peru

This article analyses the contradictory nature of the 'new space' created by women working in emergency employment programmes in Peru. It focuses on the different forms of opposition towards this new space and illustrates the mechanisms women have used in order to negotiate their place within it. The article briefly outlines the role played by the Peruvian state in legitimating this new space for women and argues that with the representations women make of themselves, of other workers, and of their workplace, these employees take strategic steps in forging new femininities. Empirical evidence is used to show how women simultaneously identify difference and commonality with their fellow female workers. In theoretical terms, the implications of these processes are examined in the context of the reproduction and subversion of stereotypes and the contestation of dominant gendered ideologies in Peru. The article examines how the reproduction and subversion of stereotypes involves the manipulation of binary categories of 'good' and 'bad' women. It argues that strategic representations, in everyday contexts, are vital to the renegotiation of femininities. It introduces the notions of 'strategic representations' and 'contradictory spaces' to examine some of the debates concerning the role of 'survival strategies' in gender and development analysis.     

Muslims in Europe: Managing Multiple Identities and Learning Shared Citizenship

Abstract

This article offers a tour d'horizon of the new Muslim communities formed in western Europe in the last forty years, now numbering some 13 million. After some idiosyncratic, historic notes, a summary ethnic, socio-economic and demographic profile is given, followed by a suggested four phase development cycle. The differential incorporation of Muslims in public and civic life turns on a consideration of a number of factors: the presence of at least three different models for managing diversity within western Europe, as well as the institutional space accorded to "religion" in public life across Europe. Muslims are not presented as passive victims of exclusion but social actors carving out space for a distinctive "identity politics." Within the various Muslim communities a debate is taking place on whether or not they should participate in electoral politics - the contours of this debate are drawn. Attention is also drawn to inter-generational tensions and the issue of "radicalization" amongst sections of the Muslims educated and socialised in the West. The article concludes by reflecting on the whether the churches can act as an antidote to far right politics and "religious nationalism."     

Imperial Dreams Prefigured: America and its Middle Eastern Urge

Book reviewed:
McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East.     

The Role of Dreams in Guru Chos dbang's Autobiography: Notes on Dreams in Two Volumes of Guru Chos dbang's Writings

According to the relevant historical documents,Guru Chos dbang is a controversial figure.He is considered one of the five prominent gTer-ston (treasure discoverers) in several chronicles of Nyingma tradition,however,Bu ston Rin chen grub claims in his comments on mantra practice in Tibet that Guru Chos dbang offered perverted teachings and fabricated false treasures.This is a topic of extreme interesting to many researchers,and there are several of works of English scholarship including Janet Gyatso's work on Guru Chos dbang's autobiography analyzing its narrative methods.There is still more remaining to figure out.