Between Mumford And Marx: Anatomising Imperial San Francisco

The practice of restoration ecology (the creation and restoration of ecosystems) has important implications for theorizing nature in the traditions of O'Connor's 'capitalized nature,' Haraway's hybrid socionatures, and other recent work in poststructural approaches to political ecology. The prominent US environmental discourse of 'no net loss of wetlands' has spurred the rapid expansion of restoration practices, which promise to open a new frontier in the commodification and capitalization of nature. Through wetland mitigation and banking, restoration science is representing entire ecosystems as abstract, mobile, and fungible entities; however, a simple reading of a restored landscape as fully capitalized is unsatisfactory. Close attention to the wetland commodification process reveals two important points: 1) the commodification and capitalization of nature is never automatic; rather, the crucial steps of abstraction and valuation are composed of negotiations between and within differentiated segments of the state and civil society, in which there are many spaces for resistance; and 2) the materiality of restoration sites provided important challenges to the commodification process, which are not contemplated within critical approaches to nature as currently constituted. The transformation of restoration sites into sites of commodity provision is incomplete at best. A major challenge for poststructural political ecology will be to specify ecological phenomena and their important role in the social construction of material environments, without falling into an ontological commitment to the primacy of ecological data.     

Embodying Place: Pathologizing Chinese and Chinatown in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco

This paper argues for uniting disease with body theories in investigations of power relations and the construction of race. It examines this alliance through the case studies of smallpox and syphilis in nineteenth century San Francisco. In locating epidemics inside the Chinese community and by reproducing Chinese bodies as intrinsically diseased, medical theories explaining smallpox and syphilis succeeded in shifting dominant constructions of race from different to pathological. But the process of body production and the role of disease in it cannot be divorced from a simultaneous analysis of the production of place. The configuration of Chinatown's streets and alleyways, perceptions of filth and crowding, and the bodies resident within Chinatown were simultaneously pathologized in a process that exemplifies the need for a better integration of body theories with theories of the social production of place.     

From collinearity to structure: San Francisco and Pittsburgh, 1860

The author argues that giving a name to any period of history is a complicated process for historians, requiring careful consideration of many factors. Applying the extensive presence and use of computers as an example of the process at work, he suggests that it may be too early to name our time the information age.     

Women's and Children's Quarters in Golden Gate Park,San Francisco

This paper explores the mythic domesticity encoded in the Children's Quarter in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The play area, opened in 1888, represented a new genre of gender-specific public space developed in urban parks in the late nineteenth century. In welcoming women to the public domain of the urban park, gendered spaces such as the Children's Quarter signified a complex response to changing class and gender identities in the nineteenth-century city. Imposing a domestic structure on women's public presence, the Children's Quarter modeled a middle-class domestic ideal, affirming women's essential association with the private sphere even as it welcomed them to the public sphere of the urban park.     

Localisation and William Macewen's Early Brain Surgery Part I: The Controversy

Neurosurgery for the removal of brain tumours based on localising signs is usually dated from the 1884 operation by Bennett and Godlee. However, within weeks of that operation claims were made on behalf of William Macewen, the Glasgow surgeon, to have been the real pioneer of such surgery. According to Macewen's protagonists, he had conducted seven similar operations earlier than Bennett and Godlee and, in a notable 1888 address, Macewen described these seven pre-1884 cases and a number of others operated on after 1884. This paper, which is in two parts, contains an evaluation of the claims made for the priority of Macewen's pre-1884 operations. Part I deals mainly with Macewen's work in fields other than brain surgery that are relevant to it and sets out the facts of the controversy. It begins with a brief biography of Macewen, describes his pioneering work in antiseptic and aseptic surgery, his work on osteotomy and bone regeneration, and his use in brain surgery of the knowledge so gained. Part I concludes with an examination of the battle waged in the newspapers between Macewen's and Bennett's and Godlee's supporters, and of previously unpublished correspondence between Macewen himself, David Ferrier and Hughes Bennett. The primary records of the patients on whom Macewen operated, together with other materials relevant to the controversy, are examined in Part II.     

Early Olmec obsidian trade and economic organization at San Lorenzo

The Olmec were the first complex society to develop in Mesoamerica between 1800 and 600 cal B.C. The earliest large Olmec center during this period was the archaeological site of San Lorenzo which emerged as Mesoamerica's first large ritual and political center between 1400 and 1000 cal B.C. San Lorenzo's growth as a prominent center included the development of long distance trade relationships with adjacent areas of Guatemala and highland Mexico. High precision chemical analysis of obsidian imported for use in the fabrication of cutting tools is used to reconstruct the growth, size and extent of San Lorenzo's interregional exchange networks with areas of Mexico and Guatemala where obsidian occurs as raw material. A total of 852 obsidian artifacts were analyzed to reconstruct changes in obsidian procurement between 1800 and 800 cal B.C. This represents one of the largest samples of sourced obsidian from a Mesoamerican site and it provides a comprehensive picture for the development of interregional trade networks for Mesoamerica's first large Olmec center.     

Geochemical methods for inferring seasonal occupation of an estuarine shellmound: a case study from San Francisco Bay

Seasonal patterns of Native American residence and use of shell mounds of the San Francisco Bay area, California are of great interest. This work investigates seasonal occupation by means of a new method for interpretation of geochemical data from Mytilus trossulus specimens recovered from one of these structures, the Ellis Landing Shell Mound (CA-CCO-295). The approach, which is suitable for relatively small shell fragments from a variety of archaeological contexts, is used to infer the environmental conditions (temperature and salinity of ambient water) at harvest time, compared with average conditions for the period, and thus estimate the season during which the shells were harvested. This information, in turn, is employed to evaluate current models about the growth and construction of prehistoric shell mounds in San Francisco Bay. The method was applied to seven different lenses in the shell mound ranging in age from ∼240 cal yr BP to ∼3510 cal yr BP. We found that, although seasonal occupation varied over time, it generally was confined to summer through late fall, with little indication of winter gathering. Our findings suggest that California shell mounds, such as Ellis Landing, were constructed in a very different manner than some other mounded places used by contemporaneous hunter-gatherers elsewhere in North America.     

旧金山媾和前后日本政治资源重组与结构演变

美国对日占领期间,日本社会政治结构初步完成军国主义法西斯政体向欧美议会民主政治的转型。在此期间,日本社会内各种政治资源经过重组,形成保守型政治势力和革新型政治势力,最终以“55年体制”方式完成日本战后政治结构的改造。     

移民网络、社会资源配置与中国东北新移民--美国旧金山湾区田野调查札记

在田野调查访谈的基础上,本文以美国旧金山湾区的中国东北新移民为研究实例,对社会资本和非制度性的社会资源配置在当代中国的跨国移民活动中所扮演的具体角色进行考察和分析。本文认为,近年来迅速崛起的东北新移民已开始成为当代中国国际移民潮的主要成员之一。近10多年来东北地区之所以会出现大规模移民海外的现象,其中既有古典经济学移民理论所提出的经济层面的原因,也有中国社会内部制度变迁的深层因素。而非制度性社会资源配置机制中的强、弱两种关系网,尤其是海外新移民社会中的弱关系网络,则对当代东北人的跨境迁徙活动及其在海外移居社会寻找工作等方面做出了莫大的贡献。