Three geographers in an archive: positions, predilections and passing comment on transient lives

Despite the existence of research conducted by geographers eschewing or professing religious faith, the influence of researchers and their methods have yet to receive critical attention within the study of religion. The experience of three geographers working on a three-year research project suggests that it is vital to reflect upon the inter-subjective relationships and methodologies used to reconstruct the religious past. How do different subject positions influence our selections from historical records? We also consider whether the spatialities of putatively 'religious' archives, whether formally or informally constituted, make a difference to the construction of historiographical knowledge. In attempting to answer these questions, the paper argues that developing an awareness of different types of positionality, vis-à-vis religious faith and practice, combined with reflexivity, vis-à-vis methodology, can enrich the interpretative reconstruction of the religious past.     

论乡村地理学的对象、内容和理论框架

本文从历史、经验和理论三个角度论证了乡村地理学以乡村区域系统为研究对象。在对乡村区域系统特征分析的基础上概括出当代乡村地理学13个方面65个要点的基本研究内容,并偿试性地建构了以结构、进化和与环境关联为主体的乡村区域系统理论框架。     

积极开展海洋人文地理学研究促进我国海洋开发

海洋经济地理研究工作大体上是从我国进行全国海岸带调查时开展起来的,前后开展了海岸带(包括从岸线起陆上10公里至水下-15米〈实际已达-35米〉的地带)的资源调查与评价、社会经济调查与评价、资源利用与开发设想,以及乡镇、县和市的综合开发研究(例如小区综合开发试验和县、市国民经济发展综合规划的研究)等项研究工作,取得了一批成果,也积累了一些经验,特别是发现了一些问题.由于这一时期是以     

Mourning Geography: A Punctum,Strathclyde and the Death of a Subject

Abstract

This article documents the formal consultation held at the University of Strathclyde in 2011 which concluded with a decision to withdraw the geography programme from the academic curriculum. In examining the remains of this consultation, the article offers an understanding of the reactions of staff and students to the proposed closure through the theoretical work on mourning by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. With use of the notions of punctum and studium in particular, it tracks the discursive location, if not definition, of what was and is poignant about geography at this higher education institution.     

Die Auswanderung: religion, culture, and migration among Old Colony Mennonites

Migrations among the Mennonite people were historically undertaken in an attempt to secure religious freedom. Migrations are still being made by the most conservative Mennonite groups. This article briefly examines the process of migration in Mennonite history, and emphasizes the role of migration among one particular group, the Old Colony. A Mennonite settlement in northern Alberta serves as a case study for this investigation, and demonstrates that the preservation of lifestyle is a fundamental objective of all Old Colony migrations. Between 1950 and 1970, families from this community moved, in succession, to another part of northern Alberta, to a new settlement in Belize, and finally, in a remarkable exodus, to Bolivia.     

Language,religion and the politics of difference

Language and religion are arguably the two most socially and politically consequential domains of cultural difference in the modern world. Yet there have been very few efforts to compare the two in any sustained way. I begin by aligning language and religion, provisionally, with ethnicity and nationhood, and by sketching five ways in which language and religion are both similar to and similarly intertwined with ethnicity and nationhood. I then identify a series of key differences between language and religion and draw out their implications for the political accommodation of cultural heterogeneity. I show that religious pluralism tends to be more intergenerationally robust and more deeply institutionalised than linguistic pluralism in western liberal democracies, and I argue that religious pluralism entails deeper and more divisive forms of diversity. The upshot is that religion has tended to displace language as the cutting edge of contestation over the political accommodation of cultural difference – a striking reversal of the longer‐term historical process through which language had previously displaced religion as the primary focus of contention.     

Presencing the divine: religion and technology in the Latin West

ABSTRACT

For over a millennium, Catholic and Protestant traditions have deployed technologies to address the central paradox of the Christian faith: God’s absence after Easter. The following essay brings together scholarship on religious technics in the Christian Latin West during the medieval and early modern periods with a focus on the performance of presence. Medieval actors utilized an array of techniques, instruments, and contraptions to manifest the divine power present in holy matter. The movement of artifacts and people across medieval and early modern horizons mobilized and multiplied the effects of sacred proximity. The Society of Jesus’ emphasis on sensuality in worship and spectacle linked older forms of ritual piety with routinized religion. The shift from a predominantly Christian to modern culture in the West did not terminate organized religion’s close association with technology, but extended the experience of spiritual presence in the West through industrial and post-industrial, digital means.     

试论区域经济地理学的实践功能

本文列举了区域经济地理学研究中存在的危机表现,认为克服危机的出路在于参与区域发展与开发的实践。在当代的中国,实践领域是非常宽广的,区域经济地理学的科学属性和方法特别适合实践的要求。文章提出了当前应参与的实践课题和实践过程中应注意解决的一些理论认识。     

清代学者对于西北史地之研究及其著述

抗日战争爆发后,中国边疆问题日趋严重。史念海先生与他的老师顾颉刚先生十分重视对边疆史料特别是西北史料的搜集和整理,史先生写下了这篇文章,旨在揭示中国疆域沿革的历程,以激发国人的抗日热情。史先生认为: 清代学者十分关注西北史地问题,早在乾嘉时期,即有人致力于西北史地之研究;乾嘉之后,西北边疆多事,探讨西北史地的人日益增多。他们或整理史地文献,或撰写史地专著,或记述清廷在西北的武功,或记载中俄在西北的界务,产生了一批重要的著述。这些著述,大都仍然具有重要学术价值。     

Geography of contestation: A study on the Yellow Vest movement and the rise of populism in France

The rise of a geography of discontent highlighted in recent studies points to a strong association between voting for populist parties and territories with socioeconomic difficulties. While discontent has primarily been addressed through the analysis of populist votes, we provide additional elements of analysis by comparing these populist votes to the Yellow Vest movement, and we distinguish the populist votes coming from the far-left party from those coming from the far-right party. Our results show that the Yellow Vest movement cannot be confused with French populist supporters and that their sensitivity to territorial dimensions also differs from that of the latter, especially in terms of access to public services. Their behavior highlights that the geography of protest takes multiple shapes and cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between urban and mostly rural or peripheral areas. This raises serious concerns about the dynamics of territories and the deleterious effects of metropolization and the closure of public services in peri-urban and rural territories that are not specific to France.     

Teaching Across the Divide: Physical and Human Geographies of Hurricane Katrina

This article critically reflects on our effort to ‘teach across the divide’, by integrating physical and human geography in a new first-year course. We achieved this integration by structuring our course around a series of key events, in order to draw out the interaction of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ forces. After setting out the intellectual and institutional reasons for integration, we illustrate our approach with reference to one of the key events covered in our course: Hurricane Katrina. Finally, we draw on our own reflections and student evaluations to consider the positive outcomes of our approach, and the challenges it poses.     

Gramsci and the issue of religion: Catholic modernism and the Italian Partito Popolare

ABSTRACT

Gramsci's interest in Italian politics led him to tackle a key issue in the present-day discourse: the relationship between the Holy See and the national State. Additionally, he paid close attention to internal issues of Christianity, from its origins to his own times and – similar to many other socialist thinkers – he believed that there were several echoes between the early Christian experiences and contemporary socialism. From this arose his concern with the religious crisis of the early twentieth century – so-called ‘Modernism’ – as well as the story of the Partito Popolare (Popular Party, PPI), the organization founded by the priest Luigi Sturzo after the First World War, which was marked – especially amongst its left-wing components – by its anti-fascist positions.     

中国人文地理学复兴的回顾、反思与展望

1978年以后,我国人文地理学走上了复苏和振兴的道路。本文试较为系统地回顾和反思十余年来人文地理学复兴的历程、成就与问题,展望90年代的发展。作者认为,理论建树、新领域和新方向开拓不足,是人文地理学发展中的主要问题;90年代应将人地关系理论与应用研究结合起来,重点开展持续发展、灾害适应、企业地理和区域科学四个方面的研究。     

Labor's Geography: Capital,Violence, Guest Workers and the Post‐World War II Landscape

Abstract: The impetus to labor geography—putting workers and their practices and interests right at the heart of our analyses and making these ontologically prior in our theorizing—is the right one. Because this is the right impulse, work in labor geography has tended to over‐valorize both the ability of workers to shape the landscapes of capitalism and the long‐term efficacy of any such “shaping”. Arguing from a specific case—the struggles over agribusiness in California in the immediate post‐World War II California—this paper seeks to understand those moments when workers are all but powerless. It argues that those of us interested in politically charged and politically efficacious labor geographies need to retrain our focus as much on the structures within which workers live and work as well as on the actions undertaken by powerful forces within capital and the state whose interests are served by various forms of worker powerlessness.     

Professor Penck's Bluff: Geography,Espionage and Hysteria in World War I

This article considers the image of geography during World War I through a discussion of newspaper controversies about the pre‐war activities of German and British geographers. Early in the war, Sven Hedin and Albrecht Penck, renowned geographers whose achievements had been widely celebrated by the British geographical establishment, were named in the media as enemy spies whose supposedly disinterested scientific inquiries in Britain and the Empire had masked their real intention to pass sensitive information to the German High Command. British geography stood accused of collusion with enemy ‘super spies’. This article examines how Britain's geographical community, represented by the Royal Geographical Society, sought to defend the discipline's patriotic virtue and head off a full‐scale media witch‐hunt. In so doing, the article comments on the media's role in shaping the image of geography and on geography's place in public debates about the sanctity of the national space.     

Hidden Histories in Geography: A politics of inclusion and participation

Many geographers benefit from the support of unheralded teachers whose inspiration leaves important marks on their thinking. This paper considers the legacy of Jan Monk's professional contribution in terms of her fostering of wider structures that support the development of a disciplinary capacity for and commitment to good educational practice, her work in researching and bringing to light the hidden disciplinary roles of women in the development of the discipline, particularly in the USA, and the place and significance of her early work in Australia at the intersection of geography and indigenous studies. It concludes that her insistence on the importance of place and context, her attention to people's own sense of place in shaping their relations with each other and their wider worlds, continues to provide a powerful starting point for benchmarking our work as teachers, mentors and researchers.     

Situating banal nationalism,the culture wars,and civil religion: governing localized geographies of national identity in Indiana

Various material forms of national identity have become ubiquitous features of the post-9/11 American cultural landscape. This research specifically examines the ‘In God We Trust’ (IGWT) license plate in the state of Indiana as a material expression and territorialized form of national identity. While conceptually anchored in banal nationalism research, exploring the spatial patterns of adoption or non-adoption of IGWT license plates by Indiana residents is only possible through situating this research through the mediating lens of the culture wars and civil religion. Although the IGWT license plate project legislatively materialized through the localized spatial networks of non-state actors in the context of a new and conservative state–citizen relationship firmly anchored in the culture wars, adoption behavior is also mediated through the much broader influence of civil religion. We conduct a quantitative analysis to determine license plate spatial distribution by county, but more importantly to explore the sociodemographic dimensions of IGWT license plate adoption and non-adoption. While our results generally mirror the sociodemographic findings of social issue-based electoral geography, the imbrication of banal nationalism, the culture wars, and civil religion as materially expressed by the IGWT license plate yields an ideologically different and broader dynamic when compared to culture wars defined by national identity.     

Cosmic negotiations: Cahokian religion and Ramey Incised pottery in the northern hinterland

Cahokia’s cultural influence altered patterns of social organization throughout the Midwest, and this complex historical process warrants further interregional research. Ramey Incised jars were cosmograms through which Cahokians attempted to frame relationships among different social groups and the broader cosmos. The exchange, and subsequent emulation, of these ritually charged vessels provided opportunities for hinterland groups to do the same. But did hinterland Mississippian peoples adopt a Cahokian understanding of the cosmos wholesale or reinterpret it based on local understandings and histories? To address this question, this paper examines variation in Ramey Incised iconographic motifs and design fields from the Lower Illinois River valley, Central Illinois River valley, Apple River valley, and the Aztalan site (47JE1). The data are then statistically compared with Emerson’s typology from the American Bottom, highlighting ground-level patterns of material variation which can be used to interpret the ways in which local peoples negotiated the spread of dominant ideologies and religious practices. Analysis of these patterns suggests regional differences in the perceived composition and structure of the cosmos and reveals the power of local worldviews in culture contact scenarios.