The Influence of Building Attributes on Residents' ‘Images of the Past’ in the Architecture of Salt City,Jordan

This paper presents an empirical study conducted in a small traditional city, Salt, Jordan. An investigation was made to examine residents' ‘images of the past’. The objective was to identify building attributes that influence these residents' images. A survey research design using multiple sorting tasks with open‐ended questions was used to identify these building attributes. The images were elicited through the observation of coloured photographs of a sample of older buildings in the city centre. Images of the past were examined within three content areas: knowledge of the past; date of construction; and character of the past of Salt City. The building attributes investigated were: contour, size, shape, surface quality, signage, visibility, use, and significance. The results of the study suggest that older buildings in the centre of the city evoked similar images of the past focused on public or social buildings along with residential settlement building. Attributes relating to images of the past were original use, date of construction, historic signage, and historic integrity. This study presents an approach for operationalising an image of the past.     

Going to a home you have never been to: the return migration of Mexican and American-Mexican children

Focusing on children's experience-driven cosmologies revealed through interviews and survey responses, this article seeks to analyse and interpret the way children explain their migration from the USA to Mexico within the context of increases in both voluntary and forced return migration of Mexicans since 2005. It draws from representative samples of students (aged 9–16) enrolled in both public and private schools in several Mexican states, which are complemented by data drawn from in-depth interviews that complicate the sociological typologies about migration, motives for migration, and returnees. The goals of this article are as follows: (a) to illuminate and value children's own narratives about their migration experiences and (b) to discuss the contribution of diverse and apparently contradictory micro-, meso-, and macro-level approaches in studying migrant children.     

Regionalism, Iran and Central Asia

A combination of revolutionary ideology, trouble with neighbours and location in the Middle East, where regionalism is moribund, make the Islamic Republic of Iran an unlikely enthusiast for regional coalition-building. The impetus towards regionalism derives first and foremost from geopolitical considerations–the need to counter the US government's efforts to isolate Iran–but also from domestic dynamics; the regionalist discourse has lent an acceptable ideological colouring to an increasingly pragmatic foreign policy.
Iran's neighbours, however, share neither its geopolitical predicament nor its ideological complexion, and the actual implementation of Tehran's regionalist agenda has been based on functional cooperation, rather than on geopolitics and ideology. Trade promotion and the development of transport infrastructure to link Central Asia and the Caspian to Turkey and the Persian Gulf have been the most appealing areas for northern neighbours, and dominate the agenda of the Economic Cooperation Organization, Iran's main vehicle for multilateral cooperaton with Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Tehran's 1992 proposal for a Caspian Sea Cooperation Organization has so far been stymied by the littoral states' well-publicized disagreements over the sea's legal status, though their numerous multilateral meetings and handful of agreements suggest that the idea has potential in the medium–term.
Notwithstanding the meagre tangible results to date, Iran's tilt towards regionalism has had a positive impact. It has helped to rehabilitate the Islamic Republic in the eyes of its neighbours, contributed to the evolution of policy debate at home and prepared the ground for future multilateral cooperation.     

Book reviews

CHINA

DORE J. LEVY. Ideal and Actual in “The Story of the Stone”. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 213 pp. US$49.00/£33.95, hardcover; US$19.00/£13.50, paper.

GREGOR BENTON (ed and trans). Chen Duxiu's Last Articles and Letters, 1937–1942. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998. 163 pp. Foreword by Wang Fanxi, editor's introduction, appendices, glossary, index. £40.00, hardcover.

EILEEN CHANG. The Rice‐Sprout Song. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 182 pp. Foreword by David Der‐wei Wang. US$15.95, paper.

EILEEN CHANG. The Rouge of the North. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 185 pp. Foreword by David Der‐wei Wang. US$15.95, paper.

MCLAREN, ANNE E. Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998. viii, 340 pp. US$103.75, hardcover.

EDWARD S. STEINFELD. Forging Reform in China: the Fate of State‐Owned Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 300 pp. Tables, figures, preface, notes, bibliography, index. A$80.00, hardcover; £12.95, paper.

PETER CONN. Pearl S. Buck: a Cultural Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 467 pp. A$28.95, paper.

FLEMMING CHRISTIANSEN and ZHANG JUNZUO (eds). Village INC. Chinese Rural Society in the 1990s. Surrey: Curzon, 1998. 277 pp. Illustrations, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. £35.00, hardcover.

HAROLD M. TANNER. Strike Hard! Anti‐Crime Campaigns and Chinese Criminal Justice 1979–1989. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1999. 253 pp. US$28.00, hardcover; US$17.00, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

LONNY E. CARLILE and MARK C. TILTON (eds). Is Japan Really Changing Its Ways?: regulatory Reform and the Japanese Economy. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998. 232 pp. US$39.95, hardcover.

PETER KATZENSTEIN and TAKASHI SHIRAISHI (eds). Network Power: Japan and Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 399 pp. US$62.50, hardcover; US$23.95, paper.

BERNARD FAURE. The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. 338 pp. US$18.95, paper.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTERAL ASIA

VIJAY MISHRA. Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. 268 pp. US$21.95, paper.

OLIVER MENDELSOHN and MARIKA VICZIANY. The Untouchables: subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 289 pp. Glossary, preface, bibliography, index. A$36.95, paper.

DONALD S. LOPEZ, Jr. Prisoners of Shangri‐La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 238 pp. Notes, index. US$25.00, hardcover.

MELVYN C. GOLDSTEIN and MATTHEW T. KAPSTEIN (eds), with a foreword by Orville Schell. Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet, Religious Revival and Cultural Identity.

Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998. x, 207 pp. 37 b/w photographs, notes, bibliography, index. US$40.00, hardcover; US$15.95, paper; £30.00, hardcover; £11.95, paper.

PETER RICHARDUS (ed), with an historical foreword by Alex McKay. Tibetan Lives: three Himalayan Autobiographies. Surrey: Curzon, 1998. xxviii, 223 pp. 2 maps, frontispiece, 33 b/w plates, select bibliography, index. £40.00, hardcover.

RAMAKRISHNA PULIGANDLA. Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy. Delhi: D. K. Print‐world, 1997 (revised edition), xix, 362 pp. Preface to second edition, preface to first edition, bibliography, glossary, index. Rs. 450, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

PAUL HUTCHCROFT. Booty Capitalism: the Politics of Banking in the Philippines. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998. 278 pp. US$39.95, hardcover.

PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER. Tales from Djakarta: caricatures of Circumstances and their Human Beings. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999. 145 pp. Foreword, introduction, glossary. US$15.00, paper.

GENERAL ASIA

YAYORI MATSUI. Women in the New Asia: from Pain to Power. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1999. x, 194 pp. Index. A$29.95, paper.     

MILITARY STRATEGIC DOCTRINE

Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counter-Insurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance 1950 to the Present
Berry M. Blechman and Stephan S. Kaplan, Force without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument