Spain's love affair with Russia: the attraction of exotic (Br)others

This article examines a specific case of identification and desire between two countries at the extremities of Europe. In a cultural love affair located largely in the imaginary, Russia constituted a desired and exotic brother for Spain, while its revolution provided the possibility of a realistic engagement with a different culture. Central to these writings is the figuring of Russia as the exotic woman. In the travel writings, despite periodic attempts to figure women as individuals, non‐essentialised, and newly formulated in their post‐revolutionary situation, we find that the myth of woman as flesh, groundedness and the repository of positive experience is presented with insistence.     

Detecting the medieval cod trade: a new method and first results

This paper explores the potential of stable isotope analysis to identify the approximate region of catch of cod by analysing bones from medieval settlements in northern and western Europe. It measures the δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values of cod bone collagen from medieval control samples collected from sites around Arctic Norway, the North Sea, the Kattegat and the Baltic Sea. These data were considered likely to differ by region due to, for example, variation in the length of the food chain, water temperature and salinity. We find that geographical structuring is indeed evident, making it possible to identify bones from cod caught in distant waters. These results provide a new methodology for studying the growth of long-range trade in dried cod and the related expansion of fishing effort—important aspects of the development of commercialisation in medieval Europe. As a first test of the method, we analyse three collections of cod bones tentatively interpreted as imported dried fish based on a priori zooarchaeological criteria. The results tentatively suggest that cod were being transported or traded over very long distances since the end of the first millennium AD.     

Experimental insights into alternative strategies of lithic heat treatment

Conditions in which thermal fractures occur are explored experimentally, and the results are used to assess heat treatment strategies. We conclude that no single ‘critical temperature’ for thermal fracturing or heat treatment can be specified for any particular raw material, as has so often been attempted, because threshold temperatures exist in relationship to specimen sizes. Our experiments show that smaller specimens are resilient to greater ranges of temperature fluctuations than larger ones, and that by manufacturing/selecting specimens of smaller sizes there is more potential to heat them rapidly and to higher temperatures without producing thermal fractures. We hypothesize a continuum of heat treating strategies between a ‘slow and steady’ strategy, which has overwhelmingly dominated past experimental designs, and a ‘fast’ strategy, which has received much less attention. The paper discusses the economic and technological contexts to which different heat treating strategies might be suited.     

Book reviews

Negotiating Development. P. Healey, M. Purdue and F. Ennis, London: E&FN Spon, 1995, 212 pp, £29.95 hb, ISBN 0 419 19410 X

The Rise of the Rustbelt. P. Cooke (Ed.), London, UCL Press, 1995, i‐x+272 pp, £40.00 hb, ISBN 1 85728 420 8; £14.95 pb, ISBN 1 85728 419 4

Urban Change and Renewal: The Paradox of Place. P. Garrahan and P. Stewart (Eds), Aldershot: Avebury, 1994, viii+200 pp, £32.50 hb, ISBN 1 85628 610 X

Territorial Competition in an Integrating Europe. P. Cheshire and I. Gordon (Eds), Aldershot: Avebury, 1995, 317 pp, £40.00 hb, ISBN 1 85972 112 5

Reconstituting Rurality: Class, Community and Power in the Development Process. Jonathan Murdoch and Terry Marsden, London: UCL Press, 1994, xv + 256 pp. ISBN 1 85728 041 5 hb     

Permeability and Protest in Lane 49: Entangling Materialities of Place with Housing Activism in Shanghai

Since China’s implementation of a neo‐liberal housing regime, housing activism has boomed. Whilst activism is ultimately in place, as increasingly recognised within protest work, there is limited reflection upon how permeable material histories are entangled with the throwntogetherness of place as a site for protest. Employing ethnography over three months, this article follows the emergence, organisation and implementation of housing activism in Lane 49, a public housing community in downtown Shanghai. Utilising feminist geography and feminist political theorisations of material permeability this article contributes to Chinese geographies of protest, providing a local epistemology of housing activism which demonstrates the importance of drawing materiality into understandings of activist tactics. The article also contributes to radical geographies of protest by deconstructing the idea of public protest in a public place and thus offering opportunities to demonstrate how, through blurring public‐private binaries, protest can emerge and survive in authoritative governance regimes.