Re-imagining the kitchen as a site of memory

Extending the focus of previous geographical research on public spaces of remembering, this paper demonstrates the ways in which memory work also takes place in private domestic spaces. The paper draws on a combination of life history and ethnographic research undertaken in Northern England, examining kitchens as a specific lieu de mémoire, showing how they serve as places where valued items are displayed and material artefacts are curated as part of the construction and reproduction of personal memories and familial identities. Using ethnographic and visual evidence from two case study households, the paper demonstrates the role of material artefacts in curating the past and materialising memory. Additionally, life history interviews with older women reveal narratives of everyday cooking practices which seemingly contradict popular discourses of the past, questioning conventional ideas about the distorted nature of nostalgia. In combination, our data represent complex narratives in which the past can be seen as infusing the present, and where present-day concerns are revealed as actively shaping public discourses which favour a return to an idealised past, which may have little bearing on people’s actual lived experience.     

The Disappearing State and the Quasi‐Event of Immigration Control

Immigration enforcement by sheriffs and police can be characterized as a proliferation of quasi‐events which never quite rise to the status of an event. This poses distinct challenges for feminist‐inspired scholarship on the state which seeks to document, ethnographically, how the state goes about its business on the ground. In this article we draw on our fieldwork experience in North Carolina and Georgia on sheriffs’ and police departments’ use of traffic enforcement and policing roadblocks to scrutinize drivers for their legal status, and ask how our ethnographic approach to the problem of state power inevitably stumbles in relation to the ordinariness of these practices. We conclude that feminist scholarship committed to an ethnography of the state could do much more to think through the potentially aporetic quality of that which is our common object of research—the state in practice.     

Urban political ecology in late prehistory: New evidence from El Purgatorio,Peru

One of archaeology's greatest strengths is its reliance on interdisciplinary collaboration and the utilization of multiple lines of evidence to inform archaeological interpretation. For example, through an examination of faunal and floral remains, production and storage facilities, and the isotopic analysis of human skeletal remains one can develop a model for urban political ecology in ancient cultures. In this case study, the political ecology of the Casma capital city, El Purgatorio, Peru, is investigated in order to inform our interpretations and conclusions regarding Casma political, economic and social organization. The results indicate that Casma political ecology was firmly based in coastal resources and oriented towards supporting state-sponsored feasting and ritual activities, suggestive of a largely elite-controlled redistributive economy. In contrast to previous models characterizing this time period as one of factionalism and environmental stress, the data suggest that coastal cultural adaptations produced an era of widespread political and economic stability.     

Book reviews

J. J. Ras (ed.). Javanese literature since Independence: an anthology. xi, 442 pp. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkunde, 88.) Guilders 65.

Hans Rhodius and John Darling. Walter Spies and Balinese art. Zutphen: Terra, 1980. 95 pp. Guilders 39. [Obtainable from Uitgeverij Terra, Postbus 188, 7200 AD ZUTPHEN, Netherlands.]

A Teeuw. Modern Indonesian literature. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. 2 vols. x, 232 pp, 12 plates; x, 292 pp, 8 plates (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde. Translation Series, 10.)

Drs. Ibrahim. Kursus bahasa Indonesia. London: Linguaphone Institute, 1978. [vi], 128 pp. — G. Hoff and J. Pride. Indonesian course handbook. London: Linguaphone Institute, 1978. [v], 130 pp. — Anonymous. Indonesian course instructions. London: Linguaphone Institute, 1978. [ii], 5 pp. — 4 cassettes. £85.     

Eugenics as Indian removal: sociohistorical processes and the de(con)struction of American Indians in the southeast

Although research on the history of the eugenics movement in the United States is legion, its impact on state policies that identified and defined American Indians has yet to be fully addressed. The exhibit, Our Lives: Comtemporary Life and Identities (ongoing until September 21, 2014) at the National Museum of the American Indian provides a provocative vehicle for examining how eugenics-informed public policy during the first quarter of the twentieth century served to "remove" from official records Native peoples throughout the Southeast. One century after Indian Removal of the antebellum era, Native peoples in the American Southeast provide an important but often overlooked example of how racial policies, this time rooted in eugenics, effected a documentary erasure of Native peoples and communities.     

Silent Voices,Hidden Lives: Archaeology,Class and Gender in the CMS Missions,Bay of Islands,New Zealand, 1814–1845

This paper explores the themes and tensions of class and propriety at one of New Zealand’s early European settlements, a Church Missionary Society mission in the Bay of Islands. Archaeological investigations at the site of the Te Puna mission house revealed a cellar containing, among other articles, items connected with domesticity and feminine concerns, demonstrating the presence of women and their daily activities. The interweaving of the archaeological and historical record sheds light upon the replication of class and culture through themes such as the “cult of domesticity” at this remote location, a decade prior to British colonization.