Book Reviews

While recognised for advancing historical scholarship on collecting in the colonial Netherlands East Indies, the Netherlands-Indonesia Shared Cultural Heritage Project of 2003–2006 merits analysis in its own right as a ‘heritage process’. From the perspective of heritage studies theory, this article demonstrates how the project both illustrates and contradicts several influential conceptions of heritage. It also reveals that such heritage negotiations can benefit states dealing with the legacy of the colonial past in European museums, when they forgo competition in the interest of a workable consensus. However, the project also offers counterpoints and paradoxes connected to remembering and forgetting, between its orientation to the present and to the past, and in its relationship to the tangible and intangible heritage of Dutch colonialism.     

New Directions in Classic Maya Household Archaeology

Over the past two decades, household studies have coalesced into a recognized subfield within archaeology. Despite this relatively short history, household archaeologists are now taking a leading role in epistemological shifts that are placing people and their practices and differences at the center of archaeological interpretations of the past, rather than subsuming these into the noise of passive and depersonalized depictions of ancient social systems. As Maya archaeologists have played a critical role in the development of household archaeology, examining recent trends in Maya household research provides a perspective on the directions of both Maya studies and household archaeology more generally. This article explores three interrelated trends: (1) understanding ordinary people; (2) understanding social diversity among households; (3) understanding households in articulation with the broder social universe. Through a discussion of these three trends, this review uses Classic Maya household archaeology as a case study to illustrate how household research has led to the development of theoretically rich and empirically substantive understandings of an ancient society, which repeople the past and foreground the active roles of and structural constraints on ancient people.     

John Banville’s “monstrous child”: freedom and inheritance in Shroud

ABSTRACT

John Banville has described his novel Shroud (2002) – a fictionalised re-imagining of the 1988 scandal of Paul de Man, whose war-time publications for a collaborationist journal were discovered after his death – as his “monstrous child” that only he could love. This essay turns to Derrida’s thoughts on monstrosity, and in particular his framing of the future-to-come as an unforeseeable reckoning between Nietzsche and Rousseau, whose approaches to human freedom and authenticity remain philosophically irreconcilable. Shroud engages with these two inheritances on a thematic level, bringing them into conversation through the characters of Vander and Cass. The interruption of intergenerational love and the prospect of a child between them, however, makes Derridean monstrosity – that more properly deconstructive trope that opens to the future by unearthing traumatic inheritances from the past – into a structuring principle, and the means by which we might best understand the novel itself as a “monstrous child”.     

Book reviews

The Political Economy of Spanish America in the Age of Revolution. 1750–1850. Edited by KENNETH J. ANDRIEN and LYMAN L. JOHNSON. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Pp. viii, 263.

Mexico in the Age of Democratic Revolutions, 1750–1850. Edited by JAIME E. RODRIGUEZ O. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994. Pp. xiii, 330.

Transiciones hacia el sistema colonial andino. By CARLOS SEMPAT ASSADOURIAN. Lima: El Colegio de México—Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1994. Pp. 304.

El Comercio Libre en el Perú. Las estrategias de un comerciante criollo: José Antonio de Lavalle y Cortés Conde de Premio Real, 1775–1815. By CRISTINA ANA MAZZEO. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad Católica, 1994. Pp. 279.

Barbarie y canibalismo en la retórica colonial. Los indios Pijaos de Fray Pedro Simón. By ALVARO FELIX BOLAÑOS. Bogotá: CEREC, 1994. Pp. 243.

America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Edited by KAREN ORDAHL KUPPERMAN. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 428.

After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Edited by GYAN PRAKASH. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pp. viii, 352.

A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. By ELINOR G. K. MELVILLE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii, 203.     

FIRE IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON: A SPATIALLY EXPLICIT MODEL FOR POLICY IMPACT ANALYSIS*

ABSTRACT.  This article implements a spatially explicit model to estimate the probability of forest and agricultural fires in the Brazilian Amazon. We innovate by using variables that reflect farm-gate prices of beef and soy, and also provide a conceptual model of field management and deforestation fires to simulate the impact of road-paving, cattle exports, and conservation area designation on the occurrence of fire. Our analysis shows that fire is positively correlated with the price of beef and soy, and that the creation of new conservation units may offset the negative environmental impacts caused by the increasing number of fire events associated with early stages of frontier development.     

The Anti‐Essentialist Choice: Nationalism and Feminism in the Interaction between Two Women's Projects

Abstract. Two cross‐national women's organisations, one in Northern Ireland the other in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, are observed here in interaction with each other. The article explores the connection between their ability to sustain such cross‐community alliances and their choice to be women's projects. In so doing, it addresses the question ‘are feminism and nationalism compatible?’ Not all the women are ‘anti‐nationalist’ in philosophy, but they draw distinctions between variants of nationalism, and may be described as ‘anti‐essentialist’. The article distinguishes between variants of ‘feminism’, recognising it, too, as a plurality of movements. An anti‐essentialist understanding of ethnicity and nation is partnered in both the Network and Medica by an anti‐essentialist feminism, in which a woman's family role is minimised and value placed instead on her autonomy and agency. Certain forms of feminism and nationalism are thus compatible – but the configuration may be progressive or retrograde.