Book review

Seafood of South‐East Asia: an illustrated catalogue of the edible marine fish, crustaceans, molluscs and other sea creatures of the region, with their names in the various languages followed by a collection of recipes from each of the countries with additional information for cooks, by Alan Davidson. London: Macmillan, 1978. pp. 366, £9.95.     

Book reviews

Bouwstoffen voor de sociaal‐economische geschiedenis van Indonesië van ca. 1800 tot 1940; een beschrijvende bibliographie: Koloniale Studiën 1916–1941, Koloniaal Tijdschrift 1912–1941, by Gerard J Telkamp. Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, 1977. 89pp. D.F1. 15.

Tetum Ghosts and Kin — fieldwork in an Indonesian community, by David Hicks. Explorations in World Ethnology, General Editors, Robert B Edgerton and L L Langness. Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing Co 1976, 143 pp, 24 p1, 13 figs. IBSNO‐87484–368–5.

Southeast Asian Materials in the Australian National University Library: A Programme for Development and Use, by Cecil Hobbs. Canberra: Australian National University Library, 1975. iv, 180pp.     

Interview with Adrián Curiel Rivera

Adrián Curiel Rivera is a Mexican novelist, short-story writer and academic. In addition to his novels Vikingos (2012), A bocajarro (2008) and Bogavante (2000), and the collections of stories Día franco (2016) and Madrid al través (2003), he has published two substantial volumes of critical essays, Los piratas del Caribe en la novelística hispanoamericana del siglo XIX (2010) and Novela española y boom hispanoamericano (2006). In 2013 he published Blanco Trópico, an excoriating and often hilarious fictional account of life in the Mexican Academy in the wake of sweeping neoliberal reforms in the university sector, the nature and consequences of which will be all too familiar to many European and US academics. The book caused something of a storm in his native Mexico. In the following interview, which took place in the summer of 2016, he discusses the genesis of and reactions to the novel, but also touches on a broad range of social and literary issues which the book raises: globalization, publishing, the Mexican literary canon and its sacred cows, as well as the place of the campus novel and science fiction in the current Latin American literary landscape.     

Between human capital and human worth

This study concerns the history of Swedish public everyday discourse about knowledge and its benefits for the individual, c. 1920–1974. We examine the value(s) ascribed to knowledge – in economic and/or idealistic terms – using private correspondence institutes as our point of departure. These were immensely popular, yet have hitherto been overlooked by historians. First, we argue that commercially driven correspondence education, which was a mass phenomenon in early and mid-20^th-century Sweden, blurred the demarcation lines between general and vocational education, and more importantly between formal and so-called popular education (folkbildning). Second, we examine how knowledge and education were promoted and justified in the widely circulated advertisements for Hermods Korrespondensinstitut, the largest of the Swedish correspondence schools. By analysing and contextualizing advertisements over six decades, we find a strong dominance of individualistic economic valuations from the beginning, a successive increase in idealistic valuations over the decades, and an increasing amalgamation of idealistic and economic justifications for knowledge. We argue that the extensive scale of Hermods’ and similar institutes’ educational activities offers an important key for understanding the social context in which the overall marketization and capitalization of knowledge in the latest decades was able to take root.     

Zechariah 5 and the priestly law

The bizarre imagery of Zechariah 5, and the relationship between the two visions contained therein has long been a source of bafflement to commentators. This article argues that the content of these visions is dependent on three texts from the priestly law: Leviticus 14, 19 and Numbers 5. The first of these texts provides the legal precedent for Zechariah's attacks on theft, fraud and perjury, while the action taken by God (the entry of the curse scroll into the house of the perjured thief, followed by its destruction and the removal of ''wickedness'') makes use of Numbers 5 and Leviticus 14 respectively.     

The development of a new geospatial framework for the palaeoanthropological site of the Sterkfontein Caves,Cradle of Humankind,Gauteng, South Africa

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) provide an essential element in modern paleoanthropological inquiry through their ability to integrate a diverse range of data within a multidimensional spatial framework which can be used for data storage, analysis and modeling. One of the challenges of creating such a framework is the integration of legacy and new data (collected with digital technologies) at large sites with a long history of research. The Sterkfontein Caves, located in the Cradle of Humankind, is the richest Australopithecus-bearing locality in the world and has been the focus of intense palaeoanthropological research for the past 80 years. A diverse range of spatial data has been collected over this history and future integrative research necessitates the development of a unified, cohesive 3D GIS framework. In this paper we describe three phases of work undertaken to implement such a framework and discuss the next steps in its development and utilization for spatial analyses.     

A heavenly poise: radical religion and the making of the Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

Scholarship continues to identify the Enlightenment with secularization, despite the theological tenor of much of the movement's canonical literature. This article proposes an explanation for such a dissonance, before addressing the matter more directly through the work of Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle. The claim is that scholars have been unduly dependent upon theological commentary in reaching the fixed verdict of secularization, inferring ‘atheism’ and disenchantment from the polemical utterances of a privileged orthodoxy rather than the primary sources themselves. Seen apart from such controlling anathemas, icons of the radical Enlightenment such as Spinoza and Bayle emerge as deeply spiritual thinkers, challenging the theocratic assumptions of their age with theological certainties of their own, interrogating orthodoxy with a resolutely biblical rationality. The final section suggests the continuity of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment of Voltaire, Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft with the spiritual rationalism of the seventeenth century. If so many of the Enlightenment's landmark thinkers were inspired by religious ideas, the concept of a secular modernity must be open to revision.