Environmental Justice Storytelling: Angels and Isotopes at Yucca Mountain,Nevada

Abstract: This paper discusses the productive role of storytelling in community struggles for environmental justice. The individual and collective task of environmental justice storytelling highlights where the politics of pollution intersect with geographical imaginations. Storytelling takes on a productive role in transforming localized and individual emotions and experiences of environmental injustice into public knowledge that is performed in the world. This paper draws on a case study of nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. I focus on how storytelling enacts scenarios of environmental witnessing and transformation that hold together a plurality of presences, absences, action and imagination, past histories and hope for the future.     

Recent Books in the Field of Mediaeval Literature

In the Cantigas de Santa María, King Alfonso X unveils an intricate cultural, political, and economic system that defines the relationship between Christian society and religious minorities. This article illustrates that the Cantigas must be understood as an ideological instrument of cultural codification that reaffirms the established Christian social order in relation to three principal groups: heretics, Jews, and Muslims.     

The Honey Bee In New Spain and Mexico

Resort-hotel location has diffused from the Northeast and Midwest to the Sunbelt and West. In 1985 there were approximately 834 resort hotels and 295,617 resort-hotel rooms in the United States. More than half of these rooms were located in just three states: Florida, Nevada, and Hawaii. The present distribution of resort-hotel rooms has been influenced by three periods in resort-hotel evolution. Until the early 20th century, resort hotels were in the tradition of the “Grand Hotel,” oriented toward natural resources in the East and Midwest and serving an elite clientele. Later in this period, elite resorts were also developed in the coastal Southeast and in the Southwest. A second, transitional period beginning in the 1920s accelerated construction of resort hotels in the Southwest and along the Southeastern coast. In the third period, post World War II mobility and affluence led to a revolution in resorthotel location and function. Resort hotels are now found in urban and suburban locations and have expanded the resort concept by linking it to meetings, conventions, and business travel. This has allowed resort hotels to adapt to changing market conditions and to achieve economies of scale by spreading demand throughout the year.     

Old medicine in a new bottle

Arthur Kleinman, Peter Kunstadter, E. Russell Alexander, and James L. Gale, eds. Medicine in Chinese Cultures: Comparative Studies of Health Care in Chinese and Other Societies. Washington, D. C. U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Public Health Service. National Institutes of Health. 1975. xvi and 803 pp. Maps, tables, notes, references, and index. $11.00.     

Selected writings on Philosophy,Religion and Politics

Benedetto Croce was the author of the most important and original theory of history in the 20th century. His theory was that of ‘absolute historicism’, and this necessarily entailed an acute critique of inherited ideas about the Enlightenment. This article studies both Croce's theoretical analysis of Enlightenment and his historical analysis of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Croce's interest in the Enlightenment had political as well as philosophical roots. All over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s historical and theoretical research was occurring into in the Age of Enlightenment. The broad goal of such research was to bring forth a new concept of reason, which would have purchase in the contemporary debate about rationalism and irrationalism. This debate, which flourished in the era of totalitarian regimes, raised a series of further questions: What was culture? What was the task of culture in the fight against political irrationalism? What was the relationship between culture and the growth of public opinion? With respect to the latter relationship an important role was played by intellectuals, as evinced by the works of Benda, Max Weber and Croce himself. The genealogy of the modern intelligentsia led again to Enlightenment. In the third part of the article Croce's position on this issue is discussed in the light of his historical researches on Enlightenment by reference to his correspondence with two young historians, Delio Cantimori and Franco Venturi.