Book reviews

CHINA

NI ZHEN. Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: the Genesis of China's Fifth Generation, trans. Chris Berry. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 234 pp. US$54.95, hardcover; US$18.95, paper.

CHUNHOU ZHANG and C. EDWIN VAUGHAN. Mao Zedong as Poet and Revolutionary Leader: social and Historical Perspectives. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002. x, 140 pp. US$60.00, hardcover.

SUSAN BLUM and LIONEL JENSEN (eds). China off Center: mapping the Margins of the Middle Kingdom. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. Maps, photographs. 400 pp. US$165.00, hardcover; US$64.95, paper.

JIE TANG and ANTHONYWARD. The Changing Face of Chinese Management. London: Routledge, 2003. Tables, figures, bibliography, index. 234 pp. A$66.00, paper.

FRANK DIKÖTTER. Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China, 1895–1949. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 264 pp. US$38.00, hardcover.

JAPAN AND KOREA

BOB JOHNSTONE. We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age. New York: Basic Books, 1999. xxiii, 422 pp. US$27.50, hardcover.

ANDREW C. ROSS. A Vision Betrayed: the Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542–1742. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994. xvii, 207 pp. US$30.45, hardcover.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

PREMA CLARKE. Teaching and Learning: the Culture of Pedagogy. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001. 223 pp. Rs 450, hardcover; Rs 250, paper.

ROBERT DELIEGE. The Untouchables of India. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999. xiii, 229 pp. Tables, bibliography. £42.00, US$65.00, hardcover; £14.99, paper.

BINA GUPTA (ed). The Empirical and the Transcendental: a Fusion of Horizons. Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 284 pp. US$69.00, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

JYOTSNA AGNIHOTRI GUPTA. New Reproductive Technologies, Women's Health and Autonomy: freedom or Dependency ? New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. 704 pp. Rs 775, hardcover.

PRADEEP BARUA. The Army Officer Corps and Military Modernisation in Later Colonial India. Hull: The University of Hull Press, 1999. iii, 234 pp. Illustrations, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. No price given, paper.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

KEES VAN DIJK. A Country in Despair. Indonesia between 1997 and 2000. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2001. viii, 621 pp. Plates, index. 31.80 Euros, paper.

CHEAH BOON KHENG. Malaysia: the Making of a Nation. Singapore: ISEAS, 2002. xviii, 264 pp. No price given, paper.

ROBERT L. WINZELER (ed). Indigenous Peoples and the State: politics, Land, and Ethnicity in the Malayan Peninsula and Borneo. New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies Monograph 46, 1997. xii, 316 pp.

ANDREA WHITTAKER (ed). Women's Health in Mainland Southeast Asia. New York, London and Oxford: The Haworth Medical Press, 2002. 128 pp. No price given, paper.

JAN BREMAN and GUNAWAN WIRADI. Good Times and Bad Times in Rural Java: case Study of Socio‐economic Dynamics in Two Villages towards the End of the Twentieth Century. Leiden: Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐en Volkenkunde No. 195, KITLV Press, 2002. viii, 330 pp. Maps, tables, photos, glossary, index. US$33.00, paper.

WILLIAM CASE. Politics in Southeast Asia: democracy or Less. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2002. x, 318 pp. £60.00, hardcover; £17.99, paper.

ANDREW McWILLIAM. Paths of Origin, Gates of Life: a Study of Place and Precedence in Southwest Timor. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002. xvi, 331 pp. Figures, maps, plates, orthography, glossary, bibliography, index. US$40.00, paper.

PATRICIA M. PELLY. Postcolonial Vietnam: new Histories of the National Past. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 344 pp. US$19.95, paper.

SALLY ANN NESS. Where Asia Smiles: an Ethnography of Philippine Tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. xvii, 300 pp. 4 maps, 11 photographs, notes, references, index. US$55.00, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

GENERAL ASIA

JOHN KELLY and MARTHA KAPLAN. Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. vii, 243 pp. US$40.00, hardcover; US$18.00, paper.     

Sex differences in musculoskeletal stress markers: Problems with activity pattern reconstructions

This study examined six musculoskeletal stress marker (MSM) scores that showed reverse sex differences in the previously published research. MSM scores often differ by sex within a population. Most often females have lower MSM scores than do males; however, reverse sex differences do occur. If reverse sex differences are culturally specific, then these MSM scores are more likely caused by activity patterns than biology. Yet, if the same MSM scores show reverse trends in multiple populations, then perhaps these reversals may be the result of biological sex differences, such as hormonal differences and body size, or methodological reasons, such as MSM location. In the current study, deltoideus, pronator quadratus and trapezius MSM scores were significantly more pronounced in males in the California Amerind population examined. Most MSM scores examined significantly correlated with body size and age. With articular size and age controls, only the pronator quadratus and trapezius continued to display significant sex differences. Males had greater MSM pronator quadratus and trapezius scores than did females. The lack of sex differences in four out of six MSM scores may relate to the confounding factor of body size. Thus, it is suggested that some reverse sex differences in the published literature may not relate to activity patterns whereas other MSM sites show more promise. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Free trade in mad cows: how to kill a beef industry

Australia is the world's second largest beef exporter, dominating the highest value beef markets of Japan and Korea. Australia's competitiveness is underpinned primarily by its freedom from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)—better known as ‘Mad Cow’ disease—thanks to strict animal feeding and importation regulations adopted in 1966. Why then would the Australian beef industry appear to agree to soften prohibitions on beef imports from BSE-affected countries, which would have the effect of opening Australia to BSE and potentially destroying its BSE-free status, along with its prime Asian markets? Our analysis begins with commitments that appear to have been made under the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement. If our interpretation is correct, these commitments would compel Australia to accommodate US trade goals by recognising and adopting the weaker international standards on meat trade. To understand why the US would want Australia to abandon its stringent BSE safeguards, we consider wider US policy on BSE and beef exports, and its strategy for re-entering the valuable Japanese and Korean markets. To explain why the Australian beef industry might allow its interests to be sacrificed to serve US trade goals, we examine institutional and ownership features of the industry. Government pre-emption or ‘capture’, we suggest, explains industry subservience. The apparent willingness of the Australian government to sideline its country's economic interests in order to serve those of a foreign power raises the question of Australian exceptionalism.     

New Models of Religious Diversity: Modern Judaism beyond the Scylla of “Political” and the Charybdis of “Religious”

ABSTRACT

This essay is a response to Julie Cooper’s piece in this volume. In her essay, Cooper insightfully analyzes ways in which the rise of the modern state has imposed “religious” forms of identification on Jews, and she engages a series of early twentieth-century Zionist thinkers who resisted and challenged that problematic imposition. I build on Cooper’s analysis, highlighting ways in which even these thinkers may still be caught up in the very paradigm that they sought to challenge. Yet despite their limitations, I suggest that it is precisely by engaging more deeply with such thinkers that theorists today can extend and continue the critique that they initiated. By gaining greater awareness of the ways in which useful critiques of “religionization” can still succumb to problematic “politicization,” and vice versa, theorists can better position themselves to draw on past texts and thought in order to challenge the hegemony of dominant “political” and “religious” options.