Turbo Island,Bristol: excavating a contemporary homeless place

This paper provides an assessment of the excavation of an apparently ordinary space in Bristol (UK) in 2009. Although the space appears unremarkable to most passers-by, it is unusual in being a place used routinely by many of the city’s street-drinking and homeless community. Homeless people were ‘colleagues’, involved in excavation, finds processing and interpretation. The collaborative nature of this project goes further than merely attempting to represent social groups who have traditionally been excluded from heritage practice and interpretation — it lays methodological foundations for praxis.     

Charlotte Sophia Burne: Shropshire Folklorist,First Woman President of the Folklore Society,and First Woman Editor of Folklore . Part 2: Update and Preliminary Bibliography

THE EVIL EYE IN THE WESTERN HIGHLANDS. By R. C. MACLAGAN, M.D. pp. 232. London: David Nutt. 1902. Reviewed by John Abercromby.

WITCHCRAFT AND SECOND SIGHT IN THE HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND. By the late JOHN GREGORSON CAMFHELL. pp. 314. Glasgow : James MacLehose. 1902. Reviewed by John Abercromby.

OUTER ISLES. By A. GOODRICH-FREER. pp. 448. Westminster: A. Constable and Co. 1902. Reviewed by John Abercromby.

POPULAR RELIGION IN THE PANJAB. Report of the Census of the Panjab and North-West Frontier Province of 1901. By H. A. ROSE. Simla. 1902. Reviewed by W. Crooke.

LA VIE FUTURE D'APRÉS LE MAZDÉISME À LA LUMIÈRE DES CROVANCES PARALLÈLES DANS LES AUTRES RELIGIONS. ÉTUDE D'ARCHÉOLOGIE COMPARÉE. Par NATHAN SÖDERBLOM. Paris: Leroux. 1901. Reviewed by Alfred Nutt.

THE ORIGIN OF CIVILISATION AND THE PRIMITIVE CONDITION OF MAN. By the RIGHT HON. LORD AVEBURY, P.C., F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D. Sixth edition, with numerous additions. Longmans, Green, &; Co. 1902. 8vo. Price 18s. Reviewed by A. C. Haddon.

THE MABINOGION. Translated by Lady C. GUEST, and Edited by A. NUTT. D. NUTT. 2s. 1 vol. Reviewed by Margaret Eyre.

THE LITERATURE OF THE CELTS, ITS HISTORY AND ROMANCE. By MAGNUS MACLEAN, M.A., D.Sc. 8vo. Blackie and Son. London. 1902. Reviewed by F. York Powell.     

Towards a Revaluation of the Legend of “Saint” William of Norwich and its Place in the Blood Libel Legend

The legend of William of Norwich is extremely well known and often quoted in discussions of defamatory folklore. However, since I started working on it three or four years ago I have found that there are surprisingly few folkloric analyses. Leaving aside those who have attempted to believe the story and to use it as anti-Jewish propaganda, most of the respectable work has been done by historians and has tended to concentrate either on debunking the legend or on attempting to reconstruct events in Norwich during Easter 1144. My aim in this paper is to redress this balance and tackle a couple of the more folkloric questions.     

Objects and interactivity: A conflict or a collaboration?

The rapid growth in the number of hands‐on centres has led to fears of museums being taken over by interactive exhibits. These are expensive to develop and maintain, causing a problem for traditional museums faced with ever‐expanding collections and diminishing resources. This article considers whether objects and interactive exhibits are inevitably in conflict or whether they can coexist in harmony. The implications for future developments at the Science Museum in London are considered in detail.

The authors conclude that, far from conflicting with traditional museum functions, interactive exhibits and new technologies will help to ensure that museums are able to compete in an increasingly complex marketplace. Their vision of the interactive gallery of the future incorporates exhibits which enhance understanding of artefacts. In short, the objective will be to ensure that visitors interacting with ‘hands‐on’ exhibits will take away ‘minds‐on’ understanding of the museum as a whole.     

Reviews

Richard J. Goy, The House of Gold: Building a Palace in Medieval Venice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xxiv + 304pp., 13 col., 100 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–521–40513–0. £60.

Paul Mattick Jr. (ed.), Eighteenth‐Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. viii + 256 pp. ISBN 0–521–43106–9. £30.

Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education, Cambridge Mass. & London: MIT Press, 1994. xxx + 350 pp., 197 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–262–19342–6. £24.95.

Barry Cunliffe, Wessex to AD 1000, London & New York: Longman, 1993. 388 pp., 128 plates and figures. ISBN 0–582–49279. £16.99.

J. M. Fladmark (ed.), Cultural Tourism, London: Donhead, 1994. 413 pp. 86 b. & w. illns. ISBN 1–873394–15–2. £37.00.

John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque, Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, [1992], 1994. xviii + 388 pp., 127 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–262–08211‐X. £17.95. Venetia Murray, Castle Howard The Life and Times of a Stately Home, London: Viking, 1994. xx + 236 pp., 33 b. & w. illus. and 20 figs. ISBN 0–670–83379–7. £18.00.

Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xv + 334 pp., 21 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0 521 40586 6. £14.95.

Alan R. H. Baker and Gideon Biger (eds.), Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 356 pp., 93 figs. ISBN 0–521–41032–0. £40.00.

Timothy Ambrose and Crispin Paine, Museum Basics, London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 319 pp., 6 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–415–05770–1. £19.99.

Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xx + 299 pp. ISBN 0–521–36375–6. £35.

David Dean, Museum Exhibition Theory and Practice, London and New York: Routledge, 1994. xii + 177 pp., 56 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–415–08016–9. £22.50.

Hanno‐Walter Kraft, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present, London: Zwemmer and New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. 706 pp., 207 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–302–00622–2. £25.00

James Strike, Architecture in Conservation: Managing Development at Historic Sites, London and New York: Routledge, 1994. x + 163 pp., 86 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–415–08130–0. £40.00.

Peter Walker & Melanie Simo, Invisible Gardens. The Search for Modernism in the American Landscape, Cambridge, Mass, and London: The MIT Press, 1994. xvi + 365 pp., 12 col. and 144 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–262–23177–8. £44.95.

John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1988] 1990. xvi + 351 pp., 204 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–521–39848–7. £22.95.

G. J. Ashworth & P. J. Larkham, (eds.), Building a New Heritage: Tourism, Culture and Identity in the New Europe, London: Routledge, 1994. xiii + 278 pp., 39 figs. ISBN 0–415–07931–4, £40.00.

W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. vii + 248 pp., 72 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–226–53207–0. £ 11.25.     

The ‘Dividual Androgyne’ and Me: a Personal Affair

In the 25 years since Marilyn Strathern published The Gender of the Gift (1988) its signature concepts of the ‘dividual androgyne’ and ‘sociality’ have received almost no criticism in the anthropological literature and are now widely accepted as true. The ‘dividual’ is considered to be ‘a new, non‐unitary model of embodiment and … one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20^th Century’ despite the fact that it erases affect, agency, identity and other essential features of human beings (Lipset 2008). The present critique of Strathern's concept of the androgynous ‘dividual’ challenges its legitimacy as a Melanesian or any other ‘premodern’ form of personhood and suggests that it expresses the wish of academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to locate an indigenous model for androgyny and to characterise patriarchy, misogyny and sexual segregation as peculiarly Western. The article explores aspects of Gimi myth, ritual and exchange which Strathern claims helped her to formulate the concept of the ‘dividual’ (especially those surrounding men's sacred bamboo flutes) and concludes that she mistook a virulently anti‐female ideology – including a fantasy in which men may subsume or incorporate certain aspects of female anatomy – for benign accommodation between the sexes. The ‘dividual’ does not correspond to social reality among the Gimi and paradoxically affirms Lévi‐Strauss' classic demonstration in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that ‘the gender of the gift’ is invariably female.     

Medieval Britain in 1965

A study was undertaken to assess the potential of the integrated analysis of metalwork excavated from medieval (late 13th–16th-century) rural settlements in the midlands of England and inventories (dating from c 1370–c 1440) drawn from the royal escheators’ records for the same region. The study aimed to explore the value and meaning of objects to the non-elite members of rural communities and focussed on three classes of artefact: metal vessels, tools and dress accessories. The analysis investigates medieval value systems by exploring evidence for aspiration, recycling and differences between town and country.     

Statistical means for identifying hunter–gatherer residential features in a lithic landscape

Techniques are described for extracting circular rock features from landscapes dominated by clasts of the same type from which cultural features are composed, using as a test case a large stone circle residential site in western Wyoming, USA. Methods consist of point plotting all relevantly-sized culturally and naturally-deposited clasts in the field and identifying potential cultural features using point density analyses tools in ArcGIS. Potential rings are either accepted or rejected as cultural features by comparing clast frequency, density and distribution in internal, feature-ring, and external spatial buffers to ethnoarchaeological data recording stone circle size and morphology and to similar data generated from a control sample of off-site, naturally-occurring clasts. The results of the analysis are used to discuss group size, mobility type, and duration of site occupation and to explore problems of assessing such at surface archaeological sites resulting from palimpsest-type site formation processes.     

Book reviews

CHINA

CHARLOTTE FURTH. A Flourishing Yin: gender in China's Medical History, 960–1665. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. A Philip E. Lilienthal Book. xiv, 355 pp. 20 halftones, 13 line figures. US$45.00, hardcover; US$17.96, paper.

MOBO C. F. GAO. Gao Village. A Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China. London: C. Hurst & Company, 1999. xiv, 286 pp. Maps, illustrations, preface and acknowledgments, appendixes, index. £16.95, paper.

JAMES R. LILLEY and DAVID SHAMBAUGH (eds). China's Military Faces the Future. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. 368 pp. Illustrations, tables, graphs, index. US$74.95, hardcover; US$29.95, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

MITSUHIRO YOSHIMOTO. Kurosawa: film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 485 pp. Introduction, bibliography, index. US$64.95, hardcover; US$21.95, paper.

YASUNORI FUKUOKA (trans. Tom Gill). Lives of Young Ethnic Koreans in Japan. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2000. 300 pp. Introduction, tables, figures, notes, references, glossary, index. A$39.95, paper.

AH‐JEONG KIM and R. B. GRAVES (trans). The Metacultural Theater of Oh T'aeSok. Five Plays from the Korean Avant‐Garde. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999. 164 pp. Preface, introduction, translators' note, photographs, bibliography. US$33.00, hardcover; US$14.95, paper.

ANDREW COBBING. The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain: early Travel Encounters in the Far West. Surrey: Japan Library, 1998. 257 pp. Illustrations, preface, introduction, biographical appendix, notes and references, index. £45.00, hardcover.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

SATISH BALRAM AGNIHOTRI. Sex Ratio Patterns in the Indian Population: a Fresh Exploration. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. 379 pp. Tables, figures, appendices, bibliography, index. Rs 475, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

ROBERT CRIBB. Historical Atlas of Indonesia. Richmond: Curzon Press (in cooperation with the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies, Copenhagen), 2000. 256 pp. £75.00, hardcover.

STEFAN EKLOF. Indonesian Politics in Crisis: the Long Fall of Suharto, 1996–98. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 1999. 288 pp. Introduction, bibliography, index. A$33.00, paper.

BARBARA LEIGH. The Changing Face of Malaysian Crafts: identity, Industry and Ingenuity. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 2000. Glossary, bibliography, index. 124 pp. 59 colour and 92 b/w illustrations. A$85.00, hardcover.

KRISHNA SEN and DAVID T. HILL. Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000. 245 pp. A$35.00, paper.

GENERAL ASIA

DAVID HANLON and GEOFFREY M. WHITE (eds). Voyaging Through the Contemporary Pacific. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. 443 pp. US$75.00, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

LAKSIRIJAYASURIYAandKEEPOOKONG, (eds.) TheAsianisation ofAustralia?:someFacts about the Myths. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999. 114 pp. A$16.95, paper.