New maps and atlases

GENERAL

All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas. By Preston E. James. 9 × 6. xiii + 622 pp. 35 maps/figures. Odyssey Press, Indianapolis, 1972. $6.lb50.

The Conceptual Revolution in Geography. By W.K.D. Davies. 9 1/2 × 6 1/2. 416 pp., 35 figures. tables, references, bibliography. University of London Press, 1972. £4.lb85.

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

The Ice Age in Britain. By B. W. Sparks and R. G. West. 9 1/2 × 6 1/4. 302 pp. 44 plates, references, index. Methven, London, 1972. £5.lb50.

MEDICAL GEOGRAPHY

Man, Environment and Disease in Britain: A Medical Geography of Britain through the ages. By G. Melvyn Howe. 8 3/4 × 5 3/4. 285 pp. 16 plates, 91 figures, maps and tables. David and Charles, Newton Abbott, 1972. £4.lb75.

Medical Geography: Techniques and Field Studies. Ed. N. D. McGlashan. 9 1/2 × 6 1/2, 336 pp. 86 figures. Methuen, London, 1972. £4.lb50.

Sheila Bain

EDUCATIONAL

The U.S.S.R. By G. Melvyn Howe. 6 7/8 × 8 1/4, 110 pp., 55 maps, 40 plates. Book list, tables, index. Hulton, Amersham, 1972. 80p.

Topics in Geography. A series of books by various authors. 8 3/4 × 8 1/2. Paperbound. Macmillan, 1970–1971. 50p.

London. By Oswald Hull. 72 pages.

Transport. By Oswald Hull. 72 pages.

Food, Clothing and Shelter. By Leonard W. Stevens. 79 pages.

Towns. By P. M. Turner. 80 pages.

Hulton's Practical Geography Series Book 4 Advanced Techniques and Statistics. By Philip A. Sauvain, 10×7 1/2, 164 pp., Plates, Maps and Diagrams. Hulton, Amersham, 1972. £1.lb20.

Geographical Studies in Western Europe. By T. W. Randle. 9 3/4 × 7 1/2, 170 pp., 145 figures, 57 plates. Oliver &; Boyd, Edinburgh, 1971. £1.lb25.

A Notebook of Physical Geography. By K. Briggs. 9 3/4 × 7 3/8, 109 pp. Numerous illus. And diagrams, exercises. University of London Press, 1972. 60p.

East Africa in Colour. By D. C. Money. 7 1/4 × 9 3/4. 60 pp. 113 figures. Evans Brothers, London, 1972. 60p.

Geography from Space. By E. C. Barrett. 11 1/4 × 8 1/4. 95 pp. Numerous illus. Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1972. 95p.

A Physical and Human Geography of the British Isles. By F. R. Dobson and M. E. Virgo. 6 1/4 × 9 1/4. 152 pp. Numerous illus. English Universities Press, London, 1972. 90p.     

Resolving Risk? Marriage and Creative Conjugality

The idea of rural women as risk‐averse food producers has been powerful and persistent and constitutes one of our most enduring generalizations. This contribution begins with some critical thoughts about the prevalent consensus on women and risk behaviour and goes on to discuss some counter examples of risk‐taking women farmers in Zimbabwe and Zambia. It argues that risk behaviours of these kinds are strongly related to the character of marriage and forms of conjugality, and considers more broadly how insurance and dependence are gendered. There is a danger of overdrawing, and exclusively emphasizing, household and marriage as sites of gender subordination and thereby losing sight of the value to women of domestic groups and the existence of class‐based solidarities and emotional investments, across gender, which are intertwined with gender subordinations. To recognize these (and other) positive aspects of institutions of kinship and marriage, without simultaneously endorsing subordination, requires a focus on change and women's agency within such institutions, and the happy thought that there is no such thing as the status quo. This study therefore considers myths made within different but overlapping contexts; first the idea of women as reliably risk averse (as well as disadvantaged in access to insurance) which holds sway in international development organizations and some gender analysis; and second, the myth of households as composed of entirely separate individuals with opposed gender interests, in which marriage is predominantly a contract legitimating the exploitation of women. Marriage works as a safety net for women in many contexts, as a form of insurance, but it may become an impediment to accumulation — a feature shared with other social security institutions.     

Envisioning disaster in the 1910 Paris flood

This article uncovers the visual narratives embedded within the photography of the 1910 Paris flood. Images offered Parisians multiple ways to understand and construe the significance of the flood and provided interpretive frameworks to decide the meaning of this event. Investigating three interlocking narratives of ruin, beauty, and fraternité, the article shows how photographs of Paris under water allowed residents to make sense of the destruction but also to imagine the city’s reconstruction. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of visual culture in recovering from urban disasters.     

Bad blood: poverty, psychopathy and the politics of transgression in Kenya Colony, 1939-59

This article examines the inter-relationship between psychiatry and sex, both fertile fields within the recent historiography of colonialism and empire. Using a series of case files pertaining to European patients admitted to the Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi during the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how sexual transgression among colonial Europeans precipitated, and was combined with, mental distress. Considering psychiatric treatment as a form of social control, the article investigates a number of cases in which a European patient had been perceived to have transgressed the normative sexual behaviour codes of settler society in Kenya. What these files suggest is that transgressive sexuality in Kenya was itself framed by indices, as insistent as they were uncertain, of gender, race and class. While psychiatry as social control has some degree of purchase here, more valuable is an attempt to discern the particular ways in which certain forms of sexual behaviour were understood in diagnostic terms. Men who had sex with Africans, we see, tended to be diagnosed as 'depressed' on arrival at the hospital but were judged to be mentally normal consequently. Women, by contrast, were liable to be diagnosed as psychopathic, a diagnosis, I argue, that helped to explain the uniquely transgressive status of impoverished European women living alone in the margins of white society. Unlike white men, moreover, women did not have to have sex with non-Europeans to transgress sexual codes: this is because female poverty was a sexual problem in a way that male poverty decidedly was not. Poor white women were marked by uncertainty over their sexual behaviour—and dubious racial identity in its turn—and the problem of social contamination was described by reference both to the polluted racial ancestry of an individual and to the prospective contamination of healthy racial stocks. This article aims to address current historical debates around sex and empire, 'white subalternity' and the social history of psychiatry and mental health. All names have been changed to protect patient anonymity.     

‘In Accord with British Traditions’: The Rise of Compulsory Religious Education in Ontario,Canada, and Victoria,Australia, 1945–50

This article examines the establishment of legally mandated Protestant training in the Australian state of Victoria and the Canadian province of Ontario. Fearing moral decay at home and a menacing world environment seemingly unfavourable to the ‘British way of life’ in the 1940s, educators asserted that religion, and specifically Protestant Christianity, was the only means by which the moral core of their British democracy could be preserved. The teaching of religious instruction was highly controversial in both places. Supporters of the new curriculum believed the religious courses would strengthen the British identity and moral backbone of the Canadian and Australian nations, while opponents argued that imposing religion in the classroom was antithetical to British ideals of freedom and toleration. Educators struggled to reconcile these divergent views on how religion fitted into a wider British identity, and the resulting tension exposed the points of ethnic and cultural fracture that undermined the credibility of Britishness after 1950. The very efforts to impose a unifying sense of Britishness were so controversial and problematic that they ultimately required an alternative understanding of what it meant to be a citizen of Ontario or Victoria.     

Feminism Spoken Here: Epistemologies for Interdisciplinary Development Research

Development studies is a field characterized by an unusual degree of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, and therefore is constantly subject both to pressures for the reproduction of disciplines as autonomous and self‐sufficient, and to an increasing steer from public funders of research for interdisciplinary work which is valued for its problem‐solving character and more apparent relevance, in an era greatly exercised by accountability. At a moment when the need to renew disciplinary interchange has intensified it is therefore instructive to consider the social relations which facilitate interdisciplinarity. This article does this through an argument that feminist cross‐disciplinary research shows how important shared values are to motivate and sustain these kinds of learning, and that an explicit focus on social justice as the core of development research can be the basis of such a renewal. If feminist interactions and solidarity provide the motivation, feminist epistemologies provide arguments for why socially engaged research is not ‘biased’, but stronger than research with narrower ideas of objectivity; why reflexivities and subjectivities are crucial to the conduct of research; and how these, and the convergence of concepts of individuals and persons favoured within different disciplines, might build the common ground required for greater disciplinary interchange.