Power,property, and preservation

MacKenzie, Melody Kapilialoha, ed. Native Hawaiian Rights Handbook. Honolulu: Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, 1991. xi + 320 pp. including notes, glossary, table of cases, and index [distributed by University of Hawaii Press]. $25.00 paper.

Price, H. Marcus. Disputing the Dead: U.S. Law on Aboriginal Remains and Grave Goods. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. ix + 136 pp. including appendix and bibliography. $37.50 cloth.

West, Patrick C. and Steven R. Brechin, eds. Resident Peoples and National Parks: Social Dilemmas and Strategies in International Conservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991. xxiv + 443 pp. including bibliography and index. $29.95 cloth.     

Nature and provenance of the sandstone used for Bayon style sculptures produced during the reign of Jayavarman VII

Under Jayavarman VII (1182/83-ca.1218 CE) the Khmer empire reached its apex, leaving a heritage of major construction works and unique artistic production. The stone materials of several sculptures produced under his reign were characterized and compared to possible geological sources in northern and eastern Cambodia. The data suggest that a specific type of sandstone, rich in volcanic detritus, was deliberately selected and quarried from a Triassic sedimentary sequence exposed far from Angkor, the main political and economic center at that time.     

Khaki Girls,VADs, and Tommy's Sisters: Gender and Class in First World War Britain

Abstract

Since the end of the cold war, and with particular urgency since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, historians and pundits have searched for parallel cases that make sense of the United States' military and economic predominance in the current international order. Many have chosen the British empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the most telling. As Dane Kennedy argues in an article recently published in The International History Review: ‘The United States' immediate predecessor was the British empire, and it should be the first case to which we turn for meaningful historical comparisons.’¹ For Kennedy, the United States, despite coming into existence by breaking away from the British empire, retained many of its institutions and doctrinal traditions. Having marshalled them to new purposes while expanding across the continent, the United States turned its attention abroad. Kennedy shows that, despite the different worlds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both Britain and the United States built their global power in comparable fashion through the techniques of indirect rule, military strategies geared towards protecting imperial and commercial networks, and ideological claims to universally applicable civilizing missions.     

The impact of playground design on play choices and behaviors of pre-school children

The purpose of this study was to examine where and how children choose to play in four Australian pre-school centers with very different outdoor playgrounds. Using a momentary time sampling direct observation instrument, a total of 960 scans were taken of pre-determined target areas (paths, paved expanses, grass, softfall, sand feature, manufactured functional, manufactured constructive and natural) within four playgrounds over a 30-day period. During each scan, we recorded the number of boys and girls observed in each target area as well as the dominant type of play (functional, constructive, symbolic, self-focused, talking). A total of 2361 observations of children occurred across the four centers. The results revealed the children were using the four playgrounds differently. At the diverse and natural Center A, the most popular space was the natural area and the least popular space was the sandpit. At the small, compact and diverse Center B, children were fairly evenly dispersed, with the most popular areas being the softfall and paved expanse. At the hard and barren Center C, almost half the children were found on the pavement, but the sandpits and natural areas were also popular. Finally, at the large, sparse and old Center D, children were fairly evenly dispersed, but most were observed playing on the softfall. Across all centers, irrespective of target area, the dominant play activity was functional play followed by self-focused play. This article discusses these findings and asks important questions about the design of pre-school playgrounds. In doing so, this study has begun to explain the relationship between the design of outdoor play spaces, children's choices of play locations and their play behaviors.     

Creating Spaces of Resistance: Development NGOs and their Clients in Ghana, India and Mexico

Development NGOs have been accused by some of being new instruments of control, domesticated by the neoliberal project. For others, they elaborate and pursue alternative dreams. In this paper, we argue that, although the majority of NGOs have been co‐opted to serve hegemonic development agendas, they nevertheless present a fluid, contradictory web of relations, within which a significant minority seeks to make spaces of resistance, and where even the most neoliberal NGOs are used by some clients to create new associational spaces. Drawing on work with NGOs in Ghana, India, Mexico and Europe, we explore various strategies deployed by this minority of "independent thinking NGOs". We argue that there is an important production of Melucci's submerged networks or latent social movements, however limited their political impact to date.     

FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) ‘Other Spaces’: toward an application of Foucault's heterotopias as alternate spaces of social ordering

This article applies the principles of Foucault's (1986) concept of heterotopia to the spatial imaginaries and material realities of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), an elite organisation of British women volunteers who served on the Western Front during World War I. First, the FANY created crisis heterotopia shaped by the history and politics of the period and linked to gendered cultural anxieties at this slice in time; second, FANY space was ordered and made accessible through the interplay of class privilege and patriotic national identity; third, it involved possibilities for transgression through the heterotopic juxtaposition of material practices of domesticity within and against sites of combat; and finally, FANY space both involved an utopian element that contrasted with other real spaces available to women and helped reveal the gendered politics of those traditional sites.     

Political Resources for Policy Terminators

Scholars of policy termination have long understood that there are tremendous difficulties associated with closing down public programs and facilities. This examination of one closure begins with that understanding and then, using Deborah Stone's conceptualization of politics in the policy arena, moves to categorize and analyze those difficulties.
The case involves the U.S. government's policy of providing lifelong, residential care to victims of Hansen's Disease (leprosy). The investigation documents the government's decision in the 1950s to end the policy and follows the ensuing battle. The government terminators, despite the rationality of their position, were held at bay for nearly fifty years by politically savvy opponents including patients, staff, and the community that housed the leprosarium. Only when government officials reached into their own bag of political resources and skillfully employed those resources, was it possible to end the policy.