Book reviews

Frontiers

Poststructualist geographies: the diabolical art of spatial science. Marcus Doel. Pp. ix + 229. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Price: £45.00 (hbk), £14.95 (pbk). ISBN 0 226 48720 2 (hbk), ISBN 0 226 48721 0 (pbk).

Sleight‐of‐hand

New works in geography

Geography and enlightenment. Edited by David N. Livingstone & Charles W.J. Withers. Pp.viii + 455. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Price £17.50 (pbk), £36.50 (hbk). ISBN 0 226 48721 0 (pbk), ISBN 0 226 48721 2 (hbk).

Secure from rash assault. Sustaining the Victorian environment. James Winter. Pp. xi + 342. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Price: £ 24.95 (hbk). ISBN 0 520 21609 1.

Perspectives on British rural planning policy, 1994–97. Andrew W. Gilg. Pp. viii + 154. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Price £35.00 (hbk). ISBN 1 85972 641 0 (hbk).

Exploring contemporary migration. Paul Boyle, Keith Halfacree & Vaughan Robinson. Pp. 272. London: Longman, 1998. Price £18.99 (pbk). ISBN 0 58225 161 3.

Focus on Scotland

Urban highlanders: Highland‐lowland migration and urban Gaelic culture, 1700–1900. Charles W.J. Withers. Pp. 271. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998. Price £20.00 (pbk). ISBN 1 86232 040 5.

Girls in trouble: sexuality and social control in rural Scotland, 1660–1780. Rosalind Mitchison & Leah Leneman. Pp. viii + 144. Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press, 1998. £10.95 (pbk). ISBN 1 898218 89 7 (pbk).

Girls in trouble: sexuality and social control in urban Scotland, 1660–1780. Rosalind Mitchison & Leah Leneman. Pp. viii + 164. Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press, 1998. £12.95 (pbk). ISBN 1 898218 90 0 (pbk).     

Book Reviews

Guilain P. Denoeux, The United States and the Challenge of Democratization in the Arab World. Washington, DC: Occasional Paper, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1996. 38 pp. npg.

Walid Khalidi, Islam, the West and Jerusalem. Washington, DC: Occasional Paper, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and Center for Muslim‐Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, 1996. 24 pp. npg.

Rick Fawn and Jeremy Larkins (eds), International Society after the Cold War: Anarchy and Order Reconsidered. London: Macmillan, 1996. 302 pp. $39.95 (paper).

Mark Turner and David Hume, Governance, Administration and Development: Making the State Work. London: Macmillan, 1997. xv + 272 pp. $34.95 (cloth).

Michael Pugh (ed.), The UN, Peace and Force. London: Frank Cass, 1997. 209 pp. £29.50 (cloth), £15.00 (paper).

Kent E. Calder, Asia's Deadly Triangle: How Arms, Energy and Growth Threaten to Destabilize Asia Pacific. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 1996. xi + 253 pp. npg.

Joseph M. Siracusa and Yeong‐Han Cheong, America's Australia, Australia's America: A Guide to Issues and References. Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1997. 160 pp. US21.95 (cloth), US$12.95 (paper).

Phillip Darby (ed.), At the Edge of International Relations: Postcolonialism, Gender and Dependency. London: Pinter, 1997. £45.00 (cloth).

Peter Stirk, A History of European Integration Since 1914. London: Pinter, 1996. vii + 308 pp. £42.50 (cloth), £16.99 (paper).

Philip J. Eldridge, Non‐Government Organizations and Democratic Participation in Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. $55.00 (cloth).

Dewi Fortuna Anwar, Indonesia's Strategic Culture: Ketahanan Nasional. Wawasan Nusantara and Hankamrata. Griffith University: Centre for the Study of Australia‐Asia Relations, Australia‐Asia Papers No. 75, May 1996. x + 49 pp. $10.00 (paper).

Garry Rodan, Kevin Hewison and Richard Robison (eds), The Political Economy of South‐East Asia: An Introduction. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997. xiv + 299 pp. $29.95 (paper).

Curtis Andressen and Keichi Kumagai, Escape from Affluence: Japanese Students in Australia. Griffith University: Centre for the Study of Australia‐Asia Relations, Australia‐Asia Papers no. 79, December 1996. vi + 116 pp. $16.00 (paper).

Kim Richard Nossal and Carolynn Vivian, A Brief Madness: Australia and the Resumption of French Nuclear Testing. Canberra: Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence No. 121, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 1997. $15.00 (paper).

William H. Lewis and Stuart E. Johnson, Weapons of Mass Destruction: New Perspectives on Counter Proliferation. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1995. npg.

Hendro Subroto, Eyewitness to Integration of East Timor. Jakarta: Pustaka Sinar Harapan, 1997. 279 pp. 29,000 Rupiah.     

Rethinking Western Motu Descent Groups

The Motu‐Koitabu are the traditional inhabitants of the site of Papua New Guinea's capital city, Port Moresby, and well represented in a body of literature, from the 1870s on, encompassing oral history, archaeology and social anthropology. A basic unit of Motu‐Koitabu society is the iduhu, a corporate group which is nowadays conventionally glossed locally as a ‘clan’ in English, but represented in anthropological literature as more ambiguous in nature than the gloss implies. Considering the literature in the light of recent fieldwork in a Motu‐Koitabu village, this article takes issue with an argument developed in the 1950s, which has become an accepted wisdom, that the structure of iduhu was threatened by the social consequences of missionisation and colonialism, and that iduhu were saved from collapse by new leaders, church deacons, who replaced traditional leaders. A re‐examination of the nature of iduhu, a partial reinterpretation of notions of leadership and prestige and an account of two recent disputes brought to a village court inform an argument that iduhu have been more resilient than previous researchers have thought. In this regard concepts of leadership among the Motu‐Koitabu need clarification, and it is suggested that the importance of landholding has been underestimated in previous attempts to understand what iduhu are.     

Reto's Chance: State and Status in an Urban Papua New Guinea Settlement

According to the ‘state‐in‐society’ model developed by Joel Migdal, states cannot be analytically regarded as separate from the societies they govern and have to be viewed in their social contexts. Migdal's model has been well received by scholars discussing governance and, especially, social control, in Melanesia. An anthropological qualification which could be applied to the model is that local elements of state in Melanesia are socially permeable, since their employees are likely to come from the communities they serve. This permeability arguably contributes to a mutually transformative relationship between state institutions and local groups whose praxis is informed by exigencies of kinship and community. Heuristically viewing the colonially planned ‘village court system’ in Papua New Guinea as an element of state in terms of Migdal's model, this paper presents a narrative of the appropriation of a village court into community sociality and individual aspirations for status in an urban settlement in Port Moresby. Ethnographically, it suggests that an application of the state‐in‐society model in the Papua New Guinean context, at least, must allow recognition of the way colonially and neo‐colonially introduced institutions have been appropriated into the praxis of local communities, and thus must preserve a sense of the transformations both of the institutions and the social life of those communities, to be analytically viable.