Early Medieval Trade on Japan’s Southern Frontier and its Effect on Okinawan State Development: Grey Stoneware of the East China Sea

In this paper I examine the development of a particular kind of grey stoneware called kamuiyaki which was produced and traded within the Ryukyu Islands, southwestern Japan, in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. The wares themselves, their chronology, and archaeological context are discussed. The kilns represent the first enterprise in the islands in which a commodity was made for exchange on a substantial scale. The establishment of the kilns in a remote area, with technological borrowing from both Japan and Korea, reflects social and economic trends of the beginning of the Medieval Period in Japan. Greyware production, circulation, and consumption, reconstructed from recent excavations, shows a political economy capable of fostering the development of small states on the island of Okinawa in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.     

(Re)Inhabiting awareness: geography and mindfulness

This paper opens up a dialogue between mindfulness and the discipline of geography. As a meditative practice that cultivates ‘present-centred non-judgmental awareness’, we claim that the practices and insights of mindfulness have important implications for various forms of geographical enquiry. This paper argues that mindfulness can inform geographical practices in relation to epistemology and methodology, and contribute towards geographically informed critical psychological theory and action. More specifically, we claim that mindfulness could offer a practice-based context to support the study of affects, extend the application of psychoanalytical geographical methods beyond the therapeutic, and contribute to emerging geographical studies of behavioural power and empowerment. This analysis explores these sites of interaction through a series of reflections on the Mindfulness, Behaviour Change and Engagement in Public Policy programme that was developed and delivered by the authors. This more-than-therapeutic mindfulness programme has been delivered to approximately 47 civil servants working in the UK Government.     

Counter-narratives of coping and becoming: Karen refugee women’s inside/outside figured worlds

The purpose of our research is to understand the socially and culturally constructed architecture within which refugee women produce and negotiate identity. This ethnographic case study discusses findings from data collected through participant observation and informal interviews in two refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. As Karen refugee women described their positionality within and negotiation between the socially constructed Inside and Outside Figured Worlds of the refugee camp, they depict the negotiation of a hybrid Third Space. Created at the intersection of the refugee camp structures that dominate individual agency and the discourses of gender and displacement that influence the social practices of women, this third space is characterized by the response strategies Karen women engage to support individual, family, and community health. Within the transformational spaces that refugee women constructed, the processes of coping and becoming reflected the relationship between structure and agency. Within these intersections a woman could express her resistance to a system that in its design represented a majority she was not a part of. As Karen refugee women moved to redesign their position within these systems, shifts in meaning of cultural norms resulted, inclusive of those that influence or define the role of women.     

Gendered politics of empire: the female explorateur and natural histories of the Amazon basin 1899–1901

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Brazilian Amazon was experiencing a moment of heightened exploration, mapping, border creation, and contestation. This article examines the production of the French explorateur and geographer Octavie Coudreau through analysis of the natural history/travel narrative, Voyage au Trombetas (1899), and her subsequent narrative Voyage au Cuminá (1901). Octavie Coudreau initially went to Amazonia to travel with her husband, Henri Coudreau, already a renowned explorer of the French and Brazilian Amazon. After Henri Coudreau’s death on their first voyage, Octavie Coudreau continued working under contract for the Brazilian state and published natural history narratives after each of her four exploratory and mapping missions. These travel narratives include suggestions for increased colonization along with observation of local populaces, supported by a multitude of maps and photographs. Using feminist approaches to the historiography of travel, empire, and geographical work, I look at the female European explorer’s view of imperialism during this significant period in Amazonian history and development. I examine the unfixing of gender identity as it relates to movement within a liminal space. I think of this as the in-between place in which Octavie finds herself – as a grieving widow, thrust into a position of power abroad, while still dealing with the limitations of her gender during this time period, and the space of the Amazon itself, a region in flux where multiple races and imperial powers interact in a contact zone.