Book reviews

CHINA

BOB HODGE and KAM LOUIE. The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture: the Art of Reading Dragons. London: Routledge, 1998. A$150.00, hardcover; A$52.95, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

LEWIS R. LANCASTER and RICHARD K. PAYNE (eds). Religion and Society in Contemporary Korea. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1997. 282 pp. Preface, index. $US20.00, paper.

DOH C. SHIN. Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. A$90.00, hardcover; A$34.95, paper.

GEIR HELGESEN. Democracy and Authority in Korea: the Cultural Dimension in Korean Politics. Richmond: Curzon Press, 1998. £40.00, hardcover.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

J. E. LLEWELLYN. The Legacy of Women's Uplift in India. Contemporary Women Leaders in the Arya Samaj. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998. 224 pp. Rs325, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

R. E. ELSON. The End of the Peasantry in Southeast Asia: a Social and Economic History of Peasant Livelihood, 1800‐1990s. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1997. xxvii, 335 pp. Tables, abbreviations, glossary, index. A$49.95, paper.

GENERAL ASIA

JAMES W. MORLEY (ed). Driven by Growth: political Change in the Asia-Pacific Region. Revised Edition. Armonk, New York; London, England: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. 393 pp. Preface, tables, figures, bibliography, index. US$24.95, paper.     

Investigating Activity Patterns In Prehispanic Plazas: Weak Acid‐Extraction ICP–AES Analysis of Anthrosols at Classic Period El Coyote,Northwestern Honduras

Weak acid‐extraction ICP–AES analysis was performed to obtain multi‐elemental characterizations of anthropogenic sediments from plaza spaces that no longer contain artefacts and adjacent trash deposits at the prehispanic site of El Coyote in northwestern Honduras. Multivariate quantitative assessments of the anthrosol chemical data, along with associated inventories of midden materials, are examined to derive signatures for activity areas and refuse dumps that can be linked across portions of the site. The findings of this study permit the reconstruction of activity patterns in the site's main plaza and in its environs. This has important implications for understanding the relationship among ritual practice, craft production and political economy during the Late and Terminal Classic periods, c. ad 600–1000.     

Unique Objects,Special Deposits and Elite Networks in Bronze Age Europe

Most material culture of later prehistoric Europe comprises common forms of pottery, personal ornaments, and tools of different kinds. But some objects stand out by virtue of their unique decoration. These special objects were often ornamented with motifs and patterns that were intended to capture and hold the viewer's attention. Many such objects were purposefully deposited, sometimes in graves, sometimes in ‘structured deposits’. In the Early and Middle Bronze Age, ornate cups played special roles, both in expressing the status of elites and in serving as common elements in long‐distance connections between elites in different regions of Europe. An unusual pit at Kelheim in Bavaria, Germany, serves as a case study to explore the connections between uniquely decorated cups, the emergence of elites during the Early and Middle Bronze Age, and the formation and maintenance of long‐distance connections between communities throughout Europe.     

Rooting diaspora, reviving nation: Zionist landscapes of Palestine–Israel

This paper explores the politics of landscape and nature within the process of nation-building. In it I examine how landscapes can operate in multiple, intersecting ways in the service of an ideological discourse and how the politics of nature, specifically trees, can contribute to the shaping of a new national space and subjectivity. Focusing on the multiple renditions of Palestine promulgated by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) , I discuss how landscapes can entangle diaspora and homeland, aesthetics and embodiment, antiquity and modernity, with both conceptual and material consequences. Drawing on histories of the JNF and on a selection of historic newspaper articles and children's literature, I explore the circulation of aesthetic renderings of Palestine and the performance of embodied landscapes during the children's tree-planting holiday, Tu B'Shvat. I argue that the centrality of trees to the JNF, and the imagery of roots, renewal, family and innocence that they conjure, legitimised Zionist colonisation and naturalised the Israeli nation state and body politic. I also demonstrate how JNF landscapes and afforestation work assisted in the demarcation of Israeli nation-space and therefore in the material dispossession of the Palestinians.     

Sampling Design and Inferential Bias in Archaeological Soil Chemistry

The ways and extent to which sampling design influences data collection and archaeological inference is a constant concern for archaeologists. Yet, spatial analyses based on anthrosol chemistry have been less willing to concede this problem and to explore potential solutions. This article reviews the recent literature on soil sampling for spatial studies and then uses an example from prehispanic Honduras to examine how both quantitative and qualitative interpretations of soil chemical patterns can shift when sampling design changes. The results of this study suggest that the principal challenges to selecting an appropriate sampling design are in determining the sample size and density, as well as recognizing and adequately dealing with variation in the soil properties being measured. These findings provide cautionary tales for spatial studies aimed at using soil chemical data to infer activity patterns in the archaeological record.     

Mindfulness and culture

Mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism, is simultaneously championed as a mental health tool and critiqued as a form of neo-liberal subjugation in media representations. Here, anthropology is well positioned to contribute to and meaningfully alter these contemporary debates. Anthropologists' focus on the relationship between psychological categories and culturally embedded ethical practices offers a welcome corrective to celebratory or critical interpretive modes. Through an analysis of sensationalized media reports that ‘mindfulness can make you selfish!’, the authors argue that long-term qualitative research uncovers ways in which cultural values profoundly influence the effects of mindfulness. In doing so, they suggest the importance of continued ethnographic research into mindfulness and increased public attention to the connections between the culturally patterned ways that we think of our minds and what those minds come to be through mindfulness training.     

Spaces of nostalgia: the hollowing out of a London market

In this paper we look at the place of memory and nostalgia in peoples' narratives of an old, traditionally white, working-class market in London, which over the last decade has experienced social and economic decline. We argue that in this hollowed out space, abandoned by many of those who can move, has emerged a nostalgia for the halcyon days of the market when people came from far and wide to shop, and when there was a strong sense of community. What these nostalgic discourses mask are the social divisions (particularly racialized divisions) of the time, while in this romanticized vision of the past, the new population of asylum seekers have become an easy trope for the dissatisfactions of the present. Regeneration strategies in an area such as this need to confront the force of these nostalgic discourses in order to tackle the deep social and racial divisions and reverse the socio-economic decline.