British Women Travellers and Constructions of Racial Difference Across the Nineteenth-Century American West

At a time coinciding historically with the height of the British Empire, the immigrants' rush to occupy American West lands and the wholesale removal of Native Americans onto reservations, encounters between Native peoples and British women travellers became emblematic of a whole range of socio-spatial relationships of domination, subordination and resistance. In this paper, I examine representations of western Native Americans in the travelogues of ten British women travellers to the late nineteenth-century American West, produced primarily during encounters at sites along the western rail lines. Constructions of racial and gender differences in the texts can be tied to British colonial discourses, as well as to the social relations inherent in the multiple contact zones within which the encounters took place.     

The view from Lima: Recent publications on Andean Colonial history in Peru

Relación de la religión y ritos del Perú hecha por los padres agustinos. Edited, preliminary study and notes by LUCILA CASTRO DE TRELLES. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1992. Pp. lxxxvii, 75.

Curacas, reciprocidad y riqueza. By FRANKLIN PEASE G.Y. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1992. Pp. 208.

Perú. Hombre e historia. Vol. II. Entre el siglo XVI y el XVIII. By FRANKLIN PEASE G.Y. Lima: EDUBANCO, 1992. Pp. vii, 347.

Pachacamac y el Señor de los Milagros. Una trayectoria milenaria. By MARIA ROSTWOROWSKI DE DIEZ CANSECO. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1992. Pp. 214.

Las visitas a Cajamarca 1571–72/1578. Documentos. Preliminary studies and edition by MARIA ROSTWOROWSKI DE DIEZ CANSECO and MARIA DEL PILAR REMY. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1992. 2 vols. Pp. vi, 416, 463.

Instrucción al licenciado Lope García de Castro (1570). By EL INCA TITU CUSI YUPANQUI. Edited and preliminary study by LILIANA REGALADO DE HURTADO. Paleography by DEOLINDA VILLA E. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1992. Pp. lviii, 84.     

Archaeological Investigations at Yunkaray (Cuzco,Peru): Reconstructing the Rise and Fall of an Early Inca Rival (A.D. 1050–1450)

In the highland Andes during the centuries leading to Inca imperial expansion (ca. a.d. 1400–1530s), the people of the Cuzco Basin established alliances and rivalries with diverse neighbors living across the Cuzco region. Among the most powerful of those groups was a polity centered at Yunkaray (occupied ca. a.d. 1050–1450) on the Maras Plain just northwest of the burgeoning city of Cuzco. Recent settlement survey and excavations in and around Yunkaray have identified the site as the principal settlement of the Ayarmaca group, which remained outside the sphere of Inca cultural influence despite its proximity to Cuzco. The distinctive nature of Yunkaray’s interaction with the Incas is examined here through household excavations, which indicate that the large village was occupied by a population presenting modest status distinctions and relying on locally derived sources of social identity.     

Grazing was not mining: managing Victoria's goldfields commons

The great land rush of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw vast swathes of temperate grazing land around the world pass into private hands. Commons and common lands, however, provided a vital interim mechanism in this shift from state control to private property ownership. Commons ensured continued and widespread access to natural resources, including water, minerals, soil, grass, and timber, that was integral to the colonial settler project. The gold rush in nineteenth‐century Victoria sheds important light on this process, where almost 250,000 ha of Crown land were set aside as goldfields commons. These reserves maintained auriferous or gold‐bearing land in public hands and provided access to extensive tracts of grazing for the sheep and cattle of gold miners. In this paper, we examine how the traditional English notion of common lands was transferred to a New World environment and draw on the work of economist Elinor Ostrom to evaluate the use and function of Victoria's goldfields commons in terms of management, regulation, and sustainability.     

Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars

Completing a PhD is difficult. Add a major earthquake sequence and general stress levels become much higher. Caring for some of the nonacademic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critical to their scholarly success. Yet academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How then do we increase care for doctoral scholars? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures reduce attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might create these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students admitted. We suggest that a range of actors and contingencies are involved in journeying toward a more caring collective culture. We direct attention to the hybridity of an emerging ‘caring collective’, in which the assembled actors are not only ‘students’ and ‘staff’, but also bodies, technologies, objects, institutions, and other nonhuman actors including tectonic plates and earthquakes. The concept of the hybrid caring collective is useful, we argue, as a way of understanding the distributed responsibility for the care of doctoral scholars, and as a way of stepping beyond the student/supervisor blame game.