Tapa Cloths and Beaters: Tradition,Innovation and the Agency of the Bounty Women in Shaping a New Culture on Pitcairn Island from 1790 to 1850

This article examines the tapa cloths made by the women associated with the Bounty, who sailed to Pitcairn Island with the Bounty mutineers to create a new society and culture. Traditional literature reveals a male-dominated narrative, which ignores any female agency in the Bounty-Pitcairn story, and merely objectifies them. The tapa cloths the women produced reveal much about their origins and their efforts to maintain the traditions of their homelands while initiating innovative designs that appear to have provided a sense of unique identity in the Anglo-Polynesian children of the Polynesian women and their European husbands. Given their objectification in the generally accepted historical narrative, it is ironic that the women reveal themselves through the objects that they made. By compiling data about the tapa cloths (kind of cloth, plants used, techniques, colour and patterning, quality), details of tradition and innovation emerge and reveal much about these women and the knowledge they passed down the generations through their daughters.     

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES IN SOVIET FOREST MANAGEMENT

Exploitation of forest resources in the USSR requires choices among a set of uses which are at times mutually exclusive. Trees have predominantly been used in industry, often harvested by methods which have caused environmental damage and have not allowed for optimum utilization of the resource. It appears that increasing recognition is given to other functions of forest stands, including food supply, social recreation, and non-consumptive uses such as ecosystem preservation and environmental amelioration.     

Le Sacre de la citoyenne? Pierre Rosanvallon and the significant other

Rosanvallon, P., Le sacre du citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France (Gallimard, 1992), 490pp., 195F., ISBN 2 07 072745 9     

Introduction: global perspectives on gender–water geographies

This introduction summarizes the work featured in the themed section of Gender, Place and Culture titled ‘Global geographies of gender and water’. It brings into dialogue scholars investigating a variety of gender–water relationships at different scales, including: poisoned waterscapes; fishing practices; and the implications of neoliberal water policies. The authors featured purposefully engage with the multi-faceted ways in which experiences, discourses and policies of water are gendered, and how gender is created through processes of access, use and control of water resources. In bringing these articles together, we have consciously aimed to support inclusive, feminist collaborative work and to prioritize diversity.     

Process, perception, and practice: Time perspectivism in Yosemite native demography

Multiple concepts of time apply to archaeology—from analytical time used to organize and interpret the archaeological record to the time of lived experience of those individuals responsible for creation of the archaeological record. This paper demonstrates how these disparate concepts of time can be reconciled through a perception-based approach to time perspectivism, which invokes multiple analytical scales working from the minimum scale of the average human lifespan. This approach is demonstrated through a case study of hunter–gatherer demographic change in Yosemite Valley in the central Sierra Nevada of California.