‘Gender hates men’: untangling gender and development discourses in food security fieldwork in urban Malawi

This article examines the social construction and contestation of gender and gender roles in the city of Blantyre in Malawi. In fieldwork on gendered household roles related to food security, interviews with men and women revealed a distinct set of connotations with the word gender, which reflected Malawians’ historical and contemporary engagement with concepts of development, modernity, and human rights. We denote the Malawian concept of gender as gender in order to distinguish the word participants used in interviews from the more widely accepted conventional definition. We then use this distinction to highlight the ways in which ideas of gender equality have been introduced and received in the Malawian context. The urban setting of the research is key to drawing out the association of gender with Westernization, bringing into focus the power dynamics inherent in the project of translating global discourses of gender rights and gender equality into meaningful social change in developing countries. Gender in Malawi denotes a top-down (and outside-in) process of framing Malawi’s goals for gender equality. This creates political constraints both in the form of resistance to gender, because it resonates with a long history of social change imposed by outside forces, and in the form of superficial adherence to gender to appear more urban and modern, especially to a Western researcher. Local understandings of gender as gender undermine efforts to promote gender equality as a means to address Malawi’s intense urban poverty and household food insecurity.     

Estuarine Beach Morphology in Microtidal Middle Harbour,Sydney

Microtidal Middle Harbour, Sydney, contains a range of estuarine beach morphologies from steep reflective beachfaces to wide low‐tide terraces. The most exposed beaches are morphologically similar to lowest‐energy open‐ocean beaches; however, the remainder of the profiles cannot be adequately explained by established beach morphodynamic models. Estuarine beach morphology in Middle Harbour appears to be primarily influenced by storm events. Deep‐water ocean waves rework profiles in the lower part of estuary. For beaches protected from these waves, tidal fluctuations are the main determinant of beach profile. Locally‐generated wind waves are only a significant energy contributor where the fetch is large enough; however, this only occurs on two beaches where low‐tide terraces are formed.     

The “Works of the Old Men” in Arabia: remote sensing in interior Arabia

In the 1920s pilots overflying the Transjordan panhandle discovered thousands of enigmatic stone-built structures which the beduin called ‘’The Works of the Old Men’. We now know these works are several thousand years old, extend from Syria to Yemen and probably number a million or more, making them far older and significantly more extensive than Peru’s Nazca Lines. Like the latter they are often unseen and seldom intelligible at ground level. Now an aerial reconnaissance programme in Jordan and high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth for large areas of Arabia is vastly expanding the database bringing transformation and opportunity. Despite regional and diachronic variations, these works are plainly parts of an immense prehistoric cultural continuum surviving as hunting traps, funerary/religious sites and seasonal camps. Extensive sampling and test-mapping show patterns and associations which suggest methodologies for developing a remote sensing programme to record, map and begin analysis for interior Arabia as a whole. On such foundations may be built interdisciplinary collaboration to interpret and explain this little-known human landscape on the fringes of the Fertile Crescent.     

The Boundaries of Oxford's Empire

ANDREW PORTER, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire. III: The Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxii, 774. $72.00 (CDN); JUDITH M. BROWN and WM. ROGER LOUIS, eds. The Oxford History of the British Empire: IV: The Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxvi, 773. $72.00 (CDN); ROBIN W. WINKS, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire: V: Historiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxiv, 731. $79.95 (CDN).