Australia-Southeast Asia relations and the East Asian Summit

The economic and geopolitical landscape of Asia has changed dramatically in recent years, providing Australia with an unprecedented opportunity to become an integral and significant player in a wider Indo-Pacific region as it charts its future and seeks to manage tensions while shaping a new architecture of cooperation. Late in 2004 at their annual summit, leaders of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, agreed to create a new forum—the East Asian Summit—and hold the first meeting of heads of government of participating countries in Kuala Lumpur in December this year. The summit seems destined to become a regular event and thus the policy-guiding core of any future East Asian or Indo-Pacific community.     

The Nation in Utero: Translating the Science of Fetal Education in Republican China

As Chinese nationalists grappled with the political and military weakness of the young Republic of China, some sought to strengthen the Chinese race by advocating a return to the ancient practice of fetal education. Fetal education held that every sight, sound, and flavor that a pregnant mother took in through her senses, as well as her emotions and demeanor, directly affected her fetus. This paper examines how the text Taijiao, Song Jiazhao’s 1914 Chinese translation of Shimoda Jirō’s Japanese work Taikyō, presents a modern reformulation of fetal education that draws upon both modern Western science and East Asian medicine. As the text uses modern biology and psychology to explain and demonstrate the efficacy of fetal education, it also narrows the scope of fetal education to focus almost exclusively on the mother’s psychological state. Similarly, as the text turns to instruct women on the practice of fetal education, it draws upon Edo and Qing gynecological principles to emphasise the importance of the pregnant mother’s emotional self-control. Ultimately this text represents a neo-traditionalist response to modernity as it presents a Neo-Confucian vision of fetal education focused on a pregnant mother’s moral self-cultivation and emotional self control.     

The Order of Battle in the Roman Army: Evidence from Marching Camps

The Iron Age in the North-West of Iberia is characterized by settlement patterns in which small hilltop enclosures or castros were dominant. Recent field-survey work has revealed more about the distribution of rural settlement sites in part of this area, and an analysis has been made of the pattern of rural site distributions in relation to the castros. This confirms the continued focal role of castros into the Roman period. An explanation for the settlement pattern in this region and the absence of typically Roman features like developed villas is sought in the nature and extent of Roman military recruitment from the region.     

Space and Manpower in Roman Camps

Summary.   Certain aspects of space and manpower use in Roman camps were investigated using a previously published spreadsheet model. Over half the camp area was not needed for the men's tents and this was probably enough to cope with patches of unsuitable ground within the rampart. The relationship between the camp area and perimeter was such that the bigger the camp, the relatively fewer men were needed to make and defend it. Small camps, which required relatively greater effort from the men, could be made quickly. Data from the Polybian and Hyginian models suggested that the basic determinant of camp design and numerical structure of the army lay in the requirement for a man to labour upon and defend no more than five feet of perimeter. Compared with the Polybian model, the Hyginian model greatly reduced the area and perimeter length for any given force, thus enabling the army to adopt a more aggressive posture.     

Pre‐Pottery Clay Innovation in the Zagros Foothills

Neolithic material engagements transformed the ways in which communities interacted with the physical world and one another. Based on evidence from the flanks of the Zagros Mountains, in western Iran and north‐eastern Iraq, Robert Braidwood initially proposed his ‘Hilly Flanks’ hypothesis for the origins of agriculture and sedentism. The evidence for multi‐centred developments in domestication has demonstrated that elements of these practices spanned south‐west Asia in the Early Neolithic. The Zagros Mountains (and the eastern branch of the Fertile Crescent as a whole) constituted an area of vibrant engagement with new ideas, materials, experimentation and innovation, participating in the networks of interaction and exchange that facilitated the spread of alternative lifeways. This research examines how engagements with clay influenced the development and spread of new ways of thinking about the physical world, highlighting the role of clay as a transformational material through sites in the Central Zagros.     

On the Limits of Liberalism in Participatory Environmental Governance: Conflict and Conservation in Ukraine's Danube Delta

Participatory management techniques are widely promoted in environmental and protected area governance as a means of preventing and mitigating conflict. The World Bank project that created Ukraine's Danube Biosphere Reserve included such ‘community participation’ components. The Reserve, however, has been involved in conflicts and scandals in which rumour, denunciation and prayer have played a prominent part. The cases described in this article demonstrate that the way conflict is escalated or mitigated differs according to foundational assumptions about what ‘the political’ is and what counts as ‘politics’. The contrasting forms of politics at work in the Danube Delta help to explain why a 2005 World Bank assessment report could only see failure in the Reserve's implementation of participatory management, and why liberal participatory management approaches may founder when introduced in settings where relationships are based on non‐liberal political ontologies. The author argues that environmental management needs to be rethought in ways that take ontological differences seriously rather than assuming the universality of liberal assumptions about the individual, the political and politics.