An integrated assessment of China's South—North Water Transfer Project

China's South–North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP) is a vast and still expanding network of infrastructure and institutions that moves water from the Yangtze River and its tributaries to cities in North China. This article aims to assess the SNWTP's impacts by beginning to answer seven questions about the project: How is the management of the SNWTP evolving? What are the problems to be resolved when managing SNWTP water within jurisdictions? What are the status and management of water quality in the SNWTP? What are the consequences of resettlements caused by the SNWTP? How is increased water supply affecting regional development? Is the SNWTP achieving its stated environmental goals? What are the sustainability credentials of the SNWTP? Drawing on primary and secondary data, the article demonstrates both that the opportunities and burdens characterising the project are highly uneven and that management systems are evolving rapidly in an attempt to enforce strict water quality targets. Furthermore, while the SNWTP may be helping to resolve groundwater overexploitation in Beijing, it is highly energy intensive, raising questions about its sustainability. Our analysis highlights the need to continue to interrogate the socio‐economic, environmental, and political implications of such schemes long after they are officially completed.     

Kaparlgoo Blue: On the Adoption of Laundry Blue Pigment into the Visual Culture of Western Arnhem Land,Australia

International Journal of Historical Archaeology - It has been argued that laundry blue (whitener) was introduced into western Arnhem Land in the second half of the 1920s by missionaries, where it...     

Singultus foetalis and Dr. Alfons Mermann

During intrauterine life, hiccups are universally present, their incidence peaking in the third trimester. Alfons Mermann (1852–1908), a gynecologist from Mannheim, Germany, best known for having established the Luisenheim Woechnerinnenasyl [lying-in asylum] there in 1887, is viewed as the first physician to name and describe singultus foetalis [fetal hiccups] in a modern peer-reviewed scientific publication. This short report attempts to shed some light on the work of Dr. Mermann and to explore whether or not he was indeed the first to recognize this phenomenon.     

Mauna Kea: Two Cultures and the 'Imiloa Astronomy Center

When Snow wrote delivered his lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’ in 1959, he considered this to be a phenomenon that had British, Western and global significance. This article looks at how Snow's ideas play out in the setting of Hawai'i from the early contact with Western navigators through to current disputes over the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea. ‘Mutual incomprehension’, identified by Snow as the chief characteristics of his two cultures are clearly seen to be at play in Western-Hawai'ian encounters.

This article places the TMT disputes in the setting of the Hawai'ian Renaissance, a movement that has gathered pace since the 1960s. It looks Gieryn's notions of ‘boundary work’ and that of Star and Griesemer on ‘boundary objects’ as ways of framing the discussion. The final focus of the article is the 'Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo as a ‘place of safe disagreement’.     

The bittersweet harvest of the green revolution

Keith Griffin. The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution. Cambridge‐. Harvard University Press, 1974. xv + 264 pp. Tables and index. $11.00.     

Toward critical population anthropology

Handwerker, W. Penn, ed. Births and Power: Social Change and the Politics of Reproduction. Boulder: Westview Press, 1990. 227 pp. including chapter references. $27.50 paper.

Landers, John, and Vernon Reynolds, ed. Fertility and Resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. vii + 199 pp. including chapter references and index. $59.50 cloth.