Travelling the Route from Designation to Local Action: The Case of the Underground Railroad Settlement in Buxton,Ontario, Canada

Canada’s Buxton Settlement National Historic Site is a striking illustration of the multi‐faceted conservation of a cultural landscape, from federal designation through to local action. Buxton is designated as a ‘continuing landscape’ distinguished by its establishment in 1849 as a 9,000 acre (3,600 ha) ¹ [1] Imperial measures are given first in reference to the historic resource because the measurements are historically significant. terminus for black fugitives travelling north along the so‐called Underground Railroad, escaping the tyranny of slavery in the USA. A social experiment, in the form of a block farming settlement, waited for them at the end of their journeys. Over the intervening years inevitable shifts in agricultural practice and property ownership have transformed this rather ordinary but strongly evocative heritage resource. This is a case common to many other significant cultural landscapes—the management of the inevitable evolution that comes with a landscape that continues. This agricultural landscape confronts many of the challenges that are the focus of heritage studies today: how to give local people a voice while coordinating conservation across multiple scales of government policy.     

The Authoritative Medium: George Eliot,Ruin, and the Rationalized Market

This essay analyses the competing dynamics that shaped the formation of market relations in mid-nineteenth-century Britain: abstraction and rationalization, on the one hand, and embeddedness and personalism, on the other. It takes as its central case the mid-century debates over bankruptcy reform, focusing in particular on two textual representations of ‘ruin’: the system of certificates classifying bankrupts according to their culpability of character, established in 1849 and abolished in 1861; and Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss, with its account of financial and sexual ruin. I argue that the debates surrounding the character certificates' intervention in market relations, and Eliot's explorations of abstract and embedded or sympathetic modes of knowledge were part of a larger concern to negotiate the tensions produced by the contemporary impulse toward market rationalization. Eliot's mode of omniscient narration – her construction of a simultaneously interested and disinterested, authoritative and sympathetic narrative voice – represented, I suggest, a novelistic instance of a broader cultural fantasy that an approach to character representation could be found that would mediate the changing marketplace. At the same time, her narration of the story of debt through familial and sexualized representations highlights the way that the personal continued to pose a challenge to the establishment of market rationality. However, despite the generic distinctions that can be traced, I argue that their shared interest in character provides grounds for the project of reading across genres, and suggest that the cultural history of the Victorian credit economy requires attention to what different genres have in common, as much as how they have diverged.     

Geography at the British association 1956

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

Geology and Scenery in Ireland. By J. B. Whitlow. 7 ¾ × 5, 301 pp., 38 plates, 46 figures Index. Penguin, London, 1975. £1.00.

Periglacial Processes and Environments. By A. L. Washburn. 320 pp. Maps, figures andnumerous plates. Edward Arnold, 1973. £6.75.

Global Climate. By Keith Boucher. 6 ½ 9 ¼, 326 pp. 31 plates, figures, glossary, bibliography. English Universities Press, London, 1975. £2.85.

Principles of Applied Climatology. By Keith Smith. 9 ½ × 8 ½, 283 pp. Diagrams, references, index. McGraw‐Hill, Maidenhead, 1975. £5.25.

Plant Geography. By Martin C. Kellman. 9 ½ × 6 ½, 135 pp. 25 figures, 12 plates, biblioography, glossary, index. Methuen, Andover, 1975. £3.20.

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY

The Mineral Resources of Britain: A Study in Exploitation and Planning. By John Blunden. 9 ¼ × 9, 545 pp. 17 plates, index, bibliography. Hutchinson, London, 1975. £12.50.

Locational dynamics of manufacturing activity. Ed. L. Collins and D. F. Walker. 23.5 × 16 cms, 402 pp. Diagrams and tables, index. Wiley, Chichester, 1975. £10.00.

People on the move: Studies on internal migration. Ed. L. A. Kosinski and R. M. Prothero. 9 ½ × 6 ¼. 393 pp. Illustrations, Index, Bibliography. Methnen, 1975. £8 50.

Rural Recreation in the Industrial World. By I. G. Simmons. 9 ¼ × 6, 310 pp. Tables, plates, index, bibliography. Edward Arnold, Maidenhead, 1975. £9.95.

REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY

Eastern Europe: A Geography of the COMECON Countries. By Roy E. H. Mellor. 9 ½ × 6 ¼, 358 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. Macmillan, 1975. £7.90 (paperback £3 95).

An Economic Geography of Romania. By David Turnock. 8 ¾ × 5 ¾. Pp. xiii + 319. Illustrations, index, bibliographical note. G. Bell, London, 1974. £6.25.

Rhodes. By Brian Dicks. 8 ¾ × 5 ½. 200 pp. Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. David, and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1974. £3 75.

EDUCATIONAL

Oxford Geography Project: (1) The Local Framework, 126 pp., (2) European Patterns, 130 pp. and (3) Contrasts in Development, 164 pp. By J. Rolfe, C. Rowe, M. Grenyer, et al. 9 ½ × 9, illustrated, O.U.P., London, 1974‐5. £1.25 each.

Patterns in Geography One. By W. R. Rice. 92 pp. + 30 worksheets. Longman, 1973. 85p. The Elements of Geography in Colour. By Dobson ant Virgo. 204 pp. E.U.P., 1974. £1.35. A Geography of Natural Landscapes. By R. Andrews. 138 pp. George Philip, 1975. £3.90.

Aspects of Geography Series: General Editors: Keith Clayton and T. H. Elkins. Energy: Needs and Resources: Peter Odell; Resource Systems: Ian and Caroll Simmons; Weathering and Landforms: Cliff Olier; Recreation and Environment: Peter Toyne; Regional Disparities: Morgan Sant; Slope Development: Anthony and Doreen Young. Macmillan Education Ltd., 1974.     

Reimagining sustainable cultures: constitutions, land and art

Globalisation is about the interconnection of peoples and places in accelerated ways, but it is also about resistance and adaptation in the face of change. Discussions of sustainability now incorporate both dynamic understandings of culture and the recognition that place matters because the practices that are in need of sustaining, as well as those that pose threats, happen in particular communities and in specific geographic contexts. Culture is codified not only in property rights and legislation, but also in the public artistic expressions of peoples and places. Case studies from Nunavut and Scotland show the interrelationships of sovereignty and claims to identity and community. Art, as a result of creative action in the case of Cape Dorset Inuit printmakers and carvers on Baffin Island, and a millennium tapestry telling the stories of the Isle of Harris, complement matters of property rights. Both discussions show that identity is about material culture and property relations in respect of land. Serious discussions of sustainability, in contrast to the technical practices frequently invoked using the term sustainable development, require considerations of the dynamics of complex cultural arrangements in particular places, rather than assumptions of stability of either peoples or their ecological contexts.     

Thinking Through Networks and Their Spatiality: A Critique of the US (Public) War on Terrorism and its Geographic Discourse

Conventional thinking about war is encumbered by an inappropriate geographic paradigm that conceptualizes "targets" in terms of fixed latitudinal/longitudinal locations. This paper reconceptualizes terms such as "war" and "targets" to recognize intangible problems and develop appropriate counter‐terrorist strategies. This requires geographic inquiry focused on spatiality, not on location. We frame our discussion about terrorist networks (Al‐Qaeda in particular) in terms of understanding a network's sense of place and sense of space . The former "places" a network's meeting and recruiting grounds; the latter clarifies the operational dynamics of a network across space, at different scales, from the body to the neighborhood, to the region, and across nations. We argue that the roots of terrorism lie in conditions of disenfranchisement in particular types of places, understanding, however, that the socio‐cultural fabric of a terrorist network such as Al‐Qaeda evolves across space as well as time. Counter‐terrorist strategies should target neither people nor places but rather the conditions that give rise to terrorism; further, "intelligence" should focus on network dynamics, beyond particular people in particular places. We draw from network theories (specifically actor network theory and network approaches in economic sociology) to unravel network dynamics, and we draw from the literature on spatiality to interpret such dynamics in space, over time. We advocate a non‐military engagement with terrorism on both moral and strategic grounds; here we focus on the strategic dimension, the value of which has received scant attention.     

The Locus of Carthage: Compounding Geographical Logic

North Africa’s Phoenician city of Carthage was above all a logical place from which the well-informed maritime Phoenicians colonized and controlled the Western Mediterranean. The leading important factors affecting the founding of Carthage were mostly geographical: overall centrality along the southern coast of the Western Mediterranean; proximity to the island bridge of Italy via Sicily; nascent oceanographic knowledge of water currents and wind gyres as well as shoals such as the Gulf of Sidra and the shelter of the Gulf of Tunis itself; and important local topography and religious landmarks.     

The space between: globalization,liminal spaces and personal relations in rural Costa Rica

Globalization facilitates the movement of people, goods, ideologies and even diseases across borders and into local communities. This article explores the liminal space created by tourism in the rural Costa Rican community of Monteverde as a site where the movement of people, especially Western women (women from the global North), intersects, contests and even reinforces existing heteropatriarchal ideologies. Theories from feminist geography and anthropology provide a lens for understanding and interpreting how Western women and local residents (both male and female) perceive, construct and interact with each other. We argue that ‘liminality’ or the sense of being ‘betwixt and between’ – physically, socially and ideologically – allows Western women a space to both challenge the hegemony of heteropatriarchal ideology and reconstitute it in their sexual relationships with local men. We also explore the implications that sexual relationships between Western women and local men have for local women. We stress the urgency to understand and articulate the nature of these sexual relationships in light of the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic.     

Middle East History: a Review Essay

The Modern Middle East: a history; James L. Gelvin The Modern Middle East: a political history since the First World War; Mehren Kamrava