Institutional Utopias,Eugenics, and Intellectual Disability in Brazil 1

This study focuses upon cultural representations of intellectual disability in Brazil with attention to the historical and cross‐cultural transmission of professional theory and ideology in Brazil, the USA, and Europe. The establishment of special education in Brazil is compared to the treatment of intellectual disability in the USA during the same period. In both cases the local eugenics movements greatly influenced the development of educational, vocational, and residential services. However, differing eugenics theories lead to radically different practices by professionals and consequences for disabled people.     

Ritual Appropriation and Appropriate Ritual: Christian Healing and Adaptations of Asian Religions

This article analyzes the uses of the past for liberal Christians who borrow from Asian healing‐related practices such as yoga, Buddhist meditation and Reiki. It focuses on questions of historicity, both in the ways liberal Christians validate their syncretism by drawing connections to the Christian past, and in the way that longer histories of orientalism and colonialism shape current Christian interactions with Asian religions. Centred on the narratives of three North American Anglicans, and informed by attendance at their various healing services, meditation groups, yoga classes and Reiki sessions, this article is evidence of a wider liberal Christian embrace of difference via ritual. The article argues that these liberal Christians use “ritual proximity” to bring together symbols, acts and memories from various times and cultures, thus constructing new lineages of religious inheritance within webs of Christian ritual.     

Building a New Jerusalem: The Meaning of a Group of Merchant Houses in Seventeenth-Century Newcastle upon Tyne, England

The political and religious symbolism of buildings is of enduring interest in historical archaeology. Similarly, ideal concepts in urban planning, and utopian communities have been of recent concern. This paper moves beyond iconography and ideology to examine how a new, post-Civil War English elite tried to implement a policy of reforming their town as a New Jerusalem. A group of merchant houses reveals an attempt to build Scripture into the physical environment, and establish the elite as Elect “watchmen” over the lives and souls of the townspeople. Contemporary sermons are integral to the analysis, as are the agency and inter-relationships of a tightly-knit social group.     

Biofilm growth in human skeletal material from ancient Mesopotamia

Investigators have long recognised the effects of microbial activity on archaeological bone. These investigators, however, have focused on single or groups of microbes rather than on complex microbial aggregates such as biofilms, a focus that has affected our understanding of archaeological bone biodeterioration. In this paper, we report on the investigation of a biofilm in archaeological human bone from the site of Tell Leilan, Syria (2900–1900 BCE). Scanning electron microscopy indicated that the biofilm is characterised by single cells and microcolonies of bacteria and fungi, as well as calcite crystals that were all embedded within extracellular polymeric substances. Using culture techniques and DNA sequencing, we isolated and identified several microbes from the biofilm including Amycolatopsis sp., Penicillium chrysogenum, Aspergillus sp., Chaetomium sp., and Cladosporium sp. Having characterised the Leilan biofilm, we are now closer to understanding the complex process of bone biodeterioration in archaeological bone collections.     

Book reviews

CHINA

DORE J. LEVY. Ideal and Actual in “The Story of the Stone”. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 213 pp. US$49.00/£33.95, hardcover; US$19.00/£13.50, paper.

GREGOR BENTON (ed and trans). Chen Duxiu's Last Articles and Letters, 1937–1942. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998. 163 pp. Foreword by Wang Fanxi, editor's introduction, appendices, glossary, index. £40.00, hardcover.

EILEEN CHANG. The Rice‐Sprout Song. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 182 pp. Foreword by David Der‐wei Wang. US$15.95, paper.

EILEEN CHANG. The Rouge of the North. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 185 pp. Foreword by David Der‐wei Wang. US$15.95, paper.

MCLAREN, ANNE E. Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998. viii, 340 pp. US$103.75, hardcover.

EDWARD S. STEINFELD. Forging Reform in China: the Fate of State‐Owned Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 300 pp. Tables, figures, preface, notes, bibliography, index. A$80.00, hardcover; £12.95, paper.

PETER CONN. Pearl S. Buck: a Cultural Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 467 pp. A$28.95, paper.

FLEMMING CHRISTIANSEN and ZHANG JUNZUO (eds). Village INC. Chinese Rural Society in the 1990s. Surrey: Curzon, 1998. 277 pp. Illustrations, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. £35.00, hardcover.

HAROLD M. TANNER. Strike Hard! Anti‐Crime Campaigns and Chinese Criminal Justice 1979–1989. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1999. 253 pp. US$28.00, hardcover; US$17.00, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

LONNY E. CARLILE and MARK C. TILTON (eds). Is Japan Really Changing Its Ways?: regulatory Reform and the Japanese Economy. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998. 232 pp. US$39.95, hardcover.

PETER KATZENSTEIN and TAKASHI SHIRAISHI (eds). Network Power: Japan and Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 399 pp. US$62.50, hardcover; US$23.95, paper.

BERNARD FAURE. The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. 338 pp. US$18.95, paper.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTERAL ASIA

VIJAY MISHRA. Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. 268 pp. US$21.95, paper.

OLIVER MENDELSOHN and MARIKA VICZIANY. The Untouchables: subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 289 pp. Glossary, preface, bibliography, index. A$36.95, paper.

DONALD S. LOPEZ, Jr. Prisoners of Shangri‐La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 238 pp. Notes, index. US$25.00, hardcover.

MELVYN C. GOLDSTEIN and MATTHEW T. KAPSTEIN (eds), with a foreword by Orville Schell. Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet, Religious Revival and Cultural Identity.

Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998. x, 207 pp. 37 b/w photographs, notes, bibliography, index. US$40.00, hardcover; US$15.95, paper; £30.00, hardcover; £11.95, paper.

PETER RICHARDUS (ed), with an historical foreword by Alex McKay. Tibetan Lives: three Himalayan Autobiographies. Surrey: Curzon, 1998. xxviii, 223 pp. 2 maps, frontispiece, 33 b/w plates, select bibliography, index. £40.00, hardcover.

RAMAKRISHNA PULIGANDLA. Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy. Delhi: D. K. Print‐world, 1997 (revised edition), xix, 362 pp. Preface to second edition, preface to first edition, bibliography, glossary, index. Rs. 450, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

PAUL HUTCHCROFT. Booty Capitalism: the Politics of Banking in the Philippines. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998. 278 pp. US$39.95, hardcover.

PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER. Tales from Djakarta: caricatures of Circumstances and their Human Beings. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999. 145 pp. Foreword, introduction, glossary. US$15.00, paper.

GENERAL ASIA

YAYORI MATSUI. Women in the New Asia: from Pain to Power. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1999. x, 194 pp. Index. A$29.95, paper.     

Seeking Personhood: Anthropological Accounts and Local Concepts in Mount Hagen,Papua New Guinea

Terms such as person, self, and individual have been deployed with varying success either as a set or separately to encompass cross-cultural contexts of human action and experience. The difficulties involved in using these terms as tools of cross-cultural analysis suggest that a concentration on indigenous terms and their applications is preferable. In the Mount Hagen area of Papua New Guinea the most significant organizing concept in this domain is that of noman, variously glossed as mind, consciousness, intention, will, social sentiment, and understanding. The idea of the noman is thus an ontology in and of action that engages personhood with history and biography in contemporary lives among the Hagen or Melpa people. The noman is seen as in a continuous process of differentiation and change over a lifetime, and it encompasses ideas of process, incompletion/completion, relationality, individuality, character, creativity, and identity. Two different life-history narratives are used to show how people seek their personhood over time. We interpret their narratives as stories of how they attempt to achieve ‘a strong noman’. They monitor their own successes and failures in contexts of change and turbulence in their lives with reference to their overall wishes and ideals, and this corresponds to an assessment of the state of their noman.