Book reviews

CHINA

CHRISTOPHER I. BECKWITH. The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: a History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. xxii, 281 pp. First paperback edition with a new Afterword, 1993. No price given, paper.

GREGOR BENTON. China's Urban Revolutionaries: explorations in the History of Chinese Trotskyism, 1921–1952 . (Revolutionary Studies) New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996. 269 pp. US$55.00, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

GUANLONG CAO. The Attic: memoir of a Chinese Landlord's Son. Translated by Guanlong Cao and Nancy Moskin. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996. 245 pp. US$24.95, hardcover.

JOHN FITZGERALD. Awakening China: politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. 461 pp. US$69.95, hardcover.

MELVYN GOLDSTEIN, WILLIAM SIEBENSCHUH and TASHI TSERING. The Struggle for Modern Tibet: the Autobiography of Tashi Tsering. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. xi, 220 pp. Photographs, map, index. US$27.95, hardcover.

DAVID S. G. GOODMAN and GERALD SEGAL (eds). China Rising: nationalism and Interdependence. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. xi, 196 pp. Contents, list of tables, notes on contributors, index. A$33.95, paper.

KEUN LEE. Chinese Firms and the State in Transition: property Rights and Agency Problems in the Reform Era. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991. xi, 210 pp. Tables, foreword, acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. No price given, hardcover.

LILY XIAO HONG LEE. The Virtue of Yin: studies on Chinese Women. Broadway, Sydney: Wild Peony, 1994. 117 pp. A$18.95, paper.

JOHN MAKEHAM. Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1994. 286 pp. US$17.95, hardcover.

EDWIN E. MOISE. Modern China, A History. 2nd ed. London and New York: Longman, 1994. 250 pp. Index, illustrations, maps. £14.99, paper.

MAYSING H. YANG (ed.). Taiwan's Expanding Role in the International Arena. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. 216 pp. Foreword, preface, index. US$52.95, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

WINSTON DAVIS. The Moral and Political Naturalism of Baron Kato Hiroyuki (Japan Research Monograph no. 13). Berkeley: Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1996. x, 125 pp. Contents, abbreviations. No price given, paper.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

WILLIAM CASE. Elites and Regimes in Malaysia: revisiting a Consociational Democracy . Clayton, Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, 1996. xiv, 268 pp. A$29.95, paper.

D. D. MEARNS and C. HEALEY (eds). Remaking Maluku: social Transformation in Eastern Indonesia. Darwin: Centre of South East Asian Studies, Northern Territory University. 1996. 185 pp. No price given, paper.

PANIVONG NORINDR. Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. x, 205 pp. US$44.95, hardcover; US$16.95, paper.

SAYA S. SHIRAISHI. Young Heroes: the Indonesian Family in Politics (Studies on Southeast Asia no. 22). Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1997. 183 pp. Bibliography. No price given.     

Beyond Market Logics: Payments for Ecosystem Services as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) initiatives, which provide financial incentives for management practices thought to increase the production of environmental benefits, have expanded across the global South since the late 1990s. These initiatives have thus far been conceptualized rather narrowly; by their early proponents as a novel economic instrument for more ‘rational’, effective and efficient environmental policy or by their critics as an exogenously imposed conduit of hegemonic neoliberalism. This introductory article to the special issue that follows advocates for and demonstrates a more grounded and historically situated approach for understanding the conformation and outcomes of PES in actual practice. It proposes a framework for examining individual PES initiatives as shaped by dynamic interactions between imposed structure and the development pathways and situated agency of actors in the territories in which they are implemented. It finds that certain ubiquitous components of this approach — the valuation of nature, the creation of institutions and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits — provide potential openings for articulation and engagement that can allow these initiatives to be contested, adapted, hybridized or more fully co-opted and captured. This framework opens a pathway for more inclusive, nuanced and grounded research on PES and on market-based environment and development policies more broadly.     

Hybrid Outcomes of Payments for Ecosystem Services Policies in Vietnam: Between Theory and Practice

Vietnam has had a national Payments for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) policy in place since 2010, which transfers money for forest protection from water and energy users to households who live in upland watersheds. However, despite a loose resemblance to general Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) principles, implementation in Vietnam differs strongly from a theoretical ideal, and has a number of unique features, including: strong state involvement in transactions; no use of markets to set payments; poor definition and monitoring of ecosystem services; and the adoption of non-conditional incentives that strongly resemble livelihood subsidies for poor rural areas. The form that PES takes in Vietnam has been shaped by institutional histories of forest management that have envisioned a strong role for the state and for financial transfers to the rural uplands. At the same time, PES has also been influenced by active engagement and agency of central and local government actors, and local payment recipients, and key areas in which they have impacted PES design include shared governance and more equitable benefit distribution models. These institutional priorities and local values that have shaped PES policy and implementation in Vietnam have led to a hybrid model, full of contradictions and compromises, that neither fits a classical definition nor resembles neoliberal conservation outcomes, and whose success is difficult to judge.     

Futures for Feminist Histories

Books reviewed in this article: Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought Barbara Laslett, Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres, Mary Jo Maynes, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Jeanne Barker-Nunn (eds), History and Theory: Feminist Research, Debates, Contestations Joan Wallach Scott (ed.), Feminism and History     

Block politics

This paper explores how young people have experienced everyday life on ‘the block’ in a racially diverse lower to working class community in New York City over time, a concept that I refer to as block politics. Broadly defined, block politics refers to the process in which young people's territories are socially conceived, performed, maintained and challenged in everyday life. Gendered and racialized norms and practices play an important role in determining how young people construct their identities and that of their block. Block politics represents one of the many ways in which young people express and articulate their sense of social and spatial inclusion/exclusion, something that has transcended both time and space in urban communities in the United States.     

Spatial autocorrelation of ABO serotypes in mediaeval cemeteries as an indicator of ethnic and familial structure

Hungarian cemeteries in an effort to detect familial structure. Different ethnic groups buried in separate areas dominated the spatial pattern in two cemeteries, leaving insufficient power to test for familial patterns. In a third, ethnically homogeneous cemetery, no evidence of familial structure was found. A simulation showed that familial structure could readily be detected by the methods applied when it exists in an ethnically homogeneous population. The spatial autocorrelation methods employed would have detected the ethnic diversity in the two cemeteries containing graves from different populations, even in the absence of archaeological information to that effect. A restricted randomization procedure was developed to test two alternative hypotheses concerning the ethnic designations of the occupants of the cemetery at Szentendre. As a result of this test, the hypothesis that graves located in a rough circle (putative Lombards) differ serologically from those located at the periphery (putative nonLombards) is strongly preferred over a second hypothesis based on grave goods which would imply spatially random placement of the graves of the two ethnic units.