Tapa Cloths and Beaters: Tradition,Innovation and the Agency of the Bounty Women in Shaping a New Culture on Pitcairn Island from 1790 to 1850

This article examines the tapa cloths made by the women associated with the Bounty, who sailed to Pitcairn Island with the Bounty mutineers to create a new society and culture. Traditional literature reveals a male-dominated narrative, which ignores any female agency in the Bounty-Pitcairn story, and merely objectifies them. The tapa cloths the women produced reveal much about their origins and their efforts to maintain the traditions of their homelands while initiating innovative designs that appear to have provided a sense of unique identity in the Anglo-Polynesian children of the Polynesian women and their European husbands. Given their objectification in the generally accepted historical narrative, it is ironic that the women reveal themselves through the objects that they made. By compiling data about the tapa cloths (kind of cloth, plants used, techniques, colour and patterning, quality), details of tradition and innovation emerge and reveal much about these women and the knowledge they passed down the generations through their daughters.     

Les Maladies de L’âme Comme Lieu de Rencontre Entre Médecine et Philosophie dans les Textes Arabes Médiévaux (IXe-XIe Siècle)

In the medical texts written in Arabic between the 9^th and the 11^th centuries, the diseases of the soul played an important part in the physicians’ reflection on the nature of the soul and its relationship to the body. In the 9^th and the beginning of the 10^th century, this medical anthropology was shaped by a tradition that was both Platonic and Galenic. But in the 10^th, the influence of Aristotle became most prominent in Arabic philosophy, and as a result the main lines of this medical anthropology were questioned, as was the role of medical knowledge and its relation to natural philosophy.     

Critical Geographies with the State: The Problem of Social Vulnerability and the Politics of Engaged Research

Abstract: State interventions to govern social vulnerability highlight the complexity of contemporary states, marked by neoliberal agenda but also by progressive interventions and the desire for effectiveness. This paper draws on collaborative research with government agencies on social vulnerability in the Hunter region to assess the desirability of undertaking critical geographies with the state. We see states as contested terrains invested with the institutional capacity to mobilise diverse political projects. We argue that critical research in partnership with states is possible, as are mobilisations of the agency of state institutions to promote progressive policy development. The paper explores how we might use engaged research to intersect with the production and circulation of texts, technologies and practices within the state apparatus to achieve desirable change. While critical research with the state involves uncertainties and compromise, with no permanent resolutions, we conclude that states must remain centred in our critical conversations and praxis. In this paper we advance the case for the critical possibilities of policy‐oriented research with the state. We reflect on experiences of an engaged research project with state government agencies in the NSW Hunter Region involving the production and use of the texts and technologies as state interventions in social vulnerability. Working through the project's reflexive, collaborative methodologies and our use of critical GIS, we highlight the creation of opportunities to change how the components of social vulnerability were conceptualised, contest policymakers’ view of what was “relevant”, and shift framing rationalities and resultant state practices. As such the paper contributes to our knowledge of strategic research practices for pursuing critical, progressive projects with the state. Such engagement involves uncertainties and contingent compromise. Yet, as terrains of contestation wherein diverse political projects are assembled and propelled, states must remain centred in our critical conversations and in our critical praxis.     

Neoliberal privatisation? Remapping the public and the private in Sydney's masterplanned residential estates

The analysis of neoliberalism has become a key point of departure in critical urban studies and political geography. Its application in theorising new forms of residential environments is no exception. Common interest developments, gated communities and, in the Australian case, masterplanned residential estates (MPREs) are cast as vehicles of neoliberalist privatisation, extending private property rights and embedding market logics and neoliberal modes of privatised governance. This paper is a critical theoretical and empirical engagement with the interpretation of these residential developments as iconic expressions of urban neoliberalisation. We bring poststructuralist thinking on neoliberalism as an assemblage of diverse practices and projects together with poststructuralist conceptions of the public and private as contextual and enacted political constructions, to provide an alternative analytic—an analytic of assemblage—for investigating putative pathways of neoliberal privatisation. We suggest the purchase of this extended framework through an exploration of MPRE development by Sydney's largest MPRE developer. In this framework, MPREs become contingent productions in which multiple and overdetermined projects, practices and paradigms of governance are at work including, amongst others, social sustainability and interventionism. Rather than producing neoliberal privatisation, we explore how MPRE developments involve the complex constitution of new forms of public and private that exceed coding as neoliberal. We conclude that the framework engaged with here can enable productive advances for urban theorising. Its emphasis on practice, enactment, multiplicity and assemblage can resist a tendency to reify urban neoliberalism and nurture the development of new conceptions and discourses of urban governance less bound to the neoliberal imaginary.     

Migrating identities: gender,whiteness and Britishness in post-colonial Hong Kong

This paper explores the ways in which notions of nationality, whiteness and gender are drawn upon by British expatriate women in the construction and performance of their identities in post-colonial Hong Kong. A British colony since the mid-nineteenth century, Hong Kong was returned to China in the 1997 handover to become a ‘Special Administrative Region’. Now, as the administrative workings of empire are receding, so too are the expectations about race and nationality which went with them. For the white British, the opportunities to reconfigure discourses and subjectivities of whiteness are there, although the findings of this research reveals the unevenness of take-up. The paper draws on a broad feminist post-structuralist approach to reveal the ways in which four different British women migrants position themselves in the changing landscape. The approach shows important patterns of difference and diversity between the women in the performances of gendered Britishness and whiteness, and in the extent to which these are used to redefine or challenge the memory of relations established through imperialism.     

Did the Priests Plant a Cross in This Woman’s Loins? Love and/or Marriage in the Middle Ages

Brooke, Christopher N.L. The Medieval Idea of Marriage Duby, Georges Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages Sheehan, Michael M. Marriage, Family and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies Laiou, Angeliki, E. (ed.) Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies Elliott, Dyan Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock     

Revisions of the Vanquished: Some Recent Studies in New Mexican and Mesoamerican Colonial History

Vingt études sur le Mexique et le Guatemala. Réunies à la mémoire de Nicole Percheron. Edited by ALAN BRETON, JEAN‐PIERRE BERTHE and SYLVIE LECOIN. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1991. Pp. 381.

Literacy, Education, and Society in New Mexico 1693–1821. By BERNARDO P. GALLEGOS. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Pp. viii, 119.

Nahuas and Spaniards: Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology. By JAMES LOCKHART. Stanford: Stanford Universty Press, 1991. Pp. xiii, 304.

The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. By JAMES LOCKHART. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Pp. xv, 650.

Disease and Death in Early Colonial Mexico: Simulating Amerindian Depopulation. By THOMAS M. WHITMORE. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992. Pp. xvi, 261.     

The caste system of India on the skids: Totaled by democracy and a dynamic economy?

Anand Chakravarti. Contradiction and Change: Emerging Patterns of Authority in a Rajasthan Village. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. xii + 234 pp. Tables, diagrams, maps, appendixes, references, and index. $9.00.

D. B. Miller. From Hierarchy to Stratification: Changing Patterns of Social Inequality in a North Indian Village. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. xviii + 229 pp. Diagrams, illustrations, tables, maps, bibliography, and index. $9.75.     

The limits of individualism,the ideology of the west

Louis Dumont. From Mandeville to Marx. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 236 pp. Appendix, notes, and bibliography. $17.50.