The Poetics of Devotion in ʿĀʾisha al‐Bāʿūniyya's Praise of God and Muḥammad

Recently, there has been an effort within Islamic Studies to reassess the common belief that the so‐called ‘post‐classical’ era of Islamic history was characterized by intellectual stagnation and decline. The Mamluk era is one such period that has suffered from a dearth of scholarly attention resulting from outdated stereotypes. This article contributes to scholarship on this era through examining some poems by a late Mamluk poet, ?ā?isha al‐Bā?ūniyya (d. 1517). While much scholarship on al‐Bā?ūniyya focuses on her lyrical mystical verse, the poems studied here incorporate selective allusions to key Islamic sources in order to narrate a history of divine favor as the speaker imagines it. This innovative history expresses a poetics of devotion that focalizes Mu?ammad and the poet's own peers. The poems intertextually anchor this narrative in key Islamic sources, reflecting al‐Bā?ūniyya's extensive scholarly training. They constitute an unusual example of a female poet writing beyond the genres with which women's premodern poetry is conventionally associated. This poetry also represents a post‐classical contribution to Islamic literary and religious history. However, the criterion of originality should ultimately be reconsidered in evaluations of scholarly merit, and scholarship should pay more attention to continuities and intertextuality in texts.     

A toolkit to implement graduate attributes in geography curricula

This article uses findings from a project on engagement with graduate outcomes across higher education institutions in New Zealand to produce a toolkit for implementing graduate attributes in geography curricula. Key facets include strong leadership; academic developers to facilitate conversations about graduate attributes and teaching towards them; ownership of the process by the teachers; the development of a contextualized set of graduate attributes for the geography degree; curriculum mapping to promote alignment between graduate attributes, learning outcomes and assessment tasks; incorporating high-impact educational experiences and signature pedagogies to foster graduate attributes; the use of evaluative data to inform continual enhancements; and allowing at least five years for curriculum renewal to occur.     

Social Careers Across Imperial Spaces: An Empire Family in the Dutch-British World, 1811-1933

Here the object biography of a scale model of an old Dutch colonial sugar factory directs us to the history of an extended family, and demonstrates the connectedness of people and identities across and within European imperial spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case study shows how people in colonial Indonesia became ‘Dutch’ through their social networks and cultural capital (for instance a European education). They even came to belong to the colonial and national Dutch elites while, because of their descent, also belonging to the British colonial and national elites. These intertwined Dutch and British imperial spaces formed people’s identities and status: the family discussed here became an important trans-imperial patrician family with a broad imperial ‘spatial imagination’, diverse identities and social circles. It was mostly women who played important roles in these transnational processes— roles indeed that they played well into the early twentieth century when colonial empires ceased to exist and the nation-state became the ‘natural’ social and political form of the modern world, obscuring these transnational processes.     

‘The Gospel of Health’: American Missionaries and the Transformation of Ottoman/Turkish Women's Bodies, 1890–1932

This article explores an overlooked aspect of American missionary modernisation efforts in the late Ottoman Empire: the attempted transformation of women's bodies. By the late nineteenth century, American missionary women and Ottoman government officials both viewed Ottoman women's bodies as a visible reflection of the empire's weaknesses, yet also as central to its survival and revival. The transformation of women's bodies from ‘uncontrolled’ to ‘robust’, they believed, was a prerequisite for a modern society. Through a close reading of missionary reports, correspondences and student memoirs, this study traces the development of physical education, hygiene and recreational sports at the missionary‐run American College for Girls (ACG) in Istanbul. Over time, the female teachers at the ACG partnered and collaborated with male Ottoman/Turkish government officials to implement these courses at girls’ schools across the region. While the government endorsed physical education as key to national progress and regeneration, the ACG educators framed it as a mode of international, feminist self‐empowerment. In reality, the missionaries continued to assert their own Western superiority and advance Orientalist notions through the education courses. By highlighting the shifts in women's body ideals, curricular development and nationalist rhetoric, I argue that women's bodies must be studied as a crucial site of missionary and republican reform.     

Appreciating difference? A view from Indigenous rivers

While the Saint‐Laurent river is considered to be the cradle of Québécois society, many other great rivers are found across the province—other cradles of civilizations, indigenous to the continent, notably the Chisasibi and the Manicouagan. These rivers played a key role in the Québécois movement of affirmation and modernization in the twentieth century. They are valued by many people in Quebec for their hydroelectric output rather than for their cultural richness and significance for the Eeyou (Cree) and Innu Nations. Since the 1990s, I have been able to study Quebec's historical geography from the standpoint of these rivers thanks to the expertise of Eeyou and Innu knowledge holders. Using the concept of decolonization as a practice, I explore how this has impacted both my work as a geographer and my cultural identity as a Québécois woman.     

Making a significant place: excavations at the Late Mesolithic site of Langley’s Lane,Midsomer Norton,Bath and North-East Somerset

Excavations at the site of Langley’s Lane, Bath and North-East Somerset, have revealed an important sequence of Late Mesolithic activity focused around an active tufa spring. The sequence of activity starts off as an aurochs kill and primary butchery site. Culturally appropriate depositional practices occur through the placement of a selection of bone in the wetland of the spring and the digging of pits around the spring margins. The spring at Langley’s Lane continued to be visited and more animal bone and lithic material was placed in the wetland. Finally, visits to the site involved yet more formalized activity in the form of pit digging and the creation of a stone surface. Activities such as these are difficult to locate in the archaeological record and Mesolithic ritual activity rare, making this a site of some significance to studies of Mesolithic NW Europe.     

Time,temporality, and woman–child relations

This is the second in a series of Viewpoints about a symposium on the intersections and antagonisms between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. This article traces the various ways in which time and temporality were mobilised in symposium papers and discussions and considers the implications for efforts to conceptualise woman–child relations. In conclusion, the potentials and risks of focusing on temporality when theorising relations between those positioned as women and those positioned as children are considered.     

Towards a countertopography of intimate war: contouring violence and resistance in a South Sudanese diaspora

Recent feminist geographic scholarship insists we rethink domestic violence as ‘intimate war’. Using this concept I analyze narratives of violence and resistance articulated by U.S.-resettled South Sudanese women and collected in the wake of a fatal incidence of domestic violence in 2005. One of a spate of intimate partner murders that shook the community at this time, this tragic event spurred debates about shifting gender norms, the stresses and opportunities of life in the diaspora, and the irradicable legacies of war. Bringing Pain and Staeheli's ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ to bear on this particularly violent, momentary and publicized aggression, I situate it within a more complex, quotidian, and dynamic terrain of power. In line with feminist political geography, this analysis complicates scalar distinctions of body, home and nation-state, demonstrating the common foundations of ‘private’, domestic and ‘public’, state-sanctioned violences. Inspired by Katz’s countertopographical approach, I extend our understanding of intimate war by contouring moments of violence and resistance in a diasporic context, over the lifecourse of refugee women, and across their sites of flight, displacement and resettlement. Tracing the mobilities of intimate war in this way productively reveals the spatial and temporal, as well as scalar, folds that may form part of its foundation.     

Mississippian monumentality in the Yazoo Basin: recent investigations at the Carson site (22CO505), northwestern Mississippi

Investigations at the Carson site (22CO505), located in Coahoma County, Mississippi, have uncovered data on the development of a large Mississippian mound center dating to the period from A.D. 1200 through European contact. Recent sediment coring, excavation, artifact analyses, and radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating shed light on earthworks and household structures at Carson, and on Mississippian culture in the Yazoo Basin more generally. Sediment coring demonstrates a laterally transgressing Mississippi River system deposited coarse sandy ridges and clay-filled swales underneath a surface horizon comprised of variously coarse to medium-fine sediment originating from generalized overbank flooding. In some instances, flood-borne sediments were found on mound flanks, indicating that at times river-based flooding may have interrupted mound construction. Sediment coring and trench excavation also demonstrate that Carson’s Mound D was built in four stages, with Stages II and III comprising the major stages of earth moving. Excavations on the mound summit reveal evidence of several superimposed structures that were burned in place and likely used for the production of stone, shell, and wooden craft items, perhaps related to Mississippi Ideational Interaction Sphere (MIIS) paraphernalia. Here we describe recent investigations at Carson and present preliminary findings; forthcoming publications will emphasize strategies of power, monumentality, craft production, and Mississippian exchange systems.     

Introduction: recent approaches to pottery and society in the Southeast

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the themes of this special edition of Southeastern Archaeology on modern pottery studies and summarizes the articles included in this edition. Southeastern archaeologists increasingly are applying new theoretical constructs and techniques to ceramic studies. These new techniques, in conjunction with traditional typological analysis, allow archaeologists to approach the study of past peoples from a broader perspective.