Book reviews

CHINA

EDWARD FRIEDMAN and BARRETT L. McCORMICK, eds. What if China Doesn't Democratize? Implications for War and Peace. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000. 376 pp. Index, introduction, notes, tables. US$69.95, hardcover; US$26.95, paper.

SHAOHUA HU. Explaining Chinese Democratization. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2000. 194 pp. Acknowledgments, introduction, bibliography, index. US$62.50, hardcover.

S. A. SMITH. A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai 1920–1927. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000. x, 315 pp. £45.00, hardcover.

MARAM EPSTEIN. Competing Discourses: orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 197, 2002. xii, 353 pp. US$39.50, hardcover.

JAPAN, KOREA

BRIAN J. McVEIGH. Wearing Ideology: state, Schooling and Self‐Presentation in Japan. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. 231 pp. Illustrations, introduction, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. US$65.00 cloth; US$19.50 paper.

ALISON McQUEEN TOKITA. Kiyomoto‐bushi. Narrative Music of the Kabuki Theatre Sen Studien zur Traditionellen Musik Japans Bd. 8. Basel. London: Barenreiter Kassel, 1999. 400pp. Preface, foreword, Japanese and English abstracts, introduction, photographs, illustrations, appendices. DM68.00, hardcover.

BERT EDSTROM (ed). The Japanese and Europe: images and Perceptions. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000. 283 pp. £45.00, hardcover.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

SIRI GAMAGE and I. B. WATSON (eds). Conflict and Community in Contemporary Sri Lanka: “Pearl of the East” or the “Island of Tears”. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999. 355 pp. Rs495, hardcover; Rs295, paper.

RANABIR SAMADDAR. The Marginal Nation: transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999. 228 pp. Rs 325.

GENERAL ASIA

DAVID WALKER. Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999. 312 pp. $29.95, paper.

J. S. EADES, TOM GILL and HARUMI BEFU (eds). Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2000. viii, 295 pp. A$39.95/US$26.00, paper.

YAMAMOTO YOSHINOBU (ed). Globalism, Regionalism & Nationalism. Asia in Search of its Role in the 21st Century. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. xi, 260 pp. £14.99/US$34.95, paper.

DONALD DENOON. Getting Under the Skin: the Bougainville Copper Agreement and the Creation of the Panguna Mine. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000. vii, 264 pp. Maps, bibliography, appendices, index. A$39.95, hardcover.

JOANNE R. BAUER and DANIEL A. BELL (eds). The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii, 394 pp. Notes, index. £40.00, hardcover; £14.95, paper.

ANNE‐MARIE HILSDON, MARTHA MACINTYRE, VERA MACKIE and MAILA STIVENS (eds). Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia‐Pacific Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2000. ix, 240 pages. Notes, index. £60.00, hardcover.     

'A field for private members': The Wolfenden committee and Scottish homosexual law reform, 1950-67

The proceedings and report of the Wolfenden Committee on Prostitution and Homosexual Offences (1954-7) figure prominently in the historiography of homosexuality in later twentieth-century Britain. However, in the main, research has centred on the social politics of the Committee and its implications for sexual law reform in England, and there is a notable lack of regional studies. Using a range of government archives, this article focuses on the written and oral evidence of Scottish witnesses to the Committee. It documents the pre-existing legal and medical provisions for the treatment of 'homosexual offences' in Scotland, and surveys the Scottish evidence for and against the decriminalization of homosexual practices. Thereafter, it examines the views of the Scottish members of the Committee in the context of the Wolfenden Report. The article then surveys the wide-ranging opposition to homosexual law reform within Scotland in the period 1957-67, culminating in its exclusion from the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. Finally, it evaluates the implications of the Scottish experience and concludes that, in some important respects, it does not conform to the innovative and transitional picture advanced in many previous interpretations of the Wolfenden Committee and its aftermath.     

Characterization and origin of black and red Magdalenian pigments from Grottes de la Garenne (Vallée moyenne de la Creuse-France): a mineralogical and geochemical approach of the study of prehistorical paintings

Pigments sampled from wall paintings and from crayons taken on the floor, at the Grottes de la Garenne (Saint-Marcel – Indre, France) have been analyzed and characterized by infrared spectroscopy, Raman micro-spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, ICP/MS and analytical TEM. The red pigment used for the wall paintings is mainly composed by hematite, clays, carbon matter and carbonates. Results on the red pigments show that the compositions of the paintings are similar to that of some crayons. Regarding these analyses, their origin is compatible with local siderolithic facieses. Analysis of black pigments shows that they are made of cryptomelane, pyrolusite, clays, carbonates and carbon matter. It shows also that paintings and some crayons compositions are compatible. On the contrary of red pigments, the origin of black pigments is probably allochtonous. Indeed, the traces of thallium detected in cryptomelane, the cerium anomaly and the absence of iron are not compatible with local facieses or other sites from the French Massif Central.     

‘Romanian Peasants’ into ‘European Farmers’? Using Statistics to Standardize Agriculture

In this article, the agricultural sector in Romania provides the basis of a sociological enquiry into the contribution of statistics to the definition of legitimate economic organization. Using the analytical tools developed by James C. Scott, the emphasis is laid on the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) developed by the European Commission to define ‘economically viable’ farms. The measurement units which the FADN provides are applied at national level to determine legitimate agricultural practices. This imposes a productivist definition of the agricultural economy which diverges from the modes of social and economic organization observed in rural areas in Romania. Four million Romanian citizens make their living directly from working the land. The majority own smallholdings received during decollectivization and practise subsistence farming at the fringes of the legal economy. Instead of employing a definition of agriculture consistent with their practices and developing local distribution channels, quantification instruments provided by the European Commission form the basis of a selection procedure among these smallholders. These instruments have enabled the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture to set a threshold of ‘economic viability’ below which producers are deemed unable to develop a commercial approach to their activities. The objective is to help those who just about reach the required level to consolidate their agricultural holdings and take up intensive farming. The remainder are disqualified and encouraged to leave the sector. To further this objective, the category ‘semi‐subsistence’ agriculture has been created and takes centre stage in all measures implemented. Nevertheless, the statistical dividing lines on which this category is based have no substance and the structure of agriculture is manifesting high levels of inertia.     

Two Vanished African Maritime Traditions and a Parallel from South America

Maritime traditions that extend along coastlines are more vulnerable to disruption and disappearance than areal trading networks. The paper describes two cases from Africa, the likely early movement of Bantu speakers down the coast of West Africa and the Swahili trading diaspora that reached southern Mozambique by at least the seventh century. Both of these have disappeared from the ethnographic and historical record but can be recovered through archaeology and linguistics. A parallel is made with the trade route that linked the coastal region of Peru and Ecuador with Western Mexico and may have been active from as early as 4,000 bp until the Spanish conquest. The hypothesis is that areal networks, such as those in island Southeast Asia and the Pacific, which are driven by colonisation and bidirectional exchange, are more likely to persist because they are more resilient due to the number of broken ‘links’ they can withstand. Linear expansions may be driven by a quest for trade and resources but are usually not necessary to survival.     

Integrating human dimensions of Arctic palaeoenvironmental science: SEAD – the strategic environmental archaeology database

Environmental change has a human dimension, and has had so for at least the last 10 000 years. The prehistoric impact of people on the Arctic landscape has occasionally left visible traces, such as house and field structures. More often than not, however, the only evidence available is at the microscopic or geochemical level, such as fossil insect and seed assemblages or changes in the physical and chemical properties of soils and sediments. These records are the subject of SEAD, a multidisciplinary database and software project currently underway at Umeå University, Sweden, which aims to create an online database and set of tools for investigating these traces, as part of an international research infrastructure for palaeoecology and environmental archaeology.