Biography without history?

Kevin Perkins: Menzies: Last of the Queen's Men, Rigby, Adelaide, 1968, pp. 264, $5.50.     

Book reviews

Hans Granqvist: The Red Guard: A Report on Mao's Revolution, trans. Erik J. Friis, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1967, pp. 159 + ix, $5.95.

James A Maxwell: Commonwealth‐State Financial Relations in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 1967, pp. 124 + ix, $5.00.

J. R. Flynn: American Politics: a Radical View, Blackwood and Janet Paul Limited, Auckland, 1967, pp. 255, $5.50.

Colin Mackerras and Neale Hunter: China Observed, 1964/1967, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1967, pp. 194, $4.95.

F. Alexander: Australia Since Federation, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1967, pp. 352, well illustrated, $4.95, $2.50 (paperback).

G. R. Elton: The Practice of History, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1967, pp. 178 + viii, $3.00.

A. Jones: Andrew Jones M.H.R. by Himself, Rigby Ltd., Adelaide, 1967, pp. 186, $0.95.

R. W. Connell and Florence Gould: Politics of The Extreme Right, Sydney Studies in Politics, No. 7, Sydney University Press, 1967, pp. 115, $2.50.

R. R. Walker: Communicators: People, Practices, Philosophies in Australian Advertising, Media, Marketing, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1967, pp. 416, $10.

Basil Mitchell: Law, Morality and Religion in a Secular Society, Oxford University Press, London, 1967, pp. 141 + vii, $4.25.     

Searle's Social Reality

Book reviewed in this article:
The Construction of Social Reality by John R. Searle     

Drought,Domestic Budgeting and Wealth Distribution in Sahelian Households

Over the past twenty‐five years, Sahelian households have experienced recurrent harvest failure and greater reliance on remittances from migratory wage labour. Household subsistence has become less dependent on household grain stores and more on the liquidation of individual wealth stores. This study investigates how these broader changes have affected struggles between household members over obligations to support the household in the Zarmaganda region of western Niger. As the land‐derived leverage of male patriarchs has declined and household dependence on individual wealth stores has increased, domestic budgeting has become more contested. Household heads make case‐by‐case moral claims on other household members during times of grain shortage. Women and subordinate males invoke Islamic law, which accords primary provisioning responsibility to the household head, to protect their individual wealth in times of grain deficit. This article investigates the nature of these budgetary struggles, showing how individuals’ decisions to contribute individual wealth to support the household are best understood as highly situated, affected not only by the specific material conditions of the household but also the interplay of the moral, structural, and individualistic imperatives that derive from one’s position within the household. Using reconstructed livestock wealth histories for the members of fifty‐four households in western Niger, this study investigates the material consequences of these struggles. Male heads of corporate households, the historic managers of the household’s land and agricultural labour, have lost wealth relative to their wives and married male subordinates since the drought of 1984.     

Territorializing Armenians: geo‐texts,and political imaginaries in French‐occupied Cilicia, 1919–1922

This article examines the petitions, letters, opinion pieces and scholarly works that Armenian intellectuals generated to convince French decision‐makers to carve an Armenian nation‐state out of Cilicia (present‐day southern Turkey). This colonial encounter took place within the process by which European powers dismembered the defeated Ottoman state following the First World War. These “geo‐texts”—textual representations of territory and population—were strategic attempts at adjusting the parameters of French imperialism, and thus tapped into French notions of history and ethnology to make a case for an Armenian state. First, I show how Armenians adopted and inflected French epistemologies to depict their ancient homeland. Then, I trace the shift from a representation based on historical commonalities between the Armenians and French to one that stressed the ethnological specificities of Armenian nation and territory. Finally, I argue that the static notions of territory, text and population that lobbyists produced continue to fuel scholarly debate over the confessional and ethnic make‐up of Cilicia. This study on “geo‐texts” provides insights into how, at a certain historical moment, differences and similarities among people, both within a society and between societies, are established in text.     

The environment of northeast England during Roman times as shown by pollen analysis

Data from nine radiocarbon-dated pollen diagrams from the northeast of England are considered and it is argued that much of the area was deforested and used for farming during the late pre-Roman Iron Age. This farming continued throughout the Roman rule (approximately AD 80–AD 410) and lasted until at least the sixth century, implying a measure of political stability after the Roman withdrawal.