Insights into Past Ritual Practice at Yikpabongo, Northern Region, Ghana

Varied interpretations have been provided for the figurine mound sites located in Koma Land and in the Mogduri District, Northern Region, Ghana, including that they represent burial mounds or shrines. In particular, the producers or affiliates of the mounds are unknown, as the traditions of the present inhabitants of the archaeological region dissociate themselves from the mounds. Current excavations of the mounds have provided considerable contextual information, leading the excavation team to hypothesise that the mounds are best understood within a shrine context and that the figurines, possibly representing ancestors or other beings, were used in ceremonies aimed at communicating with the supernatural world for healing or other purposes. This article presents the current understanding of these mound sites with particular reference to the 2010 and 2011 excavation seasons and the ethnography of existing groups in the area. Possible future avenues of enquiry are also discussed.     

‘British India on trial’: Brighton Military Hospitals and the politics of empire in World War I

During the early years of the First World War, wounded Indian soldiers were treated at hospitals in southern England. Focussing especially on the hospital created within the Royal Pavilion complex in Brighton, this article examines the implications of an episode in which thousands of colonised subjects were located and managed within a metropolitan province. We show how the Indian hospitals became sites of concentrated imperial anxiety, with the potential to destabilise British rule in India itself as well as the English localities in which they were created. In particular, we argue that the agency expressed in Indian soldiers’ letters home generated an acute consciousness among British officials of the need to bear in mind subaltern subjects’ own networks when managing those hegemonic imperial networks that come more readily to historians’ attention.     

Drainage on the Grand Prairie: the birth of a hydraulic society on the Midwestern frontier

The Grand Prairie of east central Illinois was notorious for a marshy environment that prevented dense agricultural settlement until late in the nineteenth century. While recent historical–geographical scholarship has focused on innovations in drainage technology, drainage-related laws and institutions, and the ecological impacts of wetland reclamation, it has largely failed to account for the persistence of agrarian structure, and its key component, land tenure, on the Grand Prairie. Late-nineteenth-century reclamation efforts were not quite so transformative as previously believed. The same landed elite that dominated in the pre-drainage era quickly emerged atop a system of public drainage that held the key to the region’s economic future. In this paper, we extend Karl Wittfogel and Donald Worster’s theorizations about ‘hydraulic civilizations’ from the realm of irrigation to that of drainage. While drainage was indeed important in shaping the history of east central Illinois, we argue that a distinctive social order in east central Illinois emerged from, and was shaped by, an older agrarian structure that had developed in response to marshy, unpredictable conditions before drainage began in the late 1800s. The beneficiaries of the old order did not yield power easily, and instead skillfully capitalized on the new opportunities presented by drainage enterprises, to create a ‘hydraulic society’ on the prairie. The new order continued to rely on the exploitation of tenant farmers even as the landscape itself was transformed into the intensely managed and highly productive Corn Belt of today.     

“British Tribute to Virginia Valor”: Unveiling the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Statue

This article outlines the political agendas surrounding the dedication of the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Statue, an early Confederate monument commissioned in Britain in 1863 and unveiled with much fanfare in Richmond, Virginia in 1875. It argues that the statue’s British provenance made it an ideal means of expressing the distinctive claims of the Conservative Party of Virginia. By commemorating both General Jackson and Britain’s Confederate sympathizers, modernizers in the Conservative Party presented themselves as representatives of an Anglo‐Saxon Christian value system, guardians of the “Old Dominion’s” immemorial character, and defenders of political views that held national and international significance. Thus the Conservatives dedicated an international monument to a transatlantic and implicitly racist cultural tradition as part of their larger effort to facilitate Virginia’s integration into the reconstructed national union on terms favorable to the former Confederates.     

Inclusiveness and coherency in the history of the neurosciences

The International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN) defines "neurosciences" broadly, and we want to encourage the widest possible range of scholarly approaches to our subject. However, this deliberate inclusiveness could potentially cause problems with internal coherency in our organization and in the scholarship that we are trying to create. In other words, we need to avoid the pitfalls of the internalist-externalist tension without losing the benefits of both perspectives. In fact, I think that there is a large and interesting "gray zone," where the boundary between these supposedly separate approaches is both artificial and porous. This should be one of the most rewarding intellectual domains for the study of neuroscience history, because our subject is always culturally loaded by the mind/body problem and by the assumptions that it entails. Of course, neuroscience history is also influenced by all of the other cultural and scientific aspects of the milieus in which it is conducted. Understanding neuroscience history in all of its multiple historical contexts will require the participation of a wide range of scholarly viewpoints. To keep ourselves coherent in the process, we will have to educate each other.     

A news flow analysis of the sale of a public asset

As the marketplace approach to economic regulation swept through New Zealand in the late 1980s and early 1990s many new business opportunities were created. The deregulation of the electricity industry resulted in Utilicorp, a United States‐based utility holding company, entering into a joint venture with Waikato Electric Corporation in Hamilton, New Zealand. The public felt betrayed by the sale of a former public asset and a media crisis event was born. This study examines the crisis event from its historical origins and conducts a content analysis of the media coverage of the crisis. Waikato Electric and Utilicorp both underestimated the potential for public backlash to what appears on its face to be an excellent business opportunity. The Waikato Times assumed an adversarial role in this public controversy and sustained the coverage of this community crisis to effect change in the proposed merger.     

Book reviews

General

Peter Elphick. The Far Eastern File: The Intelligence War in the Far East, 1930–1945. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997. xvii, 510 pp. Introduction, author's note, maps, photographs, index. £20.00, hardcover.

Northeast Asia

Nancy Abelmann. Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. US$40.00, hardcover; US$18.00, paper.

Robert Barnett and Shirin Akiner, editors. Resistance and Reform in Tibet. London: Hurst and Company, 1994. £32.00, hardcover; £12.95, paper.

Ronald D. Schwartz. Circle of Protest: Political Ritual in the Tibetan Uprising. London: Hurst and Company, 1994. £37.50, hardcover; £12.95, paper.

Mick Broderick. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. Japanese Studies Series. London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1996. x, 255 pp. US$93.50, £55.00, hardcover.

Susan Brownell. Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. 393 pp. Bibliography, index. US$49.95, hardcover; US$18.95, paper.

Lincoln Li. Student Nationalism in China, 1924–1949. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. ix, 209 pp. Acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, plates, index. US$19.95, paper.

Colin Mackerras. China's Minority Cultures: Identities and Integration Since 1912. Melbourne: Longman, 1995. x, 252 pp. Contents, preface, maps, photographs, references, index. A$42.00, hardcover.

David Zweig. Freeing China's Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997. xvii, 365 pp. Contents, preface, tables and figures, index. US$62.95, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

South Asia

John Hutnyk. The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation. London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1996. x, 223 pp. Preface, bibliography, index. US$65.00, hardcover; US$22.50, paper.

Frederic C. Thomas. Calcutta Poor: Elegies on a City above Pretense. An East Gate Book. New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1997. ix, 166 pp. Preface, plates, notes, bibliography, index. US$29.95, hardcover.

David William Martin. The Changing Face of Calcutta. New Delhi: Vikas, 1997. xxvii, 232 pp. Rs.450, hardcover.

Thomas R. Trautmann. Aryans and British India. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997. ix‐xiv, 260 pp. Illustrations, maps, references, index. US$35, £24.95, hardcover.

David Gordon White. The Alchemical Body. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. xviii, 596 pp. Preface, abbreviations, notes, bibliography, index. US$49.95, hardcover.

Joanna Williams. The Two Headed Deer: Illustrations of the Ramayana in Orissa. California Studies in the History of Art, No. 34. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xix, 210 pp. 289 plates. US$65.00, hardcover.

Liz Wilson. Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. xviii, 258 pp. Foreword, bibliography, illustrations.

Stanley Wolpert. Nehru, A Tryst With Destiny. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. xii, 546 pp. Preface, illustrations, footnotes, bibliography, index. A$49.00, hardcover.

Southeast Asia

Justin Corfield, editor. Rama III and the Siamese Expedition to Kedah in 1939: The Dispatches of Luang Udomsombat. Trans. Cyril Skinner. Monash Papers on Southeast Asia No. 30. Melbourne: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1993. Editor's introduction, translator's introduction, map, plate, appendices, index. 338 pp. A$24.95, paper.

Duong Thu Huong. Novel Without a Name. Translated from the Vietnamese by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. London: Picador, 1995. 289 pp. A$16.95, paper.

Dean Forbes. Asian Metropolis: Urbanisation and the Southeast Asian City. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996. xxii, 120 pp. Foreword, contents, maps, plates, index. A$19.95, paper.

Antoon Geels. Subud and the Javanese Mystical Tradition. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series No. 76. Preface, author's note, abstract. 262 pp. £30.00, hardcover.

Bryan Hunsaker, Theodore Mayer, Barbara Griffiths and Robert Daley. Loggers, Monks, Students and Entrepreneurs: Four Essays on Thailand. Introduction by Clark Neher. DeKalb, Illinois: Southeast Asia Publications, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, 1996. Occasional Paper No. 18. vi, 143 pp. Introduction, bibliographies, index. US$12.00, paper.

Ian Mabbett and David Chandler. The Khmers. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. x, 289 pp. Preface, introduction, plates, maps, appendices, bibliography, index. £35.00, hardcover; £13.50, paper.

Leo Suryadinata, editor. Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians. Sydney and Singapore: Allen and Unwin, and ISEAS, 1997. A$35.00, paper.     

A Dynamic Location-Allocation Model for Evaluating the Spatial Impacts for Just-in-Time Planning

This paper presents an interperiod network storage location-allocation (INSLA) model to solve the just-in-time production planning problem. The model is extended to a multiobjective problem in which trade-offs between delivery time and transportation costs are analyzed. The results for a hypothetical problem show that in an attempt to reduce inventories on the part of the primary purchaser of raw materials, the possibility exists for less than optimal behavior in the system.