Book reviews

Negotiating Development. P. Healey, M. Purdue and F. Ennis, London: E&FN Spon, 1995, 212 pp, £29.95 hb, ISBN 0 419 19410 X

The Rise of the Rustbelt. P. Cooke (Ed.), London, UCL Press, 1995, i‐x+272 pp, £40.00 hb, ISBN 1 85728 420 8; £14.95 pb, ISBN 1 85728 419 4

Urban Change and Renewal: The Paradox of Place. P. Garrahan and P. Stewart (Eds), Aldershot: Avebury, 1994, viii+200 pp, £32.50 hb, ISBN 1 85628 610 X

Territorial Competition in an Integrating Europe. P. Cheshire and I. Gordon (Eds), Aldershot: Avebury, 1995, 317 pp, £40.00 hb, ISBN 1 85972 112 5

Reconstituting Rurality: Class, Community and Power in the Development Process. Jonathan Murdoch and Terry Marsden, London: UCL Press, 1994, xv + 256 pp. ISBN 1 85728 041 5 hb     

A new model for royal penance? Helgaud of Fleury's Life of Robert the Pious

This article studies the theme of penance in writings about early medieval kingship through a case study: in his eleventh-century vita of Robert the Pious, Helgaud of Fleury described how the king did penance for his incestuous marriage in terms taken directly from Ambrose's Apologia David . This article, therefore, examines the influence which Ambrose had both on Helgaud and on earlier writers on kingship.     

Indigenous health organizations,Indigenous community resurgence,and the reclamation of place in urban areas

Research around the world has been nearly unanimous about the positive impacts of Indigenous‐led health organizations on Indigenous peoples' qualitative experiences in health care, in the face of often negative experiences in non‐Indigenous‐led health care settings. Urban environments, including health care environments, are areas of increasing attention with regard to Indigenous peoples' health in Canada. In this study, which took place in the northern city of Prince George, British Columbia, 65 Indigenous community members and health services workers participated in interviews and focus groups, describing their experiences with urban Indigenous‐led health organizations—defined in this study as non‐governmental organizations that prioritize the values and practices of local Indigenous communities. Employing perspectives on place and relationships drawn from Indigenous critical theory and Indigenous community resurgence to analyze the findings of this qualitative study leads to a focus on how relationships impact and can even constitute places, enabling new understandings of the roles of Indigenous‐led health organizations in urban Indigenous community resurgence.     

Mapuche youth between exclusion and the future: protest,civic society and participation in Chile

In Chile, indigenous Mapuche teenagers are caught in a deadlock between, on the one hand, parental aspirations and neo-liberal educational processes, and on the other, affective and social ties to a racialized and often stigmatized indigenous population and landscapes. The paper draws on the concept of vital conjuncture [Johnson-Hanks, J. 2002. “On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 865–880] to explore the contradictions facing youth in transitions to adulthood [Jeffrey, C. 2010. “Geographies of children and youth I: eroding maps of Life.” Progress in Human Geography 34 (4): 496–505.] and to consider the spatial–territorial dynamics through which these contractions are expressed [Smith, S. H. 2012. “‘In the Heart, There's Nothing’: Unruly Youth, Generational Vertigo and Territory.” Transactions of the IBG 38 (4): 572–585]. The paper explores young indigenous rural secondary students' understandings of their life trajectories and socio-political conjunctures. The paper shows that although indigenous young people express aspirations and even hope regarding their futures [cf. Kraftl, P. 2008. “Young People, Hope and Childhood-Hope.” Space and Culture 11 (2): 81–92], these expressions are best analysed in the context of ongoing racial exclusions, and the emotionally freighted situation this places them in regarding ties to indigenous communities and family members. Drawing on one year's in-depth qualitative research, the paper outlines the beliefs, practices and identities of rural Mapuche youth subjects caught between parents' experiences, and the Chile they want to inhabit with jobs, status and opportunity. The paper argues that vital conjunctures are not singular moments of modern historical ‘events', as they have tended to be construed in the previous literature. Rather, vital conjunctures arise from and directly engage longer-term histories, not least in contexts of the global South where postcolonial exclusion occurs.     

Transformation in East Central Europe: 1918 and 1989. A Comparative Approach

The authors of the introduction to this special issue argue for a historicization of the concept of transformation by broadening our understanding of it to decrease its teleological spin. This allows us to discard the “zero hour” narrative and to rather consider phenomena that exist long before a “turn” or “revolution” accelerates the transformation process. The closely related terms of “continuity” and “discontinuity” can be relieved of their mandatory dialectical logic by introducing the concept of “adaptation” as an analytical instrument in order to explain what happens after a certain turning point. Consequently, a historicization of the concept of transformation, as the briefly presented case studies show, entails detachment from apodictic periodization and the narration of quasi-mechanized progress in order to specify every single field of accelerated change. However, this does not necessarily limit the usefulness of the concept, as examining individual cases using specific criteria and comparing and bundling them will contribute to a better understanding of societies in transformation as a whole.     

Sørenga 7: the reconstruction of a 17th‐century boat from Oslo harbour

In 2006, during the Immersed Tunnel Project in the harbour of Oslo, Norway, a c.9.4 m‐long boat was discovered. The boat was found in the area historically known as Sørenga, and was named Sørenga 7, following six other finds in the area excavated from the early 1970s to the 1990s. The boat was documented digitally piece by piece, and a scale model was made in cardboard and polyamide. The deposition of the boat in the transition between the 17th and 18th centuries focuses attention on life in the early modern harbour of Christiania (Oslo).