Mortality,Money, and Commemoration: Social and Economic Factors in Southern California Grave-Marker Change During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Social and economic factors significantly influenced grave-marker choice in southern California cemeteries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gradual changes in the American way of death since Victorian times underwent punctuated shifts in mortuary attitudes, commemoration practices, and funerary materials following moments of extreme social and economic duress. While the form of gravestones slowly evolved from large monuments to smaller flush markers during the late 1800s and early 1900s, they collectively experienced a pronounced shift during the 1920s, reflecting American responses to the devastating human losses of World War I and the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. Financial conditions directly affected decisions regarding those materials selected to mark the deceased as well. Although overall trends reveal that granite gravestones gradually replaced marble as the marker of choice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pronounced fiscal struggles during the 1907 Bankers’ Panic and the Great Depression were evinced in distinct surges in less expensive marble and metal grave markers.     

European trade ceramics on the Arabian Peninsula 1800–1960

European trade ceramics found across Arabia date from the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries and were made at factories mostly located within northwest Europe. After c. 1930, imitations of European ceramics are increasingly represented from factories in Japan and later China. Combining the information from archaeological excavations on the Arab coast of the Gulf and ceramics from museum and private collections, information from the archives of the British India Office and the Maastricht pottery order books for Arabia, a relatively detailed overview of this market for trade ceramics can be reconstructed. Three key points may be highlighted: First, the complex routes via which European ceramics arrived within Arabia, second, the significance of the link between producers and consumers on opposite sides of the globe, exemplified by specific designs and types of vessels manufactured for the Arabian market, and third, new layers of meaning that were given to such objects as they were incorporated into the homes, social fabric and the lives of people in Arabia.     

The Impact of Demographic Representation on Absences and Suspensions

Representative bureaucracy theory is central to public administration scholarship due to the likely relationship between the demographic composition of the public workforce and both the actual and perceived performance of public organizations. Primary school classrooms provide an ideal context in which to test the predictions of representative bureaucracy theory at the micro (student) level. Specifically, as parents have at least some agency over primary school students’ daily attendance, absences partially reflect parental assessments of their child's school, classroom, and teacher. Ensuring students attend school each day represents an effort at coproduction on the part of parents. The representativeness of the teacher workforce, and specifically that of the student's classroom teacher, is therefore likely to influence student absenteeism. Similarly, student suspensions reflect students’ relationships with their teacher, students’ comfort level in the classroom, and teachers’ discretion in the referral of misbehavior. These academically and socially important outcomes provide convenient, objective measures of behaviors that are likely influenced by street‐level representation. Using longitudinal student‐level administrative data from North Carolina, we use a two‐way (student and classroom) fixed effects strategy to identify the impact of student–teacher demographic mismatch on primary school students’ absences and suspensions. We find that representation among street‐level bureaucrats significantly decreases both absenteeism and suspensions and that these effects can be given a causal interpretation. This pushes literature forward by establishing the importance of demographic representation in shaping productive relationships between individual bureaucrats and clients.     

Trance and society

Erika Bourguignon, ed. Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social Change. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1973. x+389 pp. Tables, illustrations, references, appendix, notes, and index. $12.50.     

Book reviews

Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. 183 pp. $34.95 (paper).

David Beetham and Kevin Boyle, Introducing Democracy: 80 Questions and Answers. Cambridge: Polity Press/UNESCO, 1995. xiv + 135 pp. £10.95 (paper).

Jurgen Habermas (interviewed by Michael Haller), The Past as Future, translated and edited by Max Pensky. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. xxvi + 185 pp. $34.95 (paper).

Jacob Bercovitch (ed.), Resolving International Conflicts: The Theory and Practice of Mediation. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996. xiv + 279 pp. $US19.95 (paper).

Georgina Waylen, Gender in Third World Politics. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996. xi + 163 pp. $34.95 (paper).

Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset (eds), Politics in Developing Countries: Comparing Experiences with Democracy, 2nd edn. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1995. viii + 592 pp. npg.

Stuart Woolf (ed.), Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. vi + 215 pp. npg.

Michael Mandelbaum (ed.), Post‐Communism: Four Perspectives. New York: The Council on Foreign Relations, 1996. vi + 208 pp. npg.

Stelios Stavridis and Christopher Hill (eds), Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy: Western European Reactions to the Falklands Conflict. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1996. x + 202 pp. £34.95 (cloth), £14.95 (paper).

Ramesh Thakur (ed.), The United Nations at Fifty: Retrospect and Prospect. Dunedin: University of Otago Press and the Peace Research Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 1996. xvii + 334 pp. $34.95 (paper).

Emma Matanle, The UN Security Council: Prospects for Reform. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs Discussion Paper No. 62, 1995. vi + 70 pp. npg.

Ross Garnaut and Peter Drysdale (eds), Asia Pacific Regionalism: Readings in International Economic Relations. Sydney: Harper Educational Publishers, 1994. xviii + 433 pp. $39.95 (paper).

Russell Trood and Deborah McNamara (eds), The Asia‐Australia Survey 1995–96. Melbourne: Macmillan/Centre for the Study of Australia‐Asia Relations, Griffith University, 1995. xiv + 586 pp. $95.00 (cloth), $42.95 (paper).

Jim Rohwer, Asia Rising. London: Nicholas Brealey, 1996. 382 pp. $34.95 (cloth).

David Shambaugh (ed.), Greater China: The Next Superpower? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ix + 310 pp. $44.95 (cloth).

Anne Blair, Lodge in Vietnam: A Patriot Abroad. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. xv + 200 pp. $US25.00 (cloth).

David Mayers, The Ambassadors and America's Soviet Policy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. xiv + 335 pp. $75.00 (cloth).

Christopher Tremewan, The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore. London: Macmillan, 1994. xv + 252 pp. $88.00 (cloth).

John A. Larkin, Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xvi + 337 pp. npg.

Hermann Joseph Hiery, The Neglected War: the German South Pacific and the Influence of World War 1. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. xvii + 387 pp. US$35.OO (cloth).

Anthony Milner (ed.), Australia in Asia: Comparing Cultures. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996. xii + 300 pp. $26.95 (paper).

Lachlan Strahan, Australia's China, Changing Perceptions from the 1930s to the 1990s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xv + 374 pp. $34.95 (paper), $90.00 (cloth).

Graeme Cheeseman and Robert Bruce (eds), Discourses of Danger and Dread Frontiers: Australian Defence and Security Thinking after the Cold War. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin/Department of International Relations, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1996. ix + 317 pp. $24.95 (paper).

John Spoehr and Ray Broomhill (eds), Altered States: The Impact of Free Market Policies on the Australian States. Adelaide: Centre for Labour Studies, University of Adelaide/Social Justice Research Foundation, 1995. 226 pp. npg (paper).