East Polynesian Islands as Models of Cultural Divergence: The Case of Rapa Nui and Rapa Iti

The diverse island societies of East Polynesia are well-suited as models for comparative evolutionary analysis. Settled ca. 750 BP by a common ancestral population, colonists of the remote corners of the Pacific shared a pool of cultural traits that included commensal species, language, technology, and other cultural practices. Following colonization however, island populations diverged in language, subsistence practices, degree of territoriality, settlement patterns, investment and forms of monumental architecture, and social organization. Driven by historical circumstances and varied environmental conditions, this divergence presents evolutionary case studies of alternative paths of cultural change. One explanatory approach to this evolutionary divergence involves isolating the critical ecological parameters that likely constrained and shaped the diverse history of island populations. Here, we offer a comparative evolutionary analysis that explores the divergent histories of two marginal East Polynesian islands: Rapa Nui and Rapa Iti.     

Georges Perec’s experimental fieldwork; Perecquian fieldwork

This paper traces key themes in contemporary experimental fieldwork – explorations of ordinary places by artists, writers, activists, enthusiasts, students and researchers – to the works of Georges Perec. Preoccupations of this work – including playfulness, attention to the ordinary, and writing as a fieldwork practice – are all anticipated and elaborated in Perec’s oeuvre, where they converge around an ‘essayistic’ approach. Exhibiting these traits, some contemporary fieldwork is more convincingly Perecquian than psychogeographical or Situationist, despite the tendency to identify it with the latter. Through Perec, it is therefore possible to bring contemporary experimental fieldwork into focus, identifying a coherence and sense of project within it, while speaking to the question of what it means and could mean to conduct fieldwork experimentally. Particular attention is paid in this paper to Perec’s most accomplished and sustained field texts, both of which have been translated into English: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010, from 1975 original in French) and Species of Spaces (1999/1974).     

Evolution of marine mammal hunting: A view from the California and Oregon coasts

Marine mammals constitute … an integral part of the marine ecosystem usually as top predators. Hunting of cetaceans and pinnipeds for skins, meat and blubber has of course gone on from the earliest recorded times. At various periods … the hunting of them intensified to the point at which it caused serious depletion. Although accurate records are not available, there is little doubt that many marine mammal populations were reduced to a small fraction (perhaps no more than a tenth or so) of their former levels. Some like the sea otter, disappeared from parts of their range …     

Pearl fishing in the ancient world: 7500 BP

The oldest pearl in the world was found in the United Arab Emirates and dates from 7500 BP. Gemmologists and jewellers have popularised the idea that the oldest pearl in the world is the 5000‐year‐old Jomon pearl from Japan. Discoveries made on the shores of south‐eastern Arabia show this to be untrue, as the archaeological pearls that have been found are 2500 years older. In this region, pearls still hold an important place. Indeed, today they remain a central, identifying element. The discovery of archaeological pearls demonstrates an ancient fishing tradition that no longer exists today.     

Decolonizing geographies of travel: Reading James/Jan Morris

Travel writing can produce critical 'in-between' spaces, which contribute to broader cultural politics of postcolonialism, by transgressing and in a preliminary sense deconstructing imperial binaries. These imperial binaries structure subjectivities, on the one hand, and material geographies, on the other. This paper examines such a project, through a reading of travel writing by James/Jan Morris, which shows how processes of decolonizing subjectivities and material geographies may be recursively related. Morris is known for newspaper coverage of the 1953 Everest expedition, for a trilogy on the British Empire, for the autobiographical account of a sex change, and for many travel books and articles; all of which foreground themes of gender and imperialism. The paper argues that Morris's decolonizations have charted and created in-between spaces of subjectivity and material geography, ambivalent spaces with critical potential. The ambivalence of these spaces can constitute a critical limitation, but also an opportunity; in response, the conclusion redirects some critical attention away from writers and textual spaces to readers and interpretations, and thus points towards a postcolonial (and wider) politics of reading.     

Foucault and museum geographies: a case study of the English ‘Renaissance in the Regions’

This paper explores the subject of museum geographies, focusing particularly on the development of museum policies in a changing political context. The empirical focus is the emergence and transformation of the museum programme Renaissance in the Region, which is linked to the concepts of primary, secondary and tertiary spatialisations presented by Michel Foucault. The paper discusses the development of the programme and how it transformed aspects of the primary, secondary and tertiary spatialisations of museums in England, before focusing attention on the geography of school visits to museums. The results of two extensive studies of school visits to museums in the programme suggest that large numbers of visits come from schools located in areas with high indices of multiple deprivation and income deprivation affecting children. It is argued that this social geography reflects the tertiary spatialisation of museums linked to their emergence in areas of past industrial development, although practices linked to reconfigurations of the primary and secondary spatialisation as part of the Renaissance in the Regions programme may also have played some role. The paper concludes by discussing recent changes in government policy and the degree to which the ‘New Renaissance’ policy may signify reductions in the social reach of museums into areas of social deprivation and exclusion.     

The First two Language Academies in Spanish America

Abstract

Jeffrey Mehlman. Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France. Cambridge University Press, 1995. 262 pp.

Lewis C. Seifert. Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France, 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias. (Cambridge Studies in French 55). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xii + 276 pp.

“Cher, très cher, admirable et charmant ami …” Correspondance Georges Perec &; Jacques Lederer. Jacques Lederer, preface. Paris: Flammarion, 1997. 617 pp.

Timothy Unwin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxiii + 281 pp. $59.95.

Sarah Kay. The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. 273 pp. $65.

Carrol F. Coates, ed. Repression and Expression: Literary and Social Coding in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. xv + 342 pp.

Charlotte Stern. The Medieval Theater in Castile. Binghamton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 156, 1996. 321 pp.

José Belmonte Serrano, Origen y proceso de la narrativa de José Luis Castillo-Puche. Murcia: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia, 1997. 247 pp.

Brad Epps. Significant Violence. Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo, 1970-1990. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xii + 513 pp. $82.00.

Francisco Javier, Díez de Revenga, and Mariano de Paco, eds. En círculos de lumbre. Estudios sobre Gerardo Diego. Murcia: CajaMurcia, Obra Cultural, 1997. 509 pp.

Charles F. Fraker. The Scope of History: Studies in the Historiography of Alfonso el Sabio. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. ix + 235 pp.

John A. Scott. Dante's Political Purgatory. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. 295 pp.

Amoldo Carlos Vento. La Generación Hijo Pródigo: Renovación y Modernidad. Lanham: University Press of America, 1996. 301 pp.