Shifting monument production chains and the implications for gravestone design on Prince Edward Island, 1820–2005

This paper examines changing gravestone design in Prince Edward Island (PEI) (1820–2005) and relates these changes to changing modes of production in the monument industry. Information from field surveys, newspaper advertisements and business correspondence reveals how supply-side factors helped shape the morphogenesis of the island's cemetery landscapes. Among these, different sources of raw materials and manufacturing innovations over time resulted in the use of harder, more durable types of stone. With these changes, gravestone production and design moved increasingly away from local monument works towards off-island producers in Vermont, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Since the early 20^th century, PEI's gravestone suppliers vertically integrated along Fordist mass-production lines and increased choices available to local monument sellers and their consumers.     

Clarifying the critical in critical heritage studies

This paper considers the term critical in the unfolding formulation of critical heritage studies. It argues for a shift in emphasis from the subject of our effort to the object of attention, in other words focusing primarily on the critical issues that face the world today, the larger issues that bear upon and extend outwards from heritage. To that end, the paper presents two key directions. It suggests much is to be gained from tackling the uneasy relationship that currently exists between social science and humanities-based approaches to heritage and the professional conservation sector oriented by a scientistic materialism. Second, there is a need for heritage studies to account for its relationship to today’s regional and global transformations by developing post-western understandings of culture, history and heritage and the socio-political forces that actualise them.     

Beyond Eurocentrism? Heritage conservation and the politics of difference

There is a long-standing debate concerning the suitability of European or ‘western’ approaches to the conservation of cultural heritage in other parts of world. The Cultural Charter for Africa (1976), The Burra Charter (1979) and Nara Document on Authenticity (1994) are notable manifestations of such concerns. These debates are particularly vibrant in Asia today. This article highlights a number of charters, declarations and publications that have been conceived to recalibrate the international field of heritage governance in ways that address the perceived inadequacies of documents underpinning today’s global conservation movement, such as the 1964 Venice Charter. But as Venice has come to stand as a metonym for a ‘western’ conservation approach, intriguing questions arise concerning what is driving these assertions of geographic, national or civilisational difference in Asia. To address such questions, the article moves between a number of explanatory frameworks. It argues declarations about Asia’s culture, its landscapes, and its inherited pasts are, in fact, the combined manifestations of post-colonial subjectivities, a desire for prestige on the global stage of cultural heritage governance and the practical challenges of actually doing conservation in the region.     

Book reviews

CHINA

ZHIYUE BO. Chinese Provincial Leaders: economic Performance and Political Mobility since 1949. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. 183 pp. Appendix, bibliography, index. US$74.95, hardcover.

KIRK A. DENTON. The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 324 pp. A$90.00, hardcover.

ROSS GARNAUT and LIGANG SONG (eds). China 2002: WTO Entry and World Recession. Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, 2002. x, 192 pp. Bibliography. A$35.00/US$30.00, paper.

NEIL C. HUGHES. China's Economic Challenge: smashing the Iron Rice Bowl. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. xv, 235 pp. Photographs, map, index. US$24.95, paper.

P. R. KUMARASWAMY (ed). China and the Middle East: the Quest for Influence. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999. 228 pp. Rs425, hardcover.

ROBERT H. SHARF. Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: a Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. 414 pp. US$47.00, hardcover.

STEPHEN UHALLEY, JR. and XIAOXIN WU (eds). China and Christianity: burdened Past, Hopeful Future. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001. 520 pp. Illustration, table, notes, bibliography, glossary, index. $79.95, hardcover.

ANN BARROTT WICKS (ed). Children in Chinese Art. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. 216 pp. Illustrations (colour and b/w), glossary of Chinese characters. US$51.00, hardcover.

YONGJIN ZHANG and GREG AUSTIN (eds). Power and Responsibility in Chinese Foreign Policy. Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, 2001. 293 pp. Index. A$36.00/US$32.00, paper.

JAPAN AND KOREA

DAVID BELL. Chushingura and the Floating World: the Representation of Kanadehon Chushingura in Ukiyo‐e Prints. Richmond: Japan Library, 2001. 170 pp. 41 b/w plates, synopsis, list of principal characters and roles, glossary, bibliography, dustjacket. US$48.00, hardcover.

EYAL BEN‐ARI and JOHN CLAMMER (eds). Japan in Singapore: cultural Occurrences and Cultural Flows. Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000. 238 pp. £40.00, hardcover.

MAHITO ISHIMOTO (ed). Remembering Aizu: the Testament of Shiba Gorō. Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by Teruko Craig. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999. 158 pp. US$37.00, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

YASUHIRO NAKASONE. The Making of the New Japan: reclaiming the Political Mainstream (translated and annotated by Lesley Connor). Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999. 256 pp. £30.00, hardcover.

HIROSHI SHIMIZU and HITOSHI HIRAKAWA. Japan and Singapore in the World Economy: Japan's Economic Advance into Singapore 1870–1965. London: Routledge, 1999. 268 pp. £60.00, hardcover.

JULIA ADENEY THOMAS. Reconfiguring Modernity: concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xv, 239 pp. Index. A$37.50, hardcover.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

BAABAR (Bat‐Erdene Batbayar). Twentieth Century Mongolia. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1999. xiv, 448 pp. £50.00, hardcover.

WENDY DONIGER (ed). Splitting the Difference. Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xi, 376 pp. Bibliography, index. £38.50, hardcover; £15.50, paper.

DIANA L. ECK. Dar?an: seeing the Divine Image in India, 3rd edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. v, 115 pp. Appendices, bibliography, glossary. US$16.50, paper.

JEFFREY HOPKINS. Emptiness in the Mind‐Only School of Buddhism: dynamic Responses to Dzong‐ka‐ba The Essence of Eloquence: I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 542 pp. US$45.00, hardcover.

FAREED KAZMI. The Politics of India's Conventional Cinema: imagining a Universe, Subverting a Multiverse. New Delhi: Sage, 1998. 252 pp. Rs 195.

BURTON WATSON, trans. The Essential Lotus: selections from the Lotus Sutra. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 195 pp. US$16.95, paper.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

LEONARD BLUSSÉ Bitter Bonds: a Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2002. x, 194 pp. US$49.95, hardcover; US$22.95, paper.

ERIK COHEN. The Commercialized Crafts of Thailand: hill Tribes and Lowland Villages. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000. xiii, 316 pp. Photographs, diagrams, tables, notes, bibliography, index. US$39.00, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

VIRGINIA MATHESON HOOKER. Writing a New Society: social Change through the Novel in Malay. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. xviii, 492 pp. Notes, select bibliography, index. US$39.00, hardcover.

PETER RIDDELL. Islam and the Malay‐Indonesian World: transmission and Responses. London: C. Hurst and Co., 2001. xix, 349 pp. Maps, tables, index, bibliography. £45.00, hardcover.

GENERAL ASIA

RICHARD J. ELLINGS and AARON L. FRIEDBERG (eds). Strategic Asia: power and Purpose 2001–02. Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2001. 378 pp. US$19.95, paper.

PETER FRANCIS, Jr. Asia's Maritime Bead Trade: 300 B.C. to the Present. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. 305 pp. A$52.00, hardcover.

DAVID GOLDSWORTHY (ed). Facing North: a century of Australian Engagement with Asia, Volume 1:1901 to the 1970s. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2001. 523 pp. A$59.95, hardcover; A$39.95, paper.

BRIAN MOERAN (ed). Asian Media Productions. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001. £45.00, hardcover.     

Regional environmental planning: Progress and possibilities in Western Europe

The challenge of environmental thinking is putting extreme stresses on the imagination and techniques of planners, at least in those European countries where ecological issues are being taken seriously. Generally, city or regional planners, and academics as well, are only at the beginning of a necessarily rapid learning curve. It is argued here that a spatial planning approach to guiding environmental change could usefully complement other sectoral or financial instruments, particularly if focused at regional levels. Important dimensions of different approaches are analyzed, including the political economic model, the degree of development and wealth (north‐south variation) and the institutional framework in each country. The progress made so far is examined in case studies of the Netherlands, England and Catalonia. It is suggested that some aspects of the Dutch approach could form a useful basis, if suitably adapted, for regional planning elsewhere. But, above all, much more fundamental thinking on the goals and means of desirable regional transitions will be necessary.     

Fearsome people and places,narratives of street and hideout children in Freetown,Sierra Leone

This article is based on a GOAL Global field study of street children in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It draws on narrative accounts given by street children who have migrated to Freetown from rural Sierra Leone. The study used the participatory ranking method to generate data about children’s street and hideout (a room, shack or part of a building where children live in groups) lives post-migration. These data contained much about children’s fears, and the article explores their experience of fearsome people and places, showing that fear is a dominant aspect of these children’s lives. Fear shapes their day-to-day choices and decisions: their agency. It also suggests that agency should be seen as complex, contingent and sometimes paradoxical. The article concludes by identifying implications for social policy and practice, suggesting that these necessarily entail risky engagement with fearsome people in the liminal spaces of children’s street and hideout lives.     

Geographies of everyday nationhood: experiencing multiculturalism in Melbourne

In this article, we explore the geographies of nationhood manifest in everyday life, arguing that our quotidian surroundings continually reproduce the nation as we engage with them. We show that nationhood is obvious and ubiquitous in the lives of people when they are asked to attune to it, and that even when not in the forefront of attention, it partly informs how we make sense of our daily experiences. This is not to claim that nationhood is fully formed or coherent, a separate substratum waiting to be tapped into or closely defined by an identifiable symbolic repertoire, if only we pay attention. Instead, we demonstrate that nationhood is emergent in everyday life, is reproduced continuously and intimately entangled with the sensations, routines, material environments, public encounters, everyday competencies, memories, aspirations and a range of other affective and embodied qualities that comprise how we understand and inhabit our worlds. This mundane experience involves shifting between reflexive and unreflexive states, and the method we deploy ‐ photo‐elicitation ‐ is devised to draw out these oscillations and heighten the attunement of participants to the usually unreflexively apprehended taken‐for‐granted national qualities of everyday space. Here, we aim to empirically foreground the neglected spatial dimensions that characterize the experience of banal nationalism.