PUTTING WOMEN IN THEIR PLACE: THE CARNIVAL AT GREENHAM COMMON*

In this paper I examine reactions to the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. I argue that the media, local and government responses to the Greenham women reveal geographical assumptions about “normality.” The peace women, by living away from home, on the edge of a military (and therefore masculine) establishment challenged accepted patriarchal understandings of “women's place” and were thus described as “out of place.” More specifically, the women were referred to in terms of hygiene, inadequate culinary ability, sexuality and hysteria. Each of these implies a gendered form of disorder in which social, cultural and geographical boundaries have been transgressed. These reactions are placed within the context of Bakhtin's formulations of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism. I suggest that the women, through their highly visible opposition to a patriarchal military establishment, represent a threat to neatly bounded official culture which finds its geographical expression in the formal territories of the courtroom and the air base. In conclusion this illustration is placed in the wider context of cultural/political protest. I argue that transgression, while serving to reveal normally assumed hegemonic landscapes, is restrained by already existing boundaries.     

Book reviews

Australian Politics

Peter Beilharz, Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp.245 $29.95 ISBN 0 521 43821 7.

Christine Fletcher (ed.), Aboriginal Self‐Determination in Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Report Series, 1994) pp.204 $16.95 ISBN 085575.

William Sanders (ed.), Mabo and Native Title: Origins and Institutional Implications (Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, The Australian National University, Research Monograph No.7, 1994) pp.83 $15.00 ISBNO 7315 20084.

Ciaran O'Faircheallaigh, Peter Graham and Jeni Warburton (eds), Service Delivery and Public Sector Marketing (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1991) pp.191 $24.95 ISBN 0 7329 0386 6.

J. Taylor, Regional Change in the Economic Status of Indigenous Australians, 1986–91. Research Monograph No.6 (Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU, 1993) pp.77 $15.00 ISBN 0 7315 1870 5.

J. Taylor, The Relative Economic Status of Indigenous Australians, 1986–91. Research Monograph No.5 (Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU, 1993) pp.85 $15.00 ISBN 0 7315 1841.

Andrew C. Theophanous, Understanding Social Justice (Melbourne: Elkia Books, 1993) pp.373 $n.p. ISBN 1875335 021.

Rodney Tiffen, News and Power (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989) pp.255 $19.95 ISBN 0 04 372043 9.

K.J. Walker, The Political Economy of Environmental Policy: An Australian Introduction (Kensington, NSW: UNSW Press, 1994) pp.349 $24.95 ISBN 0 86840 070 X.

Comparative and International Politics

A. Doak Barnett, China's Far West: Four Decades of Change (Boulder: Colorado: Westview Press, 1993) pp.688 $US39.95 ISBN 0 8133 1774 6.

Robert E. Bedeski, The Transformation of South Korea. Reform and Reconstruction in the Sixth Republic under Roh Tae Woo 1987–1992 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) pp.197 $35.95 ISBN 0 415 10604 4.

Samuel H. Beer, To Make a Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993) pp. 392 US$29.95 ISBN 0 674 89317 4.

David Campbell, Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics and the Narratives of the Gulf War (London: Lynne Rlenner, 1993) pp.118 $20.50 ISBN 1 55587 381 2.

Jack Donnelly, International Human Rights (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993) pp.198 $US39.95 ISBN 0 8133 8181 9.

Scott Davidson, Human Rights (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993) pp.178 $49.95 ISBN 0 335 15768 8.

Frank Fischer and John Forester (eds), The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (London: UCL Press, 1993) pp.318 $39.95 ISBN 1 85728 183 7.

Frank Frost, Vietnam's Foreign Relations: Dynamics of Change. Pacific Strategic Papers No.6 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 1993) pp.90 $14.99 ISBN 981 3016 65 5.

Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1994) pp.266 $US18.95 ISBN 1 55587 446 0.

Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia New Edition. (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1994) pp.258 $14.95 ISBN 0 14 023415 2.

Brian Hocking, Localizing Foreign Policy: Non‐Central Governments and Multilayered Diplomacy (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's, 1993) pp.249 £40.00 ISBN 0 312 09720 4.

Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose, (eds), Constructions of Race, Place and Nation (London: UCL Press, 1993) pp.216 $37.95 ISBN 1 85728 077 6.

Ann Kent, Between Freedom and Subsistence: China and Human Rights (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993) pp.293 $25.95 ISBN 0 19 585521 3.

Robert Pinkney, Democracy in the Third World (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1993) pp.182 $39.95 ISBN 0 335 15704 1.

Larry Diamond (ed.), Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries (Boulder and London: Lynne Rlenner, 1993) pp.485 $US49.95 ISBN 1 55587 303 0.

Geoffrey Ponton and Peter Gill, Introduction to Politics. Third edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) pp.327 ISBN 0 631 18784 7.

George Schopflin, Polities in Eastern Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) pp.327 $39.95 ISBN 0 631 14724 1.

Andrew Sharp (ed.), Leap Into the Dark: The Changing Role of the State in New Zealand Since 1984 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994) pp.255 $NZ34.95 ISBN 1 86940 096 8.

John Stevenson, Third Party Politics Since 1945 (London: Institute of Contemporary British History/Allen and Unwin, 1993) pp.157 $32.95 ISBN 0 631 17127 4.

Phil Cocker, Contemporary British Politics and Government (London: Tudor Business Publishing/Hodder and Stoughton, 1993) pp.404 $38.95 ISBN 1 872807 35 6.

Danny Unger and Paul Blackburn (eds), Japan's Emerging Global Role (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1993) pp.213 $US16.95 ISBN 1 55587 387 1.

Anthony van Fossen, The International Political Economy of Pacific Islands Flags of Convenience (Brisbane: Centre for the Study of Australia‐Asia Relations, Monograph No. 66: Griffith University, 1992) pp.86 $10.00 ISBN 0 86857 474 0.

John Wesley Young, Orwell's Newspeak and Totalitarian Language: Its Nazi and Communist Antecedents (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991) pp.335 $US36.50 ISBN 0 8139 1324 1.

Political Theory and Methodology

Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power. John B. Thompson (ed.), Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (trans.) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) pp.302 $39.95 ISBN 0 7456 1034 X.

Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (eds), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) pp.679 $165.00 ISBN 0 631 17993 3.

David Held (ed.), Prospects for Democracy: North, South, East, West (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993) pp.412 $45.00 ISBN 0 7456 0989 9.

Anthony H. Birch, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy (London: Routledge, 1993) pp.260 $38.95 ISBN 0 415 09108 X.

Kathleen Jones, Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women (New York: Routledge, 1993) pp.272 £12.99 ISBN 0 415 90644 X.

Robert Leach, Political Ideologies: An Australian Introduction. Second Edition (Melbourne: MacMillan, 1993) pp.245 $32.95 ISBN 0 7329 2001 9.

Lynn McDonald, The Early Origins of the Social Sciences (Montréal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1993) pp.397 ISBN 0 7735 1124 5.

Toby Miller, The Well‐Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993) pp.290 $n.p. ISBN 0 8018 4604 8.

Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) pp.194 $US24.95 ISBN 0 69107893 9.     

Transition From Wild to Domesticated Pearl Millet (Pennisetum glaucum) Revealed in Ceramic Temper at Three Middle Holocene Sites in Northern Mali

Imprints of domesticated pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.) spikelets, observed as temper in ceramics dating to the third millennium BC, provide the earliest evidence for the cultivation and domestication process of this crop in northern Mali. Additional sherds from the same region dating to the fifth and fourth millennium BC were examined and found to have pearl millet chaff with wild morphologies. In addition to studying sherds by stereomicroscopy and subjecting surface casts to scanning electron microscopy (SEM), we also deployed X-ray microcomputed tomography (microCT) on eleven sherds. This significantly augmented the total dataset of archaeological pearl millet chaff remains from which to document the use of the wild pearl millet as ceramic temper and the evolution of its morphology over time. Grain sizes were also estimated from spikelets preserved in the ceramics. Altogether, we are now able to chart the evolution of domesticated pearl millet in western Africa using three characteristics: the evolution of nonshattering stalked involucres; the appearance of multiple spikelet involucres, usually paired spikelets; and the increase in grain size. By the fourth millennium BC, average grain breadth had increased by 28%, although spikelet features otherwise resemble the wild type. In the third millennium BC, the average width of seeds is 38% greater than that of wild seeds, while other qualitative features of domestication are indicated by the presence of paired spikelets and the appearance of nondehiscent, stalked involucres. Nonshattering spikelets had probably become fixed by around 2000 BC, while increases in average grain size continued into the second millennium BC. These data now provide a robust sequence for the morphological evolution of domesticated pearl millet, the first indigenous crop domesticated in western Africa.

     

Resisting relocation and reconceptualising authenticity: the experiential and emotional values of the Southbank Undercroft,London, UK

In 2013 the Southbank Centre proposed the redevelopment of a complex of buildings including a famous skate spot known as the Undercroft. The 2013–14 campaign to protect the Undercroft drew strongly on heritage arguments, encapsulated in the tagline, ‘You Can’t Move History: You Can Secure the Future’. The campaign, which was ultimately successful as the Undercroft remains open and skateable, provides a lens through which three key areas of heritage theory and practice can be examined. Firstly, the campaign uses the term ‘found space’ to reconceptualise authenticity and places a greater emphasis on embodied experiences of, and emotional attachments to, historic urban spaces. Secondly, the concept of found space opens up a discussion surrounding the role of citizen expertise in understanding the experiential and emotional values of historic urban spaces. Finally, the paper concludes by considering the place for found space and citizen expertise within current heritage discourse and practice. The paper is accompanied by the award-winning film ‘You Can’t Move History’ which was produced by the research team in collaboration with Paul Richards from BrazenBunch and directed by skater, turned filmmaker, Winstan Whitter.     

‘Tracking,tracking and more tracking was their motto’: bush tracking and warfare in late twentieth-century Southern Africa

Tracking, the skill of following a subject by signs left behind in the environment, dominated the experience of state forces and insurgents during Southern Africa’s late twentieth-century guerilla conflicts; particularly in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1965 to 1980 and South African occupied South-West Africa (now Namibia) from 1966 to 1989. Rhodesian and South African forces emphasised tracking to locate and eliminate their elusive enemies, and learned that the only way to do this was by using horses, motor vehicles or helicopters to gain ground. Both security forces established tracking training institutions and specialist tracker units. However, only the South Africans were able to create large and highly effective tracking units in the context of a specific environment and the mobilisation of indigenous communities. In response, insurgents in both conflicts shifted their activities to areas less conducive to tracking and developed anti-tracking techniques. Despite the failure of these counter-insurgency campaigns to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the civilian African majority, their attempts to use tracking to engage insurgents can provide useful lessons.     

Mundane mobilities,banal travels

Participatory approaches have become a critical and somewhat normalised methodology in geography for working in a positive and constructive way with Indigenous communities. Nevertheless, recent literature has seldom examined the sustainability of participatory projects or looked critically at their ongoing impacts. Since the early 2000s, Nibutani, an Ainu community in Hokkaido, Japan, has developed several participatory projects led by a non-Indigenous professional. The projects have involved community members working to revitalise and promote local Ainu culture. Over the last decade, some positive outcomes from the projects have been observed; for example, the younger generation has had opportunities to engage intensively in learning local Indigenous knowledge and skills. The projects have also helped some participants to develop a stronger sense of ethnic identity and gain empowerment. Still, the power transfer from the talented non-Indigenous leader to community members has been limited and Nibutani has yet to realise a sustainable project structure. Also, community members have multiple perspectives in regard to the direction of participatory projects and their impact. I discuss these issues in Nibutani's participatory projects based on my observations and interviews and suggest that Indigenous geographies need to undertake follow-up evaluations of participatory projects.