Between colonising waters and extracting forest fronts: Entangled eco-frontiers in the Usumacinta River Basin

The eco-frontier concept has addressed the processes of certain territories that are subject to ecological concern and appropriation of different actors. This study approaches the underexplored interaction with the frontier. The article sharpens the focus on the relations between the eco-frontier and the frontier as both a naturally rich periphery with importance to political centres and as an advancing front. The research discusses empirical results in the case of the transboundary Usumacinta River Basin (URB), which extends from Guatemala's highlands and lowlands through three Mexican states to the Gulf of Mexico. Three historical stages of eco-frontiers—exploratory, epistemic, and institutionalised—are identified in the URB. Its entangled eco-frontiers transform wildernesses and waters to forest ecosystems with inhabitants both spatially and mentally, yet contain some colonial, geopolitical, and global components. This article suggests that the eco-frontiers are fundamentally created because of contemporary frontier dynamics.     

另类社会空间:中国边疆移民社会主要特殊性透视(1644-1949)

边疆社会存在许多内地社会所不曾具有并且往往为学术界所忽视的文化现象。本文所使用的“边疆社会”的术语并不是简单地以地理范围为依据,而更主要的是企图从文化人类学角度揭示拉铁摩尔所谓的“边疆风格”(the frontier style)现象,与通常所谓的“边疆地区的社会”这一术语在内涵上大相径庭,可以作为透视边疆移民社会中“边疆化”诸多现象的概念工具。     

徐世昌与延吉边务交涉

1907-1909年,中日之间发生了关于“间岛”问题的严重交涉。时任东三省总督的徐世昌在交涉中起到了非常重要的作用,主要表现在选贤任能、注重情报、洞悉阴谋、全盘谋划、灵活外交等方面,有利地遏制了日人的侵略阴谋。     

Ritual Brotherhood Across Frontiers in the Eastern Adriatic Hinterland,Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Ritual brotherhood, or pobratimstvo, is attested by a range of sources dealing with the Adriatic hinterland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Read one way, pobratimstvo shows us a border society characterized by cohesion and tolerance, where Christian and Muslim frontiersmen find ways to overcome religious and political boundaries, recognizing their common interests and shared values. Read another way, however, the same institution (and sometimes even the same documents) also offers an insight into the persistence of frontier conflict and the pervasiveness of its violence, drawing attention to other, no less bloody divisions between predators and victims. In teasing out some of the possible meanings and uses of ritual sworn brotherhood on this early modern frontier, I attempt to give due weight to the complexities of a specific place and culture. But the problems highlighted by the institution of pobratimstvo are more widespread: the troubling ambiguities of friendship, with its quality of simultaneously including and excluding; the boundaries between affection and interest, or between camaraderie and desire; the obligations (and the potential resentment) conferred by gifts; the moral dilemmas posed by cross-cutting obligations.     

Frontier Landscape – Lapland in the Tradition of Finnish Landscape Painting

Abstract

Finnish artists depicted Lapland as a frontier. The position of the Lappish landscape as a part of the Finnish landscape painting tradition is explored through a framework based on art and cultural history as well as humanistic and cultural geography. Paintings from three historical periods are analyzed: the early and later period of Finland as an autonomous Russian Grand Duchy (1809–1917), the first decades after the independence of Finland (1917–1939) and the Second World War (1939–1945). Lapland is today the borderline of leisure and work and the frontier of Finnish and Sámi cultures. Earlier Lappish landscapes were places of Sámi nomadism and Finnish farming, which can be seen in the Lappish landscape paintings from the 1890s to 1920s. Finnish art tradition, however, was not ready to accept Lapland, the northern frontier, as a part of Finland. During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s the meaning of the northern borderline grew and Lapponism, the golden years of Lappish landscape and tourism, began. During the Lapponism period there were few paintings depicting Sámi culture, because the Sámi were thought to be primitive or Mongolian, and were not accepted as part of Finnish culture.     

Were the Miao Kings "Prophets of Renewal"? The Case of the 1795-1797 Hunan Miao Revolt

This essay considers the concept of "prophets of renewal" introduced by James Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed:An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009),as seen in the context of the 1795-97 Miao revolt along China's Hunan-Guizhou border.The appearance ofa "Miao King" and four "Wu kings" centering anti-Qing resistance in an intractable highland-utilizing native legends,spirit possession,investment of officials,and multi-ethnic recruitment-suggests a case of"Zomia" (the vast Southeast Asian Massif) prophets in action,as Scott himself suggests.Closer examination,however,reveals a more complex and uncertain picture,characterized by division between rival lords and an overall dearth of institutional,ideological,or cosmological elaboration,all further obscured by a paucity of historical sources.The Miao kings might be seen as prophets of renewal in a general sense,but the fit is inexact.There is still value,however,in considering Scott's model in the study of this event.It enables a sharper conceptualization of the agency of the Miao people,while offering a case for comparison with analogous instances of religiously-based native resistance on other Qing frontiers.     

瓦剌与明代大同贡市

从瓦刺的兴起到衰落,明瓦以朝贡为核心建立的边疆关系动荡不羁,围绕贡道建立的贡市贸易成为影响明蒙关系的核心要素.大同作为瓦刺贡道的重要地点,其贡市贸易经历了均势博弈下的约贡路市、瓦刺崛起下的通贡马市、明廷全面内守下的绝贡闭市和外羁内守下的封贡互市四个时期.大同贡市实践表明,朝贡关系中明廷政治利益和蒙古经济利益的非均势博弈...     

The Middle Ground, “Middle Ground Moments,” and Accommodation in the Study of Later Qing Borderland History

This article examines Richard White’s concept of the “middle ground” and its prospective application to the study of China’s Qing (1644–1911) borderlands from the late eighteenth century. It argues that although White’s model, in its specific formulation, is problematic to apply due to the dissimilarity of Qing conditions, it yet has value and can be adapted. One possibility is advanced in the notion of “middle ground moments,” briefly explored in the cases of Shaanxi’s Dabashan highlands in a “population boom,” Hunan’s Miao Frontier in the “fog of war,” and Xinjiang’s Kashgar crossroads during the “fall of empires.” Focusing on group exchange, adaptation, and hybridization offers insight into regional cultural creation, as well as a means to question received narratives of breakdown, pacification, resistance, or Great Game struggle. Such modeling, and shared attention to accommodation perspectives generally, also presents a space for dialogue across the New Qing History and Chinese nationalist divide in Qing frontier studies.     

Private agricultural colonization on a Brazilian frontier, 1970–1980

Private colonization is the use of companies and cooperatives to survey, demarcate and occupy land, build infrastructure, open roads, plan urban areas, and provide health services and education. Although state-directed colonization projects are strongly implicated in recent environmental and social changes in the Brazilian Amazon, areas settled by private colonization were larger than state-led settlement. The paper considers this poorly examined aspect of the region's recent settlement history by focusing upon a colonization cooperative and private company that settled smallholders from southern Brazil to eastern Mato Grosso State between 1970 and 1980. The analysis emphasizes how private colonization cooperatives successfully secured land title, setting the stage for subsequent commercial agricultural development. This study rejects prevailing interpretations of private colonization as a tool of authoritarian government in Brazil. Rather, private colonization secured land tenure and organized an economically viable production system in a frontier environment of unpredictable state bureaucracies, high transaction costs, risk, and precarious markets.