Newlyweds,Young Families,and Spinsters: A Consideration of Developmental Cycle in Historical Archaeologies of Gender

The social relations of class, gender, and ethnicity affected individuals and families in the nineteenth century and shaped (as well as were shaped by) uses of the material world. Changes in demographic composition of the household, successions in land ownership, and other events that altered the developmental course of the family unit, however, were also significant. Variations in the material and spatial expressions of gender ideologies, for example, were more than simply deviations from middle-class cultural norms. They represented the active negotiation of dominant ideologies and the construction of alternate meaningful gender relations and forms of domesticity.     

A missing link? Network analysis as an empirical approach for critical physical geography

Critical physical geography (CPG) calls for integrative research on material landscapes and the socio-political dynamics of scientific knowledge production. Network analysis, a rich tradition of tools and approaches for analyzing relational information, has seen little use in the CPG literature to date. This represents a fruitful opportunity, as many of CPG's core interests—knowledge politics, histories of scientific concepts, and ecosocial relations—can be effectively analyzed using network techniques. In this article, I argue for adapting network approaches to CPG. First, I provide an overview of various network concepts, approaches, and their origins. I then discuss bibliometric network techniques for “science mapping” including co-word, co-authorship, and citation analyses. Next, I describe discourse network analysis, a recent mixed-method approach from political science. Finally, I discuss overlaps with emerging approaches from qualitative and visual network analysis. In each section, I provide existing and hypothetical examples, as well as software and visualization techniques, that demonstrate how network approaches could add new insights to CPG and related scholarship. Linking CPG with the diverse traditions of network analysis has the potential to produce new empirical understandings and bring the field into conversation with a growing body of research that spans the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.     

Establishing the Public Sphere and Abolishing the Private Domain: The Rise of a Doctrine and Its Social Significance in the Spring and Autumn Period

The dominant views regarding the concepts of “the public” (gong) and “the private” (si) took shape in the Spring and Autumn period and matured in the succeeding years of the Warring States period. This paper is an attempt to trace both the growth of the vocabulary containing “gong” and “si” and the development of philosophical views regarding issues that center on the relation between the individual and the larger social/communal/political body, of which that individual is a member; it also touches on issues related to the proper handling of public affairs and the relation between state, sovereign, and the individual. The era is often characterized as “The Contention of the Hundred Schools of Thought,” notwithstanding it ended with but one view that is universally accepted by thinkers of diverse persuasion, namely, si is the source of all social evil and, therefore, should be condemned. This is the doctrine known as ligong miesi (abolishing si so gong may be established), which contributed to the orthodox for that era and the millennium to come. By extolling gong and condemning si, it painted a portrait of the pair as two irreconcilable norms or forces in social and political life; it provided a justification for the then emerging new social arrangement and ways of distribution of power and resources, and it also led to acute conflicts between the sovereign and the state, the ruled and the ruler, the state and the subject, as well as the public sphere and the private domain. Translated from Nankai Journal, Vols. 4, 5, 2004     

The Role of Russian Big Business in Local Development

The paper, based in part on field surveys in 2006, examines the role played by large Russian companies in local development, focusing on the operations of SUAL and Severstal' in Northwest Russia. The two companies provide examples of different models of corporate behavior (transnational and paternalist) in the current Russian business environment, reflecting a choice more broadly between neoliberal and corporate-nationalistic versions of Russia's participation in globalization. The author investigates the implications of the different models for the local jurisdictions in which these companies operate. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: D21, L20, O18, P20. 2 figures, 1 table, 48 references.     

A vernacular way of “safeguarding” intangible heritage: the fall and rise of rituals in Gouliang Miao village

This paper documents a vernacular method of interpreting and safeguarding intangible heritage in an ethnic Miao village in China. Tracing the conflicting discourses of ritual in different stages of the past and the present, it shows how ritual practices were transformed by imperial Qing officials in the mid-nineteenth century, demonised and denounced as feudal superstition during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), exploited as cultural resources for ethnic tourism since the early twentieth century and involved in the evaluation system of intangible cultural heritage in the twenty-first century. Based on ethnographic materials collected in 2008 and 2009, this paper argues that it is the inherited vernacular narratives and ritual performances that are negotiating with the state’s constant effort of shaping the ritual through various discourses, constructing the meaning of inheritance and safeguarding the intangible heritage within the community.