Book reviews

Richard Higgott, The Evolving World Economy: Some Alternative Security Questions for Australia. Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence No. 51. Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University 1989. 90 pp. $10.00.

Andrew Mack and Paul Keal (eds), Security and Arms Control in the North Pacific. Sydney, Allen and Unwin Australia, 1989. xiii + 324 pp. $39.95 (cloth), $27.50 (paper).

Francis Stuart, Towards Coming of Age. A Foreign Service Odyssey. Centre for the Study of Australian‐Asian Relations, Griffith University, 1989. vi + 264 pp. $12.00.

Bruce S. Bennett, New Zealand's Moral Foreign Policy 1935–39: The Promotion of Collective Security Through the League of Nations. Wellington, New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, 1988. vii + 134 pp. $NZ21.00.

E.E. Azar and Chung‐In Moon (eds), National Security in the Third World, The Management of Internal and External Threats. Aldershot, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 1988. 308 pp. £25.00.

Robert P. Haffa Jr, Rational Methods, Prudent Choices: Planning US Forces. Washington D.C., National Defense University Press, 1988. xv + 165 pp. No price given.

William Bunge, Nuclear War Atlas. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989. 204 pp. $29.95.

David H. Price, Atlas of World Cultures. A Geographical Guide to Ethnographic Literature. Newbury Park, California, Sage Publications, 1989. 156 pp. $US35.00.

Richard Sakwa, Soviet Politics: An Introduction. London and New York, Routledge, 1989. xvi + 356 pp. $120.00.

Terence Thomas (ed.), The British, Their Religious Beliefs and Practices 1800–1986. London and New York, Routledge, 1988. vii + 247 pp. $82.95 (doth), $29.95 (paper).

Robert A. Scalapino, Seizaburo Sato, Jusuf Wanandi and Sung‐joo Han (eds). Asia and the Major Powers. Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy. Berkeley, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1988. vi + 386 pp. $US20.00.

Robert A. Scalapino, Seizaburo Sato, Jusuf Wanandi and Sung‐joo Han (eds). Asian Security Issues. Regional and Global. Berkeley, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1988. vi + 394 pp. $US20.00.

Robert A. Scalapino and Dalchoong Kim, Asian Communism, Continuity and Transition. Berkeley, Korea Research Monograph 15, Center for Korean Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1988. vi + 364 pp. $US20.00.

Ngok Lee, China's Defence Modernisation and Military Leadership. Canberra, Australian National University/Pergamon Press, 1989. xxi + 395 pp. No price given.

David G. Mart and Christine P. White (eds), Postwar Vietnam: Dilemmas in Socialist Developments. Ithaca, NY, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1988. 248 pp. $US12.00.

Philip Eldridge, NGOs in Indonesia: Popular Movement or Arm of Government? Working Paper 55, The Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University. 59 pp. $6.00.

Saw Swee‐Hock. The Population of Peninsular Malaysia. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1988. xv + 342 pp. $US32.00 (doth), $US25.00 (paper).

Colin Legum, The Battlefronts of Southern Africa. New York, Africana Publishing Company, 1988. xxiv + 451 pp. No price given.

Morris H. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba, 1952–1986. Melbourne; Cambridge University Press, 1987. ix + 571 pp. $51.00.     

Onward Precarity,Mobility, and Migration among Latin Americans in London

Contributing to debates around the relationships between precarity, mobilities and migration, this paper examines the nature of precarity among onward Latin American (OLA) migrants as they have moved transnationally to multiple destinations from their homelands to southern Europe and onwards to London across different time periods. Drawing on primary research with over 400 OLAs, the discussion highlights how precarity maps onto onward migration trajectories in fractal rather than linear ways. In moving beyond a continuum approach to labour exploitation, the paper develops the concept of “onward precarity” to capture how migrants negotiate intersecting vulnerabilities in holistic spatio‐temporal ways as they move through different structural contexts across the world from origin, through transition to their final destination country over time. These negotiations are underpinned by multiple agentic tactics that revolve around resilience and reworking strategies as onward migrants traverse wider structures of disadvantage in situ and through mobility in different places.     

Changing emphases in English vernacular homiletic literature, 960–1225

In spite of the highly traditional nature of English vernacular homiletic literature, the content of the homilies can be shown to change when the period 960–1100 is compared with the period 1100 1225. This is especially true of the homilists' attitudes toward history, and of the subjects they address when they admonish their audiences with regard to correct behavior.By identifying direct admonitions to behave or obstain from behaving in a particular way, it has been possible to establish certain important categories of behavior advocated or prohibited. Admonitions relating to these thirty-seven categories of behavior have then been recorded and quantified. The results of this analysis show significant changes in the attention of the homilists to such categories of behavior as murder, lying, sorcery, theft, disloyalty, kinship duties, and confession, as well as to various states of mind such as chastity, contrition, etc. These changes reveal an early thirteenth-century homiletic literature in which questions of basic social order are no longer considered pressing matters for the pulpit, and in which sincere compliance with Christian moral precepts is a primary concern.Seen in this light, the homilies give us valuable insight into the world view characteristics of the parish pulpit during a period when there are very few other records of parish life.     

Coital Experience Among Adolescents in Three Social-Educational Groups in Urban Chiang Mai, Thailand

This article compares coital experience of Chiang Mai 17-20-year-olds who were: (1) out-of-school; (2) studying at vocational schools; and (3) studying at general schools or university. Four-fifths, two-thirds and one-third, respectively, of males in these groups had had intercourse, compared to 53, 62 and 15 per cent of females. The gender difference for general school/university students, but not vocational school students, probably reflects HIV/AIDS refocusing male sexual initiation away from commercial sex workers. Vocational school females may have been disproportionately affected. Loss of virginity was associated, for both sexes, with social-educational background and lifestyle, and was less likely in certain minority ethnic groups. Among males, it was also associated with age and parental marital dissolution, and among females, with independent living and parental disharmony. Within social-educational groups, lifestyle variables dominated, but among general school/university students, parental marital dissolution (for males) and disharmony (for females) were also important, and Chinese ethnicity deterred male sexual experimentation.     

The Birth and Growth of a Polynesian Women's Exchange Network

Based on ethnographic interviews and historical research, this article describes the birth and growth of a commoner women's exchange network in the Kingdom of Tonga during the twentieth century. The network developed during the first two decades of the century along with other late colonial institutions in Tonga that have been called ‘the compromise culture’. The exchange institution started with the inter-island exchange of women's prestige wealth within Tonga; the network soon expanded to incorporate Fijian and Samoan women's groups, to include western commodities and cash and, in the 1980s and 1990s, to involve Tongan migrants who are resident overseas. The detailed history of the women's exchange network over eight decades recounts an important slice of commoner women's life stories and memories. At the same time, as an account of a compromise institution, the history of the exchange network offers a window on the process of change in the twentieth century. It demonstrates the deeply conservative nature of seemingly radical institutional changes in Tonga, the increasing difficulties over time in trying to isolate ‘western’; and ‘traditional’; forces, and the profound transformations of Tongan life now underway.