Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)最新文献

{"title":"Book Review: Mirror of modernity: invented traditions of modern Japan","authors":"P. Waley","doi":"10.1177/096746080100800215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800215","url":null,"abstract":"Japan, we are often told, was the first non-Western country to enter the hallowed time/space of modernity. There is therefore a sort of paradigmatic power to Japan’s transition from a state of premodern Innocence to one of modern Experience. The apparently abrupt and radical nature of the change has not been lost on the Japanese themselves, who have devoted much thought to the particularities of their trajectory. Within a few years in the 1860s and 1870s, the emperor, an obscure and impoverished figurehead, had been catapulted into the position of a sacred national symbol, and through the adept construction of unifying institutions a small number of leading politicians were able to forge a consciousness of a nation-state called Japan and of its inhabitants as subjectcitizens. In doing so, they were remorselessly inventive and imaginative in their creation of new traditions. Mirror of modernity concerns itself less, however, with this early period of centrally scripted history than with a later stage of appropriation and manipulation of tradition. The defining scheme of the book is that of ‘invented tradition’. The reference to Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The invention of tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983) is explicit. But the earlier work is left far behind, stranded by the high tide of its naïve historicism, while the present volume immerses itself comfortably and productively in the warm currents of social theory. ‘Traditions’, Stephen Vlastos reminds us in his introduction, ‘are shaped by everything from capitalist markets to technological innovation in the ongoing process of incorporating and reorganizing new knowledge’ (p. 6). Traditions – supremely ideological as they are – stand caught in a ‘disjuncture between the rhetorical posture of invariance . . . and their actual historicity’ (p. 7). Traditions spring from attempts to give meaning to modern life through a carefully scripted rendition of a status quo ante. In this sense, they are perhaps not so much invented as crafted or moulded. Running through the contributions to this book is an insistence on the overwhelming significance of state and capital, but above all of state. The state in modern Japan is characterized as inventor, appropriator, mobilizer and manipulator of traditions. In the early decades of this century and again in the more recent days of Japanese economic triumphalism, the state has successfully scripted a tradition of harmony and cooperation and cast it in a dominant role. In his chapter, Ito Kimio describes how the penumbral figure of Prince Shotoku, an early seventh-century regent, was turned in prewar years into the apostle of a national cult of harmony, while Frank Upham writes of how a political elite found it expeditious to define and implant a national tradition of non-litigation, a tradition substantially at variance with documentary evidence. In similar fashion, Andrew Gordon explores how leading industrialists over several generations wove and embroidere","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132871959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Philosophy and geography II: the production of public space","authors":"P. Howell","doi":"10.1177/096746080100800206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800206","url":null,"abstract":"This second issue in the ‘Philosophy and Geography’ series is addressed to the problem of ‘public space’ and its prospects in post-industrial society. It is advertised on the back cover, somewhat grandly, as enhancing its readers’ appreciation of ‘the intimate connections between political principles, social processes, and the commonplaces of our everyday environments’, and it is potentially appealing to the very diverse body of people who claim an interest in the question of ‘public space’ and its future. Its particular claim is to provide a philosophical and geographical engagement with the recent flurry of prognostications on ‘the end of public space’. That the editors begin this book with an unfortunate metaphorical reference to the tension between (philosophical, ideational, abstract) thoughts, and (earthy, concrete, geographical) ‘clods’ should not put readers off the usefulness of this approach. The distance between concrete and philosophical approaches is daunting, and if philosophy keeping the ‘company of clods’ helps to bridge that chasm, it is very welcome. Unfortunately, this volume does not quite do this. It is, in the first place, largely directed by the editors at a confrontation of the ‘public space’ literature with the work of Henri Lefebvre – hence the title of the volume – but this direction manages to be both unduly constricting, neglecting other useful philosophical avenues, as well as inadequately policed, so that few authors direct their attention to the ‘production of public space’ in the Lefebvrian sense. In the end, therefore, it is a disappointingly mixed bag, a curious curate’s egg, and only spasmodically insightful. The organization of the book is certainly inadequate. The editors settle for what are virtually meaningless banners, such as ‘Beyond the public/private dichotomy’ and ‘Regional territories’, which have no relevance to the chapters and which are anyway promptly forgotten in the heart of the book, so that the chapters run one into the other to little good effect. The exception is the opening section devoted to Lefebvre, in which Edward Dimendberg and Neil Smith debate through Lefebvrian categories the ontological and historical significance of public space, and this does deserve some more sustained criticism. Dimendberg’s lucid analysis argues that Lefebvre’s conception of ‘abstract space’","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125327327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Heritage on stage: the invention of ethnic place in America’s Little Switzerland","authors":"S. Macdonald","doi":"10.1177/096746080100800216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800216","url":null,"abstract":"ent form by a number of leading Marxists, and addressed by Andrew Barshay’s chapter in this volume. Many of the contributors to this book reflect on the manipulation of traditions in terms of binaries of space and time, binaries that are singled out and defined as essential elements of modernity. As Jennifer Robertson notes, in a chapter entitled ‘It takes a village: internationalization and nostalgia in postwar Japan’, the concentration of activity in Tokyo has led to an exoticization of the countryside. In this state-sanctioned space of nostalgia, arenas for the performance of traditional activities are created, despite the inevitable paradox in this process (a paradox inherent within modernity). Modernity defines itself in terms of tradition, but tradition is always at its root a view of the past defined and informed by the present and heavily imbued therefore with nostalgia. Carol Gluck, whose book Japan’s modern myths: ideology in the late Meiji period (Princeton University Press, 1985) is one of the inspirations for this work, details the highly selective rendition of Edo (the name for premodern Tokyo) that came to be used as a basis for extolling a postmodern, nativist view of the contemporary city. Bluck’s is but one of several chapters that can be read as a critique not only of the more explicitly state-oriented exercises in tradition manipulation of the prewar period but also of the rather more obliquely ideological orientations of postwar historiography. For in the end, the writing of history is an ideologically laden enterprise and one in which traditions are constantly being reinforced, recast, or re-evaluated. Mirror of modernity is the work of a number of leading American scholars, most of them historians, and three Japanese sociologists. Its strong engagement with theory – Foucault is inevitably a central point of reference – marks it out as an important staging post in a more theoretically informed understanding of Japan. It is therefore a book with resonances that reach beyond the exclusive domain of Japanese studies. On its way, it enriches our understanding of the multiplicity of meanings that modernity can have. It challenges our epistemologies of modernity, but equally it challenges the assumptions that lie behind Japanese exceptionalism.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130466282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Digital places: living with geographic information technologies","authors":"N. Bingham","doi":"10.1177/096746080100800208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800208","url":null,"abstract":"differential access. The essay expands a useful story of coping strategies while unpacking the notions of both women and open space to look at different groups of women and different designs of open space. Meanwhile Leavitt, Lingafelter and Morello take us through an auto-photographic project getting young girls to record their own poor Los Angeles neighbourhood, and its microgeographies of play and deprivation. Taking a rather different space, Longhurst looks at the supposedly feminized space of the shopping centre, but in terms of the pregnant female body. In one sense unsurprisingly, this unravels the relationship of a sexualized, marketed femininity and its exclusion of the reality of many women’s lives. On the other hand, as the essay suggests, the relationship of pregnancy and motherhood is rather more problematically situated in regards to both sexuality, gendered behaviour and consumption. Skelton’s essay, around sexually forceful female ragga artists from Jamaica, unpicks the relationship of place and sexuality in a different direction showing their performances as trebly coded by places – by the space of performance, by the urban ghetto and by Jamaica. The different ways these different places interact with sexuality and audience reaction makes a fascinating account mapping out some sexual empowerment, some containment and the sexual inequalities within the ghetto. This collection offers much thought-provoking material that, as the chapter by Boys suggests, gets us beyond ‘reading’ urban space, beyond a simple metaphorical model where architecture stands for social organization, and into the actual uses of different spaces. The collection usefully emphasizes how different places are inhabited and the differences places make to inhabitants. The overall connection of identity politics with geography develops an important issue, and the chapters offer new perspectives that more carefully disentangle the links between spaces physical and imagined, embodied practices, and the performance of gender.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114320060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Virtual anxiety: photography, new technologies and subjectivity","authors":"M. Doel","doi":"10.1177/096746080100800210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800210","url":null,"abstract":"ception brought on by mediation (current for at least 100 years), alongside critical discussion of the claims linking forms of logic to different technologies – linear text to instrumental reason, graphics against writing and so forth – through a continual focus on how such changes may operate in detail, which challenges many overstated and underspecified accounts. Of some interest is an extended analysis of geotemporal cartographic imaging and remote sensing. The general critique of cartographical knowledges will not be surprising to readers of Ecumene, but the aesthetic account here suggests not an omniscient viewer, but one that is always rather misplaced – lost in the corporation, in the future, as at once constructed and factual, a viewer oscillating between power and ignorance, evidence and artifice, data and digital art. The argument is perhaps clearer when we turn our gaze from down on the planet to outward to the stars. The parallels of orientalism, imperial gazes and sci-fi are perhaps more suggestive than proven, but the linkage of temporalities of the image and the position of viewing with particular regimes of knowledge and desire was effective. The unpacking of the relation of the subjective and the material is also fruitful in the discussion of the networked subject as an oscillation of hyperindividualization and dispersal; where digital media offer egocentric imaginative universes privileging the controlling self, yet are predicated on the loss of that very autonomy in an endless stream of data and commodities. This leads to a conception of global hybridity that is critical of simply celebrating syncretism without looking at the relative power relations. Indeed, Cubitt is careful to see the exclusions and baggage in mediated networks, and makes a plea to move away from models of a resistant user – arguing that this very idea of popular choice is articulated through corporate technologies. In the end the critical edge of the account is to look for the possibility not of a romantic model of resistance outside the media but of a careful working of heterotopic possibilities between different configurations through a sense of play. On balance then, a by no means easy book, and one which did not always quite convince this reader, but which certainly repaid the effort of a serious engagement.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121945635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Espace et identité à la Martinique","authors":"I. B. Thompson","doi":"10.1177/096746080100800212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800212","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127734621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: The radiance of France: nuclear power and national identity after World War II","authors":"S. Kirsch","doi":"10.1177/096746080100800211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800211","url":null,"abstract":"children first. For they are targeted first, she claims, ‘when a dominant technoscientific culture becomes unsure of itself’, being constructed as ‘threatening and monstrous others out of virtual anxiety’ (p. 133). Given the anxiety provoked in the (dominatrix) subject vis-à-vis the (elusive) object, Kember maintains that masculinist medical science is attempting to have done with the object, its feminized other, through NITs and new reproductive technologies (NRTs) that will father themselves in a cycle of ‘autonomous reproduction’, a yearning found in Frankenstein, artificial intelligence and cloning. Since NITs and NRTs do not enable us to see social relations and their mediation differently, Kember employs a parodic figure that may: vampirism. Information is the new currency of exchange: ‘It is the life-blood of contemporary societies . . . turning us all into (metaphorical) vampires’ (pp. 134–5). Hence the recent transdisciplinary interest and anxiety about connection and contagion. What Kember adores in the figure of the vampire is that its ‘feminine desire’ is transgressive and transformatory; it effects afamilial and illicit connections. Vampires, like cyborgs, proffer a re-envisioning of social relations that is neither Frankensteinean nor sado-masochistic. They also foreground the interlacing of science and myth that ‘optical empiricism’ would rather disavow. Although quite short, the book is well written, wide-ranging and accessible. Most of the key ideas are laid out in the introduction and first couple of chapters, often with very effective examples. Thereinafter, the remaining chapters do not so much develop and sharpen these ideas as rehearse them with more expansive case studies. The occasional gems notwithstanding, this is a shame. I was also disappointed by the literary side of the study, which seemed to jar with the rest of the book. However, there is much here that will stimulate readers of this journal. It makes a valuable contribution to a host of timely debates.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121127893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cultural Geographies in Practice","authors":"Lisa Parks","doi":"10.1177/096746080100800205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800205","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114683184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"St Kilda and the Sublime","authors":"F. Macdonald","doi":"10.1177/096746080100800202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800202","url":null,"abstract":"This paper considers how the search for the sublime in nineteenth-century Scotland found its expression in the voyage to St Kilda, a remote island archipelago west of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. It looks at the historical construction of St Kilda as an ultima Thule for Victorian travellers, a site which offered an incongruous set of discourses on antiquity and modernity; improvement and romance; evangelicalism and impiety. Grounding the early interest in St Kilda in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory - specifically that of James MacPherson and Edmund Burke - the paper shows how this corporeal adventure into the Ossianic and oceanic sublime was disrupted by the islanders’ religion and social organization. If the rhetorical strategies of the early tourists located St Kilda ‘on the edge of the world’, I draw attention to how the island was central to the ecclesiastical geography of Scotland. Given that for nineteenth-century Scotland the political life of the church eclipsed that of the state, the use of St Kilda as an emblem of Presbyterian polity was highly significant. In the context of a modern Scottish nation searching for historical perspectives on governance and community, the story of this ‘island republic’ has become important in the production of contemporary meaning. By challenging the moral-political authority of the travellers’ accounts, I ascribe a greater degree of agency to the islanders and thereby question the dominant narrative of St Kildan history.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125365560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: New frontiers of space, bodies and gender","authors":"M. Crang","doi":"10.1177/096746080100800207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800207","url":null,"abstract":"worth in opening this question up, so that the recourse to Lefebvrian reasoning does not lead us into mechanical valorization of the worst sort. Mary Ann Tétreault, for instance, gives a welcome outing to civic republican conceptions of public space and the ‘spaces of appearance’ neglected by Lefebvre; her concept of ‘meta-space’, where dimensions of public and private space intersect or overlap, is particularly useful. This is not going ‘beyond the public/private distinction’, as the editors insist, so much as emphasizing the necessary and inevitable blurring of boundaries in civil life, and locating the possibilities for freedom in the very ambiguity of these boundaries. Ted Kilian, in one of the best chapters in this collection, goes further than this, rightly stressing current confusions over the definition and interpretation of public space. Kilian moves things forward by stressing, like Tétreault, the public/private distinction rather than mechanically denigrating it. For him, publicity and privacy are not characteristics of space, but expressions of coexisting power relationships in space. This means that we should not reify space as public or private – exclusion and access are not good or bad in themselves, we infer – and we should devote our attention instead to ‘the processes in which the necessary contestation of privacy and publicity is played out’. Of course, if Kilian is right to insist that there is no public space, as such, the whole project of this volume begins to look a little odd. Once more, I have the feeling that the focus on a Lefebvrian production of public space collaborates with the same mechanical, productivist, reifying orientation we have all become rather quick to denounce. In the end, what the editors call ‘the perpetual permutation of public space’ escapes them. And perhaps we should be grateful for this: the ambiguities of public and private space are still more empowering than Lefebvre’s contradictory and unhelpful definitions. The editors begin this volume by noting that public spaces are the testing grounds of social theories and political ideals (rather than the other way round); if so, the implicit privileging of the claims of philosophy and social theory here seems misguided.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127247776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}