THE RISE,FALL, AND RECONFIGURATION OF THE MEXICAN EJIDO*

ABSTRACT. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910 the Mexican federal government created a communal resource‐holding institution, the ejido, to redress long‐standing land‐tenure inequality. Between the 1930s and the late 1970s, the period of active redistribution of federalized and previously private resources, half of Mexico's entire area was transferred to the ejido sector. Local ejidos became the driving political and economic force at the municipio level for agrarian reform, redistributing local power and affirming the national stamp of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the dominant national party of the twentieth century. Although the 1992–1993 reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution prohibited any future expansion of communal lands and allowed privatization of communal resources, few widespread privatization schemes have taken hold in the vast majority of ejidos. In this article I provide examples of this new communal framework and its implications, with illustrations based on fieldwork in the states of Guanajuato and Sonora.     

A Review of “The Tsunami of 2004 in Sri Lanka: Impacts and Policy in the Shadow of Civil War”

Abstract

Zionist geographers in Israel were highly involved in institutionalizing Israel's national identity. In search for interpretative schemes, they were highly committed both to Western paradigms and to Zionist narratives. Until the 1970s, organicist models of regional geography were popular despite contradictions between the use of tragic and comic narratives in Western models and the need to adopt romantic narratives for Zionist purposes. The emergence of historical geography in the 1950s helped to solve these contradictions by adopting a contextual mode of explanation in which the national story has been described in terms of a unique one and as an example for the power of Zionist civilization to transform bewildered nature. During the last two decades, new forms of criticism have emerged that changed the discourse from a particularistic story of nation building to a more general story of colonization and territorial control.     

Genealogy of the Singaporean black‐and‐white house

The distinctive black‐and‐white houses from Singapore's colonial era that survive in enclaves as fine dwellings for the present‐day elite have been recognized and documented as a type. In this paper we tell the story of their cultural formation, which is one of remarkable hybridity. Various influences were brought to bear and resolved into the black‐and‐white house‐type, which was not invented ‘all at once’ in Singapore, but developed over the course of more than two centuries. We begin the story in India, when British settlers learnt from local Bengali practices to make serviceable dwellings for a climate that they found difficult. The overhanging roofs that shaded walls and the tall internal volumes were formalized with reference to European expectations of geometry and finish, and the bungalow was born. In British Malaya the bungalow was further hybridized with the house on stilts that was well known to the indigenous tradition. This produced the spatial configuration that is to be found also in the Singapore houses, with their extensive verandas on an upper floor level. Their distinctive colouring comes from a different tradition: the black‐and‐white Tudoresque style that was very popular in Britain and sometimes called ‘Old English’. This was used by the British colonizers so that they could feel more at home in surroundings that were in a far‐off foreign cultural environment.     

Appropriate‐ing Rubber: scalar translations in Southern Thailand

Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in two provinces of southern Thailand, Nakhon Si Thammarat and Phatthalung in 2015 and 2016, this paper engages with literature on the politics of scale to consider the relationships among the practice of growing rubber and regional belonging. In many ways decoupling low rubber prices (at the time of writing) from a larger story of substantial, multinational increases in rubber cultivation and production since the early 2000s, a common calculus in southern Thailand among smallholder rubber farmers, or chao suan yang in Thai, of current price woes points in large measure to past policy moves by the Thai government, and especially under the administration of Thaksin Shinawatra in the mid‐2000s, to promote rubber cultivation into northern and northeastern provinces. I contend that emphasis given to such a regional‐national, in other words Thai, story of declines in rubber prices entails noteworthy moments of translation whereby rubber's scales are reconstru(ct)ed through appeals to regional legacies and perceptions of a transmission of ‘southern Thai rubber’ outside of the south.     

VOODOO,ZOMBIES, AND MERMAIDS: U.S. NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF HAITI*

ABSTRACT. Newspaper articles in the United States paint a picture of Haiti as a failed state, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. These articles place the blame of the country's problems entirely on Haiti itself, with little regard for the outside forces that also contributed to the country's present‐day state. This study is a critical geopolitical analysis of Haitian representation in U.S. newspapers. I empirically examine a year's worth of articles from 2004 written in five major U.S. newspapers. From these articles I analyze both the words used to describe Haiti and the emerging media frames. Critical studies have shown that representation in the media can greatly impact the conventional wisdom surrounding a place and legitimize social inequalities. By understanding the images used to describe Haiti, I hope to develop a means of rethinking popular perceptions of the country. I argue that only then can the problems of Haiti be more effectively addressed and a new dialogue created, one that encompasses the entire story of this Caribbean country.     

A FELT GEOGRAPHY*

In this article I revisit a literary‐audio work I created in collaboration with a Vancouver composer for Intersections, a new music series organized by the Western Front in Vancouver, Canada. We spliced together recorded interview material with composed music to craft a site‐specific acoustic landscape. This work is presented as a site in which to explore creative, experimental ways of restaging memory and of bringing experiential landscapes more fully to life, immersing public audiences in the felt histories of the city.     

Beyond Postmetropolis

Three recent developments have created new challenges and opportunities for urban geography and geographers: the rediscovery of the generative power of cities, the cross-disciplinary diffusion of critical spatial perspectives, and rising interest in regions and regionalism. With these new developments as background, I reflect upon some of the ideas and themes introduced in Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, published in 2000. Like the book, this effort to move beyond Postmetropolis is divided into three parts: Remapping the Geohistory of Cityspace; Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis; and Lived Space: Remembering 1992 in Los Angeles. Some of the same themes are taken up, often with a different emphasis, in the accompanying essays by Robert Beauregard, Mona Domosh, and Deborah Martin.     

Chocolate in China: the cadbury experience

Since 1979, China's Open Door policy has attracted increasing foreign investment. To maintain global competitiveness, the British confectioner, Cadbury, authorised its Australian subsidiary to develop a chocolate plant in China. This paper details the decision‐making processes that eventually led to a new factory on a greenfield site near Beijing. It also illustrates some of the adaptations that Cadbury has had to make in its product and production procedures in order to match its own standards for dairy milk chocolate and yet accommodate guo qing (the special situation in China).     

Israeli Geographers in Search of a National Identity

Zionist geographers in Israel were highly involved in institutionalizing Israel's national identity. In search for interpretative schemes, they were highly committed both to Western paradigms and to Zionist narratives. Until the 1970s, organicist models of regional geography were popular despite contradictions between the use of tragic and comic narratives in Western models and the need to adopt romantic narratives for Zionist purposes. The emergence of historical geography in the 1950s helped to solve these contradictions by adopting a contextual mode of explanation in which the national story has been described in terms of a unique one and as an example for the power of Zionist civilization to transform bewildered nature. During the last two decades, new forms of criticism have emerged that changed the discourse from a particularistic story of nation building to a more general story of colonization and territorial control.     

Incidental Aquaculture in California's Rice Paddies: Red Swamp Crawfish

Introduction of the red swamp crawfish, Procambarus clarkii, into California and its diffusion throughout northern California's rice paddies created the conditions for an incidental aquaculture economy in a landscape devoted to irrigated grain production. For more than three decades, fishermen have harvested this prolific invader and sold their catch to Europe and the Gulf Coast. Since 2004, the diffusion of Vietnamese‐American seafood restaurants to California and nationally has created additional markets for red swamp crawfish.     

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AIZJOMI LANDSCAPE†

This article considers the history of a particular Latvian cultural landscape, located on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Known as an aizjomi landscape, it consists of small, humanly made tilths on the seashore. These features are both physical elements and repositories of historical and cultural meaning. In one sense, through hard labor humans created the aizjomi landscape, adjusting the morphological and dynamic elements of the landscape and continually maintaining them. These human efforts made agriculture possible in the dunes, and in so doing they fashioned a means for producing a livelihood and, indeed, for sustaining life. The aizjomi landscape became a materialization of the people's day‐to‐day life in the middle and late nineteenth century and can thus be considered a “taskscape,” pulsating simultaneously with the rhythm of nature and historical events. I have analyzed empirical evidence from archival documents, reviewed ecological and historical studies, and conducted field research on specific farming practices that shaped the landscape that, in turn, shaped agricultural activities. Through a retrospective analysis I trace the development and decline of the aizjomi landscape.     

Access to natural resources and conflicts between farmers and agro‐pastoralists in Borkena Wetland,north‐eastern Ethiopia

This case study on the Borkena wetlands in north‐eastern Ethiopia tells, through the voices of the inhabitants, the story of the occupation and management of an area where agro‐pastoralists (Urrane) and farmers have progressively settled. It shows how different policy changes and natural disasters have transformed the type of peoples' livelihoods and land use patterns in the wetland. It tells the history of relationships between smallholder peasants, irrigation farmers, commercial farms, and the Urrane, where conflicts as well as collaboration developed, and it shows how different stakeholders behave and consider their own situation. The study also reveals that development intervention by World Vision Ethiopia (WVE) had mixed impact on peoples' livelihoods in the wetland: sedentary peasants have benefited while the Urrane have been adversely affected. The main issue is the marginalization of pastoralists, with the denial of their traditional land use rights by three successive regimes and administrations. Any solution to the cohabitation of the different groups and livelihoods will have to address the issue of land rights for the pastoralists and promote the fair participation of all stakeholders in the future management of the wetlands. Good governance and the competence of the state actors at local levels are the crucial issues for the realization of the suggested solutions.     

Teaching physical geography at university with cartoons and comic strips: Motivation,construction and usage

This article presents the cartoons and comic strips that the author draws and has used in his teaching of physical geography at the undergraduate level since 2011. In the context of an image‐based culture, this article discusses the pedagogic goals that cartoons and comic strips fulfil: enhancing learning and creativity, associating pleasure with learning, pushing students to think ‘outside the box’ and relating the students' learning experience to a media framework popular with students. Cartoons and comic strips also answer particular necessities related to the teaching of physical geography. Using characters placed in hypothetical situations, they explain the process of doing geography and being a physical geographer.     

Childhood asthma: Regional and social inequalities in parents' perceptions of the diagnostic process in Norway

This paper focuses on the 'cultural turn' which has taken place in British and to a lesser extent North American and Australian human geography in the last decade. It begins by exploring what constitutes the cultural in what has been dubbed 'new cultural geography'. It then explores contemporary claims that cultural geography has eclipsed or marginalised social geography. The final section evaluates these claims about the demise of the social, arguing that the social has not been evacuated but rather has been redefined. While this paper tells a specific story about a particular tradition and geographical frame of reference, it nonetheless has wider relevance because it provides an example of the differential development of particular sub-disciplinary areas, of the way subdisciplinary knowledges shape each other, and of the way understandings of disciplinary trends are contested.     

The Elementary Social Studies: Sense and Nonsense in Integration

Abstract

The ultimate goal of all geographic education is to have our students think geographically for life. To this end, the five geographic skills sets allow teachers to use the inquiry approach to more accurately observe whether or not geographic thinking is actually taking place. As essential components of these geographic skills, fieldwork, journaling, and stories based on the field experience have proven to be effective tools of inquiry. This article demonstrates how a journal, kept by the author while on an advanced alliance summer institute to Russia in 1996, was used to write an original short story based on the author's fieldwork there. The author's experiences model the five geographic skills sets in developing lesson plans for the original short story, The Dragon and the Anchor. These activities allow the students to sharpen their geographic skills and develop a sense of place by studying the changes that have occurred in Russia since the fall of communism in 1991.     

The market(able) place of school geography scholarship, 2007–2016

This report analyses a decade of geography scholarship student entry and achievement data (n = 10,205) to reveal patterns and trends of high‐achieving school students. The study is an exploratory analysis, the aim of which is to describe where the greatest scholarship success has occurred, as well as attendant demographic characteristics of New Zealand's most capable geography students and their schools. Emerging from the regions is a localised story of students from an extremely narrow number of schools achieving disproportionate scholarship success. This raises questions in the wider geography teaching community about the possibility of a broader constituency achieving scholarship awards.     

Giving an account of oneself: The PBRF and the neoliberal university

The New Zealand Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) has come into being in the last decade in the wider context of the neoliberalising and corporatising of the academy. It is far more than its outward form: that is, an innocent accounting of the research‐related activities of academics for the purposes of determining institutional funding levels. But neither is it only a process that seeks (to use Judith Butler's terms) to constrain, subordinate and discipline individual academics. Drawing on her book, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), we suggest that the PBRF can also be used to enable and sustain through creating spaces to critique neoliberalising managerialism.     

MIDDLE EAST URBAN STUDIES: IDENTITY AND MEANING

Addressing Wacquant in the symposium on the book Urban Outcasts, the commentator (Western) notes in introduction certain parallels in both their academic approach and their international experience, and expresses admiration for Wacquant's work. Then, a summary is provided of Wacquant's comparison of the U.S. inner city with the French banlieue (suburban zones of public housing), in particular of two neighborhoods in Chicago and Paris. Strong contrasts emerge along five dimensions: scale/location, race, relative deprivation, criminal violence, and state intervention/inaction. In conclusion, Wacquant's call for engagement, his insistence on agency, and his refusal to submit to seemingly determinant structural-historical factors is appreciatively noted.     

Book Reviews

Ryan, James R. Picturing Empire: Photography and theVisualization of the British Empire Sizoo, Edith (ed.) Women's Lifeworlds: Women's Narratives on Shaping their Realities. Teaford, Jon Post-Suburbia Government and Politics in the Edge Cities. Warhus, Mark Another America: Native American Maps and the Historyof Our Land Yeung, Y. M. and Chu, David K. Y. (eds.) Guangdong: Survey of aProvince Undergoing Rapid Change Young, E. M. World Hunger