SEAFARERS' “MARITIME CULTURE” AND THE “I‐KIRIBATI WAY OF LIFE”: THE FORMATION OF FLEXIBLE IDENTITIES?

This paper aims to examine how seafarers from the Pacific Republic of Kiribati cope with the experience of working with crews of different nationalities, and, further, how the exposure to different cultures during their journeys through international waters influences both their own identity as well as their perceptions of I‐Kiribati culture. Based on examples from open and semi‐structured interviews with seafarers working on German merchant ships and Japanese fishing vessels, the paper questions the application of concepts of “hybridity” in the case of these I‐Kiribati men in favour of the idea of “cultural flexibility”. It further considers to what degree seafarers strongly rooted in the clearly confined cultural values of Kiribati have adapted the values received through their training and employment by German or Japanese and Korean companies and officers. The paper adds to the framework of transnationalism by advancing the notion of emporion, in which the circular and transversal journeys of seafarers are viewed as a connecting space between land‐based areas; a space which provides a basis for an extended knowledge and understanding of different cultural outlooks as well as relations between nations.     

THE LEGENDARY “REDISCOVERY” OF GEORGE PERKINS MARSH

The conventional narrative regarding the American reception of George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Nature (1864), is that his work and ideas were “lost,”“forgotten,” or “neglected” until Lewis Mumford “rediscovered” him and introduced him to geographers at the University of California‐Berkeley through The Brown Decades (Mumford [1931] 1955) and until Carl Sauer made him known to the profession at large beginning in 1938. This article upends the conventional narrative by looking at earlier references to Marsh's later versions of Man and Nature, which were published as The Earth as Modified by Human Action from 1874 to 1907. Analysis reveals that a number of geographers and historians cited these editions between 1875 and the early 1950s. Examining the legend of loss and rediscovery suggests the value of methods utilized in reception studies for research on the history of geography.     

“SCIENCE” AND THE FUNDING OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Misunderstanding of phenomenology and positivism as perspectives upon the philosophy and practice of science has important implications for the future of geographic research and research funding in America. Positivistic perspectives on the philosophy of science appear to be seen as fundable, whereas the scientific status and the possibilities for funding of phenomenological and other perspectives on the philosophy of science seem to be in question.     

LIVESTOCK VERSUS “WILD BEASTS”: CONTRADICTIONS IN THE NATURAL PATRIMONIALIZATION OF THE PYRENEES

ABSTRACT. The Pyrenees are becoming an environmental reservoir. The acute human depopulation experienced during the twentieth century and the progressive appropriation of large parts of the mountainous territory by the state in order to implement conservation policies have resulted in the return, via reintroduction or natural regeneration, of bears, wolves, beavers, river otters, marmots, mouflon, feral goats, and deer, among other species. This development, however, has not occurred without social and scientific controversy and leads to questions about territorialization and governmentality. Herders perceive wild animals as unregulated public property subsidized by the work of the local populace. Agriculturalists see their fields trespassed on a daily basis by animals they cannot kill because of their protected status. Ranchers, under extremely strict sanitation regulations, see their animals coming into contact with these unchecked wild populations. The work and living space of the mountain communities has fallen under the jurisdiction of external institutions and constituencies that value conservation and ecotourism above local subsistence.     

“HANDS ACROSS THE SEA”: THE MASONIC NETWORK,BRITISH IMPERIALISM,AND THE NORTH ATLANTIC WORLD

ABSTRACT. From Montreal to Madras, from Barbados to Burma, the lodges of Freemasons dotted the landscape of the British Empire from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. Together with the British grand lodges under whose authority they met, these lodges constituted a vast network that extended across the oceans and linked Freemasons in Britain's colonies to the metropole and to each other. In this article I use the fraternity to demonstrate how the age of empire can serve as a laboratory for studying transoceanic networks, institutions, and identities. Looking first at the broad imperial context, I demonstrate how the global Masonic network developed and describe its functions during the long nineteenth century. I then focus on the British North Atlantic as a case study of the brotherhood's role in connecting people on various sides of a particular ocean basin by offering practical services and encouraging an “imperialist” identity that helped consolidate the British Empire.     

“GEOGRAPHY IS TWINNED WITH DIVINITY”: THE LAUDIAN GEOGRAPHY OF PETER HEYLYN

ABSTRACT. This critical history of geography looks to the political concepts that historical actors held and analyzes the incorporation of these concepts into geography. Peter Heylyn, who politicized his geographical books Microcosmus (1621) and, still more, Cosmographie (1657), followed William Laud's characteristic brand of High Church Anglicanism, avowedly hostile both to Roman Catholicism and to Calvinist forms of Protestantism, while upholding an ideal of the Church of England as both independent and apostolic. Further, Laudians were stalwart defendants of monarchy as a divine institution. This Laudian vision of church and state informed Heylyn's geographical works, which goes against a received wisdom that they are divorced from his polemical historical, political, and theological tracts. We thus recover the politics of early modern geography as contemporaries might have understood them.     

ON “BIOREGIONALISM”AND “WATERSHED CONSCIOUSNESS”*

A diffused but philosophically sophisticated social movement, emphasizing the importance of the sense of place and a locally responsible stewardship of Nature, has been emerging in recent years in various parts of North America. Whether “bioregionalism”is a new way of thinking about our place on Earth and our relationship to it, as some would believe, or simply the ecologic perspective familiar to geographers and environmentalists, romanticized and dressed in a new vocabulary, it deserves our attention for its adherents are kindred souls.     

THE CYBERSPACE “WAR OF INK AND INTERNET” IN CHIAPAS,MEXICO*

ABSTRACT. The Chiapas uprising of 1994 rallied an international community of supporters, largely organized through activities on the Internet, that provided an example of the possibilities and limitations of the Net as a tool for social movements. This article models the Internet as a form of rhizome: an intermediate and contested social space composed of flows that transcend boundaries and forge new connections between events and places. The success of Internet organizing in southern Mexico is due to the constant and reciprocal connections between cyberspace and other social spaces, which avoided the restriction of events to a contained space and scale.     

“THE FARTHER REACHES OF HUMAN TIME”: RETROSPECT ON CARL SAUER AS PREHISTORIAN*

ABSTRACT. Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–1975) is widely regarded as one of the most influential geographers of the twentieth century, admired particularly for his studies in cultural and historical geography. His contribution to the study of prehistory is less widely acknowledged, but, between 1944 and 1962, he published a series of speculative yet scholarly papers that contain many prescient insights into humanity's remote past and the relationships of our ancestors to the environments they occupied—and modified. In this essay, based on the Carl O. Sauer Memorial Lecture given at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2001, I reflect on Sauer's contribution to the science of prehistory by examining, in the light of recent advances in knowledge, two major themes of Sauer's work: the early dispersal of Homo sapiens in the Old World, and the origins and prehistoric spread of agriculture.     

“GREAT OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE MANY OF SMALL MEANS”: NEW JERSEY'S AGRICULTURAL COLONIES*

ABSTRACT. Pogroms in the Russian Pale in 1881 set off a wave of immigration of Russian Jews to the United States. Most went to the cities, but an important group, with the support of philanthropic organizations, became part of an experiment in Jewish agricultural colonies. South Jersey's Alliance and Woodbine were the most successful. Both were established on undeveloped land, and the landscape that emerged suggests the importance the funders placed on using landscape as a means of Americanization.