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Background: Through a close reading of the four issues of The Bowater Papers, this article aims to understand the rise of a paper modernity and to reinsert it—as material and infrastructure—into media studies. Analysis: Producing wood paper is a strain on the landscape and the environment. The Bowater Papers showcases the histories and material possibilities of paper media products. A paper-dependent modernity can be understood as an infrastructural assemblage of harvesting, production, circulation, and consumption. Conclusion and implications: Paper calls for a natural history and geography of media. Thinking about the mediations from tree to paper through the encompassing notion of “xylomedia” is a way of articulating the intersection of the material, environmental, and infrastructural in media studies. Today is still a paper world, one that is also the age of lignin, package, and Amazon. Contexte : Par une lecture attentive des quatre numeros de The Bowater Papers, nous cherchons a comprendre l’essor de la forme moderne du papier. Se faisant, nous le reinsererons—en tant que materiau et infrastructure—dans le champ des etudes mediatiques. Analyse : La production de papier de bois est lourde de consequences pour l’environnement. The Bowater Papers nous renseigne sur des aspects historiques et materiels du papier. La modernite, dependante du papier, peut ainsi etre apprehendee comme un assemblage infrastructurel liant recolte, production, circulation et consommation. Conclusion et implications : Le papier appelle une histoire et une geographie naturelles des medias. Penser aux mediations de l’arbre au papier avec le concept de « xylomedia » est une facon d’articuler l’intersection du materiel, de l’environnement et de l’infrastructure dans l’etude des medias. Nous vivons toujours dans un âge du papier, un âge qui est aussi celui de la lignine, des paquets, et d’Amazon.

The review analyzes the collected materials from the 13th International Scientific Conference “The Current Problems of Parliamentarism: History and Modernity” (Tauride Readings 2019). Most of the papers in the collection cover various aspects of the activities of the parliament of the Russian Empire. Some of the materials touch on the issues of the current situation in the people’s representation in the Russian Federation and the CIS countries as well as important aspects of the history of foreign parliamentarism. The review considers the key articles of the collection and notes the role of the published proceedings of the conference discussion platforms. It is concluded that the collection under review is of great relevance for studying history, theory, and practice of Russian and foreign parliamentarism.

The paper highlights the context and the main points of the speech given by Max Weber at the International Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis in September, 1904. It analyzes Weber’s views on the dynamics of social change as presented by the German classic in the shape of the comparative historical sociology of the European and American versions of modernity. The first part of the article covers the background and the most significant episodes of the trip to the United States undertaken by Max Weber and his wife Marianne. The second part of the article elucidates the main points of Weber’s speech in St. Louis. The third part examines the observations and conclusions of the specifics of American modernity made by Weber through his direct acquaintance with life in the United States. In conclusion, the paper proposes a brief analysis of Weber’s contribution to the development of historical sociology’s ideas about the nature and pathways of Western modernity.

The review analyzes the collected materials from the 12th International Scientific Conference “Current Problems of Parliamentarism: History and Modernity (Tauride Readings 2018).” Most of the collected scientific papers cover various aspects of the activities of the State Duma of the Russian Empire. The review considers the key articles of the collection and notes the significance of the published materials of the conference discussion platforms. It is concluded that the collection of articles under review is of great relevance for studying history, theory and practice of the Russian parliamentary system.

High-profile revelations of organizational malpractices in the last few years such as unethical business deals based on large-scale conflicts of interest, insider trading, overvaluation of housing mortgages, doctored inventories of inadequate capital holdings to raise finances, and manipulation of facts and figures have made transparency an important value in today’s organizational world. Stakeholders, whether internal or external, expect to have access to information and organizations have little choice but to open up in keeping with current trends (Christensen, 2002; Christensen & Langer, 2009). This paper offers a tentative examination of what we believe to be an original conceptual framework for a critical understanding of processes of and motivations for organizational transparency, including its paradoxes, by drawing on and combining theories of power, hegemony, legitimacy, and liquid modernity.

This paper explores how the Chinese customary ritual of burning paper money to commemorate the dead ancestors challenges the nature-culture dichotomy. The paper argues that the practice of burning paper money reflects a Chinese cosmology that is not based on a dichotomy between the living and the dead, instead, the dead is often mobilized to exert influential power over the living. The paper money that people use in such rituals are active actors that participates in people’s social, cultural and economic life. The paper also investigates how the conflict between government policy and traditional practice demonstrates that the modernists’ efforts to mobilize modern dichotomies have failed to triumph over the entanglement among networks of the living and the dead, the human and the spirit, the object and the subject, nature, culture, and super-nature.

Traditional Chinese paper-cut art is a splendid flower of folk art. It has a long history and already been rich treasure of world art treasures. This thesis expounds the traditional paper-cut art history, style characteristics, and the combination with modern design. Focus on the tradition and modernity, inheritance and innovation, the thesis analyzes the new concept of paper-cut in the modern design. It can be said that the ingenious combination of paper-cut art and modern design, not only enriches the design thinking, but also has enlightenment on the concept and performance of modern design. Moreover, in the global art and design context, we also should summarize and rethink profoundly. Keywords—Traditional paper-cut art, Modern design, Inheritance, Innovation

Trois chercheurs distingues du champ de la communication rendent accessible ici une partie du texte quasi legendaire d’Harold Innis, pionnier de la recherche en histoire de la communication, en Amerique du Nord. Ils affirment d’emblee que ce texte represente la premiere tentative de proposer une histoire de la communication (des communications) ou de l’histoire des medias comme champ de recherche veritable. C’etait l’entreprise a laquelle s’attelait Innis au cours des 12 dernieres annees de s...

This paper addresses several questions that appear preliminary to understanding the circulation of knowledge in early modern India (circa1500 to 1800): What work did writing do? What was the relationship between writing and speaking? And what can our answers to these questions tell us about cultural formulations of ‘knowledge’ in this period? After addressing these questions on ‘modes’ of circulation, this paper turns to the more practical issue of ‘means’ of circulation, looking at the intersection between religious and bureaucratic patterns of the production and consumption of books in the absence of printing in Indian languages. Overall, the paper argues for early modernity as a period of tension and transition between ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘bibliocentric’ attitudes towards the location and thence circulation of knowledge in a Persianate context. The issues are exemplified by reference to the various and, at times, perplexing uses of books in an imperial dervish lodge ortakiyya.

choreographers or events to ausdruckstanz, which informed a certain moment of nation building, enables the reader to see changes in scale. Whereas Keefe showcases individuals, Hardt shifts to masses and the communities that chal- lenge national formation and the processes of mechanization associated with capital. Many of the other pieces provide thick descriptions of movement vocabularies that construct masculinities in different contexts. In the contributions by dancers Fred Strickler and Rennie Harris, artists and teachers of differ- ent generations respectively from the Midwest and East Coast of the U.S., dance seems to have insinuated opposing masculinities within the communities in which each came of age. Such accounts of the diverse means by which movement registers and enacts larger social anxieties attendant to constructions of masculi- nity recur throughout the book. From Jennifer Fisher’s and Jill Nunes Jensen’s respective explorations of the hyperbolic imagination and expression of gendered relationships in classical ballet to Stephen Johnson’s essay on transvestite acts in Juba’s minstrel shows, this collection encourages both thinking through the body as scripted through matrices of gender but also the body as a sight of negotiation, perhaps even resistance, to the norms that obtain in a given time and place or through highly codified forms of corporeal expression. Here Juba’s self- conscious play of gender might become the sur- prising antecedent to the choreography of Alonzo King. To be clear, my pairing of these two pieces does not gesture toward some ima- gined racial link but rather to an awareness of the constraints regulating people’s expressive capacities at distinct moments in time. For me, the collection produces its most substantive arguments in relation to how mas- culinity physically manifests under and as differ- ent regimes of power (e.g., Namus Zokhrabov’s recounting of the politics within the Azerbaijan State Dance Ensemble). The invention of traditions, the propping up of national and international discourses on particular demon- strations of masculine power, the assertion of moving men as an exercise in modernity— these are the elements of the book that promise to advance dance and masculinity studies together. Along this line, the “legacies of coloni- alism” section furthers the steps begun by some of the earlier contributions. The emphasis here on overlapping disciplinary mechanisms that inform the perception of moving bodies articu- lates why bodies matter in particular configur- ations, spaces, and times (Anthony Shay’s essay, for example, includes a wide overview of these issues). The labor of dancers harnessed to imperialist and nationalist ideals, often sim- ultaneously, is worth exploring because the pro- cesses of empire and nation-state formation have long been analyzed in gendered terms. But the work here insists that these sorts of ana- lyses must not only function at the level of dis- cursive abstraction. Enactments of power can be the subtle acts of bodies moving independently or together; perhaps this is the principal reason to study when men dance. However, the Introduction emphasizes pho- bia; When Men Dance is situated as a response to strategies that have marginalized dancing males. In this vein, the project seems not so distant from that of institutions such as The Gold School (a dance education venue in Massachusetts), which recently premiered its anti-bullying piece “accept ME.” Perhaps the field of dance studies requires this intervention. The editors seem to think so, for the Appendix reveals questions posed to generate discussion of stereotypes faced in the course of men’s dancing careers. Because the brief narratives continually return the reader to the potential difficulties in choosing to be a male dancer, the volume as a whole shades a bit too much toward the therapeutic, at least for me. On the other hand, a nice bit of therapy for $29.95 is a good deal, and the reader will certainly learn something along the way. Sean Metzger Duke University Choreographing Asian America Choreographing Asian America by Yutian Wong. 2010. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. x + 280 pp. notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 paper. doi:10.1017/S0149767711000453 “Can you name an Asian American choreogra- pher?” (1)—so begins Yutian Wong’s ground- breaking study, Choreographing Asian America. This book carefully and critically fills the silence that would presumably follow this question. I suggest silence because the two sites the DRJ 44/1 • SUMMER 2012

A model of culture, the continuous model of culture, presented by the paper is an attempt to work out solutions to several important issues as a matter of standing debates in human and social sciences. Given that it is a review of the paper, I am going to provide the reader with only some of its outcomes yet in their close connection with the three main aspects of the model’s general approach to sociocultural being—the end-means and absolute value plus concept of reality approach to culture. It ascribes to culture more wide and fundamental meaning than cultural studies does, and by this, it stands closer to a strong program in cultural sociology [1]. The latter is striving for attributing the trait of autonomy to culture within a consistent theoretical framework, yet so far unsuccessfully. I suggest that this is possible only at the level of philosophizing—namely, via overcoming intellectualism marking the mainstream philosophical discourse of modern philosophy since its origination. According to the paper, arguing for cultural autonomy is incompatible with intellectualism, and introducing an absolute value into a cultural model supports the task. In addition, the three aspects of the approach are closely related. For example, an absolute value as such implies an ultimate end or wish relative to which everything else one could consider as a means or a challenge to it.

Katherine A. Snyder. The Iraqw of Tanzania: Negotiating Rural Development. Boulder, Colo.: Westview case Studies in Anthropology, 2005. xii + 196 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $20.00. Paper. Lowe Borjeson. A History Under Siege: Intensive Agriculture in the Mbulu Highlands, Tanzania, 19th Century to the Present Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2004. Distributed by Almqvist & Wicksell International. 187 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. SEK 266. Paper. These two fine studies taken together are as refreshing as they are informative. They are both about the same ethnic group, the Iraqw (or Iraqw'ar Da/aw) of Tanzania. The study by Katherine A. Snyder is more of an ethnography, while that of Lowe Borjeson is more an historical ethnogeography. Both deal with agriculture, its intensification and modernization. They nicely complement each other and have implications for understanding development and change in other areas. The Iraqw are anything but traditional (in the stereotypical use of that term). They clearly have an ability to adapt and adopt new technologies in agriculture and food production for their benefit. Both authors recognize that many Iraqw see that what is modern (even if Snyder uses the term with quotation marks) can also be desirable. To Snyder, "notions of tradition and modernity have resulted in a struggle over identity as well as the meaning of community" (2). Modern ways have clearly brought a diversification in agricultural products and pursuits. Snyder has an entire section on the "decline in production" (91-94), but it is not clear whether she means a decline in total agricultural production with a concomitant decline in yields or whether it is a decline in per capita production as a result of population pressures resulting in ever smaller holdings. Is she, in fact, referring to a decline in grain and cattle production, which may have been offset by increases in tree crops, other crops, and livestock? In neither study does one get the sense that accepting the modern has, in any significant way, undermined Iraqw traditional identity. Quite the contrary, the successful use of new ways of doing things seems actually to have helped sustain bonds of group identity that would otherwise have been lost for those seeking participation in the larger community. This does not mean, as Snyder's study makes clear, that older forms of authority may not have been undermined; as would be expected, it is the younger members of the community who are most attracted to the practices of "modernity." Snyder speaks of the "ways in which Iraqw manipulate 'development' for their own aims"; she notes that "Iraqw have always been quick to adopt changes that provide obvious benefits, yet who gets these benefits is always determined by those who are quickest to recognize the possible gains" (100). Whatever problems modernity creates, "modernizing" elements allow its members both to retain their group identity and to participate more fully and effectively in the larger community and nation state. "In the Iraqw homeland, cultural practices continue to endure, albeit in modified form, in new circumstances and are deployed in novel ways to fit current problems, thus continually blurring the divide between past and present, tradition and modern" (100). This conclusion has broader applications. As is often the case, what seems to the outsider as an alien intrusion in a "traditional culture" is often accepted by the people themselves as local or even indigenous. …

This article contributes to discussions of technology transfer in the modernisation of Iran through the study of a neglected episode in the memoirs of an early Qajar traveller to England. Arguing f...

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Charles Piot. Nostalgia for the Future: West Af rica after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 200 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibiography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $20.00. Paper. Charles Piot's landmark 1999 ethnography, Remotely Global, showed that societies of the savanna region of northern Togo, far from being static, insular polities on the margins of the nation-state, lying outside history and isolated from global forces, have always been influenced and preoccupied by the "outside world." In this new book, Piot argues that the ending of the Cold War brought about a decrease in the power of both the state and local chieftaincy in Togo, the emergence of a radically new political economy centered on NGOs and Pentecostal churches, and new, future-oriented social imaginaries, modes of subjectivity, sovereignty, and storytelling. Piot's tide "indexes Togolese longing for a future that replaces untoward pasts, both political and cultural. Such longing is represented not only in Christian End Times narratives and die universal quest for exit visas but also in the embrace of a thousand development initiatives that hail youth and leave elders behind" (20). Utopian yearnings find expression in a passion for playing the green card lottery, fantasies of fictitious marriages with foreigners, membership in churches that promise supernatural abundance, Internet searches for exit strategies, and a turn to the transient pleasures of sex, drugs, and music for an instantaneous sense of affective power and presence. This emphasis on inwardness and self-fulfillment stands in dramatic contrast to the prevailing ethos of a traditional culture, where duty, forebearance, and respect for elders imply a stoic acceptance of life as one finds it and the suppression of thoughts and feelings that challenge the status quo. Traditionally, lip service was paid to the idea that one must sacrifice personal gratification and spontaneous self-expression to make sociality viable (the implication being that what is good for the many will prove good for die individual). Collective rituals and everyday practices of commensality, neighborliness, and mutuality reinforced the common weal. Modernity reverses these assumptions. Personal development through education, travel, and purchasing power becomes the royal road to social development, a precondition for the wider social good. This revolutionary change in worldview does not occur adventitiously. It follows radical disruptions to the social fabric - civil war, famine, epidemic illness, mass migration or displacement, and urbanization. Piot paints a grim picture of the anomic background against which the new social imaginarles emerged in the 1990s. These changes "burst onto this socio-cosmological stage like a comet from the sky. Disconcerted by the violence against Kabre in the cities of the south, puzzled by those strange new keywords democratie and droits de l'homme, attacked by the Pentecostal churches, stung by currency devaluation and state withdrawal, and increasingly neglected by cash-strapped diasporics, this authority system was shaken to its roots" (99). …