Cynthia Radding

Introduction: Borderlands in a Global Perspective

In the winter of 1716–17 Lady Mary Montague crossed the border dividing the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire. As she noted in a letter to Alexander Pope, dated February 12, 1717, decades of conflict between the two empires had caused the belligerents to police the border with particular care. The Habsburg governor and the Ottoman Bas sa negotiated, via courier, a place along the border frontier where Montague and her husband, Richard Wortley, could cross. A convoy of Habsburg soldiers then escorted the couple and their entourage to a small village on the border, where they were met by Ottoman Janissaries and regular soldiers. From there the couple traveled to Belgrade, then heavily fortified and filled with the tension of war. The previous year Prince Eugene of Savoy had defeated the Grand Vizier Damat Ali Pasha’ two hundred thousand-strong army near the spot where Montague had crossed into the Ottoman Empire. Eugene of Savoy had now set his sights on Belgrade, hich he successfully captured a year after Montague’ journey from England to Constantinople had ended.

Environment, Territory, and Landscape Changes in Northern Mexico during the Era of Independence

What do we mean by territoriality and how do we connect territory, landscape, and borderlands in the ways in which we build historical narratives? Thinking about the title of this volume in reference to the northern borderlands of Mexico brought me back to the material features of land forms, vegetational patterns, stream flows, and water management systems, which are based on the natural forces of geology and climate. Nevertheless, their changing morphology is demonstrably and even measurably affected by human technique and culture.

Missions, Missionaries, and Native Americans: Long-Term Processes and Daily Practices (review)

Missions, Missionaries, and Native Americans: Long-Term Processes and Daily Practices. By Maria E Wade. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press. 2008. Pp. xxiii, 301.

David J. Weber (1940-2010)

69.50. ISBN 978-0-813-03280-1.) This comparative study is woven around the leitmotiv of conversion. Its conceptual framework centers on Pierre Bourdieus notion of habitus, interpreted by Maria F.Wade as the habits of nourishment and requirements of subsistence among native peoples, in which their seasonal movements contrasted with the daily and weekly schedules established in the missions. The book provides a broad view, stretching from Florida to the Californias, but skipping over the longstanding mission fields of Sonora-Sinaloa and Nueva Vizcaya. Wade brings her anthropological training to bear on the questions of directed culture change and the unintended consequences of mission programs that were focused on the indigenous groups gathered in the reducciones of northern New Spain. Her comparative framework opens a fresh perspective on questions of intent and the methods for establishing and maintaining missions by the Franciscan and Jesuit orders; Wades overview and thoughtful comparative summaries in a number of chapters as well as the final conclusions helps us to understand that mission methodologies were not religious blueprints for conversion, but rather projects that underwent considerable experimentation and modification in different natural environments and cultural settings. The discussion in part 1 of the basic philosophies and internal conflicts within the Society of Jesus and the Order of Friars Minor provides a useful preface to the authors examination of the mission programs and their outcomes in the regions she has chosen to compare. Perhaps because of the authors ambitious comparative scope, the analysis of historical processes in each region is at times thin, and the treatment of the books main themes is uneven across the geographical and temporal perimeters of the study. Wades discussions of the failed Jesuit sixteenth-century mission to the Calusa in Florida and of the early Jesuit and Franciscan missions in Coahuila and Nuevo Leon are weaker than those of the Franciscan missions in Texas and of the Jesuits and Franciscans in Baja and Alta California. The author focuses on settlement, work regimes, and patterns of religious conversion, presenting very interesting information drawn from inventories and mission reports on handicraft production, crop cycles, and livestock in different mission districts; however, she stops short of quantitative analysis or even tabular presentation that would clarify the comparison across these regions and permit meaningful engagement with recently published historical literature on the missions. …

Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New. By Daniel T. Reff. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 290. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

David J. Weber, an outstanding scholar, teacher, and mentor, dedicated his productive career to the Ibero-American borderlands. He held the Robert and Nancy Dedman Chair in History at Southern Methodist University from 1976 until his retirement in June 2010, only months before his death on August 20, 2010, from complications following his three-year struggle with multiple myeloma. David Weber endured his illness with dignity and courage; his ashes remained in his beloved New Mexico, where he received his graduate training and focused his early research.

50.00 cloth;

The book as a whole has a number of strengths. First, it demonstrates that those people and places commonly assumed to be excluded from processes of globalization are very implicated in them and are shaping the global in creative and decisive ways from their distinct localities. The struggles are hugely complex and the setbacks serious, and women in particular seem to face particular constraints and barriers to greater public participation. However, it is clear the neoliberal model is on increasingly shaky and contested ground and water mobilizations (and women) are playing a key role in that political contestation. Second, the collection has a deconstructive impact on many of the gendered binaries that are part of conventional approaches to water resources management. Binary thinking does not only overlook womens roles as farmers, irrigators and resource managers, but also assumes a simplistic division between the varied uses of water instead of focusing on the interconnections. In this regard, the connections between water rights and land rights are also illuminated. For this reviewer, the books main strength is that it is highly accessible yet resists the usual essentialisms, generalizations and simplifications which tend to abound in this kind of work.

21.99 paper.

Wandering Peoples is a chronicle of cultural resiliency, colonial relations, and trespassed frontiers in the borderlands of a changing Spanish empire. Focusing on the native subjects of Sonora in Northwestern Mexico, Cynthia Radding explores the social process of peasant class formation and the cultural persistence of Indian communities during the long transitional period between Spanish colonialism and Mexican national rule. Throughout this anthropological history, Radding presents multilayered meanings of culture, community, and ecology, and discusses both the colonial policies to which peasant communities were subjected and the responses they developed to adapt and resist them. Radding describes this colonial mission not merely as an instance of Iberian expansion but as a site of cultural and political confrontation. This alternative vision of colonialism emphasizes the economic links between mission communities and Spanish mercantilist policies, the biological consequences of the Spanish policy of forced congregacion , and the cultural and ecological displacements set in motion by the practices of discipline and surveillance established by the religious orders. Addressing wider issues pertaining to ethnic identities and to ecological and cultural borders, Radding’s analysis also underscores the parallel production of colonial and subaltern texts during the course of a 150-year struggle for power and survival.