cultural geographies

Supermarkets employ codes of standards to assure the uniform safety, quality and `ethical' content of their food products. These standards represent a form of epistemic knowledge, intended to override the kinds of practical, local knowledge long employed in food production and trade. This form of food governance by standards bears a striking resemblance to other forms of imperial governance. This article explores the historical parallels and inherent contradictions of supermarket rule.

The article examines the role of the former Long Kesh/Maze prison as one of the key heritage sites of the Northern Ireland conflict. It is grounded within the context of the political processes which have followed the implementation of the Belfast Peace Agreement in 1998. A brief history of the site and the salient points in its timeline precedes a discussion of the recommendations of the Maze Consultation Panel which reported in 2005. Among its principal proposals was the reconstruction of part of the Maze site as an International Centre for Conflict Transformation. The article examines the responses of various stakeholders to this idea but uses Sinn Féin's favoured analogies of Robben Island and, particularly, Auschwitz-Birkenau to conclude that only republicanism has a clearly defined sense of the heritage value of the Maze and an understanding as to how the site might be appropriated and exploited as an iconic place for remembering, contestation and resistance.

This article contributes an embodied historical cultural geography that pays attention to the interplay between the dressed body, material culture and textual representation. Debates concerning the politics of identity, performance and subjectivity, transnational circuits of consumption, clothing as material culture, and the place of dress and colonial power, are drawn on to configure a material and embodied biography of the clothes and the clothing of Lady Curzon, Vicereine of India 1898—1905. The geographies of exchange, appropriation, transculturation and hybridity that are woven into her clothing practices are examined in relation to discussions of the regulation and performance of colonial power and authority. This article pays close attention to the material culture approach to the `lived garment', examining cloth and associated wearing practices in the broader context of cultures of consumption. In so doing it charts the intimate historical cultural geographies of modernity and colonial power.

The essay experiments with a process of recollection that moves associatively among the discarded material remains of a Montana homestead. Fragmentary objects and documents are brought into focus through their juxtaposition with each other, in an attempted recuperation of obsolete networks of use and affinity. A thread of oral history offers complement and counterpoint to the material histories. Shuttling between close description and critical reflection, the essay engages imaginatively with the cultural remembrance of private and public life in Depression-era Montana.